The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Slog: Strangercrombie

What's that Gray and Burgundy Logo in All the Ad Slots on Slog Today?

Christopher Frizzelle — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:16:31 -0800

We're getting letters like...

slog background. Tattoos. Whaat??

And...

why are you letting someone anonymously fuck up the aesthetics of slog?

well other than the cash, of course

you can do more complicated/site-integrated advertising but you gotta do it right. hate to say it, but go look at how the various gawker media sites create whole new site templates for ads and they pull it off really well.

tip: slog looks like shit right now

tip #2: i have no idea who captain red rectangle and grey circle is and i don't plan on finding out anytime soon by clicking on any of that crap that is fucking up my like #3 time waster at work

but that's just like my opinion, man

I was as confused as anyone, but then I remembered—oh yeah, it's that Strangercrombie thing. According to our advertising department, a local guy bought this item—Ad Bomb the Hell Out of Slog for one day—because he wanted the world to see this design of his that has personal meaning to him. He's not trying to sell anything or get out any message.

It's true that we did it for the cash, but for what it's worth we didn't keep any of it: All the cash he paid to put his art up on Slog today went to charity.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

That Wasn't So Bad, Was It?

Dennis Dale — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:09:29 -0800

No one opens up when you scream and shout,
But it's time to make a couple things clear
—LCD Soundsystem, "Home"

Well, I had planned a great big F-U post to finish out the week, but frankly I'm tired and have grown fond of everyone here. So one more short post on a wholly non-controversial subject, as you've requested. Sorry if I've tended to indulge myself—but hey, give a guy a megaphone, what do you expect? Thanks to the great people at The Stranger, particularly a certain editor who must have seriously pissed somebody off to draw the Dennis detail and probably was every bit as appalled as you by what she had to read (no "didn't read it but it still sucks" for her). In all seriousness, it's been great, if sometimes perverse, fun. One last boast, in good fun—whoever wins next year, I guarantee you won't remember a word. Below the fold.

From February 2009

Deconstructing Eric, or, Little by Little

Abraham Lincoln once said that "If you're a racist, I will attack you with the North," and these are the principles I carry with me in the workplace.
—Michael Scott

Our Attorney General is right. We are a nation of cowards, fearing an honest discussion of race. But, unless he's breaking utterly with rigorously observed convention, he's dead wrong about what that discussion would look like. A newly open conversation about race and public policy is the last thing an Eric Holder wants.

In fact, Mr. Holder's intent was to preempt just this possibility, which he reasonably fears as an unintended consequence of Barack Obama's remarkable success. That success shatters the very assumption upon which it is most dependent—that America is inherently and uniquely racist, forever incomplete thereby. Holder finds himself tasked with performing the traditional February rite of reinforcing this assumption—as the first black attorney general serving the first black president. That's one hell of a contradiction. It's going to take a nation of millions to obscure it. Thus Attorney General Michael Scott's suggestion that every day be a nation-wide Diversity Day:

...if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.

When I saw the scare-quote screen crawl (I shall start calling them scare-crawls) on a television across a room, "Atty General Holder Says US 'Nation of Cowards'," I assumed Mr. Holder had renounced the fear-mongering on behalf of "security" that has overtaken the Nation since 9/11. Something about the courage required by liberty and the cowardice required by tyranny. Perhaps he even had the nerve to suggest the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by those seeking power and wealth. I imagined myself defending him to you. This is, after all, only what he should be saying. But Holder wasn't there to calm a panicked nation; he was there to panic a calm one:

If we allow this attitude to persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted — and remember, there will be no majority race in America in about 50 years — the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more routinely — and to do so now.

But this is nothing new. The remarkable thing about Wednesday's speech was that the Attorney General broadened the mandate of the U.S. Department of Justice:

But we must do more, and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must — and will — lead the nation to the "new birth of freedom" so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.

Mr. Holder did not reveal any plans for how he will "lead the nation to [Lincoln's] 'new birth of freedom'"; probably because he has none. Of course he may think we're not ready for them. As if this immodest language isn't disturbing enough, Holder combines it with an attempt not to merely prompt debate but to direct it:

I fear however, that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of "them" and not "us." There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self interest

This is a false accommodation. That there "can be" a "very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action"; is given, and not by the Attorney General. The implication is that current debate is heading for "illegitimate" territory, deliberately reinforcing white anxiety and black resentment that holds opposition to affirmative action as racist until proven otherwise.

To limit the debate is to control it. Holder, arguing like the lawyer he is, needs to place the status quo he defends between two arbitrary "extreme" boundaries. Thus certain opinions are "simplistic" (of course he could be talking about the stubbornly crude logic of disparate impact and quotas—his call to frankness and depth included neither) or "extreme," serving "narrow self-interest."

It is a monologue Holder desires, alternating between narrow, meaningless poles toward a safely predetermined end, mouthed by a multitude distracted by false choices. The product of a collective, conditioned mind. But this much is obvious. What is more interesting is the unintentional but more revealing subtext, inaccessible to the author, incapacitated as he is by status, position and, appropriately enough, chauvinism. Holder's speech revealed the potential conflicts facing a civil rights movement-turned-industry by Barack Obama's stunning, rapid rise.

Those who most fear the reality of a "transformation" to a "post-racial" America are those who've most benefited from the decidedly racial nature of recent American politics—again, embarrassingly demonstrated with Obama's success. The end game of affirmative action and discrimination-through-litigation is revealed as long overdue. The intent of the "conversation" about race, now more than ever, is to de-legitimize that challenge by declaring it unfit for conversation.

If we should start taking seriously the "post-racial" nature of Obama's rise, we might start asking that it mean something beyond assigning a professional and political premium to certain individuals based on Obama's myth of "race and inheritance." But the obvious advantage that race played for the inauthentic son of slavery and segregation contradicts the myth. The notion of a white American jackboot forever on the neck of our culturally most powerful—black Americans—was questionable before Obama's remarkable campaign and the ecstatic reception of his inauguration. Now it is farcical.

But it isn't only that Barack Obama renders the white/black reparations dynamic absurd. The nascent Diversity State finds itself too soon and too totally triumphant. The bogey of white oppression threatens to become no longer plausible, and those groups assigned varying stature within the hierarchy of grievance are already eyeing one another uneasily.

The order now threatened by diversity is not pre- but post-civil rights. That minority became synonymous with oppressed, and "underrepresented" synonymous with denied, once only enhanced the power of the dominant minority, which extracted concessions from a still comfortable majority (that could still afford them and held an expectation of final conciliation). Smaller minority groups were content to follow the leader and accept a subordinate position. But what happens to that dynamic in a "post-racial" ("post-white") America where the majority of individuals have a birthright claim against the white plurality and no sense of obligation toward a black population that is culturally dominant, politically favored and stubbornly lagging in professional and scholastic achievement?

It was therefore Holder's purpose to preclude any challenges to black America's position atop the hierarchy of grievance. Black equality is more than simple equality. Holder is here to defend the primacy of his faction as the vanguard of a revolution now triumphant:

In addition, the other major social movements of the latter half of the 20th century — feminism, the nation's treatment of other minority groups, even the antiwar effort — were all tied in some way to the spirit that was set free by the quest for African American equality. Those other movements may have occurred in the absence of the civil rights struggle, but the fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment. Further, many of the tactics that were used by these other groups were developed in the civil rights movement.

By more false accommodation he allows that feminism, anti-war protests and other minority rights movements "may" have happened without the black civil rights movement—insinuating that they probably would have not. When Holder goes on to assert that black history is too little studied, and that "African American history is American history", he declares that black history is more than American history, and greater than any other group's American history.

The line is that we must continually revisit the sins of the past to understand our present. But in reality the better things get in the present, the more the self-interested must recourse to the dismal past, and the more the present has to be compared to an ideal of race relations that has never existed and may not be possible. There is no historical precedent for America, and nothing like her at present.

The regions from where America's "disadvantaged minorities" originate cannot compare in wealth, opportunity or liberty. Resentment of this humiliating reality feeds into that encouraged by the dishonest class of political opportunists represented by Holder. The language of civil rights has become an affront, no longer condemnatory of practice but of a people and a nation: the long history of Western civil liberties is only begun with the American civil rights movement and invalidated by the interlude of American slavery. "Simplistic," indeed.

We are in the late decadent phase of the civil rights movement. Declaring victory and demobilizing is not an option—this would involve the voluntary surrender of power, something that does not happen. Power is only surrendered under coercion or dissipated over time. The latter threat panics Holder and friends. Pretext must be found to justify power. Enemies, if they don't appear, must be found. First, they are said to be hiding among us. Then, the enemy hides latent within each of us. Our eternal vigilance against "hateful" thought is a population regulating itself on behalf of power.

Holder's acknowledgement of the problematic nature of diversity reveals an internal contradiction. By unmindful incrementalism we went from the noble ideals of equality and tolerance to their near-opposite: diversity as a goal in itself. Even now one cannot suggest publicly that a policy of ethnic diversifying is no more legitimate than one of ethnic cleansing, and no more fair. And while ethnic cleansing has a long, sordid history, ethnic diversifying has none at all.

A multiracial democratic republic worthy of the name will defend equality before the law against those who equate it with equality of results. It's too late in the game to deny that fairness in hiring and education produces racial inequality—inequality that, as we've seen, does not necessarily benefit the majority. Ethnic diversity and democracy are thus at odds. This was once a given; now it is heresy. But it is heresy only because we think it's awful that it should be so. Thus far we have chosen not to reconcile a diverse population to democracy, but to reconcile democracy to a diverse population. This may be inevitable. But, as the truth is always worth knowing and no subterfuge lasts forever, we would do well to call the Attorney General's bluff.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Unity in Levity

Dennis Dale — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:19:00 -0800

The Internet is too fast for me, and I rue the fact that once a news story demanding satire comes along I can be sure by the time I see it all the obvious angles have already been exploited, along with a few not-so-obvious. It's so bad you can never be sure someone else hasn't gotten there first, no matter how novel your take may be.

Dick Cheney's present Tin-man conundrum comes to mind; maybe on day one or two I might have been able to peck out the obvious gag about surgeons opening him up to find a black void (or, as the forensic scientist opening up the cranium of an alien in the under-appreciated Tim Burton satire Mars Attacks, nothing but green slime).

A friend last night suggested if he was to get into a car accident anywhere near Cheney's hospital, he would plead to be taken anywhere else or left to fend for himself on the road. Probably a good thing to put off even routine procedures until the coast is clear.

"I'm afraid you're terminal, Mr. Dale."
"What? I came to have a boil lanced."
"It's very unfortunate. We need to talk about end of life planning."
"No, we don't."
"We're very enlightened here; we offer euthanasia services to spare you a long, painful decline. Death with dignity. But we don't have much time. Let's get some formalities out of the way now. You wouldn't happen to be an organ donor, would you?"
"What? What's the hurry? You said long decline. I feel fine."
"Oh dear; he's already experiencing dementia. Guys, would you restrain Mr. Dale?"
"Please, God, aaagggh!"

I'm already over the limit for film references, but picture Rock Hudson thrashing away in terror at the end of Seconds.

Below the fold is a similar piece from back in those simpler, if no less scarier, days of 2008. A somewhat bowdlerized version appeared in The American Conservative at the time. Please to enjoy.

In the Bunker with Barney, Laura, and Me.

"I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me."
George W. Bush

The following diary fragments were found by rebel forces of the breakaway American states near the ruins of President George W. Bush’s secret bunker at the close of the Second Civil War in May of 2008. The author is unknown, signing only his initials, “D.D.”

Various explanations abound for D.D.’s identity; all of them entirely speculative, some wildly fanciful, such as the legend that he was an obscure “blogger” (a phrase for dilettante as well as professional writers, political activists, exhibitionists, and others who used the Internet for self-publishing before the Consolidation and Control Act of 2020 solidified the Second Republic's absolute control over the media, ushering in the Long Repression of the mid-21st Century).

According to this legend, after abandoning his early opposition to the Administration D.D. became a fervent supporter in its last days and somehow, with the zeal and determination of a convert, managed to insinuate himself into the upper echelons of the Administration just as it descended into confusion and madness.

Whoever he was, all indications are that his role was that of a domestic servant. The diary entries make obvious that the other residents of the bunker considered him an insignificant dullard. This likely explains why they were unguarded in his presence, allowing him to witness and record this invaluable insider’s view of the bizarre death throes of the Bush Regime.

April 5

I think the stress is starting to take its toll on the president. Earlier today I went to clean his quarters; I was surprised to find him standing before a full length mirror, practicing his oratorical hand gestures and muttering under his breath.

I should have got out of there immediately, but I was so shocked I just stood there watching him for a moment. Hearing the sound of a muffled cough, I looked to see the first lady sitting across the room watching, sullenly taking long drags from a cigarette. She smashed her cigarette out violently in an over-full ashtray with disgust and, turning to withdraw another, caught sight of me. As she turned that glare on me a chill went up my spine, as it always does. Pretending that I’d just walked in I said:

"Mr. President? I found that copy of Rebel in Chief we've been looking for."
He didn't seem to hear, but when he caught sight of me in the mirror he said:
"How long you been in the service, son?"

Before I could reply he returned to his muttering, delivering a one-liner and mustering a sickly version of his familiar chuckle. It was frightening, seeing him like that. I hurried out, feeling the first lady's eyes on the back of my neck. I’m beginning to suspect that things aren’t going as well as the President says.

April 9

Today Rove caught me, again, as I tried sneaking past his quarters.

“D____. Would you come here for a moment please?” He said in that unctuous voice he uses when he wants something. I braced myself and went in; I was appalled to find that awful green silk bath robe—all he’s worn for days now—was left open, revealing what had to be a thong. He was covered in oil and reddened from lying in his tanning bed.

“I wonder if you might help me; I need to apply this lotion and I can’t quite reach…”

“I have to feed Barney.” I stammered. "Mrs. Bush—I mean the first lady—will kill me if I don’t—"

“Women.” He said, shaking his head, advancing on me. “Why do we bother? Well, the dog can wait. Barney I mean, not Laura." He gave that creepy little laugh he uses when he thinks he's said something clever. "You won’t tell that I said that, will you? Our little secret?” He said the last part in a low, conspiratorial tone. As he came near I backed away, bumping into the wall; I slid sideways until I fell out the open door.

“Gotta feed the dog.” I said nervously over my shoulder as I hustled away. “Gotta feed Barney.”

“Okay then, maybe later.” He said casually, pretending not to notice my obvious discomfort. Damn that guy’s persistent.

April 12

As I was passing the conference room this morning the president called me in.

“D____. C’mere. Check this out.” He said, sounding surprisingly upbeat. I allowed myself the hope that he was going to say we'd be leaving the bunker soon. “Have I shown you this?”

He had been leaning over a scale model of a city. He stepped back and smiled proudly, spreading his arms in presentation.

“What is it sir?” I said, dutifully disguising my disappointment. The room was a shambles; it appeared as if everything had been hastily tossed to the walls to make room for the model, which occupied a place of well-lit preeminence in the center of the squalor.

“It’s Baghdad.” He said, delighted.

“Oh, of course.” I said, still feigning enthusiasm.

“See, here’s the airport; here’s the road to the airport; see the cars? Everything’s safe and secure. See the people? They’re voting.”

“What’s that sir?” I was sorry the moment I asked, but the futuristic structure on the outskirts of the city was clearly out of place, clumsily cobbled together with what appeared to be the modified parts of a child’s toy.

“That’s the Bush Freedom and Liberty Mosque.” He said, his enthusiasm quickening. “It's going to be open to Muslims and Shiites alike. Let me show you—“

“George!” The First Lady called sharply from behind me. The look of a chastened boy came over the President’s face. I instinctively came to attention. I shifted to the side and, careful not to make eye contact, excused myself with a mumble.

I hurried down the hallway before stopping in my tracks. Rove’s door was open; a muted, down-tempo R&B beat and the scent of marijuana emanated from his room. I turned about on my heel. Too late.

“D____!” It was the Vice President. “Get in here.” He motioned at me from the other end of the hallway.

I had to pass Rove’s open door to reach the V.P.'s quarters. I studiously avoided looking, but out of the corner of my eye I could see him leering tauntingly at me through the dim resolution of the black-light. Worse; I thought I saw Bolton’s white moustache glowing in the darkened recess behind him, over a constellation of glinting studs that would have to be one of his leather-get ups. This was bad. They would be at it all night. I would have to spend the night hiding in the pantry again.

“C’mon. Double-time!” The V.P. barked impatiently, going back inside.

When I came in I saw General Pace and General Casey standing at attention before a folding table covered in maps.

“See this idiot?” The Vice President said, pulling me into the room with what felt like a claw. The two stared straight ahead. “Look at him!” He thundered. The two sheepishly complied. There was an awkward, embarrassing moment as we stared dumbly at one another. The room felt even colder than it usually does. For a moment I thought I saw steam coming from Casey’s breath.

“This moron can do a better job than you two!” He gave me a rough shake. “In fact, he’s about to replace you incompetent bozos! What do you think of that?” Pace began to speak, and then thought better of it.

“Go ahead, Miss, let’s hear what you have to say.” The V.P. growled.

“I—we’ll try harder sir; we just need another six months to turn this thing around.” Pace’s voice quavered on the verge of one of his legendary crying jags.

“Get the hell out of here.” The Vice President said without looking at me, shoving me back out the door.

I'm starting to wonder what I've gotten myself into.

April 15

When I went to clean the conference room today I found Ledeen bent over the Baghdad model; using one of Goldberg's Star Trek toys he was pretending to strafe and bomb the city, spraying the besieged streets with spittle as he made explosion and gunfire noises, interspersed with the anguished cries of his imaginary victims. I managed to slip back out before he saw me.

April 19

I sneaked out into the garden today, against the V.P.’s orders, just to escape the relentless drone of the ventilation system. It was shrouded in silence and a cool mist; an incredibly peaceful contrast to what was going on inside. It was so still there that for a moment I actually believed that the war wasn’t real.

The impulse to desert came over me with such a sudden severity that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to resist. Then I heard something: barely perceptible, but clearly the sound of a hushed, urgent voice. I followed it, my accelerated heartbeat sending a hot pulse through my temples. I thought the enemy had found us; I half-expected to find a commando whispering into a headset, setting up a raid.

Then I heard a phrase I recognized. Following the voice I came upon the president, bundled against the chill and reclining in a lounge chair. He was facing away, revealing his profile. He was speaking just above his breath, reciting the programmed phrases that had been the boilerplate of his speeches to the nation, in a maniacal, urgent tone. He spat the words out as if to purge himself of them. Occasionally he would punctuate a sentence with an exaggeration of one of his stock facial expressions; now gross caricatures. Like before, I couldn’t help watching; it was only then I realized how lost we were. I turned to go.

“Not exactly what you signed on for, is it?” He said.

It was a voice that I didn’t recognize; it was relaxed, unguarded, natural. I turned back to face him. He was looking at me over his shoulder. He looked different, wearing an expression I’d never seen before. The mask that was the man I thought I knew was now revealed in its absence. It wasn’t that he was no longer himself, but that he had finally returned to himself. I was only now meeting the man. He had the look of a penitent wearied of resistance and peacefully, even gratefully, resigned to a dire fate. I came closer so I wouldn’t have to speak up.

“No, I don’t think any of us signed on for this, sir.”

He smiled appreciatively.

“Well, sorry anyway.” He turned away. Just as I was about to leave he said, “You know, I was almost baseball commissioner once.”

“I know.” I hesitated a moment. “You would’ve made a good commissioner, Mr. President.”

He faced me, grinning a wan thanks, before looking down into his lap, lost in thought. He broke off suddenly, as if catching himself, then looked up and said with jesting bravado:

“No, I would’ve made a hell of a commissioner, D____.”

I straightened up and nodded, forcing a grin.

Turning around I was confronted by the First Lady, very nearly walking right into her; I stiffened and started to excuse myself. She silenced me with a light hand on my shoulder and brought her face before my lowered gaze. Her look had softened. She had been listening to our exchange.

“Thank you, D____. For everything.”

It was the first time she addressed me by name.

“Yes ma’am.” I said, embarrassed. “I better get back inside.”

“Be careful.” She said. “Dick is chewing out the guys from The Weekly Standard. You might want to steer clear of the conference room. Or, if you want a glimpse of something you don’t see every day, I think Kristol is about to throw himself at the Vice President’s feet.”

"I'll pass," I said, "I saw that last time he was here."

April 20

Everyone is gathered in the conference room. It’s the V.P.’s birthday. I can hear them singing a forced and shrill Happy Birthday right now. I know exactly what the V.P. looks like at this moment: his thin, mirthless grin as he revels in the fear betrayed by their voices; I can see his beady eyes as they furtively scan back and forth with reptilian satisfaction, obscured behind the reflection in his glasses of the terrified, contorted faces of the false revelers.

Well, this is it. Now's my chance; I’m leaving the bunker. Barney has come in; he looks miserable, wagging his tail plaintively. He seems to understand. No, I'm sure he does.

"I gotta go, pal. Take care of yourself." I tell him, surprised to hear my voice cracking with emotion as I pat him on the head. "Don't worry."

The grim, insincere singing; the dog's helpless, imploring eyes: I have no choice.

"Oh alright." I say. "Come on boy, let's go home."

D.D.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

And Now For Something Completely Diffident

Dennis Dale — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:32:16 -0800

We've all been working hard; let's take the day off. I will be frolicking in the U-District, shambling among you like a specter; if I hadn't a date already I might even invite you to look me up. Probably not the best idea. More old material molding beneath the fold.

Possession

I confess I've never been overtaken entirely by passion. I've never given myself over unconditionally and without reservation to anything; neither joy nor grief, hate nor love. Likewise for any given idea; but this is just another way of saying the same thing, for the passions are ideas too. The purest ideas, confounding transposition into mere language and only hinted at by even the most sublime art. One has to live such ideas. The poets tell us the lover, as opposed to the merely amorous, is a zealot prepared to accept death itself on behalf of the idea of love.

But for me always there is an inaccessible self-consciousness, a clinical awareness that becomes alien. There is a foreigner within narrating the varying circumstances of my existence: so this is Dennis stricken with grief; so this is Dennis afflicted by love; etc. It has taken in every tragedy or conquest, every humiliation and all the pride, unaffected. This awareness constitutes, impossible I know, a distinct entity. Another Dennis.

I've always had my suspicions about this separate consciousness that is not conscience. It's not the opposite of the conscience, but the absence of it, that part between mindless instinct and moral self-awareness. It—he—observes me as if from without. He waits for the thing, whatever it is, to end; he makes no distinctions of geography—the peak of Everest or the easy chair, it's no difference. He takes everything in with a wonder-less curiosity, and never with surprise, even as he takes note of the novelty of a given occurrence, how familiar it is, or not, how it might change the dynamic of my existence, but not really, because, he knows, it's all just protocol and convention in the end, until it all ends—and this I expect he will witness with the same idle, abstract gaze. He is impossibly inhuman.

But there he is, always, looking down on the confusion of my psyche as if through impenetrable glass. I can only dimly sense his formless presence, there behind the reflection I cast on the pane separating us, unforgiving in its clarity. He sees all and records nothing; he doesn't care. He humors no vanity. He has the goods on me; he doesn't care. He taunts me with his lack of reproach for anything, great or small. He will not be run off; he can't be gotten to. His indifference is eternal, mocking, superior.

I've felt passion, of course, even "deeply", whatever that means to you. But if a man hasn't at least once been "consumed" or "blinded" by passion, whether it be love or hate (and what's the difference, in the end, between these inversions of each other?), he cannot say he knows them. It then follows that he cannot recognize them in others; he can only behave as if he understands. He knows what a thing is supposed to look like and responds accordingly, in the interests of order, but mostly out of habit. Eastern mystics of one sort or another—and I can't tell them apart—might say he is unrealized as a human being.

But a human can only be human, in part and in whole, no more or less in the depths of "inhumanity", and always. The depraved man appalls us not only for his deeds but for his irrefutable demonstration of humanity's potential for evil; it must then follow that he demonstrates for each of us our own capacity for evil, because we cannot escape the bond that is our shared humanity. With each transgression the evil expand the Devil's realm, as surely as the the great establish the uppermost boundaries of human achievement. Every iteration of a man is an argument on behalf of and proving itself; lives committed to malice, lives sacrificed selflessly or stupidly, lives of "madmen", lives "wasted" to sloth or obsession; all are competing models of man. No man can escape the assertion that is his life; he lives as he would have everyone live. Each life is the proposition: "this is Man."

There is some sort of accommodation between the reasoning frontal lobe and the reptilian brain stem, a Faustian bargain, a grotesque, conjoined symbiosis, right here in my head. Here appetite meets abstraction. A devil's workshop fashioning rationales for base impulse. It's a bureaucracy employed in legalizing anything, as needed. But it is not immoral—that would be too human, a transgression of morality and thus a recognition of it, leaving the prospect for contrition and redemption; it is amoral. It's out of this world, man.

A Christian might call him the Devil. Popular convention calls him "detachment", a sort of psychological debilitation, an unfortunate byproduct of modern society, or of Society; a decayed capacity to feel resulting from the ease and equivocal nature of the age; a problem of too little struggle—and too much time. One convention even, ironically, blames Convention. Vanity imagines him as a superior posture. Psychology gives him one name after another, as if to coax him out by finally landing on the magic invocation; after long and total failure, this science of the mind resorts finally, crassly, to myriad refinements and specialized forms of the original, temporary solace from the alien self: the intoxication and suppression of the senses.

These answers may suffice for a time, even a lifetime, but in the end they all fall short, because they allow for some accommodation or destruction of the demon. Even the Devil cowers before God, just as we mortals do. I am witness: my demon is a constant in presence, measure, and autonomy, immutable and ageless, there from the flash of conception to a death he will likely witness with the same impenetrable indifference. But ultimately he cannot be separate, even if he confounds my will to the end; he is central, he is in fact the last reducible part of me, to be resolved by fire or oblivion, as the case may be. He will not distinguish between these two, therefore I cannot. I speak only for myself, understand.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Air Break

Dennis Dale — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:12:00 -0800

You think a couple whacks to my guts is gonna get me down? It's gonna take a hell of a lot more than that, Counselor, to prove you're better than me!—“Max Cady”, Cape Fear

Can it be that we’re already rounding the horn in our exploration of the ecumenical beyond? Time flies when you're having fun—or being pelted with flung excrement, as they say.

For me the experience brings to mind the closing scene of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm:

Larry David invests in a restaurant and hires a chef with Tourette’s to run his kitchen-which is open to the dining room floor (he knows better but, seeing the lottery numbers the man’s scrawled on his arm, mistakes him for a Holocaust survivor and feels obligated). It’s opening night and the place is packed; sure enough the chef has an attack, shouting out a string of obscenities and silencing the appalled crowd. Thinking fast, Larry leaps to his feet and starts shouting obscenities himself, as if it’s all a great gag. Gradually others join in until the place is a cacophony of gleeful cursing. As the camera pulls back Larry stands amidst his chaotic handiwork, looking at us with satisfaction.

Yesterday I checked on the comments thread just long enough to read "f— you, Miss Dale.” My pretense of thick-skinned imperturbability bolted like an Afghan hash-head newly recruited into the army and catching his first sight of the Taliban. Not enough training, perhaps. Now I see the advantage of anonymity. This damn ego.

I don't want to be melodramatic (okay, maybe I do), but I fear I may have put a loved one in a difficult spot, socially at least, with my provocations here; my imagination runs wild with images of someone identifying her as the daughter of That Awful Man. Leave her out of it please, she didn't know what was in store—being young she has far better things to do than read my blog. She only knows that I periodically obsess over it and writing, and operates on the naïve assumption that a lifetime without evidence of anything like racial bigotry or misogyny (the desire—most pronounced in men, I believe—to live vicariously through our children, and the shrinking size of the family, has proven a sure cure for that) must mean I’m okay. When she surprised me with this gift, a part of me was terrified.

You see, in day-to-day encounters I might as well be Alan Alda; that’s the assumption people make. Just goes to show you never can tell. That person next to you? Maybe. People don’t walk about with signs around their necks cataloguing their many doubts about the various articles of our secular faith (though the idea no doubt appeals to some of our more energetic commenters here). If that was the case I imagine the experience, for those very few true true-believers, would be sheer terror—something like putting on the special glasses in John Carpenter’s They Live, only everybody is revealed as a monstrous alien.

She’s a good liberal, one of you—vegetarian (mostly), environmentalist, peace-loving, tolerant and open-minded. More importantly she is kind and decent. That’s the daughter I raised, alone and for an extended period under the duress of a long, difficult separation and divorce; if this smacks of pride so be it. If the price of my vanity-driven exhibitionism here (and it is vanity; how I enjoy the attention, any attention, after all) is to cost her so much as a troubled night's sleep—well, you win. But I trust in your decency; the same decency that, paradoxically, leads you into misunderstanding and fury when it comes up against that which offends it. As for me, each laboriously gained certainty unleashes a demon-host of doubts. So I've decided to take the only advantage obscurity affords—the right to speak one's mind. It's liberating. I recommend it, in moderation.

So while I may know where I stand on a given question, I don't know where that places me in relation to my fellows. I'm an atheist who prefers the company of the religious, and a conservative who gravitates toward the liberal. This crazy fucking world.

Other than that, I remain defiant. Needless to say, I won't be looking at the comments on this one. Until tomorrow, friends. The home stretch awaits.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

...the Darndest Things

Dennis Dale — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:57:32 -0800

Monday one of the feral teens involved in the economic-recreational beating death of Seattle's "Tuba Man" was arrested for something called "unlawful bus conduct." This is his second arrest after serving a nominal sentence for the killing, committed when he was just fifteen. His first (known) fatality remains a source of considerable pride for the youngster (see below), now 18 and just whiling away the brief period between that and the blessed release that will be his own death or long-term incarceration.

Somewhat reassuringly, the fundamental constant of violent crime—its high correlation to gross stupidity—is here in evidence, suggesting that indecent interval will be brief. His sophistication regarding the criminal justice system hasn't yet matched his precocity for criminal violence however, and his conspicuous lack of shame regarding the killing (or appreciation for the mercy shown him) suggests that on his block he's something of a celebrity:

"While he was being searched by Deputy Hill and Deputy Nix, (the teen) bragged to them about being one of the juveniles who killed the Tuba Man," according to an incident report. "He bragged how his lawyer, John Henry Brown (sic), got him off with only three months for stomping Tuba Man to death and how he would get him off for these charges too," a deputy wrote in an incident report.

However, John Henry Browne was not the teen's attorney on the Tuba Man case, in which he received a sentence of 30 to 72 weeks and served all 72. His attorneys were public defenders Daewoo Kim and Hal Palmer, according to the King County Prosecutor's Office.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

And Now a Little Something for the Ladies

Dennis Dale — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:18:00 -0800

Chastened into enlightenment by yesterday's demands for brevity, coherence and, always, civility, I have decided on this relatively inoffensive post about sports, from last June, where it was originally published at my lonely outpost on the nether-net. Yesterday was exhilarating but exhausting, so excuse me if I don't engage in the comment thread. I'm sure you'll be just as kind in my absence as before. Hey I'm sorry, but it's not as if I have nothing more important to do in the middle of the week but monitor some comment thread...

Jesus, I just realized that's not true. Okay, if I don't return it's because I've found some sturdy rope. First one to seize on the "go ahead and hang yourself" retort wins the Presidential Medal of Healing Rhetoric Award. We shall have to come up with a word for the combination of nerve and obliviousness displayed by the uncivil proponent of civility—so far all I've got is "Chutz-duh." Needs work I know.

But my favorite moment from yesterday: when one commenter suggested the responses were a tad overheated, somebody shot back (paraphrasing)—hey, this guy just questioned the value of civility, there's no way in hell I'm going to give him any! Priceless. Back home and nursing my wounds I was reassured by a friend that the comparison between my writing and Loughner's ramblings was unwarranted. Thanks, man. Dennis Dale—he's no Loughner!
Until tomorrow, friends.

Discreetly tucked below the fold. Please to enjoy.

Basketball is Basketball, Equality is Excellence, War is Peace

Boldly now comes the WNBA's television campaign for its new season, to accompany the NBA playoffs. Interspersing footage from both leagues the spot creates the illusion the men and women are playing together. For example, a WNBA player makes a pass; we cut to an NBA player hauling it in on his way to the basket. Several such iterations and the tag-line:

Basketball is Basketball

It is agreed. Basketball is basketball.

As a self-contained system of rules, the game is its own standard and ideal; its quality is its only valid measure. The players' identities are incidental—they are only represented by their competitive success. Why would you concern yourself with who plays, as long as they play well? I offer this as the best interpretation of the WNBA's slogan.

But how is this not precisely the WNBA's problem? It is basketball we go to see, not basketball played by X. The WNBA has the unfortunate circumstance of competing with its far superior parent league in delivering to market basketball. The women are way out of their league. Yet here they are, at once drawing our attention to and contradicting the purely sentimental nature of their appeal. Basketball is basketball, sister.

Any league not open to all is a novelty act. Akin to a six-foot-or-under league, of which we would make no pretense of parity with the NBA. Why, then, does the WNBA exist? If there is some demand for off-season professional basketball, why not another open league (which in turn might not be too competitive for the better female players)?

But "basketball is basketball" can have another meaning besides that which I've assumed thus far. So just to be thorough. It can also mean:
discernment in basketball is unwarranted because quality is trivial or uniform.
If you've seen one game you've seen them all. Call it the "parts is parts" fallacy. This exhausts reasonable interpretations of the slogan at two, and they are mutually exclusive.

Thus we have a phrase that is literal nonsense yet holds in potential two contradictory meanings; it is and isn't. What a perfect foil for the encouraged chaos of cut-and-paste. Here it blends together the superior with the inferior deliberately to conflate them, to the benefit of the inferior over the superior. As the advertisement's visual creates the illusion of one game by splicing together two, likewise the text splices together one meaning from two. The WNBA offers, as needed, two fluid options to guide us to the Nirvana of egalitarian bliss: ignore inferiority or disregard excellence.

Not that anyone is paying attention, much less defending the integrity of the language, but the slogan, mild doublespeak that it is, is the inclusion argument boiled down to its essence; all the energy they concentrate in their concise palindrome backfires and only serves to reveal that equality degrades excellence ("equality" as defaced by the modifier "social"; alternatively "inclusion," or "anti-discrimination"). In any given instance, more of one ensures less of the other. Yet we are conditioned to believe the effect is non-existent, trivial or even opposite. Why?

Our elite is divided between those invested in and those cowed by the advance of a federally administered regime of equality. Thus too-evident instances of of equality degrading excellence and impoverishing the common good are collective embarrassments, not only as individual failures of policy, but as evidence of the constant—equality degrades excellence. The more "equality" the equalitarian gets the greater its cost, the plainer its effects, the more he must hide. He is not alone, however; the need to conceal this corrosive process has as many allies as excellence has enemies, always ready to take up pitchfork and put torch to the affronts to vanity and pride that are Truth, Beauty, God. Only here the rabble is roused on behalf of power and the status quo. We have drifted into a historical novelty: we have an elite that demands disdain for tradition, custom, history. What then do they consider their mandate? A certain definition of excellence, ironically.

Meanwhile, the NBA is a singular story of merit by excellence overcoming social and sentimental bias, justly celebrated as a civil rights accomplishment yet, less noted, demolishing the queer premise upon which civil rights law and culture is based. That premise: American culture degrades and represses minorities and all groups are equally blessed with the host of human talents.

A group representing some seven percent of the US population (before accounting for age), setting out with every social and many legal conventions against it and armed only with exceptional ability, took one generation to to dominate professional basketball—transforming the game in the process. Today black American men still represent eighty percent of the NBA, even as they've made it so successful it draws talent from around the world. This attests equally to the unprecedented fairness of the league and nation on one hand and the racial diversity of human talent on the other.

Not only has white America rejected sentiment in favor of the superiority of the black game, the stunning display of racial disparity on display is itself largely responsible for the success of the league—white fascination with black physical talent as a superior and therefore good thing. A recognizably Western impulse. Western (and if the following carried negative connotations we would be allowed "white") creativity propels the story through various media, its ingenuity delivers it in high definition to your home, its industry daily manages the logistics of filling arenas with the reverential. African athleticism made transcendent by American imagination and industry. Is there anything comparable in history? A little respect, please.

It is not forthcoming. The celebration of this story grows progressively shriller, as if in inverse proportion to the improving material condition of its beneficiaries. The narrative focuses almost entirely on the storming of the barriers—not of their creative dismantling. Taken as part of the larger civil rights narrative it is presumed the barriers remain, their latency here contingent on our militant stance against them, active most everywhere else. But the true lesson lies in the relative ease with which longstanding social prohibition gave way permanently to excellence.

But the broader cultural emanations from this frank display of what still seems like a mystical talent to white America transcend basketball, combining with black excellence in popular music to level an entire complex of traditional barriers to blacks; once habitually taken as inferior, now considered superior in many aspects; envied, emulated, exploited into cultural preeminence.
The milieu demands however the writer frame the cracker here, yet again: the nation is uniquely neurotic regarding race, what with all this fascination with it! This sort of thing often from sportswriters, as if to absolve themselves of that they so conspicuously ridicule or abhor, shocked, shocked. But the story is not told. Racist exploitation has made Black America a cultural colossus.

Indeed, it is not an imagined human uniformity but racial diversity, and its complementary nature, that acts as a catalyst to excellence in an exploitative process that nonetheless empowers the exploited. This could only happen in an overarching culture with the energy, creativity and fairness—the excellence—of America. Ironically, when we are compelled to pledge "diversity is strength" the meaning is opposite (roughly: diversity is our strength because we're all the same and no culture is superior—a patent absurdity!) and the intention is to scandalize this reality in the popular mind, contradicting as it does elite convention—rather, convention prescribed for us by the elite.

Equality is a conceit only societies made wealthy through discrimination can afford (or a disease only wealthy societies contract). We have so long been wealthy and thus conditioned to humor this sentiment that it has become an unexamined article of faith. That conditioning is evidenced by the oblivious confidence of the accusation (women!) implicit in the WNBA slogan: that we aren't giving the women a fair shot! They truly know not what they say.

None of this of course means the WNBA hasn't the right to exist, or that its athletes aren't worthy, or that it might not carve out an economic niche and justify the NBA's subsidy; it just means we would do well not to allow them the affront that is this slogan. If people will create and nourish the WNBA God bless them. But that does not entitle them to abuse the language or logic. You can have your ladies' league and I wish you well; but you cannot then have your "basketball is basketball" pretense. No ma'am.

As demonstrated by the NBA's example, excellence and equality are at odds. In the case of the NBA's wardship of the WNBA, excellence humors equality, because it can afford to. American history in aphorism! Long may she wave!

Pessimistic as we imagine we've become about the nation's economic prospects, we nonetheless dutifully assume an endless summer of rising tax revenue to fund the ever-increasing cost of our condescension. We presume the creativity and industry of the resented will outrace the demands of resentment in perpetuity. This resentment is far more nurtured than confronted by our creative class, as jealously as if it were their own. Which it is, of course; as an artistic form, the civil rights genre now is where class bigotry goes to masquerade as enlightenment.

If it seems the narrative has become indulgent, pornographic even, that's because it has. Self-interested but still less rational than emotional. We now have an elite that not only doesn't care what is good for the common, it doesn't know what is good for itself. Our modern inversion: an excitable, bigoted and irrational elite in need of the calming influence of a wise and engaged population. Ah, to have one!

Where might our defensive wisdom begin? By critical examination of just such Orwellian tropes as the WNBA slogan. The fact that it is merely an advertisement, or "just basketball", shouldn't pardon it. This is where merit should make its stand, out here on the front line of the assault on excellence, where language and logic are the collateral damage. Exposure, examination, ridicule; these are the weapons of the insurgency.

The WNBA's egalitarian experiment is a tap stuck into the broad trunk of the NBA—the very bounty of human inequality—diverting a trickle for the purpose of sentimental inclusion. Embarrassed by this fact, the WNBA distracts from its inferiority through artful subterfuge and chides us for our bias even as it claims privilege. Is there a better model of the Token State?

Can it suggest something of the costs of that state and its definition of equality, out here in the world where the individual's spoils are humbler and the collective consequences graver? After all, the law is the law, engineering is engineering, firefighting is firefighting, medicine is medicine. That disparity in quality the WNBA wants you to ignore isn't an anomaly, but a small, exposed section of something vast and deliberately misunderstood.

Of course, what the WNBA is really about is making women more like men. Which prompts a whole new why?

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Satire and Obscenity

Dennis Dale — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:01:00 -0800

From The Onion:

NEW YORK—According to media analysts, the nation's TV commentators and political pundits have proved uncannily accurate when describing the deeply disturbed inner thoughts of accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner. "It's strange, but when it comes to getting inside the mind of this human being who seems to possess no empathy, sense of morality, or hold on reality, and who is motivated only by personal animus and self-glorification, the nation's major political pundits have been amazingly adept," said Horizon Media analyst Bob Cullen, who has studied extensive tape of commentators on all major TV news programs and found their remarks on "what the killer is thinking" to be consistently thorough and detailed across the board. "It's almost as though they have some way of knowing, firsthand, exactly what this demented and highly dangerous individual with the eyes of millions upon him is going through." Researchers at Horizon Media also reported that a number of prominent TV pundits appeared to be mimicking the exact same chilling gleam in Loughner's eye for what they could only speculate was "dramatic effect."

But satire fails a nation that routinely lies to itself. Cue America's meaty mc of the maudlin, Al Sharpton, yes, that Al Sharpton, invoking MLK in the Washington Post on, yes, civil discourse.

I'll let you decide if Arizona "changed everything." One thing is certain, demagogues of all stripes are still in business, and they aren't selling "civility" any more than they're practicing humility. You didn't really think it would be otherwise, did you?

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

...A Good Idea at the Time

Dennis Dale — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:12:04 -0800

Dennis Dale's daughter purchased the right for him to post on Slog for a week through our annual holiday auction Strangercrombie, which this year benefited neglected children and the homeless. More info about our charity auction here. The views expressed in Dale's editorials on Slog are his alone and have not been edited based on ideology.

My name is Dennis Dale and I'll be blogging here through Friday, inspiration willing. I maintain a desultory blog of my own, which I will refrain from mentioning again, modesty willing. I’ve also published a few magazine articles over the years, though, for which I claim semi-pro status—not a neophyte but a dilettante! If you’re not sure that’s a good thing, neither am I. Let this be our little experiment seeking an answer to that question. I’ll do my best, and as for you, reader, let me just remind you now that while humoring overreaching amateurs may encourage bad art and foul notions, it's always good manners. And manners are what really count.

Here’s our problem. I am to the right of Ronald Reagan. Literally; I bought a plot, due northwest from and to the Gipper's own eternal right-hand side and so, like Bill Murray's burn-out groundskeeper in Caddyshack (blessed with deathbed enlightenment by a guru, in lieu of monetary gratuity) I have that consolation awaiting me. The Pacific sunsets will endlessly strafe us with their glorious rays until kingdom come, or Obama, having declared his presidency-for-life and finally revealing his secret alliance with Ahmadinejad and Chavez, turns the Reagan presidential library into a mosque and hands the grounds over to Venezuelan flood-victims and their clucking, defecating chickens. shudder

Not really; it’s both not as bad as and far worse than that. But ideology is like real estate; it’s all about location, location, location. Here then I will be the temporary reactionary in residence. So do be gentle and, please, not in the face. The week's blogging was a gift, by the way—for you as well, as you no doubt have already decided. Thank you, I'll be here all week.

To avoid a too-jarring shock, for each one of us, I'll just ease into this progressive morass with a wholly inoffensive post on a wholly innoffensive topic and with due reverence for the date. Below the fold.

Rhetoric and Political Violence

kinesis, n a movement that is a response to a stimulus but is not oriented with respect to the source of stimulation[1913 Webster]

Ten days ago a madman, having legally acquired a handgun, killed six unsuspecting innocents. The Democratic Party, assisted by the braver elements of the national media, sprung into action, quickly wrestling the First Amendment to the ground and disarming it before it could do more damage. Alas, the culprit has escaped, spirited away by his longtime associates Hate and Intolerance, no doubt. Fear not; speech posses are combing the hinterlands even now in search of malicious metaphors and savage similes. Needless to say, these suspects should be considered armed and dangerous. In the event that you come into contact with one, make no attempt to engage it, avoid ear contact and back away slowly before fleeing to your nearest progressive cable news outlet or blog, where you can report the encounter. Don't be a hero. That's what we put Keith Olbermann in pancake make-up for.

But above all, just as Fox News and the DHS dutifully advise regarding the terrorist threat of such criminal masterminds as the Liberty Seven and donkey-borne Taliban in the Pashtun hinterlands: be afraid, be very afraid. Always. And trust in the government. Always. Just as in those heady days following 9-11, we are advised to "watch what we say." The parallels between this and that panic make a handy and instructive analog for the confused citizen. Meanwhile, working with heroic speed, experts have already fashioned a new standard for acceptable public rhetoric—if it's capable of provoking a raving lunatic it is illicit. Make a note of it.

This has been necessarily expanded from the original focus on white male Republicans, who nonetheless retain their place atop the hierarchy of hysteria. This all will take some getting used to, I know, but one can always observe Mom's advice—if you don't have anything nice to say, drown your hatemongering words and yourself in your acidic spittle, you fascist bigot. And if you’re incapable of recognizing what might set off a lunatic, you are the lunatic.

And don't despair; our enlightened betters are valiantly fighting to will into being this "new reality" that will have "changed everything." They know what they're talking about. Recall the media's uncanny prophesy that AIDS "changed everything," delivering us from our libertine sexual ways; that 9/11 "changed everything," bringing the nation together finally; and of course the post-partisan transformation of Barack Obama's presidency ushering in a new era of domestic tranquility and world peace. These are the people who saved you from Saddam Hussein's killer drones and WMD labs, remember. Despar not of their wisdom and sobriety.

So, aroused from my own torpor by this national emergency, I have decided to do my part, by recycling here an old essay of mine about another unstable naif stirred up by the bigoted rhetoric of political demagogues, and his reception in the media. Originally posted last August 15.

Cowardice and Credulity

psy•cho•sis, n
loss of contact with reality: a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or mania that is marked by delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, and distorted perceptions of reality.
Microsoft Encarta

Is it too soon, for decency, or too late, because things move fast nowadays, to speculate on the potential for an Omar Thornton fan page? Due to the solemn credulity with which the media addressed the accusations—of a killer against his still dying victims—no mass murderer has so quickly gained so high a platform for so petty a charge. When the crimination is “white racism” no decent interval is allowed. Neither, skepticism. Omar’s hearing was immediately and dutifully granted in response to his crimes, with the usual suspect “experts” weighing in—only this time on workplace discrimination, not, as we've come to expect, workplace violence.

This estimation of "racism", broadly defined, as the equivalent of violence (with the noose as a talisman and the "n-word" as incantation, both imbued with supernatural powers) is how the cultural commissariat sanctions black-on-white violence as an unfortunate but understandable means of redress.

The press response occurred at the nexus of willed ignorance and forced imagination. The sort of horrors before which this cloistered class feigns to shudder on behalf of Thornton and his ilk they can only imagine. And imagine they do, with energy and diligence. I had previously reckoned a sane man’s homicidal “breaking point” was well beyond an overheard slur, an item of graffiti, and a company’s objection to being systematically robbed by its own. Merely mentioning these charges here, even if true in their slender entirety, is to give them indecent attention. Forgive me, but this is a very dirty business.

And we still don’t know the depths to which our media will go to prove its ideological gullibility—no echoes of restraint have yet answered the pings of credulity that were the first news reports. Exhaustion, rather than shame, quelled the herd’s hysteria. We can say the farcical delusion goes at least as deep as this Christian Science Monitor headline:

Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.

How quaint of you, if you thought the answer all-too-clear in the case of a shooter singling out the middle-aged white men who built and sustained the company that employed and endured him (as they tend to do wherever we find productive endeavor—an unacknowledged fact explaining most of the deliberately cultivated resentment, eagerly taken up by Omar, for this, the last remaining class against which discrimination is codified into law and derision is compelled by culture). No, this bigotry doesn't alarm the media. Even in the act of murder a black man isn't granted the capacity for hate that a white innocent bears like a human stain, shed not even in death. America's "original sin" is, after all, confined to white Americans in perpetuity, whoever they are and whatever they do. Sickening still, but no longer surprising.

The grotesque irony of pursuing a homicidal bigot’s complaints of racial harassment is only noticed by the irrelevant (my hand’s raised). Still, the CSM story above actually lagged the pack to the skeptical rear by featuring an authority discounting, rather than humoring or giving undue credence to, Omar’s charges. For the media the event worked like a brain-teaser, where habitual thinking leads one to miss plain meaning. You know: one of the coins is a nickel; the doctor is the boy’s mother; the hateful murderer is the bigot.

No “but of course” moment is forthcoming. Here the press is like the ideal subject for a hypnotist’s lounge act: easily brought under, highly suggestible, shameless in its stupor, oblivious in retrospect.

This defamation of the dead isn‘t without its black comedy: the murderer was wearied, we’re told (by a callow girlfriend as oblivious to shame as the reporters encouraging her, reveling in the attention and enthusiastically adopting, as it were, the role usually reserved for a tearful mother), by the racism that just so happened to find him at every job. The chronically incompetent and stupid typically blame luck or a spiteful world for their misfortunes, and in Omar’s mind racism followed him like a personal storm cloud, manifested, I presume, in charges of tardiness, ineptitude, theft. Perhaps it is me who’s being naïve. After all, what a boundless reservoir of racism white America is!

The media’s appetite would not be sated before we were assured of the gentle nature of this man and his love for family, lovers, and handguns. One newspaper featured a photo spread of the widow (of the killer, not one of the killed), complete with an image of the tattoo consecrating her upper thigh to their love.

In this AP story some demanded (further) justice be delivered upon the dead:

Some experts said Friday that, although nothing justifies Thornton's killing spree, the allegations of workplace racism should be investigated so they can either be dealt with or laid to rest.
"You have to investigate it," said employment lawyer Kelly Scott, adding that racial harassment in the workplace is often a crime.

"Any chance you have to make your workplace a better place, a safer place, you have to take it," Scott said. "If there are people who have these attitude problems or problem dealing with other races, they should lose their jobs." [seems the company attempted just this, in firing Omar]

Sharon Toomer, founder of the website blackandbrownnews.com, called it "an accountability issue."
"If he didn't (report harassment), that's great. He's just a nut case," [but if he did...] she said. "If he did go and nobody did anything, then the company's hands are not clean." [killin' is too good for 'em]

Messages seeking comment about a potential investigation into Thornton's racism claims were left Friday for the Hartford State's Attorney's Office, the FBI's New Haven office, the chairman of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, and for the president of the Connecticut NAACP.

Once the guilt of the dead is confirmed by the standard of federal “civil rights law”—wherein the burden of proof is on the accused (here they can be said to be doubly disadvantaged, compelled by law to prove the negative in a voice rendered silent by their accuser; damn this teacher is strict!)—remedies will be considered. Perhaps a class action suit and subsequent settlement, an injunction mandating some sort of diversity program, a donation to an activist organization (and administration ally) of the Justice Department’s selection, the hiring of some member of the elect. Ms. Sherrod is available.

It has been a teachable moment.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Today Is the Final Day to Get Your 2010 Strangercrombie Donor Badge

Paul Constant — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 09:42:29 -0800

Hey there, Slog commenter! Do you have your Strangercrombie Donor badge yet? Canuck does!

Today is your last chance to get a badge that will remain on your profile until Strangercrombie 2011 kicks off next December. Here are some Strangercrombie donor badge Fun Factz™:

A donor badge automatically makes even your most dickish, ad hominem comments appear compassionate and charitable!

Whichever gender you prefer finds Strangercrombie badges to be completely irresistible.

And as previously stated, badges provide your comments with 79% more legitimacy.

Plus more! It's just science, people!

All you have to do is donate $20 or more to PayPal and send a copy of your receipt to strangercrombie@thestranger.com with your commenter name. We are giving out badges until 5 pm today. After that, you will not be able to get a badge until next year. And did we mention it's for two great causes? It's true! So get to clickin'.

One last time, with feeling: Strangercrombie: Once a year, we do something good™.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Thank You for Making Strangercrombie a Success!

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:01:07 -0800

...And to all, a goodzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

Thank you for making Strangercrombie 2010 such a great success! You raised tens of thousands of dollars for two great local charities, and you bought a buttload of sex toys*, celebrity encounters, hot dates, and one-of-a-kind items to make it happen!

Big thanks, of course, to the businesses and creative folks who donated to Strangercrombie. I hope you'll give them your business—they deserve it.

Thanks to Kelly O, who did such a fine job art-directing David Belisle's Night Before Strangercrombie photo shoot. Nancy Hartunian coordinated this monster with her usual good humor and eerie sense of calm. Marty Griswold and our entire sales team rustled up virtually everything in the catalog out of thin air in a very bad economy, the web team dragged the fine art of charity auctioneering boldly into the future, and the editorial staff wrote up the catalog text eagerly and without complaint. They are all fucking champs.

But most of all, thanks to all of you. Every year, Stranger readers and staffers get together and show that we're not just an angry band of complainers and ne'er-do-wells. And it never fails: Every year, I'm blown away by your kindness and generosity. We're a community that gets good shit done. I'm proud of all of you, and I couldn't be more pleased to be a part of the extended Stranger family.

If you didn't win your auction, I'd like to gently remind you that you can still donate to Strangercrombie via our PayPal button. That will stay open through 5 pm Friday; if you give $20 or more to get your very own much-coveted Strangercrombie Donor 2010 badge.

Good work, everyone. You made Seattle a better place today.

* Actually, you bought way more sex toys than a single butt could stand at once.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

TEN MINUTES LEFT!

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:50:00 -0800

Ten minutes until Strangercrombie closes! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Lube up your bidding fingers and start to pushin'!

Why Not Buy The Stranger for Christmas?

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:30:31 -0800

Click to enlarge

Did you know you can buy virtually all the content in the January 20, 2011 issue of The Stranger? It's true! You want to make me re-read the Twilight series—and like it this time? I'll do it! Want Lindy to wax rhapsodic over the intellectual pleasures of Marmaduke? Bring it! Want to force Brendan Kiley to sit through all of your play? He will do that!

Every inch of the paper is for sale, including Savage Love (and Savage Lovecast and a HUMP!-y dinner with Dan), a restaurant review, a news story, a music profile, and a day of ad-bombing all of Slog. That's right—we sold your eyeball impressions!

Just think about what you could do with a platform like this; you could make us look like (even bigger) idiots (than we usually are)! And all for the cut-rate price of...well, they're sold separately, so get in there and bid!

There's just a half hour left!

But You Know What? You Deserve It!

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:00:49 -0800

David Belisle

Sure, it helps some very good causes. But you know what? Strangercrombie is motherfucking awesome!

Where else can you get a Ping-Pong package that includes your own paddles—hand carved to your specifications, and an entire tournament named after you? Who else will give you a Dungeons & Dragons session with the sexiest Dungeon Master in the world? What other auction gives you a chance to have drinks with the mayor? Can you find another place that will ensure you will get your 3,000- to 6,500-word short story edited down into a 200- to 500-word short story by Stranger cover boy Tao Lin? If you can, buy it there! If you can't buy it at Strangercrombie!

A bunch of mind-blowing items are going for bargain-basement prices right now, including an underground art tour from hot young art thing No Touching Ground, a political planning session with dreamy Joe Fitzgibbon, a dinner cooked just for you by Ethan Stowell, a gumbo dinner with lion of Seattle poetry Ed Skoog, and a consultation with superstar anonymous literary agent's assistant The Rejectionist!

All this plus the proverbial more! Go! Bid! Buy! You only have an hour left, people!

A Step Up

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:00:38 -0800

Christopher Daniel

Did you read Dominic Holden's great profile of Downtown Emergency Service Center? It's great because it's not just the standard charity pitch; he really advocates passionately for DESC because it's something he's believed in for a long time now.

And if you know anything about DESC, you believe in them, too. They help the homeless of Seattle who have fallen through all the safety nets—the unrepentant drunks, the severely mentally ill—and they don't just help them by providing one hot meal and a cot for one night. They provide care on a long-term basis, and they teach the forgotten class how to reclaim their dignity and their humanity.

You don't need me to tell you that it's tough out there. We all know it. But the shittiest part of all this is that the people who are suffering the most are the people who have the least. DESC is facing some egregious budget cuts, and it's going to be up to us—up to all of us, as a community—to help them keep doing their brilliant work. As plainly as possible, what DESC does is help the people nobody else cares about; 2,000 of them a day. Show them that you care by bidding on Strangercrombie items and by donating through the Paypal link on our Strangercrombie page; you'll be glad you did.

Strangercrombie: Once a year, we do something good™.

Do You Know Who Lee Brissey Jr. Is?

Grant Brissey — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:55:47 -0800

Lee Brissey Jr. is actually the most interesting man in the world. That's right, forget those lame Wes Anderson-rip-off Dos Equis commercials—Lee Brissey flies airplanes and knows stuff about torpedoes! Currently, the Strangercrombie flight piloted by Lee Brissey is going for little more than $300. That's less than he gets paid to get out of bed in the morning, people! As of this writing, you have little more than two hours to claim this privilege. Do it.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Look at This Adorable Kid!

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:00:51 -0800

Don't get us wrong—we love putting together our skanky, sexy photo shoots and giving away boozy, sexy packages to our readers every Strangercrombie. But we should all take a moment and look at this adorable little kid to the left here. This kid is why we do Strangercrombie. He's a poster child for Childhaven, one of our two Strangercrombie charities this year, which means that at some point in his recent past (and all he has is a recent past) this boy suffered some kind of abuse and neglect. Think about that.

Then think about what Childhaven does. It takes children who have often only known a world of cruelty and it offers them kindness and teaches them that violence and neglect isn't the only way. When I wrote Childhaven up for the paper, I saw that in action. Imagine a roomful of babies who are being shown that they have every right to be loved. A roomful of children who, in a very methodical, intentional way, are being taught that abuse and neglect is not all this world has to give them.

Childhaven does more than that. They teach parents who have hurt or ignored their children—parents who themselves were likely adorable children who were abused or neglected—how to break that cycle. Nobody sets out to become a bad parent, but we can only raise children with the skills and experiences that we have. Childhaven does important work by teaching these parents a new way to love their children.

That—not the sleazy sexy pictures, not the cool celebrity dinners and swag—is why it's important that you give to Strangercrombie this year. That's why, if you don't have enough cash to win an auction, you should give what you can to the PayPal button on our Strangercrombie page. Because when you give to Childhaven, you're not just helping that beautiful child up there to the left. You're ensuring that future generations of beautiful children never have to experience the pain that this child did.

Strangercrombie: Once a year we do something good™.

You Have Four Hours Left to Bid on Strangercrombie

Paul Constant — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:00:21 -0800

Now's the time! Go! Bid! Buy!

Wine, Women, and Songs: ALL FOR YOU!

Megan Seling — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:00:25 -0800

Strangercrombie 2010 ends in 9 HOURS. You have until 5 pm TODAY to get in on this shit, dudes!

DAVID BELISLE

For all you wine and cheese lovers, how about a wine and cheese party thrown in your own home for you and nine of your friends! Sheri LaVigne of the Calf & Kid and Peter Moore of Poco Wine Room will come to your house and serve you up the tasting party of a lifetime. Delicious! And it's sure to buy you a few friends, too!

For all you lady lovers, the Burning Heart Burlesque is waiting to give you a night filled with gorgeous women! You and nine of your friends will receive VIP treatment for the BHB show at Motor (shows every third Thursday), and to top of off, you'll also get some surprised gifts. SURPRISE GIFTS! Bid now!

And NOTHING can beat the feeling you'll get when you hear a song that's written all about you. Two local bands have stepped up and offered their services this year—Pillow Army and Exohoxo will write an original song for the winner of their respective auctions about whatever the winner (YOU!) chooses!

Remember: All proceeds are going straight to two really great charities—Childhaven and Downtown Emergency Service Center (you can read The Stranger's profile of these organizations here).

The auction ends today! At 5 pm! GO! BID! BUY!

Strangercrombie: Once a year we do something good™.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

What? You Haven't Browsed Strangercrombie Yet?

Brendan Kiley — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:27:33 -0800

Browse Strangercrombie, why don't you? Browse it! You'll find things like the optimistically named "Taking Nirvana Back from the Masses" package. (Going for $162.50! I didn't realize obscurity could buy them back so cheap!)

And the ten tickets to HUMP! (no lines, no hassle) are going for a mere $315! That's just $10 over the ticket price to breeze right through the door. Do you have any idea what kinds of things—filthy, dirty things—people would do for that privilege? You want NINE people in your eternal debt? (If you know what I'm saying.) That's got to be worth more than $10 per—ahem—head.

Derek Erdman's offer to write and record a revenge-rap against the person of your choice is at just $31 right now. Stupid cheap!

(Speaking of stupid, I am amazed that a date with me [plus a bunch of theater tickets] is currently outselling a date with Wendell fucking Berry [plus a bunch of lecture tickets]! IN YOUR FACE, you distinguished old environmentalist/poet! The people have spoken! All the Guggenheim Awards in the world can't rig the outcome of Strangercrombie!)

And remember, you can buy these things for other people. Do you know someone who'd like the privilege of commissioning a revenge rap? OF COURSE you do. And it's all for charity!

Strangercrombie: Get on it!

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Strangercrombie Is the Nobel Prize Winner of Holiday Shopping

Jen Graves — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:02:03 -0800

Photo by David Belisle
You will feel good, and you can rest, once you check out Strangercrombie this year.

Yeah, I said it. Nobel Prize! When we win it you are ALL going to Stockholm with us! Seriously, the charity auction—all the money goes to Childhaven and Downtown Emergency Service Center—ends tomorrow, December 15th, at 5 pm, so it now has officially become time to get on this.

Last year's dinner for four couples at the home of leading art dealer Greg Kucera was a total hit, I heard afterward. You do want to be on this guest list. It's basically a museum visit, with a dinner and sparkling conversation, too:

Thinking about starting to buy art? Already collecting? Just want to get a peek inside the house of Seattle's original power dealer (a very friendly fellow who happens to set a mean table)? Well, his table seats 12 and his walls are covered with an amazing collection...And make sure you sneak away to glimpse the nudes in the back bathroom.

Then there's the bride package. Obviously it won't work for everyone. But good lord, if you intend to be a bride, male or female, this is a serious bonanza, and at the moment it's going for nickels.

Have you ever considered, while listening to KEXP, just what Riz Rollins can do for you? His mixes are legendary. And he's willing to make one for you, 80 minutes long, according to your taste, totally customized.

You like film better than music? Take over Central Cinema with 20 of your friends.

For one night only, you will light up Central Cinema's giant screen with the film of your choice (pending acquisition of rights by Central Cinema) and pack your 20 dearest friends into the theater's comfy benches to watch it, all for free!

Or hell, browse the whole auction on your own good time—today or tomorrow afternoon until 5. It really is a good cause, and great stuff.

Strangercrombie: Once a Year, We Do Something Good.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Strangercrombie: The Pioneer Square Edition

Charles Mudede — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:56:26 -0800

DAVID BELISLE

Time is flying. This year's Strangercrombie Holiday Auction ends at 5 pm this Wednesday, December 15—and the big bucks, as you must already know, will go to Downtown Emergency Service Center and Childhaven.

Now, with all of the bad news coming out of Pioneer Square, here is a way you can show that bad news means nothing to you. It's a package for grub in the oldie and gloud part of town. You get 25 vouchers for free döner kebab sandwiches at the Berliner Döner Kebab, a 6-BuiltPack at BuiltBurger, and $50 to spend at F.X. McRory's. Also in this package is one hour of tattoo time at Hidden Hand Tattoo. Even I didn't know you could eat a tattoo.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Case of the Mondays? Strangercrombie Can Help!

Lindy West — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:19:51 -0800

First of all, let's all take a moment to look at this dude's butt!

David Belisle

[moment]

This dude's butt is not for sale at Strangercrombie (we do not sell people, you barbarian!). HOWEVER, there are plenty of other roundy lumps of happiness for you to bid on between now and this Wednesday December 15th at 5 pm, when the auction closes.

Plus, the money you spend benefits two amazing charities, Child Haven and Downtown Emergency Services Center, and nothing buoys a doldrummy heart like helping people in need. Let's get started!

Art thou bored?* Art thou sober? Art though non-vegan? How about the best wine and cheese party EVER?

If you love cheese, prepare to lose your mind: Cheese-lady Sheri LaVigne of the Calf & Kid and Peter Moore of Poco Wine Room will come to your home and give you and nine friends the tasting party of a lifetime. This is seriously so awesome, it breaks the brain.

Got something to say but not sure how to say it? How about the Fat and Happy Filmmaker Package?

You always wanted to make movies, but the thought of becoming a possibly starving artist scared the shit out of you. We know. It's terrifying. Also, slimming! But still: terrifying. Well, worry no more. With this package, you get a $545 scholarship to Seattle Film Institute, where you can learn to be the film genius that you are via either the Hands-On Filmmaking 1 Class or the Screenwriting 1 class—winner's choice! Each is an eight-week class that normally costs $545, but with your scholarship will cost… NOTHING. And lest you starve from all the excitement/artistry, we'll also throw in 12 free pizzas from Kylie's Chicago Pizza in Fremont (worth up to $24 each), redeemable all at once—or one at a time—winner's choice!—through December 31, 2011.

David Belisle
Happy Monday!

(BONUS: You can also buy a film review by ME, for a guaranteed thumbs-up to your masterpiece or a brutal takedown of your film school nemesis!)

Oh! Shit! Did you just squirt out a kid? No worries—we've got a package for that too.

This package includes the following: Mama Rose's Naturals Baby Care Travel Kit (baby wash, baby lotion, baby balm, and baby powder—clean that baby up, for god's sake!). $50 to spend at Stitches good for merchandise or sewing classes, a pair of Monster Feet fleece booties, and $20 to Bootyland (cloak that baby's shame!). A Haba Trix multicolored wooden rattle/clutching toy (give that baby something to do before it turns to the drugs!). And eight pre- or postnatal yoga classes at any 8 Limbs Yoga Center (limber that baby up!).

Seriously, there's just tons and tons of great stuff—you should browse through and see for yourself. And bid! It's for the children. And the adult people. And for you. Everybody wins!!!

Strangercrombie: Once a Year, We Do Something Good.

*Sorry if this is misleading. There are no Strangercrombie packages involving Slim Jims OR Macho Man Randy Savage. At least not this year (Dan? Any relation?).

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

A Year of Brunch at the Skylark Cafe

Cienna Madrid — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:00:12 -0800

David Belisle
Chicken fried steak.

I know it's hard to see past the breasts, but breasts are an impractical holiday gift for most people (think of the awkward wrapping job). Now imagine: You could give the gift of chicken fried steak or Harbor Island Hash to someone you love (perhaps yourself), once a month, every month, for a year, with this weekend brunch package at West Seattle's Skylark Cafe and Club. Good for 12 free brunch entrees (excludes drinks and tip).

Here's their full brunch menu. Now go bid!

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

It's the Lord's Day. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Eli Sanders — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:00:08 -0800

David Belisle

Of all the days of the week, Sunday is clearly the best and most divinely ordained for sitting in bed and snuggling your laptop until—woah, how'd that happen?!—it decides to go on a little holiday shopping spree.

And look: Today is Sunday!

Some suggestions as you cruise through the Strangercrombie offerings, which of course you should be doing because all proceeds go to help two worthy charities: Child Haven and Downtown Emergency Services Center.

No. 1: Go to Europe without leaving town. Duh. I mean, come on: Belgian waffles for two at Sweet Iron. Ridonkulously tasty Italian food at Brad's Swingside Cafe, where $75 will get you all the big bowls of pasta you can handle. And $100 worth of Le Pichet Parisian-ness. You want it. Do it now.

No. 2: Flying! With Grant Brissey's father! Scheduled on a clear day, weather permitting, which both sound like very very good ideas! Also: Currently a steal.

David Belisle

No. 3: Prince of Ping Pong. You get custom-carved Stiga ping-pong paddles (you design 'em, they carve 'em), two Twilight Exit hoodies, lunch or dinner for two at the Twilight Exit, $40 to spend at Twilight, lessons from one of the bar's "ping-pong champions," and naming rights to the bar's annual ping-pong tournament. Which is awesome. Must. Have.

You're welcome.

Once a year we do something good.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Effin' A! The Strangercrombie Bonanza Continues

David Schmader — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:00:33 -0800

David Belisle & Kelly O

Attention citizens: You have just a handful of days remaining to take part in this year's Strangercrombie Holiday Auction, which wraps up at 5 pm this coming Wednesday, December 15.

In case you don't already know, Strangercrombie is our annual cavalcade of one-of-a-kind gifts, which we auction off to raise money for exceedingly worthy causes. Some examples of the awesomeness:

*Vegetable Lover's Package!
Get healthy in the New Year with a gift from Lucky Palate Vegetarian Meal Service, which will get you at least six vegetarian and/or vegan dishes delivered to your home. For a night you feel like going out, enjoy $25 worth of vegan eats at Loving Hut. Work off all that food with 30 days of unlimited Bikram yoga at SweatBox (see www.sweatboxyoga.com for schedule), and since a little indulgence never hurt anyone, we'll throw in a little something from Coopers Brewery.

*Meat Lover's Package!
Do you have a hankering for meat that no mere panderingly named pizza can satisfy? Then this is the package for you. You get bacon socks and meat socks from the Sock Monster (made of cotton, not actual meat); a vintage mink-fur hat, a muskrat pelt, a ram's horn, and deer antlers from No Parking on Pike; a Bacon Lover's Ultimate Gift Pack from J&D's Foods (includes multiple flavors of Bacon Salt, one bag each of Regular and Cheddar BaconPOP, Bacon Lip Balm, Bacon-Flavored Mmmvelopes, one jar of Baconnaise, and J&D's Country Style Bacon Gravy Mix); and dinner for four at Smith (including two appetizers, four entrées, dessert, and two bottles of wine), plus YOUR OWN TAXIDERMIED PHEASANT. If that doesn't get you hate-fucked by the nubiles from PETA, nothing will!

*HUMP! Lover's Package!
The winner of this auction gets a row of 10 seats at HUMP! 2011. No waiting in line—just come on in and prepare to witness a whole lot of homegrown fuckin'.

Find the whole avalanche of gift packages here and get to bidding. You've got a scant four days and a few hours left!

Strangercrombie: Once a year, we do something good™.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Strangercrombie: THE THINGS YOU CAN GET!

Dominic Holden — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:03:34 -0800

You cannot get this guy on the left:

David Belisle and Kelly O

I've tethered him to my desk and he's mine now.

But the bounty of Scrangercrombie has so much to offer that hasn't been tied down. You can bid on and purchase—to help Childhaven and Downtown Emergency Service Center—the cover of the paper. It's all yours, you get to decide what people see on buses (within legal limits) right over here. Or you can buy a story in The Stranger's news section.

Or, or, or! If those sound too nice, you can post on Slog for a week (emotionally fragile types may want to skip this one). You could have a pizza party at Big Mario's with socialite Dave Meinert and King County executive Dow Constantine. Or get drinks with Mayor Mike McGinn.

BUT THIS IS THE BEST ONE: An 80-minute mix tape just for you by DJ Riz. Holy fucking shit.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

"Where'd My Strangercrombie Donor Badge Go?"

Paul Constant — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:19:04 -0800

Here is one of Fnarf's comments from Tuesday:

Here is one of Fnarf's comments from today:

You will notice that the Strangercrombie Donor badge is no longer there. In fact, the badges have been removed from everyone's comment handles. But don't fret! If you donated to last year's Strangercrombie, you will always have the badge, forever and ever, on your MyStrangerFace profile page, like so:

And we have started giving out new badges for donors to this year's Strangercrombie auction! Last of the Time Lords is the first to get a badge, which looks like this:

To get your badge, all you have to do is give more than $20 to this year's Strangercrombie charities, either by winning a package in the auction or by donating cash directly to Strangercrombie, and then e-mailing your Paypal receipt to strangercrombie@thestranger.com with your comment name. Everybody knows that a Strangercrombie Donor badge makes your comments exactly 79% more legitimate, so open those wallets and earn your credibility the way everyone else does—by buying it!

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

A Critical Overview of The Stranger

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:50:00 -0800

Open wide the doors of smug self-satisfaction and loose the floods of hypocrisy! The brainless peons at The Stranger have doffed their pretend-journalism caps—while leaving their smut-peddler caps planted firmly on their soft skulls—and churned out yet another Strangercrombie catalog on the ridiculous assumption that Stranger readers have compassion and/or disposable income.

In theory, Strangercrombie is a "charity auction" (which of course is hippie-speak for "shameless tax dodge") that benefits abused children and homeless people. In practice, it is an excuse for staff photographer KELLY O and known-homosexual DAVID BELISLE to wrangle a menagerie of inebriated models into a room to besmirch the last family-friendly holiday in America. The very cover of the catalog features a Christmas wreath as some sort of ghastly access portal to bared female breasts—although perhaps one should applaud Miss O for the noteworthy effort to include photographs of women in the pages of The Stranger, instead of the traditional eerily slight man-boys favored by Dan Savage?—and the to-be-auctioned items include satanic products such as marital aids, vegan cookery, and a drink with Mayor McGinn. If you feel strongly about either of the chosen charities, I urge you to donate directly to them without encouraging The Stranger's immoral proclivities. There is a hoary cliché that applies here, something about two wrongs not making a right. Do not encourage them.

The other lengthy attraction in this issue involves almost everyone on staff (note that in a rare moment of honesty, the staff is referred to as a band of "know-nothings") attending the Picasso exhibit at Seattle Art Museum and writing about it. This is supposedly clever, you see. Picasso was a "cubist" (which is pretentious shorthand for "person who does not know how to draw"), and this is supposed to be a cubist study of the artist's work. Instead, the 12 writers provide the usual laundry list of swear words, inane observations, and "insights" that they normally apply to their various disciplines. Short version: Who cares?

Speaking of apathy: ADRIAN RYAN apparently has a column hidden somewhere in the bowels of The Stranger—how appropriate, that placement!—titled "The Homosexual Agenda." This week, he promotes a protest against the good people of the Washington State Liquor Control Board at an infamous homosexual drinking establishment and pornographic-film screening room called the Eagle. This is the second week in a row that The Stranger has risen to defend the Eagle (I ignored Christopher Frizzelle's lame diatribe last week because I refuse to review tear-stained memoir, which places all of Frizzelle's work firmly on my do-not-read list), and this means it is time for the city to shut the Eagle down once and for all. If the tiny Mr. Ryan flounces to your defense, you deserve whatever punishment you get.

In other sections: NEWS: Didn't read... BOOKS: Didn't read... THEATER: Is there no theater in Seattle this week? If not, does anyone notice?... CHOW: Didn't read... MUSIC: Dave Segal continues to obsess over the unlistenable... DEAR SCIENCE: Saw the word "ovulation," averted my eyes just in time... SAVAGE LOVE: Gayer than gay.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Publish a Book, Commission a Revenge Rap, Invest in Your Political Future

Cienna Madrid — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:30:00 -0800

David Belisle and Kelly O
Glad tidings of great joy!

Here's the deal: Strangercrombie, our annual feel-good donation drive, ends next Wednesday, December 15 at 5:00 p.m. (instead of Friday, as in years past). In other words, THERE'S NO TIME TO DALLY. Bid now!

You can browse through all of our hand-crafted packages here. But for those of you overwhelmed by all the options (or for lazy readers who trust my impeccable taste in gifts), here are a few recommendations:

• Immortalize Yourself in a Book. So you have a book inside you—or on your desktop, rather—clawing to get out. Here's your chance: Third Place Books staff will consult with you then help you self-publish your oeuvre on their Espresso Book Machine, a fantastic contraption that'll print and bind 25 copies of your work as paperback books.

• Made-to-Order Revenge Rap. Totally trumps the revenge haikus I've been hobby writing for years.

• Political Planning Session at Cooper's Alehouse. Five city council members are up for re-election next year. If you're plotting to dethrone Bruce Harrell, Sally Clark, Tim Burgess, Tom Rassmussen, or the reanimated corpse of Jean Godden, you need to first grab a drink with Sandeep Kaushik, Thomas Goldstein, and freshly-elected Representative Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34). Kaushik is a seasoned political consultant; Goldstein owns the youth vote; Fitzgibbon is a winner. Together, they can tell you who's the weakest link on city council and how to take them down.

If you're too good for political upheaval, revenge, or reading, consider donating a little cash to our featured charities via our Strangercrombie PayPal account. Every dollar goes to two hard-working local organizations.

Strangercrombie: Once a year, we do something good™.

[ Comment on this story ]

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]