"I Wanna Be a Nonconformist, Just Like Everybody Else!"

Jeez, Lileks got grouchy real quick at the end of yesterday’s Bleat (probably in the archive by time you read this). Must be that slight cold. I have to say I’m sort of perplexed but not really surprised at all the consternation caused by the NY Times article about blogging. Not surprised because it seems that about 2 out of every 3 blogs I read are borderline-obsessed with Blogs As the Vanguard of the NEW New Media; perplexed because, well, I just can’t get too excited by that proposition one way or the other. I mean, hey, I dig blogs, I read a whole raft of ‘em every day, go blogs! But so much of that kind of rhetoric sounds exactly like the stuff that people used to (and still do!) say to each other in the fanzine scene: You still read the New York Times? Bah! I only read FANZINES!! Get hip to the desktop publishing revolution, gramps! You ARE the media!! Etc. It all sounds just a little self-serving. Whatever. If there really is a serious change afoot, bring it on, I welcome it - anything’s better than listening to Walter Kronkite being eloquent for six hours every night.

At any rate, Lileks’s story at the end of the Bleat was funny to me, since that whole ‘cultural elite’ stereotype is one I like to invoke all the time; it’s also one that I tend to embody much of the time as well. Trust me, when it comes to making cheap jokes at the expense of Prius-driving, Whole-Foods-shopping, farmer’s market fuckheads, I am THEE KING. Together, Stacey and I are the ROYAL FRICKING FAMILY of mockery. You can TELL that I mean it because of ALL THOSE CAPITAL LETTERS.

But: we buy the NY Times every Sunday (for what its worth, I read the magazine third, after Week In Review and the Book Review (‘cause I just love words!)). We live in a swanky, liberal college town. We’ve both got MAs in hopelessly obscure and useless humanities programs. We’re married now, but we lived together for almost three years beforehand, and only really bothered to get hitched so she could get on my health insurance. We never, ever want to have children. Is all that cultural elite enough for ya? Uh, we also go see foreign films a lot, if that helps. Oh, and we buy soy burgers at the grocery store!

Butt: I promise you that we read that paper at Perkins as often as not (no shit!). And I don’t think you’d need to ask for proof if I told you that we had more than our share of low-brow, red-statish allegiances (culturally, at least). Look, its all well and good to make fun of dipshits who seem to strive to embody all the cliches of their particular demographic, who try to model every aspect of their identity around what some pollster or magazine editor or whoever says it oughta be. And that’s not only true of liberal blue-state snobs: I grew up in a little town in northern Wisconsin, so you can believe me when I tell you that not all of those cliches about willfully ignorant, Kodiak chewing, fag bashing, gun luuvin’, Confederate-flag-waving bigots were made up by Howell Raines and Graydon Carter. There are jag-offs everywhere, Herr Lileks, even among the ranks of suburban, married fathers of young children.

But that’s why I like Lileks’s writing so much: he’s NOT a cliche, he’s NOT whatever the modern-day equivalent of a Ward Clever would look like. Or: he sort of is, but he’s not only that. He’s got opinions on politics, but he doesn’t use ‘em as a checklist. He writes serious bits about the war and he also takes time out to make jokes about obscure composers of television music. He’s, like, a HUMAN BEING. When I was a kid back in my aforementioned sleepy hometown, I couldn’t wait to leave so I could be in an environment that wasn’t so dominated by rigid, narrow-minded creeps. But over the course of the last ten years, and ESPECIALLY over the course of the last five years, the people I meet have become more, not less, conformist than what I was used to (there’re plenty of noble exceptions to this, but you get my drift). I guess what sticks in my craw about his story is not that its some malicious smear but that its true: its getting to the point where I feel like I can guess everything about a person - their opinions, their politics, what shows they watch late at night, what kind of beer they drink, what kind of music they listen to, what kind of jokes they’re gonna tell me - after talking to ‘em for five minutes. And it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this predictability could be anything other than a virtue.

Yeah, I know: But I’m different! I’m not like that!! Not Handsome Dan!! I’m a wild free-thinker, a dupe for no man’s dogma!! Sorry if this reads like some teenager’s diary (“oh, why is everyone but me such an asshole?”). And a lot of this is just election fever, war fever. But the election’s gonna be over in about a month, and I feel pretty confident that everyone will stick with their team regardless of what kind of shenanigans fortune has in store for us on Nov. 2. Eh, look on the bright side - at least there are TWO teams (at least two teams; I suppose I’m on some third or fourth or fifth team). Whatever. I’m sick of writing about this.