Forgetting Sarah Thompson

“Nearly half a million Facebook users last week joined a group dedicated to avoiding the gas pump on Thursday, March 10.”

Shockingly, national gas prices did not decline in the wake of No Gas Day. Round 2 is taking place March 31st and promises to enlighten gasoline retailers the nation over of the power of reactionary Facebook users with a tenuous grasp of economics and a penchant towards symbolic wastes of time. The March 31st boycott has over 970,000 Facebookers on board with over two weeks to recruit. Sarah Thompson, creator of the No Gas Day Facebook event page, has increased the scope of her anti-petrol crusade beyond the confines of the continental United States to include “all gas stations across the planet.” The purpose of the boycott, according to Thompson, is to let “oil companies know we aren’t going to stand for these prices!” Several paragraphs later, Thompson confesses she does not think the 24-hour boycott will cause gas prices to plummet. She punctuates her manifesto with a reminder to reduce, reuse, and recycle, and inserts an obligatory colon-parentheses smiley face.

To recap: The revolutionary godmother of No Gas Day has digitally collected roughly one million armchair warriors on a planet with over six billion people to spend twenty-four hours not purchasing one commodity whose price is set on the global market.

In her defense, Thompson admits, in a backhanded sort of way, that No Gas Day is an act of pointless symbolism championed by a few hundred thousand people whose generation is helpless to mount any meaningful opposition to consolidated corporate power and believes that ‘attending’ a Facebook non-event is more or less equivalent to fomenting a revolution.

If toothless acts of symbolism are your bag, I suggest spinning your wheels somewhere else. Maybe war or taxes.

The price of a barrel of oil is set on the global market. It is as much the result of speculation as supply and demand. Prior to the 1990s commodities speculation was a big no-no, mostly due to the fact that people tend to die when they can’t afford food. The government apparently changed its stance in the mid-90s and allowed a select few banks and investment firms to speculate on the price of commodities. The beauty of commodities speculation is that simply purchasing a large amount of futures can illicit a price increase. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi believes the spike in gas prices in 2008 was the direct result of speculation, largely due to the fact that no significant disruptions to supply or demand occurred.

In the end, gas prices are subject to manipulation from Wall Street goons that will go to any lengths to fistfuck every last dollar from us Shmoes. But Sarah Thompson and her Revolutionary Vanguard of Recycle-istas refuse to go down quietly. They’re mad as hell, and they aren’t going to let these godless Earth-rapers profit from our suffering. Only they are, just like the rest of us, because America isn’t putting down the pump anytime soon. Sarah Thompson’s revolution, just like every piece of legislation that serves up a blowjob to corporate ringleaders and masters of high finance, will go down not with a bang but with a whimper, and just as quickly disappear from public memory.

What If Lady Gaga Were Fat

Two recent articles, “Lady Power” and “Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline,” have attempted to analyze the complex persona of pop superstar Stefani Germanotta, known to the layperson as Lady Gaga. The paradox of Gaga is that she conforms to Western standards of beauty – young, blonde, slender – while challenging conventional gender roles and sexual norms. The gaudy outfits, blood-spattered performances, (mostly) male corpse-laden music videos, and semi-automatic mammary guns conjure an aesthetic amalgamation of Madonna, Elton John and GWAR. Initially forgoing the feminist label, Lady Gaga has most recently described herself as “a little bit of a feminist.” All women, regardless of rank on the hierarchy of American beauty, can choose to embrace feminism and champion women’s rights and gender equality. However, my question is this:

What if Lady Gaga were fat?

What if she were morbidly obese? What if her slender legs were strewn with tufts of thick black hair? Or what if, God forbid, she was middle-aged? (Or black or Muslim or gay, for that matter, but I digress.) Would her message of female empowerment resonate?

Of course not, which then begs the question, must one first conform to ascribed social standards before one can challenge those very standards? Is it hypocritical to kill a man in a music video for gawking at one’s scantily clad body while male America sits at home committing the very same act? If Lady Gaga innately gravitates towards a minimalist philosophy of dress regardless of the cultural expectation that women make themselves attractive to men, is motive enough to deem the act self-empowering? Or do the demands of superstardom simply render any challenge to the status quo impotent?

Take Green Day for example. Their last few albums, in somewhat more eloquent verbiage, essentially said “Fuck you, George Bush, and all the idiots that voted for you.” By punk rock standards, this message isn’t particularly subversive. But can Green Day be considered a punk band when they are signed to Time Warner, the third largest recording company in the industry? Is “selling out” justified as a means to spread expressions of dissent to a larger demographic? Does anyone give a fuck about what Green Day is saying to begin with? Producing an album that appeals to both angst-ridden teens and yuppie liberal suburbanites requires just the right amount of “edginess,” that wretched, watered-down, lukewarm, generic mound of hogshit that halts itself just shy of overstepping established lines of decency so as not to frighten away potential album purchasers, and in doing so, undermines its own authenticity.

And it is at this line that I question the efficacy of feminism ala Gaga. Lady Gaga embraces sexuality in her music and performances, combining themes of violence, voyeurism, fascism, and war in ways that no other mainstream artist does. She challenges established roles of domination and submission and, in doing so, uses her own sexuality as a vehicle of empowerment. Unfortunately, this message is mutilated nearly to the point of non-recognition once it is shoved through the meat grinder of American consumer culture. This is not to say that Lady Gaga is disingenuous. On the contrary, she treats issues of gender, sexuality and inequality, issues most mainstream artists shy away from, quite seriously. It is the so-called fourth branch of government, the crap-peddling pusher for the capitalist gangbang known as The Media that boils any substantive form of expression down to the lowest common denominator: tits and ass. A producer could read passages from "The Second Sex" through Kanye West’s Auto-Tuner, chop it up, throw it over a beat with a nice hook and use it to sell drinks to sweaty ass-shakers at nightclubs. Hell, The New York Times could run an ad featuring a topless Rosa Parks with the word “Greyhound” digitally stamped onto her forehead and the irony would largely go unnoticed. The CEO’s, producers, managers, A & R douchebags and all other industry lackeys don’t give two shits about what any artist is saying, as long as the albums and concert tickets sell.

Despite the desecration of the message and the commoditization of the artist and music, the greater theme of empowerment espoused by Lady Gaga cannot be entirely eradicated. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, Lady Gaga was quoted saying, “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.” Although addressed to women, the statement above is inspiring to anyone struggling with self-identity in the face of constrictive and often prejudicious social roles. Young women (and men for that matter) struggling against the restrictive expectations of a consumer culture that strives to mold everyone into the same faceless drone with identical, generic, and standardized tastes whose behavior is managed and predictable can surely find inspiration in a successful woman who challenges conventional ideas of gender, sexuality, and identity.

And that’s reason enough to embrace the Tao of the Gaga.

Plus her music is catchy as hell.

Thoughts on the Dude Who Tried to Blow Up the Plane on Christmas

I was reading some news articles this morning and felt compelled to write something. I know nobody gives a shit and I don't expect them to, but I have no better place to put this drivel and I didn't want to pass up an opportunity to use such a catchy title. So here it goes. Dear failed airplane bomber kid, I would like to thank you. Not for attempting to blow up an airplane but for putting a human face on the "terrorist" moniker. In reality, you only succeeded in setting your nuts on fire in coach. On the terrorist grade scale that should earn you an F, or an incomplete at the very least. But I still applaud you. You see, if you were Middle Eastern there likely would have been a public outcry to drop shitloads of bombs on schools and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation. But you are a 23-year old from Nigeria, a Muslim dude from Africa to be specific. And, since Americans don't know that you can be both African and Muslim, there wasn't much anti-Islamic hysteria whipped up in the wake of your ball-roast on the descent to Wayne County Airport. You also earned a mechanical engineering degree from University College London, which alone annihilates the Arab-Muslim, "they hate us for our freedom" stereotype, but I'm going to assume nobody caught that last tidbit since we all had to gorge ourselves on the Earth-shattering news that Tiger Woods will stick his club in anything with two legs and a pulse.

Which brings me to the big picture, the thing I've been waiting to bitch about for at least three days now. And that is the fact that we need events like botched plane bombings by baby-faced Nigerians to remind us that human beings, even ones that want to light our balls on fire, are still human beings. The manufactured hysteria over the Tiger Woods incident was so over-the-top it should have been broadcast as a deleted scene from Crank 3. And what did we learn from it? That Tiger Woods has a dick and he likes to use it. Big. Fucking. Deal. And as swiftly as the story emerged Tiger fell from grace and has been relegated to suffer his existence in the realm of humanity with the rest of us. Another fallen hero drowning in the American cesspool of celebrity worship. No longer a golf legend strolling through Torrey Pines in my living room in 1080i, he is now subject to scrutiny under the flimsy moral standards we use to judge our neighbors.

Our culture of infotainment may be the most dangerous institution we face as a nation. Though it sounds hyperbolic, nothing succeeds at simultaneously distracting us and perpetuating indifference to the problems we face in reality more so than the rampant celebrity worship that oozes in HD from our flat-screens and adorns the checkout lines at our grocery stores. TMZ and People Magazine symbolize our callous penchant towards the dehumanization of anyone who is "not like us."

On one end of the spectrum are celebrities who have been dehumanized through their construction as uber-human models of perfection. They have been reduced to images in movies and magazines upon which we cast our adulation, jealousy, and judgment from the comfort of our own homes. They have been made into "things" for us to consume and discard. On the other end we have the somewhat more unpleasant version of dehumanization. The kind that allows the powers of our country to wantonly destroy over a million Iraqi souls while suffering nothing more than a stale belch of dissent. But why should we care, if they are not as human as us? On the News, the same corporate-run jack-offs that brought us the Tiger Woods scandal, we see images of Middle-Eastern men (doesn't matter what country they are from since they are all equally "not like us") yelling jibberish we can't understand, burning American flags and wearing silly clothes. If that is the extent of our national understanding of the Middle East then it is no surprise that Brittany Murphy's death, as tragic as it may be, trumps the deaths of more than one million Iraqis. We may, as a nation, share complicity in each.

In closing, I would once again like to thank Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for lighting his balls on fire over the city of Detroit. I'm sure the security corporations that manufacture body scanners would also like to thank him but a PR firm probably poo-poo'd the idea of a public display of gratitude. Had Umar not been neutralized and dragged to First Class, where he assuredly did not get a window seat, he could have overlooked a city that once epitomized the ideal of the American worker, a city that now suffers from chronic neglect and abandonment. An industrialized ghost town laying waste to the distorted vision of the American Dream. When Umar's plane touched down on the Wayne County tarmac Tiger Woods' infidelities were likely unfolding on television screens throughout the terminal. And once the press found out about Umar's existence, the stampede of talking heads, sound guys and camera crews inevitably trumpeted past the seemingly endless strips of sports bars and baggage claims, not to unearth the clandestine underpinnings of a terrorist plot or examine the root causes of international terrorism, but to sketch a caricature of a young Nigerian man who set his balls on fire over Detroit.