I don't read Lileks, though I used to check out his Institute of Official Cheer and the Gallery of Regrettable Food way back when. My question is, has he always been a holier-than-thou crank, or is this a recent development?
He takes up the bugaboo of "morality" in one of his latest columns, using Clarence Darrow's closing argument from the Leopold and Loeb trial as his template. He also makes snarky asides asserting that we all really believe some greater power is behind our actions, even if we don't admit it and subsequently hide behind bogus explanations for our behavior like, say, "biology" and "mental illness."
The devil makes them do it. Oh, and there’s no devil. There’s “nature,” and “genes,” and other “mysterious” factors that combine to make us victims of our boiling synapses. But isn't it odd how the sociopath unable to constrain his desires never kills women on the courthouse square, but spirits away hookers in back alleys at 2 AM? It's almost as if he can control himself, isn't it.
Right. No one ever gets murdered in broad daylight in a public place. If nothing else, Lileks has single-handedly justified the criminal defenses of Mark David Chapman and Dan White, since it's apparently only sociopathic behavior if everyone can see you.
Finally, he gets to what I assume was the point of his piece, those damn, dirty airwaves. He specifically cites Howard Stern and "sex-shows in the Super Bowl," which I'm still waiting to check out, myself:
I suppose it comes down to this: you should have to seek these things out instead of having them come to you. Otherwise the coarsening of the public arena continues unabated, and the good & decent fathers who fought hard for Howard Stern’s right to say shit – literally – find themselves without an argument when the billboard across from their kid’s elementary school uses the same words. Today’s crusading moderate is tomorrow’s prude.
I guess his TV doesn't have an "Off" button.
Watch out when someone uses words like "coarsening" and "dirtying" and "filth" when referring to the broadcast spectrum, because all they really want to do is bring back the glory days of family TV, when Little House on the Prairie was the highest rated program, and cop shows got no dirtier than Dragnet. "Morality" doesn't equate to whether or not Stern (or Dale Jr., for that matter) lets slip with an f-bomb. Maybe my encroaching senility has erased the lessons of the logic class I once slept through, but when did bad language and more skin on HBO lead to matricide and pederasty?
Then he goes off the deep end:
It's amusing to read reviews of "Closer", a film that sounds like 100 minutes of attenuated gum surgery: four shallow bitter people trading lacerating quips with their transient sex partners. If you believe that puddle-deep self-obsessed people engaged in two-backed beast construction is somehow the most illustrative example of the human condition, I suppose the movie will strike you as high art, but the notion that trivial people screw a lot and argue afterwards is as illuminating as the fact that dogs don't get married after they knock paws. Of course, that's the nature of art: it celebrates the abberant, be it the abberantly lovely or the abberantly horrid. But try and sell the critics and producers on the idea that a happy marriage with kids has more to say about the human heart than a tale of a 40 year old man who throws over his family for a 16-year old stripper. Hah!
I wish he'd make up his mind. Is the fact that people sleep around and bitch about it afterwards as commonplace as dogs humping? Or is it "aberrant?" Lileks would have you believe that no movie released these days celebrates "family values," and that Closer, an intelligently written film that actually delves a little deeper into the human condition than "all you need is love" or "don't worry be happy" (or "Run, Forrest, run!"), is really the norm.
For the sake of argument, let's take a look at last weekend's box office:
1. National Treasure
2. Christmas with the Kranks
3. The Polar Express
4. The Incredibles
5. Closer
6. The SpongeBob Square Pants Movie
7. Alexander
8. Finding Neverland
9. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
10. Ray
Yeah, there's a lot of depravity on that list.
Not that it matters, but here's very little nudity in Closer, unless the fleeting boob shots as one of the characters passes through a strip club are too much to handle. There's no graphic depiction of sex, either. Sure, Natalie Portman bends over to show Clive Owen her goodies, but the scene is about manipulation, not arousal. Oh, and no one "leaves their family" for a stripper, 16 years-old or otherwise (Portman's character is in her 20s). Shockingly, Portman's character is left for someone else.
Of course, had he bothered to actually watch the fucking movie instead of simply knee-jerking his way into righteous indignation like self-appointed stewards of the public good always do, he'd already know this.
UPDATE: Title changed. Because I didn't like the old one.
Today's spleen venting is brought to you courtesy of a post seen on World O'Crap.
Lileks went off the deep end ages ago in internet time. Probably 2+ years ago. It was the terrorist threat to midwestern targets (and Targets), which blue-staters like New Yorkers couldn't possibly understand, that did it to him.
I bumped into Lileks in his earlier incarnation once, and the utter hilarity was lost on me. I mean, anachronism and bad photography, har har har, maybe there's a chuckle in it assuming you'd never seen it before, but how freakin' difficult is it to come up with the stuff? It's like a fart at a bean dinner, and never mind you're congratulating yourself for your good sense in being born later. In the 50s, I'm sure, "buggy whip" and "sleeve garters" never failed to have the easily amused rolling in the aisles.
No way I remembered his name, and it was sometime after I started seeing Mr. Target Shopper lampooned by people who actually are amusing that I learned they were one and the same. And I can't tell you how gratifying it is to learn that Lileks is, in fact, just a later incarnation of the tasteless pedestrian housewives he skewered so effortlessly.
You'd think that somebody with a head the size of the aliens' on "This Island Earth" would be smarter. I mean, at least those Robin Williams-lookin' motherfuckers managed to instruct pitiful humans how to build an interociter incorporating planetary generator, interociter with voltarator and astroscope, and an interociter incorporating an electron sorter.
>Sure, Natalie Portman bends over to show Clive Owen her goodies
Is it a good shot? Is it worth seeing the movie for this part alone?
So reading Lilek's blather just made my jaw drop. Is this guy for real? I'm more worried about him than Howard Stern...but seriously, Pete. If we lived in a parallel universe where you were not the family man, I would grab you up in a SECOND. Damn, life is just not fair. :)
P.S. Did I mention that I'm a 16-year-old stripper? Does that make any difference?
He hasn't always been a crank, but it has been a while. His blog was on my daily read list about 3 or 4 years ago. It dropped off about...well, I think Ginger's right. About 2 years ago or so. His observations of life in a small town used to be funny, and reminded me of parts of my own early life. When they became holier-than-thou, with all the mentions of how awful those of us liberals in the big cities are, I stopped reading. It had the same quality as that anti-Howard Dean ad that referred to those nasty liberals as Starbucks-drinking, Birkenstock wearing, etc. etc. Even the pictures of his adorable daughter weren't enough to bring me back at that point.
Is it a good shot? Is it worth seeing the movie for this part alone?
You should probably wait for the uncut DVD.
Did I mention that I'm a 16-year-old stripper? Does that make any difference?
16? You must work at the Riviera.
From what I understood, it's the sociopaths that are the ones who almost never do these things out in broad daylight.
My friend who is a psychiatrist, in a conversation recently, specified to me that, serial killers are not psychopaths (as some popularly assume), but are sociopaths.
Psychopaths are people who would have difficulty concealing their psychosis (their craziness) from those around them. Sociopaths are the people who are capable of being serial killers, and getting away with it for a time, even a long time, because they're the people that after the news comes out, there are people standing around in front of TV cameras saying "He was such a nice guy." They're the people who can superficially dupe everyone around them with ease.
To me, I think that's a sign of someone more seriously crazy. Someone who can deliberately fool & charm people, or would want to be fooling people and then committing sinister acts in private!
Just because someone's craziness isn't plain for all to see at all times, doesn't mean they don't have a problem.
I wonder if Lileks believes that cancer is not a physical reality, but a form of demonic possession, or wrath of god, since the effects and conditions of cancer are often not seen with the naked eye. You can't see heart disease either. (Except in the case of a creased earlobe, maybe.) You can't see gallbladder disease. (I know only too well about that one! Not being believed about something awful going on inside - medical tests don't even always see it! But there was something nasty happening!)
And don't even get me started about the silent STDs.
But then, I wouldn't be surprised, after this, to imagine this Lileks person subscribing to the notion that AIDS is a plague sent by god to rid the world of evil... dental patients, babies born with it, and 15 year olds who've had blood transfusions.
Aside from that, I'm not sure why people have a hard time reconciling science with their religious beliefs.
Plenty of scientists, psychiatrists, etc., are people who believe in god, and have a religion. They can't all be wrong for being able to accomodate both their religious beliefs & science together in their lives.
I don't get it... Even if someone is terribly superstitious, there's room to say that mental illness, on its physiological level, is physically caused by some type of demonic possession. So even if you were to believe whole-heartedly in demonic possession, it doesn't mean you must throw out psychiatry and science! haha.
"Sex shows in the superbowl" indeed! Talk about framing! I think the new current name to call him, though, is now, "moralist elite". haha!!! ;)
"Then he goes off the deep end..."
Too good! hehehe. You're a riot. ;)
I never heard of Lileks until maybe last year, or at least I never paid attention to him.
But I know that about 3 years ago, a lot of previously mildly interesting, & seemingly intelligent, on-line journalers suddenly went off the deep end, never to return.
I'm in the "always a crank" camp. His opinions have always been unreadable. I only go to his site for the pictures.