#2 - Hipsters

It was the decade when...

Apathy was the new black.

Like the hippie of the sixties and the yuppie of the eighties, the aughts too featured their own archetypal personality, a persona born of the ideological vacuum left by a post-cold war world and cauterized in the anxious miasma of a post 9/11 America. The hipster, raised in the affluent and vacuous 90's, is a child of privilege who, without rejecting his bourgeois roots like the hippies before him, merely attempts to neutralize the fact by ironically appropriating the aesthetic of the working class. Not to be confused with solidarity, this arch performance is a variety of liberal guilt that's been internalized and then regurgitated as self-conscious meta-commentary. A hipster is not dressed so much as costumed, each item and accessory meticulously chosen to juxtapose a hipster's privilege with their assumed blue-collar aesthetic. At the root of every Hipster-ism is the tension between authenticity and artifice, the hipster embracing the latter as if it was a variety of the former. Hipsters are truly fake in the most literal sense of the term.

There has always been bohemians dwelling in certain enclaves of urban centers, loci of struggling young artists, writers, thinkers, revolutionaries and philosophers who, despite what might be a middle-class or aristocratic background divert themselves from the mainstream path to success; one might think that hipsters offer little new in the way of social phenomenon. This is missing the crucial point. Whereas all other Bohemian movements, from the Belle Epoque world of Puccini's La Boheme, to the beatniks in the 50's to the hippies in the 60's, have sought out alternate enclaves of living in order to better seek out the grand philosophical ideas of truth, beauty and authenticity. The hipster is the negation of these ideals, deliberately rejecting such quests as vain exercises by sentimental people naive enough to believe in these antiquated ideas. The hipster instead exists as a living quotation mark, every facet of the personality a tacit rejection of any all proactive assertions. The Hipster is the death of hope, for hope implies an ability to rectify contradictions and achieve progress. A hipster's existence is a censure of all efforts to viscerally engage with the word in anything but an ironic context. In this way the Hipster is, of course, the extension of post-modern thought as applied to an actual individual; post-modernism taken, as it were, "to the end," penetrating the very essence of subjectivity. If post-modernism's central tenet is it's rejection of modernism's obsession with "the new" and "the true," (replacing such ideals with the negation of meaning) then the Hipster is the movement's living breathing foot soldiers.

Being a Bobo, a cousin of the Hipster but absent the pretense, my interaction with the aughts more prominent social group has been mostly tangential. A social phenomenon replete with analytical interest, my feelings toward the group have always been apathetic at best. Seeing how apathy is the dominant stance of a hipster toward, well, everything, the reaction is not without some appropriateness.

If the earnestness and "free-love" flower-power dreams of the 60's seem silly to jaded modern eyes at least we can say that the Hippies really believed in their dreams of social progress, free-love and liberated consciousness. True Hipsters, believing only in irony, exist in an ocean of ill-matching yet meticulously chosen signifiers, undoing all meaning rather than bolstering it. Neither left nor right, political ideologies are something to be undermined and not endorsed - a lazy cynicism about progress is a staple of the hipster diet. But, maybe this is the end of history; Francis Fukuyama's dream of capitalist democracy's triumph is, in fact, true, but the price we pay is that we all morph into self-referential, uber-sarcastic, consumption pod people who, in capitalism's sneakiest trick, think that this very consumption is the purest expression of our individualism. Self-obsession and the free-market go hand-in-hand, and by being too "meta" to believe in meta-narratives anyway, the hipster is nothing if not the most intense of naval gazers, all the while, like a moth to a flame, subscribing subconsciously to the most insidious kind of groupthink, conforming to the most rigid and insidious social standards.

The most insidious aspect of Hipsterism is its illusion of authenticity. In order for this grand post-modern gambit to work, the Hipster himself must be convinced that his tastes and aesthetics are entirely determined by a solipsistic self-awareness which allows him to pursue his tastes and cultivate his style based on his little more than own subjective appetites. It's a variation on a old joke: I wouldn't want to belong to any club that I had to be member of. Going by self-disclosure, there is no such thing as a Hipster; all candidates would easily deny their inclusion in this non-group. The Hipster just "digs what he digs," it's all just personal preference. To admit any solidarity with any "movement" or "scene" is to confess a kind of positive engagement with social reality, a reality that Hipsters claim to be above. To be a Hipster is to be deeply conformist yet wholly unaware of this fact. That is the ultimate irony. It's an irony which must never be spoken of lest such a breach rupture the whole architecture of disaffection that is the Hipsters raison d'etre.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't like Hipsters. I suspect the only way to eradicate this hipster problem is satiric ridicule.

You AUGHT to remember.

#6 - The Great Recession

It was the decade when...

The free market cost us a whole lot.


Greed was very good in the aughts. Goaded on by the radical free-market zealots populating the Bush administration, the American economy resembled not so much a self-regulating system in the invisible hand paradigm of Adam Smith as it did a full-blown Reno casino with the taxpayers tied to the roulette wheel. And like a frothy-mouthed gambling addict on a lucky streak, there is no stopping the madness until it was too late. During the better part of the aughts, for the sharks within the financial system, times were good indeed: the Cristal champagne flowed at crowded velvet-roped clubs, credit was loose, and the word "bonus" came to mean a nothing short of a small fortune. The Masters of The Universe were back, "the hostile takeover" being replaced by "the credit default swap" as the archetypal dubious financial transaction of the decade. Complex mathematical financial models, totally inaccessible to laymen, became the backbone of our financial system, an apparatus so complex that even its practitioners didn't fully understand how the economy was working. All that mattered was profit, and, for some, there was plenty of that.

Sub-Prime loan. The quality of the investment is advertised in its name. You think that people making, oh, 20k a year (if that) would know better than to buy a $500,000 home but, hoodwinked by mountebanks peddling low-interest rates and manageable monthly payments, these sad-sacks couldn't help but reach for the American Dream when the carrot of home-ownership was dangled above their heads. "What's an Adjustable Rate Mortgage you ask? Don't you worry your pretty little head about that, that's just technical gobbledygook." And as these real estate robber barons bundled and sold the mortgages to ever-higher strata of financial institutions, the real estate bubble swelled to the point that the whole American economy rested upon the ricketiest of foundations. The pillars of American finance were weighed down with mounds of bad debt that could never be repaid. What happened when all these checks suddenly came due? What happen when that adjustable rate mortgage, well, adjusted? Let me put it thusly: did you ever play Jenga?

After the housing bubble burst, the shock-wave rippled through our economy, all but leveling its totemic institutions to the ground. The wealth of America had become little more than a slight-of-hand trick orchestrated by a few ingenious and unscrupulous bankers who put momentary profits ahead of sound long-term financial planning.

The narrative of the collapse of 2008 is now legendary. A domino metaphor is almost too easy to describe what took place in the fall of last year; perhaps a Nagasaki analogy is actually more fitting: it all just blew up in our faces. A mushroom cloud of cash whose fallout will prove radioactive for years to come. Lehman Bros was the first to fall. The headline was almost unthinkable but, there it was on the front page: Lehman Bros. files for bankruptcy. It was clear that this was a whole new depth of fissure in the capitalist system. Washington Mutual followed suit, the biggest bank failure in American history. It was looking like 1929 again. Insurance giant AIG was next on the chopping block when the United States Government performed a deus ex machina, saving the institution (and maybe the nation) from total financial ruin.

The economic collapse did provide America a living receptacle of loathing, disgust and resentment. His name was Bernie Madoff and, if history is just, the "Ponzi scheme" is no more; "Madoff scheme" will do very well, thank you! Stealing billions (billions!) of dollars from his investors, Madoff kept up his deceitful charlatanism for years, the robust economy allowing him to delay paying the piper as long as business was good. When the bull turned into a bear, and a really mean bear at that, there was no where else to hide. Madoff was through, his investors were broke, and America finally got a sense of just how corrupt and insane the world of finance had become. Yet Madoff is something of a whipping boy. Though he was without question corrupt, Madoff was, in a sense, a product of a system that encouraged behavior which, if not downright illegal, teetered ever so close to impropriety. Viewing Madoff as a singular and isolated example of corruption is to to ignore the myriad Bernie Madoffs that operated within the confines of a deregulated and corrupt system. These 21st Century Gordon Gekkos may have not broken the law but they nonetheless plundered America, turning our entire economy into a big game of "hot potato." Guess who was left holding the vegetable when the music stopped? That's right. All of us.

If there is a silver lining to the bleak clouds that now hover over America it is to be found in the resurgence of liberal Keynesian economics. If the crisis of '08 doesn't put the final nail in the coffin of Monetarism then we are all doomed. The economic meltdown has thoroughly discredited lassez-faire mandarins like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, the latter of whom finally admitted that he "found a flaw" in the system. "I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact." Well, about time you stopped jerking off to Atlas Shrugged and took a gander at the real world Mr. Greenspan.

"Experts" like Greenspan set the stage for this grand drama to unfold, blindly confident in the all-powerful wisdom of the "market." What we're left with is a disaster on a par with nothing in America since the crash of '29. But there is also hope. Hope of a future where greed may be kept in check by powerful regulatory forces and the "market" is utilized not as a grand schematic for all social organization but a tool, amenable to control, to help further the prosperity of society and welfare of the general populace. But, until these dreams are realized, we remain isolated in our private hoovervilles, singing the new anthem of The Great Recession: Brother can you spare a 401K?

You AUGHT to remember...

# 8 - Hooking-up

It was the decade when...

No one had "sex" anymore.

Note: College and Grad students, feel free to submit this essay as your own for a course in "Contemporary Neologisms and Hegelian Philosophy."

The Hookup: A Dialectic Analysis

In the aughts, one expression has surged in popularity, especially among the young. One expression embodied, in itself, a shift in the culture's sexual mores. This shift, I hope to prove, could not have occurred without the expression, the language facilitating the needed symbolic restructuring that social pressures demanded. Eventually, so common was the expression's use that it itself began to alter behavioral patterns, as opposed to merely accommodating them.

I am, of course, talking about "hooking-up," the aughts' catch-all term for any casual sexual interaction. By deconstructing the subtle ways in which the word functions, we can analyze both how behavior dictates language and, reciprocally, how language dictates behavior. A dialectic analysis allows us to trace the evolution of the expression and its widespread integration in society.

Employing the dialectic concepts of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis we can trace how "hooking-up" became such a dominant phrase in our collective vocabulary. In a traditional dialectic, within each thesis is a contradiction which leads to the antithesis -- which then brings about synthesis.

What was the thesis here? As the 21st century approached, a generation was coming of age that had never lived through the sexual revolution of the sixties or the gender politics of the seventies. Women were equals to men prima facie; they no longer had greater pressure to get married than men and were actively discouraged from having children at too young an age. Concurrently, sexual interactions outside of marriage were by now the norm, safe-sex education and the pill rendering the activity consequence-free for those responsible enough to take precautions. The result was a society where casual sex, of one sort or another, was becoming more and more prominent.

And here we arrive at the contradiction. Even though social pressures were creating a need for loose and easily-disposable romantic detachments, the lexicon of terms to describe this variety of sexual behavior was wanting. Options of expression were limited and inadequate. There was a severity to saying that you "had sex." The disclosure was too invasive, too clear, too forward. It was even worse to "make love" when obviously you were doing no such thing. Expressions with a more casual feel were tainted by a misogynistic cant: "Get laid," "scored," "hit a home run," "got some," "nailed her" (which is almost impossible to imagine or make sense of with the opposite pronoun, continuing a tradition of male-centric slang descriptions of sex)," are but a few examples. They all share a view of sex as conquest, a vantage point almost always masculine in perspective. Suddenly these terms began to sound as antiquated as "free love." There simply was no word to express the new sexual politics of the 21st century.

What kind of language would be required to accommodate these new social pressures? It would have to be gender neutral, for one; women as much as men were engaging in this casual sexual behavior, and it sometimes involved two women or two men. It would have to deflate the importance of sex, making the activity as mundane and routine as walking the dog or getting a latte. It would need to maintain a certain level of discretion, allowing people to discuss the topic without admitting much in the way of specifics. And finally, it should allude to easy detachment. "Hooking-up" was the perfect candidate.

Already an expression in common - though different - usage before the aughts, to "hook-up" with someone meant little more than to meet them in person. It was inevitable in retrospect that the word would get re-appropriated to imply, now almost exclusively, some sort of sexual interaction. This re-appropriation was the anti-thesis to the contradiction created by a vocabulary and social climate that were deeply mismatched. "Hooking-up" could mean anything from a stolen smooch at a party to full-blown intercourse. In either case, one was not inclined to press the point further and inquire just what a person meant when they said they had "hooked-up" with someone. "Hooking-up" was a catch-all; a phrase allowing people to both confess their intimate behavior to others and simultaneously reveal almost nothing. The verb "to hook" was the perfect symbolic image for interpersonal connection in the aughts. Hooking implies easy unhooking. Other verbs in the vicinity carry with them a deeper sense of permanence: to link, to join, to latch, to meld. Hooking, with its intimations of tenous permanence, was the ideal metaphor for sex in the aughts.

As the phrase caught on we reached the synthesis point in the dialectic. From first accommodating new social realities, the phrase began to proactively create them. "Hooking-up," as an expression more than an activity, normalized casual sex to such a degree that inhibitions against such behavior were slackened to the point of non-existence. "Hooking-up" became an expectation, a fully integrated aspect of modern life for the young. Language, not merely expressing our ideas, actively sets the coordinates of our social reality, creating culture, not just defining it. There needs to be a stabilization between external behaviors and internal representations of such behaviors, these representations being embodied by words and expressions. The relationship is a two way street. The important thing is that they not get too misaligned; such tensions, as seen in the early aughts, can lead to dramatic change, both within a individual and society as a whole.

Does "Hooking-up" have a half-life in our collective consciousness, or is the notion here to stay? I suspect the former. The synthesis of the dialectic that brought us to this point may itself be a new thesis with its own internal contradictions. The cagey ambiguity at the center of the expression - its failure to express much at all - implies a certain retrograde prudishness that we still hold with us. There is something dishonest about "hooking-up," something delusional. "Hooking-up" takes away the sex from sex, neutralizing its awesome power. We still feel anxiety about the broken down gender roles and sexual negotiations that the modern world foists upon us, unable as we are to integrate a truly coherent sexual ethos into a world where procreation can be accomplished in a lab and men and women share social equality (in theory if not practice). "Hooking-up" may not, in the final analysis, resolve this neurotic predicament. It's a temporary solution to a long-term problem: the human animal.

You AUGHT to remember...

#10 - Harry Potter and the Enchanted Bag of Money

It was the decade when...

Boarding school never looked so good.


Harry Potter was the Aughts' biggest franchise, a series of books (and later movies) that cast a spell not merely on children but the whole of civil society. To call them "childrens books" is akin to calling the Atlantic Ocean a really big lake. Grown men and women showed no qualms when reading the books in public, often on on park benches and on subway trains, all but advertising their devotion to the series. J.K. Rowling could do no wrong. It wasn't kosher amongst even the most pretentious of the intelligentsia to sneer at the books the way the same crowd did (and should have) for the two other publishing bombshells of the decade, The Da Vinci Code and Twilight. Take that same superior attitude toward the Potter books and you were likely to lose friends fast. Rowling's creation was critic proof, despite whatever Harold Bloom says.

By the time the door-stopper of a final Harry Potter book came out, the release was greeted with the kind of promotional roll-out usually reserved for Michael Bay films or Olympic ceremonies. Deep queues of people dressed as Hufflepuffs and Slytherins waited for hours outside bookstores to grab their midnight copy of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, which, after their persistence and patience, they proceeded to read until completion in the wee small hours of the morning. No book can, or maybe ever will, receive such a mardi-gras of celebration upon release. When the smoke had cleared, the series had sold over 400 Million copies and had been translated into over 67 languages. Rowling, who had once subsisted on the government's dole, heads into the next decade a billionaire.

The trick of Harry Potter was Rowling's employment of a traditional coming-of-age narrative filtered through enchanted cheesecloth, creating a "magic" world that was, in fact, analogous to our own. Hogwarts was in most important respects like any boarding school, except at Hogwarts one could converse with the portraiture or learn how to brew aphrodisiacs in chemistry class. Though the muggle (that's Potterian for non-wizard) world seemed anemic and bland next to the Hogwarts fairly-tale, look deeper and its clear that each was but a reflection of the other. All the magic in Harry Potter can be read as a parody of more mundane realities. Even Quidditch, the most popular sport no one has ever played, is little more than an elaborate game of soccer (excuse me, football) taken into the third dimension.

Rowling's myth-making was not the genesis-like creation of an entirely new imaginative eco-system, as was the case with fantasy classics by Tolkien and (dare, I say) George Lucas. Rather than inventing her menagerie of enchanted fauna from thin air, Rowling's potpourri of character types are a grand buffet of mythic creatures and traditional Christian and pagan bogeymen: Wizards and witches, dragons and trolls, giants and werewolves. Rowling was churning through the entire back-catalog of childhood fantasy to make her epic. But, underneath the spells and sorcery were adolescent realities: schoolwork, puberty, nascent sexuality, and the tenuousness of innocence and youth.

The Potter phenomenon did not begin in the Aughts (the first book was published in 1997), but it was the release of the first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in 2001, that kicked off Potter's march toward total cultural dominance. The following series of films based on the books have too been wildly successful in their medium. How successful? Well, all six of the films made so far are among the top 25-highest grossing movies of all time. That successful. And, for the most part, they have achieved artistic as well as commercial success. Though the first two films reek of a heavy-handed and antiseptic Hollywood aesthetic (the blame mainly falling on the director Chris Columbus' less-than-subtle approach), as the series pressed onwards Warner Bros. hired adventuresome and sophisticated directors, supplying greater depth and melancholy to the story. Alfonso Cuaron, Mike Newell, and David Yates have all sat at the director's chair, bringing their dinstictive styles to the property.

For the adults in the room the real joy comes from watching the entire payroll of the Royal Shakespeare Company gnaw at the expensive, stony scenery the way only a British thespian can. Has Alan Rickman, an actor with 16 variations of a sneer, ever been put to better use than in the role of Severus Snape? Could Ralph Fiennes be any more ominous and serpent-like as the Dark Lord Voldemort? And how genius is Maggie Smith as McGonagall, pursuing her lips with the hilariously submerged indignation and hysteria that only the two time Academy Award winner can summon? Or consider Emma Thompson as a batty "divination" instructor? Or Kenneth Branagh as...well, the list goes on. The brilliant cast is the series' secret weapon: not only are they all impeccable in their roles, they're English as Fish & Chips. An cast chock full of Sirs and Dames supplies a national authenticity (the Potter stories, for all their universal appeal, are as British as Brideshead Revisited or Coleman's Mustard) to a production as Hollywood generated and financed as a Transformers film.

When the final installment (halved into two films, lest the cow be anything but totally dry upon final milking) hits multiplexes starting next year, it will be the final curtain to Potters hegemonic dominance on childrens fantasy entertainment. Rowling, the most profitable writer in history, now finds herself with an impossible act to follow. Maybe she'll just spend the rest of her life dropping scandalous morsels of gossip about the characters from her books. Sure, we now know Dumbledore's a homo, but maybe Ms. McGonagall was actually a 60's radical. Or perhaps Ron grows up to become an S&M fetishist. The possibilities are endless. Meanwhile, the books will remain staples of a child's literary diet, easily on a mantle next to the best of Lewis Carrol or C.S. Lewis. Personally, I would like Rowling to keep telling Harry's story. He grew up with us, shouldn't he grow old with us too? Who wouldn't want to read Harry Potter and the Irreversible Herpes Spell? Or Harry Potter and the Cursed Marriage of Doom? And finally, we can't forget Harry Potter and Potter and the Mage's Magic Adult Diaper.

You AUGHT to remember...

#11 - Tweens

It was the decade when...

Grown men and women were forced to use the word "tween."


Pop quiz. Before you were a teenager you were a....what? Well, for almost all of human history you were, simply, a child. But, one day the early-mid aughts, some corporate douche (actual it was probably a whole boardroom full of doucheitude) realized that he could drum up a whole consumer base by inventing a new demographic to exploit. Enter the "Tween." As in, "inbetween." As in, "inbetween childhood and high school." Clever? I thought not. Those oh-so-magical years from 8-12, notoriously the worst of all youth (especially the later few, with the inchoate stirrings of puberty in the background), are now the focus of our national attention and the drain funneling away our excess cash. A demographic defined almost entirely by what it consumes, a tween cannot be extracted from their taste in music, or clothing brand loyalty or movie going habits. With almost all other media splintering down into more and more refined niches, the Tweens represent the last remaining monolithic mass market to advertise to. No group is more susceptible to slavish groupthink than a pre-teen, the age when solidarity with and acceptance by one's peers is paramount to ones own sense of identity. Sell to one, sell to all. You are what they buy. And they bought a lot. Tweens, funded by an apparently endless stream of cash from their dazed and clueless parents, shopped with the abandon and mouth-foaming need that only a child could summon guiltlessly, when cost is nothing and obtainment is all. I don't think there were a lot of piggybanks cracked open, it was more like an ATM.

A massive, synaptic-ally interconnected, multi-platform, synergistically marketed network of TV shows, pop bands, movie-musicals, fantasy-novels, clothing brands, and video games - to those in the matrix Tweendom is all. It's celebrities are just the biggest things ever! The music's like, the most fun in the world. Duh! To those unplugged, Tween culture is a hermetically sealed media-dome, inaccessible to those outside yet totally transparent; the tweens themselves were a kind of body-snatched alien race living amongst us. The circular totality of Tween culture is its most amazing feature. Tweens were a self-contained subculture that metastasized into the decade's most game-changing (and profitable) pop-culture phenomenon.

Acting as a kind of central ventricular pump for all things Tween, the Disney Channel hatched more bankable stars this decade than anything other media incubator. A locus of pre-sexual romantic angst, blandly cheerful gonad-free pop, pixie-stick hyper situation comedies, and white-strip-print-ad-ready cherub superstars, the Disney Channel was ground zero for the pre-teen set in the Aughts. From here we can sketch our new Raphael-ian tableau. (The school of Athens? The playground of Tween!) To do so, I have to channel my inner 11-year-old-girl, so, here we go...

Oh My God! So like you have to talk about Zac first, cause he's like hottest boy evah! Seriously though, super serious now, he has really proved himself a worthy, like, mega-star since his debut in HSM. He has so pushed his mad skillz as an actor! Like, for example, he really stretched himself in Hairspray cause he went from playing a singing and dancing hunky high school student to like, a singing and dancing hunky high school student in like the 20's or 60's or, you know, ancient history. I totally bought it! But speaking of HSM..VANESSA! VANESSA HUDGENS! She is like, so beautiful and so talented and it's so not fair! And she gets to date Troy Bolton in HSM and then really date Zac in real life. Again...not fair!! Ok, yeah, she sexted. Like, so what? LOL! I totally love her. But not as much as I love JOE JONAS! He is the middle one in the Jonas Brothers and, OK, like I love them all, I do, I love all the Jonas Brothers, but Joe...is totally the one. Just something about him is so dreamy. And you know he'll be totally a gentleman cause he always wears his purity ring. And of course, I can always listen to his music. Oh, and if you're gonna talk about awesome music you can't not talk about Miley. Miley Cyrus OMG! Only the most awesome biggest most amazing actress/singer/songwriter/dancer/producer ever!! The star of Hannah Montana, the best show on TV! Miley is like, everyones hero. I can't believe that you hadn't heard of her, she's like the most famous person on the planet, duh! Ok, gotta run, my Mom got tickets to the matinee of Wicked; I've seen it, like 10 times. I'm totally Galinda! Yeah..HSM, Jonas, Hannah Montana. That's all you need to know. There is like, totally so much more but I'm gotta go. CYA!

You AUGHT to remember...

#12 - The Metrosexual

It was the decade when...

Put-together straight men threw off everyone's gaydar.


I Am the Very Model of a Modern Metrosexual

I am the very model of a modern metrosexual
I have good taste in matters both specific and quite general.
I know that when a gent is getting ready to go out at night,
It's needed for his self-esteem that shoes and belt should match just right.

I'm very well acquainted too with fashions that are high couture,
From Prada shirts to Fendi belts to Marc Jacobs' entire oeuvre.
And 'cause my wardrobe closet overflows with clothes that I enjoy,
Now other members of my sex are calling me a girly boy!

[Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!
Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!
Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!]

I'm very good at picking out real diamonds from Zirconia.
My ear for music, delicate as songs of a Euphonia.
In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
He is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

And in the morning I wake up and head directly to the loo.
Before I leave I have about an hour of grooming to get through.
I brush my teeth, I jeuj my hair, I wax and I exfoliate.
I look so hot that I'm aroused; I drop my pants and masturbate.

And at the club so late at night, the girls they swoon and follow me.
The work paid off! I look so good, I've nabbed a pussy colony.
But when I try to make a pass, it doesn't matter what I say.
It seems that they just can't believe yours truly isn't really gay.

[It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.
It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.
It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.]

The grooming of your body is important if your tres hirsute,
A manscaped torso is a must to look good in your birthday suit.
In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
He is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

Why most men choose to act and talk as if they were neanderthals,
Is but a question which I know cannot be solved in schoolyard walls.
A man can know the rules of sport and pledges of fraternity,
But get a manicure and some would call it an absurdity!

Though I don't mind that people think that I am gay when they see me,
I know that it's a compliment. I know my sexuality.
Try "acting straight?" Well, I don't know, I guess I've never really tried.
But I'm one man, I'm proud to say, with no need to become queer-eyed.

[But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.
But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.
But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.]

So in the Aughts, well, here I was, a new kind of celebrity.
I fooled them all to think that I was more than just a jerk yuppie.
But still, in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[But still, in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
he is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

You AUGHT to remember.

# 30 -Soccer Mom/Hockey Mom

It was the decade when...

Motherhood was defined by your child's sport of choice.

Dear oracle that is Google Images, what is a "Soccer Mom?":

Ah, I see Oracle. Please, I implore thee in the name of Apollo, answer my second querie, grant to me on this day visions of a "Hockey Mom!":

You AUGHT to remember....

#33 - 2 GIRLS, 1 CUP

It was the decade when...

Scat was not a jazz style.


I have not seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I have no intention of ever seeing 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I would recommend to anyone, if they haven't seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup, that they avoid doing so at all costs. 2 Girls, 1 Cup is, of course, the Marquis De Sade's favorite Internet video. A movie of such misogynistic degradation that even Leopold Sacher-Masoch would get nauseous watching it. A two minute dive into Caligula-worthy debauchery. I wont describe it's contents (a description is available here and here) as elaborating further would cause me to lose my lunch all over my laptop.

Extreme porn was, before the Internet, a hard-to-find commodity, an object of borderline legality that had to be sought out by a dedicated pervert; they don't put coprophilia magazines on deli newsstands everyday. But, thanks to the democratization of information dissemination (finding bestiality sex videos is as simple as searching for stock quotes or weather reports), imagery that in the past would have been seen by only a select adventurous and/or disturbed few have now been watched by cringing millions. Hungry Bitches (the official title of 2 Girls, 1 Cup) is without question one of the most watched pieces of pornography since Deep Throat. A uniquely 21st Century phenomenon, this inexcusable movie became a pop culture sensation in 2007. It may also spell the end of Western Civilization.

The appeal (if that's what you want to call it) is not just the video's disgusting contents. Making a gross-out video is remarkably easy. No, what makes 2 Girls, 1 Cup such a widespread "hit" is its pretense as pornography; the filmmaker's attempt to arouse is what shocks and titillates. The irony here is textbook. 2 Girls, 1 Cup's actual effect is (we hope) the opposite of its intent. The set-up is almost comic: the maudlin piano score, the beauty of the "Girls," the mysterious title with its intimation of ravenousness ("What ever could these 'bitches' be hungry for?) - the ambiance is decidedly romantic. And then...

Whether or not anyone has ever watched 2 Girls, 1 Cup for sexual gratification is a question I don't really want to know the answer to, like, do I have the Alzheimer's Gene, or, how many calories does a Grande Frappauccino have? I take some comfort in the fact that the vast, vast majority of Cup viewers have watched the video as either as test of wills or on a dare. A sad few didn't know what they were watching when they started. (An occupational hazard for voracious Internet surfers.) All these decent people, confronted with images as foul and debased as any as they will ever see thought it wise to record their own personal Ludovico treatments for posterity. The great legacy of 2 Girls, 1 Cup is the anthology of reaction videos, a voluminous record of disgust uploaded to YouTube and preserved for all time. A parade of faces in various grimaces of laughter, horror and nausea, watching these videos in rapid succession has a hilarious, hypnotic fascination. The consistency of the reactions, the uniform tempo of the squirming, the omnipresent piano serenade in the background- the reaction videos are more and more of a delight to watch with every new "Oh My GOD!" They became so popular that 2 Girls, 1 Cup's viral popularity can only be explained in reference to the desire people had to share their horror at watching it with the world. Why else would you sit through that? The 21st Century is the era where nothing is worth doing unless it's taped and uploaded. Privacy is so overrated.

By all means, should my reservations not dissuade you, watch the movie and post your own reaction video, but let it go at that. I don't recommend writing college essays about 2 Girls, 1 Cup, the professor is prone to miss your satirical brilliance.

Another piece of advice: don't think too long about 2 Girls, 1 Cup. You might find yourself asking unpleasant questions like: "Who are these 'actresses?'" " Why was the video really made?" "Why did the girls do it?" "It it fake? It's gotta be fake! It's fake. Please God, let it be fake." "What viral video could possibly top this?" That last question is the scariest of all. While I'd like to pretend that 2 Girls, 1 Cup will be a unique moment in the history of the Internet, I suspect that we will have more unfit-for-human-consumption videos uploaded our way in the near future. But for now we have, for your viewing pleasure, our de facto psychological record: Variance of disgust reactions in human subjects.

You AUGHT to remember.

Tosh.0
The Biggest Reaction Video
www.comedycentral.com
Web Redemption 2 Girls, 1 Cup Reaction Demi Moore Picture

#40 -Going Green

It was the decade when...

Green was the new black.

The bad news: We're all fucked. The planet is now a phlegmatic, feverish, invalid. Mother nature is looking more and more like Grandma Moses each day. Hard to believe for some but, if science is to be trusted, it seems that pumping carbon emissions and pollution into our environment unabated for a hundred years eventually takes it toll. Who woulda thunk it?

What's going to happen according to those nerds in the know?: Temperatures will continue to rise. Even one or two degrees upwards will wreak total havoc. Eventually, ice caps will melt, polar bears will go the way of the woolly mammoth, and the Kevin Costner film Waterworld will come to seem less a Hollywood debacle and more like the most prescient of documentaries. (Yes, in the future the oceans will be ruled by a leather clad Dennis Hopper in an eye patch.) I, for one, have already bought some beachfront property...in Nevada.

The good news: It was cool to be a harbinger of doom. There was no easier way to be "with it" than to decry the fate of our planet and mock those rubes who would deny the existence of climate change even as they suntan in January. And rubes they are indeed. There are few emotions as self-satisfying as justified pessimism in the face of delusional optimism. Convinced that climate change is nothing but a socialist plot to regulate commerce, the far right, though convinced of impending Armageddon by any and all other means, nonetheless refuses to believe that we could ever do anything to our environment that would threaten our well-being. The good lord said nature was there for our use after all. So, it was empirical fact vs. faith based denial. Um, score one for science. The problem is, of course, just how bleak the scenario really was. No one wants to hear about their inevitable destruction. Pandora's Box cannot be left wide open, hope must be maintained.

Enter the patron saint of the new environmentalism, the maharishi of green, the philosopher-king of Eco-alarmism, Al Gore. A dejected and bloated Gore left the 2000 election embittered and in shambles; a should-be president with no country to lead, what was the former VP going to do with himself? The answer, become earth's biggest hero since Captain Planet. There was something charming and professorial about his slide show of eco-terror, not the hippest of ways to spread his gospel of green. And yet, put that slideshow (OK, powerpoint presentation!)on film, release in theatres across America and you have yourself a major documentary hit. Two Academy Awards (Yep, even the song won!) and a Nobel Peace Prize later and the green movement had reached its apotheosis.

Now everything is green. Celebrities are green. Companies are green. CARS are green. CARS! Kermit was so wrong. Being green is a marketing ploy now, a signifier of a person or product being "with-it." Shedding the granola eating, hemp attired persona that typified environmentalists in the past, the environmental movement could count on movie stars to be their poster boys. Leo DiCaprio drives a hybrid and flies commercial, private jets use too much fuel. Less glamorous, Ed Begley Jr. has gone all the way, living in a "green" house and driving a converted electric VW rabbit. It's all about eliminating your "carbon footprint," one of the Aughts most pronounced coinages.

Is it all for nAUGHT? Though Gore would have you believe that changing your light bulb will change the world, I can't help but fear we are deluding ourselves about our own ability to divert the rolling boulder of climate change. China and India are on track to surpass the USA in almost every criteria of industrialization, including carbon emissions. America has passed no real laws or regulations that addressing the issue in any serious, systematic way. We couldn't even stand in solidarity with the rest of the civilized world and join the Kyoto protocol. What we have instead of policy is fashion. Instead of solutions we have "crisis awareness." Instead of leaders we have trendsetters. Own a hybrid car? Awesome. Seriously. But China is still poised to pump more pollution into the environment than any nation has in the history of the world. And they all ride bikes! Everyone doing their part may not be enough, and until we realize as a nation and as a world that a political solution in the only solution (if there is a solution), I'm afraid all the good intentions and Hollywood endorsements wont be worth the price of a gallon of dirt when we find ourselves canoeing over the Sahara.

You AUGHT to remember...

#46 - Cougars

It was the decade when...

Women with hot-flashes were hot.


Meow. Prowling through the late Aughts was a whole new kind of kitty-cat, a feline with a little too much mascara and way too much lipstick. Une chat who specializes in French kissing - she's had years of practice! A pussy who doesn't so much smile as smirk lasciviously, worried that a full grin might expose her crow's feet. Meet Matronus Sexualis, aka, The Cougar.

The Cougar is that unmarried woman of a certain age (that age being middle), who, approaching the period when women no longer have them, the time when many who long ago traded sexual inhibition for estrogen replacement therapy, refuses to go gently into that good night and seeks out sexual conquests with all the desperation of Christopher Hitchens at last call. Big hair and cleavage are welcome. A duplicitous ex-husband who left the Mrs. for a much younger Miss is not unheard of. An external carapace of confidence hiding a wounded and lonely soul who, at middle age, finds herself unloved and alone is a must.

The appeal of The Cougar persona is a total contradiction. On one hand, The Cougar is a celebration of female sexuality: In a society where women are routinely de-sexualized in the movies and media the minute they turn 40 (as Goldie Hawn says in The First Wives Club, women in Hollywood have three ages, "Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy"), Cougars flip the bird and demand that we accept the reality that not only do women over 40 have a libido but that they can express it with whomever they want, including younger men. The Cougar is, in her way, a feminist trailblazer, a woman refusing to conform to the sexual role society prescribes to her. But the other paw tells a different story. It's the novelty of the cougar, the silliness of the idea, that made this new Archetype catch on. The Cougar fascinates because she is so improper. A middle aged business-man trolling for pussy is hardly news but a middle age woman hunting for cock is funny and unexpected and vaguely grotesque, a step away from midget sex. With Cougars, women are reduced to their sexual appeal and appetites, other facets of their identity regulated to the litter-box.

The Cougar phenomenon has been lampooned on Saturday Night Live, chronicled and dissected in the pages of magazines, and most recently inspired its own sitcom starring Courtney Cox. It's all Cougar, all the time. If the media were an accurate guide to reality, it would appear that the USA is overflowing with Mrs. Robinsons, out to ensnare the young men of America in their leathery claws. The truth is that The Cougar is a fictional creation, a marketing device to appeal to middle aged women and easily titillated men. But, in the great feedback loop that is modern mass media, the illusion has become a reality, the existence of the Cougar archetype inspiring older women to express their sexuality more openly and shamelessly then they have in the past. So despite the yin and yang sides of The Cougar as a social phenomena, it remains true that the empowerment granted a woman when she owns her Cougardom is a positive change for both the individual involved and America in general. Cougars not only travel in a pride, they have reason to feel some as well.

You AUGHT to remember...

#59 - Scopes/Monkey Trial: The Rematch

It was the Decade when....

Intelligent Design was not so intelligent.

Newsflash: The World is round. Oh, you knew that! (Don't tell Sherri Shepard.)

Ok then...

Newsflash: The Earth orbits the sun. More controversial? Not since the 16th century.

Fine...

Newsflash: All species of life on Earth, including man, evolved from a common ancestor. BINGO! Now that's controversial.

Of course, it's not. Or rather, it's not to anyone who believes that science is in any way a means of achieving objective truth. When I was taught evolution in school it was as much a part of accepted biology as cell structure and anatomy. There was nary a whiff of controversy. Sure, I knew about Inherit The Wind and the famous 1926 case which inspired it, but the "Scopes-Monkey" Trial was taught in history-not science-class, and had all the contemporary intrigue of Prohibition debates or revelations on the Teapot-Dome Scandal.

Of course creationists (or, tautologically, "Intelligent-Design" advocates) have their panties all in a twist about the label of "theory" attached to evolution, citing this as proof that the "theory," being a "theory," is anything but established truth. They're quick to forget that gravity too is a theory as is the germ "theory" of disease. ID'ers may score some rhetorical points with perplexed laymen - "Hey, if the scientists call it a theory, how can they be so sure that Darwin was right?" - but scientists and informed members of the public are not so easily hoodwinked by grammatical word games. The veracity of natural selection is determined by hard evidence and reasoned inferences, not taxonomic puzzles about what to title a proven scientific hypothesis. (Law? Theory? Fact? Who cares!) Is it true? That's the only question that matters.

When the Dover school board voted to have a statement read to students elucidating this bogus "theory" argument and then pointing them to an alternative pro-ID textbook in the school library, a nations culture war had found it's Gettysburg in another small Pennsylvania town. Battle lines drawn, we had a sequel to Inherit the Wind playing before our eyes some 80 years after the original court case, this time with air conditioning and less suspender snapping.

Stakes were raised not just by the historic connotations of the trial but by the religious debates in general that had been consuming the American consciousness. The President was seen as a product of the Christian right; the "moral majority" had never before had such a platform for expression and powerful ear to influence. Polls showed massive portions of the American populace did not subscribe to Darwin in the slightest. To the devoted Christian, the complete rollback of the enlightenment seemed no longer a far-off dream. Conversely, the blowback by the so-called "new atheists" had put the central tenets of religion up for debate in the public sphere with a prominence not felt since the high not-so-holy days of 20th century modernism. Lead by "Darwin's Rottweiller," Richard Dawkins was both the face of evolution and atheism in the Aughts. A victory for the former in Dover would likely be felt as a triumph of the latter as well, even if the conflation, by Dawkins' own admission, is not wholly necessary.

Ratcheting up the tension was the adjudicator of the whole debacle, Judge John E. Jones III - a Bush appointee. Would The President's nominee agree with his appointer and concede that both evolution and Intelligent Design deserve to be taught in public schools? Or would the case for natural selection win out and Intelligent Design would be called out for what critics claimed it really was: creationism with a lab coat. In a shockingly tough and definitive decision Judge Jones ruled against the school board writing, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

Writing also that:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

That is what we here at YATR call a judicial smackdown. In the 1926 trial, Scopes lost his case and was found guilty of illegally teaching students that men and apes had a common forefather. It took 79 years for another court to correct this miscarriage of justice. So, though Darwin won this battle, the war is still far from over. As recently as February of this year a State Senator in Florida introduced a bill requiring teachers to include ID alongside Evolution in their science classes. Like Lemmings toward the cliff, no logic can slow their righteous march to oblivion.

You AUGHT to remember...