Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (10 page)

Apparently, these symbols have caused belief-system-related mayhem. This is because the symbols don’t just mean “I’m the nice sort of Christian who sometimes distributes hot soup to the homeless,” but are more likely to mean: “Science is witchcraft and you’re all going to hell.” To underline the hard-right/anti-science/anti-abortion intent, some fish contain the word
BUSH
inside, indicating that George W. is “doing God’s work.”

Incensed, humanists created their own bumper fish symbols with the word
DARWIN
inside hoping to irritate the Christian right. It worked. They didn’t like it. It got nasty. Chris Gilman, the Hollywood special-effects whiz who apparently invented the Darwin fish, said: “Here’s a religion about forgiveness, peace, and love, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about Darwin fish being torn off of cars and broken.”

The Christians retaliated with a bumper sticker depicting the Darwin fish being swallowed by a larger
JESUS
or
TRUTH
fish.

The humanists shot back with a reversed version of the sticker.

Then the Ring of Fire Web site produced a sticker depicting the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish forming “what Shakespeare jauntily termed the beast with two backs” (they were at it like bunnies).

Nothing will wind up a right-wing Christian more than piscine-penetration faith denigration. And so it proved, with yet more parking-lot/highway altercations. Actually, this is possibly a good way finally to settle the evolution/creation debate: a demolition derby on the highway with the losers ending up bleeding in a ditch with bits of car stuck in them.

If the Christians won, they could shout back at the twisted wreckage: “What’s that you said about survival of the fittest?
I can’t hear you!
”

FOOD COURTS

Dishes from the four corners of the world! Left half eaten, on paper plates, stacked up, on Formica tables.

The food court: the most monstrous part of the already desperate shopping center “experience.” It’s like a horrible accident at an MSG factory. And always, as well as the usual suspects, there are chains that you never see anywhere outside of food halls. Panda Express. The Great Steak and Potato Company. Quiznos. What is that? Who is this Quizno? What is this for? Who are these people?
What do they want from us?

FOOT SPAS

At what point did manufacturers decide that people might need something full of hot water to put their feet in that wasn’t the bath? Or, if you must, a bowl? It’s like using the normal sink to wash your hands but having another, special basin just in case you feel like giving your pits a rinse.

Other useless items filling up people’s cupboards include sandwich toasters and bread makers. We’ve got billions in useless goods under our collective stairs. What amazing fucking idiots we are. Stick ’em all on eBay in one go and we could probably bring down the economy.

Sandwich toasters are foul, satanic tempters. They seem like a great idea right up to the point you produce your first grilled cheese and the cheese is hot enough to kill you and melts a hole in your hand.

Bread makers are just complete and utter bastards. You assemble the eight trillion ingredients and leave it overnight as instructed—to be lulled to sleep by what sounds like someone being beaten senseless by a marine all night long. Look, it was a fucking present, all right, and we smashed it with a hammer and threw it out an upstairs window. We’d advise you to do the same.

FRAUDULENT RACE-AGAINST-TIME DEADLINES ON TV SHOWS

“Hang on, what’s the freaking hurry?”

“Erm . . . well. Nothing, really. Just, you know . . . it makes things more tense. And we won’t be able to shout things like ‘Wow, I can’t believe you painted those seven walls and converted that canal into a home for the blind, all in seven minutes—the drinks are on me!’ ”

“Oh.”

FREE-CD GUNK

You know, that sorta-sticky, sorta-not stuff that holds a free CD or DVD into a magazine ad. What is it? Where do they get it from? Is it bat sperm? Is it hellspawn? Is it mined by infants? We know it has the consistency of nose goblins, but what is it?

FREE MAGAZINES

The ones you have to pay for are bad enough. But then there’s all the free magazines—on trains and airplanes, in shops, coming through your door, from trade unions, from insurance companies.

Supermarket magazines never say things like “Of course you’ll want to get the vegetables for this recipe at the market, where they’re much cheaper”; or “If we’re honest, most of our competitors have a much better selection of wines than us. We tend to just get the stuff with the biggest markups or see if it’s got a pretty label. Sorry about that.” That’s possibly because they’re less about being informative than about trying to sell you their stuff. Hence, we guess, the age-old adage: There’s no such thing as a free magazine.

FUNKY, THE WORD, AS APPLIED TO ANYTHING EXCEPT A MUSICAL GENRE

A yuppie being shown around a sleek urban bachelor pad, on spying a particular feature, will say: “Nice, funky. Okay.” A stripped-pine bar-club filled to bursting with vacuous douchebags will call itself The Funky Monkey. A new handbag with a slightly unusual buckle? That’s funky. So, too, is a reasonably colorful mug.

So forget any earlier associations (adj. from the French
funquer,
meaning “to give off smoke” through to “being enticingly odorous” and on to “being rhythmically badass”). Now we must presumably imagine James Brown backsliding across some varnished floorboards holding a chrome tea press and going: “Urrgh!” With Funkadelic all sitting on little stools behind the breakfast bar.

And how “funky” is that?

G

GADGET BORES

William Morris said you should have nothing in your home that is not either beautiful or useful. So we wonder what he would make of boring bastards crapping on about their new sat-nav handheld spaz-top.

GADGET BORE
: Look, it shows you all the streets and tells you
where to turn.

WILLIAM MORRIS
: BUT YOU’VE BEEN DOING THAT JOURNEY EVERY WEEKDAY FOR FOUR YEARS. YOU ALREADY KNOW THE WAY. ALSO, THIS WALLPAPER’S SHIT.

GADGET BORE
: SHOWS YOU WHERE THE NEAREST SHOE SHOPS ARE. YOU KNOW, FOR IF YOU NEED, ERM, LACES. DO YOU WANT TO SEE MY IPOD PLAYLIST?

WILLIAM MORRIS
: COBBLERS TO YOUR IPOD PLAYLIST. THAT IKEA TABLE? IT’S BOLLOCKS.

If further proof were needed that electronic gizmos are just a way of filling the void, it is that the magazine for gadget bores is called
Stuff.
That’s not even a proper name. What are you interested in? Stuff. That’s just stupid.

Mecca for gadget bores is Tokyo’s Akihabara, or “Electric Town,” which the guidebooks describe as a dense maze of neon straight out of
Blade Runner
with electronic widgets so amazing you will probably want to sign up to be turned into an android. However, if you go to Akihabara, you will find it’s more like a really, really big branch of Best Buy where everything is in Japanese. The mutating neon may as well carry the slogan
NOTHING TO SEE HERE
. New mobile phones that aren’t out here yet? Guess what: They look just like mobile phones that are out here yet. That is not, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, very interesting at all.

Later, emerging into a dimly lit side street, you will almost be run over by what looks like a Japanese Nick Cave driving the smallest car you have ever seen.

GEOGRAPHICALLY INACCURATE RACISM

At a middle school somewhere, an Iranian kid is being called “Saddam”—several letters and one very long war away from accuracy.

If people do have to be racist, do they also need to be so droolingly brain-dead that they can’t tell which ethnic group they are rabidly insulting? Maybe they should make special racist maps.

GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS

If you’re worried about global warming, you must be some kind of pussy. The ice caps aren’t melting. There aren’t more forest fires or old people dying in heat waves. The seas aren’t getting substantially warmer—and even if they are, which they aren’t, the fish are absolutely loving it!

We know this because of a small cabal of scientists who believe in big business more than life itself and who, funnily enough, often receive funding from Big Oil. These “skeptics” get everywhere: by the president’s ear; near big business; on news programs keen to stir up “debate” and show they’re not biased against frothing nutjobs.

In 2004, Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the British media that global warming fears were “ridiculous, unrealistic and alarmist” and that European countries were “not out to save the world, but out to get America.”

In 2005, White House official—and former oil industry lobbyist—Philip Cooney was found to have filed reports on the link between greenhouse gases and climate change with dozens of amendments that all exaggerated scientific doubts. That was before he left the White House for a job with . . . Exxon Mobil! Could you make it up? Probably, but there’s no need.

All this despite the fact that virtually all other climatologists—the ones without links to the fossil fuels industry—now predict that even a conservative rise of 2.1 degrees will probably result in tens of millions of people losing their lives. Even a suppressed Pentagon report warned of a danger that far outstripped terrorism, mega-droughts, famine. Thanks to a newly submerged Gulf Stream, by 2020 the British climate could rival Siberia’s. Thankfully, President Bush responded immediately. By standing proud alongside the British prime minister and declaring: “We need to know more about it.”

More about what? You can see how this thing will develop in years to come . . . But Myron, I’ve just put a page of A4 paper in sunlight and watched it spontaneously combust. “Sheer alarmism—we’ve always had hot days!” But Myron, a herd of gazelles has just elegantly pranced past the window of our Manhattan studio. “Er, yes, they’re mine. I brought them along with me. That big one—he’s called Dave and he likes nachos.”

And Myron, now you’re being swept into the skies by a freak tornado. “What a funny thing you are! I see nothing extraordinary in this turn of events . . . It’s great up here! Hi, George, good to see you! Pretty breezy, I know! You what? You want to know more about it? It’s okay, I’m on it!”

GOOD AND EVIL AS DEMONSTRATED IN THE MARKETING OF AUTOMOTIVE TRANSPORT

Now, more than ever, we need a firm moral compass to guide us through our treacherous age. Let us be thankful, then, for car ads.

It might not have escaped your notice that many of the ads are car ads. And you might well admire the way many cars embody very distinct moral attributes. Some cars are repositories of goodness that make you feel honest, real, and true—like getting emotional about the memory of
Brokeback Mountain
while sitting in a hedge.

Other cars, very different cars, make you feel dark, cruel, and sleazy, like you’re eating a dirty burger for breakfast in preparation for a day’s gunrunning.

Very much in the former camp, the new Nissan Note understands that having kids is the greatest adventure in the world (it’s not, though—skydiving is: it’s over quicker, and people don’t clam up when you talk about it). Billboards show this vehicle of virtue speeding through the countryside with a kite flying behind in the clear blue skies. It’s wholesome, pure, and pure, like Coldplay’s Chris Martin, fresh from having a bath, smelling a fragrant meadow at dawn.

Alternatively, if the idea of going on holiday with children makes you feel nauseated, there’s the infamous ads for the European Ford SportKa, which gained worldwide notice for showing a sentient hatchback decapitate a cat with its sunroof. Seriously. All to brag that this car is—again, no joke—the “evil” alternative. All that was missing was the tagline:
You’d better be one sick puppy to drive this baby. Ford SportKa.

Or you might prefer something closer to nature. “Go Beyond,” says Land Rover. Appreciate nature, the hills, the beaches, the misty forests . . . by driving through a misty forest, in a Land Rover! Because the Land Rover is the only off-road vehicle that naturally occurs in nature. Land Rovers are actively beneficent—like sharing cherries with an Eskimo would be good. Maybe the Eskimo has never had cherries before, and you’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.

Or you might prefer batshit crazy. In which case, enjoy the VW Polo. A controversial viral Internet ad shows a Middle Eastern suicide bomber driving up to a café in the Polo—but when he triggers the bomb, the ensuing explosion is contained within the Polo. Why? Because the Polo is
that tough!
It is the
only
car that can contain terrorism! If you love freedom and dead bad guys,
buy VW!

So the choice is clear: You can drive a car that’s truly at one with the cosmos, that will make you feel like the Buddha on a mellow tip. Or you can drive a car that thirsts for blood. At least until these two eternal opposing forces come crashing together in a final titanic struggle that will see the skies rent asunder, the ground shake, and the seas get decidedly choppy. At this point, the lamb will lie down with the lion. The shepherd will lie down with his flock. It will rain cats and it will also rain dogs. The beetles will lie down with the monkeys. The Green will lie down with the Black. Everyone is lying down.
Brm brm.

GRAVITY-DEFYING CREAM

Clinique’s Anti-Gravity Firming Lift Cream is marketed to women as preventing the inevitable downward effects of the aging process: “A lightweight oil-free formula [that] helps firm up skin instantly and over time [helps] to erase the look of lines as it tightens. Anti-Gravity Firming Lift Lotion by Clinique restores supple cushion to time-thinned skin.”

Of course it does.

Things known to science to defy gravity: airplanes, missiles, space rockets. Things known to science to not, generally speaking, defy gravity: magazines, cookies (not even very light wafers), pants, cream.