Frank Deluxe Disagrees

Frank Deluxe Disagrees with two guys from St. Pat's School, circa 1984

2009-09-27T06:17:00.002-07:00

I don't want to seem like I'm the type to hold a grudge for 25 years, but I've been thinking about it and what you guys did wasn't cool.

First of all, what did you expect me to say? I entered kindergarten that year all hyped up on this supposedly epic feud between St. Bon's and St. Pat's that had been going since time immemorial. Did you really think that I was just going to let you walk down Mullock Street like that? Did you think you could just waltz down to Jim's Convenience or Biddiscombe's and not get what was coming to you? Could you even deny that you were, in fact, "St. Pat's Dirty Rats"? Apparently not, since you decided to change the topic by striking me with your lunch.

Also, who throws a slice of pizza at a five year old? You guys must've been, like, 9 or 10 for sure. I wasn't throwing pizza at kindergarteners when I was in grade 5, I can tell you. I don't remember which one of you actually did it, but whoever didn't throw it but laughed anyway - I'm even more disappointed in you, man. That was, like, my first week of school ever and you traumatised the shit out of me. It was bad enough I had to put up with the goons in my own school, I didn't need you getting all out of line with the snack your mother packed for you.

Speaking of mothers, do you know what I said to my mother when she finally showed up to take me home? I said "I got slam-dunked by a pizza." So not only did I have to suffer the humiliation of getting into the car with a soiled blazer and tie (a blue and gold tie isn't stainproof, by the way), I also had to get her laughing at me by misusing the term "slam-dunk" in my explanation. Oh, and in case you're interested, which I know you're not because you're a couple of skeets, she still laughs hysterically about it today if she remembers it. Do you think that I like being a grown man whose mother regales people with the story of how her first born son got assaulted with a slice of pizza?

Anyway, thanks for the last two and a half decades of neurosis, coping through self-deprecation, and fear of the frozen foods aisle. I hope you're happy.

Sincerely,

Frank Deluxe

Frank Deluxe Disagrees with his dad

2009-09-27T06:17:00.001-07:00

Dad -

Gilbert and Sullivan are not 'cool'.

Your son,

Frank Deluxe

Frank Deluxe Disagrees with 3 abuses of the theory of evolution

2009-09-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

Attention: Secular Humanists, "Alpha Males" and Hegemonophiles!

Please stop using the theory of evolution to back up your nonsense. You are ruining it for the rest of us.

Secular Humanists - I'm not going to lie; whatever I say here has nothing to do with the fact that I disagree with your general project ("Secular Humanism" makes about as much sense to me as "non-alcoholic beer"). It's rather that trying to invoke the theory of evolution to act as a scientific underpinning for your de-religionized Christian morality is going to cause you major grief. So consider this a favour. I know that you all want to defend a collection of values that, for most of their history, had some sort of a theological explanation. For a while now, of course, it's been hard to take a lot of that stuff seriously. But at the same time, a lot of people don't want to give up on ideas and ways of relating to each other that are so familiar as to be intuitive. So, in an age where THE dominant way of explaining organic life comes to us from the theory of evolution, it certainly must seem appealing to try and transpose what used to be religious into a non-religious bit of machinery and hope that everything works more or less as it used to.

But: the way that you evaluate behaviour is at odds with the only real criterion given by the theory of evolution; namely, species survival (or genetic propagation, if you prefer). What I mean is - have you ever noticed how successfully despots, murderers, collection agents, and other assorted dicksmacks have been around? Certainly as long as the "good guys", which indicates that they've managed to reproduce over and over again. From the point of view of evolution, they can't be doing much worse than your Tommy Douglases and your Nelson Mandelas. So it seems that if you're going to give an evolutionary argument for all the things you like, consistency would demand that you acknowledge all the things that you hate that have survived for thousands of years could probably be regarded as successful evolutionary strategies (even though this seems to take the argument well beyond the basic evolutionary dynamic of natural selection and genetic drift - is every survival strategy an evolutionary one?). It seems that, if you want to prioritize one set of values over another, you're going to have to introduce criteria that don't come from the theory of evolution itself. Like, oh, I don't know - The Bible? Or a little John Stuart Mill, I guess. Or maybe Mr. Rogers.

A common complaint that gets tossed out whenever you see or hear an argument that involves "evolution" is that "it's used to explain everything!" - and that's exactly the problem: it can explain "everything" (whatever that is, anyway), including things that are taken to be the polar opposites of one another. Including things like "good" behaviour and "evil" behaviour. So it's hard to see how anyone can attach a particular moral content to evolution and act like everything else is excluded. It's like when you see the "Social Darwinist" types trying to justify tyranny and private health care - somehow they don't seem too interested in all the cooperative behaviour that you see in nature. Unfortunately, like the Social Darwinists, the Secular Humanists are committing the same fallacy, pretzeling their minds up and putting a bad taste in everyone's mouth about a perfectly good scientific programme.

Speaking of Social Darwinists, that brings me to the second subject of this disagreement ...

Alpha Males - As if the Ayn Rand, the waxed chests, and the tendency to "rate" womens' attractiveness by using a 1-10 scale weren't enough, you guys have to resort to misrepresenting poor old Charles Darwin to justify your shitty behaviour? I prefer my science when it doesn't smell of Aqua Velva, thanks. Anyway, just in case anyone doesn't know how the Alpha Male argument goes, it goes something like this:

"Men evolved to treat women like bitches; women evolved to be weak (yet nefarious), malleable (yet unreasonable) creatures; that's how our species evolved; we win, deal with it, FAGGOT!"

First of all, Todd - calm down. Second of all, you just revealed that you know zilch about the theory of evolution, and that you're making a profoundly anti-evolutionary argument. How? Well, by projecting your macho bullshit back into the past so that the entire history of our species looks like Maxim magazine—regardless of the fact that you have flimsy grounds for doing so—and then projecting that fictional past into the future, in order to show that humans have always been this way and will always be this way. As if the process of evolution just stops at some point, and you happened to be the end result; and as if there aren't matriarchal social structures on earth, and as if someone like Margaret Thatcher couldn't crush your nuts like a couple of raw eggs.

Much like the Secular Humanists, you presume too much and too little at the very same time. It reminds me of when I saw (if I remember correctly) Christopher Hitchens on TV, actually talking about the "point at which humans became fully evolved" - that's a contradiction in terms. Evolution means that there is no completion; every moment is a transitional one. So who's to say that the emergence of feminism isn't a precursor to your demise, and that you won't be bred out in 500 years? Again, you'd have to argue that our species can't evolve in order to be correct. Nice work.

Hegemonophiles - You know who you are; deep down you have a borderline erotic attachment to imperial power. Everyone's probably met someone who holds this position. It's exemplified by a line of argumentation that I witnessed in a first year philosophy class. The argument went like this:

The relationship between men and women in which men go out and hunt and women stay home and cook is true because evolution made us turn out that way.

Counterexamples to this social structure don't matter, because, hey, which societies conquered all the other ones? That's right, only the ones in which men go out and hunt and women stay home and cook! It's Evolution!

Never mind the fact that this person probably could be proven wrong historically speaking, it also glides right over the fact that one population conquering another through warfare doesn't equate with evolutionary success. If a nation annexes a territory, nothing has necessarily changed in terms of genetic propagation. Unless, that is, you start having kids with the people you've conquered. Which means that their genes are going to be reproduced as well. And even if you do invade a country and wipe out the entire population, that still doesn't amount to your evolutionary success, because an environmental catastrophe (for instance) could still come along and wipe you out in a couple of hundred years. So, for all you warhawks out there, your "might makes right" fantasies can't be bolstered by falling back on some kind of evolutionary justification. Okay?

This has been a public service disagreement from Frank Deluxe.

Frank Deluxe Disagrees with hipster fashion

2009-09-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

Obviously, this isn’t a surprise. But I’m not interested in ranting about the waxed moustaches and the Joey Jeremiah hats (I actually think some of the straw ones are rather sporting) or the Athenian soldier sandals and the genie pants. It doesn’t bother me that much that every time I go to a café nowadays I keep thinking I’m at a yacht party in the early 1960s, or that a lot of girls resemble extras in a Ray Harryhausen flick. Look, yes, I am a little pissed off about the return of deck shoes and neon coloured sunglasses; but that’s because I already had to live through it once and I consider it a complete abandonment of solidarity on the part of anyone 28-40 that they’ve revived the silliest years of the first decade of my life. It’s not even a big deal that every guy I see around here makes Kate Moss look like an MMA heavyweight. Or that I’m half-expecting to see a fleet of penny farthings sail down Dundas West toward the Dakota lounge any day now. In fact, if there’s the possibility of a sarsaparilla joint in all of this, then I welcome it.

But my problem hinges on the fact that you’re all wearing costumes as your actual attire. Now, I know that some anthropologist or cultural studies whiz might pipe up and say something like “all clothing is costume,” but come on. You know what I mean. Serf rags in the 7th century are not “costume” in the same sense that fancy dress at Versailles in the 18th century is “costume.” And as far as I can see, hipsterism tends decidedly toward the latter in its fashion-sense. Everyone knows about the “ironic hipster,” which is a bit of a misleading term since there’s obviously a lot of sincere investment in the whole project; however, when that project itself relies on a semi-parodic citation of past events in the history of dress, there’s a degree of unavoidable irony that has nothing to do with any kind of projection on the part of anyone involved. And here’s the crux of my problem: the way that hipster fashion structurally operates in the mode of “wink wink, nudge nudge” is bad for irony. We need a healthy sense of irony, and hipster fashion sends it out into the streets wearing a propeller beanie. I have to disagree.

Karl Marx opens his 1852 text “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” with this well-known claim: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” For (a very schematic) example: the recent economic “downturn” can be analyzed as the farcical repetition of the Great Depression, which is ubiquitously known as an historical tragedy. What’s the difference? In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonplace as a model for understanding global capital, whereas in the 20th century the closest comparable event was—arguably—the 19th century “Long Depression,” which didn’t involve, for example, the US Federal Reserve or a global fiat currency. In other words, in 1929 people couldn’t have seen the banana peel; in 1929's farcical repetition, we could see it and enough of the right people were happy to step on it anyway.

Tragedy is being absolutely unable to see the banana peel. It’s not that you were just looking at something else and didn’t notice, it’s that you couldn’t have seen it if you were looking right at it. In Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, the main character, “The Swede” Levov attempts to reason his way through “the American berserk” to rescue his daughter from her catastrophic life. He can’t see that his absolute faith in reasonableness is the banana peel: it’s not available to him. Farce, on the other hand, heads right for the banana peel with a big wink at the camera, blowing a raspberry. There’s irony in both cases: in the first, it’s that the real is both other than what you think it is and that it’s structurally out of your reach. In the second, it’s that you affect a conscious detachment from a situation of which you’re completely aware.

Hipster fashion falls squarely within the second case. We might argue that it owes a certain debt to the Douglas Coupland era, when sneering, disaffected young people became the primary vehicle of “cool” after the collapse of 1980s arrogance. That was the time in which one of the funniest moments in The Simpsons went like this: “are you being sarcastic?” “I don’t even know anymore.” In a way, that gets right to the soul of what we ended up calling the “ironic hipster.” So there was a period in which the viciousness of irony was intensified. But—and this is my claim and my point of disagreement—we seem to have blown right through that into blitheness, which just eviscerates irony. In a way, it’s the union of 1990s cynicism with the 1980s devil-may-care attitude toward being a cokehead (in the 80s everyone seemed a little surprised when people’s lives got messed up; now everyone thinks the whole thing’s a bit of a knee-slapper).

Now, I’m not saying that “hipsters” are at fault here (again, I suspect it has little to do with peoples' intentions), or that the “Do's” page in Vice magazine is the cause of all this. And I’m also just having a bit of a laugh. But I do think that it’s symptomatic of a certain kind of dangerous blitheness. Everyone knows the saying “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” which certainly applies to those of us who are old enough to remember how badly we cringed about 1988 from the vantage of 1994 (and let’s not get into maroon bomber jackets, chain wallets, size 48 jeans and undercuts, unless we’re going to talk about how we hope they stay dead). What I think that that saying means, more than just something like “don’t repeat the bad things we did in the past,” is that we ought to remember that we’re never quite in touch with our present, and there’s always a crucial point at which we can’t see the banana peel. And that sometimes we need to ask ourselves if it’s really so cute to put on those mom jeans.

Frank Deluxe Disagrees with his Mom

2009-09-27T06:07:00.000-07:00

Mom,

I know you love me and only want the best for me, but I completely disagree that it looks bad if I leave the house with an unbagged 6 pack. Here, in point form, is my argument, which I think you'll find convincing:

1) The only neighbours whose opinions we value (here I'm specifically thinking of the Hogans, the Dimmells, and the Wades) appear to enjoy beer as much as I do. Moreover, I have seen them leaving their houses with unconcealed 6 packs. Granted, in those instances they've carried the beer into one of our backyards, but I don't think it's a qualitatively different act to leave the house by the front door and go to someone's backyard in another neighbourhood.

2) A Sobey's bag does not effectively conceal the fact that the 6 pack I'm carrying is a 6 pack. In fact, done frequently enough, it becomes a signal that I'm carrying alcohol and therefore fails to do its job. Also, it leaves open the possibility that people might think I'm carrying a bunch of India, which I renounced the moment it was named the St. John's "hipster" beer in The Current a number of years ago. This makes me feel uncomfortable, as I'd rather be known as a drunk than a hipster.

3) That Sobey's bag won't be around to conceal me when I stagger up the front steps at 7:30 AM while everyone's having breakfast. Even if it were, it would only be a danger. In all likelihood I'd knock myself senseless from lack of visibility and then fall into the yew bush, where I would die of suffocation. Is that what you want?

4) We live in St. John's. I don't think I need to elaborate on this point, although I will say that the time I saw a couple of cops having a chat and a laugh with some guys who were drinking out of an open case of beer on Monkstown Road is an apt illustration of my meaning.

5) Finally, plastic bags are bad for the environment and only end up making Robin Hood Bay look like an unholy glacier of non-biodegradable destruction. Up here in Toronto they're trying to discourage the use of plastic by charging 5 cents per bag at any store. I suppose I could use a cloth shopping bag, which could render the sub-premise of 3) irrelevant since cloth is breathable, but still - at 99 cents a pop I'd just be wasting your good shopping bags. If I'm home for a month, that might be 20 or 30 bucks gone on mislaid cloth bags, which just seems silly and avoidable. Ultimately we really shouldn't be using plastic bags for any purpose. It just seems easier and more sensible to leave the house carrying my beer without trying to hide it.

So to sum up: I understand your motivations and do appreciate them, but I think that I've made a very compelling argument. I look forward to my next visit home, which will come and go without any discussion in which you foist a plastic bag on me before I go out to a Christmas party.

Love,

Frank Deluxe