You Cynical Bastard!

"Gimme my soul back you goddam camera!"

Cynical, pessimistic, hypochondriac, insecure, fatalist...these are the words that probably best describe me. At a certain point in my life I just stopped striving for perfection. I stopped hoping for the best. I just relegated myself to a certain amount of misery. Now, that is not to say that I am not a content person, I am, but in the game of life I have unceremoniously accepted defeat. This is an article about why creativity and intellectualism is dead and why most of us are so up our fucking asses with political correctness that the dystopian future predicted by so many authors is practically right around the corner. I'd like to tell you all about a few of the moments in my life that made me realize my generation is one ignorant kamikaze nosediving into oblivion.

The clearest memory that I have of when I first thought, "Wow, the future is fucked," is when I was a college freshman at the University of Iowa. One of the required classes was Rhetoric. There were three levels of Rhetoric: Rhetoric, Advanced Rhetoric, and Speaking and Reading. Now, because I'm so fucking smart and well-read and scored a 32 on the English section of my ACTs, I was placed in the Speaking and Reading class. The class was made up of mostly Liberal Arts majors, specifically English majors, like myself. Those of you who are in college or went to college probably know that the realm of higher learning is filled with self-congratulating, pretentious dick burgers. These dick burgers probably exist at every college and in every major, but they are most prominent in Liberal Arts, and most specifically in the English department. The English department is filled with kids who want to be called artists, and style themselves after those famous bohemian behemoths like the writers of the Beat generation, or they want to be viewed as uber-intellectual, so they write wordy, over the top bullshit and say they were inspired by Thomas Pynchon. At least one of these assholes was in every fucking English class I took. You know the type: the douche nozzle that has to raise his fucking hand every two seconds to go off on some tangent that has nothing to do with what the professor was talking about. The skinny jeans-wearing motherfucker with the huge stocking cap over his head, editing his manuscript over a black coffee and a cigarette. Hipsters, I think they're called. My sophomore roommate was a hipster. He would often go out and drink Port wine with his friends and discuss Naked Lunch and On the Road. He said his favorite book was Madam Bovary and his favorite writer was Vladimir Nabokov. And to top it all off he was a fucking Red Sox fan. But, listen, no one fucking drinks Port wine. Have you had it? It's nasty. No one just picks up a bottle of Port, because they love the taste. If you drink Port you are making a conscious decision to look like an asshole. And no one discusses William S. Burroughs for the fun of it. Naked Lunch is possibly one of the most complex books ever written. It's like a David Lynch movie, an M.C. Escher drawing, and a Led Zepplin song all smashed into book form. No one knows what Naked Lunch is about. But this scrotum taco roommate of mine, oh shit, he loved the book! One day a friend of his came over and said, "I've read Naked Lunch eight times. Every time I read it I find something new." Fuuuuuck yooooouuuu.....Anyway, I should have known this guy was gonna be a hipster douche, because we met in Speaking and Reading, which was full of hipster douches. So, the point of the class was to basically read a bunch of books, then eventually pick out a random topic, then give a speech on it. My speech was on patriotism in America, an extremely safe, risk-free topic. But the speech that basically stole a bit of my will to live came from this girl. Obviously she was smart. And she was pretty, soft-spoken, and I guess just an all-around normal human being. Her speech was on the conflict in Darfur, and it was all about the suffering of the people, the genocide taking place, and how many Western governments are ignoring it. But here's the problem, this dumb bitch giving her speech kept on referring to the people of Darfur as "African Americans." I was so blown away by how insanely stupid this was that I completely stopped listening to her speech and started looking around the room to see if anyone was picking up on this. "Are you serious? Did you hear her! She just said black people that live in Africa are called African Americans!" And no one said anything! Not me, not a classmate and not the professor. Maybe people were just being nice, but she said African Americans more than once in her speech. This girl was fucking gang raped by political correctness. Based on her speech I surmised that every black person in the world must be considered an African American, no matter where the fuck they live. The comic Louis C.K. does a bit where he says a white guy could be dropped in the middle of Africa, and the guy would say, "Jesus Christ, look at all the minorities around here." This girl might be a teacher now. A little piece of me died that day, after listening to five minutes of an upper-class white girl referring to native Africans as African Americans.

One time I was at a bar in college with my hipster roommate and some of his friends (for I had none of my own), and they were all talking and I was more or less bored out of my mind, because I had really nothing in common with the people I was with. Anyway, I am not sure what the topic of conversation was, or how it led me to say what I said, but at some point in the night, probably after a few beers, I said the following: "You know, guys, I have never seen a black person with Down Syndrome." OK, cue the needle scratching the record, cue the crickets...all the air went out of the room and an oppressive silence just filled the group like a thick syrup. Finally it was broken by a girl at the table casually lifting her glass and saying to no one in particular, "Wow, that was racist." Which of course pissed me off to no end, because I didn't say anything racist. I simply said that of all the people that I have seen with Down Syndrome, none of them had been black. Which, if anything, speaks highly of the genetics of African Americans.

When I was in kindergarten in Columbia, Illinois, my class would always take "milk count." Milk count was the time of day when when the teacher would ask who all wanted a small carton of milk for a snack, and a certain number of students would raise their hands. Then the teacher would ask who wants chocolate and who wants white, and students would raise their hands to signal their preference. One day the milk count was something like 7 for white and 5 for chocolate. Now, those are not the exact numbers, but I remember that a certain number wanted white, and certain number wanted chocolate, but it was not the same amount. But after the teacher said, "7 for white and 5 for chocolate" a girl next to me said, "All right! It's a tie!" And I looked up from my construction paper and safety scissors and protested, "No, it's not!" And the girl replied, "Yes it is!" That's probably the first time I thought to myself, "Christ, it's gonna be a long fuckin life."

The Moore You Know: The wire hanger was invented in 1892 when Sally Ralston, an infamous nurse who performed back alley abortions said, "Hey, if you take the wires we use and bend them into the proper shape, you can hang your knickers from them."

© Eric Moore - 2011