The Gist of It: April 5th, 2013
“The imagination is a dying animal,” as the hapless CEO of “Creative Possibilities” told us in a memorable Kids in the Hall skit years ago. That poor submarine-dwelling dreamer was more right than he knew. Look around you, at the people we’re supposed to admire as the leaders of the future. Data-mining fraudster Mark Zuckerberg, who has the physical presence of that Richard Scarry earthworm but none of the charm, stunned the tech world Thursday by announcing a bold new vision: Facebook – on a phone. It was weak tea, but action had to be taken after Zuck’s Tom Sawyer analogue, former Facebook president & N’Sync “cute one” Sean Parker, easily upstaged the social network earlier in the week in the imagination department.
“Facebook Home” is thin gruel in comparison to the terrifying possibilities implied in Parker’s recently mailed wedding invitations – of a medieval-themed gala in which “costumiers” would outfit the guests as elves and hobbits. Parker, a paragon of one-percenter virtue who whined about Occupy Wall Street days before dropping six figures on a Halloween party, angrily set the record straight – this would be no deranged “Game of Thrones” bacchanal in Big Sur, the stillborn creation of a vacuous mind strung out on multi-billion dollar IPOs and undiluted ketamine. No, it is going to be a much more modest and tasteful affair:
“Academy award winning costume designer Ngila Dickson created a series of outfits for everyone that are based on modern suits and dresses with some elements of victorian [sic] flair and whimsy; however they are not at all ‘medieval.’”
Got that, you jackals? VICTORIAN, not medieval – the British Empire declined across many stages. Parker gets these distinctions, in part because of his nauseating efforts to similarly hollow out America until the sun sets on our empire.
Now, if you want my advice – and owing that you’ve stayed the course through the hellscape described above, I imagine you do – Parker should be forced by the State of California to have that “Hobbit”-style union, a real “Morte d’Arthur” affair. Why not? Chivalry is dead in a country that’s belonged to hustling sawn-off creeps like Parker and Zuckerberg ever since we repaid Squanto by giving him a fever. No, the only true innovators we have left are the ones who even on this shellshocked moral plain can still find ways to be even more evil than we remembered possible.
We are seeing this in the Southwest this week, as an unprecedented and remarkably vicious crime spree has claimed the lives of two state prosecutors and a prisons chief. A fellow assistant D.A. was so shaken, he’s quit his case against the prime suspects in the slayings – the Aryan Brotherhood, a homegrown all-American white power mafia so inured to brutality, their members are only comfortable in prison. The only other suspect is, naturally, a disgraced local politician.
White supremacist gangs straight out of “The Road Warrior,” bottomless corporate greed, vigorous celebration of the destruction of the very land we live on into something resembling Dante’s inferno – Parker’s right. We could use a bit of whimsy these days.