Researchers figured out you’re all possessed by ghosts

The LGBTQ community has long luxuriated at the top of society’s dignity pyramid, raking in our systemic respect, employment opportunities, and general decency for as long as we’ve been recording history. But the jig is up thanks to a group called the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, who have deduced that as much as 85% of gay people are actually possessed by ghosts.

According to their report “Symptoms of Ghost Affecting or Possessing a Person,” about 30% of the world’s population is possessed by ghosts at any given time. In the queer community, though, those numbers take a huge leap:

So most gay people aren’t gay, they’re just acting out the desires of a ghost of a different gender identity or orientation. Simple! “The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts,” they say. “It is the female ghost in them that is attracted to other men.” The same is true for lesbians, who are possessed by male ghosts.

How do you know if a ghost has possessed you? Only a saint within the spiritual science community can tell you. “Whether a person is affected or possessed or not, can in actuality only be understood by Saints above the 70% spiritual level or by persons with an advanced sixth sense,” they report. “As most people lack both in spiritual level and advanced sixth sense, the majority of affected or possessed people are unaware of their affected state.”

Just remember: It’s not your fault you don’t know you’re haunted by a ghost, it’s just that you’re not as spiritually gifted as them.

Symptoms of possession include everything from physical ailments like bad breath and reproductive trouble, to behavior like marching in pride parades. The team has deemed the latter “undesirable from a spiritual point of view” because marching encourages “ego… exhibitionism and narcissism,” which makes sense when you remember the queers are the one group that has historically overpowered all of the others and forced them to serve their particular needs, desires, and whims. Only a ghost would be capable of a gesture so redundant.

The organization recommends chanting and prayer to “overcome homosexual tendencies and desires,” but have yet to share a pie chart on its success rate.

If we poke around the rest of the site, though, it turns out ghosts are actually up to a lot in these modern times. Global warming? Ghosts are making us do it. Black Friday? Ghosts love it. It’s almost as if, when we do not want to accept accountability for our own actions, it is convenient to blame something outside of ourselves to create a diversion. That way we appear very inconspicuous and no one can tell what our motives are.

Anyway, this is just some “science” “research” I came across this morning that I wanted to pass on to you, my friends on the ‘net. Please schedule an appointment with your nearest saint accordingly.

Classical Music Hour with Fran

Five years ago this winter, I spent Christmas (and a fraction of Hanukkah) in Prague. I was studying abroad at the time in London, but took my extended holiday break to jump around central Europe rather than go home. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this; five years just feels like an oddly significant amount of time. I haven’t been back since, so Prague remains, in my head, this beacon of snow and Christmas markets and fried baked goods. Our hostel was located right on the river that runs through Prague, the Vltava, and every day we’d walk along the riverside into the central part of the city to explore something new.

Because it’s nearly the holidays, and because as I’m writing this Chicago is getting its first snowfall, I want to go back a little, both in time and to the Czech Republic, where I started this column with Dvořák. This week, I want to tell you about Bedřich Smetana (an amazing name, truly, perhaps the best name I’ve typed so far), a Czech composer who predates Dvořák by about twenty years.

It’s perhaps easiest to think of Smetana as like the Czech version of Beethoven: he was a prodigy at a very young age who rewrote the pre-existing classical rulebook and also went tragically deaf in the latter half of his career. Let’s unpack this a little. By “prodigy,” I mean: he started composing at the age of 6. (Honestly messed up if you think about what you were doing at the age of 6; I was learning to Rollerblade.) By “rewrote the pre-existing classical rulebook,” I mean that unlike composers who came before him, Smetana, like Saint-Saëns in a way, was less interested in composing symphonies based on variations on a theme, so much as he was operas and tone poems. And by “went tragically deaf in the latter half of his career,” I mean :(.

The “Moldau” is the second movement in Smetana’s set of symphonic poems known as Má Vlast, which translates to My Homeland, and of all the six movements, the “Moldau” itself is the most famous by a wide margin. (I prefer the 2001 Berlin Philharmonic recording, which, interestingly enough, pairs it with Dvořák’s Symphony From The New World.) Má Vlast was written as a celebration of all things Czech, ranging from landscapes and nature and architecture to history and myth and nationalism. In Czech, the “Moldau” is known simply as “Vltava,” like the river I used to walk along in Prague.

The “Moldau” is also peak woodland nymph. We’ve got flute and harp and oboe all up in here. The whole thing is lush and calm and flowing — it really does feel like listening to a river. It starts coyly: a flute solo, pizzicato strings. It beckons you into the universe it’s setting up, namely the Vltava. It should speak to the general soothing nature of the “Moldau” that there’s a triangle part (I hate triangle!!!) I actually love, perhaps because it feels as though it’s hidden in plain sight.

The core melody of the piece doesn’t come in until the 0:55 mark, a little louder and more confident. Throughout the rest of the eleven-minute “Moldau,” the theme comes back, each time a little bolder and more forceful. At the 7:19 mark, it’s confidently backed up by the horns. In the final two minutes of the piece, what felt like little more than a whisper at the beginning has gone full fanfare. Don’t be mistaken: despite a loud and triumphant ending, it’s one of the most relaxing pieces there is. Is it weird to applaud the nature of a river? The end of the piece welcomes the Vltava to Prague, where it flows calmly under the historic King Charles Bridge. It’s crazy to be like, wow, I am now generally enthused about Czech river culture, but that’s what the “Moldau” will do for you.

Even as it builds, the “Moldau” keeps to its smooth, airy melody. It’s a tone poem, after all, and it’s versatile enough to feel suitable for any number of winter activities, like locking yourself in at home when the windchill is bad to trudging through the snow in the wrong boots to tuning out everyone else at a department store while you look at food processors for your parents. It feels naturally uplifting — it doesn’t have to work to get there — in the way that we want the holidays to make us feel. I’m aware of how I sound when I say this, but there’s a magic to the “Moldau.”

So no, it’s not religiously affiliated or particularly holiday-inspired, but there’s something inherently wintery and playful about the “Moldau.” It’s hard not to feel sentimental about something while listening to this, be it your own self-guided study abroad vacation or building a bad snowman or just knowing that you’re going to get a couple of days off from work.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer from Chicago. You can find a corresponding playlist for all of the pieces discussed in this column here.

Some suggestions for other Words of the Year

by Adam Bessie, illustrations by Jason Novak

The word of 2016 is “post-truth,” according to the Oxford Dictionaries. Here are some of the premature candidates for the 2017 Word of the Year:

America is dying and I don’t feel so good myself.

So admit it: As horrified, frightened and depressed you are that Donald Trump was elected president, there is a part of you that somehow refuses to believe the end result will actually occur. Sure, you’re making your donations and putting marches on your calendar and tweeting angrily about each outrageous new announcement but there is a tiny corner of your brain that will not allow you to accept that, come January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump will be the President of the United States of America.

What will happen to prevent it? That’s not your brain’s responsibility to figure out. All it has to do is somehow keep the hope in your head alive that anything — asteroid strike, admission by Putin that he rigged the whole thing as a joke, second coming of a deity whom you have until now refused to believe in; whatever it is so long as it stops it from actually taking place — might make it stop.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is this is not a dream, you are not going to wake up, there is no magic spell or divine intervention to save you from the catastrophic embarrassment a minority of your fellow citizens have sentenced you to suffer under. The good news is “increases in ‘virtually every cause of death’” have lead life expectancy in the United States to decline for the first time since 1993. So we probably don’t have to put up with it for that long.

Feel better? Me too. Now let’s listen to some music! Enjoy.

★★ The clouds were high and flattened, silvery-white on the morning. The black shape of an airplane acquired contour as it moved slowly from west to east. Children stayed on the playground equipment after the first summons to school had sounded. Furrows had formed in the clouds, now a solid mass, as the five-year-old waited to go to the urgent care center with his bandaged forehead. Two or three hours later, in the cold light of the hospital waiting room, he kept asking whether the day was over. By the time he was discharged, with tape over stitches, the sky was a darkening brown gray. In the dark after dinner, people coming into the building lobby or waiting by the service elevators were suddenly glazed with rain. The lights of the wreath outside shone on sheeted water.

What a remarkable age in which we live.

“The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman. The troll acts ‘as a self-appointed cultural critic’ in a tradition of clowns and jesters, according to Benjamin Radford, while simultaneously ‘plausibly maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are left with is the logic of punishment in its distilled form: if even the grieving are punishable, who isn’t? ‘None of us,’ goes the refrain, ‘is as cruel as all of us.’ It is around this principle that the most infamous trolling community forged its identity: ‘We are Anonymous, and we do not forgive.’ And what goes unforgiven is weakness.”

LRB · Richard Seymour · Schadenfreude with Bite: Trolling

See also: The Internet’s Vigilante Shame Army

Soundscan Surprises, Week Ending 12/1

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

The holiday season is a big time for the back catalog! Garth Brooks outsold Metallica’s black album by a factor of almost two! He and Trisha Yearwood just released Christmas Together, a smashing success that’s boosted sales of all of Brooks’s other current records on the top country charts, as well as sales of his ultimate hits on the back catalog.

So what’s left when you take out all the holiday albums? Pretty much what you’d expect: a lot of Metallica, Adele, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and a few other regulars like Willie Nelson and Nirvana. The real artists don’t have Christmas albums, because they don’t need them. They get by on monster sales, year in and year out. I don’t know what this says about Lana Del Rey, but until she pushes out some mistletoe jams (haha, toe jam), I guess we must concede she is at least too big to fail, if not a true artiste.

21. METALLICA METALLICA 5,211 copies

35. ADELE 21 4,474 copies

38. COHEN*LEONARD ESSENTIAL LEONARD COHEN 4,320 copies

50. METALLICA MASTER OF PUPPETS 3,751 copies

55. METALLICA AND JUSTICE FOR ALL 3,509 copies

59. METALLICA RIDE THE LIGHTNING 3,278 copies

82. PRINCE VERY BEST OF PRINCE 2,632 copies

86. WINEHOUSE*AMY BACK TO BLACK 2,571 copies

91. SIMON & GARFUNKEL GREATEST HITS 2,536 copies

93. JACKSON*MICHAEL THRILLER 2,518 copies

128. NELSON*WILLIE SUPER HITS 2,099 copies

129. ADELE 19 2,083 copies

130. NIRVANA NEVERMIND 2,075 copies

155 DEL REY*LANA BORN TO DIE 1,812 copies

Take a bite out of the Big Apple, worms and all!

“Book experiences designed and led by some of the most interesting people out there. You’ll get to unleash the sushi chef or street artist you’ve always wanted to be.” — Airbnb

CURATED SHOPPING

Get a guided tour of Soho’s hottest boutiques with your host, a nervous 23-year-old with an important job interview next week. Finger brand labels amidst succulent-covered tables and marble shelves as you decide what just might be worth it, especially if the job comes through. Cringe as the shop attendants either ignore you or pay way too much attention. Stop in at somewhere between three and five stores then let the relentlessness of the aspiration overwhelm you and head to Uniqlo to buy everything. (Clothes are returnable, but only if you’re still in town.)

AN ARTIST’S LIFE

Brooklyn is the creative capital of the world! Spend an inspiring day with your host, a New York artist who has seen it all. Visit his semi-renovated windowless studio in a loft building that’s threatening to kick him out, inhale the toxic fumes of spray paint, and cover your ears when the sculptor turns on the buzz saw. Afterwards, smoke a joint on the roof deck to feel stable enough to attend a series of openings in Chelsea, where you’ll seethe with jealousy at every gallery. (Speak with curators for an added fee.)

HOT REAL ESTATE

In New York City, apartments are the only thing anyone talks about! Go on an exciting hunt for a new home with your host, a true broker who won’t tell you his agency affiliation or real name. You’ll lose your way in a neighborhood you don’t know, force entry into apartments where the inhabitants are asleep, encounter human feces, and, if you’re lucky, get dragged to an office to hand over a deposit the size of your monthly salary. Cry over a bagel on whichever block you land. Repeat the process until you’ve succeeded or given up. (Approximate duration: One month to forever.)

WEEKEND BRUNCH

Time to eat like a real New Yorker! This one starts at home. In bed at your Airbnb, text everyone you know if they want to get brunch. Wait to hear back, somehow unsure if you want responses or not. Your host, who works in finance, will help you triangulate a suitable restaurant that’s equidistant from all of the other participants but farthest from you. Watch in helpless terror as your host hits on the waitstaff in an attempt to get a table that fits everyone — it’s cool, they know him here. (Bottomless mimosas available but not advised.)

BUSHWICK BOHEMIAN

Spend a weekday like the locals do! Buy a lukewarm coffee and subpar croissant, sit in a crowded cafe, and try to come up with something that will pay your imaginary rent alongside your host, an experienced freelance writer. Thrill at the closeness of other “creatives” and the authentic stench of french-press coffee and desperation. When the work’s all done, head to the cheapest nearby happy hour and then fall asleep back at your apartment before eating dinner. (Drinks not included.)

Will anything ever be funny again now that Donald Trump has won the presidency?

It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Throughout the election cycle, Donald Trump had been parodied, mocked, ridiculed, and “destroyed” by a veritable Who’s Who of comedians, but that didn’t stop him from sweeping the Rust Belt and seizing the White House. Humor can’t vanquish an unqualified race-baiter, so what can it do for us going forward? Speak jokes to power? Help us bear the unbearable?

The next four years — heck, maybe even the next eight — should be exceedingly funny. History shows us that such liminal periods are rife with comedy. In the classical world, Greek tragedy yielded to Greek comedy as that region’s influence waxed and then waned. The Silver Age of Roman literature saw the flowering of its finest wits; so too did late Victorian England, which provided a backdrop for the great works of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. But what kind of humor will suit our troubled times?

The 1960s and 1970s experienced social upheaval and a reorientation of American politics, with comedians from horn-rimmed pianist Tom Lehrer to drug-fueled Richard Pryor tagging along to offer biting commentary. These performers also sounded alarms, warning against the forces of political reaction that would empower Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In 2016, however, the reaction and retrenchment embodied by Trump were treated as a kind of joke, a self-parodying cable news sideshow that distracted from the real future of American politics. From Lena Dunham to the “Chapo Trap House,” most comedians operated on the assumption that HRC’s victory was a fait accompli and thus aimed their best barbs at one another as they participated in a rollicking debate about the direction and velocity of liberal (or leftist) reform.

Is comedy, so often invested with deep social significance by highbrow commentators, good for anything besides enduring chronic pain? In prior election cycles, I had retreated behind a wall of “Daily Show” clips and the resulting self-satisfied laughter. This time around, I chuckled along with my favorite millennial media-savvy podcast hosts, all of us secure in our obvious mental superiority. As philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, “Laughter cannot be absolutely just, [for] its function is to intimidate by humiliating.” Having recognized the failings of the ignoramuses around him or her, “the laugher immediately retires within himself, more self-assertive and conceited than ever.” All jokes, Bergson thought, were jokes at someone’s expense. During the 2016 election cycle, many of those someones on the receiving end of the gibes and jests were, in theory at least, encompassed within the same enormous Democratic coalition that was all but guaranteed to deny Trump the White House.

For many of us, humor had been our defense mechanism; sarcasm our second language. But now the harsh reality of a presidential administration oriented around racism and xenophobia had strangled comedic invention. Yet how could we possibly cope without it? How could we accept anything as deadly serious as Trump’s ascension without adding an ironic wink to leaven the unbearable heaviness of being woke?

Like every other Gen Xer, I was weaned on stupid, misogynistic 1980s teen comedies and then nourished to maturity on the minimalist nihilism of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. The apolitical consensus comedy of a show like “Seinfeld,” where an entire episode can revolve around a tell-tale red spot on a cashmere sweater, was both funny and safe. Judging from the Nielsen ratings, upper middle class, middle class, and even lower middle-class Americans could all relate to jokes about minor faux pas and petty irritations. Even “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Mr. Show,” two brilliant slacker sketch shows, failed to pair biting social critique with any particular call to action. The closest thing we ever got to that came when Beavis told Butthead, “This sucks, change it.”

The 2000s, a decade dominated by the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, witnessed the tentative rebirth of oppositional political comedy. Jon Stewart, an MTV alum, earned two Peabody Awards for broadcast journalistic excellence by exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the governing class. Stewart and his “Daily Show” colleagues redefined how millennials consumed the news: they watched clips of stupid politicians saying dumb bullshit intercut with live studio footage of an exasperated Stewart doing spit-takes. In retrospect, this was soft-edged comedy, almost toothless at times, that eschewed hard political labels even as it emphasized how we, the educated, college debt-incurring audience, were all so much smarter than our debt-free boomer parents.

Obama’s first election to the presidency was the beginning of the end for what remained of the comedy consensus. We had joined together to laugh about nothing, then tuned in to Stewart et al. to enjoy a reassuring twenty-two-minute reminder that everybody else was stupid. But the cracks were beginning to show. It became impossible to ignore that much of the humor described here was overwhelmingly the work of heterosexual, reasonably well-off white men. Short-lived successes like “Chappelle’s Show,” “The Bernie Mac Show,” and “Everybody Hates Chris” didn’t linger on the national stage long enough to change that, and even a new crop of women-helmed comedies, such as “Girls” and “Inside Amy Schumer,” struggled to foreground many underrepresented viewpoints.

Then there was the matter of politics. For young people struggling to secure gainful employment in a globalized market where graduate degrees often meant less than nothing, Jon Stewart’s ceaseless exhortations to be reasonable and his can’t-we-all-get-along attitude grew insufferable. The hollowness of that approach became painfully obvious when John Oliver released a lengthy “Last Week Tonight” segment mocking Donald Trump’s candidacy, urging viewers to “Make Donald Drumpf Again.” The bit was textbook Stewart — “We can beat them if we make them look dumb!” — and spoke to the weaknesses of this method: you cannot make Trump look any dumber than he already appears. Trump’s fire — his insults and tweetstorms and alt-right trolling army — can only be fought with fire.

As if on cue, the blaze has indeed arrived, burning away the vanities of many of our nation’s greatest menaces — villains like multiple-time Jeopardy! champ Arthur Chu, a dude who writes widely panned thinkpieces about toxic nerd masculinity for The Daily Beast. One of the funniest comedy sketches I heard this year was a pitch-perfect parody of sports talk radio that mocked Chu and a bunch of other internet-native “allies” who rather naively and unhelpfully believe they’re “amplifying the voices” of people with more legitimate stakes in the campaign for social justice. The sketch, one of the first “Chapo Trap House” segments that boasted legitimate production values, highlighted the trio’s ability to simultaneously skewer multiple forms of popular culture (dumb sports commentary, even dumber millennial media commentary) while conveying a relatively simple and blunt political critique.

Why did I derive such Twitter-brained enjoyment from a laugh at the largely unknown Chu’s expense? And why, for that matter, did I care that Samantha Bee — another comedian whose work I sometimes enjoy — had sided with one politician over another during a divisive Democratic primary? Did Jon Stewart fail because he couldn’t maintain a form of oppositional political discourse that included everybody who was at least slightly left of center? And why was this assumed to be his responsibility in the first place? Given how wistful and reflective he’s become post-Daily Show, it certainly seems he began to think so, even if he didn’t want to shoulder that burden.

With Stewart gone from the scene, millennial humor has devolved into a kind of Donner Party, with high-profile yukksters and their wisecracking partisans devouring one another on Twitter. And as these battles raged, populist puppeteer Jeff Dunham and his stereotypical sidekicks filled midwestern arenas to capacity while outspoken white nationalist Sam Hyde (who appropriated Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s public access TV aesthetic if not their progressive politics) briefly helmed a controversial alt-right sketch show on Adult Swim. Have comedy’s limits at last been reached?

Sure, comedy didn’t “destroy” Trump, but that doesn’t mean it should be devalued as a form of social discourse. One vitally important function of humor is to eliminate any superficial optimism we may have by explaining the reasons for despair. But what comedy can never do — what we must somehow find a way to do for ourselves — is replace this superficial optimism with cautious hope. Hope calls for a willingness to act on one’s best conjectures, even if they can never be proven absolutely. It demands continuing to strive for genuine reforms to ostensibly insoluble problems.

In recognizing comedy’s limits, we should be left with a sense that all of civil government, all of ethics, all of civilization is at stake. We stand with one foot over the edge of an abyss, and the answer is not to avert our gaze, stifle a helpless giggle, and pretend things are all right. Even those of us who have laughed ourselves into a state of despairing skepticism have reason to remain brave and hopeful in our struggles for what is good and right. Otherwise we will lapse into cynicism and indifference, chiding one another for our mistakes and chuckling to ourselves about the impossibility of altering this untenable state of affairs. Comedy isn’t some all-powerful messianic force that can alter the course of history, but it’s right to expect that our comedians will continue alerting us, their voices increasingly strident and urgent, to the fires off in the distance. We must heed their warnings, and extinguish these blazes before it’s too late.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck does not make eye contact. We are beside ourselves.