“’Vicious cuts.’ ‘Savage cuts.’ ‘Swingeing cuts.’ The language that the British use to describe their new government’s spending-reduction policy is apocalyptic in the extreme. The ministers in charge of the country’s finances are known as ‘axe-wielders’ who will be ‘hacking’ away at the budget. Articles about the nation’s finances are filled with talk of blood, knives, and amputation.

And the British love it.”
-Slate’s Anne Applebaum suggests that the British fondness severe budgetary slashing comes from a sense of nostalgia for the postwar austerity era, but come on: everybody knows if you want to get a Brit excited about anything you have to explain it in terms of knives.

“The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten up its image with a new name: corn sugar. The bid to rename the sweetener by the Corn Refiners Association comes as Americans’ concerns about health and obesity have sent consumption of high fructose corn syrup, used in soft drinks but also in bread, cereal and other foods, to a 20-year low. The group plans to apply Tuesday to the Food and Drug Administration to get ‘corn sugar’ approved as an alternative name for food labels.”
-I kind of love that the healthiest-sounding alternative the corn industry could come up with to peddle their poison is “sugar.” But whatever, I’m fine with this so long as we get to rebrand our gigantic American asses as “back padders.”

by Luke Mazur

Buffalo is buzzing over native son Carl Paladino, Republican candidate for governor of the State of New York. Given Buffalo’s losing streak generally, Carl probably does not have a great shot at the statehouse come November. But recent polls do indicate that in today’s Republican primary, Carl is virtually tied with Rick Lazio. You may remember Rick as the guy who wagged his finger at First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on her march to the Foggy Bottom.

One gesture also epitomizes Carl and his supporters. Because if one political sign dominates front lawn acreage here in Buffalo, it is Paladino’s middle finger of a sign.

Orange and black, the mini-billboard reads: “Mad as Hell too, Carl!” Years ago these feisty supporters might have been called the “silent majority.” Today they’re noisy like elephants. Drunk nightmare elephants.

But it’s not just the mad as hell cartoon elephants talking about Paladino. Self-hating detractors, convinced Carl confirms downstate’s notions of Buffalo as a parochial backwater, are weighing in too. Can he actually do it? Did he just say poor people should live in used-up jails and have hygiene classes? Do we all sound nasally like that?

To celebrate Primary Day here in New York, and, in particular, the shit Carl says, I’ve put together a quick quiz. Of the quotes below, decide which are: a) shit Carl said b) shit no one said, or c) shit my Dad says. That is: some of these are Carl Paladino, some are made up and some are Twitter-fodder for a sitcom starring William Shatner. In other words, something for everyone to get mad as hell about today.

1) Moving back to Buffalo is the first time I put on shoes in four years. (Answer.)

2) I don’t take grape soda with food. People who never finished high school do that. (Answer.)

3) Why do you keep telling me that crime isn’t random? It’s a disgusting world out there. I’ve seen it. (Answer.)

4) I’m just frankly telling you what I think. I’ll get in the face of anyone I think is wrong. (Answer.)

5) It is what it is. She’s a complete asshole. (Answer.)

6) I made a crude remark and she threw a beer on me, and that was the end of that discussion. (Answer.)

7) Your mother’s at the gynecologist. I didn’t ask why. (Answer.)

8) I’m human. I’ve had my careless moments. I didn’t think twice about sending to my friends a bunch of obscene emails. (Answer.)

9) I’m sitting in one of those TGI Friday’s places, and everyone looks like they want to shove a shotgun in their mouth. (Answer.)

10) Garbage day is Tuesday. Don’t people know that means you put your trash out Monday night? (Answer.)

11) Richard Nixon did not play politics with race. Or vice versa. The man was color-blind. Now shut up over there. (Answer.)

12) Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene — the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes. (Answer.)

13) My fingers are too fat for this phone. I don’t know how you young people use these things. Give me the one in the wall already. (Answer.)

14) I’m going to turn him upside down and shake out every dollar he’s stolen. (Answer.)

15) I’ll tell you why we address priests as “father” and nuns as “sister,” you little piece of shit. (Answer.)

16) I’m not voting. What has any politician ever done for me that I didn’t already do for myself 40 years ago? (Answer.)

17) The blond one isn’t speaking to me anymore, so ask the fatter one if I can get the kiddie menu size. She let me do it last week. (Answer.)

18) I don’t want to be anybody’s friend. I don’t have to be anybody’s friend. (Answer.)

19) Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked. (Answer.)

20) The little dark-haired one I gave the thing to? (Answer.)

21) I’m just gonna be me and they can go fuck themselves. […] Don’t care, that’s the only attitude you can have when you go to the DMV. (Answer.)

22) Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities. (Answer.)

23) Can you get me a Fudgesicle from the freezer? Regular, not sugar-free. My insulin is out of whack this morning. (Answer.)

24) I don’t need more friends. You got friends and all they do is ask you to help them move. Fuck that. I’m old. I’m through moving shit. (Answer.)

25) I don’t know what the word would be, but it’s Italian for ‘what the $@! is this?’ (Answer.)

1-A, 2-B, 3-B, 4-A, 5-B, 6-A, 7-B, 8-A, 9-C, 10-B, 11-B, 12-A, 13-B, 14-A, 15-B, 16-B, 17-B, 18-A, 19-C, 20-B, 21-C, 22-A, 23-B, 24-C, 25-A

Luke Mazur misses Tim Russert today. He is technically our grammar columnist.

The enchanting unicorn that is Penelope Cruz is doing the future a favor and procreating. In my mind she’s basically Sarah Connor and her offspring will lead the resistance.

“The Wire” is a fictional television show that many people really liked and that many people think is a very revealing take on The Way We Live in Urban Cities now. As you probably know, it is being taught at universities including Harvard, in a seminar on urban inequality. Now comes a defense of that choice: “’The Wire’ is fiction, but it forces us to confront social realities more effectively than any other media production in the era of so-called reality TV,” writes the director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at Harvard Kennedy, an esteemed sociologist. How is that possibly true? It’s fiction. It’s made up. (Also has he not seen “Jersey Shore”? Half-kidding!)

His case:

Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can’t. More than simply telling a gripping story, “The Wire” shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself.

Those kinds of connections are very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, “The Wire” can be more creative.

Yes, more creative than… the truth.

The study of fiction is a fine thing! It’s, you know, what you do in some of the humanities! There’s lots to look at in terms of critical reading and representation with this COP DETECTIVE CRIME SHOW. But this is an admission that kids are too… stupid? Inexperienced? Homogeneous?… to learn without fiction and illustration. (And no, it’s not just because the professor’s own good work was an inspiration for parts of “The Wire” itself.)

Here it is: “There’s this question of how you appeal to young people who feel-not all of them but many of them-far removed from the type of people who are the major characters in The Wire,” is what a “The Wire”-teaching Duke prof said. (I’m not sure how the gang at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies would feel about that statement.)

So the claim is that the top-notch sociology students of America are unfamiliar with (and probably not of) the urban poor and they will learn empathy and be introduced to poor people through a made-up TV program. That seems a little broken.

“The album’s got a cute title, with the double meaning of ‘check out how hot we are” and ‘hooking up again with the person you used to date.’ Almost any of these simple two-riff, verse-chorus songs would have made a perfectly acceptable addition to their original records (and they’re better than anything either Kelly or McKee has come up with since they broke up); in particular, ‘I Hate the 80’s’ is a welcome bit of grumpy oldsterism and ‘Turning It On’ is built on juicy love/hate sentiments. The band’s twanging, strummy arrangements and McKee and Kelly’s bedroom-eyed thrust-and-parry are exactly like they were the first time around.”
–Pitchfork gives the new Vaselines album, Sex With an X, a cute rating of 6.9.

Here are our endorsements for today’s primary elections: Voters in New York Senate District 33 should cast their ballots for Gustavo Rivera, who is running on the immensely worthy platform of not being Pedro Espada Jr. Voters who live outside of New York Senate District 33-a group which, funnily enough, includes Pedro Espada Jr.-should feel free to vote for whomever they like, because with these crazy Scantron ballots they’ve got now the odds that your ballot will actually be registered correctly are about 50–50.

Cuba has 11.2 million people, half of them are workers and 85% of those are state-employed in some way. Now 500,000 people will be forced/allowed over the next year to enter one of the authorized 124 private occupations.

Big changes, civic-minded friends! The polls are open-and they’ll remain open until 9 p.m.-for today’s primary election. We hope you’re planning to vote! And we’ll have a voter guide later today totally not have a voter guide today-vote your conscience!- but first, the technical details. You can find your New York State polling place here. Even if you’re accustomed to your polling place, today you’ll find big changes! The ballots look pretty similar to what you’re used to but it’s a return to junior high school, because now we will use the exciting, time-honored technology of, pretty much, the bubble-scantron test. You remember how to fill in bubbles, right? The ballot you receive after you sign in-in its glamorous “privacy envelope”-will be in four languages and difficult to read in any of them! So, working by hand in your little station, you will fill in the bubble for your candidate of choice. You may instead provide a write-in candidate. You may not do both, nor may you select multiple candidates in the same race, nor may you write or mark outside the bubbles, or your ballot will be discarded. When you are done selecting your choices, you will then get in line for the scanning portion of today’s test. There you will feed your ballot into The Machine and it will either accept or reject your ballot. Perhaps you have done a good job and The Machine will reward you with a thank you. Perhaps not! Instead it may say there is a problem, such as that your ballot is “over voted,” in which case you should take your ballot back and fix it, by choosing the red button that says “don’t cast,” even though The Machine will give you a choice to let you submit it anyway. Here is a vaguely handy video that walks you through the new system, which we’re sure will just go swimmingly. Good luck with all that!

by Robert Lanham

Fashion was a pretty straightforward matter for me until 1980. I was still in elementary school, and up to that point my wardrobe decisions generally involved finding the matching giraffe, monkey or elephant tags on my Garanimals outfits. I was too young to take notice of the other animal that was beginning to show up on the left breast of some of the older kids’ shirts, an alligator, or to pay attention to a new book that had just come out that year, The Official Preppy Handbook, a compact little handbook that foreshadowed the clean-cut conservatism of the decade that was to follow.

As preppy culture trickled its way down to the fourth grade, Izod shirts by Lacoste soon replaced Mag Scrambler bicycles as that next thing that we all simply had to have. But, unfortunately, these fancy little shirts with the alligators stitched into them weren’t something we all could afford.

As a nine-year-old I’d relegated much more mental energy to Boba Fett than to issues of class, but I began to notice that the kids in school who came from the wealthiest families were all wearing the coveted alligator shirts. The rest of us got stuck with the humiliating knock-offs. There was the fox Izod knock-off, which was sold at JCPenney. And then there was the dragon Izod knock-off, which was even worse. It was sold at Sears-a company where only the cheapest and/or poorest families shopped for anything other than refrigerators. My father was an employee at Sears, so naturally I got stuck with the dragon.

After much teasing, I finally convinced my parents to buy a generic shirt that didn’t have a tag on it at all. Luckily, my older brother had somehow managed to stain his authentic Izod (he worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and had bought one with his savings) and, having access to a spare alligator, I asked my mother to sew it onto the breast of my unadorned generic shirt. Of course, I didn’t fool anyone. My mom’s stitching was overly bulky and she somehow managed to make the alligator’s tail appear painfully dislocated. Plus, the shirt itself was clearly a fake-it was way too thin and made of some synthetic poly-fiber that was likely outlawed circa 1985 for causing melanoma in laboratory monkeys. I was busted about five minutes after exiting the bus, when a preppy bully with a popped collar grabbed me to inspect the tag sewn into the neck of my knock-off. I was exposed.

Despite my early run-ins with bullying preps, I recall The Official Preppy Handbook with fondness. When my sister was given a copy as a gift, I remember devouring it, knowing through the wisdom of my high-school-aged siblings that it was cool, even though none of us were named Muffy, belonged to a country club or would go on to get our masters from Yale.

My family often joked about how preppy we were (the word to us was a synonym for high class) to reclaim a little dignity in those times when we coveted things-vacations, designer clothes, cable TV-that we knew we simply couldn’t afford.

Despite its emphasis on fashion, Lisa Birnbach and company’s The Official Preppy Handbook was always something larger than a book about clothes. It was a send-up of the wealthy class, specifically Northeastern WASPs, which knowingly (and fondly) celebrated their peculiarities while simultaneously mocking them. It was smart, funny and even a bit reckless for a national bestseller. There was, for instance, a section named “Deviant Behavior: The Top 10 Drinking Schools; 20 Verbal Expressions for Vomiting.” But more interestingly it was an uncomfortable dissection of classism, pedigree and race. And as Reagan entered office, and the distribution of wealth became increasingly uneven, it became, well, important; an edgy satire of the times. I’m certainly not alone in saying it influenced me. It was a book that I channeled with nostalgia two decades later when I was writing a handbook of my own, The Hipster Handbook.

Given a publishing industry so desperate that it’s trolling Tumblr sites in search of bestsellers about ferrets wearing berets, it’s no surprise that a sequel to The Official Preppy Handbook is here. With the tagline, “Wake up Muffy, We’re Back,” Lisa Birnbach returns as the arbitrator of all things preppy in her new book True Prep: It’s a Whole New Old World. This time she’s paired up with influential graphic designer Chip Kidd to create a much more expansive, 250-page homage.

It pains me to says this, given my admiration for the original, but we need a sequel to The Official Preppy Handbook about as much as we need a sequel to Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. It’s hard to criticize the design or the thoroughness of True Prep. But the whole misguided project, published during the harshest economic times since the thirties, leaves a foul taste in the mouth of anyone who the recalls the first incarnation with fondness.

When the first Preppy Handbook was released, we’d just struggled our way through two energy crises and were headed towards recession. It was the era of trickle-down economics and “Dynasty,” when people where much less cynical about the wealthy. An era when we’d yet to experience “too-big-to-fail” and the AIG bailouts. The Preppy Handbook introduced regular folk to Prepdom: a privileged, madras-filled world occupied by golden retrievers and children who called their mothers “mummy.” Of course, people always enjoy mocking the rich, but in the 80s people also wanted to emulate what they perceived to be their genteel ways. Needless to say, we live in profoundly different times.

There’s certainly no denying that the preppy aesthetic has made a comeback. Ushered in by cultural forces like “Gossip Girl” and the popularity of Ivy League rockers Vampire Weekend, argyle, rugby shirts, and loafers by G.H. Bass & Co. are now as ubiquitous as they were in their 80s heyday. Not surprisingly, True Prep devotes plenty of ink to fashion (preps now love polar fleece), but like the original Preppy Handbook, the book is much more about class than it is about style. True Prep comes across as callous and out-of-touch with the times.

Take the chapter on rich people behaving badly. After listing a number of wealthy individuals who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law (none of whom are John Thain, Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff-she opts instead for Winona Ryder, former Sotheby’s CEO Dede Brooks and, uh, Don Draper), Birnbach’s tone-deafness is on full display.

“We don’t mean to be bad,” she writes. “Just like other people, we intend to be good… Mostly, like Homo sapiens of every other stripe, we do not want to be caught.”

Offering some advice for the nouveau riche, she writes “[b]uying your way onto boards is done,” as long as you don’t flaunt.

In moments such as these, readers of True Prep will find themselves longing for more biting satire, such as Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things, a funny yet scathing indictment of the excesses of the wealthy. By comparison, True Prep’s vapid celebration of pedigree makes Stuff White People Like feel like a profoundly inflammatory call-to-arms against the aristocracy. Clearly, I’m not the only one who noticed how out-of-step this book is for the era: its initial first-print run was honed down from 150,000 copies to a much more modest 60,000.

Judging by the book’s contradictions, even Birnbach is uncomfortable slipping back into those Ralph Lauren loafers. She often comes across as being confused about what a prep is in the first place. The preppies she describes are pro-gay fashionistas who listen to NPR (ahem, Democrats) but nonetheless enjoy a good quail hunt and graduated from Hampden-Sydney (ahem, Republicans). Even more curious is her assertion that preps love thrift shops. Preps are frugal, she attests, before filling us in on what types of shoes they wear on their yachts. Later, she instructs that preps should never fly first class. Imprudence is for the nouveau riche. But then she goes on to joke that “children don’t need to know that private planes aren’t normal.”

In other moments True Prep becomes overly earnest and preachy. Perhaps it’s the passage of the years, but Birnbach spends an inordinate amount of time apologizing for the preps of yore. She writes, for instance, that preps “wholeheartedly condemn the use of drugs” and backpedals on the politically incorrect topic of birthright (a touchy subject in Preppy Handbook 1.0) by devoting a section to the societal importance of adoption.

In a clumsy attempt to make the book more sensitive about race, she provides the recipe for a drink called The Mixed Marriage and informs us that preps are supposed to use the terms “chef” and “driver” instead of “cook” and “chauffeur,” respectively, when talking about the help. Um, okay. If you only have a housekeeper, allow her to “make a treat from her native land, whether it be a kind of wonton, or a kind of lentil thing, or maybe even a fish stew,” she suggests.

Meanwhile, Birnbach attempts to desegregate preppy culture by enlisting Obama as a member.

If, in 1980, you had whispered to a few friends that within the next few decades, America would elect a thin, black, preppy basketball-playing lawyer to be President, they would have laughed at you and exhaled in your face, inside the restaurant or club where you were sitting.

Her intentions are good, but I’m sorry, anyone who has seen the video of Obama tossing out the first pitch at the All Stars game wearing his self-proclaimed “frumpy” dad jeans knows that he is anything but preppy.

At its most uncomfortable, there’s an interview with David Coolidge, the Muslim Chaplain of Brown University (Birnbach’s alma mater). Suggesting that today’s Prepdom is of the big tent variety (Birnbach is brunette and Jewish) she explains that Coolidge, a white, “well-spoken,” Islamic convert from Chicago, is proof that “anyone can assimilate into our world.” Again her intentions are good, but I found myself longing for a list that detailed twenty new synonyms for vomiting.

Of course, True Prep is being marketed as a satire, so anyone seeking profound social commentary on racial inequality and classism is probably asking for too much. (Although the first one pulled it off.) True Prep is largely devoid of humor other than its campy references to 80s nostalgia.

As the subtitle “It’s a Whole New Old World” indicates, one of True Prep’s major themes is that preps, a smugly discreet and old fashioned tribe, are destined to feel out-of-step in this very public age of cell phone chatter, Facebook and JWoww. It’s a clever insight into the reactionary nature of “old money,” who were always the subject of Birnbach’s satire in the first place.

But ironically, the book’s smugly discreet tone is precisely what is most exasperating about True Prep. Let’s face it, most Americans are too busy trying to make ends meet to discuss with “loving irreverence” those dandily-dressed hedge-funders. And should the topic be broached, the last thing they’re looking for is a little old fashioned discretion.

I’ll of course continue appreciating the first Preppy Handbook. But comparing this injudicious sequel to its 80s original is like comparing that shirt I once wore with the alligator sewn into its breast with a true izod Lacoste. It doesn’t stack up.

Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.