by Sean McTiernan

Sometimes videos go viral within the confines of one country and they never reach the wider world. Luckily we’ve had Irishman Sean McTiernan to take us through the country’s storied collection of viral gems: we’ve examined the majesty of Ham Sandwich, the mystery of Irish rap and had fun with the cops. Yesterday, we looked at mad TV presenter Pat Kenny. And who couldn’t? With his beady dolls eyes and his sinister message from his home planet. But today, in our final installment, we’re widening our brief and taking a tour around the rest of the madness that Irish TV has to offer to the world.

The old Irish TV tradition of not cutting away at any cost. About halfway through this report, it becomes clear that there is about to be an unwelcome intervention. But the Irish TV team remained ever vigilant-only when physical violence is about to be enacted on the intrepid reporter do they cut away. Observe the thought process of the attacker “I can’t be identified-oh no, wait, I want to be on TV… let’s take the hood off again.” Great facial expressions back in the studio as well: “Oh God, typical.”

This is the apex of the Irish cutting away problem. The reporter is nowhere near the camera and when you eventually do see him he is completely terrified. Bizarrely, none of the children swear. They do however exhibit the little-known scourge of the Irish race: the insistence on getting as close to an operating camera as possible. Below is the horrific natural result of that obsession.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that story is being reported by a many-headed monster and thus is sort of burying the lead. Sadly, the fate being endured by reporter David Davin Power (or Diamond Davin Power, if you’re like me and want to make the news more like wrestling) is a lot more sinister than that. He is doing the story at the party conference of major Irish political party Fianna Fáil (yes, this does make headlines easier). There is a disturbing and strong tradition in Ireland of a politician of note being interviewed while his yes men stand all around him, rapt with sycophantic ecstasy.

This is a step further. These complete morons are minor members of the party who just want to be on TV and want to make sure DDP is saying what they want. That not only grown men, but ostensibly grown men who are supposed to act on behalf of the people, is just embarrassing for everyone really. Their party put them there in the hopes that people from their local constituency would see them and go: “Was that Marty in that hill of twats on the telly? He’s got our vote!” Oh and watch for the beardy man who disappears briefly on the right.

Hey, there’s a nude painting some “edgy” artist did of our Prime Minister Brian Cowen (Taoiseach if you’re curious about what it’s actually called… and no, I won’t pronounce that for you). Not only did the main news program in the country actually do a story on this, they presented it as if it were a “Monty Python” sketch. There’s not a lot of love lost between him and I (also, I suspect he’s the person I keep arguing with on my “Doctor Who” message board) but if you’re the country’s main news program you should probably have slightly more respect. Every aspect of this report is so pun-friendly and camp, they may as well have played footage of An Taoiseach putting on his underwear while playing the “Benny Hill” theme underneath it. And yes, they did apologize.

As a contrast, here is the news enacting beautiful justice. This clip would be funny enough if it just had two of the most stereotypical Irish criminals in history trying vainly to wipe the guilt off their boss’s car. Even the cigarettes look completely fake, like stupid children wearing an awful disguise. But when you finish it off with instant karma delivered by an inanimate object: that’s a kind of magic you just don’t get every day, friend.

There’s a lot of reasons to love this clip. It’s closest approximation of what talking to my friends is like. It was shown on one of the state owned TV stations. The show is regularly like this. The lady to comedian Andrew Maxwell’s right is about to try and soften the point before he annihilates it. It happened on the Christmas show. And best of all: it assumes, correctly, it is perfectly acceptable to show zero respect to the irritating, facile, smug inhabitants of South Dublin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNvbpSMujg

What’s the worst thing you’ve heard someone say on TV and not get fired? Nevermind, here’s a video of Scottish footballer Graham Souness proudly continuing his career as a commentator by using the word “rape” as a synonym for sporting domination.

Leaving you with a depressing and horrible video of a Scotsman? I ain’t going out like that, reader. For the finish I am showing you Ireland’s most beloved viral video. A video which is dear to every man, woman and child in this country. The video that every person I asked over the course of this article suggested immediately and then moved quickly to their laptop to watch again. It was broadcast on the News as part of a fairly serious news report. The footage was shot by the News itself. I hope you enjoy it-it saved my life many a time.

Sean McTiernan is 21, his favorite rapper is E40 and he only smokes when he’s drinking. He has a blog and a Twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. In other words: it’s great for the gym. He thanks you for your time.

At the end of Gary Shteyngart’s near-future satire Super Sad True Love Story, I sank into a curious exhaustion. I had impulsively bought the discounted hardcover while battling a poisoned haze of emotions-an agent is peddling my own near-future novel to publishers; I wanted to demonstrate the commercial viability of near-future-based literature; I wanted assurance that what I’ve written and rewritten over the past few years had not been made redundant overnight. I was afraid to discover better, streamlined permutations of my own ideas, and I was further afraid that Shteyngart’s rich voice would alert me to the holes in my not-as-meticulous alternative universe. I came into the thing with competing biases, breaking my pledge to avoid books that the New York Times reviews twice, hoping for transcendence, praying for a flop.

Quickly now, what I got: ultra-capitalist, crumbling New York City, soon to be repossessed by Chinese/Saudi/Norwegian creditors and renovated as a luxury-class Valhalla, described in alternately terrified and nostalgic terms by the diary of Lenny Abramov, a schlubby-neurotic 39-year-old employee at a life-lengthening firm that caters to the obscenely wealthy-a clientele he aspires to join through mere diligence. Lenny is infatuated with Eunice Park, a sleek, androgynously beautiful 24-year-old riding a post-college malaise defined by shopping binges and angst over her dysfunctional Korean immigrant family: her half of the novel is related in deliberately vapid messages to friends and relatives on a Facebook analogue called GlobalTeens.

Their wobbly courtship may carry them through the collapse of an overextended, authoritarian United States; then again, the stress of the national endgame will surely destroy it. Lenny and Eunice’s struggle to smooth each other’s failings is paralleled by an erosion of their denial concerning the country’s slide into an acultural cesspool of insolvency and chaos.

That cesspool is Shteyngart’s sandbox of choice, the only place he wants to play-that’s where he derives the promised comedy, comedy that can be nutshelled as Orwell filtered through an iPhone, comedy that in its nagging cleverness supersaturates the page where a tint of color would have done wonders. Eunice’s college major was “Images,” her minor “Assertiveness.” Most people find printed books smelly and baffling, choosing instead to “caress” bits of web data from hand-held, holograph-throwing “äppäräti,” which also enable the user to rate strangers’ “Personality” and “Fuckability” levels, as well as download entire financial histories. Women’s fashion is vectoring toward nudity, with brands like “JuicyPussy” dominating the market; there is also “JuicyPussy4Men,” in case you’re not adequately repulsed by the flagship label. The hobbled state can still afford to erect fixtures that menacingly flash the credit scores of passersby on every Manhattan street corner. The United States, a producer of nothing, offers careers in Retail, Credit or Media-with your typical Media äppärät stream being a string of White House press clips punctuated by close-ups of live gay sex on a yacht. We’ve invaded Venezuela, just for the sake of a quagmire grace note. A cartoon otter interrogates you at passport control. Russia is now HolyPetroRussia, London styled HSBC-London, these geopolitical barbs more facile than damning. Things are really bad in the Midwest; no one will even talk about it

This all scans as comedy of a broad stripe, labored in its bid for scary silliness even as it tackles low-hanging fruit, as addictive and disposable as the entertainments it lampoons. It is seasoned heavily with Lenny’s pervasive fear of change-this typically middle-age bias compromising whatever laughs we want to enjoy at the expense of tomorrow’s clueless adults, i.e., the jacked-in 9-year-olds of today. (Moreover, this fissure openly correlates to an ongoing snipe-fest between Shyengart’s generation [late-30s] and mine [mid-20s], a dialogue he is happy to keep relatively one-sided, and not only via page count ratio.) The economic and political tribulations are either turbocharged or Mad-Libbed versions of the catastrophes we sadly accept every day, with Eunice and Lenny-both born to immigrants who escaped despotic regimes-retaining a privileged, wildly exaggerated understanding of what it means for a nation to succumb to its worst instincts. But worse than any of that was this: I could sense the jokes growing stale in my hands. Super Sad Love Story was dated before I got halfway though it.

Most near-future lit or “soft” science fiction is attempting to diagnose an extant social pathology, something already happening. In Super Sad’s case, that means addressing a perceived shallowness of experience, technological addictions, the destructive passion for eternal youth, personal branding, obsession with quantifiable popularity, the viral sensibility, mass financial delusion, willful illiteracy, ruined education systems and national infrastructure, expanded executive power, content-free media, evaporating privacy, opaque and exclusionist slang, and the navel-gazing endemic to our text messages and blog posts, to name but a few fish in Shteyngart’s overstuffed barrel. I’d wager that Super Sad has more “the way we live now” commentary per sentence than Jonathan Franzen’s present-set Freedom does, because it needs to plow through as formidable a laundry list of grievances as any manifesto could muster and create redundant prophecy based on those complaints, all while kicking a doomed-romance subplot along like some crumpled beer can that happened to be in its path.

It’s not that the love story lacks warmth or complexity; it’s that it appears faint and irrelevant amid the candied lightning of all that 2010-on-steroids environmental detail. Which may be sort of the point: that amorous involvement, the delicacy of attachment as depicted by the Russian masters who claim the lion’s share of Super Sad’s literary allusions, requires a bit more silence than a digitized globe allows. But when Shteyngart’s awful ear for acronym-spangled youthspeak or his gift for inhabiting 21st-century shame (bodily or moral) blurs the contours of this entanglement, it’s hard to suss out whether the interrupted mating dance had any grand potential. Are these proper soul mates, unfairly divided by screens of grime and neon-or is their acquaintance itself spurred by this atmosphere, its hazardous endurance a symptom of the ill empire? Since the white noise enveloping the reader is indistinguishable from the shit that clouds our daily efforts to live, is it any wonder that I ultimately don’t care? The Chekhovian impulses flaring out from the book’s fat, tender heart are allowed no oxygen, suffocated by a world that I learned to dread long before Shteyngart sought to painstakingly construct it.

Which is to say that beyond the more typically failed task of trying to wring darkly emotional resonance from antic satire, there lies a failure of imagination. Super Sad is rightly praised as “all too real” and “frighteningly accurate” precisely because it refuses to project anything more than the most predictable outcomes of today’s popular follies-the road from here to there is unnaturally straight, inflexible. None of history’s usual shocks intervene; no hint of mystery or chance attends the thoroughly plausible endpoint. For a story sold as “absurd,” there’s precious little of the unswervingly weird. It’s too much about our own moment (one that rarely sits still long enough to be satisfyingly skewered, I might add) and not the next. The May-December couple is transplanted from this very instant, flung forward to stoke our most banal and talked-about anxieties, their division mapped exactly by the same cultural gulf that will always separate mid-20s “underachievers” and late-30s “middle management types.” Tellingly, there is an epiphany from the more aged half that his younger companion does not presume herself to be special-unlike the rest of her generation, he is compelled to note. Is this calibration a jab at millennial self-worship or at civilization’s habit of generalizing the next wave of humans? I’d like to say the latter, but the comment comes from a place of hard-won wisdom toward the end of the book, with nothing to support the reading of a tongue-in-cheek tone. It stares at you like the dull reflection of a million cross-eyed trend pieces.

You could claim that I’m just projecting my own generational or writerly neuroses. You could argue that I’m a hypocrite, or that I’m pushing for a more escapist type of fiction, or attacking a genre’s very foundation, the now-future concept being virtually sacrosanct. I’ll accept all that and yet I can’t shake the inkling that we should demand more than a well-polished fun mirror when it comes to social critique. I want some surprising membrane: warped, restless and permeable. I need, more than anything, to be startled.

Miles Klee is a young reader.

The earth is always a-moving. “But certain parts of the continents called cratons-places in, for instance, Canada, South Africa, Australia-don’t recycle. They just sit there while their plates move around them, they’re a couple hundred kilometers deep, they’re like stable keels, and how they manage the stability has been a mystery. The answer turns out to be not terrifically sexy.”

This week in America: Sad Don Draper went from meme to backlash to metameme in the space of four days.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today, a new poem from J.D. Smith.

The Vikings

They were more than welcome at first.
Anything to break the monotony
of days gone over to pastel shades.
The pirates had long since grown tiresome,
joining the landscape
like the starlings before them.
The clowns, of course, were passé
from the moment that first great shoe
kicked out of the tiny car.
The drag queens turned out to be
a subset of the clowns.

The Vikings cleared our low bar without trying.
The large woman at the opera
offered to trade headgear,
and we came to rethink fish at breakfast.
There are still thriving outlets
of Herring Hutâ„¢.

Yet what the Vikings wrought in funerary services
could only be called a revolution.
The land saved by launching the deceased on flaming boats
permitted an expansion of cropland
and the creation of several parks.

So what if casks turned up
ruptured, as if struck by swords,
or a few more girls than usual
had round bellies for a while?
On net, we were well ahead,
inhabiting a Frazetta poster come to life.

Things changed only when the Vikings
met up with the biker gangs,
each camp like the fish
that sees itself in a mirror and strikes.
The earth shook in those days-
if not for long.
A battle-axe wielded even by a berserker
proved no match for a twelve-gauge
or a Glock.

Such Vikings as survived
traded their skins for denims and patches.
After sailing and rowing, it was child’s play to ride.
A leading scholar of management science
had just begun research on this leveraging of synergies
when he was found along three stretches of highway.

The days have gone over to a shade of gray
as if a great wolf had swallowed the sun.
Tolls are collected for crossing territory,
and for breathing.
Between raids, we wait for the lumberjacks to save us.
Perhaps the actuaries.

J.D. Smith was awarded a 2001 Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His two collections of poems are The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1999) and Settling for Beauty (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005). He edited Northern Music: Poems about and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke, 2001) and is the author of a children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World (Raven Tree Press, 2008).

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

by Luke Mazur

I had some questions for George W. Bush, but the ex-president is more elusive than Kanye West. I just couldn’t figure out how to get a hold of him. What follows is my fake conversation with the son of the forty-first President of the United States of America. Which is to say, he actually said these things once. Just not to me.

LM: Mr. President! Just the person I’ve been looking for. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this number kicking around mainstream media lately. I mean, I guess it’s more of a proportion. A percentage, really. But a percentage just shows how two numbers relate to each other. So we’ll stick with “number.” You’ve heard of the word, right?

[GWB stares.]

LM: Well regardless. 1 in 5 Americans thinks Barack Obama is Muslim. And the funny thing about numbers, the thing which you may not know, is that they lie.

[GWB takes phone call. From his Android.]

LM: I know you know what lying is. So, yeah, numbers don’t tell the whole story. The 20% of Americans thinking BO is Muslim, for instance. We’re meant to assume that every member of that group also hates that the President is Muslim. But it doesn’t account for the people who think Barack is Muslim, but who are totally fine with that. That 20%? It’s a half-truth for the Whole Foods set. Heh.

[GWB stares.]

LM: Which brings me to why I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You’re one of those people, right? You think Barack Obama is Muslim, but I feel like you’re cool with that. Yes?

GWB: Here in the United States our Muslim citizens are making many contributions in business, science and law, medicine and education, and in other fields. Muslim members of our Armed Forces and of my administration are serving their fellow Americans with distinction, upholding our nation’s ideals of liberty and justice in a world at peace.

LM: Uh. Mr. President, you understand that Barack Obama is President now. He isn’t a member of your administration. And yes, while he is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I don’t think it’s correct to think about him as a member per se. It’s more like he’s in charge of the military. But yeah, I hear you. Muslim citizens are everywhere. Even in the White House. Your point is well taken.

GWB: Islam brings hope and comfort to millions of people in my country, and to more than a billion people worldwide. Ramadan is also an occasion to remember that Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind.

LM: Yeah my college roommate is Muslim. He’s been fasting. I feel bad for him because it’s been so hot this August. Did you know they can’t even drink water during the day? It’s not like Catholic fasting. Or born-again Christian fasting. That’s what you are, right? A born-again Christian?

[GWB blinks.]

LM: Anyway, it’s interesting you bring up Ramadan. Is it just because it’s just ending? Or are you trying to say something else? Are you saying you think President Obama’s been fasting? Do you think it’s affected his job performance?

GWB: Over the past month, Muslims have fasted, taking no food or water during daylight hours, in order to refocus their minds on faith and redirect their hearts to charity.

LM: So he’s lost? He’s lost his mojo? You’ve been reading Maureen Dowd, I see. Weird.

GWB: Some of the comments that have been uttered about Islam do not reflect the sentiments of my government or the sentiments of most Americans. Islam, as practiced by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others. Ours is a country based upon tolerance and we welcome people of all faiths in America.

LM: No, I understand. You’re not saying he’s lost his mojo because he’s Muslim. That’d be insane. You’re just saying that his listlessness has nothing to do with his faith. And Ramadan is a time for the President, to use your expression, to refocus his mind. It’s sort of good timing then that it is happening now. Am I getting that right?

GWB: Islam is a faith that brings comfort to people. It inspires them to lead lives based on honesty, and justice, and compassion.

LM: I just think it’s so cool that even though you really believe Barack Obama is Muslim, you don’t mind at all. I’ve been to Whole Foods before: it’s very easy for me to just assume that people who think the President is Muslim have some other agenda. And you just turn that upside down. Half-truth for Whole Foods. Get it?

GWB: Americans understand we fight not a religion; ours is not a campaign against the Muslim faith. Ours is a campaign against evil.

LM: That’s so neat to hear you say that.

GWB: Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.

LM: Do you mean how the Taliban has bastardized Islam? How their actions are actually mocking their own faith? Is that what you mean? Because in a weird way, your words could also be construed to be referring to right wingers here at home. Your old base, I guess. They don’t respect Islam or honor its traditions. Who is the evil you’re referring to?

GWB: Because this great nation of many religions understands, our war is not against Islam, or against faith practiced by the Muslim people. Our war is a war against evil. This is clearly a case of good versus evil, and make no mistake about it — good will prevail.

LM: Right, right. So the fear mongering and the etc. and etc. is evil? Is that what you’re saying?

GWB: Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

LM: Well I know. But this is an interview about how you think Barack Obama is Muslim. And you’re changing the subject just as we get to the juicy part. I’m trying to ask if you think all the fear mongering is evil.

GWB: I care what 51 percent of the people think about me.

LM: Geez, we know that. Your administration was a divisive one. And I know midterms are approaching, so I get why you don’t want to sell your base out. I get that. But we were just getting to the part where you tell Sarah Palin to knock it off and pose in Playboy already. I think.

[LM stares. So does GWB.]

LM: I’ll tell you what. If you think the fear mongering is evil, just blink, or nod.

[GWB tears up.]

GWB: They misunderestimated me.

LM: I know. And I’m sorry.

[LM blinks, possibly tears up.]

LM: Wait a second. No. They didn’t underestimate you. We. We didn’t misunderestimate you, that is. I mean, I guess in some ways we did, but I don’t think we did in the way that you mean. You guys did a lot of fucked up stuff. But I am sorry. And I’m sorry for putting words into your mouth about Sarah Palin.

[GWB plays with Android.]

LM: Fine. I’ll ask the question that is rarely asked: is our children learning?

GWB: I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you… in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.

LM: Are you thanking me for my unemployment?

[LM tears up.]

LM: I can’t believe we’re both crying. This is insane. Is this how your other interviews go?

[LM can’t believe he’s crying.]

LM: OK OK. Let’s wrap this up. You’ve been out of office for a few years now. Do you have any thoughts about your legacy as you see it? Anything nagging you want to clear the air about?

GWB: Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they’re waiting in airport lines longer than they’ve ever had before.

LM: Ha. I guess that’s all anyone can really say these days. Can I see your Android?

Luke Mazur recommends Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side if you want to learn more about President George W. Bush’s legacy. Elements of Stale is our irregular grammar column.

To everyone out there who believes that there are no more miracles, that our best days are behind us and the time we’ve got left will be spent in an agonizing and ultimately futile struggle to maintain our basic human dignity, I would say, Yes, you are absolutely correct. But here is a video about a cat who adopted a baby squirrel, which learned how to purr. It should help you forget your grim and hopeless future for a little bit.

How could this go wrong? Los Angeles is installing new solar-powered parking meters! They are so reliable apparently that the city is rescinding its policy of not ticketing cars at broken meters. Got it? They never break, so when they do actually break, you’ll now get a ticket for parking in that space. Also they have outlawed smoking in Santa Monica on residential balconies as of today. Everyone back in the car, smoking with the windows rolled up. To your health!

I want to thank all of you who sent me the link to this Australian report claiming that fat men last longer in the sack than their more fit penis-having compatriots. I’m really thrilled that when you see something about being overweight and having sex you immediately think of me. Anyway, here’s the Science.

Men with high fat levels were found to have higher levels of the female sex hormone oestradiol, which disrupts the chemical balance in their body, making them last longer during sex.

The survey’s results found fat men could last an average of 7.3 minutes during love making, while others only lasted 1.8 minutes.

Normally I would suggest that you take all this with a grain of salt, but as a fat guy who will go all night just to make you scream and claw I’m just going to suggest that you just take it. Because it is so so true.

Here’s a good song from Gary, Indiana rapper Freddie Gibbs-the last song on his first official release, the Str8 Killa EP. It’s a posse cut, in the tradition of other last songs, and sort of a midwest power summit, featuring as it does Michigan’s Chuck Inglish, Cleveland’s Chip Tha Ripper, Texas’s Bun B (well, southern midwest), Dan Auerbach, from the Akron, Ohioan rock duo the Black Keys singing the hook, and a very nice beat made by a Chicago producer who goes by the name of “Blended Babies”-which, yuck.

That’s on some Alice Cooper shit (Detroit). This video, of a 1971 musical performance featuring mannequins, plastic dolls and a big long pirate sword is an important historical document. But it may not be entirely safe to watch at work.