The funny thing about life as a religious person is that, even when you are pretty sure God has told you to do something, sometimes you weren’t necessarily hearing God right, and so God tells you something louder. (The Bible is full of stories like this!) And so now the Christians in the White House and the Christians in the Palin House can sit back and watch the massive Gulf oil spill take on the delta of Louisiana. The lesson is clear: GOD HATES PELICANS. We must destroy them all with oil. Or maybe it’s something else, I’m not sure, God and I have an appointment at 10:35 a.m., I’ll report back. The only (bitterly) amusing part of all of this is watching volcano-hating states-rightist Louisiana governor “Bobby” Jindal running to the federal government for help. Oh, but to be fair to Jindal, he’s the one who sponsored and lobbied for the pro-Gulf continental shelf drilling “Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act,” so basically, he was kind of out there asking for this. Man, nature has it IN for that guy’s “policies” this year!

by Mike Barthel

And why not, while we await the return of Mad Men this hot summer (and its accompanying cultural romp), return to the vexing problem of manliness that is Don Draper? Right here on Sex Offender Week!

We all want to like Don Draper for reasons other than his glamour. We want to find reasons to like him other than that he’s pretty and suave and charismatic-we want to make him, more or less, the Ideal Man, the “why aren’t more people like this?” guy. We talk about him as a kind of zenith of masculinity, something everyone agrees men should be striving for. This seems weird to me.

On the one hand, there’s no denying that Don is attractive in an almost universal way. In addition to his physical beauty, he is extremely well-dressed, has great taste and a growly voice that makes you want to call him “tiger,” is generally in control of things, has money and is successful, yadda yadda yadda. And indeed, lots of straight dudes express a no-homo desire to want to be Don Draper. Makes sense, right? If there are two things we can agree on as a society, it is that 1) incest is wrong, and 2) being Don Draper would be awesome. (“Don Draper is the coolest TV character of all time,” says professional reviewer person Paige Wilson.)

But there’s also a kind of practical consensus among straight dudes that becoming Don Draper, as opposed to being Don Draper naturally, isn’t really a workable proposition, and they may be right. After all, to do so, you would have to make a conscious decision to change the way you look and act, to trade in your khakis for wool slacks. (And become, you know, emotionally cold). And if this seems “affected” to you, then you can never pull it off-a self-conscious Don Draper would be unappealing. But logically, we shouldn’t feel this way. After all, the idea that intentionally dressing up like Don Draper would be illegitimate is contradicted by the character’s own backstory. “Don Draper,” in the show’s reality, is a character constructed by Dick Whitman, and intentionally designed as a paragon of attractiveness, a way out of the social location he was born into. Dick Whitman, pre-paragon of masculinity, decided to do exactly what many of Draper’s male admirers find so difficult: fix up and look sharp.

“Mad Men,” which I am writing here to praise-not-bury, is well aware of these contradictions in Don’s character, and exploits them to the hilt. It’s just the way we take Don that’s odd. Because let’s be honest here: objectively, Don Draper is mostly an awful person. He cheats on his wife relentlessly, is a workaholic and an absentee father to his children, lies about who he is, abandons his former family (and, arguably, causes his brother to hang himself), is a borderline alcoholic, and is in general awfully prudish, judgmental, and bigoted for a sexually licentious fraud of a man. If this was your OKCupid profile, you would not be attracting Don’s caliber of women. (Or would you?) But we find ways to forgive or excuse him. The easiest is the argument that this was just how it was at the time, with the assumption that the present-day incarnation of Don Draper-the real one, the one we could be friends with, or date-would be at least less awful in his attitude toward women and minorities. But that’s kind of a cop-out, a way of letting us unproblematically idolize Draper without dealing with his unattractive qualities.

We ignore these problems because Don’s overriding redeeming quality is his decency, his display of the kind of good morals the show seems to make us nostalgic for (even though there were lots of crosses burned on people’s lawns back then, and even though there is lots of decency about now). Don protected gay old Sal, even though he also thinks the gays are gross; Don gave Peggy a job, even though he also refused to pay her as much as her co-workers; Don tells young people not to talk dirty with an old lady in the elevator, and refuses to engage in public displays of promiscuity, even though he forcefully fingered his mistress in a restaurant bathroom in order to close a business deal. This is to say that we’re happy with a dude as long as he’s generally nice to people he’s face-to-face with (hand-to-groin being another story), and it doesn’t matter if he’s blithely unaware of larger issues that haven’t already been more-or-less resolved by the culture. It’s easy to see why dudes would be OK with this, since they mostly benefit from a culture of low expectations. And given how rarely dudes manage to rise to even this level of bare competence (not we dudes, of course, not you and me-I mean other dudes), you can understand why some women (not all y’all women, you lovely readers and commenters!) would be willing to settle for it. But as a model for what we should aspire to, Don Draper seems like the wrong guy.

Because Don Draper-or our idea of Don Draper, at least-is as much of a fantasy as whatever the name of the character Megan Fox played in Transformers was. (Lilly? Roxanne? Princess Helplesstina?) He’s an honorable salt-of-the-earth macho dude who prefers spending time with women to spending time with men and is also a successful, moderately wealthy business executive. If only he could also morph into both a vampire and a majestic stallion, he would be some sort of walking embodiment of the female libido. Ladies get this, mostly, but it’s a new thing for guys. While women are, of necessity, more adept at coexisting with unrealistic romantic ideals, dudes are just getting used to it, and it’s confusing, especially if you try to take the fantasy literally (as we tend to do). For women, the request for real-world men to be more like Don is a reaction to that low bar-setting: at least don’t be total assholes. But for men, being Don Draper seems achievable, somehow. He’s not an action hero, he’s a businessman. And hey, many of us are already businessmen! We should be able to match that.

But matching is not really what we’re being asked to do. Absent the purty face of Jon Hamm, the sort of women likely to be a Don fan wouldn’t be terribly interested in Don Draper as he is actually constituted, e.g. a guy who didn’t go to college and has generally retrograde attitudes toward women. (To date, at least; boning is another story, as it always is.) Rather, any Draper-hunter is actually looking for someone of her (or his!) own social location who can convincingly enact the idea of Don Draper.

And it’s that “convincingly” that’s the key. It’s the tough part, the thing we need to figure out here. It is fundamentally impossible to be Don Draper, even for Don Draper; you have to consciously decide to transform into him. But for dudes fixated on authenticity as one of the few remaining stable masculine values (which, if taken to its logical extreme, leads to Greenbergism, but has its good points otherwise), this isn’t really a practical possibility. How do we wear that suit comfortably? How do we put on that fedora in a way that seems true to ourselves and convincing to others but only embodying the good parts of Draper’s personality? Because fedoras are actually, you know, ridiculous. (Unfortunately!)

Is there a way to break out of the weird emo box a lot of guys have worked themselves into-the very box that makes it necessary to have a guy like Don to idolize-without becoming total sexist assholes? It would be a way, maybe, that preserved the pleasures of Don’s obviously appealing masculine traits, a way that expanded on his sense of decency and humbleness, while dropping the way these things excuse his self-centeredness, his general blindness to anything not right in front of his face. But that makes him sound like a pussy, right? And that’s precisely the problem. Don Draper may be an awful person, but he is definitely not a pussy. If he was, he wouldn’t be nearly as attractive.

Mike Barthel has been a music writer, for Idolator and other places, and is currently the worst. He has a Tumblr.

Burger King is doing its part to help accelerate our country’s incipient extinction-through-obesity program by bringing brunch-a meal heretofore only available to sophisticated metropolitans like the ladies from “Sex and the City” (this was the actual example provided by CNN)-to its customer base of slovenly, ill-mannered buffoons whose lack of proper dentistry makes the concept of “chicken fries” both palatable and easy on the gums. But how will the company be able to educate a clientele which is surely ignorant of customary brunch refinements such as “napkins” and “salad forks,” that there is more to a meal than an overheated patty of gristle and cow anus quickly washed down with a chocolate-seeming substance that has been thickened with potato starch? By mixing the exotic with the familiar.

The menu is set to feature a breakfast sandwich of eggs, cheese, tomato, ham, bacon and smoky tomato sauce served on Ciabatta bread, Whoppers (which are not usually available in the morning) and the BK Mimosa — a nonalcoholic version of the classic cocktail with Sprite standing in for the traditional champagne.

Sacrilege! The idea that the Mimosa, that elite, urbane concoction-the nectar of the upper class, the ambrosia of the aristocracy-should be shared with the Nickelback-loving plebes in even a bastardized form such as this is horrifying. I hope the gentry responds by adopting a sacred dining custom of the lower orders and turning it into something it can call its own. I suggest le repas quatrième.

It was one of those headlines crossing the transom yesterday that raised an eyebrow: A huff from the News, “Opponents of immigration law call for boycott of Arizona Iced Tea — but it is brewed in New York!,” that was above a 151-word news-of-the-dumb item on “misguided tea fans” who were airing their grievances online. Total number of quoted sources in the piece: Two. The source for both those quotes: Twitter. You can probably see where this is going!

The offending quotes, as quoted by the News:

“Dear Arizona: If you don’t change your immigration policy, I will have to stop drinking your enjoyable brand of iced tea,” Twittered Jody Beth in Los Angeles.

“It is the drink of fascists,” wrote Travis Nichols in Chicago.

Well, that second quote was a paraphrase (the full Tweet: “I think we should all also boycott Arizona Iced Tea because it is the drink of fascists”), but guess what: both were, in fact, jokes! Somewhat imperfect jokes, it is true — a friend once taught me that the best comedy is often the most precise comedy, and it is a lesson that I have found has rarely failed me — but the News reporter who wrote up this item failed to pick up both on the sarcastic tone and Twitter’s handy ability to communicate directly with people on the service. should they have questions. (And neither Twitterer is exactly drowning in followers! No offense meant to either, obviously — it just makes the story behind the story odder, you know?)

So the story got picked up by tons of churnalistic outlets whose commenters were more than happy to let their freak flags fly. (Some people even got more industrious than the reporter, sending classy @-replies to the yuksters.) And the company got all defensive about its Noo Yawk roots. And meanwhile, the story continued to live on all over the Internet, where it will never ever die because the half-life of bad information online is somewhere just short of forever.

Promising news for those of you who have always wanted to spend hours watching Clarence Thomas sit silently in a robe: The Senate Judiciary Committee has passed a bill requiring the Supreme Court to televise its open sessions.

Whoever wins The Race to Run Knifecrime Island will take the reins of a fragile, broken country-a nation where small children are denied the comforts of cheese and harried educators batter their charges with free weights while screaming “Die, die, die,” only to walk free. Britain’s finances are so terrible that even the head of the Bank of England has predicted that the party which wins the election will be forced to make such savage cuts that it will be out of power for a generation. A group of psychologists predicts that the Conservatives will snatch that poisoned chalice, but there is still one final debate in which Britons’ lager-addled minds can be swayed. It is perhaps Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s last opportunity to berate both his staff and his nation, or for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to skate by on the fact that people aren’t sick of him yet. Who will stab their way to victory? You can watch the whole thing here. I’d suggest some kind of drinking game, but for the beleaguered unfortunates who eke out their sorry existence on that cursed isle, life is already a drinking game, which you only lose when they knife you to death. And it’s on.

by Charlie

Panic mode! The injustice of this world keeps thickening like giblet gravy. The Internets have been abuzz for ages with the most recent setback for the black woman (me) and it’s pretty much sending devastating shockwaves throughout my brains. Here’s the scoop: Black women, the more edumacationed you are, the less likely it is for you to get maaaaaaa-wied! Even though I am a goddamn-right-don’t-fucking-touch-me-unless-I-say-so-my-body-is-not-an-object-for-displaced-male-on-male-fantasies-to-be-realized-through-the-occasional-ass-fuck feminist, this is like really, reeeeeeally freaking me out.

What? No white dress? No free bling? No uncomfortable toast from that friend you shouldn’t have invited but did because they’re a videographer with a kickass Super8? Clearly, like “all” heterosexual females, I’ve thought waaaaaaaay too much about my (oh yes, it is MINE, dear. All mine. Just stand there, look good and don’t embarrass me) wedding. Apparently, however, my marriage prospects are as doomed as John Cusack’s career after 2012. My, cough, humanities degree makes me less eligible for future widowhood than say, cockeyed Lashanda Jones on the block. For real, what’s seriously throwing me for a loop here is the fact that ugly white educated women still get married like clockwork.

I guess it’s time I revisit my life map. As I approach the area of the timeline where a good blowjob and a fuck translate to something more serious than, well, a good blowjob and a fuck, it’s time for me to start thinking critically about what I want, what I really really want. According to Nightline, I am about as lucky as Nancy Kerrigan at the ‘94 Olympics if I’m planning to marry a Negro, because Society says darkies belong in jail. So while our men keep working on the chain gang, or making license plates or whatever the fuck the fuzz has them doing in there for way less than minimum wage, we black women distract ourselves by, gasp!, reading books and going to college. What nerve, right? I blame the Church.

There are several rationales being bandied about as to why successful, educated black women are less likely to get married. The one that’s got my knickers in a bind is this: black women have unrealistic standards. They want a Denzel when they should be thankful for a T-Pain (pre that one song I’m guessing is responsible for my even knowing his name.) The fact that I’m being asked to lower my standards even though I’m not a) diabetic, b) a dwarf that isn’t a sexy dwarf, c) totally busted like Hatchet Face or d) a Jehovah’s Witness, is totally absurd. What is this, Simpatico? “Singled Out”? FUCK THAT SHIT. Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Luckily, I never have and never will take anything out of Steve Harvey’s mouth seriously and he is one of Nightline’s “experts” pushing the “be more realistic ladies” agenda. I find it hard to take relationship advice from a man as unattractive as Steve Harvey. Not to mention the fact that he’s been married three times.

Truthfully my black ass shouldn’t talk because I am dating a bona fide, blue-eyed, corn-fed cracker. He sweetly tells me I have nothing to worry about, that my life map looks great but that it, like most things, is known to be somewhat malleable. Often times one has to make adjustments. Still this recent phenomenon makes me wonder: have I been trying to head this whole thing off before the pass by thinking Mr. White is Mr. Right? Am I so driven by my desire to get married that I’ve been ignoring perfectly wonderful black men? How seriously have the strictures of black life in America influenced my decision to date whitey (briefly, can I take a moment to tell you how unfortunate it is that there are so few ethnic slurs for “white”? Truly a sad, sad state of affairs.) I’m sure there is something definitive to be said about this, but I’ll leave that to the very smart, highly educated, unmarried black women to figure out. In the meantime, honky and I get on just fine! We are well aware of circumstances that make our relationship taboo, but we don’t give a fuck what other people think. This is especially true of Steve Harvey and his doucher mustache.

Charlie is a pen name for a young professional woman living in New York who plans to ask her white boyfriend to wear blackface this Halloween.

The National Milk Producers Foundation is fed up at all the fake dairy products out there — your soy milks, your rice cheeses, your muscle milks. So it’s starting to agitate, asking the Food & Drug Administration to limit use of the word “milk” to what they call “mammalian lacteal secretions.” (Yay, human milk is in the clear!) Too bad that the FDA has been ignoring lobbies regarding this particular semantic subject since the soy industry first petitioned them to be allowed use the term “soy milk” in 1996. So the milk producers are fighting to keep it real the only way they (or their interns) know how — on Facebook!

The They Don’t Got Milk campaign (get it?) may only have 213 fans at the time of this writing, but it does have rogue’s galleries of “beverages that use the names of a real dairy product (‘milk’), but don’t contain ANY real dairy milk!” and similarly offensive foods, as well as a very huffy mission statement about “white fluids”:

Putting a white fluid into the same package as milk, with pictures showing uses for it just like milk, with phrases on the carton like “the perfect alternative for milk”, putting it in the dairy case right beside milk, and including the word “milk” in the name of the product… all confuse the consumer into thinking these imitation products are nutritionally the same as real milk, when in fact they aren’t the same.

Or, as one fan of the page puts it more succinctly:

Milk is milk, made from milk. Peanuts are peanut. Don’t get it twisted!

Unless you are making a delicious peanut butter milkshake, of course. (Right? That’s still allowed?)

“Sereno, who has conducted extensive fieldwork in the region, says he has visited villages where the fossil trade is the livelihood for the majority of residents… He recalls entering one tunnel in China, guided by candlelight, that was dug by hand about 900 feet into the side of the mountain. ‘There were no wood supports or anything. It was so deep in the side of the mountain, it actually went through an entire valley,’ he says. ‘There is an untold number of people-probably not thousands, but hundreds-that have been buried alive in the course of trying to find these dinosaurs.’”
–Interesting Indiana-Jonesy story in Popular Mechanics about University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno-who discovered the previously unknown raptorex last year (that’s the one that’s like a mini tyrannosaurus rex)-and the booming international black-market for smuggled dinosaur fossils.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has declared the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “a spill of national significance,” which is so totally how I’m going to refer to my ejaculation from here on out.