FAILURE, WRECK AND RUIN!

Many of you have written to ask what happened to the BUILDING THE IDEAL AMERICAN series I started a few days ago.

Obviously, I pulled the entries, but not because of trolls. The whole point of the style of that series was to poke a stick in the eyes of those whiny, joyless, professional complainers.

No, I decided to reconsider the idea because so many of the regular commenters didn’t seem to get the spirit of what I was getting at. And that’s when I realized that the idea is probably fatally flawed.

Here’s an example:

I made fun of soccer because I was trying to catch the (I think) admirable national impatience with process without progress. The idea of teams of professionals running hither and yon for 90 minutes, often without scoring a single goal, was a fat target in this regard.

However, I got nothing but exasperated comments maintaining what a great sport soccer is — so why couldn’t the ideal American play soccer? Or Ice Hockey! Hey, I never played baseball — does that mean I can’t be an Ideal American? And who are you to decide what an Ideal American is, anyway!

And so on.

Since I despise the idea of trying to engineer society, all I could do was talk about engineering the only individual I’ve had any experience with — myself. Does that make me the Ideal American? Of course not. There is no such thing; there never can be. But I was hoping that I could talk about some of the things I try to do to make myself more Ideal, as far as our shared values are concerned.

However, the ‘construction manual’ style required a certain amount of rolling with the flow, and not taking what was a playful attempt too seriously. I don’t give a damn about the trolls and crybabies, but when the regulars start to have problems, then I know I’m barking up the wrong tree.

So I threw the computer in the lake and tried to figure out what to do next.

I suppose I’ll have try a more traditional approach. It’s just as well, I guess. I still aim to put together a handbook for the culture wars. But I think now it will probably be a little more conventional and serious.

I’m thinking of calling it, BACK! BACK, YOU BASTARDS!

First installment coming soon. Sorry about the dead-end. I had a lot of fun with it; perhaps I can boil it down to a single chapter.

Oh, BTW: I’m no longer going to provide readership or bandwith to hateful complainers who want free bandwith and free readers. We all know the difference between meaningful debate, and individuals that simply post contrarian opinions again and again, adding nothing but rancor, and hijacking the comment thread in an antibody response to their viral need for attention.

I see someone like that from now on, they get banned and deleted. I hated those people when they disrupted class when I was in school; now I can exercise my godlike powers over virtual life or death and crush their heads… crush them like a grape! Crush! Crush!