Pissing Into the Wind: Pissing Into the Wind

This post is a lot like Dan's dear old mum: late, lackluster and notable mainly for its holes.

Ok, so that analogy was a bit off-sides. Truth is, I don't know how the shit to make this topic funny.

I told Dan as much when he posted it the other day.

"But, its about death!" he said. "Death is ALWAYS funny."

"No, Dan." I says to him. "Its about advertising. And advertising is the least funny thing in this and all reasonably promixate universes."

"Shit, I dunno." He scratched his head. "Imagine.....product placement on tombstones."

There is, of course, no accounting for taste.

But what's worse is that, in the absence of humor, I don't even know how to make this post interesting. It seems to me this is a non-issue. Should we be profitting from the death of a great artist and social critic, even a much-loved one? Why, no, Yoko, we shouldn't. But it doesn't seem to me that we here at The Enfranchised ARE profitting from it. We are not, for instance, selling "Death of a Playwright" t-shirts or commemorative porcelein "Cruci-bowls". Nor are we claiming to be in receipt of a homemade, super-steamy, uncensored Miller-Monroe Technicolor (R) Moving Picture, coming soon (for a fee) to your 16mm Reel-to-Reel.

No, sir. If we living white men are guilty of any crime against that dead one, it's that we deign think we've got something meaningful to add to the discourse on his demise. We've perhaps gotten it into our heads that the world, or at least the digital world, gives half-a-kilobyte about what we have to say. So we use our meagre pull with the Oracle at Google to siphon away a few well-intentioned furrowed-brow intellectual types from the standard fare at salon-dot-com and The Times, to our little den of triumphant WASPism, where we offer up only the best in self-congratulatory, obscure references (Jude the Obscure-obscure, not The Mayor of Casterbridge-obscure; after-all, we want to make you feel as snarky and clever as us). But if class-solidarity through the public-exhibition of exclusivist, jargon-filled rhetoric is a crime, then surely Michael Moore, my "Postcolonial Studies" professor, and the editorial staff at The New Yorker should all be in jail.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly so good a writer as Dan would like to think that I like to think I am. In fact, I'm fairly sure I misused "gotten" in the previous paragraph, but I don't really know because I'm just THAT mediocre. So, I'm not too worried about the repercussions of our nontroversial choice to market to the "reader-of-armchair-punditry-about-recently-deceased-playwrights" crowd. Fact is, even with the extra Google hits, we're just a blog in a sea of blogs, no different from this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one. And what's more, we don't even have an interesting "underrepresented" or "repressed" or "marginalized" take on things. As the name of the blog suggests, the only thing marginal about us is our talent.

Therefore I say fret not, Fearless Moderator. I doubt you'll have to wring your hands or consult your scriptures too much over this one. I think its cute and endearing that you see our convoluted method for getting the little boxes of numbers at the bottom of our page to change more frequently as presenting an ethical dilemma about the price of exposure. But if you're really convinced that our b-musings here are going to make any of us famous, well, I've got a real estate investment I'd like to talk to you about.

You're right about one thing, though. And that's that, once we've hooked the reader, once she's come this far, she can't stop. That's right, I'm talking to you. Don't even THINK about not reading the rest of this post.

Every. Last. Word. Of it.