Dan and His Discontent

Whew-- So I don't read and/or post to my blog in a little over two weeks and just LOOK what happens: Dan goes on a tear; a tour de force; a dimestris mirabilis of consistent sexcellence. In the space of mere days he publishes the tender and pensive "Retrospective"; "Why the internet will never replace being smart" and "The Powers of Ten that Be" with their anti-platonist technological skepticism, their dystopian echoes and their underlying humanism; and, of course, the two charged, angry fragments against the cultural logic of late capitalism that together would come to be known by generations of critics as "The Douche-Bag Papers." Of course, saddled amidst these seminal works of ontoblogical exegesis are two rather unfortunate forays into fiction, which most scholars (perhaps with justice) are prepared to forgive as the overextension (or, to some, the hubris) of a great mind.

From time to time, I here at The Enfranchised like to take a few moments and reflect (aloud) on the work of my colleague. I do this in the spirit of dialectical rigor; and also because it saves me from having to think about my own thoughts (as George Bernard Shaw so famously quipped: "Those who can't do, quote George Bernard Shaw.") So, to this end, here's some comments and conjectures:

-In "My SAT score is now average", Dan makes an elliptical allusion (by means of a pun-deployed URL link) to what, I can only assume, is a letter-to-the-Editor of his once published by the New York Times. Of course, as any of you who were curious enough to follow the link in the hopes of it leading to a pictorial essay on the hernia examination can attest, the URL belongs to a section of the Times website inaccessible to non-members. Is this an oversight on Dan's part? Or has it deeper meaning as some kind of audience-participation analogue to the general elitism of the piece? Perhaps neither. My own hypothesis (sadly unconfirmable, since Dan and I haven't been on speaking terms since that May in '68, in Paris) is that it speaks to his conviction that adding the place-name "New York" to anything makes it sound posher and more worthy of our chin-stroking. Observe: "The Hackensack School of Air Conditioner Maintenance and Repair" sounds dull and provincial; but hehold "The New York Institute for the Edification of Interior Climate-Regulation Apparatae." I know what you're thinking, 'Didn't Chomsky study there?' The answer, of course, is yes, he did.

-In "The Powers of Ten that Be", Dan again reveals in print his two minds about the Enlightenment thesis that the rational sciences and their progeny hold the key to human progress. Sadly, Dan himself commits one of the all-time worst logical blunders: the Phallus Fallacy. He says:

"Allow me to quote a sage mentor: "How do you make my dick 8 inches long?" "Fold it in half." This 2/3 foot phallus is still only 4 times as long as D.R.F.'s semblance of an organ: less than an order of magnitude separates us.

Instead, it is McCormack's Reaper, Whitney's Gin (Cotton, not the Christmas Tree liquor), McCoy's Not a Bricklayer, He's a Doctor, and such contraptions of the 19th Century that introduced the idea that one man, no matter how great, even if he were John Henry, could not match up against machines measured in Hundreds of Horsepower. (I don't believe in posthumous medal ceremonies).

Can anyone make sense of this second paragraph? Neither can I. But this is to be expected: utter an absurdity (in this case, one about the righteousness of my Johnson, which in truth is as long and distinguished as the list of universities from which Dan received rather thin envelopes) and patent nonsense follows.

-Lastly, in "The only Mechanics...", Dan is a bit unfair vis-a-vis International Relations majors. Therein he says: "how many times have I seen an International Relations major (in my fraternity, we called them IR unemployed majors) try to woo a girl at a party with long, soft elucidations on the nature of the cosmos only to learn that she was herself a physics major...)". Now, I'd like to tell you what's wrong with Dan's thinking here, but unfortunately I am strictly speaking unable to mentally parse and process any string of symbols that follows directly after "in my fraternity".

-Bigus Dickus