2022: The Year We Won't Forget

Though we probably ought to try

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This past summer, Alex Didion, the proprietor of the Substack Lack of Taste, which bills itself as “a newsletter about movies for people who don’t like movies,” asked me to do a lengthy print Q&A. It was nominally supposed to be about one of my favorite films, Glengarry Glen Ross. But instead, or rather, in addition, it ended up being about everything under the sun from the sorry state of the journalism industry to fly fishing to how politics ruin comedy. I simulcast it on my site, and you can read that here if you’re so inclined. But no need. Because Didion just doubled back and asked me to once more weigh in on every topic imaginable as a sort of year-in-review about The New Dumbness. Here, we cover everything from crazy-ass Kanye to crazy-ass Elon to our crazy-ass politics to our crazy-ass war on masculinity to our crazy-ass overcompensating faux-masculinity to our crazy-ass human condition. (If you’re sensing a theme here, it might be The Year of the Crazy Ass.)  I am again simulcasting a slightly edited (and fuller version) of our back’n’forth in these pages. But you should also check out Alex’s site if you’re interested in unconventional film writing. As a side note - since this is a long piece, I figured I’d better put this upfront -  if you’re hard up for Christmas gift ideas, now’s the time to make it easier on yourself. Why leave the house and fight the madding crowd?  Face it, you barely have in three years anyway. Just buy someone you love an annual subscription to this here Slack Tide, and be done with your Christmas shopping. Or, if you dislike my wordloaf, buy a subscription for someone you hate as a spite gift. Either way, it’s a Christmas win.

And if you know your family is going to disappoint you in the gift-giving this year (“Thanks, Aunt Myrtle, I really needed these Skiddies Underwear Liners!”), ease your pain by buying yourself a Slack Tide subscription now. It’ll stay between us. Nobody has to know.

And now, on to the good, clean fun:

Alex Didion: Let's talk about what is happening with the culture this year. My favorite song of 2022 is The Heart (Part V) from Kendrick Lamar, and one of the reasons why is its music video. He released an album called Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers that was all about trauma and taking responsibility for yourself. The Heart (Part V), is a bonus track that sees Kendrick shapeshift into a deepfake O.J. Simpson, Jussie Smollett, Kanye West, and Will Smith. These men remind us of how they have fallen from grace, and the lyric "In a land where hurt people hurt people, fuck calling it culture,” reveals how much the excuses of victimization and lack of accountability are deeply embedded. Will Smith is the most interesting out of the bunch because his mistake was caused by an errant urge to honor his wife, before winning an award that could have validated his status as one of the biggest movie stars in the world. It hurts not just him, but the Oscars, an institution that people used to watch. Meanwhile, Kanye is much more painful to bear, and for a man who famously once said that “slavery is a choice,” he sure is living up to that standard by sucking up to a has-been that was going to {again} be a darling of the conservative movement, before it turns out that he is a liability, as well as to a young white nationalist who is banned from taking a public flight {Nick Fuentes}. It's the color of their skin that's used as a shield, while for Kanye, people use his heterodox thinking in his music and personal life as an evasion of accountability. I can go on about how much I can't count  on my heroes, especially when my interaction with them is through a screen. My point is, seeing these folks being used as useful idiots for what is essentially a culture war shows a lack of order and reveals a culture that is ultimately bitter and aimless. What are your thoughts?

Matt Labash: Well, I’m not going to pretend like Kendrick Lamar has been one of my spiritual gurus, even if he is a wickedly talented lyricist. My hip-hop taste was mostly frozen in the late eighties through the early aughts. But one of my MC heroes – Rakim, of Eric B. & Rakim fame – has given Lamar the legendary MC seal of approval, which is kind of like Michael Jordan saying he’d hate to guard you. So I’d be a stodgy middle-aged fool to say Lamar’s not okay by me. I rewatched the video you speak of, and as with most of Lamar’s videos, it’s hard to look away – especially with all those eerie deepfakes.  I even had a flashback when he turned himself into O.J. Simpson.

Kendrick Lamar as O.J.

I once did a story on O.J., almost by accident. I was working on another piece – on the filmmaker Michael Moore, actually – and requested an interview with Simpson’s people just to get a quote about what O.J. thought about Michael Moore’s claim in a book of his that there was little chance that  Simpson actually murdered Ron and Nicole, because he’s a rich guy, and rich guys would get lowly serfs to off their ex-wives.  A few days later, I received a call from O.J. – collect – from his golf course. He thought Moore’s theory was preposterous, perhaps blithely unaware that Moore was trying to help him (sort of)  by using him as a cudgel in a class-grievance culture war. Moore was actually ahead of his time, in a way. Because it was a war everyone would join within the next two decades, conservatives included and especially. Everyone now jockeying for victim status.  Be they multi-millionaire liberal filmmakers posing as the avenger of the working class even as they abused their employees (Moore), or billionaire real estate developers posing as the avenger of the working class so they could hand out corporate tax breaks (Trump), pretending that was a meaningful tax cut for the hoi polloi. But after we got that out of the way, O.J. and I talked about his golf handicap (which improved, he informed me, “after Nicole”), and about how he once hit the links with Bill Clinton. Since Clinton was in the midst of getting impeached at the time, I took a detour and ended up writing a whole story about O.J. and Clinton.  Why not? It’s not every day an NFL legend calls you collect, taking a break from hunting down the real imaginary killer who he insisted iced his ex-wife, to tell you about his golf game.

All of which is a long way around the barn of saying for one (very) brief moment, O.J. was willing to not be used as an idiot in the culture war. At least not by Michael Moore. One could make the case he was being used in mine against Moore/Bill Clinton. Nobody’s pure. I’ve seen it observed by others (I want to say Chuck Klosterman and Douglas Coupland – though feel free to fact check me on that)  that the main difference between the nineties and now, is that it used to be a badge of shame to sell out to outside larger forces - a sign of compromised integrity. Now, it’s a badge of honor. Rock stars, actors, people generally, can’t seem to sell out hard and fast enough. Buy me! I’m for hire!

Hence, Kanye getting worked like a hand pump by MAGAville.  I don’t know what the hell’s up with that guy. Probably bipolar insanity.  At least I hope for his sake that he’s insane – because it might be the only defense he has left if he ever comes to his senses long enough to realize the harm he’s done to himself and others after his months-long Jew-hating tour.  And which has now backfired on the very people who thought they could use him as an ideological mascot (such as Trump and Candace Owens). 

But I now suspect that’s not going to stop anyone. Back during normal times – let’s call those 2014 - we used to argue about tax cuts or healthcare or deficits, but now, culture war is the only issue that really registers and moves people. It’s Bloods vs. Crips for white people who are on the internet or cable TV all day. And so, they will collect their dead (Kanye, Nick Fuentes) bury them, and will go on fighting like casualties never happened.  Except maybe the dead now also come back to life. Nobody’s ever really dead in the new set-up. (Trump should’ve been figuratively dead after January 6, but he’s still often leading Republican primary polls, and most elected Republicans are still too afraid of his voters to cross him in any meaningful way.)  So it would not surprise me in the least if the human skid-mark, Fuentes, ends up winning a congressional seat down the line. Why not? If a butt-dumb QAnon lover like Marjorie Taylor Greene can do it, why shouldn’t a Hitler-loving incel find similar success?

Fame matters a lot more now than intellect, or conscience, or morality, or competence, or any of the yardsticks we used to wield to measure whether people were worthy of our attention/vote.  Though I may be overstating that, and am probably needlessly romanticizing the past.  It’s not that we haven’t always had a high tolerance for con men and demagogues. It’s just that there are so many more of them now, and they all have unprecedented access to their audiences through the magic of our modern communication channels.  So instead of just tolerating it these days, we seem to practically require it of our celebu-parasites, who feed on our need to debase ourselves. Which kind of puts me in the mood for another Kendrick Lamar song, come to think of it. “Humble,” off his 2017 album, Damn.  Chorus:

Bitch, be humble
Sit down
Be humble
Sit down

Good advice for about 70 percent of the people on the scene right now. Though probably more like 80. Humility is completely missing from public life, which is a large part of the problem. It’s our least favorite medicine.  Nobody wants to take it. And a helluva lot of people need to.

Alex Didion: I don't think doing things like a bull in a china shop mitigates polarization. That's what I suspect a lot of people are susceptible to even when they're supposed to be above it. Jordan Peterson was already a divisive figure when he first broke out in 2018, but now that he’s been hired to do Daily Wire videos, while he’s not in a good place, it has worried some of his fans, even if they are few and far between. I don't want this conversation to revolve around him, Kanye, or Will Smith, but about what really drives people to make these kind of choices. Choices that ultimately look like human compromise, and harm a lot of people. 

I can certainly imagine a multiverse, where they were ideal, rational human beings in our heads. I can also imagine that multiverse, where we all have good times and the arguments were calmer. No pandemics, no wokeness, no conspiracy theories. Just normality. One of the most acclaimed movies of the year is Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is about an immigrant woman escaping from her real-life woes to something more fanatical, before it all goes out of control. I find it to be an interesting movie, not a great one. And this gets to my theory in that there is something soothing about that situation because we convince ourselves that our preferred ideology is going to fix everything. We then make excuses for people who are less capable in presenting themselves professionally, because we fear they will be cancelled, have their lives ruined, and we want them to retaliate and protect themselves. We blame someone for it and call it “the regime” or “the patriarchy.” As Spencer Klavan wrote in his long essay about multiverses, they provide an escape route because humans fear that they are run by one person and that person is corrupt. Would you like to live in that world, Matt?

Matt Labash: You’re not gonna make me read long essays about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, are you? Because I can’t even bear to watch the films. I’m not what you’d call a cape’n’codpiece guy. In fact, one of the happiest days in film history of the last ten years (there haven’t been too many to choose from, since filmdom has largely headed down the crapper by pretending everyone should have the taste of 12-year-old boys – which is why Quality TV now laps them creatively) was the day when Martin Scorsese dumped on the entire enterprise, calling it theme-park cinema.

He was roundly attacked by the fanboys, of course, a disproportionate number of whom I suspect might also show up for a Jordan Peterson talk on how to be manly men, or at least as manly as a Canadian psychology professor. But I was proud of Scorsese, and even defended him in a long essay of my own in print. I’d hyperlink to it, but the film site I wrote it for (the great Sonny Bunch’s Rebeller)  was shuttered shortly thereafter for reasons I won’t bore you with. Though I’d like to think in the multiverse, it’s still alive, schoolchildren still read my Scorsese defense with clear eyes and open hearts, and they stay away from cinematic dross like Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania.

So I guess the answer is no. I probably wouldn’t want to live in that world. I kind of think people choosing their own reality and worshiping superheroes (especially of the political stripe) is precisely where the problems start. Most of the people we’re talking about now aren’t worthy of veneration, and yet, they inspire cult-like devotion. Which requires devotees to ignore all data points that suggest that the object of their devotion is, if not an outright fraud, at least deeply flawed. Which is a hazard of being human, generally.

For a good little while this fall, the Republican party liked to pretend that Kanye was some thunderbolt-throwing oracle of truth. I always thought he was a sort-of interesting guy with bad taste in women who was also a talented rapper that was on the verge of a bipolar breakdown. (Though I really liked those gospel “Sunday Service” concerts he did – those things kicked ass.)  And now it turns out that Kanye’s a Nazi-loving madman who prefers the company of finger-sniffing Hitler Youth like Nick Fuentes. You know you’re in trouble, spiritually, when you go on Alex Jones with a full ski-mask covering your face (one without eye or mouth-holes) and even Jones is like, “Whoa, Hoss, you might want to walk the Hitler stuff back a little….”  When Alex Jones is the Voice of Reason in your life, it’s probably time to take critical inventory of your choices.  And if you’re the low sloping forehead  who runs the House Judiciary GOP’s Twitter feed, tweeting: “Kanye. Elon. Trump” (which finally had to be deleted), that probably applies to you, too.

Confederacy of Dunces: Kanye, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes

And yet, as long as Kanye (I refuse to call him “Ye,” in the interest of preserving my own dignity) keeps trying to own the libs, 20 percent or so of the country will think, “Hey, that guy’s really onto something! He tells the truth!” No, not really. He’s just another mentally unbalanced clown in the passing carnival. Let’s not elevate him. Let’s not make him more than he is. Let’s not choose our own multiverse. Unless the multiverse we choose, as you suggest, is normalcy.  A state of existence that I vaguely remember. But which, after the last several years of off-the-charts public madness, feels like an otherworldly dream.

I would like to think we’ll somehow settle back into that. But I’m  doubtful. We’re just overrun with too many people in public life right now who have a vested interest in and who profit from tracking in insanity. And too many readers/viewers/suckers – whatever you want to call them – are all too eager to have their alternative realities given life.  Everyone pretends they want the truth. But at least half of them would rather hear sweet little lies. It’s more fun to be told you’re smart and right, than that you’re blinkered and wrong.  And too many hard partisans lack the discipline or integrity or whatever it takes to question their own assumptions.  When you’re in a forever war, you don’t want to understand the enemy, you want to demonize him. It makes him much easier to kill.

But truth is the only reality that ultimately matters. And it often hurts to realize it, especially when it’s coming for you.

Alex Didion: A recurring theme for the past few years has been the yearning for a leader to solve almost all of their problems. People associate it with populism. Some will unironically agree with that and start movements that will not solve those problems properly, but will divide people who are quite sympathetic to your opinions. With Elon Musk, he captured a social media service that's barely used by a lot of people, except for shitposters and professionals trying to be hip with the former. While I think much of the response towards him is hysterical, I feel that it is at least warranted when he is acting chaotically. If you are running a social media service, wouldn't you not interact with right-wing accounts that stoke it up over some account that was banned years ago for flipping the Terms of service? Why choose these conflicts?

Matt Labash: Well, journalists get hysterical because Twitter is their baby. (Not mine – I’m not on it.) And if somebody walked up to your baby and put a fright wig or Groucho glasses on him or her or hir (if fake genders are your thing), you too might start crying like……a baby. A lot of them are motivated by fear. Fear that their protected class status is in jeopardy. Fear that the other side might gain unfair political advantage when the woke dorks who formerly helped them cop their narcissism fixes were put out on the street. Fear that they might be seen as the shallow climbers many of them are if they have to shell out eight bucks a month for their sad little blue checks.

But a lot of populists and faux populists who are cheering on Elon’s every move are motivated by fear as well – fear that before he took over, they might have to actually shut up about leaving Twitter if they weren’t lucky enough to get banned (so they could brag about it in conservative media) and actually do it, shoving off to one of Twitter’s even worse rotten-to-the-core alternatives like Truth Social, which seems to have been named straight out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (its propagandistic properties resting right up there with “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery” in the irony department). And of course, fear is the operating principle and chief animator of the new populist pin-up boys themselves, preying on everyone’s enmity, paranoia, and suspicions. I think deep down, Elon’s greatest fear is that he might have to stop talking about himself for five minutes. Or that other people might stop talking about him. Why else would you pay $44 billion for that money-hemorrhaging, smoking turd of a company? A smart friend of mine swears that Musk is going to die broke, and I’m starting to concur.

Mind you, I don’t think Musk is the locus of evil (at least when he’s not killing monkeys) the way I do, say, Trump. I’d hate to have to work for that erratic, nutty bastard. But last I checked, Elon didn’t invade the Capitol to try to overturn an election or invite a bunch of Hitler-lovers over for dinner. (Though he has let a few of them back on Twitter, even if he did re-ban Kanye, for which the libertarian jihadis will now give him hell – content moderation is a thankless task, he will learn.)  He is, however, reaching Trump-like levels of news-cycle ubiquity and saturation douchery – the two often walking hand-in-hand. And I wish he’d stop and go back to rocket science. You know, doing something potentially useful, instead of just keeping everyone – Substack writers included – overstimulated.

I welcome more free speech champions, mind you, even if I think Elon’s interpretation of the First Amendment sounds like someone who has never actually read it, much as he admits he hasn’t even read the Twitter Files he claims are bombshells. (Though they aren’t without some newsworthiness. It’s always worth knowing more.)  I can say these things, because I didn’t have to sign one of those NDA’s like what’s left of his workforce had to.  But that aside, Elon is at heart Sam Bankman-Fried with better hair and (one suspects) less musky gym shorts. Another carny barker. Another shameless self- promoter. Another Ponzi schemer - figuratively, in Musk’s case - posing as a populist avenger.

And he’s not just a window on what’s happening in society, but a mirror. He’s the face staring back at ours, because we practically begged him for his services.  Most of us are motivated by fear, as well: fear of being bored. Which is why these circus freak-shows keep hijacking public life. They’re not doing it in a vacuum. They’re doing it because we get the publicity whores we deserve. I expect even more of those in the years to come. Which is why I predicted Congressman Nick Fuentes. Who I’m sure will win a district in Florida (where else?) - though Arizonans might fight them for bragging rights. 

Alex Didion: The concept of masculinity is more misunderstood by its defenders and opponents. The latter will conflate normal masculinity with a straw-man version of toxic masculinity, while its defenders will use masculinity to make it as a thing that they agree with. Here comes Andrew Tate, a MMA fighter with a cult following and potentially a sex trafficker. There's a sense that real masculinity is lost, hence the solution is to take a massive red pill and be the biggest chad possible around women. Can you blame young boys for taking him at his word, when there is not a lot of male role models out there? What do you think counts as a good man in 2022?

Matt Labash: Good Lord, has it really come down to Andrew Tate as a role model? I mean, I don’t disagree with plenty of wingers who think conventional masculinity has been kicked in the shorts over the last few decades. Because it has. Even biologically – with scientifically-established dropping sperm counts. Why, here’s CNN just the other day citing review data that has sperm counts dropping 50 percent over the last half century. So that’s not just something Proud Boys say to each other while tenderizing their meat in circle jerks. The good news – if you can extract any good news from that disturbing fact – being that as Smithsonian magazine recently explained, even in that diminished state, you still have all the bites you need at the fertility apple so long as your love batter (my paraphrase) contains 40 million sperm per milliliter of semen. (Present worldwide levels are thought to have dropped, on average, from 104 to 49 million per milliliter.)

Who knows what’s causing all of this? It’s probably multi-faceted. And God knows we ingest more lab-hatched-artificial-everything than we did a half century ago, which can’t be helping. But just because we’re not surprised, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be alarmed. And of course, you and I have discussed the sociological kick-in-the-shorts last time we talked, when you brought up my New York Times critique from a few years back of GQ’s silly-ass masculinity issue, where one of the nation’s once-preeminent men’s magazines saw fit to redefine masculinity by soliciting opinions from trans women and the dudes from the “Glorious Now of the Men in Make-up Spread” (GQ’s words, not mine), largely for faddish and politicized reasons. Mind you, I didn’t write it for HairyChestedMan.com. I wrote it for the New York Times, because even their op-ed editors, I’m guessing, could see what a cynical sop that was to science’n’nature denial.

But of course extremism often breeds equal-and-opposite extremism. Which might be why Andrew Tate now has a large following. I’ll let readers Google his rap sheet if they’re Tate-curious rather than eating up valuable real estate in this dialogue, though here’s a fast primer. But people like him who seem to think that buffoonish bravado equals masculine indomitability are basically just another variation on some of the other themes we’ve explored above. It’s a vicious cycle. People are getting dumber – often due to their media diets – and therefore are rooting for more brain-dead, extreme, cartoon versions that perfectly exemplify whichever side of the hard-partisan cheering section they wish to sit in. It’s stupid and gross, and it’s killing the country. We need to stop it, yesterday.

What counts as a good man in 2022 you ask?  I’m a simplicity guy. Respect women. Look after them, when appropriate, without wishing to be them. Love your fellow man. (Platonically, I mean, unless you’re otherwise inclined. In which case, I don’t judge – to each his own.)  And knuckle-dragging Andrew Tate should not be anyone’s role model. Choose better role models. If you want to be a rebel, be Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. Let your insubordination be in the service of a righteous cause. If you want to be the best at what you do, be Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar. Play from your soul. In your intellect, be Ralph Waldo Emerson, relentlessly true. In your spirit, be Thomas Merton. In down’n’dirty real life, be my father, a man I don’t always agree with politically, but who woke up early every single day of my childhood to go support his family, without complaint or self-dramatization. He’s a man who took great pains to train his children up in the way they should go (as the Good Book puts it – a book he ingrained in us), even if we didn’t always want to sit still for his instruction. He is a man who takes a similar rooting interest in his grandchildren. He lays out his life wisdom to them in pages he prints off and assembles in three-ring-binders. Not out of vanity, but so they’ll have a record. And they appreciate and read it. My dad is not always perfect. But he spent a lot of time figuring out how to lead – not for the sake of calling himself a leader, but to lead the people he loved to the things that he knows will enrich their lives even after he leaves them. It ain’t necessarily glamorous. He does not wish to become an Instagram influencer. I’m not even sure he knows what Instagram is. But to me, he’s what real manhood looks like. I can only hope to live up to it…..

Alex Didion: Here's a simple question: What are your favorite things that you've done this year?

Matt Labash: Why, talking to you, Alex. You’re a thoughtful dude!  Also, I guess, having started a Substack in the fall of 2021, I wrote more words in the last year than I have in any three-to-four combined years of my adult life. And I’ve been writing in public my whole adult life.  Am not sure if I’m proud of that, or if should be ashamed for popping off too much.  But I didn’t think it possible, and it was. And a lot of really good people have sprung up around those words.  I hear from them with some frequency. So that doesn’t suck. Even if the New Obligation has been hell on my fishing totals. (I’m an obsessive fly fisherman, and a fish counter, sadly.) So I hope to rectify that deficit in 2023, and exact some piscine revenge.

Alex Didion: What are you hoping for in 2023?

Matt Labash: Not to go all sunny on you, but I’m kind of hoping a giant meteor hits the planet and puts us all out of our misery. Though not before Season 12 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Barring that, I’d settle for a nap.

Bonus Tracks: Since I name-checked him upstairs, here’s the late great Texas guitar slinger, Stevie Ray Vaughan, performing “Life Without You,” one of my favorites of his. It’s a mid-tempo ballad that builds with some blues-voodoo guitar magic scattered throughout. The far-and-away best live version is off SRV’s 1986 Live Alive album, heard faintly here. But since I can’t find a quality sharable copy of that, I’ll instead showcase a good runner-up below. Plus, you can actually see him in action. According to Guitar World, the song was a tribute to the bluesman’s friend, Charlie Wirz, after he passed. Wirz founded Charley’s Guitar Shop in Dallas in 1976, and worked on Vaughan’s guitars early in his career. (Vaughan himself died in a helicopter crash in 1990.)

And since I likewise name-checked Eric B. & Rakim, you might as well experience one of the great hip-hop cuts of all time, “Microphone Fiend.” Fun fact: that guitar’n’jingle ear-worm sample comes from the Average White Band’s 1975 song, “Schoolboy Crush.”