Taki's Mag

On the off chance that you lead a remotely fulfilling life and were busy working, studying, or having sex—even alone—on Wednesday, you may have missed the “First Annual Global Planking Day” and been none the worse for it.

You might even be one of the rare souls lucky enough never to have heard of “planking.” I sincerely regret being the messenger who delivers the bad news to you, because even learning about it will render you permanently less intelligent.

Here’s the simplest definition I’ve found:

Planking is the practice of lying down flat as if to mimic a wooden plank.

A more complicated explication that still fails to make it sound any smarter:

A fast-spreading global fad, planking involves people being photographed while lying face-down in a public place and posting the images on the Internet.

Helpful instructions for the would-be planker:

Lie face down, straight as a board, pointed toes, arms to the side with straight pointed fingers. The planker’s face must remain expressionless, head held straight, not turned. Pretend as if rigor mortis has set in.

If on some lonely afternoon I were to find myself in such a position, I would wish for rigor mortis to set in. Another plankophile described the practice as “pretty much active lying down.” Yeah, pretty much. “It’s the most fun you can have while being still,” enthused an Australian plankster on Facebook. If that’s the case, I imagine being stillborn must feel like attending the Mardi Gras.

Still, on Wednesday, people across this vast blue orb who display flashes of intelligence in other areas—mainly computer programming and social media—celebrated First Annual Global Planking Day by doing stupid things such as lying flat on basketball hoops, balcony railings, and kitchen counters, having someone photograph it, and uploading the results online.

One could strain with all their might and still be unable to conceive of things more meaninglessly self-abasing than lying face-down to get some thumbs-up, but we live in desperately meaningless times. And it’s not as if there weren’t stupid teen crazes of yore. Train-surfing wasn’t the brightest of ideas, yet at least it carried a subtext of poverty, bravery, and danger. It also required a modicum of athletic skill. Pole-sitting was a goofy American fad in the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression came along and replaced it with a goofier fad of stockbrokers jumping from skyscraper ledges. But even pole-sitting derived from a long historical tradition of column-sitting that went all the way back to fifth-century ascetic St. Simeon Stylites, who was reputed to have sat on a small platform atop a pillar in Turkey for 37 years. As superficially idiotic as that sounds—which is “very”—such feats involved tremendous physical endurance and, however feverishly misguided, some huge scoops of spiritual dedication. They definitely required more chutzpah and effort than lying still on a park bench for five seconds while your best friend captures it on his iPhone.

Modern planking seems to have derived from what was known as the “lying down game” in Europe and Japan during the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, the French referred to the practice as “on one’s belly” and South Koreans as “playing dead.” Around 2007 or so, a New Zealander named Paul Carran rechristened it as “extreme lying down.” More recently, Aussies adopted the trend as their own and called it “planking.” Of late, the practice has gone viral as if it were some form of autistic measles. At last count, Facebook’s Official Planking page has received a quarter-million “like” votes. There are numerous other planking pages with healthy membership rolls where exuberant youngsters upload photos of themselves lying face-down on their front lawns and in return receive emotional stroking in the form of thumbs-up votes and comments such as “sic plank, brah” and “sweet planking skills!” and “LOL! Awesome plank!!!!” The craze has also spawned anti-planking pages such as Kick the shit out of a ‘Planker’ day and Plankers are Wankers.

But sometimes when people try to act stiff, they wind up turning into stiffs. In at least one known case, planking has proved to be fatal when combined with alcohol and misguided bravado. Around 4:30AM on May 15th, after what was described as a mischief-filled night of planking at “various spots,” an allegedly drunken 20-year-old Aussie named Acton Beale attempted to plank on an apartment balcony in Brisbane but instead fell seven stories to his death. Ginger-haired Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard subsequently appeared on television to urge Oz’s kids to at least show some sensibility and restraint if they couldn’t help themselves from planking. Some of Beale’s friends, failing to concede that their recently departed mate got drunk and did something dumb, have publicly blamed Paul Carran, the Kiwi advocate of “extreme lying down,” for Beale’s death. Others blamed “the media.”

At least in death, Acton Beale was spared the lifelong embarrassment he’d have faced if, say, he’d only fallen from two stories and wound up paralyzed from the neck down. Imagine him feeling the burn twenty years from now as he explains to youngsters that he’s forced to eat all his meals through a straw because of a planking accident, and they ask, “What’s ‘planking’?” As he was falling to his death, what was he thinking? Did it all happen so quickly, he had no time to think? Most importantly, did he reproach himself in any way? At any time did he think, “Wow, I’m an idiot”?

Maybe it’s more of an argument against drinking than planking. Way Down Under last Saturday night, while drinking and trying to demonstrate that planking was still safe even in the highly publicized wake of Acton Beale’s death, a 48-year-old Sydney woman identified simply as “Claudia” ascended a six-foot-high garden wall and then accidentally fell to the ground, suffering arm, shoulder, and head injuries. Before assaying the six-foot wall, a wide-eyed and tipsy Claudia was photographed holding a wine bottle and planking from a shiny black designer stool. Claudia’s apparently unsympathetic female friend told a reporter: “Planking came up and we were discussing how stupid it was, how silly….We were just making light of it and we balanced on a little stool. Then it went a little further…it was all started with why you don’t plank—and look what happened.”

Yes, I’m looking. I’m looking, but I’m not liking. I’m looking at one dull row of planking photos after the next, all of them featuring copycat morons frozen in a receptive, sodomy-awaiting position. I’m looking at a trend that is provocative in its idiocy, something that I’d like to ignore but that extracts the sticky sap of contempt from my pores even against my will. I’m looking at a future where copycat psycho-plankers try to outdo each other’s deaths. And maybe I’m overlooking the tens of thousands of idiots who are doing it safely, but who cares about them? Unless they fall on someone else and crush them, plankers are only hurting themselves, either in a literal physical sense or in terms of a dignity irrevocably lost even after the first planking incident.

Is it wrong to hope for more planking deaths? By any reasonable ethical standard, I suppose it is.