People often compare video gamers to crackheads, but that’s unfair. Crackheads are way more motivated to get out of the house. While gamers cozy up on the couch to battle orcs and inhale their own farts, crackheads dart through shadowy housing projects, use their wits to find the next $20 rock, and occasionally fight for their lives. Pit a chronic gamer against a drug addict in a cage fight, and I’d throw my last hundred dollars on the dopehead.

If it was a shootout, though, I might bet on the nerd.

During Anders Breivik’s ongoing trial, prosecutors submitted the fact that the Norwegian mass murderer continuously played World of Warcraft at his mom’s house for a full year. The killer has shown little emotion in the courtroom thus far, but according to Reuters: “Breivik broke into a smile when the image of his online character was displayed.”

Breivik rationalized his compulsive gaming as a training program to attack multiculturalists:

I feel that this period was needed in order to completely “detach myself from “the game”, my “former shallow consumerist lifestyle ” in order to ensure full focus on the matters at hand.

Columbine murderer Eric Harris had a similar love affair with first-person shooter games—rather than a steady girlfriend—and wrote in his journal:

I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy…so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom....

A handful of violent video game-players have gone on to become rampage killers, but for now these are isolated incidents.

A more likely scenario is the atrophied couch potato who flexes his ego in the real world like he’s playing Call of Duty, then gets his teeth kicked in. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of violent video games is that constantly playing them will make you a pussy. Compulsive gamers don’t experience enough real sex and violence to become grown men.

More importantly, the crippling effect of excessive gaming is laid bare in the countless stories of “gamer widows” who watch their lovers slip away into prefab digital fantasies. Of all the tragic reasons that relationships fail—alcoholism; incompatible sex organs; differences in taste or temperament; incessant infidelity; porn addiction—the #1 lamest reason for a broken relationship is when a man can’t tear himself away from World of Warcraft long enough to give his lady a kiss, let alone an orgasm.

A computer programmer recently told me that he’s witnessed three marriages collapse under the pressure of “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (or MMORPGs) such as EverQuest, Skyrim, or the unstoppable World of Warcraft, which boasts over 10 million subscribers. Out of the three newly single gaming buddies who chose goblins over girls, only one showed any remorse. The other two were relieved to log endless game hours without “wife aggro.” Your loss, ladies.

There are always those lucky geeks who manage to physically connect to their cyber-soulmates and crank out a few babies. But I have to wonder if they’ll actually reproduce at replacement levels, considering the cases of game-nerd infanticide that surface in the news:

April 2012—Seoul, S. Korea. A young woman gave birth in a 24-hour Internet café’s bathroom. With the father long gone, she proceeded to stuff her newborn into a trash bag, toss it into a street-side can, and step back inside to play her online game into the night. Two days later, a cleaning crew found the tiny corpse.

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The woman later told police that she didn’t know how to raise a baby.

January 2011—Flaxmere, New Zealand. Mikara Reti left her five-month-old son in the care of her boyfriend: 21-year-old Trent Hapuku. She returned to find the baby crushed to death in Trent’s arms as he sat absorbed in his PlayStation game. The infant had suffered blunt-force trauma to his liver, internal bleeding, and a severed spinal cord which caused him to vomit on Trent’s shoulder just before dying.

Mikara was pregnant with Trent’s child at the time.

October 2010—Shelbyville, TN. Eighteen-year-old Andrew Johnston went overboard in his attempts to silence his one-month-old son William during an intense gaming session. “I…held him in my hands and squeezed him harder than what was intended,” Johnston wrote. “I then took both of his legs and shook him with enough force to hurt him.”

The infant died a week later from a severe brain hemorrhage.

September 2009—Yangju, S. Korea. An unnamed 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman met online, fell in love, and had a baby. The couple repeatedly left their daughter home alone to go care for their virtual daughter, “Anima,” at a local Internet café. After an engrossing 12-hour session, they returned to find their three-month-old biological daughter had starved to death.

It is unclear whether their favorite daughter, Anima, is still alive in the virtual world of Prius Online.

Not every MMORPG story is a pathetic tragedy. Take the anomalous Rick K., for instance. His ex-girlfriend grew so hungry for his attention that she would go down on him while he played games. She’s gone now; but Rick has no trouble attracting women. An athletic animatronics sculptor, he recently met a hot young lady online while playing Mass Effect. They finally met in real life at the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention and felt immediate chemistry.

“All of my free time is spent in movie theaters, playing video games, or having sex,” he tells me. “The costumes get expensive, though.”

Rick is the Keith Richards of geekdom—the rare exception who can feed his addiction and still pull women. Most compulsive gamers never even land a girlfriend to lose.

Not that I’m one to judge. I played Nintendo religiously as a kid. Any female companionship I enjoyed was in spite of my obsession with Tetris and Mario Kart. Everything changed when I bought The Legend of Zelda for my N64 system. Having anticipated its release for months, I found myself playing Zelda for 14-hour stretches—smoking, napping, then starting the next shift.

After four days it suddenly dawned on me: If female affection is inversely proportional to hours playing video games, I might never get laid again. So I sold my game system and all of my cartridges for a few hundred bucks, then hitchhiked to a commune in Florida.

A year later, I met my first love in a den of depravity—a raven-haired Goth chick named Zelda. (True story.) She broke my heart, but I have never looked back.

The women in real life are cruel, but at least they are soft to the touch.

Did life evolve by purely natural processes? Could random mutation and natural selection really generate the human brain or the electrosensory system of the duck-billed platypus? Or did an intelligent force shape our universe?

Am I a total retard for asking?

As of April 20, Tennessee teachers will be allowed to address these nagging questions without fear of reprisal. Gov. Bill Haslam reluctantly allowed HB 368—known to sneering progressives as the “Monkey Bill”—to pass without his signature. The law will permit teachers to

help students understand, analyze, critique, and review…the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories…[such as] biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

For secularist busybodies, the law’s innocuous wording translates to brazen promotion of Young Earth creationism, climate-change denial, and (I’m guessing here) the imminent genocide of android clones. The prevailing fear seems to be that kids will devolve into superstitious, knuckle-dragging homunculi if they aren’t fed a strict diet of unquestioned Darwinian evolution.

With every new story, I imagine some lisping liberal trying to pronounce “creationists” without biting off his own tongue:

Creationists notch big win in Tennessee

Tennessee opens door to teaching creationism in schools

Tennessee Enacts ‘Monkey Bill’ To Dumb Down Kids In Biology And Physics, Undermine Their Future

CBS News reports:

…the thrust of the proposed law would elevate creationist theories about human evolution to the same status accorded by most educators to Darwin’s research.

It hardly matters that the bill clearly states:

This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs….

Hand-wringing intellectuals aren’t buying it, and their opinion pieces imply a theocratic conspiracy. The same buzzwords appear in article after article: anti-evolution, anti-science, creationism. Tennessee’s students will lack scientific literacy, they warn. High-tech industries will be repelled from our state. Disparaging “redneck” jokes will be told at snooty cocktail parties. (Why can’t Tennesseans jerk off?…Because they haven’t evolved opposable thumbs yet!) Only an inbred mongrel would question neo-Darwinism’s materialistic assumptions.

Valerie Strauss writes in The Washington Post:

The problem is that there is no important “scientific weakness” in the theory of evolution that could scientifically undermine its essential truth.

What insidious cabal is behind the brain-withering “Monkey Bill”?

Tennessee’s HB 368 takes its language from the model “Academic Freedom Bill.” This legislative template was originally drafted by Seattle-based conservative think tank the Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of “intelligent design” theory.

Intelligent-design theorists have tried to disassociate their movement from biblical literalism and its bastard stepchild, Young Earth creationism. Judging from the headlines, their attempts have failed.

In its purest form, intelligent design offers no specific religious claim. It does not rule out universal common descent, natural selection, or macroevolution (i.e., the evolution of new species).

ID theorists argue that complex organ systems and cellular machinery could not have originated from known natural processes. They claim the most plausible alternative is intelligent design—presumably by benevolent deities, demonic demiurges, extraterrestrials, or clockwork elves. Just as archaeologists distinguish man-made arrowheads from stones or SETI astronomers scan space noise for intelligent patterns, so biologists can detect intelligent causes in organic structures.

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Via email, senior fellow Casey Luskin insisted that the Discovery Institute does not intend to stifle the teaching of evolution:

We oppose teaching religious views like creationism. Although ID is a science, we oppose mandating it in public schools. What we DO SUPPORT is teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution in public schools. (This is not the same as teaching ID.)

These alleged gaps in neo-Darwinian theory include frustrated attempts to reconstruct life’s origins, the fossil record’s discontinuous progression, and the inability of natural selection acting upon random mutation to create functional adaptations.

Perhaps we should be suspicious of such skepticism. After all, Casey Luskin is a Christian, as are many Tennessee biology teachers. Can religious folk be trusted to mold the malleable Play-Doh inside teenaged skulls?

Richard Dawkins famously accused anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution of being “ignorant, stupid, or insane,” and maybe he’s right. Yet he joins Francis Crick in proposing extraterrestrial intelligence seeding the Earth as a plausible explanation of life’s origins—which sounds like a green Intelligent Designer wearing spring-loaded antennae.

If iconic atheists entertain sci-fi creationism, why should supernatural conjecture be met with such derision?

It seems that the greater part of this mainstream condemnation is rooted in intellectual one-upmanship and humanist snobbery. In highfalutin circles, being called a “creationist” is just one step up from being labeled a “racist.”

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species laid down the unifying concept in biology and revolutionized the field. But as elite scientists’ ideas trickled down to worldly bandwagoneers over the last century and a half, pop evolution became the new evangelicalism. Academics and self-styled sophisticates float placidly in watered-down Darwinian notions. For them, evolution is a matter of faith, superior to all others by virtue of infallible science. Any public dissent toward their fashionable orthodoxy is met with ridicule and ostracism, as with the present outcry over Tennessee’s “creationist Monkey Bill.” Like the biblical literalists they hysterically criticize, many lay evolutionists are grossly ignorant of their own intellectual roots and mentally incapable of a nuanced worldview.

Dayton, TN hosted a persecution similar to the one against intelligent design nearly 90 years ago during the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Playing into an ACLU-orchestrated media spectacle, the young John Scopes was charged under the Butler Act for teaching evolution. Back in those days, Darwinists could still maintain a rebellious swagger. Self-congratulatory progressives continue to identify with Scopes as a right-thinking hero and deride the populist William Jennings Bryan as a sweaty, boneheaded villain.

I paid a visit to the courthouse in Dayton a few months ago. One item in the display cases immediately caught my attention. It was a copy of George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology—used by John Scopes in his class—opened to page 195. One passage reads:

Although anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage…there is an immense mental gap between monkey and man.

How many culturally sensitive shmoes have read that page with a mixture of smug approval and pious distaste for the word “savage”? Of course, the next page is safely hidden:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure…the highest type of all [are] the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Had they been able to turn to page 263, they would find even more juicy tidbits from the evolutionary perspective:

Just as certain animals or plants have become parasitic on other plants or animals, [biologically inferior humans] have become parasitic on society…corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease….If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.

In 1925 the ACLU financed a world-famous lawsuit to protect the right to teach human evolution from A Civic Biology. Today, they would call the textbook (listen carefully for that hissing lisp) a rabid racist screed. But the only alternative to evolving group differences is human exceptionalism—either human populations somehow evolved uniformly or all men and women of all races were created equal. How ironic that the ACLU now leads the fight against the only conceivable alternative to genetic determinism: nonmaterial causes.

Politically correct science writers insist that innate racial differences have long been discredited, yet they steadfastly deny intelligent design. To them, evolution is a fact—except for human biodiversity. It’s like a stud-hungry nympho who tells her diminutively endowed boyfriend that size doesn’t matter.

These guys must have evolved a digestive ability to have their cake and eat it, too.

Resurrection of Christ by Rafael

“What day did Jesus die on?” my friend asked. “It was on Christmas, right?”

He wasn’t pulling my leg. We both grew up in a vipers’ tangle of Southern Baptist fundamentalism, but obviously he was better at avoiding church than I was. He never had to endure relentless sermons about the wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb. Unlike a hundred million or so other Americans, he was never taught that the Bible is literal history—word for word—or that Satan buried dinosaur bones to lead us astray. That’s why he called me.

“Easter,” I replied with a weary sigh. But that isn’t exactly true.

Technically, Christians commemorate Christ’s death on Good Friday. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter Sunday. This is the most sacred time of the year for many Christians. If they read their scriptures carefully, there would be nothing more troubling to modern biblical literalists than when and how the Gospels say the crucifixion happened. It is obvious to me that these Christians don’t, and it’s likely they don’t want to know. Maybe they have good reasons. For all I know, you’ll go to hell merely for reading this.

Easter hops around the calendar from year to year in tandem with the Jewish Passover. This is because the Bible says that Jesus died on the day after Passover. Or was it the day before?

That depends on which Gospel account you would rather believe. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus eats his final Passover meal with his disciples, during which he institutes the Lord’s Supper. The next morning, he is crucified. Mark even checks his sundial:

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. (Mark 15:25)

Yet according to the Book of John, Jesus’s last supper is not a Passover meal. Pilate condemns Jesus to death the day before Passover, at the exact time of day when the sacrificial lambs are being slaughtered at the temple:

Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. [Pilate] said to the Jews, “Here is your King!” (John 19:14)

In the next passage, Jesus carries the cross to Golgotha—by himself, according to John—and is crucified. Where was Simon of Cyrene to help shoulder the burden? He only helped in the first three Gospels. From there, the astute reader can collect contradictions like trading cards.

What were Jesus’s last words before he died? In Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Luke, he is more hopeful: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In John, he simply declares: “It is finished.” After that, the versions of his resurrection spin off in four different directions.

If the crucifixion is the most important event in the Bible—and the Bible is the most important book ever written—then why don’t the Gospel narratives line up? And why do ministers routinely avoid the subject?

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Jesus’s biographies were passed down through an oral tradition for decades before they were put down on parchment. Each of these four accounts was used by separate Christian communities which held dramatically different ideas about who Jesus was and what his death and resurrection meant. This created ample opportunity for permutations in the story before they were gradually wedded into an orthodox canon.

From beginning to end, the Book of John bears little resemblance to the other three Gospels, which in turn show subtle variations between each other. John is the only Gospel that refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God, emphasizing his “glorification” on the cross as a sacrificial act. By having Jesus crucified on the day of Preparation—while the lambs were being killed at the temple—the author implies that Jesus was a cosmic substitution for animal sacrifice. Just as the lambs’ blood protected the Hebrews during the first Passover in Egypt, so does Jesus’s blood save each believer from eternal death. It appears that the author—or the author’s oral source—was willing to alter the details in order to make this connection. All of the Gospel writers bend Jesus’s story to fit their own perspectives. It’s called selective memory.

Fundamentalists never address these glaring discrepancies. They cling to biblical inerrancy as though the universe would collapse into the vacuum of reasoned inquiry if they started asking questions. This wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for their evangelical mandate to badger the rest of us with holy-rolling enthusiasm. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if they would actually read their Bibles.

Fundamentalists tend to ignore everything in the “inerrant” scripture besides a few choice passages such as the “literal” creation story in Genesis, the assurance that only Christians go to heaven (“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”), or the simple formula for getting there (“...whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life”). Any wiggle room for metaphorical interpretation is immediately crushed by their classic conversation-stopper at the dinner table: “God does not make mistakes.” That’s when I mention how delicious the bean casserole is and hope they’ll let me go to hell in peace.

Don’t get me wrong: I would much rather share a property line with Christians than with hypersensitive Muslims or chicken-gutting witch doctors. But fundamentalists really take the fun out of biblical discussions for me. Are they trying to ruin a literary masterpiece?

The first time I read the Gospels in their entirety was over a decade ago, when I was hitchhiking around the West Coast. I only packed one book, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which I read on the way. I found myself at a Rainbow Gathering in Montana, and as I sat in that field watching stinky hippies warp their brains, shed their clothes, and jiggle around hypnotic drum circles, some random guy handed me a pocket New Testament opened to 1 Corinthians 13.

I eventually flipped to the Gospels, where I found a welcome counterbalance to the decadence around me and a salve for the cancerous fury in my heart. I read every word as I bummed rides down the coast. I have read them many times since. Jesus’s and Lao Tzu’s parallel teachings—their counsel to avoid pretense and empty rituals; to remain calm in the face of adversity and cultivate empathy for your enemies; to moderate pleasure and detach from material wealth; to maintain the mind of a child—slowly opened a profound dimension within an otherwise animalistic existence.

A taste of wisdom does not turn a fool into a sage, but at least I’m not a completely selfish bastard anymore.

As for the nagging differences between the Tao Te Ching and the Gospels, I approach them in the same way that I do the multitude of contradictions within the Bible as a whole or the apparent discrepancies between all holy books and hard science. I absorb what I can with an open mind and weigh it against my reason and experience. These are ancient riddles to which there may be no ultimate solution. No one is comforted by ambiguity, but without the anchor of rigid dogma, that’s all we have.

In one scene peculiar to the Book of John, Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?”

Jesus never answers.

As if smart phones weren’t irritating enough, by the end of the year people will be wearing them on their faces. Google Glasses will finally allow trendy transhumanists to see the world through Terminator-style digital eyes. According to the boosters, these high-tech sunglasses will come equipped with a camera, a GPS locator, motion sensors, audio input/output, and a non-transparent heads-up display that projects Cyberia onto the surrounding environment.

They will feature navigation programs for people who can’t follow simple directions, superimposed historical facts for those averse to reading old-fashioned books, and immersive virtual-reality games to alleviate suburban sprawl’s soul-crushing monotony. Whether you’re searching for an old friend in the area or just a decent falafel, Google Glasses will guide you through modern life’s chaotic landscape. You’ll never have to ask another living soul for information.

If you are inclined to meet people in real life (or IRL, as it is now called), facial recognition will eventually provide instant dossiers on the folks you pass on the street. Unpredictable interactions may be eliminated entirely. If difference of opinion gets on your nerves, you can download an app to locate people in close proximity who share your interests, hobbies, and social-network friends, then coagulate inside your cozy little world. You can even stalk that special someone from behind your digital shades.

I imagine that some version of Microsoft’s much maligned “Avoid Ghetto” app will be available for anyone who can’t recognize obvious red flags such as dilapidated buildings, sagging pants, or streets named after a nonviolent activist. And maybe there will be an “Imminent Flash Mob” app to warn you about marauding youths coming your way—or to keep you updated in case you want to join in the fun and smack down a random polar bear. Now that you live in augmented reality, the only limits are the programmer’s imagination.

I’m straining to see the upside, but at least these first-generation cyborgs can look me in the eyes while they incessantly check their Facebook pages.

The droids at Google stated in a recent blog post:

Every day we aim to make technology so simple and intuitive that you stop thinking about it—we want Google to work so well, it just blends into your life.

Well, I liked computers better when I had to go out of my way to use them. Back in the good ol’ days, I’d walk to the library or a friend’s house to “surf the Net” for a couple of hours. Having grown up in the sticks, I marveled at this rapidly expanding universe of underground music, esoteric philosophies, vivid conspiracy theories, and deviant porn—novelties for which you would otherwise have to travel. These things are so mundane today, they’re hardly worth mentioning.

By the time I sprouted my first chest hair, everybody had the Internet at home. Within a few years, there was a laptop in every tote bag. Then came the endless flood of smart phones. My generation is the last that will remember a world without ubiquitous computers. Before social networks killed the mystery of personal interaction. Before the growing e-book market turned my favorite medium into a quaint novelty. I’m just old enough to miss it.

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It’s ironic that I found Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future on the Internet in the late 90s. A few years later, I read a hardbound copy of Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and immediately thought, “Damn, Ted, you weren’t kidding.” Contrary to every apprehension I felt, Kurzweil actually looked forward to a coming “Singularity” in which artificial intelligence surpasses its creators, forcing humankind to merge with machines in order to survive. It sounded like a bad scene to me. Apparently, the vast bulk of society doesn’t share my reservations.

By that time, everybody and their grandmother had a cell phone plugged into their ear. Friends were replying to my handwritten letters via email. Every form of print media—newspapers, novels, encyclopedias, even love letters—got sucked up into cyberspace. Child’s play went from romps in the woods to high-res psychopathic fantasies of blood-splattered bodies. Thousands of surveillance cameras popped up overnight. Total information awareness became a distinct possibility.

Machines have replaced workers in the fields and the factories. Amputees are now fitted with robotic prosthetics, humans can control computers with their brains, remote-controlled drones drop bombs on Third World countries, and cars drive themselves—with or without David Hasselhoff.

And now these goofy Google Glasses are poised to hit the market. They might flop like the stupid Nintendo Power Glove. Or maybe they are another trendy step toward transhumanism. I’m placing my bets on the latter, but if so, the future won’t take me without a fight.

Ray Kurzweil’s obsession with transcending the flesh seems to be rooted in a religious impulse—a misguided longing for approximate omniscience, virtual omnipotence, and digital immortality. But it’s also possible that his transhuman ambitions boil down to his desire to become a transgender pop star backed by fat, shirtless dancers. Either way, what nature denies, human beings demand. And those without patience will be the first to take electrodes into their skulls.

Cutting-edge technologies tend to trickle down to the masses as production becomes more efficient. Should the economy recover, look for your average Billy Scabknuckles to get suited up like the Lawnmower Man for a Saturday night out on the circuit board.

But not me. I’ll be staying at home, thanks.

Today, you’re sporting Google Glasses. Tomorrow, your disembodied consciousness is playing Conan the Womb-Basher in some lecherous digital adventure while your actual body becomes a withered sack of potatoes.

Call me a redneck, but I’d rather go fishing. If immortality requires digitizing my soul, then let me turn to dust.

I tried to go into the 2012 American Renaissance conference without prejudice, but it was difficult. I’ve been taught since childhood that whites can’t be white together without the streets running red with blood. Look at NASCAR, punk rock, or ice hockey.

Everyone knows that only racists promote a positive white identity, and I agree. African, Latino, Asian, Arab, Persian, Indian, and Native Americans who openly celebrate their own heritage—well, they’re racists, too. Anyone who embraces, denigrates, or even notices another person’s race is a racist in my eyes. Come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who isn’t a bit racist. Race-deniers are total racists for disregarding someone else’s heartfelt racial identity. So I wasn’t surprised to find racists at the AmRen conference. I was surprised to find intelligent racists who can discuss race in a civil tone.

This is the first time in three years that AmRenegades have been allowed to gather in the same room. Their last two conferences were canceled after venues received continual harassment. Detractors applied pressure once again this year. According to a newsletter circulated by the “anti-fascist” One People’s Project:

Anywhere [AmRen founder] Jared Taylor and his followers gather and organize, violent crime inevitably follows. If you live in Tennessee and are a decent person and this conference is allowed to occur, you will find your neighbourhoods considerably less safe.

Judging from the battered white faces displayed like hunting trophies on OPP’s website—and their triumphant announcement that white supremacist Dick Barrett was murdered and set on fire after allegedly making sexual advances on his black yard worker—it is clear who the victims are supposed to be. Watch your back, whitey.

So what’s all the fuss about? Is mixing Caucasians, coffee, and conversation as dangerous as combining ammonia and bleach?

The AmRen conference proceeded with the same decorum one would expect of any academic symposium. It was devoid of uncouth observations and loutish slurs.

This year’s multicultural event featured globetrotting novelist Alex Kurtagic, British android Richard Lynn, and the wild-eyed Frenchman Guillaume Faye, among others. The young bucks were on fire with determined optimism while the gray-tops conjured images of civilization swirling around inside a cracked toilet bowl. The overall vision was distinctly dystopian: a white sub-species on the endangered list with no greenie do-gooders coming to their rescue.

Alex Kurtagic took the podium dressed like he’d just stepped out of a Tim Burton film. He laid out the project of remaking Western Man with poetic flourish. “Let him die and be reborn!” He warned white advocates to avoid sounding like whining old men overly obsessed with IQ studies that “flatter their vanity.” Instead, Kurtagic emphasized the importance of positive cultural expression—art, music, and literature—and the need for “moral force” in white racial consciousness. Western man, he declared, must assert his white identity with a clear conscience. It isn’t often that you see a standing ovation so early in the morning.

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Jared Taylor kept his talk short and his message clear. Imagine Ward Cleaver wiping off the Beaver’s bloody nose while gently explaining why so many blacks and Mexicans have moved into the neighborhood—that’s Jared Taylor. He is sure that race is a reality and that humans possess a tribal nature which draws them to those most like themselves. This also provokes an instinctive dislike of diversity. Left to their own devices, he says, humans tend to congregate along racial fault lines. In order to eliminate ethnic strife, Taylor advocates total freedom of association that would allow Americans to homogenize—or mix—as they see fit.

Richard Lynn‘s monotone British accent is as chilling as the icy logic of his studies on human intelligence. With no hint of emotion, he explained how the West’s dysgenic deterioration is inevitable. Lynn cites the influx of low-IQ immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere and the low fertility rates among high-IQ populations in the Northern Hemisphere as the primary causes of diminishing intelligence in America, Canada, and Europe. Convinced that IQ correlates with moral character, he says this explains the steady increase in crime and illegitimacy. Even more depressing, he sees no end in sight. Our culture’s machinery will fall apart in the hands of imbeciles. In the coming centuries, Lynn concluded, “the torch of civilization will pass from Europeans to the Chinese.” Polite applause and tense silence followed.

After we dined on a delicious banquet of asparagus and the other white meat, the infamous Guillaume Faye proceeded to rally his “brothers in arms” with lunatic facial contortions, spastic gesticulations, and a French accent so thick, a cannonball could float on it. Faye derides the modern concept of “citizens of the world” as an egalitarian delusion sown by elites. In his wild imagination, the near future will see such artificial alliances dissolve and “ethnopolitics will replace geopolitics.” The whites of North America, Europe, and Northern Asia will be forced to consolidate into a seething blob of pallid homogeneity—a pan-European Frankenstein’s monster facing torches and pitchforks in a mounting clash of civilizations. In the end, he says whites will prevail. “Good blood cannot lie,” he tells us. “Vive l’Amérique!” Another standing ovation.

Driving home was like waking up from a disturbing dream, but AmRen was no more surreal than another ethnocentric gathering I’d attended the night before. The “Royal Comedy Tour” featured black comedians telling off-color jokes about other black people to a belly-laughing black audience.

The show’s headliner, a man who calls himself Earthquake, discussed his recent trip to Africa, where he learned, “I ain’t got no Africa left in me!” He mocked African natives’ skin—“Goddamn, put some lotion on yo’ ass!”—then questioned the race-baiting Al Sharpton: “How you be a Reverend without a church? Where yo’ congregation, on the Internet?”

The next day I read this stunning comment on a local news website and laughed hysterically:

These “people” should not be allowed to live in the regular population, the state should make them live in a community by themselves and surround it with a massive concrete wall with only one entrance and exit which US Soldiers will stand guard to make sure none exit it illegally. Similar to a prison or reservation.

This would be considered Nazi hate speech if it was about racial minorities. But it was directed toward the white folks at American Renaissance. Are “race realists” so evil that they should be rounded up and locked away?

I don’t buy it. American Renaissance attendees are not the trash-talking thugs who constantly bubble up to the surface of white identity. I met talented white people having an educated discussion about how great it is to be educated, talented, and white—such discussions are what the SPLC calls “hate speech.”

The worst I can say about these guys is that their scientific conclusions are a bit hasty and their separatist undertones run up against the desert island quandary:

If you had to be stranded with only one person, would you choose a white sociopath or an empathic Asian? A white retard or an Indian intellectual? An acne-encrusted white chick or a Nubian princess with a bangin’ badonkadonk?

The best choices are obvious to anyone but a racial purist. Fortunately, that’s their problem, not mine. Too bad the totalitarians of tolerance can’t understand that.

Christian rock is just like any other music that sucks, except it’s played for Jesus. The other night I peeked into our local arena and found it filled to max capacity for the “Winter Jam 2012 Tour Spectacular.” Maybe Jesus really is coming back…in a tour bus.

To everyone’s surprise, Winter Jam was the #1 best-selling (though not top-grossing) tour of 2011’s first quarter and is selling out arenas again this year. Is it because Winter Jam only charges $10 at the door? Has Christianity finally become “cool,” or are these kids merely too young to stay out late for real rock shows?

Maybe this is only another pious fad, but as talented artists are rapidly being phased out in favor of hi-tech production techniques, it seems that Christian pop is actually improving in quality. It meets the mainstream in some mediocre limbo of soul-shaking sound systems and mind-numbing repetition. I’ve worked arena shows for years—from rock, rap, and country concerts to corporate, sports, and political events. Sensory overload is essential to modern entertainment.

Now in its 17th year, Winter Jam proves that quasi-Christ can use the Machine just as effectively as any other prosthetic god. This glamorous incarnation wears a curlicue hipster ‘stache and gauged piercings in his palms. The lambs at his right hand hang the lights and sound while he parties backstage with two hot Marys and a groupie named Martha. As he dazzles the audience with pyro miracles, the goats at his left hand count up the money.

Throughout Winter Jam’s four-hour show, unoriginal rhythms and derivative vocals are woven into a cacophony of clichés laced with “God is the light,” “Praise be to your name,” and “Glory hallelujah.” Spotlights shine on meticulously primped prophets wearing gelled faux-hawks and guy-liner. The performers praise Jesus as though he’s some pagan deity who suffers from self-doubt and a chronic lack of attention. When celibate sex symbol Kari Jobe sings, “I know that you have come now” to her Lord, I wonder if her boyfriend gets a little jealous.

The MC yells, “Make some noise for Jeeesuuus!!” The crowd screams as the next band takes the stage.

Two thousand years ago, a very different Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount, in which he said:

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret…do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.…

The wandering rabbi also told his disciples:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…You cannot serve God and wealth.

Every time I walk into a billion-dollar mega-church or watch a televangelist hawk salvation, I wonder how many holy rollers actually read the Bible—and if so, which parts? Do they just skip over the Sermon on the Mount? In a material, power-driven world, I can’t blame any human being for not living up to Jesus’s teachings of humble self-negation, but it’s as though these hucksters go out of their way to do the exact opposite.

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Which brings me to two brief sermons preached between Winter Jam’s performances.

Youth minister Nick Hall comes out with an All Access Pass dangling from his belt and pulls the microphone to his sleazy John Waters mustache. With googly-eyed positivity, he yammers on about how most kids don’t think it’s “cool” to be a Christian. Before anyone gets a false impression that social approval is a spiritual distraction, Hall assures everyone that becoming a Christian is in fact the coolest trend one could follow.

For anyone ready to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, Hall recites the generic incantation that many evangelicals claim is our only way to heaven:

Assure Jesus that you believe he was crucified for your sins; confess that you are a sinner and ask forgiveness; promise him that you believe he is the Son of God; and poof your soul is saved for all eternity.

If only everything in life could be so easy.

Later on, a smiling preacher whose name I didn’t catch tells an upbeat story about Jeremy, a seventeen-year-old who got “saved” at last year’s Winter Jam. The promoters had received multiple phone calls from Jeremy’s mother after a show in Augusta, GA. When they finally got around to calling her back, the woman explained that her son had been a rebellious terror since he hit puberty, but after coming home from Winter Jam one night, Jeremy woke his parents and told them that he had given his life to Jesus. For the next two weeks, the boy was a model of good Christian behavior.

Then out of nowhere, Jeremy fell and hit his head. He died immediately. (The arena goes quiet.) But because he was saved at Winter Jam, Jeremy will spend eternity in Jesus’s loving arms!

And the crowd goes wild.

Without missing a beat, the smiling preacher explains that Winter Jam is able to charge only $10 for admission because of donations from generous believers. “I have three teenagers at home,” he says, “so I know there’s some money here!” Everyone laughs and the house lights go up. “We’ll ask God to use it for his glory.”

From my perch high above, I watch the buckets get passed around. Some people just hand it to the next guy, but most toss in a handful of bills. The jingle of change echoes throughout the arena.

A lot of statistics were alleged during the event. Fifty-three million abortions performed in the US since January 22, 1973. Two million new orphans yearly. Over one hundred thousand souls saved at Winter Jam this season alone. No one ever mentions how much cash the production clears on admission, donations, and merchandise. I can’t find that number anywhere.

Once the buckets have been filled, the headliner finally takes the stage: a Christian nu-metal band called Skillet. They hammer their fans with distorted guitars and pyro concussions. Twenty thousand tiny fists pump in unison. The air swells with the primal squeal of youth.

I wish the music’s polished aggression would take hold and spark off a furious mosh pit. If only these “Panheads” would turn the other cheek until every face is smashed to hamburger, then crash through the barricades to assail the dolled-up clowns onstage with steel cooking utensils. But they just bob their empty heads instead.

Between songs, singer John Cooper warns the crowd, “There is a war going on! I’m talking about a war for your souls!”

I have no doubt about that. On one side are the demons of carnal mass culture. On the other side are demons wearing the sheepskin of Christ. Does it really matter which side wins?

Two years ago Oak Ridge, TN housed the world’s fastest supercomputer. Even better, my state took the #1 rank for meth-lab busts that year. Nothing says “vicarious achiever” like state pride, but those glory days were short-lived.

In October 2010, as Tennessee’s Jaguar computer predicted climate change and quietly plotted humankind’s demise, China’s Tianhe-1A overtook it with a brain-searing 2.5 quadrillion calculations per second—the sort of furious computation only a crank-shooter could appreciate.

Our Southern pride was still stinging when it was announced last month that in 2011, Missouri topped Tennessee’s eye-popping 1,687 meth-lab busts with a high score of 2,096. It’s time to pick up the pace, Tennessee. Here, try a bump of this.…

Despite this recent demotion, my state remains an undeserving icon for meth addiction. You’d think we invented the stuff, but the Chinese have been making tweak tea from ephedra shrubs since ancient times. A Japanese chemist isolated crystal meth in 1919. Then the real party started during WWII, when Nazi Germany distributed over 200 million meth tabs to its soldiers. That forever solidified methamphetamine’s reputation for bestowing superhuman endurance, teeth-grinding concentration, and an all-around bad attitude. After the US made pseudoephedrine available over the counter in 1976, West Coast biker gangs supplied this powdered pick-me-up to the jittery public. Tennesseans invented Mountain Dew and perfected moonshine, yet somehow we got pigeonholed as a crystal-meth capital.

NPR recently ran a story featuring gruesome “shake-and-bake” casualties in Nashville. Although they hype shake-and-bake as some new method of meth production, I’ve been hearing about it for at least a decade. It is basically desktop publishing for cranksters—a small-scale, DIY mobile meth lab that requires little more than a Gatorade bottle, drain cleaner, lithium batteries, and a box of pseudoephedrine, which yields a few potent grams. It’s so egalitarian and empowering to the poor, you’d think NPR would be more supportive.

Dr. Jeffrey Guy of Vanderbilt Medical Center’s burn unit told NPR that an astonishing 30% of his patients are inept shake-and-bakers. Curiously, when he spoke to Boston’s Here & Now earlier in the week, Dr. Guy had claimed that meth-makers were responsible for a full two-thirds of Vanderbilt’s burn victims. Statistical discrepancies aside, these patients form an endless parade of facial deformity and full-body chemical burns that cost an average of $130,000 dollars to treat. Like all meth production, shake-and-bake is a relatively exact science. One false move and you’re holding a blazing napalm bomb due to what Dr. Guy poetically calls “the intimacy of shake-and-bake.” Since meth heads rarely have insurance, the taxpayer foots the bill. At least seven burn units across the US have been shut down due to battery-benders’ unpaid expenses.

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With our widespread reputation as a “top-ranked meth state,” it’s no wonder I never meet people in my travels who know that Tennessee technology is poised to spark the singularity. They never imagine HAL 9000 with a hillbilly accent (“I’m a’ skeered, Dave. Mah durned mind is goin’...”)

Instead, Yankees and coastal-dwellers invoke vivid images of trailer-park babies choking on caustic vapors while Daddy #3 hovers over his explosive two-liter laboratory. Urbanites imagine grease monkeys sniffing bumps off open-ended wrenches, ice-smoking evangelists with nostrils blasting fire and brimstone, spooky-toothed welfare recipients with infected scabs, and cranked-out Klansmen gathered under a Confederate flag. I’m not denying any of this, but let’s tell the whole story.

Tennessee is ranked second in meth-lab seizures. That doesn’t mean we top the list for meth manufacturing or consumption, only that our law enforcement has been more successful at busting producers. Yeah, we’re up there on the makers-and-users list, but most crystal meth now comes into the United States from Mexico and is largely snorted up by the chronically drowsy folks on the West Coast. So put that in your latte and sip it.

In 2009 methamphetamine accounted for 27% of drug treatment admissions in California, 12.9% in Oregon, and 12.4% in Washington. Compare that to the 3.3% of admissions in Tennessee. If treatment statistics are any sort of measure for drug use, head West if you’re looking for tweakers. Actual meth users are less common here than most states west of the Mississippi—or coke-sniffing yuppies from coast to coast, for that matter.

Tennessee makes an easy target for sneering city folk who like to think of us as a bunch of trailer-park tweakers. Yes, over 10% of Tennessee’s housing units are mobile homes, and meth cooks gravitate toward disposable dwellings in rural areas and trailer parks. But that shows foresight and discretion, right? Only an idiot would be inconsiderate enough to blow up a real house with his stupid mobile meth lab.

I’m all for decriminalizing any intoxicant—with one exception. I want the cops to crack every tweaker skull in sight before they expose whole neighborhoods to toxic fumes. Tennessee’s police force would have held onto the #1 spot for lab busts if it wasn’t for an abrupt disruption of federal funding, and I’m rooting to take the title back in 2012—no matter what image that projects.

I can’t say that I’m as excited about the ongoing upgrades to Jaguar, though, which will give our supercomputer twice the calculating power of the current champion by October. It’s difficult to feel tribal pride when you tell people that the smartest Tennessean is a computer.

Nomophobia, or “no-mobile-phobia,” sounds as stupid as luposlipaphobia. At least the latter—the fear of being chased by wolves on slick kitchen linoleum while wearing socks—is meant to be a joke.

Since mid-February, over a hundred news stories have popped up to warn the public: “Nomophobia is on the rise,” “66% of population suffers from nomophobia,” “Do you fear being without your cell phone? You might have nomophobia.” Even NPR ran a brief story with no trace of irony. This ridiculous meme originated with a poll of 1,000 people in the UK conducted by SecurEnvoy, a digital password company, in which two-thirds of respondents said they freak out at the thought of losing their cell phones. Most of these news stories are mindless parrot pieces repeating a dull joke with no punchline, but a few actually recommend seeking professional help if symptoms are severe. I guess that’s the punchline.

As opposed to the dwindling minority of normal people who would just go on with their lives, nomophobics melt down when they misplace their cell phones, drain their phone battery, or merely imagine getting disconnected from hundreds of their closest friends. Nomophobics experience the usual symptoms of fortitude deficiency, including panic attacks, shortness of breath, dizziness, trembling, sweating, accelerated heart rate, chest pain, nausea, and the tremulous voice of a lily-livered cyborg who anticipates a power outage. Treatments include calmly visualizing being without a cell phone, “exposure therapies” such as spending small amounts of time away from the phone, or even medication if necessary. I suggest cyanide.

Of course, this is incredibly silly—but certainly true. It may be a stretch to cite one statistic that claims 66.6% of the population, but plenty of people feel they can’t live without their cell phones. These days, your communication device is your window to the world—a critical lifeline to friends, family, and business contacts. Your whole life is stored in there, and who wants to lose their whole life? But if you put all of your social eggs in the tech basket and are too lazy to write those names, addresses, and phone numbers down, then you deserve to be isolated from the universe and I hope your cell phone falls in the toilet.

Fringe fundamentalists have spent the last few decades spinning high-tech paranoid fantasies. A tyrannical Antichrist is supposed to tag the masses with microchips to track our every move—even monitor our very thoughts. That’s all nonsense, of course. No one is being forcibly tagged and tracked. Instead, consumers line up in droves to pay hundreds of dollars for their own personal number of the Beast—complete with email, Google, and Facebook. Every communication, Web search, online obsession, and personal connection is recorded, cataloged, and stored for future use by market analysts, government agencies, and to some extent, Facebook stalkers. What I wouldn’t give to know what Google or DHS know about us. Once you have probed a person’s deepest fears and desires, it’s easy to bait the stick with the most effective carrot.

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Nomophobia is just another way to say compulsive technophilia, and isn’t that what people should fear? Hasn’t cell-phone radiation been linked to brain tumors? Aren’t people killed every day because they use their phones while driving? Isn’t it common knowledge that our overuse of technology has caused an alarming increase in social retardation, isolation, and complacency in the face of dystopic progress? Neil Postman may have been crotchety and Ted Kaczynski certainly lacked social grace, but sometimes technology’s advance is enough to make you pray that the sun will spray an electromagnetic pulse that turns all the lights out.

Most people are afraid to lose their cell phones, but they should probably be more afraid to have them. My generation was the last to use rotary phones. Looking back, that might have been a good stopping point. At least they didn’t jump off the wall and follow me out the door.

Not that mobile technology is useless. Cell phones make fantastic leashes for pussy-whipped boyfriends, remote controls for micromanaging employers, and absorbing distractions amid modern life’s endless boredom. They are a convenient escape from dinner-table conversations and an indispensable leaf on the gossiphopper’s grapevine. You can even use them to send pictures of your dick to prospective lovers. Besides bringing bad news and keeping me employed, the best thing cellular technology did for me was inspire the shortest short story I’ve ever written, entitled “One Last Love Letter”:

When the paramedics cut Lucy free from the wreckage, they found one hand melted to her steering wheel. The other gripped her charred cell phone. She had been typing a text message she would never finish. It read: “i luv u more than life itse—”

And it was clear that Lucy meant it.

A nail gun is a handy tool. So is a climbing harness or a condom. So why would anyone get self-righteous about a morally neutral device? Because there is nothing so satisfying as hammering nails straight into solid wood. Nothing is as exhilarating as free-walking open steel at a hundred feet or making love skin-to-skin. Technology only has so many benefits before it hits an existential ceiling and kills the magic of the moment.

Hold that thought—I have to take this call.…

If you suffer from nomophobia, I recommend you take that cell phone out of your pocket and smash it over your forehead until you are free. You might find yourself lost in face-to-face interactions or undisturbed contemplation, but considering that humans have survived without constant digital contact for a hundred thousand years or so, I think you’ll live. That is, if your skull is tougher than your smart phone.

Katy Perry

A good woman is hard to find, especially if you’re a rigger. That’s my job, though—I climb high steel in arenas and rig tons upon tons of concert equipment. The more vacuous the music, the more dazzling the doodads. Over the last few months, Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga came through town with over a hundred tons of gear to hang combined.

I generally steer clear of the performances, but not always. So there I was, my eyes peeled open like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, stifling the urge to puke while suppressing an erection as gaggles of plastic booty shook across the stage.

The girls in the crowd get younger and younger every year, and I have to wonder what effect these cyborg-sexy entertainers have on their little Silly Putty brains. Is teen pop just skillfully marketed boogie-woogie or cynical instruction on how to be a whore?

Katy Perry made musical history last month as the first woman—and only the second artist since Michael Jackson—to have five #1 singles from the same album on Billboard’s Hot 100. Nothing embodies our culture’s progress like a race-morphing alleged pedophile passing the artistic torch to a hot brunette in a Brownie Scout uniform.

Onstage, Katy Perry maintains this cartoonish, wide-eyed gaze that says, “Oh my, I’ve never done this before!”, but I’m dubious. Her innocent persona didn’t impress record execs in 2001 when she debuted in Nashville’s Christian pop scene as Katy Hudson, so she quickly changed course and moved to LA. As with so many of us, strict Christian morality was stifling for Katy’s pubescent libido—her parents were evangelical ministers who wouldn’t even let their daughter say “deviled eggs.” Perry told Cosmopolitan that she broke away from her religion when she decided that sex could not wait until marriage. “I was like, I don’t know if I can hold that promise because this guy at camp is really cute.” The cult of entertainment doesn’t demand those limitations.

Today, Katy Perry is married to former sex addict Russell Brand and dances around a Candyland gameboard dressed like Bettie Page shooting whipped cream out of her tits. Millions of little girls love her, filling arenas to max capacity. Some of them even got up onstage the other night to sing along:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Ke$ha takes the art of cherry pop to whole new levels. This glitter-smeared 24-year-old star began cutting through the nation’s birth canal when she appeared in Katy Perry’s video for “I Kissed a Girl” and sang backup on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton singles. Her most recent album, Animal, has sold over two million copies—which is astounding in the age of piracy.

Ke$ha’s stage presence is somewhere between Punky Brewster and Tron. The show’s theme was all about fun, fun, fun: drinking, dancing, and doing the nasty. Her audience was relatively small for a platinum-selling star but totally enthralled—mostly teenaged rave twinkies, flamboyant gays, and quite a few little girls with their parents in tow.

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What were those parents thinking the other night when Ke$ha brought a goofy guy out of the audience, wrapped him up in cellophane, and sat on his lap during “Grow a Pair”? How did they explain the dude who moments later came out dressed in a wobbly penis costume and bounced his fleshy balls on the hapless fan’s face? Would the children in the audience impress their classmates the next morning with stories about last night’s show? Certainly, the lucky little kids who danced next to Mr. Cock-and-Balls during the grand finale are now the envy of their peers. I guess giant dildos are the new teddy bear.

Then there’s Lady Gaga. This androgynous android used Oprah’s ovaries as speed bags this year when she rocketed to #1 on Forbes’s Celebrity 100 and #11 Most Powerful Woman with $110 million in earnings, 43 million Facebook fans, and 13 million Twitter followers. She is a fame monster.

Despite her voracious hetero propensities, Gaga’s live performance is gayer than an Athenian bath house. She may look like a tranny with a very convincing ass, but she’s an opportunistic LGBT wannabe—a “wezbo,” if you will—crusading to make the world safe for gayness: condemning hate crimes, supporting gays in the military, and laying down catchy dance tunes so queer, they would have turned Freddie Mercury straight. Gaga’s synthpop is as infectious as her vagina must surely be. As I type this, her voice continues to loop somewhere in my hippocampus: “Pa-pa-pa-poker face, pa-pa-poker face….” I’m willing to try trepanation to make it stop!

Like any good harem, these ladies all have one man in common: Jesus Christ. But the Risen Lord is like the ultimate hard-to-get alpha who overplays his hand. Katy Perry left Christ to marry at a Hindu altar. Ke$ha just keeps him around her neck for good luck, along with a piece of her mother’s placenta for psychic powers.

Lady Gaga remains obsessed with Jesus. In her video for “Alejandro,” Gaga wears a rubber nun’s habit and swallows a rosary, then simulates a gangbang with an upside-down cross emblazoned on her crotch. In “Judas,” she plays Mary Magdalene, who pleasures her Latino biker Jesus before his glorification. “I feel like honestly that God sent me those lyrics and that melody…there’s no way for something that pure to be wrong,” she told NME.

During her show, Lady Gaga writhed on the ego ramp, shrieking up at Jesus, asking him if he would forgive everything. Then she moaned something that really struck me: “Tonight, my religion is you [the audience]!” It seemed like the feeling was mutual.

This shtick doesn’t shock me. I did everything in my power to burn through my innocence as a youngster. What surprises me today is how deviance has become so mainstream. Drunk sluts and fag hags were once the mysterious denizens of society’s underbelly. Since the 60s’ sexual revolution, they have become the canonized heroines of the modern world, from Janis Joplin to Madonna. Hedonistic art is a barometer of underlying social decay.

It is impossible to say how deep an international celebrity’s influence goes. The kids obviously try to dress like their superstars, they try to sing and dance like them, and despite national statistics that show teen promiscuity diminishing slightly since the early 90s, plenty of them try to get freaky like they think their idols do. Jesus may forgive them, but Facebook never forgets.

I get paid whether the show is an evangelical revival or a live sex act, so I shouldn’t care either way. Millions of imprudent parents allow their daughters to flirt with whoredom—let them. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Innocence is precious. That’s why marketing agencies sell it to concert promoters at such a phenomenal price. Knowing that most potential life mates gauge a woman’s long-term value by her relative chastity, I’ll do my best to make sure that my nieces—or perhaps one day, my daughters—remain outsiders to fads that glamorize becoming a dartboard for sperm. What more can I do? Organize a moral boycott against jerking off to Katy Perry?

It’s amazing what a man will do for love. To please my girlfriend, I recently found myself at a private, clothing-optional gay club in New Orleans. Lounging beside a pool where long dongs swing freely and helmet-heads casually wag by is somewhat alienating, but it seemed unwise to skip out on my girlfriend’s graduation party. I mean, it’s not like she asked me to attend a Nation of Islam prayer service or a Pentecostal revival. Now that would be awkward.

The funny thing is, even after I took a dip in the gayest hot tub this side of the Castro, my LGBT-loving acquaintances still accused me of being “homophobic” because I feel out of place in the gay scene. Apparently, I didn’t soak long enough to wash this scarlet “H” off of my forehead. How can I be cured?

Liberals generally define homophobia as a social disease. As if in anticipation of New York’s recent legalization of gay marriage, the epidemic’s symptoms have surfaced in numerous headlines this summer. June’s most conspicuous fag-bashing was by black comedian Tracy Morgan, who joked to his Nashville audience that gay kids should stand up to bullies instead of whining. He went on to say that if his hypothetical gay son ever came home talking like a sissy, Morgan would “stab that little nigga to death.” It remains unclear how hard the audience laughed at this. However, we do know that one queer man in the crowd went straight directly to the media, who subsequently lynched Tracy Morgan and strung him up on the Rainbow Rope.

“If they can take a fucking dick up their ass,” Morgan had quipped during his routine, “they can take a fucking joke.”

Apparently not. Tracy’s strangled apologies have made headlines ever since.

The gooey snowball kept rolling when black artists Chris Brown and Cee Lo Green were lambasted for Tweets in which they ribbed their detractors by calling them “gay.” Their obligatory “What-I-meant-to-say-is-I-love-all-gay-people!” apologies immediately followed.

Late in June an unnamed Southwest Airlines pilot accidentally switched on his cockpit mic before complaining about the paucity of attractive female flight attendants in his life:

Eleven out of twelve—there’s twelve flight attendants…eleven fucking over-the-top fucking ass homosexuals and a granny. Eleven! I mean, think of the odds of that!...After that, it was just a continuous stream of gays and grannies and grandees….

The suspended pilot was quickly reinstated after a round of heartfelt apologies and his completion of a “diversity training” course. The disproportionate number of gay flight attendants at Southwest has yet to be addressed.

What causes “homophobes” to feel this primal revulsion toward gay men? Why would country singer Blake Shelton be compelled to tickle his Twitter fans with…

Re-writing my fav Shania Twain song.. Any man that tries Touching my behind he’s gonna be a beaten, bleedin’, heaving kind of guy…

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…and why would rednecks laugh?

I find an unlikely answer in the feminist theory of “the male gaze.” I submit that at least some of these celebrity “homophobes,” like most men who had once been teenagers, have been on the receiving end of unpleasant and unwelcome homoerotic attention at some point in their lives. For many of us, “homophobia” is a primal defense mechanism against unwanted sexual aggression, and so long as lug-butts and breeders intermingle, it will never go away. That’s not a hate crime—it’s human nature.

The male-gaze theory was hatched from the radical 1970s academic criticism of art and film, putting forth the argument that women are only portrayed as boner-provoking eye candy. Male viewers are active and dominant, while the female is left passive and exposed. A woman’s lovely face, breasts, buttocks, and southern canyon stimulate a man’s will to power and pleasure rather than a desire for debates on gender norms. What can I say? Guilty as charged.

It is argued that patriarchy is constructed around this objectification. At the extreme end of feminist theory, the piercing, invading, ravenous, dehumanizing “male gaze” is tantamount to rape. The radical-feminist response is to neuter the dominating male personality by crushing his balls.

But that’s exactly how I feel when surrounded by male gays beaming the male gaze at me. It is only natural for a young man to feel revulsion in the presence of leering queers—no different from a prudish woman who is disgusted by horny, uncivilized cads. Getting eye-raped feels nasty on an animal level. The difference is that I have a strong right cross.

Most men, whichever way their penis swings, are pigs. I was a total fag-magnet in my hairless youth. When my beard finally grew in, it became some kind of magical talisman against NAMBLA types.

Which brings me back to the clothing-optional gay club in NOLA. What’s a fella gotta do to get a little attention around here? Aside from the sleazy bartenders snubbing my girlfriend and calling me “baby,” or a few naked dudes going out of their way to strut their waggling wangs into my line of vision, I flew totally under the gaydar. I would like to think that my groping girlfriend drove them away, but I suspect I need to lay off the beer and hit the gym more often.

Our hot-tub party included the balding, blubber-bellied “Big Daddy” Darren—who is fifty-eight—and his twenty-two year-old lover, Little Lola. The same tutti-fruttis who called me “homophobic” for saying that I feel weird hanging out with naked rump-wranglers proceeded to pour scorn on this couple’s “sick,” “disgusting,” “May-December” relationship. While I can’t blame Darren for a second—my girlfriend and I could be called May-June—watching this gray-pubed pervo petting his topless love slave was gross as hell, but no more than seeing two dudes sit ass-to-lap in a Jacuzzi.

Then the black people showed up. One of our party’s man-lovers—a bronzed bodybuilder who once joked that “nigger bikers” are taking over the streets of New Orleans—scowled at the African arrival. Our homo-hipster bartender spat, “I’m sssorry, but thessse black motherfuckersss tip like ssshit.” Everyone nodded in solemn agreement. When my girlfriend’s hat got stolen from the dressing room while we were in the sauna, guess who got blamed? The shifty-eyed black girl.

Imagine that—an exclusive ingroup is revolted by an unwelcome outgroup. Some might call it hypocritical. I call it hilarious.

France’s recent “Burqa Ban” has provoked all the global indignation and murderous outrage one would have expected. Pointed observations on the irony of a liberal democracy which tells its citizens what they can and can’t wear were soon followed by Muslims making lunatic bomb threats. Al Qaeda has sworn to “seek dreadful revenge.” France has instigated a cacophony of international noise, just to keep a couple thousand ladies from strolling the Parisian streets looking like the singing Dinks from Spaceballs.

This should be a familiar story to most Americans. While the world watches France harass its human curtain-rods, American authoritarians—in both public and private spheres—have ramped up efforts to restrict the apparel of various distasteful minorities. The message of this fashion fascism is clear: “Dress like somebody—or stay at home!”

On September 7, Dublin, GA’s mayor Phil Best signed a bill prohibiting all beltless bruthas from gettin’ their sag on. Classifying baggy pants as “indecent exposure,” this puts bad taste in the same legal category as masturbating or defecating in public. Anyone caught with their britches more than 3” below their waist faces a fine of $25 for the first offense and $250 for each additional infraction. If this means that someone caught tossing off on a Dublin street corner is only fined the price of a double-disc porno, I’m on my way.

While Mayor Best maintains that the ban targets no particular ethnic group, everybody knows that the only people strutting around with their asses hanging out—with the exception of plumbers—are surly black youths and their pasty-faced imitators. Not surprisingly, many black citizens support the bill. In a majority African-American township of nearly sixteen thousand people, this local legislation may affect more individuals than the Burqa Ban, which addresses a tiny national minority and carries a fine of €150.

Along with Hahira, Hawkinsville, GA, Riviera Beach, FL, and at least six cities and parishes in Louisiana that have already passed similar laws, the decent folks of Dublin will no longer have to awkwardly avoid staring at all those bulbous black booties. At Morehouse College in nearby Atlanta, a different group of, err…brothers?…are being told how to dress. Claiming such illustrious alumni as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Spike Lee, this exclusively African-American institution has a reputation for producing young men unafraid to go against the grain. But in October last year, the all-male school passed the “Appropriate Attire Policy,” prohibiting women’s clothing, makeup, high heels, purses, and weaves from being worn on campus or school-related functions. The dress code specifically targeted five transvestite students who had caused considerable discomfort, as well as the occasional misdirected erection.

Of course, many civil-rights advocates condemned the code. By trumpeting equality, Morehouse faculty clearly chose to put “bros” before “hos.”

While the ban on wearing religious symbols in French schools (i.e., the hijab) attracted the international spotlight in 2004, intolerant dress codes had already gotten their stride in the U.S. after the numerous late-90s school shootings. Gang-related colors and black trenchcoats terrified hand-wringing parents and teachers, leading many districts to prohibit T-shirts featuring Tupac, Biggie Smalls, or Marilyn Manson. This paranoid tendency took an unexpected turn this year after a patriotic fashion faux pas during a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, CA. In a display of unashamed patriotism that occupies some bizarre border between trendy post-9/11 consumerism and ballsy defiance, five students came to their predominantly Hispanic school wearing American flag shirts and bandanas. Surrounded by Mexican-American classmates decked out in green, white, and red, these kids looked like an ass-stomping waiting to happen. Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez promptly told the boys to either remove the shirts or hit the bricks. Their mothers were livid, demanding that school officials apologize. What have we come to when a kid can’t express his love of country with red, white, and blue TapouT gear?

The next day, fifty Chicano students walked out of Live Oak and marched on City Hall to support Principal Rodriguez, alleging that wearing an American flag on Cinco de Mayo was “disrespectful.” In an interview with Fox News, however, Dominic Maciel—one of the patriotic five, who resembles a pubescent Timothy McVeigh despite his father’s Mexican descent—countered, “I have no problem with them wearing their Mexican stuff.”
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In December last year, a young man was thoroughly beaten in front of 4 million people after expressing his German-American pride through brand names. Joe “The Southside Strangler” Brammer walked out to the octagon on The Ultimate Fighter—along with his entire crew—sporting Iron Cross-emblazoned Hoelzer Reich gear. Politically correct UFC fans were furious. Despite the company’s backpedaling denials, Hoelzer Reich has numerous neo-Nazi associations, including logos of eagles clutching swastikas, “Blood and Honor” insignias, and an informal sponsorship of hate-rocker Ed Wolbank.

In response to the outrage, all Hoelzer Reich apparel has been banned from most major MMA leagues. According to president Dana White, the UFC maintains a “zero-tolerance policy” for “idiocy” and “white power racialists.” Of course, some fans pointed out that Cain Velasquez—whose “Brown Pride” tattoo covers his chest—fights in the UFC octagon without a Manssiere. Apparently, the UFC does not consider pride in one’s Mexican heritage to be…ahem…“racialist.”

Of course, these prohibitions on appearance are not unique to America or France.  Poland has recently outlawed communist chic such as red stars, hammers & sickles, and Che Guevara T-shirts. Nightclubs from New Orleans to Melbourne, Australia, have banned Ed Hardy attire—a brand favored by Jersey Shore guidos and various douchebags across the globe. And of course, women in numerous Muslim countries have been prohibited from wearing anything remotely sexy—upon penalty of public beatings or death—since the days of the Bedouin nomads.

Is there no hope for a universally tolerant society?

Beneath the rhetoric of “community,” “dignity,” and “equality,” there lies a more primitive motive for policies such as the Burqa Ban. While the notion of a “post-racial” society is plausible in certain locales, I can think of no culture that is post-tribal. We cling to team colors or military uniforms, to the chador or haute couture, to turbans, bandanas, or cowboy hats as a way to maintain tribal identity. Tribal affiliations are signified by superficial symbols, and the collective memories evoked by Islamic, Nazi, communist, American, ghetto, Guido, or homo aesthetics are simply a cerebral extension of caveman-level revulsion.

In the West, antagonistic tribes have been getting on in relative peace for the better part of six decades, but our ability to transcend the instinctive preference for those like ourselves is obviously limited on both local and national levels.  Not every tribe will be welcome to the collective campfire.

While citations and social exclusion are a much more civilized way to eliminate undesirable appearances than the ancient solutions of stones and spears—still employed in the global backwater—the primal instinct remains the same. Humanity’s inner ape screeches to expel that which doesn’t belong. Therefore, the realistic options for any unwanted minority are fairly clear: assimilation, evacuation, or confrontation.

Take it from a chronic misfit: Those who challenge the cultural chimpanzee should prepare to have poo flung in their faces. If you’re gonna be so bold, don’t be a fucking whiner. Just bring your baby-wipes and take it like a sport, ’cause it’s bound to be a shitty day.

Last year I toured with the Black Eyed Peas on their Japan/Australia run. It was dubbed The E.N.D. - World Tour, which was appropriate. The production is a dazzling metaphor for the end of civilization.

As I get older, I frequently find myself forced to compromise my principles—-whether ethical or aesthetic—-for a higher standard of living. My job is to fly lights, sound, and video—-not to judge the artists. My crew chief said this a dozen times. After all, I was paid well, enjoyed fine meals and plush hotel rooms, had fantastic adventures on the streets of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Melbourne, and Auckland, and I only had to wear a BEP t-shirt one time—-when my laundry was dirty. Still, the damage is evident.

I began to absorb the insidious beats and lobotomizing lyrics through constant exposure. To make matters worse, I was born with a hyperactive cerebral sequencer that will sample and loop any catchy tune within a 100’ radius. You hear about nuclear lab technicians who glow green when the lights go out. Well, for months after I came home you could hear “Boom Boom Pow” playing from my head in a quiet room. Just another occupational hazard.

The other roadies exhibited similar symptoms of BEP Syndrome. We made a psychological game of it. (Example: A laser tech walks by, and I croon: “I gotta feeling…” For the next hour, he will be plagued by the song. The only known cure is cranial bludgeoning.)

Of course, the crew had mixed reactions to The E.N.D. of civilization, ranging from head-bobbing compliance to blank-faced indifference. Plenty of them detested the sound, coping in the same fashion that a grease-saturated McDonald’s worker does: with a stoic smile and a puff of smoke. Unfortunately, I never developed the perceptual filters necessary to block out the soundtrack—-and I may never recover.

The show opens with “Let’s Get Retarded In Here.” Seriously. That’s the hook. It was like Idiocracy: the Musical, with the crowd as extras. But hey, at least these guys are honest about their agenda. Having seen the children of the world transformed into a tone-deaf choir of space monkeys dancing for a Spring Break webcam—-I can assure you that the plan is working.

So what do you do once you have subdued the youth’s brain activity? You stoke their hormones with humps and lady lumps. Maintaining a professional suspension of judgement was difficult as rows of preteen girls joined Fergie for the refrain:

Whatchoo gon’ do with all that junk,
All that junk inside that trunk?
Imma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump[...]
My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps,

Check it out…

It was a weird scene—these tarted-up Australian girls on fire with precocious puberty, singing about their “lovely lady lumps” while parents stared ahead with TV eyes. Perhaps my horror is an indication of archaic attitudes toward sexual artifice. After all, I come from the last Western generation for whom pornography was a mysterious and coveted commodity. Maybe I’m just not hip to the future.

This generation is growing up fast—-one casual click away from hardcore butt-pumping. Perhaps for them, Fergie’s high-priced humps are just innocuous objects of fascination. Still, it doesn’t take a total square to interpret “I wonder if I take you home/ Would you still be in love, baby… in love, baby…” as a foreboding sing-a-long for single mothers. The consequences of a free-lovin’ frenzy have never been a concern for the hype machine. It’s a new age of the child, and Slut-tastic Pop is a haphazard expression of the Sexual Revolution.

The Peas are all about revolution. Take “Now Generation” for instance. As it happened, I had a show cue during this song—-every night. Try to imagine Veruca Salt inciting a cyborg insurrection from her strip pole with Liber Legis tucked into her thong. “Now Generation” would be her manifesto. It opens with a clip from Obama’s speech after the New Hampshire Primaries—-“Yes we can!”—- and features the Peas on podiums dressed in cyber-politician garb, proclaiming:

MySpace in your space,
Facebook is a new place.
Dipdivin’, socializin’,
I be out in cyberspace.
Google is my professor,
Wikipedia checker,
Checkin’ my account,
Loggin’ in and loggin’ out,

I want it now[...]

We are the Now Generation!
We are the Generation Now!

Footage of Civil Rights marches and war protests play on the massive video walls. This segues into a flashing sequence of lyric-specific logos—-Apple, MySpace, Google, Wikipedia—-like Reese’s Pieces falling one-by-one into ET’s slimy little hand.

will.i.am counsels us to “Ask Barack who brought the hope.” But perhaps we should ask him for another stimulus package to pay for more bling bling, iDooDad crazes, and BEP merch. And while he’s at it, we could use help on the bar tabs as well.

The show finishes with a mash-up of “Party All The Time/Outta My Head/I Gotta Feeling.” The band saunters around the confetti-strewn stage with massive champagne props in hand, musing:

If we could party all night
And sleep all day
And throw all of my problems away,
My life would be eaaasy…

so

Tonight’s the night,
Let’s live it up,
I got my money,
Let’s spend it up…

If you put on your Rowdy Roddy sunglasses, you’ll see their skull-like faces croaking: Obey - Reproduce - Log-on - Consume - Remix.

It must be said that every personal interaction I had with the Peas was pleasant—-so far as pop stars go. They were always courteous and professional—-all smiles and warm handshakes-that-feed. They even welcomed me into their dance circle at a Tokyo club one night, cheering me on when I broke into my Chex Mix boogie—-a charitable gesture indeed.

On the other chip-implanted hand, they nearly destroyed my hope for humanity. At times, I fear that The E.N.D. is a vision of the future. Imagine a human face licking the sole of a True Religion Brand boot—-forever.

I chose to leave the Peas in Las Vegas, as they kicked off their recent U.S. leg of the tour. I felt like a lumberjack in the Redwood Forests—-great money, but you’re getting paid to decimate an irreplaceable resource. In my case, it was the higher cortical functioning of every youthful brain behind the barricade. Where the lumberjack gazes out over fields of enormous tree-stumps, I saw arenas packed to the nosebleeds with dancing brain stems. So I retreated as a conscientious objector. This has provided a modicum of inner peace.

Still, there is one riddle that I just can’t unravel. Why would will.i.am gloat over “beats so large, I be steppin’ on Leprechauns” while he’s “shittin’ on y’all with the BOOM BOOM”? I mean, wouldn’t medium, or even small, beats be sufficient to crush these micro-anthropic creatures?