• What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?

    From Javon@21:1/5 to All on Sat Aug 12 06:52:00 2017
    XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities, alt.politics.media, ca.politics
    XPost: alt.politics.radical-left

    Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, and Will Menaker befriended
    each other on Twitter several years ago. They had common interests—international politics, making fun of journalists—and
    a shared comic sensibility that borders on nihilism but stops
    just short of it. Christman, stout and Midwestern, had been
    unemployed for years, moving around the country with his wife,
    an academic librarian. Biederman was a freelance writer and
    mixed-martial-arts hobbyist in New York City. Menaker was an
    assistant editor at Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. (His
    father, Daniel Menaker, is a former executive editor-in-chief of
    Random House, and was also a fiction editor at The New Yorker
    for twenty years.) He is slight and bearded, the unofficial dad
    of the trio.

    In February, they appeared together on “Street Fight Radio,” an
    “anarcho-comedy show,” to mock the Michael Bay war movie “13
    Hours” for its bathetic moral kitsch. (Christman: “If you watch
    these screaming, turbaned jihadis machine-gun the American flag
    while it’s on the end of the flagpole, and you’re weeping, then
    you’re a fucking rube, and I want to sell you a reverse
    mortgage.”) Then they decided to branch out on their own. They
    taped a ninety-minute freeform conversation using Google Hangout
    and broadcast it, unedited, over YouTube. A tossed-off joke from
    that recording, which combined the name of a famous Mexican drug
    lord and the slang term for a crack kitchen, gave them a title
    for the new project, a gleefully eccentric podcast dedicated to
    vulgar leftist commentary on politics and media: “Chapo Trap
    House.”

    From the beginning, the “Chapo” guys lambasted Republicans as
    well as Democrats, but it was their critique of liberal
    thinking, and the assumed Hillary Clinton ascendancy, that
    generated energy and attention. After the journalist Brendan
    James appeared on their third episode to discuss a profile he’d
    written about Sean Hannity, he came on board as their producer.
    In the first episode, Menaker said that the “Bernie and Hillary
    divide is a profound and deeply instructive one—I can’t see it
    going away.” And as Bernie Sanders’s prospects dwindled during
    the primary, “Chapo” assured people who were frustrated by the
    Democratic Party that they weren’t alone. Their audience numbers
    climbed.

    In June, the same month that Clinton became the presumptive
    Democratic nominee, Christman created a page for the podcast on
    the crowd-funding platform Patreon, offering exclusive episodes
    for a five-dollar monthly contribution. “Chapo” now receives
    nearly twenty-two thousand dollars a month, and, by their own
    estimates, has forty thousand listeners. They sell out live
    shows; a page on the popular Web site TV Tropes tracks their
    inside jokes about phrenology and anti-Irish racism, among other
    subjects. (Their most diehard fans call themselves Grey Wolves,
    after the fringe nationalist group in Turkey—another tossed-off
    joke that stuck.) Menaker quit his publishing job in July. That
    same month, Paste magazine labelled “Chapo Trap House” the
    “vulgar, brilliant demigods of the new progressive left.”

    A more precise label might be the Dirtbag Left, a term coined by
    the writer Amber A’Lee Frost, who is Biederman’s roommate, and
    who, this week, officially joined the “Chapo” roster. In an
    essay for Current Affairs, Frost argued that while vulgarity
    isn’t “inherently subversive,” it can help tarnish the unearned
    prestige of the powerful—something that many Democrats, as well
    as Republicans, hunger to do. We can either “reclaim vulgarity
    from the Trumps of the world,” she wrote, or “find ourselves
    handicapped by civility.”

    “Chapo Trap House” has embraced this mission. “If you sleep on a
    mattress on the floor and fuck in a sleeping bag, then you just
    might be the dirtbag left!” Menaker told Paste. “If you’re the
    only dude at a function not wearing a pocket square in a linen
    blazer and adulting like a boss, then you’re in the dirtbag
    left!” People who belong to the Dirtbag Left, Christman said,
    aren’t afraid “to offend the sensibilities of ‘leftist’ language
    police whose only goal is sabotaging social solidarity in order
    to maintain their brands as arbiters of good taste and
    acceptable speech.”

    The “Chapo” guys loathe the unctuous sanctimony that can descend
    on liberal politics—a tone they associate with Clinton and
    certain corners of the mainstream media. According to “Chapo,”
    liberals humiliated themselves when they urged Trump protesters
    in Chicago to behave. Liberals were fools for piously donating
    to the fire-bombed North Carolina G.O.P. office in October,
    putting their desire to project civility over the ongoing
    reality of voter suppression in the state. On the podcast and on
    Twitter, they have made the case, over and over, that the way
    the Democratic Party leans on celebrity and pop culture is
    misguided and embarrassing.

    “Chapo Trap House” refuses to provide the kind of “Daily Show”-
    style catharsis that dissipates frustration en masse. “It was
    useful at the time,” Menaker told me, referring to the style of right-ridiculing political comedy that was defined by Jon
    Stewart. “But the Obama years really revealed the limits of that
    type of humor.” Smarm, not evil, was the new target.

    I went to meet the “Chapo” guys at the headquarters of the
    annotation platform Genius, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I found them
    outside smoking cigarettes in the sun. It was Election Day. We
    walked upstairs and sat on couches overlooking a white
    industrial event space where, a few hours later, they’d put on a
    show. Menaker, who is thirty-three, told me that fans are drawn
    to the podcast because the hosts have “no special obligation to
    be nice to anyone, or get a pat on the head, or”—and here he
    briefly affected the voice of an aristocrat—“have a fine debate
    with mon conservative frère.” He rolled his eyes and mimed
    masturbation. “My reaction to that is a jack-off motion so hard
    it opens a portal into another dimension.”

    Their argument is inextricable from the way in which they make
    it. But when an ethos of vulgarity is enthusiastically practiced
    by a group of white men, this will sometimes translate as
    chauvinism. Particular strains of “Chapo” invective can be hard
    to take—people are “pussies,” or they’re “retarded.” Botanical
    gardens are “gay,” Hillary Clinton is “a freak.” The caricature
    of the “Bernie bro”—an aggressively disaffected white guy who
    hates Clinton ostensibly because of her neoliberal
    incrementalism but deep down because of her gender—occasionally
    seems to apply. The very name of the podcast—as well as its
    theme song, a vaporwave remix of Gucci Mane—suggests a
    dismissive attitude toward identity politics. They are, after
    all, three white guys.

    “Four_ _white guys,” James, the producer, said.

    “Politifact rates this claim as ‘mostly true,’ ” Menaker added.

    “It depends on how you classify the Scots-Irish,” Christman
    said. Then he became serious. Representation in the media is a
    real issue, he said, but one that mostly applies to large
    institutions like the Times or CNN, where barriers to entry
    preserve gender and racial hierarchies. By contrast, Christman
    said, “we are literally just dudes who just do this.” In any
    case, on the Monday following the election, “Chapo Trap House”
    announced that Frost and another frequent guest, the comedian
    Virgil Texas, would officially join as co-hosts. (After meeting
    Texas, I had assumed that he had some Asian heritage. When I
    texted him to ask if I could describe him as Asian-American, he
    explained that he didn’t “self-ID” as such, but that he
    “wouldn’t be offended” if I did.)

    At the Genius office, as people set up chairs on the floor below
    us, Menaker described the generic Chapo fan as a “failson”—which
    Biederman, who is twenty-six, defined as the guy that “goes
    downstairs at Thanksgiving, briefly mumbles, ‘Hi,’ everyone asks
    him how community college is going, he mumbles something about a
    2.0 average, goes back upstairs with a loaf of bread and some
    peanut butter, and gets back to gaming and masturbating.” As for
    the women fans—who make up maybe twenty to thirty per cent of
    the audience, they guessed—“they all seem to be success-
    daughters,” Menaker said. “They’re astrophysicists or novelists,
    extremely on-point and competent people.”

    Christman saw a political lesson in the show’s fan base. “The
    twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human
    beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers
    or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in
    different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class,
    male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not
    be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap
    House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at
    the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall
    with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of
    purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman
    continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of
    capitalism.”

    The guys have gotten e-mails, they told me, from listeners who
    have started organizing, and who told them that they had started
    to think of their lives politically for the first time. You
    wouldn’t necessarily expect jokes about Antonin Scalia getting
    horseradish in his neck folds to spur people toward activism.
    But Biederman compared “Chapo” ’s style to the recessed
    cardboard filter on Parliament cigarettes, which, according to
    an apocryphal story, were designed so that soldiers could bite
    down on something during battle. “Irony is what allows you to
    keep your bearings when you’re looking at the horrors of the
    world,” he said.

    As their big Election Night show approached, the “Chapo” guys
    told me about their plans. They want to set up a Web site,
    publish essays, bring in more history and international
    coverage, and produce sketches and short films. The Hillary
    Clinton Administration would set them up as the dedicated
    opposition. “The show would suck under a Trump Presidency,”
    Menaker noted. “We’d end up getting into that John Oliver thing.
    The emperor has no clothes, ladies and gentlemen! Trump outrage
    of the week!”

    “Every episode would end with an open letter,” Biederman said.
    “It would be like—listen, you orange ignoramus, how dare you
    call Seth Meyers a kike on Twitter.”

    “A few weeks ago, Virgil was trying to convince me that Trump
    would win,” Christman said. “I was like, we would be so fucked.”

    On Saturday morning, I biked to James’s apartment, in Clinton
    Hill, where the guys were taping their first post-election
    podcast. James set up his laptop on a coffee table and dialled
    Christman in from Cincinnati. The room was cozy, with liquor
    bottles decorating one corner and audio cables coiled on a beat-
    up Persian rug. Texas buzzed the door, walked in, and sat down
    between Menaker and Biederman on the couch. “We ate shit,”
    Menaker said. “And the fact that we’re not alone doesn’t make it
    less acute.”

    “It makes me feel worse,” Biederman said. “I’m lumped in with
    these idiots. We’re exactly as stupid as them.”
    The live show on Election Night had been planned around a
    sequence of states going blue. The loose theme was “Dr.
    Strangelove,” and Biederman, in character as General Jack D.
    Ripper, was going to end the evening by committing suicide in
    the bathroom after Clinton’s victory was announced. Instead, as
    Trump took Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, the
    Chapo guys improvised, and the air in the room curdled. “Look,
    it’s Bernie’s fault,” Biederman said at one point. “Second of
    all, if voters are too immature to vote for someone that
    collapses and vomits all the time, the joke’s on them.”

    In James’s apartment, they talked about the bad tweets and
    smarmy posts that they’d seen about President-elect Trump. The
    mood was perky. Not for the first time that week, I was jealous
    of their freedom from the paralyzing personal investment that I
    felt in the election.

    “We have a duty to our fans to keep up the show, to provide some
    sense of community or solace,” Menaker said. “Strategically and
    politically, I think we must declare eternal, holy war on the
    Democratic Party, because they’re the ones that let this happen.”

    “Yeah,” Biederman said. “The Democratic leadership has to be
    purged. Our mission statement, for the time being, is to paint
    these targets.”

    I asked them if they blamed the Party exclusively. Didn’t it
    make sense to attribute some of the fault with the people who
    chose Trump despite his racism and sexism? They scoffed.

    “Even if you do blame the electorate, where do you go from
    there?” Biederman asked. “Do we shame these people into liking
    us?” This debate, pitting the economic concerns of the white
    working class against a focus on minority and women’s rights, as
    though it were a zero-sum game, will go surely on for years. We
    weren’t going to resolve it that morning.

    James pressed record, and Biederman launched into an impression
    of Hillary Clinton in the cheesy rhetorical pattern the “Chapo”
    guys call “Democrat voice.” “I may not be David Carradine, but I
    fucking choked,” he said. “I may not be Johnny Knoxville, but I
    ate shit on live TV. I may not be Dale Earnhardt”—he paused—“but
    I smashed into the fucking wall because I couldn’t turn left.”

    And then they were off, discussing Clinton’s loss. Clinton was
    too focussed on rich suburbs; she didn’t visit Wisconsin; she
    brought Jay Z to Ohio like a chump. She gave her base no reason
    to vote for her apart from the fact that she wasn’t Trump. The
    barrier between entertainment and politics is now nonexistent,
    they argued, and people voted against the political class.
    Clinton—“the Supreme Lady Clinton, the nice girl who just
    doesn’t know why minorities won’t give her votes that she’s
    entitled to”—wasn’t capable of getting the Obama coalition.
    People simply did not come out.

    But minorities, I thought, did vote for Clinton. The “Chapo”
    guys elided the role that bigotry played in the election. “Be on
    the lookout for everybody who’s trying to play it off like this
    was inevitable, saying that America is this irredeemably
    racist,” Menaker said. “I’m sorry, but that’s as ignorant as the
    most baying moron that voted for Trump.”

    James snuck into the center of the room to adjust the mic levels
    on his laptop, stepping around piles of books and an electric
    guitar. Biederman ranted about Clinton’s behavior at the Javits
    Center. “This entitled fucking slob,” he said. “This fucking
    asshole brought all her donors to have a big party about how
    great they were. She’s never been a fucking leader, ever, in her
    life. She just has these fans who are psychologically weak,
    tormented, élite freaks.”

    This was their mission now—to rail on Clinton, the liberals who
    had supported her, the Party that hadn’t demanded enough of her,
    the media that cheered her on. They say their primary goal is to
    entertain, but their ethos—radically anti-élite, anti-
    capitalist, redistributive—may have been validated by the
    results of the election. I wondered if “Chapo” could eventually
    attract some of the liberals they hate, if they would continue
    to target, exclusively, the disaffected. The affected deserve
    better than what they’ve been given, too.

    “We are in a new era,” Texas said, at the close of the show,
    addressing his comrades. “Politics is now an endless thing in
    our lives. It will transform our culture top to bottom. One
    thing that everyone should keep in mind is that fascism seeks to
    destroy nuance and irony. For the next four years, people are
    going to need you guys to know that they’re not alone.”
    “Well, that’s the plan,” Menaker said.

    http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/what-will- become-of-the-dirtbag-
    left?mbid=gnep&intcid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

    --
    All Clinton voters are ignorant uneducated retards.
     

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