Jack Boulware America's Rant Resurgance occured sometime in the 1980s, when Amok Press released Rants and other Incendiary Tracts and Apocalypse Culture, underground collections of literary fulminations from such square pegs as random schizophrenics, Muslims, Satanists or the Marquis de Sade. Since that time we've taken the genre, chopped and channeled it, hot-rodded it out to the point where the word rant now defines anything from Karl Marx hollering on a streetcorner about bread lines, to some white guy named Dave who works at Compuserve's Internet Division in Bellevue, and whose "Rant at Dave" page offers readers a handy form to send him their screed. A rant is not a secret e-mail to a nerd, any more than a package from the Unabomber is an invitation from Ed McMahon to join the sweepstakes. Cubicle sassiness should not be mistaken for true seething. A rant should be short, angry, shrill, annoying, mean-spirited, without a shred of reporting to get in the goddamn way. It should either be shouted at the top of its lungs, or smolder in a continuous, excruciating burn. It should find its intended target, and it should hurt. It should be self-indulgent, and know at all times -- as does this column -- that it is the only sane voice of reason howling against an insane world. Keep all this in mind as you send your rant to Dave. But the rant brushfire is roaring out of control. Witness the Windy City's long-winded Baffler, an annual literary conceit which becomes even more tedious upon catching a Baffler polemicist at a podium on C-SPAN. We have the 1996 book Rants from hair-products TV comedian Dennis Miller, a collection of formulaic pseudo-outrage essays, squeezed from a pack of joke writers. A few years ago we saw the book Rants & Crowd Pleasers, from music egghead Greil Marcus, another in a continuing series of inexplicable essays on punk rock. I personally have sat in on meetings to start up a new magazine which would include the "Guest Rant of the Week" department. We have HotWired's Media Rant, an op-ed slot with Lucky-Strike attitude. And then there are the DIY snobs, the unwashed and pissed-off art brats of the zines and web sites, where the reader must paddle upstream through the toe-tapping linguistic tortures that pass for prose, where cutsey mutations are derived by hyphenating pop-culture nouns and ad jingles into smug adjectives, where someone possesses "Steve-Austin-a-man-barely-alive tenacity," "Scooby-Doo fruitlessness," or "just-look-at-that-shine efficiency." (Or, perhaps, "Lucky-Strike attitude.") If you've always wondered whatever became of the sociopath kids in school who excelled at the Blue Book essays while scribbling furiously on their jeans, they've found their niches as the New Punditry, nose-ringed George Wills with a laptop, or the New Satirists, ersatz Mark Leyners with a T1 line. Add to this the "spoken-word" forums of high-vocabulary whinings currently taking up space at Lollapaloozas, the nation's cafes and Henry Rollins' bookshelf, and it would seem that an exciting new literary genre has emerged. Or has it? A quick web search on Alta Vista for the word "rant" yielded a breezy 10,000 hits. With no editors and no cover price -- and often no readers -- the fiberoptics are humming with tiny, useless beefs about the state of the world. Cyberspew might well define the current state of rant; it certainly presents the easiest forum to squeak your peace. America has historically, always felt our own outrage shoved down our throats, and as the following categorical "rantlet" couplets demonstrate, it sounds even dumber when you read it off a computer monitor. But it does have a certain "just-look-at-that-shine efficiency." "What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner." [http://tychonic.antioch.edu/~michael/rant.html] "Boy, it's been a while since I've been here... Why is it that everyone I know puts off all their work until the end of the quarter, and then gets all stressed out? I know very few people here who stay on top of their work. So, it being late in the quarter, everyone is being wierd... *I really hate it when people drive 100 KM per hour in the fast lane. If you aren't traveling at least 150+, then move over! I really should start using my cruise control, because every time I look down at the speedometer, it seems to have magically crept back up to the 180-190 range, sigh. *It really bugs me when several people are walking down the sidewalk *really*slowly, blocking the whole thing so you can't get by. God! How rude. *I think that only the most uncivilized people could ever think that martinis can be made with vodka. James Bond included. A martini should always be stirred, and never shaken, contrary to the title of this page. Some bartenders around town even have the nerve to think that they can use scotch instead of vermouth. Look people, a martini is 5 parts gin and 1 part vermouth with an olive. *The Macintosh window focus policy sucks, bigtime. I mean, why do I have to click in a window, after moving my tracker into it? Do I have to tell the machine twice what window my cursor is in? Motif is better, since it allows me to choose my favourite policy -- even, GAK, Macintosh type behaviour. *I doubt anyone cares, but I really hate liver, I think parsley just sucks as both a garnish and an herb, and I can't stand caraway seeds in cheese. Creamy salad dressings are a total turn-off, as are sesame snaps. Other than that, I like pretty much everything. Oh, yes. I almost forgot. Chinese green tea (including green tea ice cream) makes me sick." "In a way, I feel let down by my favorite fashion rags. I depended on them to let me know how short my skirts needed to be, how to know if I was a "spring" or a "summer" and how to put on mascara to get that Cindy Crawford "oh, so natural" look. And even though I'm interested in fashion. . . and relationships. . . and how to lose ten pounds in five days just eating chocolate bars and broccoli, I'm still an intelligent woman who realizes when she and her fellow fashion followers (don't try to say that too fast, you'll sprain your tongue) are being scammed by washed-up celebrities and spoon-bendin' money grubbers to the tune of $240 an hour. We don't need all this flummery. Tell Cosmo, Glamour and the like to stick with what they do best--keeping America's women downright fashionable and proud to be so. And as for all those psychic ads: stick a black strip over all of them and mark it a big "Fashion DON'T." "A funny thing happened the other day when I got my copy of Warp 4... And I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. As many of you know, Warp 4 comes with a neat little folder on the Desktop titled 'Connections,' in which there are sub-folders for 'Printers,' 'Drives,' and (most important for this story) 'Web Sites.' This is a standard structure set up on every Warp 4 Desktop across the world. Inside the 'Web Sites' folder are further sub-folders containing, just as you would expect, URL objects pointing to common and interesting web sites covering many topics. Naturally there is an 'OS/2 Related Web Pages' folder..." "The movie Interview With A Vampire is far from pornography. Provide me with a scene in that movie where you see a penis being inserted into a vagina. It's not there. Provide me with a scene that depicts someone being raped. It's not there. What you are referring to is the vampire who plays with his food. Try to open your mind just a little here, I know it may be difficult for you and it may even hurt, but try just the same. A vampire feeds on humans, just as a lion feeds on gazelle, or a human feeds on cattle. You are unable to see things from the cow's point of view because you are the person eating the cow. You are also unable to see the perspective of the vampire because in that case, YOU are the cattle. The vampire, at least hypnotizes it's prey (the human) and provides pleasurable thoughts while bringing death. We have no such mercy for the cow. And don't give me this sentient being nonsense. Who are you to pass judgment on what being should live and what beings should die? You? A human? A race that can't even figure out that removal of the rain forests on this planet will destroy a large supplier of their natural supply of oxygen. A species that kills indiscriminately, those of not only its own race, but of species it 'think' are lessor beings (i.e. dolphins, whales, sharks, American bison). These are the people that should make life and death dicisions? I don't think so. I don't think the human race has advanced enough to take on that responsibiliy yet. Unfortunately, the human race has already picked up that responsibilty, even though they are not old enough to properly understand or deal with it. |