Thought Roulette

• I am sorry to say (rather belatedly) that Al Weisel, better known to many as Jon Swift, has died. It's hard to pull off satire when reality itself is so absurdist, yet he frequently did it.

• I saw Jon Stewart's piece on Chat Roulette, another one of those Intert00b "trends" that I cunningly avoid by never, never watching news programs. (Speaking of satire, when Wolf Blitzer and the CNN bobbleheads unveiled their Twitter "analysis" of the State of the Union...well, even Voltaire folded his cards. Lest you think I actually watched the CNN vomitorium,* I saw that, too, on The Daily Show.) As surprises exactly no one who would give it a moment's thought, what was supposed to be a way to use the internet to get all interconnected and whatnot turned instead into another Penis Forum. It's a new and exciting way for men to broadcast high-def video images of their genitalia, thus fulfilling some kind of primal urge which I frankly do not understand. My first thought, upon hearing about Chat Roulette, was: "That sounds lame" because most people are, let's face it, pretty boring, and you have to meet a lot of them from day to day anyway. So why go out of your way? My first thought was not, "Hey, now strangers can be unwittingly duped into seeing my vagina! Won't that be TOTALLY AWESOME for them?"

• And so we see, class, that men and women are different from one another. Perhaps an effective deterrent for this would be a lot of women going online prepared to point and laugh, but we're busy, you know? Hm. In fact, maybe if we get enough men doing this simultaneously, we can have a world-wide coup d'etat by The Ladies, and get some shit done around here.

• Which brings me to the next chamber in my Thought Roulette, which is the weird way that Douthat and sundry other conservative men consistently invoke The Femininist Menace, a global force of shrieking harpies armed with castration tools and restraining orders and sexual harassment suits. Yet when I look around I see that even among my liberal and educated female friends there is not a feeling of similarity, much less solidarity. And where Friedan and Friends, bless them, had some hours when the kids were at school and the husband was at work, during which they could contemplate their suburban anomie and then get together for coffee, well, the times, they have a'changed. Hard though it may be for these conservative men to understand, most women don't call themselves feminists anymore, and also don't really give a shit about them or their transparent toddler-like attempts to get attention through provocation ("Didn't you hear me? I said Hillary was shrill! Nyah nyah nyah.").

• This lack of attention or regard from The Givers of Life/Witholders of Sex/Substitute Mommy Figures is, of course, what drives these guys nuts (and, possibly, drives them to put their penises on Chat Roulette). When I read Brooks or Douthat, I am reminded of the invariably unattractive conservative boys in the political science courses I taught, most of whom got a C-. And I wonder about retroactive grade changes.
  

*The Intert00bs inform me that "vomitorium" means a passageway in a theatre "situated below or behind tiers of seats through which people can spew out at the end of a performance" and not, as I meant to imply here, a place where people go to force feed themselves and then regurgitate in the presence of others. Ah, well. Details.