Barack Obama Naked

In the inter-war period, an American communist organizer decided for some reason to open his speech with the above. It’s a line so preposterous that if someone told me the speaker was actually a free market fundamentalist in disguise out to make Communism look ridiculous, I would have no trouble believing them. Such is the stuff of this post. Although Poe’s Law was postulated in reference to fundamentalist Christianity, its applications elsewhere are legion. Roughly, Poe’s Law holds that extremism and parodies of extremism are indistinguishable. The tanned, thickly-accented Guidismo of the inhabitants of MTV’s Jersey Shore and the sheltered, fact defying logic and beliefs of the Marxist-inspired extreme left fit the bill perfectly.

I had heard that Jersey Shore is a show best watched with enormous quantities of alcohol; with rational thinking intact, one might be liable to ask why people like this exist, how people like this manage to live free from scorn, and other existential questions that can only serve to frustrate and provoke Guido-like violence. So, brain wrapped in a warm cocoon of gin, I subjected myself to it. The premise of the show revolves around a group of Guidos and Guidettes living in a beach house on the Jersey Shore (apparently the Mecca of all things Guido) and going to clubs, working, working out, getting tan, and getting fucked up. MTV really went out of its way to find the most archetypal Guidos: though not all of them have hideous Brooklyn Fades as I had hoped, the things they do are pure Guido. Things like referring to oneself in the third person as “The Situation.” Things like pulling up one’s shirt to reveal six pack abs. Things like being obsessed with one’s Italian heritage despite being about as authentically Italian as a Pizza Hut. And, of course, things like fighting, hooking up with tanned Guidettes (themselves fairly hilarious, but nothing next to the fine male specimens the show’s producers picked out), drinking tons of protein shakes and applying dangerous amounts of product to their hair. In sum, the show’s cast look and act how one would look if they went as a Guido for Halloween.

At the same time, Jersey Shore gives me reason to believe that MTV is not, in fact, the massive black octopus slowly suffocating our culture and values that I once considered it. In almost all of their reality programming, MTV focuses on degenerate dead-enders that even the most deluded and vacuous teenager would have difficulty admiring. Perhaps the executives in charge, in order to atone for years of Jackass, now choose the most outlandishly horrific people to base series around as a means of critiquing our worst excesses. Jersey Shore specifically and MTV generally have become America’s most trenchant cultural critics. We look into the mirror provided by MTV and are confronted with all the excess and idiocy that our culture can provide.  Sometimes it’s revolting, other times it’s enthralling, but at all times it really makes you think about just how Pauly D, Snooki and indeed all of us have fallen from the American dream. At the same time, though, the people in Jersey Shore’s reliance on – and celebration of – all the fruits of our capitalist society to such absurd degrees is part of what makes them appear so ridiculous. Whatever authentic identities they may have had is lost under layers of spray-on tan and whey protein-fueled muscles. Capitalism paradoxically helped create the problem and points towards a solution – but it’s difficult to escape the notion that we wouldn’t be cursed with people like these living next to us if it were not for capitalism to begin with.

Or maybe that’s how I would have felt if I could actually understand anything that the bloggers and commenters on the Maoist-Thirdworldist-Whateverist blog Monkey Smashes Heaven were saying. Near as I can tell, they have taken the Maoist concept of people’s war – peasants encircling the cities and taking over, some other stuff, communist utopia – and applied it on a global scale, where the first world is the city and the third world is the peasant or village or whatever. Most of the rest of what’s being said is so incomprehensible and arcane it was lost on me. What wasn’t lost on me was the irony that is people who probably live in the first world blogging about how the first world needs to be destroyed on fucking wordpress. You have really never seen a flame war until you’ve seen a flame war between the denizens of the extreme Marxist left. Where else could you come across such priceless gems:

Bad-jacketing is itself pig work: it obviously serves the imperial state. But of course serving the imperial state is exactly what Davidson does, despite his pretense of being a “communist.” As was mentioned above, he openly kkkollaborates with Obomba or the Dumbokkkratic Party. What sort of “communist” buys into the U$ empire?

Well, it’s finally happened. Two of the most frequent and egregious molesters of the English language – Marxists with stilted, jargony prose and the sophomoric, name-calling American grassroots political activist – have met, had passionate sex, and birthed the Marxist blogger.

Some of their positions are so bizarre it’s difficult to believe they are serious. They defend, for instance, Professor Ward Churchill’s right to free speech that has supposedly been infringed, but cheer when tinpot third world dictators crush dissent within their own borders. For the bloggers at MSH, the senseless murder of dissenters or suppression of free speech is not inherently wrong, it’s just wrong when the first world does it. How exactly they arrive at that conclusion escapes me, but the answer is surely somewhere in some text written by Mao Zedong, who they invoke religiously in every debate. It’s tempting to believe that some of the bloggers are actually just pulling elaborate jokes on the readers – provided that one is sufficiently familiar with the arcane post-Marxist theory that they are talking about, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull off. And how are we supposed to take pictures like these seriously? But near as I can tell, they are serious. Thankfully, adherents to their weird ideology will probably never surpass an amount that can be counted on two hands, but as with Guidos, it’s still somewhat disturbing to know that actual people like these exist.

I seriously doubt any Guidos or renegade Maoists will find this post. If some do, then I expect to be called either a hater or a crypto-Trotskyist bourgeoisie wrecker. And those are appellations I’d wear proudly. In an era in which it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate reality from non-reality, it’s not like those labels mean anything anyway. I’m not even sure they ever did.