Month / February 2020

by Edward Champion

Why Bernie Needs Stacey Abrams as Vice President

Bernie is likely to be the Democratic frontrunner. But the recent South Carolina primary results have revealed why Stacey Abrams is his most ideal vice president.

Joe Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary tonight. As I write this, with 67% of the precincts reporting, Biden leads by 48.68%, with Bernie Sanders in second place at 19.3%, Tom Steyer in third place at 11.4%, Pete Buttigieg in fourth place at 7.9%, and Elizabeth Warren in fifth place at 7%.

First off, Biden’s win doesn’t negate Bernie’s present momentum as Democratic primary frontrunner. And it doesn’t discount Bernie’s ability to build broad and inclusive coalitions. Even in South Carolina, Bernie did very well among younger black voters in the exit polls. What he needs to do now is to appeal to older voters and, of course, more African-American voters. He has a strong partnership with Nina Turner and, nationally speaking, his numbers are up among blacks — with 20% describing themselves as “enthusiastic” about Bernie.

Warren’s campaign is nearly finished. Barely 10% in both Nevada and New Hampshire. Just 7% tonight in South Carolina. We’ll know more on Super Tuesday, but, despite an increasingly stronger profile at the debates, she’s just not getting through to voters. My prediction is that she will drop out of the race before Buttigieg and that this support will likely go to Bernie. Buttigieg has proven to be incredibly tenacious, but his track record prevents him from winning the broad support of black voters. On that front, Biden definitely has more of a shot nationally than Buttigieg ever will.

The likely reality is that the three top Democratic candidates will be Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. Of this trio, Bernie stands out as the most progressive candidate. And he has the support of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, and Rashida Tlaib. But to clinch the national race, Bernie needs someone who is (a) African-American, (b) a woman, (c) from the South, and (d) who can unite moderate liberals and progressives.

That person is Stacey Abrams.

If Bernie is the frontrunner, Abrams is the only logical choice for vice president. She’s been the deputy city attorney of Atlanta and an incredible figure in the Georgia General Assembly, single-handedly stopping Georgia Republicans from implementing a cable tax that would shift the burden to working people. She’s shown that she can reduce prison expenses without the crime rates going up. So she’s good with the numbers. Abrams’s powerful response to this year’s State of the Union address demonstrated that she was authentic, personable, and pragmatic, and showed that she genuinely cared about working people. In talking about her father hitchhiking home without a coat (he had given the coat to a homeless man), Abrams proved that she was better than Warren in talking about her working-class roots and tying this personal experience into the need for kindness and sacrifice.

What’s greatly appealing about Abrams is that she’s formidable — especially in her 2018 gubernatorial battle against Brian Kemp — but has always come across as a voice of empathy and reason. She is a natural born leader and she has said repeatedly that she wants to be President one day. So she’d definitely bring her A game as veep. Among moderates, she could be perceived as the gentler voice to Bernie’s bellowing. Plus, she’d clean Mike Pence’s clock in the vice presidential debate.

But aside from these terrific credentials, we’d also have the historic precedent of the first African-American woman running for vice president. Not only would this carry on Obama’s legacy (she earned his endorsement while running for Georgia governor), but this would also add a vital new context to Bernie’s proposed plans for Medicare for All, tuition free education, and guaranteed housing. Progress shouldn’t just be about adopting vital and significant policy changes. It also needs to ensure that the people in power reflect the people of America. This would also lay down the flagstones for Abrams becoming President — whether in a subsequent election or in the terrible event that Bernie, who is 78 years old, dies while serving as President.

It’s not enough to want Trump out of office. If the Democrats want to win, they need people who will be inspired enough to show up to vote. And in order to do that, the 2020 Democratic ticket needs the same hope that fueled Obama’s campaign in 2008. Bernie is close to this, but it’s clear that he cannot build a coalition on his own. He needs Stacey Abrams to be there with him.

by Edward Champion

The Overwritten Sentences of Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell’s mediocrity sets me off like a bull running loose in the streets of Pampolona. This “sentence master” is a fraud. Here are several reasons why.

There are awful writers out there who you can ignore or forgive. Because you can at least detect a whiff of growth with each new volume. And honestly who wants to be the guy stifling an artist’s evolution?

But every so often, you have the misfortune of reading the other type of awful writer. The awful writer whose rhythm is so off and whose observational approach is so obtuse and obvious and condescending that his work just fills you with rage. This type of awful writer is often anointed with undeserved literary royalty when the work itself offers little more than platitudes. He becomes so puffed up with vanity and certainty because today’s literary outlets are little more than fawning promotional hubs rather than thoughtful and genuinely useful venues for critical discussion. The awful writer believes his own press. And he gives the public more of the same. And the public, easily manipulated by savvy publicists and locked in the Ouroboros of social media groupthink, comes to believe that there’s something to the mediocrity.

Garth Greenwell is a writer I despise with the same venom that I apply to anyone who stands in the way of universal healthcare and solving income inequality. He is the Pete Buttigieg of literature: a smug huckster who seems so certain that he knows the world when he really doesn’t know much at all and will never be honest about his ignorance, a younger man inexplicably adopting the windbag cadences of a calcified septuagenarian. Like Buttigieg, Greenwell is a pretentious and out-of-touch bore who flexes his alleged erudition not from a place of genuine passion and curiosity and interest in people, but much like a Bernese Mountain Dog performing a spinning trick before a paying crowd. Step right up! Look at the man’s sentences! Pay no attention to that ungainly clause between the commas! Greenwell has been given a free ride by the literary establishment, largely because there is presently a vacuum for the type of culture-fueled gay literature that has been long practiced by the likes of Edmund White. Certainly we need more of this type of writing. But it needs to be good writing. And Greenwell ain’t it. He isn’t an Ed White. He’s certainly not a James Baldwin or a Christopher Isherwood or a Shyam Selvadurai. And he sure as hell isn’t a genius like Alan Hollinghurst. (Honestly, if you’re considering reading Greenwell, you’re better off reading everything Hollinghurst has written. That man is a true master of the sentence, not Greenwell.)

Greenwell’s overwritten and often unintentionally hilarious prose has been mistakenly heralded as top of the line. You have to give the people at FSG this much. They really know how to manipulate today’s literary bobbleheads. I’m likely feeling far more indignation about this than I should. But bad writing sets me off like a hopped up bull running loose in the streets of Pampalona.

Anyway, last week, I had the considerable displeasure of reading Garthwell’s latest volume, Cleanness. I found myself in a state of unceasing disappointment and a book-throwing fury I couldn’t seem to shake over how such literary bullshit got a pass from today’s overworked editors. Here are some examples of Garth Greenwell’s overwritten offenses:

“…as if he were deciding whether or not to pronounce a judgment he was on the point of making.”

If G. is already deciding, there is no need to tell us that he is “on the point of making” a judgment. This would be akin to maybe eating a bagel that I am on the point of chewing.

“I came to the center every morning I could, walking the streets as the city woke up…”

Pick a lane, Greenwell. If you’re walking the streets as the city wakes up, then we already know that it is morning.

“The room was lit by a row of small windows near the top of one wall, their panes clouded and stained with smoke, so that the light was strangely muted, as if steeped in tea.”

Who in the hell edits Greenwell? This is a lot of pretentious huffing and flexing just to impart that smoke-stained windows muted the light in the room. The superfluously precise detail of the “row of small windows near the top of one wall” gets in the way of the tea-steeped light. (I’ll give him some credit for the tea imagery!) William Gibson is better at hyper-specific description because it’s a vital part of his atmosphere. Greenwell, by contrast, reads like some dude tormented by descriptive desperation.

“G. laid his cigarettes on the table and rested the tips of his fingers on the pack, tapping it lightly.”

In an attempt to be clever and “literary,” Greenwell uses G.’s fingers as a metaphorical parallel to the cigarettes. But this sentence is a failure for its length and risibility. The image of a smoker tapping a pack of cigarettes with his fingers for five minutes like the late Neil Peart doing a drum solo is an unintentionally hilarious one.

“My satisfaction only deepened when G. continued, after our coffee arrived and we took a moment to add sugar and milk.”

I looked into his eyes, after I patted my left jeans pocket, my hand placed perpendicularly to my thigh, and felt around for my keys, which were shiny and jangling and nestled like a pig in a blanket. Come on. You obviously don’t care about my keys. You care about me looking into my lover’s eyes. But then this is the Greenwell formula: imply “literary” import by stretching a sentence beyond its natural limits. Honestly, who gives a toss about the sugar and milk? How is this important to the story? We’ve already established the rituals in this restaurant. This badly written bullshit gets me fuming.

“He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to a nub between two fingers.”

This is a lot of hot air just to get to the cigarette nub. We don’t need to know that the table is in front of him. Where the fuck else would the table be? Behind him? I mean, if Greenwell wants to chronicle an unusual Bulgarian practice of sitting in restaurants and reaching behind one’s back to eat your meal, then, dammit, I’m all ears. In fact, a goofy story along those lines would be far more interesting than anything Greenwell has ever written.

“I put both of my hands around the cup in front of me, taking a deep breath as I pressed my palms against what warmth was left, and then, when I could speak more calmly, What is the life you want, I asked.”

I must confess that this sentence made me laugh out loud. It reveals what a humorless dolt Greenwell is. It shows us how a badly written sentence — and, let’s face it, there isn’t a page in Cleanness that isn’t littered with these runts — can completely botch your efforts to establish atmosphere. The belabored attempt at sensual intimacy, followed by the superficial question, is unsuccessful because of the preposterous behavioral explanation. Greenwell might have had me if he had stuck with the hands around the cup. But he’s such a literary control freak that he has to tell us why the narrator does this. And when he does, we have to take a deep breath and say to ourselves, “Oh, Greenwell, you hopeless Harvard gasbag. You really don’t know people as well as you think you do.”

“He hunched his shoulders a little, as if to say I don’t know or maybe what does it matter, and then he started talking about something else, or what seemed like something else, making me feel again that I was on the wrong tack, that I had failed to sense or say what I should.”

More overwritten malarkey! Greenwell asphyxiates his readers with these superficial explanations of what behavior — in this case, G. hunching his shoulders — may mean as opposed to suggesting what it can mean and how these two characters perceive it. Good fiction requires ambiguity and speculation about characters. And we’re clearly not getting that here. Greenwell also commits the cardinal sin of explicitly telling us how the narrator feels rather than permitting his gestures to suggest feeling. For all of his syntactic engineering, Greenwell fails to understand that a good sentence needs to advance the story and our knowledge of the characters. The rhythm here is off, complete with the “something else” jumble that is completely superfluous and appears to exist here to pad out the page count. (Cleanness is 240 pages and the text has been typeset so that you get about thirty lines per page with notably larger page margins.)

“It was a tender gesture, and his voice was tender too as he said Kuchko, addressing me as if solicitously and tilting my head so that we gazed at each other face to face; his fingers flexed against my cheek, almost in a caress.”

Greenwell has been celebrated for his frank portrayals of intimacy. And while I’m happy to see more LGBTQ and BDSM relationships in mainstream literature, I cannot accept bullshit sentences. If you have tilted your lover’s head and you are gazing at each other, you are face to face. What other position would you be in? This takes us back to the eccentric table ritual in Bulgarian restaurants, which has captured my imagination so much that I may very well have to write a story about this myself. Also, why do we need the “as if solicitously” and “almost in a caress”? The adverb stands out like a sore thumb and the imagery here is pulled from the bodice-ripper cliche playbook. Greenwell is near incapable of writing a story without all this unnecessary commentary on what a gesture may mean. I suppose, it’s that privilege and Harvard background that makes this asshat assume that his readers are too impaired to imagine anything.

“I could feel his cock thicken against my cheek, then lengthen and lift: there had been no change in it during my long recitation, that catalog of desires I had named, but now at our first real touch he grew hard.”

If this sentence isn’t a finalist for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, I’ll be very surprised. This reads more like a description of Puppetry of the Penis than a love scene. And Greenwell’s verbosity, his compulsion to insert needless clauses, his catalog of desires (nay! his catalog of desires that he has written!), really destroys his good faith efforts to describe intimacy. But he certainly has a strong future ahead with these unpardonably flatulent sentences!

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this essay mistakenly referred to a “Burnese Mountain Dog” as a “Burmese Mountain Dog.” Reluctant Habits is grateful to reader George Jansen for pointing out this error.]

by Edward Champion

The Tragedy of Caroline Flack

Caroline Flack’s tragic suicide further exposes the terrible culpability of heartless newspaper hacks, profit-motivated reality TV producers, and our lack of empathy towards people suffering from mental health problems. What further horrors will it take for us to curb this?

Caroline Flack was a bright and bubbly presence on the British television scene. Her North London loquacity landed her into a prominent position as a presenter on such reality shows as Strictly Come Dancing and The Xtra Factor. Then came Love Island, which secured her status as a household name. In 2018, Love Island won a BAFTA award. But Flack, like many figures who entered the dark covenant of a well-paid celebrity resonating with a large audience, was someone who became a target for the tabloid newspapers — most prominently, The Sun, one of Rupert Murdoch’s rags. (After the tragedy that was to come, The Sun was deleting its most savage articles and, with high hypocritical gloss, pretending as if it had always been a Flack booster and that this vulgar meatgrinding outlet actually cared about the mental health and wellbeing of its targets.)

Despite all this, all seemed to be going well for Flack. At least on the surface. Until the police were called during the early morning hours of December 12, 2019. Neighbors had heard shouting and scuffling. And Flack’s boyfriend, a very tall 27-year-old tennis player named Lewis Burton, was believed to be the victim of assault by Flack. The media disseminated images of a bloody bed. Various reports speculated that the dried pools of blood had come from Flack smashing a glass, receiving a deep cut from a major vein. Both Flack and Burton were sent to the hospital to receive treatment.

It’s difficult to know precisely what happened or who was in the wrong, but we do have enough details to draw some conclusions. Burton reportedly shouted, “Bruv, I was normal until I met her,” to the police as he was being escorted to a waiting car. Neighbors reported six police cars and a police van showing up to Flack’s home in Islington. If the 999 tapes are ever released by the Crown, we will have a better idea of the tone. What we do know is that Burton told the emergency dispatcher that Flack was trying to kill him, that he had received a significant blow to the head from a lamp. “She is going mad,” said Burton. “Breaking stuff. I’ve just woken up. She’s cracked my head open.” Flack believed that Burton had been cheating on her. She could be heard screaming, “It’s all your fault! You’ve ruined my life!” Burton told the operator, “She tried to kill me, mate.” We also know that one of Flack’s ex-boyfriends, Andrew Brady, posted an NDA — dated March 14, 2018 — that he had been required to sign, with the hashtag #abusehasnogender. (Brady’s NDA posts have since been scrubbed from Instagram.) We also know that Brady had also called 999 when he grew concerned about Flack threatening to kill herself.

It’s clear that Flack, at the very least, suffered from significant mental health issues and suicidal ideation. In an October 14, 2019 Instagram post, Flack described how she kept many emotions to herself. “When I actually reached out to someone,” wrote Flack, “they said it was draining.” Flack, like many people who suffer from depression, said that “being a burden is my biggest fear.” It’s also clear that the television producers who profited from Flack wanted to keep these treatable problems under wraps, lest their big star be revealed as less than pristine. After all, the quest for money always takes precedence over a troubled person’s wellbeing.

But the alleged assault was enough for Flack to be dumped from Love Island, replaced by Laura Whitmore. Burton, for his part, publicly stated that he did not support prosecuting against Flack, who plead not guilty. The two had only been dating for less than a year, but we also know, from a September 3, 2019 interview with Heat Magazine, that Flack was pining for marriage and kids. The relationship with Burton may have been driven by certain manic qualities from Flack. In the Heat interview, a third party reported that Flack was “moving at 100 miles a minute” and the two were described as having “insane chemistry.”

The press — particularly The Sun — kept ridiculing Flack with impunity as she faced the burden of losing her primary gig and the indomitable attentions of the Crown Prosecution Service, who was set to begin trial on March 4th. It remains unknown if the CPS was motivated by significant evidence that they planned to introduce into court to prosecute against Flack or that the so-called “show trial” represented the bounty of landing a big fish. We do not know if Burton, like Brady before him, was coerced into silence by Flack’s handlers. But the only conclusion that any remotely empathetic person can draw here is that Flack needed significant help and that the intense scrutiny was too much for her to bear, as she posted on Instagram on December 24, 2019, and that this needed to stop — for the sake of Flack herself and all who loved her. Burton and Flack wanted to be together, but Flack was banned from having any contact with her. Burton defied this ban on Valentine’s Day, posting a message on Instagram reading “I love you.”

Two days later, Flack was dead. It was a suicide. She was only 40 years old.

Many celebrities have blamed the British media for contributing to Flack’s incredibly sad decline. I would respectfully suggest that these well-meaning people are thinking too small. This is the third suicide that Love Island is responsible for. Two previous contestants — Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019 — also took their own lives after bloodthirsty attention from the media. It is estimated that at least 38 people have died because of reality television. It’s clear that creator and executive producer Richard Cowles and producer Ellie Brunton showed no compunction as they lined their opportunistic pockets and are also partly to blame for these three deaths. They willingly preyed on the hopes and dreams of presenters and contestants, meticulously designing a television show that would be received by the Fleet Street scavengers with a sociopathic motivation for maximum ridicule. In other words, Cowles and Brunton engineered a show acutely harmful to human life. Love Island should be canceled immediately.

It is also clear that there is something significantly warped and cruel about the Crown Prosecution Service’s process. When you ban two people from having any contact with each other right before the holidays, and one of those people suffers from significant mental health issues and is already under intense scrutiny by News Group jackals, then this is callousness writ large. Even if the CPS had significant evidence to prove that Flack had willfully assaulted Burton, then it certainly had an obligation to ensure that Flack was safe and provided with care and not harmful to herself or others before carrying on with their trial.

One must also ask about the people who Flack surrounded herself with. Flack clearly had a history of erratic behavior. Did they do anything to get her treatment? Did they adjust her schedule so that she could get well? Or were they, like Cowles and Brunton, more driven by the sizable paychecks rather than the common decency of helping a troubled person to get well? Flack was tearing apart her home on December 12th. Was this the most violent she had ever been? How much of this violence could have been stopped if the television industrial complex had considered the greater good of getting a star presenter the treatment she needed?

I am not arguing that Flack’s alleged assault should never have been investigated. But, goddammit, nobody needed to die over this. Our moral obligation for mentally troubled people is to offer compassion and the opportunity to seek treatment so that they can live long, happy, and fruitful lives. But today’s cancel culture advocates are swift and casual in their gleeful zest for vituperation, refusing to comprehend that their targets are flawed human beings capable of contrition and self-examination. The people who have done wrong in the collective eye are truly doing their best to conquer their demons and curb their harmful behavioral patterns. But the media — The Sun and the unchecked harassment, the calls for permanent debasement, and the death threats that profit-motivated sociopaths like Jack Dorsey heartlessly refuse to curb on Twitter — is contributing to a culture where help and forgiveness are increasingly being eroded. How many people have to die before we address the problem? How many lives have to be destroyed before we acknowledge that giving people treatment and a second chance is also an essential and ineluctable part of social justice?

by Edward Champion

Andrew Yang: A Presidential Candidate Who Brought Empathy and Understanding Into the Race

Now that Andrew Yang has dropped out of the presidential race, I’m forced to conclude that he was an underrated candidate who was very good for the Democrats.

On Tuesday, Andrew Yang dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. He was only able to crack 2.8% of the vote during the New Hampshire primary and a mere 1% of the Iowa Caucus votes. But Yang’s presence represented an outlier sincerity that was sui generis, a welcome reminder that the Democratic frontrunner this year can possess a genuine empathy for the American people that can be worn on one’s sleeve without apology. Yang filled the void left by Beto O’Rourke’s exit with his off-kilter sincerity. He was an inspiring force for the “Yang Gang,” a group of supporters who were just as passionate as “Bernie bros” and justifiably excited to see an Asian American represented in a vital election race. He was the lone non-white regular on the debate stage after Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, and Cory Booker dropped out of the race. And after Bong Joon-ho swept the Oscars on Sunday with Parasite, it seems a great letdown to take in the dawning reality that Yang won’t be participating in future debates. In an age in which Jack Dorsey and his crew of idiots upholds racism and hateful xenophobia on Twitter through ineffectual algorithms incapable of parsing nuance and intent, we truly needed more voices like Andrew Yang to set the record straight on a very real disease that ails us.

Yes, Yang, with his lack of necktie and his MATH pin always clipped to his lapel, was socially awkward at times. During the third democratic debate, when Yang introduced a raffle where ten families would receive a “freedom dividend” of $1,000 each month for a year (he later expanded this to thirteen families), he was received with bafflement and modest ridicule. But this seems to me unfair. Unlike other millionaires who entered the race for ignoble and narcissistic reasons (**clearing throat** Bloomberg **spastic and theatrical coughing**), Yang really wanted to solve our national ills with wildly original ideas. He believed that he could cure systemic racism with his universal basic income concept, providing purchasing power to minorities. While this was a batty idea and while his tax policy was more concerned with implementing a value-added tax rather than addressing income inequality, there was nevertheless something appealingly immediate about his position. Was it really any less crazy than finding the essential money for Medicare for All or Elizabeth Warren’s plan to forgive $1.6 trillion of student debt? Yang smartly recognized that one of our long-standing national ills requires a swift remedy and that mere lip service — the empty and cluelessly myopic white privilege that one sees prominently with Pete Buttigieg — won’t cut it.

Yang also had a refreshing sense of humor about his campaign. He sang “Don’t You Forget About Me” at a campaign rally. He crowd surfed at another rally. He even skateboarded before an appearance. Andrew Yang brought an instinctive sense of fun that seemed beyond most of the other candidates, but his heart seemed to be in the right place. He never came across as wingnut as Marianne Williamson or as stiff as Tom Steyer or as cavalierly hostile to voters on the fence as Joe Biden. Even if you couldn’t see him as President, it was almost impossible not to like the guy.

Yang’s willingness to commit to positions of empathy and understanding in provocatively inclusive ways was one of his great strengths. Last September, when comedian Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live as a regular and fired after repugnantly racist remarks about Chinese Americans were discovered on YouTube, it was Yang who called for a dialogue and a second chance for Gillis. Yang remarked, “I thought that if I could set an example that we could forgive people, particularly in an instance where, in my mind, it was in comedic context or gray area, that I thought it would be positive.”

Yang didn’t really have the opportunity to display the full range of these subtleties. But we did get one moment during his final debate when he calmly responded to Buttigieg shallowly grandstanding about the collective exhaustion of people outside Washington: “Pete, fundamentally, you are missing the question of Donald Trump’s victory. Donald Trump is not the cause of all of our problems. And we’re making a mistake when we act like he is. He is the symptom of a disease that has been building up in our communities for years and decades. And it is our job to get to the harder work of curing the disease. Most Americans feel like the political parties have been playing ‘You lose, I lose, You lose, I lose’ for years. And do you know who’s been losing this entire time? We have. Our communities have. Our communities’ way of life has been disintegrating beneath our feet.”

While there’s certainly a very strong argument that present frontrunner Bernie Sanders has united variegated people by highlighting their stories, Yang had a way, unlike the other candidates, of going directly to the underlying heart of aggravated Americans in the heartland who altered their votes in the 2016 election after being fed up after years of condescending vacuity. It is them who the Democratic candidate must speak to. Yang’s inclusive approach to empathy seems well beyond Buttigieg’s platitudes, but it appears to be increasingly adopted by Amy Klobuchar (which partially accounts for her third place win in New Hampshire).

Andrew Yang opened up a promising road for people of color to speak to voters who are still knowingly or unknowingly practicing systemic racism. And for this not insignificant contribution, he’ll have a place in my heart. America may not have been ready in 2020 for Yang’s approach to empathy, forgiveness, understanding, and inclusiveness. But this nation will almost certainly be prepared for this in future presidential elections. It will take some time, but I think history will see that Yang was ahead of the curve.

by Edward Champion

Dating Script for the New York City Metropolitan Area Single

Valentine’s Day is coming up! And Reluctant Habits has consulted with its team of experts for this useful script on what to expect if you are a single in the New York City metropolitan area!

Install app.

Swipe left. Swipe left. Ooh! Swipe right. Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Left. Left. Right. Left. Right.

Why am I not getting matches? I’m a catch. Surely.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Come on.

No.

Left.

Well, maybe I can settle.

Right. Right.

Match!

“I am from Bulgaria looking for a husband. Please send me $400 through Paypal.”

Unmatch.

Left. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Ugh.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Send flirtatious opening line based on hasty yet astute study of profile.

Nothing back.

Left. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Take more time with flirtatious opening line based on hasty yet astute study of profile so as to stand out from other singles who are using the same opening line for all matches. Don’t be a fuckboi.

Engage in banter with dating prospect for approximately six quick rounds.

Suggest meeting in person. Make the prospect alluring. Pay highly specific compliments on qualities that other prospects won’t notice to stand out and close the deal.

Date scheduled. Exchange numbers.

Engage in modest banter by text off the app.

More swiping to play the field.

Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Engage in more banter. Schedule date with second match to combat feelings of nervousness and insecurity, which must not be present during the date. Engage in modest banter by text off the app.

Take break. Live life.

Engage in modest banter with second prospect to combat nervous feelings as you are on the way to first date.

More swiping.

Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Left. Right.

Arrive early at bar. Liquid courage.

Date arrives.

Early compliments to take pressure of date. You will almost never receive compliments back. In 65% of the cases, your date will show almost no interest in your life, no matter how interesting it is. So work yourself up in advance to ensure that you are confident and prepared to take the inevitable hit.

Begin questions. Be witty and charismatic to the best of your ability. Don’t talk about yourself too much. Ask questions of her. Show that you are a listener. Interlard with compliments and light and respectful touching to let her know you are interested and to see if she responds. Make offers to help out in bits of your date’s life. I mean, you can be as sincere as you want. You probably won’t be seeing your date again in about a month anyway.

Ignore buzzing from phone in pocket from second dating prospect. You can respond to her later, where you will go through the same damn process again and feel your hopes sink as dependably as it will happen here.

Become ashamed and self-aware that you are probably telling the same stories to your date, only because you know that your date probably isn’t interested in you for the long haul and, like you, at the very least, just wants to get intimate. Shame dissipates once you realize that your date is also telling the same stories and you are both here for the same reasons. You are both “looking for a relationship,” but not really. This is really just a pretext for sex, which you hope will be good.

If the date is not going well, politely thank date and leave with class. Let time pass before sending text reading “It was nice meeting you but I don’t think it was a match. Best of luck.” Sometimes you will think that the date is going well and you will be the one who receives this message. This is because your date also has a second prospect awaiting her and she has concluded that the “new” is better than the “old” and we are all hopelessly ensnared within the paradox of choice, the quest for the ideal that gets in the way of really knowing anybody. But at least we have lots of sex with different people along the way.

If the date is going well, go in for the kiss.

If you are making out with your date, respectfully suggest a nightcap or to show something at your apartment that reflects your interests. Engage in loud and amorous passion that you will probably both forget about in a few weeks. Don’t be selfish. Be sure your date has an orgasm. Always practice consent.

72% of singles in the New York City metropolitan area are “one and done” types. Both men and women. It is possible that you are not, but your date probably is. You may graduate to “friends with benefits,” especially if the sex is good, which will help take the edge off as you date and search in futility for someone who you can “be in a relationship” with. You may at least have someone to hook up with on a regular basis to allay loneliness.

Swipe left. Right. Right. Left. Right.

Match. See previous documentation for procedure.

Go on date with second prospect.

Just before date with second prospect, you will receive a text from first prospect paying you a backhanded compliment and saying that you are not a match. Said text will cause date with second prospect to backfire.

Uninstall app.

Drink heavily.

Commiserate with single friends.

Remind married and coupled friends how lucky they are and communicate just how hard it is to be single.

Try to “meet people organically” — that is, the way we used to meet before the dating apps. Rediscover, much to your horror, that dating apps have created a social construct where strangers aren’t as fond of flirting in person as they used to be. You will come to see that “meeting people organically” is more of a nostalgic idea rather than a widespread practice, as antediluvian as making mix tapes on cassette or using a Walkman in an age in which our phones can play and download damn near everything.

Once you have rebounded from the malaise and despair generated by the experience with your two failed dating prospects and once you have seen that “meeting organically” doesn’t really work anymore, and once some ridiculously optimistic faith in romance has returned, reinstall dating app.

Carry out subroutine again.

Try not to think that you are on a hamster wheel. Even though we all are. Try to sustain some belief that you will find a meaningful relationship. Try not to get angry at friends who, remarking upon your many fine qualities, ask you, “Why are you still single?” Yes, they mean well. But they aren’t aware of the script.

Date someone for two weeks.

Date someone for two days.

Date someone for a month if you’re lucky.

And so forth.

Die alone.

by Edward Champion

Moving Forward Happily Without Twitter

A more level-headed response concerning my Twitter exile.

I’ve had some time to revisit the events leading up to last night’s Twitter ban because I want to approach this with a clearer, less angrier, and more rational head.

It is often the practice of an inveterate addict to deny his own culpability. And I don’t want to do that here. It would be supremely dishonest if I didn’t offer a more reflective account of where I was at and how I behaved last night.

I am a highly sensitive person who responds very strongly to injustice. And I watched an act of pure beauty — Bong Joon-ho, a wonderful man from Korea deservedly winning multiple Oscars for Parasite, the best movie released last year — become completely sullied and slandered in an act of barbaric racism and gleeful ignorance from Jon Miller, an attention-seeking jackal who is now exploiting his Twitter Enemy of the Week position with unbridled hubris and calculated opportunism. Bong was attacked for not speaking English very well and for addressing the auditorium in Korean. Miller’s callous disregard of Bong as a human and as an artist, taken with his gleeful ignorance, sent me into a piping hot rage. Because this awful man had taken a steaming load upon three principles that I hold very dear to my heart — the power of art, the power of multicultural inclusiveness, and the power of creating opportunities for future voices — Miller’s tweet hit me very much like a jaw sinking its ravenous teeth into my leg. And I reacted like a caribou who had been happily dancing in a forest just before a sudden attack by a ravening wolf.

I realize that my replies to various people in the wee hours, in which I was suggesting that Jon Miller supporters then replying back to me with various vulgarities could serve as seconds to Miller during our proposed boxing match, were very much on the wild side. I had been drinking and, because I’ve lost some weight recently, the beer went to my head a little quicker than I anticipated. While I remain firm about my open boxing match offer to Miller, I’m still nevertheless responsible for the latter tweets, in which I started reciting Guns N’ Roses lyrics to random people. Were I able to respond to them, I would apologize. But I can’t. I can see now how, out of context, the Twitter Police would perceive me as a blithe maniac when we were discussing a hypothetical rather than an actual. It’s another reminder that our world now relates to each other with grandiose cartoonish notions rather than subtle nuances. I’m certainly not discounting my own responsibility here.

I’ve figured out how to put in an appeal to Twitter. Nevertheless, the Twitter ban may be the best thing that ever happened to me this year. Even if my account is somehow restored, and I don’t believe it will be, I do not think I want to return for a while. The irony is that, before my Twitter melee, I was actually getting along with people even in that wasteland. There was a nice sign hanging on the factory floor reading 180 DAYS WITHOUT A TWITTER BRAWL. But that dreadful medium, which preys on dopamine hits and loneliness, has amplified my worst flaws so that my considerable strengths are occluded. That place turned me into a crazed animal last night, much as it turns the finest minds of our planet into insane monsters.

Friends have told me for a long time that Twitter is not good for me. And I suppose I had to blow up the bridge in my own ridiculous and dependably self-destructive way to get it out of my life. But it is now pretty evident that I cannot control myself very well on Twitter, especially when alcohol is involved. The instant rush to be first rather than right. The tendency to destroy someone before you have heard the full story. How is any of this good? So I’m going to move forward with a life without Twitter. I suspect it will be a happier and more peaceful one. Besides, I have an audio drama to finish.

by Edward Champion

I Was Banned from Twitter for Protesting a Racist Man Named Jon Miller

Twitter has banned me for speaking out against a conservative racist. This sends a clear message that Jack Dorsey is in the business of upholding fascism and promoting hate and racism.

This morning, I learned that my Twitter account was permanently suspended and that I was banned from the social media platform because I had the temerity to express anger and outrage towards a racist.

A man with a blue checkmark by the name of Jon Miller, a conservative “White House correspondent for BlazeTV,” tweeted an insulting, cruelly disparaging, and racist message mocking the great filmmaker Bong Joon-ho after he delivered one of his Oscar speeches in Korean. Miller’s disturbingly xenophobic words, which are still published on Twitter as of Monday morning, proceeded to claim that “these people are the destruction of America.” This is language that echoes anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany and any number of hate groups singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Words that need to be strongly protested. Even conservative Piers Morgan protested it. Miller’s tweet was rightly ratioed, but thousands of people still retweeted and favorited this vile expression. Miller, in other words, willfully promulgated hate.

As someone who is a big proponent of democracy and multiculturalism and as someone who has a number of Korean friends, some who greatly helped me during a time of crisis in my life, it was my moral duty as a citizen to lodge my protest against this in the strongest possible terms. Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar win for Parasite is not only a historical and artistic triumph. It also rightly sends a message to Korean Americans that their dreams are possible. By any objective standard, this is a good thing and a beautiful advancement of humanity. For someone to shit on this — as Miller did — is to besmirch the very purpose of why and how we evolve as a species.

So I got angry on Twitter. One cannot stay silent when anyone is demeaned and stripped of his dignity like this. But as far as Twitter is concerned, calling someone “a xenophobic, anti-tolerance, anti-art fuckface” — as I did — for expressing such hateful language is “abuse and harassment.” Moreover, there is no appeal for Twitter’s decision. The appeal link that I received by email did not work.

On Twitter, I also challenged Miller to a ten round boxing match to see if he wanted to settle this matter like a man. I did this for a number of reasons. First, I’ve been on a fitness kick and it seemed like a playful way of opposing a racist. Second, my challenge offered a corporeal method of resolving a national cancer that needs to see more resolution in the real world. Racism has long been buried underneath the surface of this nation. And if Miller wants to claim that an entire race is “destroying America,” then let us see if he has the stones to say this in public and in the ring. If Miller still wants to take me up on my challenge, then I will be more than happy to sign up for boxing lessons immediately and get in the best shape of my life. That’s how much I care about fighting racism and intolerance. I’m willing to put my body on the line. It is my position that, when you are confronted with racism, you must not stay silent about it and you have an obligation to fight it.

My playful boxing challenge also falls into a great tradition of writers boxing other writers — seen with Craig Davidson challenging Jonathan Ames to a boxing match, a match, incidentally, that I happened to announce. I’m sure that this probably factored into Twitter’s decision. Still, challenging someone to a boxing match does not involve “wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical pain” — the codex behind Twitter’s rules. The decision to engage in a fight is on Miller. I have challenged him. He is free to take me up on the challenge. I’m willing to put myself on the line and in the ring, but my ultimate wish or hope would be to see Miller acknowledging and confronting and sincerely apologizing for his flagrant racism and unacceptable xenophobia. That’s the goal here. Since Miller proved intransigent on Twitter, I was forced to take him up with my boxing challenge. Even if Miller decides not to box me, then the point has been made. Unable to walk back his hateful remarks, he is revealed for the coward that he is.

What all this does tell us is that Twitter is firmly on the side of the fascists and the racists and the doxxers and the misogynists and the Nazis and the authoritarians. Jack Dorsey’s business model is to promote hate and to block anyone who pushes strongly against it. Because hate and sustaining the status quo of hate and racism is very good for Dorsey’s business model. It’s lining his pockets right now. My words to Miller were no different than the words that got the great David Simon (temporarily) banned in 2018. As Simon put it in a blog post shortly after his suspension:

The correct response to racism, to white supremacy, to anti-Semitism, to slander and libel is to:

1. Tell the fucker he’s a piece of shit and should die of throat clap.

2. Block him. And in doing 1. and 2. you have marked the spot for the sane and sentient on Twitter, much as any good infantryman who wanders into a minefield marks the Claymores for the rest of the platoon. It’s just good soldiering, Jack.

My Twitter ban may very well be a blessing in disguise and should give me more time to practice my guitar and the new set of harmonicas I just purchased. But it is still part of a national disease that is silencing and squelching voices who speak out against hate, racism, and fascism. A few friends texted me this morning about what happened and claimed my ban to be “a badge of honor.” But I don’t see this as honorable at all. I see this as a deep stain against social justice and a blow against fighting for what’s objectively right. I see this as Jack Dorsey willfully prioritizing hate before justice and profit before human decency. But then we all know that Jack Dorsey has no soul. We know that this shallow profiteer met with Trump last year. If he possessed any qualities of actual decency and if he was truly invested in true discourse, then he would understand precisely what’s at stake here. If we cannot speak out against racism and human indignity, then how will we be able to speak out against any other significant human ills that crop up in the next few years? Especially if Trump manages to win a second presidential term and the Senate remains under control by the Republicans. You don’t win battles by keeping silent or by staying neutral against a gleeful hate merchant like Jon Miller. You call them out for the repugnant atavists and venal promoters of bigotry and intolerance that they are. You challenge them to boxing matches if you have to.

UPDATE: This morning, Jon Miller celebrated the fact that Twitter ruled his racist tweet as something that did “not identify any violations of the Twitter Rules.” Twitter, in other words, is clearly in the practice of upholding racism.