Dirtbags and Bluenoses
Elephants and donkeys are out. Welcome to the new American divide // Also: smoking an ounce for Stephen Hawking, or, shitposting toward utopia
In college, two of my friends started a club called Creative Minds Driven to Overcome. Sort of sounds like an interest group for artistically inclined people with disabilities, but it wasn’t. The club hosted social events to fundraise for philanthropic causes: $5 at the door to tie-dye shirts, or pickle vegetables, or participate in a Bob Ross painting night. One year, they donated their proceeds to the Rukmini Foundation, which funds the education of poor teenage girls in rural Nepal. I forget the exact figures, but the dollar amount required to keep a single Nepali girl in school for a year was shockingly low, and the club’s donation covered several. Without that donation, it’s conceivable that one or all of those girls would’ve had to drop out of school to help support their family through domestic or agricultural labor. Often what comes next for these girls is being forced into an early marriage. So, Creative Minds Driven to Overcome contributed, in a small but tangible way, to breaking the cycle of poverty and gender inequality in Nepal.
My friends could’ve named their club anything. Why Creative Minds Driven to Overcome? Well, they started with the acronym — CMDO — and reverse engineered the name, and this was the best they could come up with. CMDO, you see, had a secret meaning. To the club’s founders, it stood for “cut my dick off.” The name was reflective of their mission statement:
CMDO is an education based philanthropy club focused on raising awareness and funds for specific charities in a ~fun~ way!
For my friends, ~fun~ tends to come simmered in a vat of absurdism and irreverence, garnished with a few layers of irony.
One of the two founders didn’t have a Facebook before the rise of CMDO, but since the club organized events on the platform, he had to make one. So he did, under the alias “John Dickerson,” an alter-ego he soon started bringing to life. Dickerson was an avid fan of Tom MacDonald, the pro-wrestler turned rapper, whose songs have titles like “Fake Woke,” “Snowflakes,” and “No Lives Matter.” He was also obsessed with another Canadian rapper, Unkle Adams, who at one point in his life was funding production costs by opening lines of credit to buy dozens of TVs and then reselling them at a profit. In addition to his eccentric music taste, Dickerson was an active member of Facebook pages devoted to flat earth conspiracies and anti-wind mill activism — e.g., Citizens for Clear Skies — from which he would pull memes like these to post on his timeline:
There was no purpose for any of this, save for the amusement of the founder and a few of his friends. Likewise, much about CMDO, right down to its name, existed mostly for the purpose of self-entertainment, and the club’s founders were entertained by bizarre and often insensitive things. The tie-dying, the pickling, the Bob Ross painting — these event ideas were all compromises between the founders and the board members, the latter of whom had less of an appetite for unhinged shenanigans. Had it been up to the founders, most events would likely have been a bit further beyond the pale.
At least twice, though, they talked the board into organizing events more to their liking. Once, they came up with a list of Jack Ass-style challenges — ranked in order of pain/discomfort involved, higher ranking challenges unlocked through costlier donations — for the board members to do on a Facebook livestream. By the end of the livestream, one of the founders was puking off-camera after consuming, in rapid succession, an entire raw white onion and a gallon of whole milk. But even this lunacy kneels at the altar of their true masterpiece.
Shortly after Stephen Hawking passed away in March of 2018, the founders were struck with inspiration. They would throw a fundraising party in Hawking’s honor. The Facebook event page was titled “CMDO Presents: One Last Fuck,” as the party was to be the club’s last fundraiser for the spring semester. This was the promotional flier:
The detail page made clear that this was a BYOO (bring your own ounce) event. A bunch of people showed up at a club member’s apartment, which CMDO had stuffed to the gills with liquor, and everyone got blasted in the name of a freshly deceased, wheelchair-bound, world-historical genius. To people like me, this is fucking hilarious. To others, it’s puzzling, needlessly offensive, or just plain stupid. But unlike John Dickerson’s anti-wind mill memes, all this buffoonery served a greater purpose: the “vigil” raised enough money to keep a poor Nepali girl in school for a few months. And, in my mind, that material difference matters much more than how any Pitt undergrad may have felt about the fact that a club secretly named “cut my dick off” was making light of Stephen Hawking’s death to boost proceeds for a fundraiser. CMDO’s dirtbag aesthetics were trivial in the light of its philanthropic impact.
The dirtbag aesthetic — which “eschews civility” in favor of “subversive vulgarity” — increasingly feels like an important dividing line in American life. It’s most closely associated with the “dirtbag left” — snarky Bernie Bro types like the Chapo Trap House hosts. But I think it’s become something bigger, an amorphous cultural force that transcends political subdivision. More and more often I see people with drastically different politics affiliating with each other on social media, in the blogosphere, and on podcast circuits. These are people who seem to have only one thing in common: their love of subversive vulgarity, which implies a disdain for the politically correct aesthetics of the social justice left.
At face value, for instance, it’s bizarre to see Anna Khachiyan featured as a guest on The Fifth Column podcast, or her podcast, Red Scare, getting a shoutout from Mike Solana on Pirate Wires. The Fifth Column fellas loosely identify as libertarians, and Solana is a venture capitalist with vaguely right-leaning politics. Red Scare was once an epitome of dirtbag leftism. The ladies have all but abandoned substantive politics and no longer consider themselves leftists, but even so, they have little in common with TFC and Solana. The latter are the type to earnestly hold up America — past and present — as a deeply flawed but ultimately positive force on the world stage. The Red Scare ladies are more of a mind to sneer at our legacy and question the merits of the entire American project. But they all publicly despise the puritanical atmosphere of the social justice left and they all espouse some form of subversive vulgarity. Seemingly for that reason alone, they’re willing to associate with one another online.
I love TFC, Solana, and Red Scare, but even I can admit that this all feels a little backwards. Overlooking substantive disagreements because of aesthetic resonance? Doesn’t it make more sense to cast aside aesthetic differences for the sake of substantive agreements? Maybe, but that’s not how things work in post-Trump America, where politics seems to be slowly dissolving into aesthetics.
Here’s a lightly edited excerpt from a piece I found on Freddie deBoer’s latest Subscriber Writing post:
I’m on a train working its way from Yogyakarta to Jakarta in Indonesia. It cuts through small towns and rice paddies, and from my window I see laundry drying on the line and tanks collecting rainwater on rooftops, mosques and schools and people in conical hats working the fields. I’m in a leather seat, drinking tea, passing through.
I’m trying to reconcile what I see from my window with American cultural conversations. Here, in the villages, people my age look twenty years older and wear a life of back-breaking labor on their faces. Back home, somebody is insisting J.K. Rowling’s words are violence and that Twitter makes them feel unsafe; that books about queer families have no place in school libraries…
So little of the average American’s time is concerned with matters of basic survival, with the simple business of procuring material necessities. And for many of us, this reality is unaffected by electoral politics; administrations come and go, chambers of congress switch from red to blue, but our lives of material comfort plod along largely unchanged. In our hyper-partisan age, it’s easy to overestimate the concrete differences between life under Republican versus Democratic governance. If squabbles between the two major parties feel trivial from a train snaking through rural Indonesia, that’s because a lot of American politics is comparatively trivial. We inherited a relatively functional set of institutions, so we can afford to spend time policing language and the contents of K-12 libraries. We can afford to focus on aesthetics to the exclusion of material politics.
But for the people doing back-breaking labor in Indonesian rice paddies, or the impoverished Nepali families who are forced by poverty to take their daughters out of school and marry them away, contemporary American political obsessions must seem pretty goddamn petty. All our endless babble on social media, in the blogosphere, on the podcast circuits — it must seem sickeningly divorced from material reality, the deranged behavior of decadent toddlers in adult bodies.
If the 13 year old girl in rural Nepal gets to stave off forced marriage with another year of schooling, who fucking cares how the money was raised? On the flip side, let’s imagine the social justice left had a policy agenda that, if enacted, would put an end to the suffering of America’s downtrodden (humor me). If that were the case, I wouldn’t give two shits if the movement was led by a bunch of bluenose losers. I guess, ultimately, this is a plea for everyone — dirtbags and bluenoses alike — to care less about aesthetics and more about material impact.
But if I have to choose, I’m team dirtbag all the way. Like the song says: I’d rather smoke an ounce for Stephen Hawking with the sinners than pickle vegetables with the saints.
Loved this piece so much. I used to be an entrenched member of the social justice left. Over the years, I’ve watched my ideological peers prioritize individual identity over true betterment of the collective. They’d use activism to shame and moralize people, making otherwise good people feel isolated from their own political community. At a very base level, it’s just psychologically stupid lol- make people feel hated by their own and they will undoubtedly seek community elsewhere, even among the fundamentally different. But in a macro sense, it’s been detrimental to effecting change. Strength in numbers, and when you sow seeds of division rather than meeting people where they’re at, and helping them get down for the cause, they become apolitical or nihilistic. All that said……. I’m a patron of Red Scare and a total shitposter but I still have hope for goodness??? Hahah