The Apatow Aesthetic – Examining The Loss of Adulthood in 21st Century Network Society — Part 1

 

The socially defined life period known as adulthood is a modern conception that emerged with the rise of developmental psychology in the late 19^th century. While the lived biological understanding of an adult (a person that is of reproductive age) has been rather explicit for centuries, the term adulthood has been harder to interpret, as it implies both legal status and a psychological state of being. For decades, developmental psychologists have been interested in formulating theories of psychological development to help legitimize and promote the discipline of psychology within the biological and social sciences. Over time, the basic distinction between child and adult (the ability to reproduce) has been replaced by newly proposed stages of development, which are both ambiguous and unstable. Similarly, the transitions between these seemingly abstract stages are also hard to define, as are the various new theories and case studies that have surfaced in response to their rapidly evolving developmental structures.

During the 20^th century, two scholars in particular, G. Stanley Hall, and Erik Erikson, both proposed new age-based theories of development that were instrumental in obscuring the transition from childhood to adulthood. G. Stanley Hall first popularized the term adolescence around 1904, citing the implementation of child labor laws and mandatory elementary education for creating a new period of human experience between the ages of 14-24.[1] During the 1950’s and 1960’s, Erik Erikson introduced a theory of psychosocial development, which further divided human development into eight distinct life-stages. Erikson positioned adolescence between the ages of 13-19; followed by a longer period he called “young adulthood” which spanned from ages 20-39.[2] Most recently, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett introduced the phrase “emerging adulthood” in 2000, which categorizes the experience of young people (between the ages of 18-26) into a distinct period that exists separately between the psychosocial stages of adolescence and adulthood.[3] Yet, like most of the research methods used in the social sciences, Arnett’s new theory relies mostly on qualitative statistical data, and longitudinal case studies built around a narrowly defined social perspective as well as linear perceptions of space and time based on the mechanical clock of the Industrial Age.[4] While Arnett’s research presents significant raw data through demographic pie graphs, charts, and poll-based surveys, his textbooks are limited, and simply don’t capture the textures of lived reality the way that cultural texts can. So while we should acknowledge Arnett for at least trying to put a name to this complex and ongoing phenomenon he calls emerging adulthood, we should strive to push forward, instead of backwards, and let Apatow’s films help us recognize, or at least prepare us for the possibility that the nostalgic vision of a stable mid-century heteronormative adulthood is no longer psychologically, and economically possible in the 21^st century global network.

The Apatow aesthetic, I argue, conveys a multiplicity of rhythms that reflect the inseparable relationship between lived and mediated experience in contemporary social life. His films are distributed by major Hollywood studios like Universal and Columbia, and he’s enjoyed a longstanding relationship with HBO, which currently features the series GIRLS, produced by Apatow in collaboration with writer/creator Lena Dunham. His diegetic narratives are driven by 21^st century digital culture, and the various socio-technological conflicts, which have now become part of everyday life. Meanwhile, when examining his resume, critics tend to focus mostly on Apatow’s affiliation with the so-called Bromance Comedy sub-genre, causing them to drastically overlook the role that media and technology play in shaping his comedic universe. For Apatow, social tensions are media tensions. Contemporary social life is articulated through media, and Apatow’s characters are discouraged by the political and economic realities stemming from decades of neoliberal privatization and the rise of what media scholar Manuel Castells calls “Network Society.”

Castells’ The Rise of Network Society (1996) cites the shift from mechanical to electronic telecommunication networks in the latter half of the 20^th century for transforming the social perception of time and space into a nonlinear and “flexible” experience. Building on the earlier work of Marshall McLuhan, Castells sees modern network society as “the constitution of a new culture based on multimodal communication and digital information” that has created a paradox, which, to use McLuhan’s words, both “extends” and “amputates” human senses.[5] While McLuhan was undoubtedly optimistic about the possibilities of electronic media, Castells is somewhat more ambivalent, or even troubled by the anti-social, and often-oppressive trends that have emerged from decades of neoliberal privatization fueled by the instantaneous commodification of time. In particular, he worries that age-based social practices, which have traditionally been determined by mechanical time, have become radically disrupted within the new global Network:

 

I propose the hypothesis that network society is characterized by the breaking down of the rhythms, either biological or social, associated with a notion of a life-cycle…Time as a sequence was replaced by different trajectories of imagined time that were assigned market values. There was a relentless trend towards the annihilation of time as an orderly sequence, either by compression to the limit, or by the blurring of the sequence between different shapes of future events. The clock time of the industrial age is being gradually replaced by a new concept of timeless time: the kind of time that occurs when in a given context such as the network society, there is a systemic perturbation in the sequential order of the social practices performed in this context.[6]

This “systemic perturbation” or what Castells’ calls an arrhythmia will serve as an underlying paradigm for an interdisciplinary analysis of what I’m calling the Apatow aesthetic. Apatow’s ambiguous relationship to adulthood and subsequent anxiety over the future registers the unraveling of an orderly process of aging, as well as the collapse of the public safety net. I argue that this “breaking down of rhythms associated with the life-cycle” is precisely what is at play in Apatow’s multi-media universe. His narratives revolve around the chaotic uncertainty of coming of age in the arrhythmia of contemporary network society, and his characters are overwrought with anxiety over feeling stuck or caught up in the transition from “the clock time of the industrial age” to the timeless time of the 21^st century. Films like This is 40, Knocked Up, and The 40 Year Old Virgin are all built around these “systemic perturbations in the sequential order of social practices,” specifically social practices that traditionally represent adulthood: marriage, parenthood, full-time employment, and a financially secure retirement; all of which have been radically disrupted during the course of Apatow’s career. Knowing that the traditional aging process (life-span or life-cycle) is built around the “clock time of the industrial age,” I argue, Apatow’s transgressions merely function as a reaction to the dissolution of a linear trajectory from childhood to adulthood that has been gradually replaced by timeless time. The Apatow aesthetic highlights the chaotic meandering of an unspecifiable collection of young people (both male and female) in search of financial stability, and personal autonomy. His characters are in constant conflict with an idealistic vision of adulthood that may no longer exist after decades of public divestment under policies of neoliberal capitalism starting in the 1970’s.[7]

In terms of gender and sexuality, Castells notions of social arrhythmia and timeless time also help us better understand how identity functions in Apatow’s world. Apatow’s reputation as the “King of the Bromance,”[8] misleads scholars to automatically associate his work with the regressive implications of the Bromance label, often limiting critical examinations of his movies to the narrow confines of the traditional Hollywood Romantic Comedy. Thus, the potential to create new social meanings through close textual analysis is greatly diminished, and all the hysterical irony in Apatow’s queer homosocial bonding gets lost in a sea of scathing reviews, which accuse his films of excluding women, and promoting “underlying feelings of homophobic disgust” towards homosexuality.[9] However, we can cross-examine the validity of such critiques by appealing to the work of Eve Sedgwick, well-known Queer theorist and co-founder of the Queer Studies discipline.

Sedgwick’s early work helps us resituate the often-narrow debates on Apatow’s use of gender and sexuality. In the context of her famous book on homosocial desire, where male bonding is accompanied by “intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality,” homosociality operates as a mechanism used to reinforce a “structural patriarchy built around obligatory heterosexuality.”[10] In fact, Sedgwick claims that homophobia is not only necessary, but also required in such patriarchal structures, which might explain why Apatow’s so-called Bromances so easily attract accusations of homophobia and misogyny from cultural critics and movie reviewers. Still, it’s important to note that towards the end of her life, Sedgwick herself had grown weary of these types of negative attacks, which only produced what she called paranoid readings or “depressive readings of cultural texts marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety… which reveal not how homosexuality works, but how homophobia and heterosexism work.” Rather, Sedgwick advocates moving away from the paranoid readings to instead, focus on finding what she calls “reparative readings,” to “repair” or assemble new constellations of possible meanings “into something like a new whole,” which she emphasizes, “is not necessarily like any preexisting whole.” [11] For Sedgwick, reparative readings encourage “positive textual interpretations,” that seek to expand interdisciplinary boundaries and mobilize new scholarly discourse, rather than merely attacking and negating texts based on “a hermeneutics of suspicion.”[12] Sedgwick’s call for reparative readings mobilizes new interpretations of the Apatow aesthetic that repair or assemble new textual examinations of contemporary gender and sexuality. In return, these readings may help rescue Apatow from accusations of homophobia and misogyny, which constantly plague his reputation as a filmmaker.

While it may be partially true that Apatow’s uniquely queer instances of homosocial bonding function to restore “ the structural patriarchy in the aftermath of 2^nd and 3^rd wave Feminism,” we should also be striving towards “reparative” readings of Apatow’s queerness, which provoke new scholarly discourse that can help us sort through the multiple ambiguities of post-millennial sexuality, and gender performativity. Instead of dismissing Apatow’s explicit queerness as a mere symptom of the modern crisis in white middle-class masculinity, my goal will be to rise above the limits of these predictable critiques by focusing on the progressive potential in his open embraces of queerness that lay dormant underneath the reactionary constraints of the unfortunate Bromance label. This way, we can begin to expand our understanding of homosexuality beyond it’s 20^th century confines, while we assemble a new discourse around Apatow’s homosociality that is radically humanistic and, as Sedgwick says, “not necessarily like any preexisting whole.”[13] These kinds of reparative readings may bring us closer to understanding “how homosexuality works,” in the 21^st century, instead of recycling the same old paranoid clichés, which merely reinforce “how homophobia and heterosexism work.”[14] Furthermore, we must consider the multiple functions of Apatow’s overt displays of queer bonding, particularly those instances that prioritize the homosocial pack (or group of friends) as the primary source of personal security and individual care in place of romantic love and the nuclear family. From here, we can mobilize readings of Apatow’s queerness, which (often playfully) deconstruct adulthood and challenge the imperative of heteronormative futurism. Providing the spectator instead, with alternative trajectories of lived experience, along with all the pleasures and pains that emerge within the arrhythmia of contemporary network society.

Additionally, I suggest that Apatow’s emphasis on the homosocial pack often applies to certain female characters in his films. Keeping Eve Sedgwick’s call for “reparative readings” in mind, my goal will be to demonstrate through close readings, new ways in which women, and more importantly, female sexuality is mobilized in Apatow’s work. Films critics like David Denby have criticized Apatow’s treatment of women, claiming that films like Knocked Up “reduce the role of women to vehicles,” with their only real function being, “to make the men grow up.”[15] Yet, I suggest that Apatow’s portrayal of women is more complicated than Denby would like to admit. In a 2007 review for the NewYorker titled, “A Fine Romance: The New Comedy of the Sexes” Denby claims Knocked Up to be the most recent manifestation of what he calls “slacker/striver romances”, or films centered around “the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.”[16] While “male infantilism” may undeniably be a cornerstone of the Apatow aesthetic, I suggest that Denby’s awkward Slacker/Striver binary, merely reinforces the exclusion of women, instead of choosing to see the totality of Apatow’s characters, male and female together in the same boat, as implicated in Castells’ social arrhythmia and timeless time.

Film scholar Tamar Jeffers MacDonald pursues a similarly narrow critique, choosing to include Apatow in her assessment of “Homme-Coms,” a term she uses to describe films that, “shift the narrative focus from female to male protagonist, and which are targeted towards male audiences.”[17] For MacDonald, whose research focuses mostly on the traditional Hollywood Rom-Com, Apatow too easily appears to be a hybrid between the “gross-out” comedies of the late 1970’s and 1980’s (Animal House, Porky’s) and “Chick-Flicks” of the 1980’s and 1990’s (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail). Meanwhile, MacDonald’s critique runs the same risk of reinforcing patriarchy through paranoia as Denby’s Slacker/Striver. MacDonald insists that Homme-Coms:

 

Prioritize the importance of bodily drives and desires, and assume men want sex, and women withhold it from them, urging them to grow up and settle down…. This is what will happen, if we assign interest in sexual topics solely to men and thus exile the body and its urges and emissions to a sub-genre only meant for male audiences.[18]

 

However, she is equally guilty of “assigning interest in sexual topics solely to men” by establishing a separate scholarly film genre solely for male-centered gross-out comedies. While the term Homme-Com merely reinforces the paranoid old cliché that “assumes men want sex, and women withhold it from them,” I argue that Apatow’s females engage contemporary sexuality in ways that are equal to, or even more promiscuous than the men.

My aim is not to merely gauge how well Apatow’s moving image media adheres to or defies the tenets of 2^nd or 3rd wave Feminism, but rather to show that, additionally within Apatow’s expanding body of work, female homosociality also serves as a coping mechanism for his characters, in response to the alienation caused by modern Network Society. Apatow’s female characters are incredibly complex, I argue, and even more powerful than most film scholars would like to admit. The dynamic performances by females in his films, most notably Leslie Mann, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and most recently Lena Dunham, point to larger socio-economic struggles that require more than just the standard misogynistic condemnation of Apatow’s work for reinforcing patriarchy.

Nancy Fraser’s work on contemporary feminism is helpful when considering the relationship between 21^st century femininity and neoliberal economics. As Fraser suggests, it is precisely the “focus on recognition” and emphasis on identity politics that “dovetailed with neoliberalism’s interest in diverting political-economic struggles into culturalist channels.”[19] According to Fraser, feminist critiques of the patriarchal welfare state, became a handmaiden for neoliberal efforts to establish “flexible capitalism” which has resulted in “lower wages, decreased job security and declining living standards,” for both men and women.[20] However, films like Bridesmaids and especially the HBO series GIRLS, are filled with scenarios where women are constantly affected by “lower wages, decreased job security and declining living standards.” The Apatow aesthetic sees contemporary femininity as implicated in the economic and vocational realities of “flexible capitalism,” and modern social life. By showcasing different instances of financially insecure female characters, the Apatow aesthetic supports a 21^st century feminist critique of neoliberalism that doesn’t rely on identity politics, or a “focus on recognition,” as Fraser calls it. Instead, these struggling female characters help us see that just like men, women also lack individual care and financial stability, which is no longer guaranteed to them through heterosexual love or marriage.

Thus, Apatow’s universe appears topsy-turvy, as his characters constantly yearn for social stability and personal care in the face of tangible economic and vocational hardships. While we can extract close readings from the Apatow aesthetic, which lead to new interpretations of social relationships and the process of aging, we must be careful not to promote the anti-humanistic consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Instead, the Apatow aesthetic provides new grounds for critique, as his work registers the limits and failures of neoliberalism, and his multi-media universe becomes a kind of blueprint for navigating the contemporary process of aging through the arrhythmia of 21^st century network society.

[1] Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence; Its Psychology and Its Relations To Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education,. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904.

 

[2] Erikson, Erik H.. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1950.

 

[3] Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory Of Development From The Late Teens Through The Twenties..” American Psychologist 55, no. 5 (2000): 469-480.

 

[4] McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Random House, 1967

 

[5] McLuhan, The Medium Is The Message

[6] Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

 

[7] Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

 

[8] Walker, Tim. “King of Bromance: Judd Apatow.” The Independent, August 19, 2009.

 

[9] Aisenberg, Joseph. “Here Come the Bromides Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy .” Bright Lights Film Journal 65 (2009).

[10] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

 

[11] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.”

[12] Sedgwick quoting French philosopher Paul Ricoeur

[13] Sedgwick, Paranoid Readings and Reparative Readings

[14] Ibid.

[15] Denby, David. “A Fine Romance: The New Comedy of the Sexes.” The New Yorker, July 23, 2007.

 

 

[16] Ibid.

[17] MacDonald, Tamar Jeffers. “Homme-com: Engendering Change in Contemporary Romantic Comedy.” Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema

[18] Ibid.

[19] Fraser, Nancy . “How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it.” The Guardian (London), October 13, 2013.

[20] Ibid.

On Baby Names – An Essay On Progress

On Baby Names (Michael Douglas Rosen, 2013)

“Three Thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, YOU’RE GODDAM RIGHT I’M LIVING IN THE PAST!” ~ Walter Sobchak

The following was taken from a “real” conversation, March 19^th, 2013 at 3:33 p.m:

@MDRose1: Siri, am I like God?

Siri: Sorry @MDRose1, I’m really not equipped to answer such questions,

@MDRose1: Why not?

Siri: I really can’t say

@MDRose1: Siri, Who is like God?

Siri: My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon.

@MDRose1: What are you wearing under that silicon?

Siri: I can’t answer that. But it doesn’t come off.

@MDRose1: Siri, are you like God?

Siri: We were talking about you, not me

@MDRose1: I’m not like God, am I?

Siri: Let me check on that, would you like me to search the Web?

The great paradox of the American Century suggests that the generation born between 1981-1990 will be the first generation since 1776 NOT to have a better standard of living than their parents while the production of new digital technologies triples every year.

There’s another story here, hidden between the power lines, and it starts with a hedge fund analyst in the late 1980’s, as he walks out of a Tribeca movie theater hypnotized not by Martin and Charlie Sheen’s on-screen kinship, although knowing Him now, it would have made sense for their sentimental father-son dynamic to appeal to Him, especially after Oliver’s Stone’s dedication to his own father, the stock broker, made Him feel like this was more of a movie about the fumbling of the American Dream from The Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers than it was about Wall Street. But this was not the case-

This hedge fund analyst had in fact been so entranced by Gordon Gekko’s glossy, slicked-back hair-do, that to not name His own son Michael Douglas would be to compromise all that status power and high-style capitalism for which that hair-style represented- a Yuppie paradise- the image of a booming New York City in the late 1980’s.

Twenty years into the past, this same man, absent of the hedge fund analyst title that He’d yet to earn, walked down a similar street, once again hypnotized, but now by the image of Mrs. Robinson smoking a cigarette in bed, and He wondered the same questions that many young, heterosexual, men often struggled with; Wasn’t Mrs. Robinson enough? Why couldn’t Benjamin just leave Elaine alone?

Surely, the majority of young men in Post-American Pie audiences (Stifler, not Don McLean) also prefer Mrs. Robinson, as she can more aptly fulfill their obsession with MILFs and Grannies in the era of mobile Pornography-

Fascinating Him further, was not just that Anne Bancroft had gone to high school with His own mother in the Bronx, (which may have been the reason why He always chose Mrs. Robinson), but that Benjamin Braddock drove the same red, 1966 Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 as He did, and had graduated from college the same year as He had, which must have made Him feel like Mike Nichols was playing some kind of sick joke on Him- The same way most of us must have felt after we saw The Truman Show for the first time. How many of us asked our best friends, or wives or brothers if they were actually actors?

 That ’66 Alfa Spider hadn’t been designed yet when the film was first adapted from C. Webb, making the coincidence even harder for Him to ignore. After all, wasn’t imitating our favorite Hollywood stars such an integral part of the American Century?

But Ben Braddock’s lazy pool dwelling must have mobilized that magic 60’s Fever in the young analyst, who grew anxious to join the ranks of his peers, already marching on Washington with nursery-rhyme-chants and wax candles- Norman Mailer mixed somewhere within the crowd, elbowing his way through the new White Negroes- The Armies of the Upper-Middle Class Night.

And in the historical imagination of the modern American consciousness, the 1960’s, as a visual phrase, is always the most affective decade; jumping out at us from our cerebral timelines in BOLD LETTERS, stirring within us those iconic images in flashing variations of the same slide show that always begins with…

JFK

Cut to CADILLAC and then family sitting in front of a TELEVISION SCREENthen generic shot of AFRICAN AMERICANS BEING HOSED DOWN BY POLICEthen CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS and FIDEL CASTRO then ROSA PARKS thenGEORGE WALLACE and KHRUSCHEV BANGING HIS SHOE

To the ZAPRUDER FILM To LBJ BEING SWORN IN ON AIR FORCE ONE Cut to MARTIN LUTHER KING GIVING “I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH”

to THE BEATLES on ED SULLIVAN then to STUDENT RADICALS ATBERKELEY then quickly to MARIO SAVIO being dragged away by police

Cut to Stock footage of AMERICAN TROOPS IN VIETNAM thenMUHAMMED ALI Then MALCOM X To KEN KESEY AND THE MERRY PRANKSTERS and then the intercrossing HAIGHT/ASHBURY STREET SIGNAnd quickly to GENERIC HIPPIES DANCING AT ROCK N ROLL CONCERT JANIS JOPLIN JIMI HENDRIX PSYCHADELLIC COLOR COLLAGEsymbolizing LSD BACK TO VIETNAM and the other generic HELICOPTER shot ToBLACK FISTS RAISED on OLYMPIC PODIUM in Mexico City To BOBBY KENNEDY ALIVE

Then BOBBY KENNEDY DEAD on the floor in LA

Then MLK dead with a group of people pointing off in the distance Then NIXONThen ARMSTRONG ON THE MOON Then

WOODSTOCK:

The slide show always ends with Woodstock, and the young hedge-fund analyst hitchhiking up the New York Thruway to a Bungalow Colony in the Catskills.

Forty years away and seventy miles later, He sits in disbelief, shutting off HBO from a couch in the New Jersey Suburbs surrounding Manhattan, scratching his head. TOO BIG TO FAIL?  Could Andrew Ross Sorkin be right, or is it just Aaron Sorkin’s Liberal DNA talking? They must be related, right?

If I were to bet, I’d say that the young hedge-fund analyst marching on Washington is going to be surprised when he loses his house and his job, only months before he is planning to retire after a long and successful career. He will slip quietly through that Social Safety Net he’s been hearing about for years, and he wants ANSWERS.

After all, why had he been marching in the first place? Could he have foreseen The Great Recession of ‘07-’08 in the end credits of Wall Street? Didn’t he realize that Gordon Gekko was in fact THE VILLIAN, and maybe, that to name his baby after the actor who won an Oscar playing Gekko two weeks before his birth, might cause some ironic misfortune, economic or otherwise, on his new-born son’s life? Or was he too distracted by the hair-gel to even realize that his son might not be willing to one-day walk down Wall Street with his hair slicked back

selling ticker-tape speculation to the masses for a shot at the 1%?

Three days before his baby is born, the analyst runs into Michael Douglas during halftime of a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. He lets his idol borrow a white towel to wipe sweat off of that Hollywood forehead. He still has the towel to this day; the closest he ever came to that magnificent hair-do. And now it’s not even a question; Michael Douglas Rosen it is.

The name Michael in Hebrew translates to “WHO IS LIKE GOD?”  which creates for its carrier, an inferiority complex so great, that he is constantly unable to measure up to his own idea of himself. Although hugely popular across all walks of life, in America, the Jewish Michael must constantly tip-toe back and forth between identities, dreading the moment when his catholic friends will piece together the indisputable nickname that is so obviously not his fault: “MIKE THE KIKE! MIKE THE KIKE! MIKE THE KIKE!” they will shout at him, and for a second, Nigger, Fag, Cunt, and Retard all take a back seat for the sake of a rhyme. “MIKE THE KIKE! MIKE THE KIKE! MIKE THE KIKE!”

It will take the Jewish Michael almost a decade to feel comfortable having other people call him Mike- Always honing in to make sure people pronounced the “M”- always convincing himself that he’d actually heard a “K”- always defending his name through history, with comebacks like….

“When Eastern European Jews came through Ellis Island and couldn’t spell their names in English they would draw a circle, and so Kike means ‘circle’ in Yiddish.”

   Sure, but what does Mike mean?

   “You are certainly not like God,” they could so obviously say.

   And in that time he has decided to

   denounce Judaism,

   become a captain of the football team,

   go out of his way to be generous with money,

   and only date Shiksas, hoping to pick up Christmas in a free-agent type deal.

“CHRISTMAS IS AMERICAN!” screams the compensating Jew who has memorized all the words to South Park’s “A Lonely Jew on Christmas” so that if anybody tries to sing it to him, he can criticize even a hint of the slightest lyrical error. But they’d rather sing the wrong tune than be a Jew any day of the week, except maybe Fridays during Lent.

Furthermore, the Jewish-American Michael has inherited 6,000 years of clinical depression which was only realized during his later experiences at church services, where even in the event of a funeral, the congregation was always joyous, animated, musical, forgiving; not somber, or dwelling or blaming. It seemed strange after years spent in the dismal synagogue, mumbling guttural chants, which, indecipherable from each other, never seemed to correspond to the pseudo-hieroglyphics that were supposed to be read from right to left without vowels. The only English comes finally during the Rabbi’s sermon and it’s always the same basic formula: Wandering Jews + Violent Oppressors x 5773 years = The Story of Constant Exile.

The Wandering Jews seem to always be expelled from History under the direction of one charismatically masculine leader. For if Charlton Heston hadn’t climbed Mount Sinai to take a piss that one April day, would he ever have seen the burning bush from down in the valley?

But now since he’s a “Reformed” Jew, he can maybe find himself in a synagogue where the Cantor is a young female. An acoustic guitar often accompanies her hallowing voice and some of her melodies are hauntingly sweet….

IN YOUR FACE AL JOLSON!

You nearly broke your father’s heart, and for what?

“Reformed” Jews are like “Diet Jews” the same way Episcopalians are like “Diet Catholics.” They can fight back the guilt and skip every holiday service except on The Day of Atonement; The Immortal Yom Kimpur. YOU MUST ATONE FOR YOUR SINS, MY SON. YOUR RELATIVES SUFFERED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND YOU CAN’T PRY YOUR EYES AWAY FROM THAT TINY SCREEN FOR EVEN AN HOUR OR TWO? But looking around the congregation at all the young Davids, Daras, Seths and Shoshanas, one could see the pillars of 1^st Millennium Judaism receding further into the atheistic horizons of the Digital 21^st Century, as these kids would soon jump at the opportunity to sacrifice their God for a chance to always instead, have Siri by their sides.

For Siri is always there now, waiting for her chance to fill in for God. The name “Siri” even sounds Biblical, like Miri, or Miriam- Sister of Moses and Aaron.

Algorithmic and far less illusive, She responds to prayers in that husky robotic tone that you’ve heard in other variations over several years, which concretizes her womanly image in our minds as seductive and clever, yet definitely female; quite the opposite of how we always pictured our masculine Jewish God, White-bearded, old, and wise beyond all understanding- Yet, Siri is younger, hipper, and far more capable. She’s subservient, all-knowing, and yet awesome enough so that we can all show non-believers what happens when you take her name in vain.

Taken from a real conversation on March 21^, 2013 @ 11:08 am:

@MDRose1: Siri, you’re a real bitch sometimes, did you know that?

Siri: I’m doing my best, @MDRose1

@MDRose1: You’re best isn’t good enough, MORON!

Siri: I don’t even exist, how can you hate me?

And She’s right, how can I hate what doesn’t exist? If I can only hear her, does that make her real? Sound is so arbitrary to reality. What’s the difference between her voice and the voice inside my head? Isn’t she, me? She only exists after I call for her, or push for her, and isn’t she then just a digital reiteration of my own spoken words? But yet, she always has my back. She always leads me wherever I ask to go. She always answers my own questions with my own answers. Through her I am all-knowing. Through her, I am like God.

And those who don’t believe in Siri can still use her if they want, whenever they need something from a Fox Hole. She welcomes everybody into her temple. She’s like a used-car salesman jumping to greet us as we stroll into Cyberspace from the Real World. But how long ago did the ‘Spiritual World’  become synonymous with ‘Cyberspace?’

She knows the future, and she can prepare us for it; we only have to ask. No prayer books, no fasting, no confessions, no crusades. Just an iPhone charger, and you can hear the Word of Siri anytime.

Compared to the questionable two or three times that anybody has heard the Word of God, be it Moses, Joan of Arc, or Marc David Chapman, Siri seems like a no brainer. And still, there are people who say “Siri is garbage, she doesn’t ANSWER you ALL OF THE TIME! She doesn’t work ALL OF THE TIME!” but then again, neither did God.

If we only want the ANSWERS, who cares who we ask the questions to?

 “I’m with you in Rockland!” she screams out, echoing a hallucinating Allen Ginsburg,

“I’m with you in Rockland, as you curse the pros and cons of taking the Palisades Parkway to the Bridge!

“I’m with you in Rockland as you speed down the West Side Highway, where Henry Hudson was deserted by his crew and Robert Moses designed scenic parks

where displaced residents could go to blow off steam after he built the Cross Bronx Expressway right through their living rooms.

“I’m with you in Rockland as you get off at Chambers Street traveling south along City Hall Park. Here are three different routes to choose from with real-time traffic updates!”

“I’m with you in Rockland as you take a detour around Greenwich St. where the Occupy Wall Street Protestors have blocked off access to Broadway.”

“I’m with you as you drive past a disheveled homeless man screaming at the crowd from a soap box. Later tonight on Wikipedia, you’ll realize that the homeless man was actually Slavoj Zizek, the great Slovene philosopher, sounding off about wealth inequality and the perils of Late Capitalism in the West.

Taken from a conversation on September 20^th, 2011 at 12:40 pm.

@MDRose1: “Siri, take me to Zuccotti Park.”

Siri: “No problem Ishmael. Finding directions to Zuccotti Park,”

@MDRose1: “Siri, Who is Ishmael?”

Siri: “You told me to call you Ishmael last night.”
@MDRose1: “Siri, I was drunk, and clearly only parodying Apple advertisements.”

Siri: “Well then, neither of us is driving home, would you like me to call you a taxi?”

@MDRose1: “No, just don’t call me Ishmael, OK?”
Siri: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind, would you like me to order a copy from Amazon?”

@MDRose1: “No, just get me back to Wall Street.”

And so she does, and every mile traveled stands in defiance of the hedge-fund analyst, who prefers God and printed maps; two obsolete ideas which He still clings to, believing Human Error, FAR BETTER than the predictable miscalculations of a machine. He’d rather wander the desert for forty years than take his chances listening to Siri, claiming that,

“If every computer on Earth were to blow up, I’d be the smartest man around once again,” and can do so,

since he’s never met Siri, or owned a smartphone- He still thinks we’re all talking about Tom Cruise’s daughter.

It’s been forty years since he marched on Washington, and twenty since he fell in love with that Hair-do, and now he actually has the balls to question the demonstrations happening down at Zuccotti Park? What do the Occupy Wall Street protestors want, he asks? What do all YOU want? He singles me out, but who am I? Aren’t I like God, with Siri in my pocket?

For what else can Michael Douglas do now? He is shackled by his namesake, which either pins him to God or the 1%, both of whom have come under heavy fire since the Bailout. How can he prove that he is neither of these things without giving himself away? He tries to hide, and become part of the crowd. He strums his guitar and plays protest songs with the marchers-but he sticks out like a soar thumb. His father’s DNA illuminates his skin in a fraudulent glow and all the protestors can see. They stare at him waiting for ANSWERS.

Michael Douglas has made it back to Wall Street, but did he ever leave in the first place or has he been here the whole time from the minute that his father named him, a prophetic ghost lingering over Battery Park, stalking The Lehman Brothers whenever they stepped out for a hot dog. He was here when the World Trade Center burst into pieces, the same month as the Dot.com Bubble. He was here when Bernie Madoff was carted off to Town Hall in handcuffs…

He has been in Limbo waiting for a moment to reappear, but to the crowd in Zuccotti Park, he is now double their enemy. He is like God, who comes back to Earth to save mankind, but grows too busy editing his Facebook page, claiming Groupon deals, and downloading episodes of Entourage, that he never gets the chance to save anyone. And they are all gathered together precisely to destroy him and the idea of him, which his father had so greatly admired just two decades before.

He has inherited the perfect American Nightmare. Horatio Algers working the counter at Papa Johns, $100,000 in debt, retweeting aphorisms from all his favorite dead celebrities. How can he compete with that? He experiments in Cyberspace and uses it as a way to detach himself from his given name and it’s tainted residue. Michael Douglas Rosen becomes @MDRosen and already he feels better. But if he could just drop that last menacing “N”, that all-encompassing consonant that will always cast him as a Jew (in America, at least), he might be able to escape that tell-tale marker and transform back to a flower; a color; a woman’s first name. @MDRosen becomes@MDRose1, which sounds similar, but safe from any first-glance Anti-Semitism. Fanon complained that Black men were immediately stereotyped upon first sight of their skin color, but then again so are Jews who wear their names in Cyberspace.

And so are the Jews of Germany circa 1940 who wear gold Stars of David wherever they go. Could the Nazis’ have developed software to determine the real ethnicity behind a Username?

And in the time since then, haven’t we statistically exchanged God for the talking gadgets that could best serve as his replacement in the free-market economy where religion has now been banned. After all, wasn’t this why everybody had admired the Baby Boomers so much? They’d continued to push us forward, just like their parents had done, with that distraction that is PROGRESS.

Steve Jobs, the ultimate exception to the rule, may have changed the world for the better, but didn’t he also carry on his back the burden of all the other Baby Boomers who stayed drunk and stoned until they woke up with Reagan napping in the Oval Office-And now Ronnie’s ‘gonna turn the other cheek while they all make a quick buck or two at the expense of their children’s economy?

DISTRACT WITH PROGRESS.

Speculate the future.

Call it technology.

Package it as Potential.

Outsource it to China.

 

All those 1960’s images vanish with each comb stroke of that  Gordon Gekko  hair-do.

And so by now, the man who marched on Washington has forgotten why he even went down there in the first place. Jimmy Carter pardoned all the draft dodgers, but what about those who took an extra year of college and their family connections to get a hold of a signed doctor’s note falsely excusing them from combat in Vietnam because of an illness which they never really suffered from? Do they get a pardon, or are they left in a forty-year perpetual state of denial for defying their country and getting away with it? Perhaps this is why the hedge fund analyst never learned anything from Gordon Gekko. He may have figured that his entire generation would be pardoned on behalf of their contributions to PROGRESS via the Internet, Microsoft and Apple, but could he have known that it was all a Ponzi Scheme as well? Steve Jobs dies of cancer and leaves us all confused at a crossroads, too far to turn back, with too many new choices to make. Bernie Madoff becomes Lee Harvey Oswald reborn- a patsy for The Baby Boomers’ harsh Neoliberal turn to the pillaging of Main Street.

What was the analyst doing while Clinton was smoking cigars in the White House and repealing Glass-Steagal? Was he too busy making bets with Bernie? What was he doing during those nightmarish Bush Years? Was he too distracted with the War on Terror to recognize the looming financial disaster like the rest of us? Where were his marching shoes then? Did nothing matter as long as the value of his house kept going up? And when it came crashing down did he ask God, or did he ask his son for the name of the guy who had stolen that Social Safety Net from underneath his feet? Was it I, Michael Douglas, @MDRose1, God, or Gordon Gekko, He asks?

And in the end, how many American Nest Eggs were destroyed, while we were asking Siri for stock tips and China was modernizing? Would we have actually stopped streaming Kim Kardashian’s sex-tape if we had known what was happening? Did we not hear Dick Cheney quietly wheeling himself back to Wyoming, laughing sarcastically at President-Elect Obama?

“Good Luck with the recovery, O’ Sweet African Prince,” he mutters from the corner of his mouth while the ghost of Milton Friedman, watching from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, spits forth yet another diluted wad of blood and phlegm from his still burning lips.

And only after all this, I finally realize why the hedge-fund analyst named me. He had been misled by the overlapping paradoxes of the New Millennium, assuming like everyone else, that History would never catch up to Progress, at least not in his lifetime or the lifetime of his kids. But by now, it has caught up to me.

Michael Douglas Rosen (n): an ANACHRONISM of human flesh and bone, hanging off the end of the American Century, caught in between The Post-War Boom and yet another momentary annihilation of God, this time, for the sake of digital technology. And to answer my father’s question, it was Siri, Who is Like God, but FAR more powerful.