The Video Version of Valdemort

She's Out of Sync - Devo (mp3)
Two Times - The Blakes (mp3)*

Didja ever do those "What's Grosser than Gross" jokes as a kid? Just wonderin'.

I first heard of "The Video That Shall Not Be Named" last fall. A number of young alumni were back in town, and I stopped by early into their evening, before their mental state was in any way altered. During the conversation, someone brought up TVTSNBN. Immediately, the rest of the young guys reacted viscerally, with beloved fake-retch sounds and other such reactions of discomfort or disgust.

Now, this caught my attention because 19-year-old males are, in general, disgusted by very few things in the 21st Century. They've seen everything. Terrorists beheading hostages. Dogs having sex with cats. Laguna Beach. Trying to disgust or shock a present-day male in the 16-22 demographic is like trying to make Dick Cheney cry. It's virtually impossible.

So, I can't deny being a little curious when they reacted with such collective and universal disgust about TVTSNBN. They then started talking about videos on YouTube where people recorded their friends or relatives watching this. One dude recorded his grandmother watching it, they explained, and it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.

As with many conversations where one is the outsider on an insider joke and one doesn't much care, I quickly tuned out and forgot about it.

Then, a few weeks ago, TVTSNBN reemerged in my conscience. One of my favorite female rockers has her own blog, and I visit it every month or two to catch up on her -- I'm kind of like a stalker who can't afford to actually stalk -- and her latest entry was about her experience watching TVTSNBN with two of her friends. The entry was only a couple of sentences, but she basically said watching it made her feel alive. (Picture at left stolen from Steven via Kay's blog.)

Well hell, I thought, if this supercool badass chick can handle it, what's the big deal?? This, my friends, is what's known as faulty logic. Yes, I watched TVTSNBN. I hunted it down, and I watched it.*

Several years ago, I got so far as to click PLAY on one of those terrorist beheading videos but stopped it and closed it before ever getting anywhere near the actual beheading part. That I allowed myself the curiosity to click PLAY in the first place left me with a hollow feeling in my gut for several days, and I still squirm a little when I recall that I even went as far as I did. (NOTE: To those who've seen it, bully for you. I ain't judging. I'm just sayin' that my physical and emotional innards objected powerfully to my curiosity.)

Because there was no death or mutilation involved in TVTSNBN, I never reached that level of self-revulsion. I mostly looked at the subjects involved as I imagine Ming the Merciless looks at the stupid Earthlings at the beginning of the Gawd-awful guilty pleasure of the 80s known as Flash Gordon. I'm pretty sure if Ming had seen TVTSNBN, he would have destroyed Earth quickly rather than screwing around with it for the better part of two hours while Timothy Dalton wondered how the f*#k he got himself into green leotards for what had to be a career low even in the infancy of his career. (And yes, I watch that movie every time I see it playing on TV, 'cuz it's one of the world's penultimate guilty pleasures.)

The morning after my TVTSNBN viewing, I was still bothered. Not haunted; nothing quite so serious. Just bothered. Bothered that people did this. Bothered that people filmed it. Bothered that millions have watched it. Bothered that I jumped on board. Bothered that I have witnessed something that could not have ever conceivably reached my eyes at any time in any other decade prior to the 21st Century.

We're not talking Susan Boyle singing Les Miz here. We're talking a video of Susan Boyle degrading herself in ways that, if I told you the readers to "Think of the most horrific and disgusting non-violence-related act you could film Susan Boyle doing," you'd fall shy of TVTSNBN more often than not.

We are in a virulent age. Everything hits us sooner, faster, harder, and with less mercy, and what used to require men on ponies or Morse Code now requires a

Less than 48 hours after witnessing TVTSNBN, I found out about some heavy rumors involving some folks I know. Rumors of an extreme and sexual nature. Rumors involving kids and police and arrests. Ugly stuff. So naturally the rumors spread like wildfire around me. Along with the talk of what did or might have occurred between two kids whose lives will never again be normal came conclusions we yearn to draw. The #1 comment with a bullet: Surely the alleged predator was at one point also a victim of similar acts. Otherwise, how would he know how to engage in such skin-crawling acts? 

I thought this. Others thought this. It's the natural conclusion of people born before 1980.

But I have crossed to the other side. I've seen TVTSNBN.

It is now possible for a kid to watch stuff on an unsupervised computer that would make even deviant adults shudder. What used to be described simply as "pornography" now needs to be separated into categories like a record store, and any kid with some alone time and an Internet connection can basically witness pornography's version of death metal.

Or, put another way, I'm pretty sure teens don't engage in "rainbow parties" because they witnessed their parents do it.

Is TVTSNBN a sign of the end-times? Will it corrupt even the incorruptible? Part of me hopes so. I'd like to think this is about as low as our species can go, taste-wise. But then I remember that scene in Braveheart where bloodthirsty parents are holding their children on their shoulders so the kids can get a better view as that mean old rebel Scotsman gets disemboweled. Best I can tell, in previous eras and centuries, kids witnessed executions of all kinds, from crucifixions to disembowelments to lynchings to firing squads. If our species can survive all that, then surely TVTSNBN ain't the end of the world.

When I made an equally-obscure reference to TVTSNBN on Facebook, I got a personal record of 13 comments. Seems lots of folks have decided to bring the apocalypse one step closer by witnessing this for themselves. And nothing brings people together like a shared experience of extreme disgust.

And, as best I can tell, none of the people I know who have seen TVTSNBN have done things terribly deviant after the fact. Well, not anymore deviant than the shit they were doing prior to watching. So even something as off the charts as TVTSNBN can't seem to shake my belief that all our hand-wringing over the Evils of Technology is 95% misguided.

* -- I've since been informed that the version I watched isn't the "original." The original is supposedly even worse than the version I watched. That this is possible boggles my feeble mind.

P.S. If you're reading this and find yourself seeking TVTSNBN, and if you end up watching it, please just leave a comment to that nature as a reminder that when someone tells you not to look at something, it's only human nature to want desperately to do so.

P.P.S. Those of you who knew what I was talking about and have seen it, please feel free to tally your experience. Those who know but avoided watching, kudos to you!

The original choice for second song was "Nobody Drinks Alone" by Keith Urban, but I bought it on iTunes before we could convert them, so I went with the backup. All of these songs can be found and purchased through Amazon.com or iTunes.

Well Dang, Shoot Fire!

BB Gun - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)
Pistol Grip - The Blakes (mp3)

The wife and I aren't what you would call gun-huggin', Charlton Heston-lovin', Bible-thumpin' conservatives. We lean left. If politics were a football field, my ball is probably on the 35-yard-line of the Liberals.

When I was in high school, I started on the 20 of the Conservative side, but I've been plodding down the field in three yards and a cloud of dust for 20 years now. It's unlikely I'll ever make it into the Liberal Red Zone, if you will, and I'm positive I'll never actually score points for either team. If anything, I worry that I'll get penalized here and there for being offsides or a false start and end up creeping back towards midfield by the time I hit my 50s.

But when I see news stories like the one we watched this morning on Good Morning America (video here), I tend to wonder just how liberal someone has to be to fall on one side of this debate as compared to the other.

The story is about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old man from Houston who hit most every branch on the Ugly Tree on his way to earth. He has no previous record of combative behavior or violence that we know of. But the man sure talked tough to a 911 operator while he fidgeted and squirmed knowing two men had broken into his neighbor's house. And the longer he talked -- waiting for cops who apparently weren't coming anytime soon -- the more he compelled himself to go outside with his loaded shotgun and enforce justice. I honestly believe ol' Joe Horn meant every tough-talkin' word he said and simultaneously didn't really know he meant it. Like my college roommate who always told other obnoxious drunk guys that he wouldn't hesitate to kick their asses. He kinda meant it, but he didn't really intend to do it... unless they chose to cross that line he'd created in his own mind.

So this old guy shot and killed these two immigrant burglars. I think most of America -- let's just say 75% for argument's sake -- is mostly OK with this outcome. Burglars don't deserve to die, and the punishment didn't fit the crime, but as the saying so eloquently puts it, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. And sometimes those fleas are 61 years old and carrying a loaded shotgun out their front door. My favorite part in the lead-in is where Diane Sawyer says the two burglars weren't armed. All they had were tire irons. And I'm like, Madame Sawyer, if two menacing black illegal immigrants headed your direction with tire irons, and you weren't standing inside an auto body shop but rather outside the house they just burgled, would you consider them armed and dangerous, or would you be expecting a hug and a pedicure?

I'm not one of those goombahs who believe Texas has the right idea in wanting every adult with a heartbeat to walk around armed and ready to pull a trigger. Further, I can't even envision a future scenario where I own a firearm that loads with anything but Nerf bullets or paintballs, so my sympathy for Joe Horn and his odd moment of vigilante justice isn't because I could be in his shoes, nor is it because I admire his state's aggressive self-defense laws. But. These two dudes broke into a house in broad daylight. What kind of world do we now live in where everyone cowers in a corner, takes no responsibility for their neighbors or their neighborhood, and just lets bad shit happen? That's the culture we've created, the rules we've apparently embraced.

My grandfather, a Baptist minister, would open his doors to transients, hobos, and Mormons. He set up places in his barn for people without shelter for the night, people who were passing through, places for them to sleep. Baptist preachers in the South weren't exactly raking in Jimmy Swaggart bling 60 years ago, so feeding others on top of a family of eight was nothing to sneeze at. "You never know when you might be entertaining angels," he was fond of saying.

My grandfather, although a preacher, wasn't doing anything most of his neighbors wouldn't have done. It wasn't being a preacher. It was being a decent human being in a different time, with different cultural expectations and rules. If you don't believe me, go watch that new Kit Kittridge movie! But if he caught one of those people trying to steal from him -- or, I suspect, from the neighbors -- I also suspect my grandfather would have shot them. Angels in disguise wouldn't steal or abuse their hospitality.

So now, we shut our doors. We don't know our neighbors. We donate to charities better than any other country, but we don't see if someone across the street needs help. Or better, we watch them squirm in their odd lives and talk about them at dinner with the other neighbors.

The Good Samaritan is a nice fairy tale and all, but the world's just too dangerous to open your home, your car, your illusion of safety. Better to write a check to Red Cross and help the poor bastards that way.  

"BB Gun" is from Roger Alan Wade's first album -- yes, he has two -- All Likkered Up. He performed this song many times at Bud's in Chattanooga. "Pistol Grip" is from the Blakes' first full-length album. Both are available on both iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.