Fame Is Hard.
Whenever you write something - and if you never do, just trust me on this - you are the least qualified person in the world to judge it. You’re always going to be too close. I’ve gone back to old blogs and articles I don’t even remember writing and thought “Hey, this is pretty good,” and I’ve spent hours on something that I was convinced was a work of genius only to look back a week later and find it was a bunch of clumsy, drunken bullshit.
This isn’t just a problem confined to my own, admittedly patchy output. Stephen King was so blitzed on booze and coke that he didn’t even know he wrote “Cujo,” and that book is pretty good. Meanwhile, he seems to have written “Revival” sober and on purpose, and that one is fucking awful.
Taking as read, then, that we’re all bad judges of our own work, deciding which of your own works is going to be successful moves from “difficult” to “impossible.” You can come up with a flash of genuine brilliance and nobody gives a shit, or you can blurt something off-the-cuff and be immortalised.
So it was on Friday with a Tweet I wrote about right-wing meathead and vaguely known actor Adam Baldwin. Baldwin, who is no relation to the multiple other Hollywood Baldwins, had been in a minor Twitter spat with author and veteran Joe Kassabian:
My take on this was pretty simple:
At the time of writing, about fifteen hundred strangers have liked that tweet. It’s far and away the most successful thing I ever said on Twitter, despite being little more than a passing observation. Yet despite this, and once again because of the fickle nature of success and popularity, Adam Baldwin is yet to call me a pussy.
Baldwin - who played the self-centered, burly idiot Jayne Cobb on the TV series “Firefly” and proved in the process that casting is probably the easiest gig in entertainment - is an idiot with a gym membership and a long history of playing That Guy In That Thing. He was “soldier most often in the background” in “Independence Day,” for example, as well as the aluded to “Large, Dumb Marine” in “Full Metal Jacket.” His hobbies include homophobia, misunderstanding how taxes work, books with lots of pictures in them and picking twitter fights. And he still won’t pick one with me.
Come on, Adam Baldwin. You normally throw a tantrum when anyone criticises you on social media. Is it because I didn’t directly @ you in this one? Is it because you can’t call fellow angry-white-man actor Nick Searcy to back you up like you did last time? Is the person who explains your Twitter to you on vacation this week?
I was never a Marine - we have that in common - but I never even pretended to be one in a movie. I’m a lot shorter than you, maybe start with that? You probably bench press more than me, so that’s a good way to prove my opinions on taxation, and treating people with dignity, and the meaning of art, are all worthless. I’m sitting right here and, frankly, I need the publicity. One big tweet every three and a half decades just isn’t cutting it for me.
Honestly, even Searcy engaged with me briefly before he quit Twitter after I pointed out that he couldn’t word a sentence properly and that the Bible is nuts. Although he never responded to the bald joke I made about him.1 That was seven years ago! I haven’t had a single Republican actor prove they’re tough by pwning me, a socialist libtard snowflake, ever since. I’m Jonesing bad, Adam, you failing stack of steroidal mediocrity. Why not throw me a bone and point out why you’re better than me? I know you’re not busy since you aren’t even welcome at conventions anymore, and they’ll take basically anybody.
Honestly. You can’t start a good Twitter feud for love nor money these days.
Dominic Raab Is Also A Fucking Idiot.
It can be hard to keep up with the unrelenting horror of the news cycle these days, but I think more attention should have been paid to Dominic Raab, the deputy Prime Minister who was sent on TV to explain why the Government had decided not to go ahead with proposed misogyny legislation. In the middle of his pointless spinning to explain why nothing will ever be done, he said this:
For those who can’t play the video, Raab explained that misogyny is wrong, whether a man does it to a woman or a woman does it to a man, in the process neatly proving why it might be a good idea to do more to tackle and educate people about the concept of “hating women.”
It’s bleakly hilarious that whatever happens, it’s women’s fault. Now, apparently, misogyny is their fault, too. This whole debate comes on the heels of the Sarah Everard case, a woman who was raped and murdered by a police officer who used his position to falsely arrest her. Whilst we’ve gone past the point of blaming women for being raped and murdered based on their clothing choices (except at ITV, who were at pains to point out that Ms. Everard was “sensibly dressed” as though that made any fucking difference) we are still in a period where we merely have to shift the goalposts in order to continue blaming daughters and mothers for becoming victims of male aggression.
In this instance, a Yorkshire police commissioner sprang forward to point out that Sarah Everard should have known the arrest was fraudulent and resisted. Because you might not be dressed like a slut, but you should still know chapter and verse of British arrest protocols at all times if you’re going to insist on leaving the house without a penis or a chaperone.
This whole section is becoming a Russian doll of male idiocy, but it’s also worth pointing out that if a police commissioner is so committed to woman-blaming that he starts advising people to resist arrest if they don’t think they’re being detained for the right reasons, he deserves everything he brings down on the heads of his own officers.
As a final note, if anyone cares, the word for hating men is “misandry.” The word for hating people in general is “misanthropy.” The word for thinking Dominic Raab is a fucking bellend is “normal brain function in a waking human.”
Tyson Fury Is An Unstoppable Flesh Tank.
Neatly combining our themes of misogyny and large, stupid men, Tyson Fury has retained his heavyweight titles in a nail-biting match against American fighter Deontay Wilder.
I really don’t know what to think about Fury. He said unpleasant things about women and gay people, and then had a nervous breakdown and gained a dangerous amount of weight, then managed to recover, get fit again, and seems an altogether more forgiving and positive person. I really, honestly hope that his breakdown - which seemed to be triggered by the fact that the public didn’t like him even after he became a champion - caused him to re-evaluate why people didn’t like him, and to maybe realise that it was his intolerance.
At the same time, Fury is the self-professed “Gypsy King” and as such is from a background that probably wasn’t massively woke, so his opinions on gay rights and the role of women in society need to be taken as part of a larger tapestry. If he still holds them, which, in my more charitable moments, I hope he doesn’t.
More than anything else, I’m often just baffled as to how Fury functions on a medical level. In his previous fight with Wilder he took a punch that would have killed most people, and it knocked him out as cleanly as I’ve ever seen a fighter knocked out. Then, on camera and in under ten seconds, his brain visibly rebooted and he got back up again.
This comes on top of the fact that Fury, huge though he is at 6’ 8”, has never once in his entire career looked physically fit. There has never been a photo of the man that made me think “Yeah, that guy can fight twelve rounds at a professional level,” and yet he does. Repeatedly.
On Saturday he did it whilst being repeatedly knocked down by Deontay Wilder, a man I onced described as hitting “like a freight train full of concrete.”
You really have to take your hat off to Fury as a medical marvel, if nothing else. I just desperately want to believe I’m right about him not being a sexist, homophobic prick anymore, too. We have enough of them on Twitter and in government.
It’s not really worth rehashing that story, and since they took Justified off the air there’s no reason to ever think about Searcy again.