As promised, here’s the second half of the official Misc. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List. If your question wasn’t used, you didn’t ask it frequently enough.
11. Howcum in your FAQ the questions are in italics, but in Savage Love it’s the answers that are in italics?
Dan looks better in italics than I do.
12. Why didn’t you write about that party/play/movie I saw you at?
(a) I tend not to review private events or discuss my personal life. (b, c) Either somebody else got to review it, or there wasn’t space for it that week, or it stank too bad to be worth mentioning.
13. Why didn’t you write about ___?
I probably didn’t hear about it ’til just now.
14. But you don’t really like ____ (football/beef/regular supermarkets/cold cereal/TV/ heterosexuality), do you? Don’t you have to be a redneck fascist to like that?
(a) Yes. (b) No.
15a. Isn’t the Seattle scene “over”?
If you mean a hegemonous gaggle of bands all playing the exact same “sound,” that never existed. If you mean people gathering to explore art and make statements, that’s just getting started. What made Seattle bands wasn’t a sound, but a non-Hollywood (sometimes even anti-Hollywood) attitude toward cultural production and consumption.
15b. I hate Seattle bands because I hate ____ (long hair, flannel, backward baseball caps, distortion pedals, heroin, teen angst). How can you possibly like them?
The media “grunge” stereotype became so precise that no local band came close to completely fitting it. The only thing all Seattle bands have in common is that they all now boast that they’re “Notgrunge.”
16a. How much do you really like the Northwest?
Mostly I think of my region like the big sister I never had, the kind of gal all the guys in school are in love with. I adore her dearly but I still feel the need to shout out, “She’s not the goddess already! She used to throw spitwads at me!”
16b. You must have loved growing up out in the country. You want to move back there, right?
Absolutely not. I was bored to tears as a kid; the place has a few more things to do now, but it’s also turned into big ugly houses as far as the eye can see. The “Back to Eden” fantasy is one of the chief things wrong with America. “Moving to the country” is simply the intellectually-acceptable version of suburban sprawl.
17. Why do college professors still obsess about Madonna, years after everyone else has stopped?
Shh. Let’s not tell them there’s been other music in the past 10 years, or that these days “a woman in charge of her music” means one who can write songs and/or play an instrument.
18. Now that the dream of economic empowerment thru entrepreneurism is available to more and more Americans, aren’t liberals obsolete?
Absolutely not. A forest that’s been clearcut by 20 small companies is just as dead as one that’s been clearcut by one big company; small business can shaft employees and customers just like big ones–heck, those old slave plantations would now be classified as “family farms.” The basic tenet of liberalism, as I see it, is that the business of America isn’t just business. We need to care for our people and our land, not just our bottom lines. Indeed, in an evolving economy we have to pay extra attention to non-material values.
Still, a decentralized, small-biz economy is the best hope for urban neighborhoods (make your own opportunities, don’t depend on big employers or big government), minority rights, free speech, and renewed creativity (though boho types will need another philosophical basis when there’s no more “Mainstream” to rebel against). However, change can work for people or against them. We’ve seen change done wrong in the ex-Socialist countries, as pensioners and working families get the shaft to make their countries more inviting to global financiers. Can we do better? Only if we treat this transitional time with truly moral concern, not with the piousfaux-morality of the right.
19. What were Yogi and Boo-Boo doing in the same bed all winter?
You’ll have to ask Dan that one.
