I made a couple of New Year’s resolutions this year. I don’t bother, ordinarily, since the average New Year’s resolution is pointless, unrealistic, and destined to go the way of the Edsel by Valentine’s Day, so I wind up with a list of Dada-esque resolutions like “consume carbohydrates” and “continue not knowing how to speak Russian.” I mean, most of the time it’s like trying to “train” a cat to “obey” “commands”: the cat is in the act of sitting down anyway, and when the cat’s ass is about an inch and a half away from the ground, you tell it, “Siiiiit…sit! Aw, good cat!” and then you can kid yourself that the cat “listened” to you.

But I scraped together a few genuine resolutions for 2001. I resolved to cut down on ordering in and cook for myself more often, even if “cook for myself” winds up meaning “chucking a single-serving canister of ravioli into the microwave,” which, you know, it definitely will. I resolved to read more books. And I resolved to stop pretending that I like and/or admire the Velvet Underground, because I don’t. That last one doesn’t sound like much, but so many of the people in my social circle hold “the Velvets” in such unquestioningly high esteem that it’s tantamount to blasphemy, and for years I figured, well, no, I don’t think Lou Reed is a genius, and in fact I don’t know for sure that Lou Reed has human DNA, but it isn’t worth getting into an argument, so I’ll just nod and smile and pretend I don’t think all of VU’s songs sound more or less the same, and in a little while I’ll go into the bathroom and sink down on the toilet and luxuriate in an eye-roll of majestic proportions. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want the music fascists to dictate the way I behave. And I don’t like the Velvet Underground. I don’t care if you like them; if you enjoy their music, then of course you should continue to enjoy it. I would ask the same courtesy of you in return, though. Think what you like in private, but don’t bother trying to sell me on the drug-fueled brilliance of Lou Reed, because I ain’t buying it.

Pop-culture snobbery gets on my nads in a big way. I will admit that I have my own strong and irrational prejudices about certain elements of pop culture, and if we meet at a party and you start raving about the comic genius of Adam Sandler, I can’t lie and say that I won’t think less of you, because I will. I mean, we all liked Happy Gilmore, but Sandler is more thoroughly played than an Atlantic City slot machine, and if you paid perfectly good American money to see Little Nicky in the theater — well, you and I don’t have much to talk about. I won’t try to talk you out of liking Sandler or his movies, though, because if that’s your taste, that’s your taste — you like Adam Sandler, and that’s that. You don’t need a lecture from me, and in any case a lecture wouldn’t change your mind, and that’s what culture fascists don’t seem to understand.

How to identify a culture fascist? Well, Vanity Fair ran a brilliant chart on the care and feeding of the music Nazi a couple of issues back, so I won’t belabor the point, but here’s how to tell whether a cultural-fascism regime has taken over your social circle:

1. You find yourself enduring repeated monologues, each one more pretentious and boring than the last, on various hopelessly obscure elements of pop music, film, and postmodern literature.
2. Opinions that you make the arrogant mistake of venturing on pop-culture subjects inevitably prompt a human-Mad-Libs macro of the following sentence: “Pfffft. That [author/band/director] is so [derogatory synonym for ‘overrated’]. The only reason [author/band/director] managed to [verb denoting unit of critical or financial success] is because [paranoid ranting about payola and the ovine properties of teenage girls].”
3. You stop venturing any opinions at all after the conversation veers, by their design, into terrain with which you have zero familiarity, and you begin to get an uncomfortable feeling which resembles that of walking in on someone in the act of masturbation.

In other words, you spend your life on the defensive. Yes, I liked Schindler’s List. No, I didn’t hate every Oasis album after “Definitely Maybe.” I apologize for listening to Top 40 radio. No, this isn’t a Starbucks cup. Okay, so it’s a Starbucks cup, but I only got a drink of water. Okay, so actually I got a latte. Okay, a flavored latte. I will now accept my punishment, o all-knowing Kulturführer.

The culture fascists of the world need to let go. Culture fascists think they know everything, and at the same time they seem to resent knowing everything; the ignorance and willful bad taste of the rest of the world is the heaviest of crosses, and it is that cross which they must bear. Culture fascists take a Jesuitical approach to their encyclopedic — and encyclopedically tedious — expertise, reasoning that their lights do not belong under a barrel and that they must teach the rest of us unenlightened fools the error of our ways. The mainstream is their sworn enemy. (For fun, mention the Dave Matthews Band or Jerry Bruckheimer in favorable terms, and watch the culture fascist in your life writhe and scream like a witch doused in water.) They don’t have any fun. Entertainment has become a duty to them. To see another person derive simple pleasure from an average, middle-of-the-road pop song or chick flick angers them. Take The “Pet Sounds” Principle as an example.

The “Pet Sounds” Principle goes as follows: culture fascists prize obscurity. Obscurity always trumps an objective judgment of actual quality in a work of art or culture. Therefore, a greatest-hits album automatically “sucks,” because — and only because — it is designed to appeal to the largest possible number of people, and anyone who buys a greatest-hits album also sucks, because — and only because — he or she has failed to show the level of commitment to obscurity, to voluminous knowledge of unlistenable dreck for its own sake, that the culture fascist requires. The greatness of the hits is completely immaterial to the discussion, except to provide an opportunity for lofty sneering, and that’s where The “Pet Sounds” Principle comes in. Music Nazis point to the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” as a “seminal” album of the sixties, and for most music fascists, it’s the only Beach Boys that’s even remotely acceptable; a lot of them insist on calling it “Brian Wilson’s ‘Pet Sounds,'” because that removes it one degree from the so-called pap of the Beach Boys as a group. It’s a good album, but it’s the Matthew McConaughey of sixties pop: perfectly nice and certainly not offensive in any way, but wildly overrated and bowing under the weight of its own slavish press. And a Beach Boys greatest hits album, if you like the Beach Boys as a group and not just Brian Wilson as a nutty genius, is better than “Pet Sounds.” In their hearts, music Nazis know this, but they can’t admit it, because lots and lots of people enjoy the Beach Boys, and music Nazis cannot bring themselves to enjoy things that lots and lots of other people also enjoy. That’s The “Pet Sounds” Principle in a nutshell. Please do not write me a letter telling me how wrong I’ve got this, because I assure you that I have heard it before, and I assure you that you will not change my mind. I don’t have a problem with “Pet Sounds.” “Pet Sounds” is great. I own “Pet Sounds.” But Brian Wilson’s incorporation of a Coke can into one of the tracks does not make him the Truffaut of surf pop. It makes him Brian Wilson. Even he knows that, so shut up about it already. In short, if you want to get the music Nazi off your back, buy “Pet Sounds,” but if you want the most and best Beach Boys for your money, buy the greatest-hits CD.

We can also apply The “Pet Sounds” Principle to consumer goods. Starbucks is evil. Microsoft is evil. Martha Stewart is evil. Domino’s is evil, Ikea is evil, the Gap is evil. Evil, evil, evil. Replace the word “evil” with the word “everywhere.” Starbucks is everywhere. Martha Stewart is everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Now replace the word “everywhere” with “rich.” Microsoft is rich. Ikea is rich. The Gap is rich. Culture fascists can’t stand the fact that Starbucks and Old Navy and Domino’s enjoy the success that they do; they love to rant on and on about corporate hegemony and the starvation of small business and how Barnes & Noble is responsible for famines in Africa and blah blah blah. If Starbucks really sucked, people wouldn’t go to Starbucks and drink the coffee, okay? If the Gap really sucked, people wouldn’t buy their clothes. These corporations understand the market, and they give the market what it wants. These corporations understand consumers, and they give consumers what they want. If the market wouldn’t bear Domino’s, Domino’s would close. If consumers ignored Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart would retire. But the market and the consumers have spoken, and if you don’t agree with what they’ve said, well, that’s kind of too bad. Nobody’s making you buy or do anything. Nobody’s making you shop anywhere. But nobody asked what you think of what they buy or where they shop, either, so save the post-hippie Ikea-is-the-decline-and-fall-of-Western-civilization monologue for the folks at your Earth First meeting, because I don’t disagree that Ikea furniture can’t hold a candle to a Mission-style living-room set, but I can’t afford a Mission-style living-room set, and that’s the bottom line. It’s pre-fab furniture, not a mandate on the death penalty. Lighten up.

And yes, it’s a shame when one of these giant corporations rolls right over a mom-and-pop. It happened in my hometown. A Starbucks moved in down the block from a coffee shop run by a guy who’d grown up in Summit, and the guy lasted about six more months before giving up the ghost, but the blame for that lies with the landlord of the building, who deliberately chased the hometown guy off by giving Starbucks the better real estate right across from the train station. The landlord didn’t like the hometown guy anyway, because the hometown guy encouraged teens — who had, literally, nothing else to do in my hometown but drive around and smoke cigarettes or hang out at the 7-Eleven — to come in and do open-mic nights and to participate in battles of the bands and hang out on the stoop, and the landlord got shit from the cops, and the hometown guy wound up taking it in the ass and losing his lease. And, at the end of the day, the blame lies with the coffee, because Starbucks made a better cup of coffee than the hometown guy. I kept going to the hometown guy out of loyalty until the day he closed, figuring that he had given my brother’s band their very first gig and had at least had tried to do something for the culture of a town long mired in the lacrosse-and-Elks-Club customs of 1958 so I owed him a bit of loyalty, but Starbucks made a better latte and they made it faster, and the hometown guy choked, and, like the man says, that’s baseball. If you make a better product and you have a better location and you have corporate money behind you, you win. It’s capitalism, folks. Capitalism also means that you don’t have to drink Starbucks coffee or buy Martha Stewart sheets or order Domino’s pizza if you don’t want to, so if you don’t want to, don’t. But don’t lecture me on the evils of capitalism and consumerist culture, either. It’s boring, it’s condescending, it’s short-sighted, and it’s kind of immature as well. Yes, the Gap uses Third-World sweatshops to produce its clothes. So does every other clothing company on the planet. If you have clothes on, you supported a sweatshop. Period. No, don’t. Don’t start. Unless you weave your own fabric and sew your own clothes from scratch, don’t even. Self-righteousness about large corporations, like most other self-righteousness, is an off-putting waste of energy. If you don’t want to use Microsoft products, don’t, but don’t expect me to congratulate you on your successful gesture of futility. Bill Gates doesn’t care that you hate him, folks. He doesn’t have to care. He’s rich and powerful, and he doesn’t know you personally. Just learn to live with the bugs in Windows and keep your powder dry for a battle you can actually win.

Culture fascists just get so angry about these things. They just get so involved, so enmeshed, so attached. They ramble on about how we define ourselves by brand names and how that’s sick and wrong, but meanwhile they do the same thing, just in reverse. Culture fascists don’t want to identify themselves with a well-known band or trend or style of dress or brand of coffee, so they dash dead in the opposite direction and identify themselves with little-known everything. But it’s still an identifier, even if nobody else has heard of it. Individuality doesn’t come from shopping at vintage stores instead of at the Gap. Individuality doesn’t come from sniffing that “at least Ani DiFranco didn’t sell out,” because — well, that’s Ani DiFranco, not you. You have to decide for yourself how to live, what you like, where you buy things; it’s not Ani DiFranco’s job to make sure that you Stay True To Yourself, and it’s not Bill Gates’s job or Lance Bass’s job either. Your life isn’t Liam Gallagher’s problem. Your apartment isn’t Martha Stewart’s problem. Sure, we all want to think of ourselves as unique individuals, but a culture fascist isn’t unique. A culture fascist is part of a big, deluded group that thinks the same things she thinks. A culture fascist believes that spouting the party line about the evils of branded consumerism makes her different and strong, but it really doesn’t. It makes her the same as everyone else, and it means that she’s letting her tastes define her, in the same way that she accuses everyone else of doing.

I make judgments; we all do. But whether or not another person likes Belle & Sebastian shouldn’t matter so much. Put on your headphones and get on with your lives.

A music-fascist hero.
More musical fascism.
Oh, whatever.

Share!