#34 - "If I Did It" by O.J. Simpson

Blood Orange

(0.1/10)

By Beau Dashington

(book chosen by Peartree)

Editor's Note: Hm.. I thought this was about Mr. Boddy and OJ's secrets to winning Clue.

The Piece of Shit Book Club™ is nothing if not topical. And what could be more topical in mid-2015 than a mildly interesting news item from almost twenty years ago? Nothing, that's what. The OJ Simpson trial is important, and we all care about it much more than Ebola in West Africa, conflict in Syria, or famine in Afghanistan. Why is it still relevant? Let’s find out.

I actually remember where I was when the OJ Simpson verdict was announced. It was 1995 and I was in English class. Some nerds came over the PA, and they mentioned that OJ was innocent, and everyone went crazy. The rest of the day was consumed by a variety of racial theories proffered by twelve year olds. Now, either these kids were precocious racists, or most racists have a child-like intellect. Because I have never seen any theories of race more developed than those that your typical pre-teen can offer.

Anyway, back to the story. Noted actor and part time football player Orange Juice (OJ) Simpson was suspected of foul play in the death of his wife and “her associate” (i.e. bang partner) Ron Goldman. Even though Orange Juice was found not guilty in 1995, he has been hounded by accusations ever since. In order to prove conclusively his innocence, OJ wrote this book describing in meticulous detail exactly how and why he murdered his wife.

The book is, as Juice tells us, a story of love. It details the moment he first met the love of his life and fell head-over-heels, right up to the point that he fatally stabbed her. It all begins with OJ married to a woman who is five months pregnant. He goes out for a beer, meets an 18 year old blonde waitress, and he liked what he saw. He leaves his stupid bitch wife and shacks up with the waitress, Nicole Brown. But things didn't go as well as he had hoped.

One of the main problems, OJ notes, is that Nicole got fat and bitchy while she was pregnant. OJ didn't like this at all. After the birth of their first child, Nicole wouldn't stop crying. OJ was confused; he didn't know if it was from being happy or terrified. He tried to console her and comfort her by telling her she had nothing to be afraid of. Except being murdered by her husband, of course. She had pretty legitimate fears about that, and even wrote about it in her diary. But OJ laughs that off, saying she just liked to write short stories. Turns out, she only had one story: being abused by her husband. But she kept writing it again and again. I guess she had writer's block.

He also details a number of times when the police came to his house after Nicole phoned them. OJ doesn't think it was fair that society accuses him of spousal abuse. He was shocked at the accusations. As he says: “Once. I hit her once… and ever since that day I've been known as a wife-beater.” 

Yes, OJ. That’s pretty much how it works.

Eventually Nicole left, and then she starts to fall apart; fighting with her friends, crying, getting knocked up by random dudes. You know, chick stuff. She also started hanging out with people that OJ says were pimps and drug dealers. And this whole time OJ wasn't being a dick, he was just trying to raise money for “children with birth defects”! What a guy. So anyway, one night OJ went round to Nicole’s house and saw she had a gentleman caller. They started to fight, so OJ grabbed a knife and killed his ex-wife and her lover.

So why is this book still relevant? Well, frankly, it isn't. Simpson clearly wrote the book to make some cash. Only he couldn't, since he still owed Nicole Brown’s family millions of dollars after being sued. So the family took legal ownership of the book and they are now claiming all profits. I am not sure what is worse here; the (alleged) murderer profiting from the crime, or the family of the victim doing the same? As tragic as the murder was, perhaps the family and friends should just let the dead rest in peace, rather than publishing their private diaries or a confession by the (alleged) killer.

Since he was African-American and his wife was Caucasian, the trial created a rift in the USA. But oddly enough, OJ never blames the trial on race. He doesn't even mention it, neither in this book nor in interviews. He claims he was accused because his ex-wife was a crazy bitch. Either way, the trial hit a cultural nerve. Many said OJ was arrested because of his race. Others have argued it was because he was a convicted wife-beater and serial criminal. But I guess the jury is still out on that one. Oh wait, no it isn't. He’s innocent. Except he’s in jail now for kidnapping and trying to kill someone else. Go figure.

At least, though, with this highly publicized trial, and a confessed (alleged) murderer walking away from the crime, race relations in the USA were finally solved forever.

Oh, what’s that? Baltimore is on fire because of allegations of racism in the USA? Oh…

Isn't Baltimore always on fire?

B. Dashington

 10-05-2015

#33 - "The Camp of the Saints" by Jean Raspail

Turd-Eating Indian Zombies

(0/10)

By Admiral Fartmore

(book chosen by Beau Dashington)

Editor's Note: Mmm... turds.

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is a racist, apocalyptic novel about zombie-like hordes of South Asians flooding into Europe and bringing about the fall of Western civilization. It has been referred to as a French “anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries,” the rambling white-supremacist bible that inspired the Piece of Shit Book Club in the first place, and there is no misreading its message: immigration is very literally the end of the world. It’s basically The Walking Dead except with Indians. Quelle horreur!

To briefly recap the plot: in India, a dalit man (referred to exclusively as “the turd eater”) has with his wife produced the Antichrist; a disfigured, wailing baby that is able to control hordes of Indians through his unintelligible screams. The screaming monster-baby rides on its father’s shoulders, commanding its followers to board steam ships and sail to Europe. So millions of impoverished Indians load up in boats and sail to the promise-land. Most of the book deals with the French government's debate over what to do when these steamboats arrive. There’s also some side plots about Chinese flooding into Siberia and black people taking over New York, but they are just typical half-baked race war crap and are secondary to the whole HMS Antichrist zombie-invasion conundrum.

Imagine a combination of World War Z and American History X.

The ships make their way to the French Coast, while their denizens sing, dance, bang and shit a lot. During the journey, the antichrist baby dies on Good Friday and comes back to life on Easter, and international blockades are unable to contain the ships because of how bad they smell. In the meantime, French society has been split on the issue of how to deal with their arrival, leading to the President giving the bizarre order for military forces to shoot at the immigrants “if they choose.” Half the military fights, half doesn’t, a sort of civil war erupts, and then a few months later France has becomes some kind of multicultural dystopia where white women must serve in whorehouses and public pools are ridden with STDs. He’s a bit loose on the details, but I guess racism is always a you-fill-in-the-blanks kind of thing.

Dehumanization is a pretty standard step in any kind of racist manifesto: all other things removed, humans are generally compassionate toward other humans, so you have to make the target ethnicity as non-human as possible in order to kill the reader’s empathy. But rather than use cliché terms like cockroach, rat, leech, etc., Raspail takes things a step further and accomplishes the complete zombification of Indians: they are always in a horde, “a forest of fleshless, Gandhi-arms,” “monsters thronging about,” a “tide that absorbed and digested” all in its path. They never speak, just moan and grope and trample things. They aren’t portrayed as consciously evil, just mindless and starving. So, pretty much exactly like zombies.

Raspail sharing another terrifying tale from the crypt!

Seems like a case of the ghoul calling the zombie dead. And as for the antichrist that leads the zombies from the turd-eater’s shoulders? Well, he apparently looked something like this:

“At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet.”

Raspail's cartoon villains are like something out of South Park, except they aren't parody.

Raspail is otherwise a celebrated figure in French literature, but he couldn’t resist referring to the dalit exclusively as a turd-eater. I think that’s the most annoying part of this kind of racist trash – this strange duality of very serious demonization and very immature characterization of other ethnicities. One paragraph Raspail will be literally talking about the end of the Christian world (a plane carrying the Pope inexplicably explodes), and the next he will be talking about how much better forks are than chopsticks. He says curry stinks. He even says that Indian guys have weird looking dicks. All this, from a guy whose collection of literary awards rivals my own cabinet of Most-Improved-Player awards.

The work is also as much an attack on modernity and liberalism as it is a racist manifesto; the flood of immigrants is basically presented as a punishment to Western society for failing to uphold conservative, Christian values. Raspail includes an extended allegory about an old oak door in some hamlet in southern France (it represents a strong, Christian Europe, or whatever) and this door is eventually destroyed not by Indian zombies, but by infighting in the French army. The real enemies in Raspail’s world are those who failed to just bomb the fleet of ships before it arrived; his heroes are those characters that started shooting Indians (even back in India) without a second thought. Anyone that attacks the mobs inevitably gets crushed to death, but all of them “die with a clear conscience,” and so the book attempts to vindicate extreme xenophobes today by casting them as misunderstood martyrs, while the rest of us are actually working the bring about the apocalypse.

As a work of horror, it’s commendable. This is terrifying for anyone to read; for racists it is a potentially real end-of-days nightmare, and for the rest of us it is an actually real glimpse into a violent, hate-filled worldview. Raspail warns that immigration to the West is leading to a society where people “shit on [the] terrace and wipe their hands on books.” It’s funny he mentions that, because after reading this, I’ve never wanted to wipe my ass with a book more.

Jean Raspail, you - monsieur - are the turd-eater.

#22. "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama" by Ann Coulter

Why Can't Black People Be More Korean?

(2/10)

By Admiral Fartmore

(book chosen by PearTree)

Editor's Note: The more books we delve into in the Piece Of Shit Book Club™, the more I worry for the world. 

Ann Coulter is a cartoon character created, written and voiced by the real-life Ann Coulter. The Coulter character was first featured in syndicated columns that appeared in conservative magazines and newspapers in the late 1990s. Part satirist, part pundit, part skeletal-beast, Coulter is described by her creator (Ann Coulter) as a polemicist – a character intended to “stir the pot.” In the surreal media circus that surrounds American politics, she is the bigoted fire-breather. After her inception at the turn of the century, her popularity grew dramatically in the 2000s, when Coulter began performing the character on American political talk shows as well as starring in a popular book series, The Adventures of Ann Coulter.

 Featuring titles such as Godless: The Church of Liberalism, and Treason: Liberal Treachery, The Adventures of Ann Coulter is reminiscent of early Adventures of Tintin comics, for its familiar blend of political intrigue and racial stereotypes.

Coulter is best known for her controversial statements, including comparing US immigration to genocide against White Americans, advocating for a carpet bombing of the Middle East, and suggesting that America’s Jewish community should be perfected through conversion to Christianity. Her character is cleverly designed to satisfy both poles of the US political spectrum; right-wingers enjoy her ability to annoy the left, and left-wingers in turn enjoy watching YouTube videos of her losing arguments. In essence, she embodies a brilliant – albeit simple – reflection of everything that is fucking wrong with American political dialogue.

However, Coulter has received criticism from various artists for her occasional low-grade animation, particularly for her unrealistic lip movement, her disproportionate features, and her emotionless, dead, dead eyes. I personally feel that this critique is unfair. I would argue instead that the entire point of her character design is to straddle the uncanny valley, through a balance of human features with that of the undead. I came across this difficulty myself when attempting to draw Coulter, as you may see below:

 I still couldn't quite catch the unapologetic hatred, but whatever.

I was both excited and nervous when I received Coulter's latest adventure, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery in America from the 70s to Obama as my assignment. In it, Coulter tells the story of “the left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else,” through her own lie-filled and patronizing arguments. Make no mistake – this book is a Piece Of Shit™ – but how exactly am I to critique a character designed to be belligerent and ignorant? When Coulter says that “the three-fifths clause had nothing to do with the moral worth of black people,” of course she’s wrong, but she’s deliberately wrong. You’d have to be a real idiot to try to whitewash the systematic racial discrimination that marked the 19^th century. But that’s the point. There’s nothing insightful or funny about pointing out the fact that Homer Simpson is a buffoon, and Ann Coulter needs to be treated with the same level of seriousness. This book is endlessly quotable, but Coulter has made her name by being quotable. As such, I want to refrain from simply quoting her through this entire review, because I hate her.

There is room, however, to critique the fictional world that the Coulter character inhabits. It is a dystopian (her words) version of the United States where Democrats and liberals (the author employs the two terms interchangeably) have engineered a mythical history of racial oppression in America in order to pander to and control the black community. The myth of racism in America is “a malicious lie told to black people to make them fear imaginary oppressors, so they will turn to the big, strong Democrats to protect them.” In Coulter’s world, everything was perfectly rosy following the abolition of slavery, but “from Jim Crow to ‘hope and change,’ liberals wrote the book on how to destroy a people.” In this world, Coulter is tasked with unearthing the liberal conspiracy and spreading the good word of the Republican Party, who are here to save the black community from its liberal oppressors.

The messiah Ann, pictured here in mid-revelation. 

I had several issues with this world. Firstly, I had difficulty finding the sodomite-academic-liberal-democrat antagonist very believable either in make-up or intent. For one, there’s no real explanation for how this monolithic demon operates. We are just expected to believe that the Democrat in Mississippi, the university professor in Seattle, and the news anchor in New York are all fastened together magically like the Megazord from Power Rangers. I got a Megazord for Christmas once, and while it’s an impressive adversary, I would have appreciated a clearer explanation of how this conspiracy actually operates. Secondly, Coulter stresses that slavery, affirmative action, childcare benefits for single mothers, etc., are all part of the same 300-year-old master plan to subjugate the black community. Flat, single-purpose villains just aren’t interesting, and so I found this to be a little stale. Lastly, Coulter’s allergies to nuance and character development left the whole conflict feeling a bit too black and white. (HEYOOO)

But to be fair, I haven’t read any of Ann Coulter’s previous adventures, and starting a fantasy series halfway through is always confusing. I do have to recognize that this book is written for people who already have an idea who the liberal demon is. Or maybe it’s deliberately ambiguous, so you can fill in the blanks with whatever you like. I’m not sure. Either way, it wasn’t written for me; it was written for black people. Wait, no it wasn’t. It was written for white people - well, maybe. I guess it was written for anyone who agrees with Coulter’s weird concluding statement: “If all black people woke up tomorrow with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities would vanish within ten years.” Soooo, Koreans? Ah, fuck it: she just wants money, and she wrote this book for anyone that would buy it.

Otherwise, most of the bigotry and ignorance that Ann is celebrated for just felt dull and contrived. And if you’re over the shock value of her work, there’s really very little substance left. She’s a perfect example of how no press is bad press, and how very rich you can get by pandering to people’s frustrations with our imperfect world. But there’s no point attacking her, because she revels in infamy. So I’ve treated Ann Coulter like a cartoon, because that’s what she is. And this book was just another boring afternoon re-run.

-Admiral Fartmore

#5: "On The Jews and Their Lies" by Martin Luther

Mazel Tov (0/10)

by Beau Dashington

(book selected by AdmiralFartmore)

In a controversial turn of events, the boys have decided to change how they assign books. After much bitching and moaning from some people who will remain nameless (actually, it was AdmiralFartmore and Peartree), it was decided to change how books were assigned. Rather than having a bet, with the loser being forced to read a Piece of Shit™, the boys will now rotate in a cycle taking equal turns to read. This book review is the first in a new cycle. This is horseshit.

It is impossible to imagine European history without the cataclysmic figure of Martin Luther. When he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg, he not only laid the foundations for Protestantism as a religious doctrine, he also opened the door for the Enlightenment and Renaissance, changing not only continental Europe, but the course of human history.

But in addition to writing the 95 Theses, Luther also wrote a real piece of shit, the questionably titled The Jews and Their Lies. It’s basically a 70 page rant with no real point, and I’m surprised that anyone even bothers to publish it. The cover promises to “shake, shock and alert Christian America.” The introduction challenges the readers assumptions, asserting that the publishers are not seeking to take sides on this sensitive issue, but instead are presenting evidence from which the reader is to draw their own conclusions. This is clear from their description of the subject matter as “the most delicate and dangerous subjects for a public man to discuss – the Jews.” Clearly, their approach is to be both fair and balanced.

The editors have gone at the work with a hatchet, eliminating anything that might even remotely interest the reader or provide any evidence to Luther’s absurd claims. In one section where he begins to rant about the perils of circumcision, the editors simply cut him off mid-sentence and state “Here follow lengthy theological treatises based on numerous passages from Scripture.” But I wanted to hear about the penis cutting. That was the only potentially interesting thing in this piece of shit.

At another point, the book is cut off with an editor’s note saying “Here Luther uncovers the deepest cause of the ever-recurring persecution of the Jews.” But it doesn’t actually say what that cause is. I would have thought that in a book advocating the persecution of the Jewish peoples, that this point would have been included given that it is the ontological founding principle of the book’s entire argument. But what the fuck do I know.

When he isn’t interrupted by the editor, Luther asserts a number of premises that could have been easily disproved with even a small amount of research. Amongst these include that all Jews are men. I don’t think this is true. I saw an Israeli woman naked once and I’m pretty sure she had a vagina. At least, I hope it was her vagina otherwise I made a terrible mistake. Luther also believes that the only Jewish profession is usury, which I also don’t think is true. I knew a Jewish guy called Ethan who worked in IT, and he would never lend me any money. Cheap bastard. Luther also says that Jews believe “what the cow and goose believes.” I have literally no idea what this means, but I’m pretty sure cattle haven’t read the Torah.

Even by the standards of low-brow racism, this book is pretty bad. The book doesn’t contain any point, other than that Jews are bad. That’s pretty much it. It doesn’t say why, nor does it advocate a course of action, thereby violating the singular rule of quality writing; that the author should have a fucking point. His main criticism of Jews is (and I’m not making this up) that they “earnestly desire to be Jews.” Yeah; no shit. Jewish people want to be Jewish.  The only solution to this, he argues, is that people should refuse to talk to Jews, and refuse to let them in their houses. At the same time time, he notes, Christians must be merciful and let Jews sleep in their barns with the chickens and Gypsies.

Speaking of sentences out of context, here’s a good one: “This it would do to her, that people would despise her seven times more than a free, public whore!” Again; no idea what he is talking about. But there is worse. He accuses Jews of habitually poisoning wells and stealing children, beliefs as childish in their lack of logic as they are dangerous in encouraging pogroms and vigilantism, something he tacitly encourages when he says Christians should no longer provide Jews with safety or protection.

Writing a review for this piece of shit isn’t easy. For starters, what tone should I adopt? Should I be flippant about rabid anti-Semitism, and try to make it funny? Or should I write a boring review with a stern I-thought-as-much tone which allies with the readers’ shock at this piece of shit? This is different than writing about mouthshots, or retarded women who seek spiritual advice from their dogs. For centuries, this book has been directly complicit in the torture of countless innocents, in the public lynching of rabbis and children, in the immolation of wives and sons.

After reading the book, I am indeed shaken, shocked and alerted, but not by the arguments of this book, but rather, by what a piece of shit it is. The scary thing is that there are people so fucking stupid and closed-minded that they would see this work as confirmation of their childish and Neolithic beliefs.

In terms of what I’d like to say to Luther, I’m tempted to quote the erstwhile prophet Joe Pesci, but I won’t. I’ll keep it simple. I say fuck this piece of shit. Confine it to the anals of history where it belongs.

As for me, I’m converting to Judaism. I’m already circumcised so I’m halfway there.

Mazel tov.




Beau Dashington

05/10/2014