I started listening because my best guy Dan Savage is a regular contributor, but over time, I have very slowly grown to semi-like a few of the regulars on the show. Eli is a great writer and good moderator in spite of his slow, choppy speaking pattern. I'm torn because the way he speaks annoys the actual living fuck out of me, but I still like him in spite of myself. I originally thought Rich was the sort of untenable wildly leftist young millennial type who wants to cancel everyone, but he's not so bad, and I've even found myself agreeing with him most of the time when he's being challenged by everyone else. I also enjoy his dour personality and the constant references to his failed relationships, and the references to his resemblance to Robert Mueller. I like someone who leans hard into their dreariness despite being young and smart and attractive. Katie Herzog is the most hated character, but she's just sort of what I expect from someone who is probably 26 years old but thinks she's 100. You might could* say I've been there.
This week, they took Dan's absence as an opportunity to pile onto him about his being a boomer and generally dominating all of them at work and on Blabbermouth. Apparently he's an overwhelming presence in the Stranger offices, but instead of enjoying it, they just grumble and roll their eyes. HE IS DELIGHTFUL YOU INGRATES. Anyway, they seem to take his constant owning of them as an example of boomerism because, by some bizarre stretch of generational classification, he is apparently technically a boomer despite being only 50ish and otherwise very Gen-Xey in general.
They accuse him of centrism because he says we should all vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is, in order to destroy Trump. Because he thinks Biden's gaffes are regrettable but not bad enough to vote for anyone else if he's the nominee, or to not vote. But he thinks that about every potential candidate, from Warren to Buttigieg. (I just want to note that I spelled that correctly on the first try, my first time actually typing his last name. Not bragging, just surprised) I think this characterization of Dan as an old yelling guy is just reductive laziness. I almost always agree with him, but I also almost always agree with Bill Maher too, so that probably makes me a cancellable old jackass as well. It's also not nothing that Blabbermouth would be adrift like a broken sailboat if not for Dan. When he was away in Europe for weeks earlier in the year, the Blabbermouth Facebook page just became a spam zone of "WHERE'S DAN" posts.
My corner of the internet is filled with these types of crazy politically fringey kids, people who aren't even that young but who want to burn and bury anyone who isn't 1000% in lockstep with their own views as they are today despite the fact that they (the accusers) have been evolving by the minute, and forget their own recent pasts in which they have been, as the kids say, hell of problematic. Some of the people I am thinking of had extremely, objectively questionable views 5 and certainly 10 years ago, when they were younger, dumber, and less aware of the lived experience of anyone not just like them. No sense of irony in these people.
If Dan is to boomer as I am to millennial, then, fine whatever. I'm considered an "old millennial" (thank you) based on my birth date and the fact that much of my life has included the internet, but I fully remember days before home computers were normal, when people recorded their answering machine messages on cassette tapes and answered the phone without caller id or hesitation. When having a pager caused your uncle to jokingly ask if you were a drug dealer. When pagers were even a thing. Those memories are getting dimmer and dimmer, but I remember what it was like to, as some New Yorker or Vanity Fair article said, stare into space for long periods of time in the absence of the constant demands and lures of social media, and I got through my adolescence that way, which I think was probably valuable.
"Republicans are always carving new orifices in our body politic and finding new ways to fuck us."
Dan Savage, 2018
My fondness for Dan is only somewhat an endorsement of his podcast, The Savage Lovecast. Go for the rants at the beginning, but based on your lifestyle, you might skip the rest. I've been listening for years, and I am dead tired of most of the questions that people ask. They always want to know if they should leave their abusive partner, or how to have anal sex. Always the same old things. Do y'all not use the internet, or do you just want to hear it in Dan's voice?
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*"Might could" just means something like "maybe" in Texas. It's my favorite old timey localism.
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