The Bitter Pill #3

I’ve been on a real rollercoaster lately. After completing Bitter Pill #2, I started developing a gnawing feeling that maybe spending so much time thinking and writing about the Eugene Weekly was a form of mental illness, or at least a serious defect in character. A good friend, albeit of the imaginary variety, suggested that the Weekly was an inside joke that I was too uptight to get. Much soul searching commenced.

Then, in the midst of this searching, just when you might hope to find some traces of a soul, I flipped the latest Weekly open to a section titled Veteran’s Voices, being a nine-page collection of brief reflections by vets from various wars. Without doubt it’s the most moving and consequential thing I’ve ever read in the EW’s pages. My heart softened. The searing vitriol that courses through my veins was transformed into the sweet waters of repentance.

I thought immediately to write the editor to withdraw my Bitter Pill submissions, and to commend the paper for putting together and publishing such a worthwhile mirror, revealing the deep and insidiously hidden costs of war. Then I had a disconcerting thought. As the Veteran’s Voices section reminded me, this was EW’s Veteran’s Day issue, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything veteran-related on the cover. The VV section took obvious time and care to create, and it made no sense that there would be anything else on the cover. I began to feel disoriented. The world didn’t add up.

Flipping the issue closed to see what was on the cover, this feeling exploded into disbelief. Cosplay. People dressed up as comic book and sci-fi characters. On the Veteran’s Day issue cover.

As you might imagine, my disorientation swiftly found its bearings. I was like a trained athlete, a steroid-charged homerun hitter being served up the fattest change-up in history. Oh, wait, I was like Hamlet just when he learns from his father’s ghost that the serpent that took his life now wears his crown. In short, I was righteously pissed.

The Weekly put together a deeply important record of the real, lasting and tragically isolating impacts of war and then buried it behind a cover about people who find purpose and connection in life by dressing up like imaginary characters. Finally, these folks can get fleeced out of some cash by a CON right here in Eugene. The inversion of priorities was staggering.

I’d already started a furious letter in my head — the POOPY HORNET rides again!!! — when flipping back to the Veteran’s Voice section, as if to check that this really was the same issue, I noticed two small words just above the section title: PAID INSERT.

Slowly, the subtle genius of the Weekly began to dawn on me. Here was a completely sly, almost unconscious, testament to the utterly fucked-up nature of a country that has managed to make perpetual war apparently painless, as if invisible, for most of the population. It is rare that any artist, let alone any artist in this town, can push perversity all the way to truth and beauty, but the Weekly pulled that shit off. Like a boss. Thirty thousand issues all over the Willamette Valley casually indicting an absolutely delusional culture. A culture that gives free promotion to a crass commercial fantasy while forcing its veterans to pay to be heard.

My hat is off, EW.

This sets a bold new standard and I’m hoping the EW follows up by replacing its WAR DEAD widget — which used to run every week in the printed NEWS section, though it’s now filed on the website under WHO THE FUCK CARES ANYMORE? — with a COSPLAY STATS box, so I can easily follow how many are dressing as what. Because in today’s America, citizenship isn’t about service or sacrifice or support for anything real, but about keeping up with, and somehow managing to continually care about, what’s #trending.