Lifestyles of the Doomed (Bayan's Tirades: Volume 2)

By Rick Bayan

Lifestyles of the Doomed: American Follies & Afflictions at the Turn of the Millennium (Bayan's Tirades, Volume 2)

Let the author of "The Cynic's Dictionary" and "Extremely Dark Chocolates" lead you on a bitterly amusing journey back to the turn of the millennium. Bayan, a self-described "kinder, gentler cynic," wrote these seriously funny commentary pieces between 1998 and 2002, as we transitioned from an age of frivolity to an age of terror and disgruntlement. On one side of the divide we had Seinfeld, New Age crystal shops and goat-cheese pizza with arugula; on the other side came the dotcom crash, George W. Bush, 9/11 and worldwide jihad.

All the pieces in this lively collection (the second of three projected volumes, each with a different theme) are gathered from Bayan's vintage website, The Cynic's Sanctuary, as well as his syndicated column, "Some Cynical Guy." Contents include "Great Affectations," "Adventures in Downsizing," "The Cynic's Inaugural Address," "Selling Your Soul on eBay," "The Museum of Discarded Names," Fanatics on Parade" and over 40 more essays that, taken together, chronicle the slow-motion cultural shipwreck that ended the yuppie heyday of the '90s.

Witty, irreverent, heartfelt and stylishly written, "Lifestyles of the Doomed" will leave you laughing and shaking your head in commiseration. It's the kind of book you'll want to dip into again and again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rick Bayan
• Release date: Nov 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780991359912

Rick Bayan

I was born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I enjoyed an idyllic semi-suburban childhood. I graduated from Rutgers with a degree in history, then picked up a master's in journalism from the University of Illinois. At the latter institution I learned little about reporting but discovered the works of classic American curmudgeon H. L. Mencken. In my twenties I held a number of typical jobs for an idealistic liberal arts graduate, including assistant editor of Rubber Age and managing editor of Container News. At Time-Life Books I was assigned to write about plumbing fixtures. After 18 months of gainful unemployment (during which I burrowed into dozens of great books and saw my first essays published), I survived seven years as chief copywriter at Barron’s Educational Series. In 1985 I moved from New York to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Why? I had taken a job as advertising copy chief at Day-Timers, the original producer of old-fashioned personal organizers. (People still wrote on paper then.) My work there won six advertising awards. In the evenings I crafted my "disgruntled definitions" for The Cynic's Dictionary (Morrow, 1994) on my office computer. Two years later I created The Cynic’s Sanctuary online to promote my book, but the site took on a life of its own – with lively message board conversations, my own monthly "tirades" and other fun features. I also wrote a weekly syndicated column, "Some Cynical Guy," for Upbeat Online. One dedicated fan even wrote a screenplay, I, Cynic, based on my writings. After 14 years at Day-Timers, I called it quits and leaped into the perilous world of freelance writing and creative consulting. As Richard Bayan (my “serious” professional alter ego), I’m the author of the popular advertising thesaurus Words That Sell and its spawn, More Words That Sell, both published by McGraw-Hill. I've also published three collections of humorous essays on Smashwords: Extremely Dark Chocolates, Lifestyles of the Doomed, and The World Is My Obstacle Course. In 2007 I created The New Moderate (www.newmoderate.com), a blog for "extreme" centrists. I’ve been interviewed by CNN, Psychology Today, Australia's leading women's magazine and numerous radio and TV shows. These days you can find me living with my teenage son and a middle-aged cat in a tree-shaded former stable in Philadelphia. I’m a longtime birdwatcher and one of the few people alive who can do a reasonably accurate vocal impression of Teddy Roosevelt. Wish me luck (and buy my books!).

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Author’s Note

Lifestyles of the Doomed collects my cultural and political observations from the turn of the millennium – 1998 through 2002, to be exact. You’ll catch plenty of dated references in these essays, of course, but that’s the whole idea. This book is a time capsule. I want you (and future cultural historians, assuming anyone still studies history in the future) to experience the turn of the millennium through the eyes of a jaded idealist (me) as we transitioned from an age of frivolity to an age of terror within the span of a few years.

Many of these pieces first appeared as monthly tirades on my vintage website, The Cynic’s Sanctuary. The others come to you from my syndicated column, Some Cynical Guy, written for Upbeat Online (and which I cross-posted on The Cynic’s Sanctuary with the publisher’s permission). As you’ll see, I’ve arranged them in chronological order with brief introductory notes to set them in context.

Lifestyles of the Doomed is Volume 2 of a projected trilogy that includes the already-published Extremely Dark Chocolates (bitterly amusing observations on aging, death, funerals, extinction and other inconveniences) and The World Is My Obstacle Course (autobiographical reflections of a kinder, gentler cynic struggling with an uncooperative universe). Together the three books should encompass the best essays from the glory years of The Cynic’s Sanctuary.

Rick Bayan

Philadelphia, November 2016

Preface

Who are the doomed? They’re the fellow members of our gifted and bumbling species, scrambling to build their personal sandcastles before the rising tide sweeps them away. These castles might be grandiose, silly, hideous, funky, fanatically detailed or touchingly beautiful. But all of them, like all of us, must crumble in the end. That’s the nature of sandcastles, lifestyles and just about everything else on our dizzy globe.

I wrote these pieces over a period of four years that straddled two millennia. By a convenient coincidence, those four years led us from the loopy heyday of yuppiedom to a ghastly new Age of Terror and Consternation. On one side of the divide we had Seinfeld, New Age crystal shops and goat-cheese pizza with arugula; on the other side came the dotcom crash, George W. Bush, 9/11 and worldwide jihad.

Lifestyles of the Doomed doesn’t form a continuous narrative, but as you’ll see, it records a cultural unraveling that looks all the more ominous in retrospect – even if I wasn’t entirely aware of it at the time. You’ll be reading the quirky chronicle of a slow-motion shipwreck from the perspective of a former idealist who had expected a bright future and got hornswoggled instead.

Maybe you feel you’ve been hornswoggled, too. Our times, like some vast gambling casino, have guaranteed that most of us will lose to the house. Maybe you watched helplessly (as I did) when the stock market stomped on your nest egg. Maybe you’re a conservative alarmed at the decrepitude of our culture, or a liberal appalled by the widening wealth gap. You could even be a lonely moderate who wonders why nobody seems to agree with your eminently sensible views.

In these pages you can watch me growl and grumble about overwork, political correctness, pretentious food, overhyped tabloid celebrities, dismal presidential candidates, absurdly overpaid athletes and CEOs, hot coffee lawsuits, repulsive art, fanatics and terrorists, reproductive failure, bad punctuation and other signposts of impending doom. This can be heavy stuff, as you might imagine, but I say it doesn’t have to be dreary. If the Titanic is tilting, why not listen to the band and enjoy a few moments of hearty fellowship before we slide below the waves? Better yet, let’s jump into a lifeboat and watch the disaster from a safe distance.

Did I mention that Lifestyles of the Doomed is an amusing book (believe me, it is), and that some receptive readers might even regard it as a book of humor? Not snarky humor, or too-cool ironic urban humor, or rascally frat-boy humor, or even the politely upscale NPR sort of humor that elicits a politely upscale NPR sort of laughter. Plenty of other books offer more sniggers per page, if that’s what you need. No, I submit this book to you as a crackling example of serious humor. Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken and George Carlin would understand, if they could still understand anything at this point.

I believe that humor should have a heart and a backbone. It should serve the truth with a bracing twist of lemon. Merely facetious humor, the inexplicably popular brand of wit that might as well have JUST KIDDING! stamped all over it, is almost as revolting to me as fresh-squeezed lemonade concocted from spoonfuls of gritty yellow powder. Truth in humor means at least as much to me as truth in advertising or truth in politics (not that we’ll ever witness the latter in our lifetimes).

One more thing you should know about me: I used to be a professional cynic, but the hours were long and the pay was dismal. My chief work in that field, a sharp little volume called The Cynic’s Dictionary (now more-or-less defunct like a miniature cactus that has turned pale gray in its pot), attracted a faithful following but never quite cracked the mainstream media radar. Ditto for my seriously amusing website, The Cynic’s Sanctuary.

What a downright deep tragedy, at least for me if not for you. If I had been living and writing in the Dark Ages, I might have been acclaimed as the reigning humorist of my era. The Vikings and Byzantines had nobody to rival my mellifluous eruptions of wounded wit. Scholars today would be annotating my essays and force-feeding my antique prose to their captive pupils.

If I had been born in Latvia or Liechtenstein, you can bet I’d already be a national hero. Within a year or two after my demise, my long-nosed likeness would probably turn up on a first-class postage stamp. But here in America, land of twenty million would-be literati, most of whom seem to possess a gene for militant self-promotion, my odds of achieving hero status are roughly the same as a team of Chihuahuas pulling the winning sled in the Iditarod.

Don’t weep for me, though. My relative obscurity has given me the priceless opportunity to rant at will. I’ve been free to observe truths, injustices and absurdities conveniently overlooked by comfortable authors who summer with their equally comfortable friends on Martha’s Vineyard. I won’t have to fret about being ostracized for my naive and forthright pronouncements on this or that cultural folly; I’m not well-connected enough to be ostracized. I enjoy the wanton freedom of the perennial outsider. But I’d prefer to be a famous perennial outsider.

Here’s where you can help: buy this book! You can’t deny that it boasts a fetching title. And unlike so many other books with fetching titles, this one has the innards to back it up. Mention my book to your friends, colleagues and in-laws, too. Please don’t let another ghostwritten celebrity memoir take my rightful place on the Times bestseller list!

If you feel at odds with the tone of our new millennium, let’s get acquainted. Let’s grumble together. Let’s look at some of those loopy sandcastles (including our own) and enjoy a few subversive chuckles while we shake our heads at the spectacle. For cultural curmudgeons like us, that kind of shared mirth might be the surest path to happiness... at least until you reach the last page and face our doomed world once again.

The Mathematics of Excess

April 2, 1998

Nobody expected a second Gilded Age. The first one was ancient history, after all. When I was a boy, even certified mega-celebrities like Lucille Ball, Jimmy Stewart and Jack Benny (neighbors on the same cozy street in Beverly Hills) lived in handsome but unostentatious homes befitting doctors or chiropractors. But somewhere toward the end of the twentieth century, the gap between the rich and everyone else widened into a canyon. The top earners started reaping such outlandish sums that I felt compelled to rant. I’ve left the dollar amounts as they were in 1998, so the hypothetical $30,000 annual income for Joe Average might seem a bit skimpy. But I’ve left the celebrity incomes in 1998 dollars, too – and the pay comparisons remain at least as eye-popping today.

It all began at a dinner party I attended back in the early 1980s. The Age of Greed was already in flower, and the topic of conversation naturally turned to money.

I can’t recall what prompted me to speak my mind; it must have been a discussion of salaries – an especially sensitive topic for a young man who had been laboring as an underpaid drudge in the world of publishing. In any case, I remember the exact words of my declaration:

I don’t think anybody deserves to make more than ten times as much as anybody else.

After a moment of silence that resounded from one end of the dining room to another, my fellow dinner-guests bombarded me with sallies of outrage and derision:

Oh, come on! Are you SERIOUS? That’s SOCIALISM!

I calmly justified my argument. I stated that anyone who puts in a full day of work – even as a lowly table-sweeper at McDonald’s – deserves to earn at least ten percent as much as the CEO. Anything less would be a slap in the face of hard work, a mockery of earnest and time-consuming labor.

But what about the decisions, the pressures, the millions of dollars in REVENUES that a CEO brings into his company?

My reply went something like this: "The CEO brings in revenues only because he’s in a position to bring in revenues. That’s his job. He’s not working any harder than the table-sweeper, and he probably makes more mistakes. I’d say a pay ratio of ten-to-one is extreme enough."

Today I’m glad I gave those capitalist noses a gentle tweak. In fact, those noses demand a bit of tweaking now more than ever. We’re still mired in an age of blatant and shameless money-grubbing, with a favored few reaping an absurd share of the spoils. Their outlandish pay – disproportionate to any consideration of intrinsic worth – makes a depressing mockery of everyone else’s efforts, especially mine. And ever since that memorable dinner party, I’ve made a minor hobby of studying the upper extremes of monetary compensation.

Here in the venerable republic of Jockistan, top baseball players routinely sign for $10 million or more a season. Their defenders justify the colossal sums in terms of their drawing power at the stadium gate. But what about those obscure shortstops with .259 batting averages who still reap $3 million for a season’s work? Nobody’s rushing out to the ballpark and buying overpriced hot dogs to watch them play.

Or what about those interchangeable relief pitchers with lifetime won-lost records of 38-44? They work half an hour every other day for six months and make a hundred times as much as Joe Average with his $30,000-a-year salary. And still they complain to their agents:

Come on, Max. Dutch Ramonez was 4-7 last year – and he’s getting $3.8 million. Hell, I won two more games than him and I’m only making $3.1 million. Gimme a break.

Sorry, but I really don’t feel his pain.

Let’s move west now, to southern California… to that dazzling realm of riotous palm trees and turquoise swimming pools, of whitewashed tile-roofed mansions basking under pale orange skies. We’re in Hollywood and its lush environs, home to some of the most spectacularly overpaid individuals on the planet.

Mildly talented sitcom star and ex-convict Tim Allen now commands $1.25 million for EACH EPISODE of his inexplicably popular Home Improvement series. Think about it: you show up for a few longish workdays, stand on your marks, smile quizzically for the cameras, recite a handful of unmemorable lines backed by a laugh track – and deposit another $1.25 million into your personal bank account. EVERY WEEK for six months. Then the remaining half of the year is yours to recuperate, splash around in your pool and do lunch with Cybill Shepherd or Danny DeVito.

How long would it take Joe Average to earn the pleasingly plump sum awarded to Tim Allen for a week’s work? No need to pull out your pocket calculator – I’ve done the math for you.

At $30,000 per annum, our friend Joe would have to labor for exactly forty-one years and eight months to reap his $1.25 million. That’s the work of an entire career, a span that would see our friend transformed from a fresh-faced young graduate into a grizzled, disillusioned low-level manager on the brink of retirement and congestive heart failure. Forty-one years and eight months of servitude for Joe Average equals one week for Tim Allen. That’s some equation.

Now let’s advance to a loftier level of stardom: the top male box-office draws who command roughly $20 million per film. Here we’re looking at immortals like Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger – acknowledged by common consent as the grand panjandrums of their profession today. How does Joe Average stack up against these sovereigns of celluloid? How long would he have to work before he netted his $20 million?

Poor chump. To earn what Tom, Bruce or Ahnold make for a single film, our overworked friend would be obligated to sweat for 666 years and eight months. In other words, if he had reported for work in the 1330s, he’d be collecting his final paycheck today.

Imagine what he could have witnessed: Gothic cathedrals soaring stone-by-stone into the medieval sky, the Hundred Years’ War, the ravages of bubonic plague, the pageantry of jousting tournaments, damsels in distress, the dark clouds of arrows raining on the field of Agincourt. But he would have been too busy to notice.

And he would have labored on, oblivious to the flames that consumed Joan of Arc, oblivious to the Renaissance. He could have watched Columbus set sail across the ocean blue; a century later, he might have attended a play by a young English upstart named Shakespeare. But no doubt he would have been too exhausted to bother. By 1664 or thereabouts – around the time the British captured the village of Nieuw Amsterdam and rechristened it New-York – his labors would have been half-finished: he’d have earned his first $10 million. Only another three-and-a-third centuries to go!

But $20 million is a disarmingly modest fee compared to what Hollywood’s real power boys have been raking in lately. Take Michael Ovitz, the notorious superagent who was hired as president of Disney in 1995. Forced to play second banana to chairman Michael Eisner, Ovitz languished in his new role and was politely dispatched after 14 months. To ease the humiliation of his departure, the good folks at Disney awarded Mr. Ovitz a glittering severance package valued at – well, approximately $100 million. We’re talking about a stack of bills that would reach up to where the planes don’t fly.

God almighty never had this kind of money; to make such a godlike sum in such an ungodly manner boggles the imagination. This menacing middleman, described by one industry insider as an icon of fear, had reaped a windfall nearly equivalent to the annual gross national product of Micronesia – simply by getting himself fired.

Now let’s return to our friend Joe Average. How long, you ask (and I knew you’d ask), would poor Joe have to push himself at $30,000 a year to reap an Ovitz-sized payday?

The truth is not pretty. If you’re easily disturbed by flagrant injustice, you might want to avert your eyes. Our marginally middle-class friend would be compelled to toil – are you ready? – for a total of 3,333 years and four months. To enjoy what Michael Ovitz enjoys today by the grace of Disney, good old Joe would have had to report for work in the FOURTEENTH CENTURY B.C.

What was happening in Joe’s world at the time? Egypt’s King Tutankhamen was a new mummy, having gone to his golden sarcophagus about a decade earlier. Another thirteen centuries would elapse before Cleopatra ruled her kingdom on the Nile. And during all those endless years, Joe would have been gainfully employed. He would have lived and worked through the Trojan War, the reigns of David and Solomon, the rise and fall of Assyria, the trial of Socrates, the conquests of Alexander the Great. If he saved his shekels, he could have booked a package tour of the Seven Wonders of the World. And when the King of Kings was born to that virgin in Bethlehem, Joe could have relaxed in the knowledge that he had a mere 2,000 years to go before retirement. (If he lived in Nazareth, he could have paid the teenage Jesus to mow his lawn.) Finally, when his work was done, Joe could have reflected on his 3,333 years and four months of labor – and taken comfort from the fact that he’d made as much as Michael Ovitz did on the day he parachuted out of Disney.

ENOUGH, you say! Hasn’t Joe already slaved too long for a mere mortal? This is unendurable – give the man a rest! Afraid not; we have yet another ridiculous sum for our friend to earn.

Back to Disney for a moment. It’s December 1997, only a year after the fall of Ovitz. Disney chieftain Michael Eisner – he of the mild countenance and relatively modest $750,000 annual salary – has decided to exercise his stock options. His net gain for picking up the phone that day? $516 million.

A hundred million here, a hundred million there, and – as the late Senator Everett Dirksen once observed – eventually we’re talking about REAL MONEY. $516 million is simply too gargantuan a sum to digest in the abstract; let’s translate it into work-years for Joe Average. How long this time, Joe?

I regret to tell you that I actually ran out of digits on my calculator. But after trimming a zero to fit Eisner’s harvest onto the display window, I made an adjustment, pushed the button, and lo! the figure stood at 17,200 years!

Joe’s time machine would deposit him in the Upper Paleolithic era for his first day on the job. Chances are he’d be working with tools made of flint or bone – and that he might have to dodge an occasional sabertooth on his strolls outside the cave. He’d need to wrap himself in furs – this is the Ice Age, after all, and anti-fur activists are as scarce as wheels; neither would appear on the scene for many millennia to come.

Squatting before his cave-fire on a chilly evening, with his hairy wife dozing contentedly at his side, our Joe can look forward to a long and satisfying career… a career that would encompass the ascent of man from stone-age warrior to cybercreature. If he waited 17,180 years, he and his family could even visit Disney World. And maybe Michael Eisner, good man that he is, would give them a free pass for the day.

Now for the clincher. Imagine for a moment that you’re Joe Average. Your lifetime goal is to earn an amount equal to the current net worth* of Microsoft mogul and alpha-geek Bill Gates. At $30,000 a year, how far back in time should you embark on your career if you want to retire as Bill’s peer today?