Fifty Shades of Who Gives a Shit

Do you know how hard it is to keep a good rant going? It’s not easy. Thank God there’s gin to fuel the fires of righteous indignation. TG has been getting mail of the -- “Well, TG, I didn’t think you were the type of guy who would love a book like The Fifty Shades of Grey” – variety. These people don’t seem to understand the thinking behind this ongoing rant, so TG will briefly explain it one more time. Try to stay with him…

TG did not love Shades. It was perfectly fine and hit all the buttons that a hundred million women wanted hit. (Which says a lot about the state of the average American male and his inability to give women what they are looking for. But that’s another rant.) What upsets TG, is handing literary book reviewers the job of reviewing the Fifty Shades book, and the movie, almost all of whom pronounced the results as “terrible.” Fortunately, this method of assigning reviews is not a normal practice. Magazines and periodicals and websites don’t usually assign literary critics to review popular fiction. But once a book becomes a phenomenon, in this case by selling a hundred million copies, everyone feels the need to weigh in. And when weighing in they usually assume a superior attitude and proceed to point out the many failings that we, the  unwashed are prey to because of our taste in popular fiction. This is what TG objects to: the unfair opinions that we are inferior and they, with their literary tastes, are superior.

Example. Here’s that pompous ass Harold Bloom on Stephen King. “That [the National Book Foundation] could believe that there is any literary value [in King’s body of work] or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.”

TG had a long list of items like the above Bloom quote that he was going to put in this entry: definitions of different types of fiction, lists of popular novels that had earned a hundred million readers over the years, much shorter lists of successful literary novels, but, as always, he’s lost all of these various pieces of info and he’s too damned lazy to look it all up again. So he’s going to go straight to the genesis of the rant, which is…

The Honey Badger.

Because, my friends, the Honey Badger Just Don’t Give a Shit.

If you don’t know what TG is talking about, go here and watch the short Honey Badger video.

Here’s the point: popular entertainment, be it books, films, music, art or any other form of popular culture, is the Honey Badger. Fifty Shades of Grey, 100 million women strong, is the Honey Badger. Stephen King is the Honey Badger. So to the high minded, the superior, those that feel the need to tell the rest of us how we are small-minded and our tastes inferior, be aware of the following.

We are the Honey Badger.

And we really, truly, do not give a shit what you have to say.