- I was watching "Ugly Betty" recently---much
the way one stares helplessly at the corpse in an open-casket funeral---and
I got to thinking ugly thoughts. It's easy, really. Most people do it
all the time.
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- Ugly, I realized, is as American as hindquarters the
size of car doors, and McBurritotacofelafels, and Christmas. Nothing is
much uglier than the Christmas, where kindness and fun have been gnarled
into psychotic trillion-dollar greedslobber. Christmas is an avalanche
of ugly, but that's fitting because for Amerryguns, ugly is the norm,
the starting point, the exalted goal. The American Dream is nothing but
ugly, nothing but craven pursuit of fatuous self-adoration, gluttony,
material wealth. I got mine. Whoever finishes with the most toys wins.
Japan invented Zen, the French existentialism, the Brits the stiff upper
lip, and the USA is the author of ugly.
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- Ugly is in the shiny, shiny, aggressively polished and
illegal alien-"detailed" $100,000 cars playing with your life
on streets and freeways, with drivers on cell phones starring in their
own private movies, peeing into their personal pee-devices as they drive,
to save time. Ugly is in their arrogantly sucked cigarettes, their fuck-laden
language, their insatiable wants, their consummate disregard.
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- Ugly is in the artificially whitened smile of our mayor,
Antonio Villaraigosa, whom I like to call The Imperious Little Anthony.
Which is an ugly pun on Little Anthony and the Imperials (who were not
ugly.) It's in Villaraigosa's styrofoam rhetoric and glazed posturing
and obscene lack of impact on anything. It's in the graft that L.A. mayors
and councilpersons have gaily engaged in, decade after decade, allowing
corporations to destroy and overdevelop the city into its current vast
ugliness.
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- It's in the gorgeous Pacific Ocean, in the river of
cigarette butts and empty Bud cans and used condoms and to-go containers
and plastic water bottles stretching from here to Hawaii. Plastic water
bottles destroying the ocean. Now there's an ugly irony.
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- The Ugly America
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- Oprah. She's really, really ugly---not physically, as
I will not comment on that for fear of the politically correct uglies
taking shots at me. Her ego, which will eventually produce a solar eclipse,
is ugly, and her self-importance and deep-seated belief that she is doing
good in the world. As opposed to pandering to dummies for money and self-aggrandisement.
And the stupidity and naivete and haplessness of those who worship her
is even uglier.
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- All the presidential candidates are colossally ugly
(though Giuliani tops the heap) and so is Frank Gehry, and those popular
hairless Chihuahuas, and that brainless Chihuahua, Paris Hilton. Family
relations are mostly ugly, and friendships seem to almost inevitably turn
that way. The microscopic creatures that live exclusively in your eyelashes
are magnificently ugly, but an improvement over Chris Wallace. "Have
a nice day" is ugly, and "finding everything all right?"
and "cool" and "I'm like" and "these ones,"
and "I seen," and euphemistic little niceties, and infomercials
and telemarketing and Trump. Most high school students are just terribly
ugly.
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- I am ugly, getting uglier by the day. There is a harmless
tumor in my back that is ugly, but I am thinking of getting Bela Lugosi's
face tattooed on it, because of the ugly fact that I can't afford to pay
some rich jackass doctor to cut it out. Cost of insurance is ugly. Birth
is ugly, death is ugly, feet are ugly. When you get down to it, a hell
of a lot of life is pretty ugly. Putting pretty and ugly together as modifiers
is grammatically ugly, although I enjoy the implied commentary there,
begging the question of aesthetic relativity. All the Zen/Yin-Yang stuff
about opposites, my citing of which is so clichéd and pretentious
as to be ugly.
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- Amputation. Vomit. Sex. The Rolling Stones. Putin. Murdoch.
American fear of terrorism. Spoiled college girls yapping into cell phones,
with their fatty fast-food-fed exposed bellies hanging over their belts.
Parking cops. Magazines that exploit voyeuristic interest in the rich
and famous. Corporate self- evaluations. A million dead in Iraq in the
name of "democracy." All morning TV newspeople, with their smiley-smiley
bullshit and their automated inane quips. Yooooooogly!
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- When you think about it, which is not a pretty thing
to do, it becomes apparent that most things associated with the human
race are about as ugly as intercourse with Larry King. Just read the
news: mass rape and murder in Africa, extinction of great apes, obsession
with the greatest ape, Britney. It will turn your insides to hopeless
mush. It's the earth and the forests and rivers and hummingbirds and daffodils,
which people are pissing on with unhinged abandon, that give us any sense
of things that are not ugly. Oh, and once in a while, a great work of
art, or genuine moral courage.
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- Beautiful Betty
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- But I have to say that the ugliest thing I have seen
in quite a long, long while is Ugly America, that is, America Ferrera,
who plays "Ugly Betty." Betty is not ugly, of course, but very
cute, really, with the braces and glasses and plain, straight hair. Her
character is intended to be an au courant imp fairly secreting self-doubt
and glib comebacks to her gay and female fashion mag dawgs, for whom bitchiness
is Nice 101. Everybody on "Ugly Betty" is kinetically, stuporously
self-involved at all times, and the program is a flitting, flicking glorification
of the ephemeral, trivial, vapid, nasty, snotty, empty. I recently made
the following ugly remark to a friend who enjoys "Ugly Betty:"
"Do you realize that nothing anyone does or says on that program
is necessary or useful to humanity?" Yes, this is also true of most
TV news, but that is another ugly column.
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- "Ugly Betty" might well be the ugliest program
I've ever seen, excluding "reality" TV, which has managed to
pull of the remarkably ugly feat of making reality seem uglier than it
actually is. Every "Ugly Betty" character is either overtly
despicable or devoid of any sense of anything outside his or her immediate
needs. Just like most American kids! Which brings up America The Beautiful.
Being a sensitive girl and an ambitious Emmy- winning little actress who
did not want the world (or at least casting agents) to think of her as
ugly, America posed for a bunch of "glamour" shots in a rag
called "Marie Claire." The issue bore a pressing and important
headline fairly indispensable to today's citizenry: "Party On!"
And there in its pages, partying on, was America---proving that she is
not ugly.
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- She accomplished this by removing the Ugly Betty glasses,
scrambling her neatly brushed Ugly Betty hair so it looked as if she'd
just done a couple days of fighting Santa Ana-wind-fed California fires,
smearing her face with lots of sticky and powdery beauty aids, then allowing
her monumental half-naked blubbery bazoom to cascade out of a black dress
fit for Elvira, or any self- respecting transsexual hooker. Oh, then there
was the beautiful look on her face, the sort coached by beauty professionals:
a carefully wrought confit of disdain, contempt, mild psychosis, and
maybe just a touch of constipation. The kind of face that would make a
jury convict.
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- This ugliness is what America, and America, are exporting
to the world as an ideal of beauty. It's been going on for a long, ugly
time. Look like a woman who would grant a male access to any and all ports
o' call for a proper and dignified fee, and you're Venus! Somewhere along
the line, this ugly madness got all balled up with feminist claptrap about
"empowerment" and "sexuality," which is sort of assbackwards,
isn't it? Wasn't feminism supposed to enable women to be assessed by their
abilities and character, as opposed to their asses? Well, employing reason
here is an ugly thing to do. The media and entertainment corporatocracy
are the whores in this case, having shifted notions of sexuality toward
sluttiness for profit. I give you: Sharon Stone. Imagine a society where
people think that a woman exposing her pubic hair to men is an exercise
in "empowerment," and you have a pretty good idea of the intellectual
and moral depth of the entertainment industry, and the public. O beautiful
for spacious minds, as I'm fond of saying.
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- It's all bad for America, and bad for America, but most
people don't understand this, or care, and that's the ugly truth. Show
America's photo spread around and you'll get a chorus of "cools"
and "she looks sexy!" and explanations like, "Well, it's
a come-hither-type look." Uh-uh. Lauren Bacall gave Bogart a come-hither-type
look in "To Have and Have Not." Her hair was neatly brushed,
and she wore a lovely suit, well buttoned. America Ferrera's is a "come
hither and touch any of this you worthless pig and I'll have Gloria Allred
on your ass in a New York minute"-type look.
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- But now I'm getting too ugly. Time to put an end to this
ugly column.
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- __________
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- Email Rip at mail@riprense.com
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