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For Fans of Gratuitous Nastiness

The Buffalo Beast has released its annual “50 Most Loathsome Americans” list. It’s mean, it’s rude, it’s not quite as entertaining (in my opinion) as the ones they put out in the mid-to-late ’00s, but it’s still almost guaranteed to tee off on a couple of people you really don’t like.

It seems like this list is heavier on pop-culture figures than some of the earlier lists; I don’t know if this shows that the writers are less angry about politics or just that popular culture has gotten even more angry-making than usual. In fact, one of the longest entries, at # 33, is for a pop culture behind-the-scenes figure virtually unknown even to most people who watch his show: Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. An excerpt:

Charges: As co-creator of “Lost” and co-writer of the monumentally terrible final episode, Lindelof first conjured a confusing yet entertaining sci-fi epic but then, despite its mechanical sound, the “Smoke Monster” turns out to be the ghost of the father of liberal philosophy, side plots about mental illness and alternate universes go nowhere, paper-thin characters inexplicably commune with the dead, and finally, in a clichéd, Old Testament-inspired supernatural battle, evil is defeated when a big rock dildo is crammed into a shiny hole by a handsome, emotionless doctor. And the whole damn thing—concocted entirely on the fly, with no eye toward resolution—from the plane crash to the time travel was actually just some brightly-lit, stained glass, feel-good, new-age, ecumenical afterlife delirium. Right.

And no, I’m not endorsing that evaluation. I still like reading it, though. Piling angry words upon other angry words until they create some kind of huge towering structure of anger is one of my favourite forms of humour, even when I disagree with the point that’s being made.

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