Dear Log,
"[America's] misfits have two choices. Play baseball, date cheerleaders and dance in formation at parties or declare yourself a Nietzschean Übermensch, get fucked up on heroin, refuse to accept the constraints of monogamy and write songs about killing your wife. In the former camp, we find 99% of all Americans. In the latter, the chainsaw-wielding minority whose reaction to being disappeared was to amplify their agony to a level where even their fellow Americans can't pretend that it doesn't exist."
-- "Heaven help the American misfit"
I think the writer greatly overcounts the formation-dancing cheerleader-dating baseball players. (Altho the writer is talking especially about Florida, a state known for the, uh, nonlinearity of its arithmetic.) But I get the writer's point nonetheless.
On the other hand, however, I have always said "the average American is someone who thinks he's smarter than the average American", making misfitness as American as single mom and pumpkin pie.
Yow! Have I commodified my dissent yet?
when, in the days following the plane crash, people were desperately trying to find something, anything, to blame this sad act on instead of really understanding that a smart thinking child has a very very lonely existence growing up in America. The UK reporter does exaggerate and simplify the situation a bit much but the meat of it is spot on. People will write the kid off as an anomaly while school shootings continue and they'll avoid asking the more painful questions with answers noone wants to hear.
Most people think of themselves as misifts. Everyone's other sock is in sock heaven.
