In Which We Choose A Woman And A President

Arlington

by DICK CHENEY

Choosing someone can be so difficult. Can you really expect a man from Iowa to really know what exactly is good for him? President Obama has not been to Iowa since the primaries for several reasons: he feels awkward around the Bachelor, Chris Soules, and he despises the smell of cowshit.

Given that he owns 800 acres, you think he could get the people of Arlington a fucking grocery.

Obama has privately expressed a determination to stay out of the 2016 presidential race. There is a not-so-quiet movement coming from some Republicans and Democrats to ensure Hillary Clinton never attains the presidency. They have trouble agreeing on what exactly is going to drive her out of Iowa, with some even resorting to the guy who was the corrupt Baltimore mayor in The Wire. Matt Drudge appears to be in love with this man:

Hillary cannot believe she is getting railroaded by Tommy Carcetti

If this seems like a stretch, maybe it's time to consider that no one actually wants to be the president. If you value your own time or ypur own family, the presidency is not really for you. There is a WH staffer who specifically updates the president on his daughters' moods and suggests how much child support he will be expected to pay once Michelle leaves him for Peabo Bryson.

If we are going to elect another unknown as president, I would prefer it be someone who is not negatively represented on The Wire, like Omar Little, or Heather Dunbar.

I actually hissed when I saw her as a brunette.

Frank Underwood wanted to be president more than anything in the world, although it is not completely clear why. Once in office, all he does is have intimate chats with his biographer and lash out at his wife for not finding a two-state solution as efficiently as he would like.

The new season of House of Cards makes you realize how difficult it is to go on living after you have seemingly gotten what you wanted. Most people don't want power or happiness; they just couldn't think of anything else they did want.

Maybe don't give someone a speech before they propose to you? It's rude.

Having a blonde Midwestern wife seems like a lot of work, maybe just as much work as occupying the Oval Office. Chris Soules chose the disturbingly vocal Whitney Bischoff as his bride-to-be. Before he proposed to her in one of his many barns (he owns 8 farms!), she interrupted his proposal with a gushing soliloquy about how she had the best time with him. She even talked through their first wintercourse, informing him of the entire plot of Hart of Dixie from beginning to end.

If he dumped her in a barn, she probably would have murdered him and his parents. He made the right call.

Whitney was a pill to be honest. Right before they had sex for the first time (Reality Steve reported that it would be missionary style, as God intended), she uttered the famous words, "Check, please!" Whitney, who will be giving up her job as a Chicago fertility nurse to produce "lots of babies" for the man she calls Ka-Ryse, has a very large sexual appetite. Her main drawback was her limited vocabulary, which began and ended with the word Amazing. Her kisses were somewhat subpar as well.

Everyone wants the smell of hay permanently ensconsed in her nostrils.

hris struggled with his choice of woman just like we struggle with our choice for president. The other woman involved treated Chris like he was a slightly overbearing uncle, and yet he still found himself deliberating over his final decision. The producers of The Bachelor couldn't choose either: instead of selecting one mediocre woman that Chris dumped to be the Bachelorette, they went with two.

The concept of two presidents isn't the worst idea I have ever heard. I guess we already had that, considering I made plenty of George W. Bush's decisions, including what cereal he would have for breakfast and what game modes he would play in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

If Becca said, "I'm just not there yet" one more time, I was going to key her asexual Lexus

The two women going on The Bachelorette that Chris perhaps unwisely parted ways with were Britt Nilsson and Kaitlyn Bristowe. The former basically did not shower her entire time on the show and wept through the entire hour of The Women Tell All. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn's accent ultimately doomed her to third place in the competition, as did coming on too strong in Bali. She should never have told him how cute she found the local monkeys; on a subliminal level a man wonders if she sees him the same way.

Who we choose says a lot about us. The important part of electing Barack Obama seemed to be how often and how effusively we could compliment ourselves for voting for him, and perhaps also saying that we voted against that Alaskan woman. An unattractive accent is everything.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can visit our mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com.

"Break the Fall" - Laura Welsh (mp3)

"Unravel" - Laura Welsh (mp3)

In Which The Bachelor Is A Sight For Sore Eyes

Love Fool

by ALICE BOLIN

The contestants on this season of The Bachelor would like to emphasize that they’re not used to being around this many women. “I’ve always had more boy friends,” says one bachelorette in an interview. “I’m not a girl, if that makes any sense,” says another to the current Bachelor, Ben Flajnik. “I appreciate that,” he says.

We recognize this as the female misogynist’s standard line. They complain of “drama,” of women being cruel and catty, when of course they are the ones who have abandoned the communal duty of women to be kind to one another. Reality television is rife with these self-hating women — since the goal is often to portray them as petty and irrational, it helps to cast those who already see their fellow women that way.

This is part of what sometimes makes The Bachelor such a sorry display. This season the contestants target one woman, Blakeley Shea, 34, as being a slut — even though she has done nothing more than kiss Ben, who makes out with nearly all of them every episode. They make fun of her large breasts and her job as a cocktail waitress. “She’s the kind of girl your boyfriend cheats on you with,” says one contestant. When Blakeley, a former college softball player, excels in the latest episode’s baseball game, one of them says, “Who knew strippers could play baseball?” This is the first problem. These women have no respect for women.

But of course, the contestants tearing each other apart is only one attraction in the circus that is The Bachelor, in which women make lovesick idiots of themselves for our entertainment. The first episode features a parade of gimmicks, as the twenty-five contestants try to gain the attention of the singularly not-all-that Ben Flajnik, 28, who is like a goofier-looking Josh Groban with Paul Rudd’s voice.

One woman rides in on a horse. One comes wearing a massive hat, another a beauty queen’s sash. One contestant actually brings her grandmother, and Ben worries he’ll have to make out with her too. Emily O'Brien, 27, a PhD student in epidemiology, writes Ben an amazing rap — "Love is like disease, always spreading," she flows. "You can get it from a friend, you can get it at a wedding." One contestant whose name is Amber Bacon makes Ben lick her hand. "Did you know that was actually Canadian bacon?” she says.

Thus begins the season-long spectacle of indignities the women endure for the chance to date Ben, apparently the last man on earth. Ben takes upwards of twelve of them at a time on absurd "group dates," like downhill skiing in bikinis through the streets of San Francisco — because he’s looking for someone who’s up for anything, obviously. The contestants are made to perform a play written by children who may actually have promising futures in the entertainment biz. “Do a sexy dance!” they bark at the women during their "auditions." "Run in slow motion!"

It’s not only that the dates are ludicrous; it’s the glow of positivity all the traumatizing activities on the show are washed in. On a one-on-one date, Ben and a woman propel into a deep ravine. "Relationships are all about trust," says Ben; "I'm 'falling' for Ben," says the obviously terrified woman. Later she says it was the best day of her life. Most harrowing, though, is when Ben makes Emily the epidemiologist climb to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I'd rather do anything than climb up a bridge," Emily says before the date. After having a panic attack while teetering on a cable several hundred feet above the ocean, she is reflective. "A bridge takes two things that are separate and brings them together," she says. "And here Ben and I are, two different people from two different places, different backgrounds, and we’re coming together. On this bridge.”

The contestants have to constantly chatter about how lucky they are, how perfect Ben is, and how magical the experience on The Bachelor is. It’s necessary for addressing the show’s major problem: its desperate need for filler. The episodes contain not even close to the action needed to accommodate their two-hour timeslot — instead they rely on several redundant "Coming up on…" preview segments, the rose ceremonies that drag on and on, and useless host Chris Harrison who appears at the beginning and ending of every episode to reiterate the format of the show. They also linger for endless uncomfortable minutes on the sobbing faces of the rejected contestants who hiccup and wipe snot from their noses, wondering aloud what they did wrong, as their cycle of humiliation is complete.

But the women’s effusions don’t just help to fill out the eighty-five-minute episodes; it goes deeper than that. "I think Ben and I have a really special connection," the contestants all gush, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are filler. It is clear from the very beginning that a majority of them have zero chance of winning Ben’s heart — they must appear so invested in him in order to rescue the show from pointlessness. In fact, nine minutes into the first episode, when a woman appears and says, "Hi, I’m Courtney, and I’ve been modeling for the past ten years," it is clear the way the season will end.

"Courtney is like a statue made of marble,” Emily says. “It’s really beautiful, but it’s cold and hard on the inside." Courtney Robertson, 28, is this season’s frontrunner and its villain, which makes for a compelling combination. She is weird and easy to hate, scrunching her mouth, sipping her signature glass of read wine, and borrowing Charlie Sheen’s catchphrase "Winning!" to sinister effect. She is also the season’s most gifted shit talker. "I hope I’m a sight for sore eyes. Because after the date with Elyse his eyes are probably pretty sore,” she says in a creepy deadpan. The other frontrunner is Kacie Boguskie, 24, a sweet baton twirler from Tennessee. She and Courtney are predictably contrasting female archetypes — fawning and innocent versus beautiful and manipulative, Snow White versus the evil queen.

These two are bound to be the last women standing. Ben was dumped by Ashley Hebert on the last season of The Bachelorette after proposing to her, and there has been some pretty clear foreshadowing that he could walk away empty handed again. He will choose the evil Courtney over Kacie B. in the finale, and Courtney will refuse his proposal; Kacie B. has a lock on being the focus of the show's sister series The Bachelorette. Make no mistake: only the promise of this sad end, not some desire to take part in Ben’s “journey,” will keep us watching.

Of all The Bachelor’s offenses, I think the worst is its self-seriousness. The greatest sin in the world of she show is to be guarded — Ben talks constantly about being "open" and "available," always asks the women about their past romantic lives and rewards the ones who seem to reveal the most. What’s cruel about this is that it is a good idea to take your guard down when looking for love in the real world, but it is almost certainly a recipe for embarrassment and heartbreak on The Bachelor, where there is such a small chance of finding lasting romance, and such a large chance of looking really stupid.

At least Flavor of Love and the show’s other trashy cable cousins didn’t act as if they were helping their contestants to do anything other than be on TV; The Bachelor actually portrays itself as a beneficial, therapeutic, or even spiritual experience, which makes it the most cynical of them all. Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields once said that love songs were "very far away from anything to do with love," and that goes double for love TV shows. The Bachelor was never about love — it was created with the knowledge that heartbreak is hypnotic.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Agnes Varda.

"Too Late" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)

"Slow Me Down" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)

"My Boy" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)