Nerding Out

I like The Onion’s AV Club. I’ve been a fan since I first realized that the satirical news magazine was doing serious reviews, interviews, and giving Dan Savage a place to publish. That said, it is a publication that has the tendency to really condescend beyond all reason to its readership.

Today’s The Knights Who Say “Nerd”: 20 Pop-Cultural Obsessions Even Geekier Than Monty Python is just ugly. There’s no merit to it, because nowhere do the authors indicate that they themselves might share in some of this fandom; it reads instead as if the hipsters are just making fun of the nerds in an attempt to feel better about their own cultural obsessions. And yes, these are people that are culturally obsessed.

It takes genuine cajones to believe that spending all of your available income on the latest European release of a Modest Mouse EP before heading over to your friend’s house for a Fassbinder Film Festival is somehow better than dressing up like your favorite anime character. Hipsters, of course, do prioritize the world this way, believing that their own obsessions are somehow superior to everybody else’s and using that idea to condescend to everybody around them. “Oh, really? Frank Zappa? Thanks, but no thanks. Rilo Kiley’s the thing now.” (Or, you know, whatever band is the thing now. I have no idea. I still think They Might Be Giants are fantastic.)

In the movie “The Apostle” with Robert Duvall, he is walking over a bridge in Louisiana when he sees Catholics celebrating a Christian holiday. Himself a Pentecostal minister, he watches for a few minutes. “You do things your way, and I’ll do them mine.” He says, laughing to himself, because while he isn’t a Catholic, he understands that ultimately, they’re both praying to the same god.

The hipsters at The Onion’s AV Club could take a lesson from that. Hipsterism isn’t in any way superior to the sort of nerdish behavior decried in the article above; rather, it is precisely the same sort of behavior focused on (barely) different pursuits. Acting as if the other is true is both offensive and shockingly dense. (One wonders if they have any idea what kind of people are reading and enjoying The Onion itself?)