Damned Read Free Page B

life
choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus
wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one
specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify
our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not
some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment. Nothing is wicked,
they insisted, and even serial killers deserve cable television and counseling,
because multiple murderers have suffered, too.
    In the spirit of the classic John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, I've begun to write an essay in the same manner the student detainees at
Shermer High School were required to write one thousand words on the theme of
"Who Do You Think You Are?"
    Yeah, I know the word construct. Put yourself in my penny
loafers: I'm locked in a barred cell in Hell, thirteen years old and doomed to
be thirteen forever, but I'm not totally self-unaware.
    What's worse is how my mom even said all her Gaia Earth Mother baloney
in Vanity Fair magazine when she was promoting her last movie release.
The magazine took her picture arriving at the Oscars red carpet with my dad
driving them both in a dinky electric car, but really, when nobody's looking
they go everywhere in a leased Gulfstream jet, even if it's just to pick up
their dry cleaning, which they send to have cleaned in France. That one film,
she got nominated for playing a nun who gets bored and unfulfilled, so she
ditches her vows to do prostitution and heroin and have some abortions before
she gets her own top-rated daytime talk show and marries Richard Gere. A total
of nobody went to the film in theatrical release, but the critics creamed all
over it. Critics and movie reviewers really, really count on there being
no actual Hell.
    My guess is I feel about The Breakfast Club the same way my mom
feels about Virginia Woolf. I mean, she had to take Xanax just to read The
Hours and still cried for almost a year.
    In Vanity Fair my mom said the only true evil was how big oil
companies were using global warming to push innocent baby polar bears closer to
extinction. Even worse was she said, "My daughter, Madison, and I have
struggled for years over her tragic childhood obesity." So, yes, I
comprehend the term passive-aggressive.
    Other kids went to Sunday school. I went to Ecology Camp. In Fiji.
Other girls learned to recite the Ten Commandments. I learned to reduce my
carbon footprint. In our Aboriginal Skills workshop, in Fiji, we used
certified organically grown, sustainably harvested fair-trade palm fronds to
weave these crappy wallets that everybody threw away. Ecology Camp cost about a
million dollars, but we still all had to share the same filthy bamboo toilet
stick to wipe our butts. Instead of Christmas, we had Earth Day. If there was a
Hell, my mom said you'd go there for wearing fur coats or buying a cream rinse
tested on baby rabbits by escaped Nazi scientists in France. My dad said that
if there was a devil it was Ann Coulter. If there's a mortal sin, my mom says
it's Styrofoam. Most times they'd spout this environmental dogma while walking
around naked with the curtains open so that I wouldn't grow up to become a
little Miss Whorey Vanderwhore.
    Sometimes the devil was Big Tobacco. Sometimes, Japanese drift nets.
    Even worse, it's not as if we traveled to Ecology Camp aboard sampans,
gently pushed along by the Pacific currents. No, every single kid got there on
a separate private jet, burning through about a gazillion fossil-fuel gallons
of dinosaur juice the likes of which this planet will never see again. Each
child was borne aloft; provisioned with his or her body weight in organic fig
bars and free-trade yogurt snacks sealed within single-use Mylar packaging
designed not to biodegrade before the future date of NEVER, all of this burden
of homesick children and between-meal calories and video gaming systems would
rocket toward Fiji at faster than the speed of