Today's word of the day: Classturbation

I recently read a column on Breitbart.com by Carl Kozlowski, looking at Mike Judge’s new movie, Extract. Kozlowski loved the movie, talking about how great it is to see a look at average guys and middle-class values.

Written and directed by Mike Judge, who has chronicled the modern everyman’s life in the long-running and brilliant Fox cartoon “King of the Hill” as well as in the short-running yet brilliant 1999 film “Office Space,” “Extract” takes a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued look at middle-class values in Middle America. But once again, Judge proves that he possesses a true love for the common, working-class Joe that translates into comedy that uplifts rather than demeans the lives of its characters.

This is, of course, the same Mike Judge who brought us Beavis and Butthead, and Daria. I’m sure Extract is, at the very least, a pretty good movie. I love Mike Judge’s work and everything he’s done has satisfied on some level or another. That’s not my problem with the review. In fact, outside of Kozlowski’s self-satisfied moral wankery, it seems to be a pretty fair, interesting look at the movie. My problem is with the self-satisfied moral wankery itself.

Kozlowski is a regular contributor to Breitbart, and a career stand-up comic who has written two books on humor. I won’t judge his status as an American, or a patriot, or a moral individual, but for him to lay claim to the “average joe, middle-American, everyday-values” crowd with which he is so enamored is a joke. It’s romanticizing suburbia and embracing a shallow image of what it is to be middle-class and American. He’s not the only conservative to do it, nor is he the most egregious, but he is the most recent to come across my attention.

Bill O’Reilly is one of the worst culprits, though his peers Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Mike Savage are all guilty of this. Sure, they make millions and millions of dollars. Sure, they live in big cities, the very dens of iniquity they condemn. Sure, some of them have been married multiple times. But every one of these people will swear up and down that they represent the people, that they hold the good, old-fashioned, average-joe, middle-America, traditional values that their readers and listeners think they hold. It’s complete bullshit, but they hold on to that identity as vocally as they can, screaming about how they’re middle America.

And that’s why I’m coining this new word.

Classturbation.

It’s the act of being so enamored with a social/economic class that you see yourself as representing it, and that everything you look at is seen through the lens of how it affects the identity of that class. Mike Judge isn’t just a guy who makes funny shows and movies, he’s a hero of middle America because he made Hank Hill and because Extract revolves around an average joe. Gay marriage isn’t just an abstract legal concept that doesn’t affect you, it’s an outrage that destroys the values of middle America, because everyone in suburbia is straight and happy. When you live a decent life by giving to charity, helping your elderly neighbor with her groceries, and not cheating on or beating your wife (because liberals have no concept of right and wrong, obviously), you’re not just being decent, you’re embracing the traditional, conservative values of middle America.

And I hope you lubed up before you started talking about those things, because otherwise your dick will burn off from the constant sanctimonious fapping. It doesn’t matter what your life is like, how much you earn, where you live, or how much of a dickbag you are. You are everything that’s great about middle America, and nothing can ever change that.

When you start doing that, you’re not looking at anything from a humorous perspective, or with any sort of intelligent analysis. You’re not offering any interesting or informative commentary on a subject. You’re not contributing anything to the discussion. You’re just classturbating.