Dear God, Thank You, Esquire.

No photos for today, but hey - being out and about 'til 5 a.m. sometimes prevents such things. In lieu of my own writing, I present to you one of my favorite writers at Esquire, Mr. Stephen Marche. Most of you know that I have a deep respect and appreciation for Esquire and, of course, Mr. Marche generally has something to do with it. After reading this article, I just wanted to find him and say thank you. Maybe even cook him dinner and clean his house.

Twenty-first century men with money might just be the luckiest group in the history of the world, but a casual glance across pop culture (from Glenn Beck crying to, especially this week, John Mayer moaning) would give the impression that they're an oppressed underclass, barely able to find enough to eat. Everywhere you look, sheep are begging and baaing for your empathy and, if you can spare it, your sympathy, but a closer look reveals rough fur and claws under all that sheep's clothing. These self-styled wimps, the ostentatiously meek, are inheriting the earth, with vulnerability becoming the definitive, and most profitable, affectation of our time.

How long can this massive, finely wrought bluff continue to stand? This spring, the film version of the publishing sensation Diary of a Wimpy Kid comes out — more than twenty-seven million copies of the book series are in print — and its basic premise is this: "Being a kid can really stink." I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that being a kid is actually terrific. I, for one, loved it. Hide-and-seek is a seriously underrated game. The Fruit Roll-Ups alone are worth the price of admission. At any rate, the promoters of the book are wrong to describe the wimpy kid as an "unlikely hero."

Robert Pattinson and Michael Cera have become the foremost leading men of their generation by becoming, respectively, the serious and comic aspects of the same projection of weakness. Pattinson's face, geisha pale, reminds me of an elaborate piece of modernist pottery. Between performances as the feyest vampire of all time, he's now starring in Remember Me, tortured-rebel claptrap of the most treacly variety. "I'm undecided," his character says at one point. "About what?" his beloved asks. "Everything." Sigh. Cera, the kind of actor who plays the same nonthreatening character in every movie, can soon be seen in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a nerd-meets-girl comedy based on a graphic-novel series whose first volume is Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. I hope Cera has insurance on his shoulders, which look like a pair of upturned newborns' bottoms. They're the key to his appeal, the weedy equivalent of J.Lo's ass. He epitomizes a new kind of flamboyance: If you don't have it, flaunt it.

Rock 'n' roll, meanwhile, which began as a defiant howl of youth's irrepressibility, has devolved into ever quieter, ever more solemn dirges. There has always been a niche of emo sensitivibots in the music scene, but now they have taken over the factory. And I don't just mean John Mayer, who uses passive-aggressive moans to bed women way out of his league. (Sample lyric: "Excuse me, Mrs. Busybody / Could you pencil me in when you can?") Or even Coldplay, the worst band ever to be the world's biggest, who come off as feeble as they are boring. The best and most original musicians, like Grizzly Bear or Vampire Weekend, require wanness as a cover for their brilliant musical experimentations. If the Beatles wanted to hold your hand and the Rolling Stones wanted to burn your town, today's rock stars want to suck your thumb.

Writers, too, have never been more desperate to paint themselves as weaklings and victims. Every memoir is now suspect. Writers will claim to have gone to jail when they're upstanding citizens. They'll claim to be drunks when they're clean. They'll cry rape. They crave debasement in order that they may be more exalted. And that's just the nonfiction. The thirty-something generation of American novelists has replaced Hemingway's hypermasculinity — writing like it passed the time between rhinoceros shooting and threesomes with Italian whores — with poses of rapt loss. Jonathan Safran Foer tries his hardest to write like a precocious twelve-year-old girl. He takes breaks from his neutered novels to write defenses of vegetarianism. Dave Eggers pursues the most direct course, though: He just assumes the voice of victims — a Sudanese genocide survivor and an Arab immigrant caught in Katrina-addled New Orleans — and writes their stories as if he were them. His first screenplay was genuinely original in the purity of its ascetic violence, but he kind of pulled back the curtain on his own motivation: Art is his means of demonstrating contempt for the world and his moral and intellectual superiority to everyone in it.

Everybody understands, even those who won't admit it, the basic psychological mechanism at work in the world today: By negating your power, you serve only to deepen it; restraint is a surreptitious, more intense expression of the will to power. "The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative," Nietzsche writes in The Genealogy of Morals, but what he failed to predict was that the slave revolt in morals would actually lead to people pretending to be slaves. The luxuries of feigned weakness are many: muddying the waters of responsibility, permitting intellectual and moral laziness, excusing failure with a powerless shrug.

Whiny rich men reach like the roots of a tree through the privilege of their own experience for ever deeper sources of resentment. Glenn Beck is the political avatar of this aggressive ersatz vulnerability: He weeps like a baby to promote the destruction of his (or, if you believe him, America's) enemies. Weakness sells, which is why I can't really blame the fake-hurt men — they're just hustling. I blame us for being suckered by all this mewing and for basking so cozily in the warm glow of virtue by association. It's our fault that self-pity prospers where gratitude never would. As for these men, they won't admit their own prosperity, lest it require they give of themselves. They won't admit their own health, the beauty of the world, and their luck to be alive in it. They won't give life itself the satisfaction.

Adapted from a column to be published in the April 2010 issue of Esquire

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/john-mayer-apology-0410#ixzz0mO3rEQ77

On a closing note:

Gentlemen, don't be sissies. Ladies, don't be sissies and for the love of God, learn how to write intelligent magazines.