Columnist Scott Dickensheets: This, that and a nation of jerks

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 1999 | 9:50 a.m.

It's time once again to scrape from the Critic at Large's notebook the notes and observations that collect there like arterial cholesterol; time to catalogue the thoughts that rattle like loose screws in the brainpan; time to ... well, choose your own loosey-goosey simile. I've got a grab bag to assemble.

LEAVE THE KID ALONE: I'd planned to clog this space with a searing term paper on Jerk Nation -- my daring thesis being that this is a nation of jerks -- when I realized, You stupid moron, everyone knows that already! I dropped that idea like a hot bad idea. Only an anecdote remains:

One afternoon last week, I'm on the freeway, hubcap to hubcap with all the other jerks, listening to the radio -- KMXB 94.1-FM, to be exact. The disc jerky was taking calls, and this kid gets on the line. He sounds 6, 7 -- definitely under 10. He wants to dedicate a song to his sick brother. All together now: Awwww ... It was a sweet gesture.

Only, being a kid and lacking the instinctive savoir faire of the KMXB deejay, he stammers a little. He's on the radio, after all. "What song would you like to hear?" the deejay prompts several times as the kid tries to spit it out amid many "ums" and "uhs."

The announcer (I'll identify him only by his full name, Ty Sante) finally puts the little guy on hold before he gets it out. Then he mimics the boy's nervous stammers as he chats up the traffic gal.

And so a moment that had been all about a kid trying to do something nice for his sick sibling -- a warm bit of awww ... in the midst of a nasty freeway afternoon -- became instead about a deejay making fun of a kid. Welcome to Jerk Nation.

KEEPING A JOURNAL: Few endeavors are more quixotic these days than the literary journal. Long gone is the time when they had a readership much beyond the culture industry and the relatives of contributors.

Yet it's an impulse that won't die; I'm thinking of starting one myself, the Quarterly Review of Shut The Hell Up: Stories and Poems About Jerks. Watch for the exciting announcement soon. In the meantime, in a more traditional vein, we have the Red Rock Review, a publication of the Community College of Southern Nevada, edited by Richard Logsdon, an English professor there.

The winter 1999 edition marks the journal's second anniversary; nice to see it hanging in there. It features work by local authors including Lenadams Dorris, Dayvid Figler and Robert Dodge. High fives from this column for giving voice to the local literary scene, for all the good -- did I already use the word "quixotic"? -- it will do.

WE'LL HAVE FUN, FUN, FUN ... ER, CANCEL THAT: Late last year, the polling firm Yankelovich Partners quizzed Americans on their top priorities for 1999. The top answer -- instead of such traditional American concerns as making more money, losing more weight, dating more swimsuit models and starting more literary quarterlies -- was this: having more fun. No. 1 answer, fourth year in a row.

Blame the wealth-acquiring, workaholic '80s; Yankelovich largely does. We emerged from that crazy economic decade with a single-minded careerism that undercut the fun-loving vibe of the '60s and '70s. Or so the argument goes. I think the actual reason is much simpler -- who, except columnists paid to do so, can have fun in a nation of jerks?