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176c0af
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As a rule, people who classify art as "irrelevant" are trying to position themselves above the entity; it's a way of pretending they're more in step with contemporary culture than the artist himself, which is mostly a way of saying they can't find a tangible reason for disliking what something intends to embody. Moreover, the whole argument is self-defeating: If you classify something as "irrelevant," you're (obviously) using it as a unit o..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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95865ee
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There is, certainly, an unbreachable chasm between the subjective and objective world. A reasonable person expects subjective facts to be overturned, because subjective facts are not facts; they're just well-considered opinions, held by multiple people at the same time. Whenever the fragility of those beliefs is applied to a specific example, people bristle--if someone says, "It's possible that Abraham Lincoln won't always be considered a g..
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judgement
objectivity
opinion
subjectivity
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Chuck Klosterman |
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815ebf0
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If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz...It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes ...if Dylan...becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition...The fact that Dylan does not have..
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philosophy
rock
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Chuck Klosterman |
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b2403d1
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I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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87e4934
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The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4728f07
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During the 1970s (and particularly because of Vietnam), it slowly became standard for absolutely everyone to go to college, particularly if they had no desire to get a real job. One of the results was a massive population of film school students, most of whom became waiters and valets in the 1980s. Since the vast majority of these Kubrick wannabes couldn't crack the motion picture industry, they saw opportunities to make minimovies in the w..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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f09a997
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We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certi..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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1047afe
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Q: Assume everything about your musical tastes was reversed overnight. Everything you once loved, you now hate; everything you once hated, you now love. For example, if your favorite band has always been R.E.M., they will suddenly sound awful to you; they will become the band you dislike the most. By the same token, if you've never been remotely interested in the work of Yes and Jethro Tull, those two groups will instantly seem fascinating...
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Chuck Klosterman |
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fb32abd
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This is how the present must be considered whenever we try to think about it as the past: It must be analyzed through the values of a future that's unwritten. Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind. This is not easy (even with drugs). But it's not even the hardest part. The hardest part is accepting that we're building something ..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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786d6fc
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his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
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child
klosterman
lazy-eye
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Chuck Klosterman |
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ff03c10
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Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with.
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love
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Chuck Klosterman |
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7489d67
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Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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2e44fda
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Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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f5bcc5e
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It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it's not the intelligence that people dislike; it's the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It's the calculation. It's someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for ..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0097fc2
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I attempted to make a more academic argument about how the Limp Bizkit song "Nookie" was misogynist for suggesting that the protagonist's ex-girlfriend should inject a cookie into her vagina (or maybe that she should somehow fold her vagina into her rectum -- the specific lyrics have never been clear)."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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b3ed737
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As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn't own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don't own a TV simply means you're poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.
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society
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Chuck Klosterman |
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f3f06d9
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Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal," because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your rel..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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b575897
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Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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70aa920
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The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4ab29f9
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But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spen..
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audiences
klosterman
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Chuck Klosterman |
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728620d
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Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4d767e7
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One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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873c8a1
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don't normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky -- for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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c773285
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If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment).
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Chuck Klosterman |
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f38beea
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I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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139b6b5
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Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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17ac5de
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The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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a09dbf9
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The future makes the rules.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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5a60e1a
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Twelve Monkeys makes a lot of references to the "Cassandra complex" (named for a Greek myth about a young woman's inability to convince others that her prophetic warnings are accurate), but it's mostly about predestination--in Twelve Monkeys, the assumption is that anyone who travels into the past will do exactly what history dictates. Nothing can be altered. What this implies is that everything about life (including the unforeseen future) ..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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e1afa59
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When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.
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truism
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Chuck Klosterman |
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2e3f3ca
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But when you're naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn't translate as humble. It translates as boredom.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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fc85d22
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he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.
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klosterman
trouble
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Chuck Klosterman |
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1710de0
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Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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1ff93c6
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I have more CDs than 99 percent of America, but fewer CDs than 40 percent of my friends; if an acquaintance has more CDs than me, I feel intimidated and emasculated. I think about my CDs a lot. I find it oddly reassuring to look at them when I'm intoxicated.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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2100bbf
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If you hate everything, you're a banal asshole...but if you don't hate anything, you're boring.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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1618af8
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Take George W. Bush: He was an unpopular two-term president. Three times, his approval rating dropped to 25 percent. [To be fair, he also had the highest approval rating of all time, very briefly. But that was immediately after 9/11 -- and in the wake of domestic terrorism, a well-dressed mannequin's approval rating might have hovered around 50.] During his last two years in office, he was hammered nonstop, periodically classified as the wo..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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3fede5e
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Tall people are naturally confident. History has proven this - Alexander the Great, Wilt Chamberlain, Gisele.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0672321
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everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9b952bd
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Klosterman's Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with. _____________________________
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Chuck Klosterman |
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7f2d306
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So think how this might alter the memory of : In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds--one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden--takes on an entirely new meaning.
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gender
the-matrix
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0deaf97
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The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whis..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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a17e836
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Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase "We just don't talk anymore")."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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72fedbb
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The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like "Say Anything" are fucking people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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c0a56eb
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It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine--something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.
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Chuck Klosterman |