Everyone Loves a Loser
Copyright (c) 2000 Wade Walker
Why do people like you so much better if you’re a loser? Mind you, I’m not talking about just any kind of loser. Certain kinds of loserdom, like sartorial or athletic incompetence, won’t do anything for you except insure that you tuck most of your disposable income into porn-store cash registers and featured entertainers’ T-backs. But if you suck at something that requires non-brainstem neurons to fire, then the sky’s the limit. Just as there are two types of herpes, there are two kinds of losers, and both of them are lesions on the pubis of our society. The first kind are those who are unapologetically sucky and have no redeeming qualities, except maybe that their sheer loserdom causes the minds of onlookers to grow stronger due to the effort of comprehending the enormity of it. The second kind are those who are actually good at something, but not through any fault of their own—either it was inborn, or someone else coached them. And, most annoyingly to those of us who don’t happen to suck, the majority of both real people and fictional characters that are looked up to or presented as ideals by society fall into one of these two classes. Like up-to-the-underarms waistband-separating wedgies and Lord of the Flies-style psychological abuse, it all begins in school. After all, if you’re going to be popular for sucking at something in school, it’s always something intellectual. No one ever got popular because they couldn’t run track or were a lousy fellatrix because their braces kept causing scrotal perforations. It was usually that pseudo-self-deprecating guy who made a big deal out of what an idiot he was in class, but in such a way as to imply that somehow the teachers were the real idiots—he was the popular one, even though everyone knew that after graduation he’d be working graveyard shift down at the 7-Eleven, furtively screwing lightly-microwaved Mrs. Baird’s fruit pies under the counter while trying to get off to the callipygian faux-Aztec chicas in a copy of Lowrider magazine. This bizarre syndrome continues in popular culture. When was the last time you saw a movie where the heroes were supremely competent because they practiced diligently before going off to save the world? No, they’ve always got to be fucking misfits who’ve never been given a real chance but somehow come through in the end, though they’ve never done any of the work necessary to get good at anything. The characters who are competent are portrayed as vaguely sinister if not downright evil. Take Star Wars, for example. Darth Vader, in addition to having the Force-enhanced ability to bust a nut more copiously than a Clydesdale on a week-long Viagra bender, is obviously a workaholic. He’s got huge battle stations that can destroy entire planets, fleets of gigantic capital ships, the ability to choke people from a distance, and Lone Wolf and Cub-level lightsaber skillz. This guy’s been putting in the hours—all those ships didn’t get built overnight, and the lightsaber ability obviously isn’t genetic since he pimp-slaps Luke into next Thursday without breaking a sweat. He’s been in the gym gettin’ his bulge on for twenty years, and now he got mufuckin’ game. Sure, his underlings’ job security isn’t all it might be, but all in all he deserves to rule the galaxy. In contrast, the Rebels are huge losers. If Luke was any bigger pussy, he’d have to use K-Y for lip balm. He’s got natural piloting ability which he apparently just inherited from dear old Dad, but he can never seem to whip it out in time to keep most of his fellow Rebel pilots from getting wacked by TIE fighters while he’s screwing around trying to get his torpedo in the exhaust vent. When he finally gets around to training with the Force he’s a crappy student, always losing his concentration and talking smack to Yoda. His best friend Han is a no-money-having chump who drives a beat-ass old ship that he didn’t even buy—he had to win it from Lando Calrissian in a sabacc game. He doesn’t have the brains to get rich legally, so he tries his hand at smuggling and fucks it up so bad that Leia gets tongue-raped by Jabba the Hutt while trying to rescue his lame ass, in an infamous scene that George Lucas had to cut to avoid an NC-17 rating. These are the guys that end up kicking the Empire’s ass? I don’t think so. Not surprisingly, you see the same shit happening in business. Take coffee, for instance. No one had a problem with Starbucks when it was just a local coffee shop in Pike Place Market back in ’71. It took them until ’87 just to get out of Seattle—sixteen years, for fuck’s sake! It’s not like they were founded between wife-swapping parties by idle billionaires who went on to dominate the world in two years. But once they started to get big in the 90’s they started catching shit, because they were no longer small-timers with just a few shops here and there. They were actually making money and expanding, and—Quelle horreur!—people liked going there. Worst of all, they were buying out old loser coffee shops and replacing them with Starbucks, a slap in the face to losers everywhere. So what’s left for the losers of the world to do except trash Starbucks during anti-WTO riots, then go and drink coffee somewhere else, still bitching about how the dry cleaners can never seem to get all the tear gas smell out of a beret, and pretending that they really didn’t want that Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino® anyway? Same thing with operating systems, which you might have guessed I’d work in here somewhere. Bill Gates and crew started out way the hell back in ’75 writing BASIC for the Altair 8800, which is a shit job if I ever heard of one. MS-DOS wasn’t until ’81. The first version of Windows didn’t ship until ’85, and Jesus H. Fuckmonkey, did it suck! It kept right on osculating posterior until Windows 95 came out, which makes it twenty years before they had the OS that really put them on top. Twenty fucking years! And you know that during that twenty years they had to toss more salads than Oscar Tschirky—they didn’t just sit back and wait for the cheddar wagon to roll up. So what the hell is up with this? I think the answer is simple: people want to believe in the fantasy that they can piss away their time and effort, then somehow still magically come out on top. So if they see someone else on top who got there by putting in fifteen or twenty years of grueling effort, they just conveniently ignore that bit and assume they must have gotten there by taking the "evil people only" shortcut to success. But it doesn’t work that way, baby. If you want the abdomen of a sex-crazed armadillo, you gotta eat less and get your orca ass to the gym. If you want to be a software billionaire, you gotta write a whole lot of shit software and kiss a feculent ocean of ass. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And no, it’s not that the world’s unfair somehow, and you or your favorite company just haven’t been given an even break yet. It’s easy to look at the Empires, Starbucks and Microsofts of the world and think they had everything handed to them, but what you really need to do is come back and talk to me after busting ass for a couple of decades. Face it, if you really were that good, you’d already be successful. So stop with the chin music and get back to work.
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