The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81

January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.

Wallow with me—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.

One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.

Come, now. Rue … forever.

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100. DRAG ME TO HELL.

99. Phony critical adoration of DRAG ME TO HELL.

98. Dips of shit just LOVING to pronounce the word “Ray-poor.”
Tee-hee! It’s fun! It’s silly! But, like the “satire” of the man himself … it’s IMPORTANT!

97. “Dracula From Houston” by The Butthole Surfers.
My favorite band of all time somehow marries “Sweet Jane” to Smashmouth by way of Beck (the lamest of all) and bifurcates one of the very worst songs I have ever heard.

And for a Scrubs soundtrack, no less.

Seeing the original Butthole Surfers line-up perform recently—and brilliantly (neither “Dracula” nor “Pepper” made it to the set list)—renders this transgression dismissable.

Being old myself now and worried about money makes “Dracula From Houston” profoundly understandable.

But still … I never, ever, ever wanted to hear Gibby faux-cockney belt the phrase: “teach ‘em ‘ow to be cool buh jus’ a lih-ull bit FUNK-ay!”

Now, of course, there’s no un-hearing it.

96. “Pirates!”

95. “Ninjas!”

94. “Bacon!”

93. “ZOMBIES!”

92. GOONIES as a popular midnight movie attraction.
Aside from the legitimate joy of The Room, the rollicking Troll II roadshow, and the relative likability of Repo! The Genetic Opera, your local arthouse’s witching-hour schedule —once the noble realm of Eraserhead, Head, Sextette, et cetera—is now strictly the domain of drunken ’80s kiddie-kaka nostalgists.

And I assure ye that The Princess Bride, Indiana Jones jagoffery and, most offensively, Goonies is NOT good enough.

91. Sarah Palin impersonations.
Great goshers gee-willikers, wasn’t that a time last election season when EVERY good-ol’ gut-bustin’ly hilarious jokester on earth was just a-itchin’ to show off all those goshdarn rootin’-tootin’ Sarah-Palinisms dontchaknow!?

Ooh, pshaw, gee-whiz-bang, were you in on it, too?

Were you out there all a-goin’ around sayin’: “I can say ‘I can see Russia from my house!’ and hope you think I thought it up right here on the spot! Well isn’t that a fine how-da-ya-doo!?”

If you were, I hate you. Still. In perpetuity.

Great golly! Yah! Yahhh!

89. THIS AMERICAN LIFE.
Be it on radio, TV, podcast, and/or in movie theaters.

88. THIS AMERICAN LIFE host Ira Glass.
Be he anywhere on this planet, breathing.

87. GET YOUR WAR ON.
Mitigating factor: this wad quit. Take the hint, Tom Tomorrow. Really, already.

86. Heterosexual men wearing big, poofy scarves indoors.
Worse: it is still illegal to properly David Foster Wallacize them on sight.

And, to be sure, this hostility does NOT extend to our homosexualist friends.

85. Those fucking STAR WARS abortions.
Sure, you claim to hate them now and you claimed to hate them all along, but we both know you brandished a Darth Maul action figure on your dot-com desk for a while.

But you didn’t see one on mine.

84. Neo-New-Wave.
Interpol, The Editors, The Strokes, ad nauseum, remind you why all Men of Good Conscience needed to baseball-bat-prostate-examine Cure fans back in the day.

And why such procedures must be terminal when it comes to devotees of this new crap crop.

83. Steven Soderbergh.
The jet-setting, bimbo-banging big-studio “indie” multimillionaire who gave us both Che Guevera as post-Jesus/pre-Obama divine savior and Sasha Grey as NOT a dumb, 20-year-old prostitute.

I imagine Soderbergh posits himself a “moralist.”

As does, I am sure, anyone who even semi-intentionally looks like Steven Soderbergh.

Which, of course, includes Ira Glass.

82. THE DEPARTED (2007)
Hollywood pamper-puffs talking tough (and thereby naughtily tossing around real-life verboten racial slurs and, dear me, “faggot”) is never pleasant, let alone anyone’s sane idea of “entertainment.”

Hearing it through ham-powered Boston accents renders it apocalyptically unconscionable.

And never has anything been more succinctly nailed than when Ralph Wiggum observed: “The rat symbolizes obviousness!”

81. The phrase: “Tell us how you REALLY feel!”
Think I had that one flung at me a few times in the past decade?

Wait, let me put that another way.

ME: “I’ve had people say that to me quite a bit in the previous ten years.”

CRETIN: “Gee, YA THINK!?!”

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Among the offal tumbling down in numbers 80-61: Sofia Coppola, David Cross, Rob Zombie, Lollapalooza, and the phrase: “It’s football night in America.”

World, snuff yourself.

Until then, a little hellacious music to tide you over, perpetuated by giants to whom I would normally assign the term “hellacious” as a compliment. Not this time. NOT ON THE GODAMMNED SCRUBS SOUNDTRACK!

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