Guest Column by NeilChair

Hello, thelabcoatguy here.

As we casually approach the reality of fauxpop.tv, and I mean CASUALLY, we find ourselves bringing in some new writers.

And by writers, I mean writer. Singular.

Neilchair, our esteemed guest, is a young man and therefore fiery tempered and filled with vigor and passion. Or perhaps he is just a miserable prick. It’s hard to say at this point.

What is easy to say is that he will be popping into The Fizz now and again to interrupt my regularly scheduled self-diddlery with his own carping on about this and/or that.

I hope you enjoy it as much as his mother does.

Enter Neilchair:

…Read some troubling news today that modern DrumKing (which, now that I say it out loud doesn’t sound nearly as complimentary as I hoped), Travis Barker, was seriously burned in a jet crash on Friday (Sept. 19, ‘08).

Like many 80s babies (yea… I know… I’m already like this. Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m 40) I came of musical age in the mid-90s and was not immune to the shiny allure of the big SoCal second-coming of punk. In fact, I loved it. Bad Religion, Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring, Blink 182… everything from thundering songs denouncing the economic strangleholds placed on the poor by the greedy, right-wing, fascist government of the day to luscious saccharine 3-chord ballads about boobies… it was all good. And despite the broadening of my horizons, I still hold a great affection for those bands which is why I was disturbed to read of Mr. Barker’s accident. As a side note, he probably won’t die. See? God really does prefer the rich.

That being said, two things struck me as I read the article and a few of the ten million comments after it.

Point 1
First, a few items to keep in mind:
1. Pilots–and especially commercial pilots–have to train and practice and learn to be awesome for a REALLY LONG FRIGGIN’ TIME. A weekend with Flight Simulator X is not going to be enough to make you a licensed commercial pilot, trust me, I know… those guards were not impressed.

2. Next to overdoses, plane crashes are a pretty common and trendy way for the rich & famous to check out, see: Aaliyah, John Denver, Buddy Holly, another-popular-one, so we can’t call this a total surprise; the Big F’s, Failures (of the engine), Fires, Faulty wiring, Foggy mountains leaping out from behind the hedge, do happen. But one observation about this specific case…

They weren’t off the goddamn ground yet.

This has happened a few times in the last couple years, and no, I didn’t bother to look the specific incidents up but I know it has. (I will back him on that, although I too haven’t looked anything up. Ed.) For starters, there was one in France. I think. Or Montreal. Same thing. Anyway, the point is that it happens. But how? How, in Lucifer’s burning hell do you crash a plane that hasn’t taken off yet? I’ll be one of the first to admit (not the first, I’m still holding out hope) that I’m in no way qualified to fly a real airplane, but even in my limited experience of Sunday afternoon computer-simulated flying I know that the easiest, simplest, basic-est, do-blind-folded-in-a-coma-deep-trance act of aviation is Taking Off. Even Ted Striker could probably manage it so how, tell me how, Virginia, does a professionally trained pro like the pilot probably was, manage to drive the thing straight off the end of the runway, across a highway and into an embankment?

Possibly reaching to turn up that new Rihanna–and, in fairness, it is bumpin’.

Point 2
The comments-section.

Almost everyone hates the comment section (wink, wink) and I am no exception (nudge, nudge), excepting the exception of on here… I won’t read them anyway so knock yourself out. “Fisrt!!!!!11!!1″, “faagg”, “visit my sexy hot site with hot male where sexy barley-legell naked women can hook up with other naked mansex” are fine up to a point, but after you realize that although you aren’t the only one who’s naked, you are certainly the only one who’s sexy, the fun tends to fade out. Such was the case under the article.

After I waded through all the, “ohmigod, Travis is so sexy, even if he is a scarred and charred shell of a man”, and “wtf, liek who cares, Neil Peart’s like wayyy better at drumming” I came across the inevitable, “No one even would care about him if he wasn’t a celebrity.” And they’re right. No one would care. That’s the point and, in a nod to my 90s roots… duh.

Now, I’m not a celebrity watcher. I don’t know exactly what Nicole Ritchie looks like or why she’s important and the only thing I know for sure about Paris Hilton is that she shocked the world by displaying her possession of short-term memory in a video over at funnyordie.com (check out the vid, but look at our ads, not theirs). At least Travis Barker is an expert at an extremely complicated instrument and has displayed a high level of skill at playing it in a wide range of styles, but the commenter was right, we only care because we “know” him.

If the guy filling your gas tank has a sniffle, do you suggest he take the rest of the day off? Do you go buy him some herbal tea and spice it up with some honey and a couple drops of lemon extract? Do you offer to put the snarky teenager down the street through college so she can study Art History and design armcovers with safety pins in them? Probably not. But what if the guy at the gas station was your brother. What if the snarky pop-art tart was your own darling Clementine. Totally different story. So what’s the difference? The difference is that you don’t know the other guy and can’t stand the stylistically perfect goth and because you don’t and can’t… you don’t give a shit.

You probably don’t know Travis either but because he’s been out there, pounding the skins, for 15+ years, you form a connection to what he’s done and how it makes you feel, which makes you feel like they’re important, which is why you care when they survive a plane crash that almost every other passenger died in. Common folk like to say that the famous are just like us but the truth is that most of the time, they’re not. Most of the time, they’re Better Than Us. For most famous people (I’ll arbitrarily say 85%) they are famous because they were better than everyone else around at the time.

Unless you’re Robert DeNiro reading this (in which case, do I ever have The Script for you, buddy), Robert DeNiro is a better actor than you are. Unless you’re George Carlin online from the grave (you laugh, it’ll happen), George Carlin is a better comedian than you are. And unless you’re Travis Barker (or, allegedly, Neil Peart… thanks rushfreakfromhell667), Travis is a better drummer than you are.

So the next time that someone famous does or almost does or doesn’t-but-could-have or wasn’t-there-but-could-have-if-they-weren’t-somewhere-else, die in the latest fashionable way, keep the “no one would care” line in the bag. Unless your are the greatest actor, or funniest dude, or craziest drummer… Neil Peart.

Sorry Barker, us Neil’s gotta stick together.

- Neilchair