Jean Paul Sartre was a whiny bitch, a Frenchman, and a commie besides, which is pretty much the trifecta of appalling. Not the least of his many accomplishments - foremost was his ability to maintain an erection in the presence of his hideous wife, Simone de Beauvoir (pictured above) - was the invention of existentialism, which is a philosophy attractive to lonely sensitive undergraduates who hope a that conspicuous display of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness will eventually lead to some chubby girl giving them a handjob. Little do they know that the easiest way to get a chubby girl to give you a handjob is simply to ask, as chubby girls are generally pretty accommodating; and those who aren’t aren’t likely to become so no matter how much turgid incomprehensible prose you wade through.

Sartre famously said that the west had become a culture of magazine readers, proving that even a blind frog can root out a truffle every once in a while. What JPS was commenting on was less our choices in print media than our cultural inability to understand and appreciate anything other than the most shallow and superficial of ideas.

It used to be that people wrote and read books: grand sprawling novels with universal themes like Gulliver’s Travels; learned tomes like the Critique of Pure Reason, wherein Emanuel Kant rejected Hume’s empiricism in favor of impure thoughts of a handjob from a chubby beer hall fraulein. As JPS noted 50 years ago, those days are long gone. Where his contemporaries moved from books to magazines, we’ve gone further: from Vanity Fair we’ve devolved to Readers Digest Condensed and the miniseries and then to web pages, and then blogs, and then face book, and now finally something called Twitter, which evidently gives every moron with opposable thumbs and access to a computer the ability to mistake his tiny random idiotic half thoughts for aphorisms and to publish them instantaneously for all his nitwit friends to read. No longer will we be denied Al Gore’s bloated insights into the viability of using fetal stem cells to fuel his hybrid deep fryer; and if Ariana Huffington’s current boyfriend suddenly decides that he’d rather suck dick than spend another second listening to her yammering away like Lisa Douglass on crank, we’ll know about it immediately. Such is progress.

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