As you should know by now, I am always on the look-out for coincidence, synergy, and Two Things At Once, but lately, even I have been suprised by how often one thing I’m thinking about intersects with some other thought-about thing.

To wit:

Michael sent me the book Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos From The Baffler. For the uninitiated, The Baffler is a leftist journal of literary and cultural criticism. The book is a collection of essays, rants and salvos whose topic, broadly defined, is how the Advertising Establishment has converged with, and in some cases, co-opted, the tenets of 1960s individualism and personal freedom — or more succinctly, how a species of “Nietzschean antinomianism has taken over the corporate mind”. The contributors take the usual potshots at the music industry (thank you Steve Albini), Microsoft, guerrilla marketing tactics, corporate street teams, and everyone’s personal favorite, Henry Rollins — who is the recognized posterboy for toothless castrated rebellion. It’s a pretty good read, if you’re interested in that sort of thing — which I am.

I took a break from reading about the commodification of dissent — something I’d been thinking about for awhile — and went downstairs to take part in a little revolutionary muckracking act I like to call “eating a tuna salad sandwich and watching Buffy”. Yes, I can do both things — no it’s not inconsistent. Buffy kills vampires and hangs out with lesbians and it’s no big deal.

In any case, I stumbled across ESPN/ABC sports coverage of the X-Games, which used to be called the e-Xtreme games, and before that was called skateboarding in your backyard. It came as no suprise to me that ESPN and ABC were covering the X games, when fifteen years ago you couldn’t see any of those sorts of sports on television, outside of the Bones Brigade’s magnum opus The Search For Animal Chin. After all, extreme sports are big business now, and the guys who used to get arrested for skateboarding are now held up as role models and are millionaires. Tony Hawk has not one — but three — video games named after him. Jesus Christ, I bet Lance Mountain is green with envy.

I see your Commodification of Dissent and I raise you a shiny Two Things At Once.

But the fates were not done with me yet, dear readers, not by a longshot.

During a commercial break — as if the X Games aren’t one big commercial break — who do I see hawking deodorant but Method Man and Redman from Wu-Tang Clan. Method Man and Redman hawking deodorant! Members of The Wu-Tang Clan rap collective — whose other members include Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Prince (The RZA) Rakeem, Raekwon, GhostFace Killah, Genius (GZA), U-God, Master Killa and Inspectah Deck — selling deoderant. Yeah, you guys are totally hardcore. . . hardcore like my Mom.

I see your plastic rap warriors and I raise you an-unprecedented Three Things At Once.

There must be something in the water.