Profiles in Hate, hated #5
The five most hated people in America:
By Archibald Montenegro
As I travel to meet my first interviewee, Darren Clarke, I must note that I am doing so in a rented off-road vehicle and traveling along a stretch of dirt the Romans wouldn’t have called a road. I’m in a remote part of Northern California, close to the Nevada and Oregon borders, at least that’s what the GPS system is telling me. Before I meet him, I’ll clarify how our organization came to determine what is was to be “hated.”
Rule #1. The hate given must be non-denominational, race, gender, or sexuality are not grounds for this assignment. There are far too many bigots to factor in to a survey like this, and we found that taking them out of the equation narrowed our search by 90%, and managed to remove most of the Middle East, the American south, and to our surprise, El Salvador.
Rule #2. The hate must be focused for singular and unique reasons for the individuals. We are not trying to propagate stereotypes about cultural foibles. When we sent our street team to gather random data, we came upon the following multiple times:
Asian Drivers (55 responses)
Women Drivers (31 responses)
That white guy at the club who tries to organize a dance off, only to throw out something lame like the robot when it’s his turn (a staggering 78 times)
The black couple in the white movie theater yelling at the screen (35 times)
The white couple in the black movie theater shushing people who yell at the screen (35 times)
There were multiple responses of this ilk, and we all decided that we needed to be more specific when we asked people about who they hate. This experiment was almost a waste, except for the production of Darren Clarke, who none of us were familiar with, but upon further extrapolation, we realized this was exactly the kind of guy that just attracts hate.
Darren works from his home, and does so for his own company DClarke Enterprises, a company he founded with money he made in the stock market circa 2001, when he made the bulk of his money off of Halliburton stock, a fact I am loathe to print. He lives alone and shuns most human contact outside of his 4 year old daughter and her mother. The two never married, or even dated, and are on malicious speaking terms. Her sole contribution to this piece was:
“That bastard knocked me up one night when I drunkenly mistook him for [musician] Ben Folds. He played this up, and while I blame myself for not having him play any music for me, even when I have a piano in my living room, I was in a bad place in my life that night, and now, I have a constant reminder of that jerk who seems to be allergic to everything in my house. Tell that sonofabitch I’ll sue him if he stops payment on another check.”
I arrive at his home at our arranged 3pm appointment; he stops me from entering the front door. He slides a small piece of paper out of his mail slot. The note is comprised of an address, a series of directions forbidding contact or stares, and to refrain from broaching the subjects during our interview: his daughter, his hair, his house, him picking up the lunch tab. He yells to me: “Finished yet? I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”
I take this in stride because during my first phone call with him he mentioned that he posses a weak immune system, something he laments that was passed onto his daughter, so he has to take extra precautions when it comes to human contact. A few minutes pass and I get a phone call on my cell. To my amazement, the reception is flawless. It’s Darren, who reminds me to spray my car interiors with a anti-allergen air freshener.
I duly move to my car, and for the third time that day, I spray the car down, and place everything but my tape recorder and notebook in a storage bin in the back of the car. I shut the door, and turn around, no less than 18 inches from my face is Darren, who seems pleased in his silent approach. I can tell he is looking for a rise in my expression. 15 minutes after waiting for an appointment whose time he set, I am already annoyed enough to take joy in not humoring his antics.
We walk to the Jeep Cherokee, and after I get into the driver’s seat, I notice he is still standing by the door. I can hear him harrumph through the glass. I walk out around to the other side of the car. He hands me a handkerchief, and I move to open the door so he can ride shotgun. After a silent 10 seconds, I open the back door and he gets in without even saying a thanks, in place I hear “burn the hankie.”
We take off Easterly and I ask how far our destination is, he responds “It’s about 25 minutes.”
“I thought you didn’t like to travel beyond 15 minutes from your house.”
“I don’t. You headed East, it’s west, off my driveway.”
“But you waited...”
“I would have told you when we got too far for my liking.”
We arrive at the locale, and he hands me another hankie through a slot in his window. I look at our destination. It’s the city’s police station, and he proceeds to lead me through the halls stopping only to allow me to open the doors for him, something he does with such a matter of regularity, I’m debating calling the office to bump him above the other candidates.
We finally reach his room, it’s the visiting room, and a cop opens the door for him to enter. The officer clears out a felon and informs his wife and child on the other side of the glass that the visit is over. He takes a garbage bag from his fanny pack and strews it over the chair, then places a white glove on his hand, pulls out a disinfectant wipe and cleans off his phone. He then gestures to take the phone on the other side of the glass.
We begin.
“I don’t want this to run too long, I want to get home for Wheel of Fortune at 7:30,” he begins.
“It’s August, they always show re-runs this month.”
“What do I care, it’s not like I got money on the show.”
“You have a fixation with Vanna White?”
“What kind of question is that. She’s 15 years past her prime and I already seen her nude.”
“Yeah, I remember she was in Playboy in the 80’s.”
“You read Playboy?”
“Moving on… now you are familiar with the reasoning of this interview?”
“Yeah, one of your interns explained it. Are we going to do this or talk more about washed up TV icons?”
I try to come on a bit more professional. “So do you take umbrage to the notion of being one of the most despised people in the country.”
“What do I care, it’s not like Ma Kettle is going to actually get off her couch and vote, especially if Oprah is on.”
“Do you know why or how you attained this ranking?”
“I reckon it’s for my work on the internet.”
“I understand you developed most of the SPAM software in the 90’s.”
“Among other things. I also used to pay a software tech to program code to disrupt the search algorithms on search engines to lead to my fisher sites.”
“Did you make much money off of those?”
“It’s not all about money. The biggest payoff was when I would overhear people complaining about contracting computer viruses from porno sites.”
“You also made some of the viruses?”
“I’m no criminal. But I do own stock in various anti-spyware and virus companies. I just enjoy people having to suffer for their online sexual deviancies.”
“Am I to take you are a moral man?”
“I was Baptist raised, but any idea of tithing turned me off of organized religion when I was 9.”
“Did your parents make you contribute from a paper route or something/”
“I hate bicycles.”
“What would turn you off from tithing at such a young age then?”
“My mother used to have me place the money in the collection plate. Always she would insist that I did so.”
“Wow. Back to the SPAM, I understand you were behind many of the evolutions of the technology. I have two questions concerning this. 1. Did you ever debate finding alternate modes of marketing, and secondly, did you ever receive email from one of your own companies?”
“What is it with journalists and two part questions? It’s just as easy to ask them separately.”
“Well then, did you ever debate not creating SPAM?”
“See, a lot of people think I would have qualms about this. I never did, because if not for me, it would have been done by someone else. So before some Hindu took the job in Punjab, I stepped in and kept the money in the US of A. Look, there is always going to be someone trying to make money off of a free system like the net. Hell, if Evian can make millions by selling a vastly abundant resource, then it’s going to happen everywhere. Shawn Fanning didn’t make any money off of people using Napster, he did so by selling the name and letting the corporate buyer fight the courts.”
“Is this a by any means necessary motive? But aside from reasoning, is there disdain for the victims or sympathy?”
“Hell, I would feel sorry for them if there was ever an issue. The only problems people have with spam is that it clogs the systems because of their KB size. Say an average person gets 40,000 unwanted emails a year. Take a company of 100,000, that’s 4 billion pieces of SPAM a year. The reason I went with this, and kept pushing it forward was to try to crackdown on the corporations.”
“That’s almost noble, in a symbiotic way.”
“I’m not doing it for the worker, I’m doing it for the employer. The more SPAM they get the less likely they are to maintain access to the internet at work. While I am not pro, I am certainly not anti-corporation. Do you know how many times I hear someone talking about how they spent 4 hours at work on Myspace or ESPN. It’s sickening. You want to know why our working class is struggling against other emerging countries, it’s because the net has made much of our workforce criminally inefficient. While I’m not going to standby and let Ravi Shankar take my money, I have no qualms about him taking some dope out of Arizona States operator job. The more I allow CEO’s to crack down on the laziness of their employers, the better hope I have in America staying on top.”
“With the payday of CEO’s routinely topping 100 million and the middle class diminishing and raising the poverty line in this country, you are for pressing the working man and woman. Even when weekends continue to diminish and work-hours grow to 60 hours a week?”
“Don’t give me this gay for the people speech. I have heard variations from a thousand people, all of them who went nowhere in their life. You seem to be doing well on your own, I found out you went to Yale, and worked your way through college to do so. What are you doing fighting for the inept?”
“I got into Yale by acing my interview, and the only reason I could afford it was because my father died and his life insurance paid for it. I would gladly be deep in debt to have him back. And what’s this about, you aren’t going to turn this on me. I got here because I was lucky and I worked my ass off. The two are not always tied to each other, and the former is far more important.”
“Ahh, Clarice, tell me about the Lambs.”
“That movie is 15 years old, and has been parodied countless times. Humor me with skill if you must at all.”
“There hasn’t been a decent American film since Taxi Driver.” He pauses for a while, and I gear up to return to the questions when he asks, “Do you still hear them scream?”
“So what do you do with your inordinate free time these days, Darren.”
“You know what, you didn’t lose your cool. I’m impressed. How about a round?”
The officer returns to the room, and places a cooler of Newcastle and a fifth of Bourbon in front of me, then moves to the other side of the glass and does the same for Mr. Clarke.
Darren opens, “You know what, I forgot about the reruns. Lets have a few.”
We leave the police station and head to a quiet street in the neighborhoods. My cooler and rocks glass are matched by his in the back. We sit and listen to the Giants – Dodgers game on AM and relax. I don’t know if he’s a serial drinker, or if he just became weary, but on my part, the idea of a drink and a baseball game in lieu of conversation was heavenly to me.
The game ends, and we’re both smashed. After a bit of small talk, he opens the interview again.
“These days, I spend most of my time on message boards. You know, like film and stuff.”
“You go on there and just make fun of the kids, right? Shit I do that too sometimes.”
“Hell, I was the one who started that chain that said Spielberg was an anti-Semite for… what was that movie.”
I giggle, “E.T. I mean what was it, Munich.”
“No… I remember, Schindler’s List. My whole point was that Schindler was a German. If Spielberg had any balls, he would have found a Jew that was a hero, and by not doing so, he merely showed that Jewish people are cowards, and that they need someone to help themselves.”
“That’s horrible. And horribly…”
We both say it: “Horribly… hilarious!”
Darren goes on, “I have made more money than I know what to do with. The only woman I loved died on the night before I was going to propose to her.”
“How sad.”
“What, you think I want to share my wealth? I miss her, but I get the feeling she was going to take everything. I didn’t as much dodge a bullet as I did have the guy pointing a gun at me get shot before they took aim.”
“The devils in the details.”
We both erupt in laughter.
“You ever see that movie Grind. It was about a bunch of skateboarding kids from SoCal who, hell, it’s not even important what they wanted. It’s a crap film.”
“I reviewed that film when I was at the Indianapolis Star. It was horrible.”
“I know. But every time I go on IMDB or one of the other movie message boards, I blast everyone’s opinions and claim that film’s the only great movie of the decade. I have said I hated the Lord of the Rings, In the Bedroom, The Incredibles, and so on, and that anyone with any intelligence would recognize that film as the triumph of American cinema, as much as what it is not, it is what is there that is important.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“Seriously. I have a 2000 word essay that I give to people, explaining that the film was a decrial of all that is youth in America, and that the only thing to connect humanity, and family, is to let go and embrace our shortcomings, and I use the Clown college as my closing argument. The best part…
“I gotta hear this…”
“Is that some people subscribed to the idea.”
By Archibald Montenegro
As I travel to meet my first interviewee, Darren Clarke, I must note that I am doing so in a rented off-road vehicle and traveling along a stretch of dirt the Romans wouldn’t have called a road. I’m in a remote part of Northern California, close to the Nevada and Oregon borders, at least that’s what the GPS system is telling me. Before I meet him, I’ll clarify how our organization came to determine what is was to be “hated.”
Rule #1. The hate given must be non-denominational, race, gender, or sexuality are not grounds for this assignment. There are far too many bigots to factor in to a survey like this, and we found that taking them out of the equation narrowed our search by 90%, and managed to remove most of the Middle East, the American south, and to our surprise, El Salvador.
Rule #2. The hate must be focused for singular and unique reasons for the individuals. We are not trying to propagate stereotypes about cultural foibles. When we sent our street team to gather random data, we came upon the following multiple times:
Asian Drivers (55 responses)
Women Drivers (31 responses)
That white guy at the club who tries to organize a dance off, only to throw out something lame like the robot when it’s his turn (a staggering 78 times)
The black couple in the white movie theater yelling at the screen (35 times)
The white couple in the black movie theater shushing people who yell at the screen (35 times)
There were multiple responses of this ilk, and we all decided that we needed to be more specific when we asked people about who they hate. This experiment was almost a waste, except for the production of Darren Clarke, who none of us were familiar with, but upon further extrapolation, we realized this was exactly the kind of guy that just attracts hate.
Darren works from his home, and does so for his own company DClarke Enterprises, a company he founded with money he made in the stock market circa 2001, when he made the bulk of his money off of Halliburton stock, a fact I am loathe to print. He lives alone and shuns most human contact outside of his 4 year old daughter and her mother. The two never married, or even dated, and are on malicious speaking terms. Her sole contribution to this piece was:
“That bastard knocked me up one night when I drunkenly mistook him for [musician] Ben Folds. He played this up, and while I blame myself for not having him play any music for me, even when I have a piano in my living room, I was in a bad place in my life that night, and now, I have a constant reminder of that jerk who seems to be allergic to everything in my house. Tell that sonofabitch I’ll sue him if he stops payment on another check.”
I arrive at his home at our arranged 3pm appointment; he stops me from entering the front door. He slides a small piece of paper out of his mail slot. The note is comprised of an address, a series of directions forbidding contact or stares, and to refrain from broaching the subjects during our interview: his daughter, his hair, his house, him picking up the lunch tab. He yells to me: “Finished yet? I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”
I take this in stride because during my first phone call with him he mentioned that he posses a weak immune system, something he laments that was passed onto his daughter, so he has to take extra precautions when it comes to human contact. A few minutes pass and I get a phone call on my cell. To my amazement, the reception is flawless. It’s Darren, who reminds me to spray my car interiors with a anti-allergen air freshener.
I duly move to my car, and for the third time that day, I spray the car down, and place everything but my tape recorder and notebook in a storage bin in the back of the car. I shut the door, and turn around, no less than 18 inches from my face is Darren, who seems pleased in his silent approach. I can tell he is looking for a rise in my expression. 15 minutes after waiting for an appointment whose time he set, I am already annoyed enough to take joy in not humoring his antics.
We walk to the Jeep Cherokee, and after I get into the driver’s seat, I notice he is still standing by the door. I can hear him harrumph through the glass. I walk out around to the other side of the car. He hands me a handkerchief, and I move to open the door so he can ride shotgun. After a silent 10 seconds, I open the back door and he gets in without even saying a thanks, in place I hear “burn the hankie.”
We take off Easterly and I ask how far our destination is, he responds “It’s about 25 minutes.”
“I thought you didn’t like to travel beyond 15 minutes from your house.”
“I don’t. You headed East, it’s west, off my driveway.”
“But you waited...”
“I would have told you when we got too far for my liking.”
We arrive at the locale, and he hands me another hankie through a slot in his window. I look at our destination. It’s the city’s police station, and he proceeds to lead me through the halls stopping only to allow me to open the doors for him, something he does with such a matter of regularity, I’m debating calling the office to bump him above the other candidates.
We finally reach his room, it’s the visiting room, and a cop opens the door for him to enter. The officer clears out a felon and informs his wife and child on the other side of the glass that the visit is over. He takes a garbage bag from his fanny pack and strews it over the chair, then places a white glove on his hand, pulls out a disinfectant wipe and cleans off his phone. He then gestures to take the phone on the other side of the glass.
We begin.
“I don’t want this to run too long, I want to get home for Wheel of Fortune at 7:30,” he begins.
“It’s August, they always show re-runs this month.”
“What do I care, it’s not like I got money on the show.”
“You have a fixation with Vanna White?”
“What kind of question is that. She’s 15 years past her prime and I already seen her nude.”
“Yeah, I remember she was in Playboy in the 80’s.”
“You read Playboy?”
“Moving on… now you are familiar with the reasoning of this interview?”
“Yeah, one of your interns explained it. Are we going to do this or talk more about washed up TV icons?”
I try to come on a bit more professional. “So do you take umbrage to the notion of being one of the most despised people in the country.”
“What do I care, it’s not like Ma Kettle is going to actually get off her couch and vote, especially if Oprah is on.”
“Do you know why or how you attained this ranking?”
“I reckon it’s for my work on the internet.”
“I understand you developed most of the SPAM software in the 90’s.”
“Among other things. I also used to pay a software tech to program code to disrupt the search algorithms on search engines to lead to my fisher sites.”
“Did you make much money off of those?”
“It’s not all about money. The biggest payoff was when I would overhear people complaining about contracting computer viruses from porno sites.”
“You also made some of the viruses?”
“I’m no criminal. But I do own stock in various anti-spyware and virus companies. I just enjoy people having to suffer for their online sexual deviancies.”
“Am I to take you are a moral man?”
“I was Baptist raised, but any idea of tithing turned me off of organized religion when I was 9.”
“Did your parents make you contribute from a paper route or something/”
“I hate bicycles.”
“What would turn you off from tithing at such a young age then?”
“My mother used to have me place the money in the collection plate. Always she would insist that I did so.”
“Wow. Back to the SPAM, I understand you were behind many of the evolutions of the technology. I have two questions concerning this. 1. Did you ever debate finding alternate modes of marketing, and secondly, did you ever receive email from one of your own companies?”
“What is it with journalists and two part questions? It’s just as easy to ask them separately.”
“Well then, did you ever debate not creating SPAM?”
“See, a lot of people think I would have qualms about this. I never did, because if not for me, it would have been done by someone else. So before some Hindu took the job in Punjab, I stepped in and kept the money in the US of A. Look, there is always going to be someone trying to make money off of a free system like the net. Hell, if Evian can make millions by selling a vastly abundant resource, then it’s going to happen everywhere. Shawn Fanning didn’t make any money off of people using Napster, he did so by selling the name and letting the corporate buyer fight the courts.”
“Is this a by any means necessary motive? But aside from reasoning, is there disdain for the victims or sympathy?”
“Hell, I would feel sorry for them if there was ever an issue. The only problems people have with spam is that it clogs the systems because of their KB size. Say an average person gets 40,000 unwanted emails a year. Take a company of 100,000, that’s 4 billion pieces of SPAM a year. The reason I went with this, and kept pushing it forward was to try to crackdown on the corporations.”
“That’s almost noble, in a symbiotic way.”
“I’m not doing it for the worker, I’m doing it for the employer. The more SPAM they get the less likely they are to maintain access to the internet at work. While I am not pro, I am certainly not anti-corporation. Do you know how many times I hear someone talking about how they spent 4 hours at work on Myspace or ESPN. It’s sickening. You want to know why our working class is struggling against other emerging countries, it’s because the net has made much of our workforce criminally inefficient. While I’m not going to standby and let Ravi Shankar take my money, I have no qualms about him taking some dope out of Arizona States operator job. The more I allow CEO’s to crack down on the laziness of their employers, the better hope I have in America staying on top.”
“With the payday of CEO’s routinely topping 100 million and the middle class diminishing and raising the poverty line in this country, you are for pressing the working man and woman. Even when weekends continue to diminish and work-hours grow to 60 hours a week?”
“Don’t give me this gay for the people speech. I have heard variations from a thousand people, all of them who went nowhere in their life. You seem to be doing well on your own, I found out you went to Yale, and worked your way through college to do so. What are you doing fighting for the inept?”
“I got into Yale by acing my interview, and the only reason I could afford it was because my father died and his life insurance paid for it. I would gladly be deep in debt to have him back. And what’s this about, you aren’t going to turn this on me. I got here because I was lucky and I worked my ass off. The two are not always tied to each other, and the former is far more important.”
“Ahh, Clarice, tell me about the Lambs.”
“That movie is 15 years old, and has been parodied countless times. Humor me with skill if you must at all.”
“There hasn’t been a decent American film since Taxi Driver.” He pauses for a while, and I gear up to return to the questions when he asks, “Do you still hear them scream?”
“So what do you do with your inordinate free time these days, Darren.”
“You know what, you didn’t lose your cool. I’m impressed. How about a round?”
The officer returns to the room, and places a cooler of Newcastle and a fifth of Bourbon in front of me, then moves to the other side of the glass and does the same for Mr. Clarke.
Darren opens, “You know what, I forgot about the reruns. Lets have a few.”
We leave the police station and head to a quiet street in the neighborhoods. My cooler and rocks glass are matched by his in the back. We sit and listen to the Giants – Dodgers game on AM and relax. I don’t know if he’s a serial drinker, or if he just became weary, but on my part, the idea of a drink and a baseball game in lieu of conversation was heavenly to me.
The game ends, and we’re both smashed. After a bit of small talk, he opens the interview again.
“These days, I spend most of my time on message boards. You know, like film and stuff.”
“You go on there and just make fun of the kids, right? Shit I do that too sometimes.”
“Hell, I was the one who started that chain that said Spielberg was an anti-Semite for… what was that movie.”
I giggle, “E.T. I mean what was it, Munich.”
“No… I remember, Schindler’s List. My whole point was that Schindler was a German. If Spielberg had any balls, he would have found a Jew that was a hero, and by not doing so, he merely showed that Jewish people are cowards, and that they need someone to help themselves.”
“That’s horrible. And horribly…”
We both say it: “Horribly… hilarious!”
Darren goes on, “I have made more money than I know what to do with. The only woman I loved died on the night before I was going to propose to her.”
“How sad.”
“What, you think I want to share my wealth? I miss her, but I get the feeling she was going to take everything. I didn’t as much dodge a bullet as I did have the guy pointing a gun at me get shot before they took aim.”
“The devils in the details.”
We both erupt in laughter.
“You ever see that movie Grind. It was about a bunch of skateboarding kids from SoCal who, hell, it’s not even important what they wanted. It’s a crap film.”
“I reviewed that film when I was at the Indianapolis Star. It was horrible.”
“I know. But every time I go on IMDB or one of the other movie message boards, I blast everyone’s opinions and claim that film’s the only great movie of the decade. I have said I hated the Lord of the Rings, In the Bedroom, The Incredibles, and so on, and that anyone with any intelligence would recognize that film as the triumph of American cinema, as much as what it is not, it is what is there that is important.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“Seriously. I have a 2000 word essay that I give to people, explaining that the film was a decrial of all that is youth in America, and that the only thing to connect humanity, and family, is to let go and embrace our shortcomings, and I use the Clown college as my closing argument. The best part…
“I gotta hear this…”
“Is that some people subscribed to the idea.”
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