Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good Read Online Free PDF

made pincers of his thumb and forefinger, pinched the flap of his own ear—as fuzzy these days, as furry as Toto’s.
    “What?” said the girl. “Oh yeah, that one killed.”
    “Did you like it? I mean was that part of the thing, toughing it out?” They were missing the opening credits but who cared. He was reaching out here, he was making contact.
    But no, the girl had moved on. She fiddled with her volume, she tinkered with the tilt of her chair. She was checking in, she was checking out.
    A little boy, ten or so. You get that he’s Jewish. He’s being humiliated, pants yanked down to reveal his teensy pecker
(schmuck,
doesn’t Zane call it, when he’s showing off his Yiddish?) just as he puckers up to kiss the little girl. Then the flash forward to his abject adulthood, the whole anger management bit …
    Right. Matt remembered this one, an obscenely popular bit of pap from a few months ago. Better yet, he remembered his kritikal take on it, his slant, his angle.
    It’s Matt’s practice to launch each of his reviews—featured, until this week, in Vancouver’s moderately hip
Omega Magazine—
with a riff so ludicrously tangential that folks will be left in a state of painful suspense. How the
heck
is he going to tie this in to the movie? Or, as
Omega
’s editor tended to put it (before the real shit hit the fan), “When the
hell
are you going to get on with it, McKay? What do you think we are here, the
New
bloody
Yorker?”
Laszlo Nagy, the über-nag.
    As intro to his review of a recent action flick, for instance, Matt philosophized about the nature of The Good. The Good had been much on his mind since Zane’s revelation, his suicidal swerve into virtue, so it was natural that Matt share this fixation with what Nagy referred to (with sly sarcasm) as his “readership.” Was The Good absolute, Matt’s piece inquired, or was it relative? Could an action be said to be inherently good, or good only by virtue of what it accomplished? He segued from this mystifying malarkey to the question of The Bad onscreen. “What The Bad guys are astoundingly bad at in this movie, and in most movies of its ilk”—Matt way overuses the word
ilk
and he knows it—“is violence. Other than the hero’s wife and daughter the thugs don’t seem to be able to kill anybody. On one occasion twenty-two of them (I counted) armed with Glocks and grenades fail to take out our hero, this despite catching him kerchiefed to the bedpost by his prankish new mate. Then again, he’s The Good guy: he’s good at violence.” And so on.
    This was a couple of months back, about the time Matt initiated his postcard campaign, his pre-emptive strike at Zane. If Zane believed that refusing the drugs was
good,
that it constituted a Gandhi-like cry for justice, then the first step in rescuing him would be to destroy his notion of virtue. Goodness isn’t so great—this has been Matt’s message in each instalment, seven so far (all northern nature shots, raven, beaver, bear). He knows his arguments are weak, that they can all be made to self-destruct, or at least he’s pretty sure they can. He suspects, furthermore, that being good will turn out to be the
only
good thing, the only thing that matters. Being uncareless. Being uncruel. Still, his goal here is to keep his friend alive (which would be good too, wouldn’t it?), and he hopes that cumulatively his arguments might shake the man’s faith. Worth a try.
    In the case of today’s movie (now eliciting great guffaws from its captive audience), Matt’s intro had been statistical. He’d trotted out a whole horde of figures to demonstrate that people would spend, altogether, a hundred lifetimes watching the wretched thing, a hundred lives. Was it worth it? Matt’s piece took the position, perhaps unsurprisingly, that no, it wasn’t. As he fumed his way through the film again today, up there in the jet-streamed azure, some of his choicest zingers came back to him. Here was the aging star,