By: Sayer

We need a crucial distinction here: trash and dogshit.

You know trash. Hello.

Dogshit are a different breed: a base facsimile of human being who use the privilege of their race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.—granted them by a broken and uncaring society—to inflict prejudice and abuse upon others. In a word, bigots. In more words, hate-filled, ignorant bootlickers bent on asserting their fragile identities at the expense of those they were conditioned to fear. If you need more words, the internet provides.

Writing off your assembly-line dogshit-human is as easy as falling off the porch at 3am. You cruise your news feed and find an article about a congresswoman urging people to be nice to one another. Below it you see a comment from a baby boomer named Rob who wears Oakleys and a sports hat in every single duplicate of every single profile picture. He’s telling the world that the congresswoman is a ‘cunt’ who should be ‘fired’ and ‘locked up’ and that ‘snowflakes’ and ‘libtards’ are a ‘disease’. And, inexplicably, a reminder that Trump won the presidential election of 2016.

Possible recourse could be reporting him to the impassive revenant that is Facebook, or you could do what most people do, and just keep scrolling. Easy. Clap that dust off your work gloves and hit the showers; it’s quittin time.

Bonus round: a dogshit-human writes and directs some of the best movies to hit major theaters.

Secret bonus round: a dogshit-human wrote half the songs you grew up on.

Special super secret bonus round: a dogshit-human actually inspired people to be better humans before it came out that they were a dogshit-human.

Not quite the tumble into your own front lawn, now, is it.

I grew up in one of the most basic, Saltine-and-tap-water ways possible: listening to The Beatles. Loved them. Still love them. Not only did their music inspire me to become a musician, but the messages of peace and love in their songs helped to shape the foundation of my entire worldview. While the sentiment of just love each other becomes a mutable axiom later in one’s life, it’s a great place to start. John Lennon would notably go on to pen such hits as the cringingly utopian ‘Imagine’ and the kind of, like, what-are-the-verses-even-about-but-alright-I-guess ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Gotta be a decent dude, right?

Turns out, if you were anything like me, you were inspired to view the world as a place where peace and love were right around the corner by a woman-beating, child-abandoning, homophobic egotist who often fucked off to his mansion in between championing himself as a man of the people. Hardly the guy you’d expect to write things like ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Imagine’. And…kinda the guy you’d expect to write things like ‘Run for Your Life’ and ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’. Huh.

There’s dogshit like this all over the place. Joss Whedon created numerous beloved fictional universes that cut mass-appeal supernatural melodrama with feminism. It’s not a masterful treatise on the subject, but it sure spawned a lot of illuminating conversations that turned me into a feminist. Turns out he used his maleness to intimidate his ex-wife and be—to put it in clinical terms—a total fuckwad.

Kevin Spacey. Louis CK. Woody Allen. Johnny Depp. Roman Polanski. Michael Jackson. Maybe they’re not sexual predators (as far as we know) but there are also famous assholes like Quentin Tarantino and Michael Jordan, who treat other humans like cat puke while inspiring whole generations of artists etc.

Trashfolk, I present to you: dogshit.

There’s a constant debate about separating the art from the artist. I can get behind the fors and againsts. I have gotten behind the fors and againsts. It’s a tricky subject.

First, I’ll share with you how I get behind the ethical hurdle. Actually no, I won’t. What I’ll do is I’ll take a moment to, in a non sequitur, mention piracy. No, I’m not advocating for piracy. Piracy, I mean. Just to be clear. We’re talking about piracy. You know, the act of going onto the internet and effortlessly finding digital copies of anything you want and obtaining them for free. I’m not going to advocate for VPNs either, but man, those sure exist.

Back to the article, I’ll just say I vote with my money. Se7en is a fantastic movie—arguably Fincher’s finest—and it’s been such a long time since I last watched it. As of the time of this writing, the film is available on Netflix. Fuck, I say, if I’m going to watch it on there, however. I admit full-throttle ignorance on the subject of royalties and Netflix, but if there’s a single breath, a memory of a chance that clicking on the title card for Se7en will put a dollar in Spacey’s pocket (or Morgan Freeman’s, yikes, my dudes), I’m not doing it. I’ll just head on down to the broad sea-inlet of the corsairs and borrow it from the, uh, friend I have there.

Now, to the actual separation of art and artist.

Presented hereafter is a hypothetical situation. You want to watch Annie Hall again because you’re going through the worst breakup of your life and it’s Wednesday night and you work graveyard shift on odd days and all your friends are asleep and you’re drunk for maybe the twelfth time in your entire life. It would be irresponsible to watch the movie without at least acknowledging that the hapless and neurotic main character would go on to marry his adopted daughter and then molest his actual daughter. Maybe you gesture at the teevee with your Angry Orchard (because you don’t know any better yet) and say, ‘You dirty motherfuck. You sick fuck. Fuck you dude. Gross-ass fuck.’

Ignoring the relationship between art and artist, even if you’re on the side against it, might actually be detrimental. Art is the product of the artist viewing the world through their scope. To look only at the art and not at the artist takes away half of the entire experience. A control example would be Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours. Knowing nothing, it’s just an album of catchy songs your mom loves. Skim their Wikipedia and you suddenly realize that, holy shit, they made this milestone of an album while all hatefucking each other.

So, if you can’t separate art and artist by ignoring it, what can you do?

My solution is something I’m just now choosing to call active separation.

A perfect and pithy example of this comes from South Park. In the three-part episode titled, Imaginationland, some guys consult Mel Gibson on something (I don’t remember anything else about the episode), and their characterization of Gibson is of course batshit fucking crazy. At the end of the consultation, in which there was a lot of self-twisting of nipples, one of the guys says, ‘Say what you want about Mel Gibson, but the son of a bitch knows story structure.’

The guys need something from an obviously crazy shitbird, and, without defending the artist, they take the art and use it for their own devices.

This frame of mind might not work for everyone, but try to approach it as if you’re an artist in the same medium and genre, and you’re trying to build your skills. Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino are excellent at story and dialogue and directing. Tear it from their dogshit hands. John Lennon could write a lyric in his sleep. Tear it from his dead dogshit hands. Louis CK was a master of self-deprecatory humor with a moral center. Tear it from his dick-filled dogshit hands.

If you’re a creative, you can then make your own thing with their framework. Whether you’re a creative or not, you can then take what you learned from studying the work of a Dogshit Human, and find the same qualities in non-Dogshit Humans. Unless he outs himself as Dogshit, comedian Shane Torres is the most recent example of a comedian with self-deprecatory humor with a moral center. John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is one of the best lyricists I’ve ever heard. If you want excellent writer/directors, I could make this article novella-length, but just go with Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers, non-Star Wars Rian Johnson, or, if you’re feeling weird, Hal Hartley and David Lynch. You know, if none of those people are being revealed as Dogshit.

Always remember that art never becomes yours. Your experience with art is always yours, and you can control it. You can divine water from the barren crust at your feet. No one is telling you that you can’t enjoy something anymore because the person who made it is a rapist. You’ll have to put in some work to enjoy it in a way that doesn’t excuse or reward the Dogshit, but you can do it.