Four Degrees of Suckeration.

Afterthoughts about Shatner’s birthday:

You know, the verb “to suck” has taken over the world. When I used to say, a few decades ago, “I suck at Asteroids,” women actually got offended. Now everyone says “suck” on family shows and “Meet the Press.” In fact, most of the impolite slang we used in New York and New Jersey in the 1960s has been adopted and legitimized by mainstream society. The only thing they haven’t adopted from our old slang is the traditional “this” response. Example? The priest says, “Dominus vobiscum.” Then you say, “Dominus THIS, Padre,” and grab your crotch. This works on all occasions and as a response to any comment. (Or, as an alternative, you can grab your crotch and say “I got your Dominus right here, Padre”, but my friends found this variant too verbose.). To relate this to the “suck” verb, one guy would say, “your cigar sucks,” and the other guy would grab his crotch and say, “suck THIS.” There you have plenty of merriment and an instant Algonquin Round Table of witty repartee for all occasions.

The co-opting of “suck” by the mainstream culture leads to a lack of gradations. Is it fair to say that Cher’s singing sucks, when this is the same way you would describe Yoko Ono? Of course not. So I therefore propose four degrees of suckeration. To focus on the musicians for a minute, here’s how it would work if they were members of your family.

• First degree of suckeration: people who are OK, but not really as good as you might expect from the success they’ve achieved. An example would be Jewel. If you got all your cousins together, Jewel would sing about as well as the best one. She has a pleasant voice, can carry a tune, knows some guitar chords, looks good. She’s OK, you just can’t quite figure out why she is a star and 100 million other equally talented women are not.
• Second degree of suckeration: people who really aren’t good enough to be doing what they do professionally. If you assembled your cousins together and had a karaoke contest, they would finish somewhere in the middle of the pack. Cher and Jerry Vale would be in this category.
• Third degree of suckeration: people who don’t have a clue how to do what they are supposed to be professionals at. Your most incompetent cousin could do it as well. Sid Vicious belongs in this group.
• Fourth degree of suckeration: people who are so bad that they not only can’t do what they are supposed to be good at, but they cause nausea and/or laughter when they try to do it. If these people were your cousins, you wouldn’t even admit it. And if you had a family karaoke contest, you’d have a kindly aunt distract them to another room to look at baby pictures. Examples would include Carol Channing, Yoko Ono, and Shatner.

Shatner is an excellent illustration of this principle, because you might casually say “Bill Shatner sucks as an actor,” and/or “Bill Shatner sucks as a singer,” but the word “suck” doesn’t really mean the same thing in both sentences, does it? As an actor he’s only a first degree suck. He has even shown brief flashes of genius. As a singer, however, he’s not only guilty of fourth degree suckeration, but he could actually be in the fifth degree, since he pretty much sucks deeper and harder than anybody has ever sucked in the history of music. In fact, if Shatner had lived before the age of recording, and your grandpa told you how bad he was, you would think the old boy was exaggerating. Even if you believed your gramps, you would not be capable of imagining how bad the performing was, because there is nothing else to compare it to. If the recordings of Shatner did not exist, we simply could not conceive of anything that bad. In a sense, ol’ Kirk, as much as Newton and Freud, stretched the very boundaries of human conceptualization.

We owe him so much.

Taken from my review of Game of Pleasure, which has nothing to do with Shatner other than being to film what Bill is to singing.