Why You're No Better than Walter White

BREAKING BAD, season 4 ends Sunday, the culmination of a season that escalated faster than Charlie Sheen’s breakdown (to catch up, click here). Just when you think it can’t get any more insane, confusing, or drug-filled it kicks it into the next gear.

The brilliance behind the show, though, is that it all started with something so simple. A man wants to support his family and pay for his cancer treatment. He was muscled out of the drug company he’d founded with some geeky guy and his sexy wife (which doubled as a love triangle) and now they’re rich while he’s a beatdown college chemistry teacher with a palsied kid and less respect than Rodney Dangerfield. So he does what any unappreciated, downtrodden genius does – he breaks the law and, in the process, goes from that geek getting sand kicked in his face to that buff stone cold killer, just like Charles Atlas promised. No, he wins some self-confidence.  Makes money. Gets back his self-respect. And seriously, what’s the difference between meth and pharmaceuticals – they’re both destroying our country, one addict at a time; the only difference seems to be that the pharmaceutical companies have a multi-billion dollar lobby in Washington while the meth producers are mostly bikers and Mexicans. Cultural bias posing as a drug war.

You might say “Jesus, no, what’s the matter with you? I’d never break the law you criminal bastard!” And to you I say one acronym – SUDS.

In college, some guy talked to my business class about how he went from a legitimate developer to a fugitive on the run from the Feds for bribery of a public official. He said it started when some lady in some state office asked him for a little extra on the top in exchange for giving his firm a lucrative government contract. He was still the lowest bidder so he figured “What the hell, nobody’s getting hurt, this money's coming out of my pocket, no problem, right?” He called it a Seemingly Unimportant Decision which, when compounded with further SUDS snowballed into the life of a fugitive where he was being shot at by Interpol and had to live with his family in the jungles of South America with a massive Samoan bodyguard the kids called Uncle Sammy Potatoes.

Think you’re too smart, too respectable for that? Here are just a few epic SUDS that have shaped the man-scape over the last decade or so.

      1.90’s Energy Deregulation – In the 1990’s everybody was high from the 80’s, when we’d proved that by letting everybody just be free to trade without restrictions we’d all be wealthy, happy, powerful. George W. Bush, a born-again Christian governor from Texas with a few family connections, championed a policy of deregulation of the energy industry on behalf of his friends at a then-little-known energy company, Enron. They quickly went to work recruiting the smartest people from the best schools, finding new and innovative ways to shape the way we power our country, surely nothing bad could come from letting them run free. 10 years after Enron’s bankruptcy, American industry and trading is practically synonymous with corruption and greedy failure.

      2.       Barry Bonds rubs some lotion on his arms – His trainer said it’s all good, everybody does it. If Barry gets caught, he can just blame the trainer; Balco too, they withhold info; there'll always be somebody else. And even more, fuck it, if he sets a homerun record the struggling institution of Major League Baseball won’t call him out – they need to worry about all the ground they’re losing to football. A hard hitter like Bonds packs the stands. What could go wrong?
    

        3.  Michael Jackson and Propofol – Michael Jackson is a tortured artist, a man filled with more confused demons than an all-boys boarding school in hell. He’s a creative genius. People like that can’t just turn it off, y’know? They need a little help to go to sleep. NyQuil stops cutting it, go for the Lunesta. Lunesta no longer works, fuck it, let’s hire a fulltime doctor to put Michael under general anesthetic every night, breathing tube and all. It’s no different from an athlete getting a cortisol shot so he can keep on playing, right? Now we have: a doctor whose career is ruined because of this SUD; a great performer and musical legend dead because of this SUD; and a 2 hour cocktease, his “you can look but don’t touch” movie about the tour that never was, THIS IS IT, leaving all us suckers with musical blue balls.

     4.       EMO Music  – one second, we turn our head to whiny kids in skinny jeans, thinking “who’s gonna listen to these angry little bitches? Everybody’ll see they’re just weaker versions of punk rock and, seriously, who wants to listen to androgynous punk rock losers like these who just want people to feel sorry for their angst?” Next second we’re presented with a young population that any self-respecting man should be embarrassed to admit is of the same gender as himself. The Duke, Robert Mitchum, George Washington, Ernest Hemingway, all great American men are now rolling over in their graves. You should be too.

5.       JERSEY SHORE – Yeah, they’re a train wreck and that’s always fun to watch. I enjoyed season 1, it was a mess but it made me feel better about myself, about how, even at my most douchey I'm still a respectable guy. But now we’ve encouraged them and it’s a cultural phenomenon. They’re on the cover of Rolling Stone, they’re ruining the view of American culture, our only real export anymore, in Europe and they’re making millions dollars for being trash and that just makes them take bitchiness and douchebaggery to unseen and hideous levels. We’ve opened Pandora’s box and now we’re fucked.

Anyway, tune in Sunday @ 10 to AMC to see where Walt’s SUDS will leave him after one dark, dirty tumult that has ruined the lives of everybody around him. And remember – this could be you. And in some ways it already is. So think about what you're doing before you do it. And stand up for what's right, you skivey, no-good bastards.

- Ryan