"The Family Guy's" Seth McFarlane was the subject of a human interest piece on "Nightline" the other day. When interviewed he took some potshots at the professionally offended and those who lobby for them, AKA Brent Bozell, so here's his response.
"Our cosmopolitan elites have embraced the smutty Fox cartoon Family Guy."
No, we haven't. I myself have delusions of being a cosmopolitan elitist, and I consider the show to be annoying and intellectually insulting. (Though I confess to giggling at a joke here and there.) As for those with undeniable 'cosmopolitan elite' bona fides, I seriously doubt that 'The Family Guy' is all that popular with Adorno scholars or post-Marxist theater critics.
A month ago, oh-so-sophisticated National Public Radio used their parody song "Everybody Poops" to report on Julius Genachowski (FCC), the incoming chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
NPR? Mildly upper-middle brow. Pacifica Radio is where you want to go for the 'cosmopolitan elites.' But whatever, go on and pimp those 1970's stereotypes you ol g.
"Now it's ABC's 'Nightline' paying homage to 'Family Guy,' and in the process telling us a lot more about 'Nightline' than about this stupid show".
O.k. I'm going to invoke my tenuous authority as a quasi-elitist here to state something that I'm sure you, dear reader, will readily agree with. If your idea of "oh-so-sophisticated" "cosmopolitan elitism" is network television news and Garrison Keillor, you are a fucking hick. You are the sort of fucking hick who will call an old school chum "faggot" for wanting to eat at Olive Garden instead of Applebee's. You are the fucking hick who your extended family reviles for screaming about 'Wetbacks' and describing your bowel movements in front of Grandma.
Is Brent Bozell the sort of fucking hick who is still dumbfounded by those newfangled news talkers wearing fancy suits on the teevee? Of course not. He is an educated man born to a wealthy family and has spent most of his life as a member of the East Coast upper class. Brent Bozell III knows full well that fucking 'Nightline' of all things is nothing approaching the domain of the 'sophisticated elite.' This mental abortion of an article he wrote is simply a naked attempt to appeal to the morons that do. He longs for the return of a Republican government that would restore a virgin majority at the FCC so that he can take his gynophobic complaints before the body and receive something more than derisive laughter in return. But the days of riding a wave of snake-dancing morons to electoral triumph are gone. Brent Bozell, among others, is either unwilling or unable to accept this. And this is the impetus behind my 'so-an-so thinks you're stupid' series.
"The reporter for this segment, titled "Seriously Funny," was ABC's Bill Weir, last seen goofily hailing Barack Obama's inauguration as a day when 'even the seagulls must have been awed.'Weir didn't come to this interview like it was time for a '60 Minutes' interrogation of an oil company CEO. Apparently, the more MacFarlane pollutes the airwaves, the more reporters like Weir will merely bow and scrape."
You mean he held a cartoonist to a lower level of scrutiny than the head of a strategically vital multi-billion dollar industry? The hell you say?! I surrender Mr. Bozell, you have conclusively proved liberal bias beyond all shadow of a doubt.
This is where ABC tossed aside any semblance of fairness in favor of a one-sided puff piece. Weir chose not to interview a single religious spokesman or parental watchdog. The only man given a voice was MacFarlane. Weir also went too easy when it came to chronicling how low 'Family Guy' can go.
There are many people who find 'Family Guy' to be vulgar and witless. I'm one of them. That's my personal taste, and despite the fact that you are in the business of pretending otherwise Mr. Bozell, personal taste in regards to low-brow humor is not a matter of public policy debate. Should 'Good Morning America' interview a 'Grey's Anatomy' hater every time Sandra Oh shows up, just to provide balance? Your imaginary culture war doesn't change the fact that this would be precisely the same thing you demand in regards to 'Family Guy', and every bit as asinine.
He (McFarlane) smiled as he said, 'I just started jotting some of the topics covered and some of the jokes made at the expense of paraplegics, the deaf, pedophilia, bestiality, AIDS. You've got an opera version of the Nicole Simpson murders. The JFK Pez dispenser, where candy comes out of his wounds. Where is the line for you? Is there a line, or is that the point?"
MacFarlane said he regretted the JFK Pez dispenser. Apparently, there is a line, at least when you're interviewed by ABC News: Don't insult the Kennedys.
Jesus fucking Christ you shamelessly pathetic bastard. First of all, 'Don't insult the Kennedys'? How strategically general. You know full well that MacFarlane wasn't talking about anyone from the drunk driving or sexually assaulting sides of the extended Kennedy clan. MacFarlane was,without any pressure or prompting from the liberal media interviewer, referring specifically to the regret he felt for mocking the violent death of THE Kennedy who was the popular President of the United States at the moment his head was vaporized in full public view. I'm afraid that it's been a very long time since a godly Republican president was blown away in public view. Though I guess it's possible that "Family Guy" did do a Bill McKinley joke that I didn't happen to see, and that the 'Nightline' reporter failed to objectively call him out on it. But I really don't think so, and at any rate, grow the fuck up.
<span style="font-weight:bold;">"Take the March 8 episode that featured the baby eating horse semen; that suggested Ronald Reagan had sex with Mikhail Gorbachev; that showed the 11-way gay orgy scene; and played it for laughs when a horse trampled a class of deaf second-graders at the race track. Weir left those trampled 'taboos' out of the discussion."
I saw that episode. Nothing described is anywhere near as funny as it sounds. I suppose Bozell is offended. Well that's what he does.
Fed these softballs, MacFarlane swung for the bleachers. "It's not like television is a God-given right. You hear the Parents Television Council raving about 'Family Guy' did this. Nobody is forcing you to watch this show. They say 'Is this taste?' No, it's not. It's terrible taste. That's what's funny."
Weir laughed and replied: "They make the argument ... with an animated show, a kid's going to stop the remote." MacFarlane insisted, "you can't hold a whole medium hostage" because animation appeals to children.
Instead, ABC allowed MacFarlane to make an unrebutted argument that the censors are arbitrary and ridiculous.
As a recently disenfranchised professional censor, Brent Bozell has also done nothing to rebut this argument. In fact this article of proving MacFarane's point than old 'fart joke and an 80's reference' could ever hope to do himself.
"Weir wrapped up the interview by warmly noting how "Family Guy" was a show Coca-Cola used to avoid with its advertising, but now "Baby Stewie stars in Coke ads alongside Charlie Brown and Underdog." Just like Coke, ABC is defining MacFarlane's deviancy down, welcoming his radioactive TV waste into the 'mainstream.'
And welcome to being stripped of any delusion that you were ever in the mainstream, Mr. Bozell. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go home to watch some mainstream black-on-white lesbian pornography. Happy weekend to you all.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20090410/cm_uc_crbbox/op_239620;_ylt=AsVgojIKIMh1nyZOmk0XGHf9wxIF
Dé hAoine, Aibreán 10, 2009
Dé Domhnaigh, Aibreán 05, 2009
Why Are There Still Creationists?
I was flipping through one of Dr. Matt Moore's books the other day, it was called something like "Biologists Tackle Evolution" I'm not sure exactly and I'm afraid I can't adequately cite it. One of the essays dealt with the motivation for creationist belief, why evolution denial has been more tenacious than, say, belief in Prestor John or anal menstruation in Jewish males.
The writer, who again I forget, examines the state of British and American society at the time that Darwin made his observations public. Darwin himself was very careful not to stir up any larger moral or philosophical crisis. He kept his own personal religious skepticism to himself and used his considerable political skill to eventually make evolution acceptable and even fashionable within the Anglican Church and other organs of the educated middle class.
But there's no stopping people from making symbols out of things, from using random bits of information to give tangibility to larger and more abstract concerns. Both Britain and the United States were undergoing industrialization and gradual democratization in the days that Darwin was alive. British aristocrats still had their titles, but the source of their supposedly eternal power, dominion over land, was losing it's vitality. Members of the vulgar middle class could now enter elite if they had the verve and wit to do so, and control of the urban industrial machinery could produce more wealth than inherited landholders could ever dream of.
Modern social mobility was born, and new money capitalists were glad to embrace evolutions emphasis on adaptation and luck. But members of the old order had lost what had undeniably been a hell of a good deal for them; a power hierarchy in which place was inherited and eternal. First-born sons destined to become their fathers, to rule over the peasants as God the father ruled over the universe, while priests under their payroll assured the masses that challenging earthly authority was tantamount to challenging the immutable Lord of an unchanging universe.
These were the people who first hated Darwin. In fact the history of evolution denial is filled with groups of people who were losing or are losing some old automatic social privilege. Who are the people in America who resist evolution today? White, Protestant rural or suburban, raised to believe that they are the eternal standard for normality in America while the absurdity of this belief grows more apparent each day.
And anti-evolutionism is no longer exists in the shadow world of the uneducated and the impoverished, as it was in the days between Scopes and Falwell. A generation of progressively more arrogant right-wing government emboldened creationists, prompting them to form echo chamber think tanks, flood local school boards with loyal candidates, and reap confusion with disingenuous notions of "teaching the controversy". The 28-year reign of the Reagan coalition was in some ways a reaction to the political successes of liberalism from the thirties to the sixties. More than that though it was a reaction against social liberalization, the same sort of democratization and breakdown of inherited privilege that was occurring in the mid-nineteenth century, and although the American ideal of progress is often exaggerated, it is safe to say that this democratization has been quite steady from the Jazz Age up until the present day. It is to the right wing's immeasurable rage that the long political ascendancy of the GOP, and all the idiotic grandstanding that it passed off as governance, has done nothing to stop this expansion of power and prerogative.
It is often said that the past twenty years have produced an economic revolution on par with the industrial revolution, that we are now in a "post-industrial" economy.
Nobody has much more than a vague notion of what this means, and some notions are vaguer than others. But it is clear that the economic restructuring (That is, over the long term and not necessarily relating to the current flame out)is causing the same sort of cracks to the power structure that the industrial revolution did.
America has, for the most part, always been capitalist in outlook, at least in the north, and so adapted to industrialization much more smoothly than Europe. (The obvious exception being the Civil War, brought on by old-fashioned aristocrats hell-bent on maintaining a feudal society.) So the old notions of physical property in general and land in particular conveying status remained proudly intact here. The suburbanization/ghettoization trends of the twentieth century was a means of maintaining this ideal of physical property conveying status. White flight to Timber Elk Water Estates was a means both of rewarding capitalistic achievement and maintaining traditional race-based inherited prerogatives.
Then along came this so-called new economy; the rise of a tragically hip new professional class that preferred the noise and ethnic complexity of the city, that had no use for giant back yards and, even worse, often no use for patriarchal religion. It is no coincidence that the rise of the new collar directly coincides with creationisms' spread to the megachurch, the suburban white upper-middle class and political respectability. Perfectly modern and educated people now needed assurance that the fathers in place were forever.
In North Platte there was this was this chiropractor who would often write crank letters to the editor. His favorite subjects were the evils of the United Nations, taxation, and Darwinism. When rural Nebraskans fret over why their brightest young people are leaving a common conclusion is that it must be because property taxes are too high. Some of these bright youngsters were kind enough to write home to inform the old folks that, no, this wasn't the case. They left because they craved the excitement and social variety of the city. They could buy a palace on the edge of their home towns for the same price with which they are now renting their studio apartments but have no desire to do so, thank you very much. The old folks back home read these letters, and continue to blame taxation. I don't think it's a case of not believing so much as being unable to comprehend.
So much of conservatism's Bonsai resistance to taxation is based on the idea that physical property is the means of judging ones worth to society and gaining access to the elite. Now there are many white-collar workers who have rejected "The American Dream" out of economic self-interest. Owning a home would only tie them down, much better to rent a place a cheaply as comfort allows so as to be available to whoever will pay them the most in any region the work happens to be. Many who could afford a new car have none at all, sometimes for political reasons, though those who peddle out of principle have always been among us, and have always been few. More threatening to the traditional ideal of success are those who ride the bus out of pure indifference, and their numbers are growing.
And what of the suburbs, the domain of the twentieth century ruling class? Crumbling and receding. The most ostentatious subdivisions empty and moribund even while Detroit still gives the occasional gasp, sheltering only coyotes and the occasional impromptu teenage kegger.
Whatever truth there may be in this "New Economy" idea, it is clear that the traditional means of gaining and conveying power have been thoroughly discredited. There will of course always be a power structure of some sort or another, and the rise of Barrack Obama would seem to suggest that the new-collars are firmly in charge now and will be the ones who will determine what the new power structure will be.
A structure that, with luck, will emphasize the best values of the post Apple 1 generation; creativity, openness, variety of interests, the ability to be fascinated by all and awed by none. Inherited privilege and social patriarchs dead once and for all. The old American pipe dream of true meritocracy finally and miraculously realized.
But I don't mean to gush. What I'm trying to do is warn of the harsh reaction to the threatened end of inherited hierarchy will surely bring. Denial of reality will be the glue that ties those cast into the heap by the new reality together. closely related to creationism are the crackpot tales of global warming being a socialist conspiracy, involving the entire field of climatology and all of academia; espoused from those who will never accept that uncontrolled industrialization can possibly lead to any ill effects, that there could possibly be anything wrong with buying the largest possible private vehicle to convey virility and power.
And of course that old time religion of anti-"Darwinism" will still be there for quite sometime, and is likely to get a renewed push in the remaining red states. Always there to remind those newly disinherited from undeserved power that the changes happening around them are not actually real. God is the eternal father of the universe. And the eternal fathers of this world are those whom he has chosen to rule over the non-white, the non-male, the unmonied and the unpropertied, the unchurched, the arrogant skeptics, those who reject or ignore the old customs. The hierarchy of the universe is forever, so long as we just teach the controversy that this is so.
The writer, who again I forget, examines the state of British and American society at the time that Darwin made his observations public. Darwin himself was very careful not to stir up any larger moral or philosophical crisis. He kept his own personal religious skepticism to himself and used his considerable political skill to eventually make evolution acceptable and even fashionable within the Anglican Church and other organs of the educated middle class.
But there's no stopping people from making symbols out of things, from using random bits of information to give tangibility to larger and more abstract concerns. Both Britain and the United States were undergoing industrialization and gradual democratization in the days that Darwin was alive. British aristocrats still had their titles, but the source of their supposedly eternal power, dominion over land, was losing it's vitality. Members of the vulgar middle class could now enter elite if they had the verve and wit to do so, and control of the urban industrial machinery could produce more wealth than inherited landholders could ever dream of.
Modern social mobility was born, and new money capitalists were glad to embrace evolutions emphasis on adaptation and luck. But members of the old order had lost what had undeniably been a hell of a good deal for them; a power hierarchy in which place was inherited and eternal. First-born sons destined to become their fathers, to rule over the peasants as God the father ruled over the universe, while priests under their payroll assured the masses that challenging earthly authority was tantamount to challenging the immutable Lord of an unchanging universe.
These were the people who first hated Darwin. In fact the history of evolution denial is filled with groups of people who were losing or are losing some old automatic social privilege. Who are the people in America who resist evolution today? White, Protestant rural or suburban, raised to believe that they are the eternal standard for normality in America while the absurdity of this belief grows more apparent each day.
And anti-evolutionism is no longer exists in the shadow world of the uneducated and the impoverished, as it was in the days between Scopes and Falwell. A generation of progressively more arrogant right-wing government emboldened creationists, prompting them to form echo chamber think tanks, flood local school boards with loyal candidates, and reap confusion with disingenuous notions of "teaching the controversy". The 28-year reign of the Reagan coalition was in some ways a reaction to the political successes of liberalism from the thirties to the sixties. More than that though it was a reaction against social liberalization, the same sort of democratization and breakdown of inherited privilege that was occurring in the mid-nineteenth century, and although the American ideal of progress is often exaggerated, it is safe to say that this democratization has been quite steady from the Jazz Age up until the present day. It is to the right wing's immeasurable rage that the long political ascendancy of the GOP, and all the idiotic grandstanding that it passed off as governance, has done nothing to stop this expansion of power and prerogative.
It is often said that the past twenty years have produced an economic revolution on par with the industrial revolution, that we are now in a "post-industrial" economy.
Nobody has much more than a vague notion of what this means, and some notions are vaguer than others. But it is clear that the economic restructuring (That is, over the long term and not necessarily relating to the current flame out)is causing the same sort of cracks to the power structure that the industrial revolution did.
America has, for the most part, always been capitalist in outlook, at least in the north, and so adapted to industrialization much more smoothly than Europe. (The obvious exception being the Civil War, brought on by old-fashioned aristocrats hell-bent on maintaining a feudal society.) So the old notions of physical property in general and land in particular conveying status remained proudly intact here. The suburbanization/ghettoization trends of the twentieth century was a means of maintaining this ideal of physical property conveying status. White flight to Timber Elk Water Estates was a means both of rewarding capitalistic achievement and maintaining traditional race-based inherited prerogatives.
Then along came this so-called new economy; the rise of a tragically hip new professional class that preferred the noise and ethnic complexity of the city, that had no use for giant back yards and, even worse, often no use for patriarchal religion. It is no coincidence that the rise of the new collar directly coincides with creationisms' spread to the megachurch, the suburban white upper-middle class and political respectability. Perfectly modern and educated people now needed assurance that the fathers in place were forever.
In North Platte there was this was this chiropractor who would often write crank letters to the editor. His favorite subjects were the evils of the United Nations, taxation, and Darwinism. When rural Nebraskans fret over why their brightest young people are leaving a common conclusion is that it must be because property taxes are too high. Some of these bright youngsters were kind enough to write home to inform the old folks that, no, this wasn't the case. They left because they craved the excitement and social variety of the city. They could buy a palace on the edge of their home towns for the same price with which they are now renting their studio apartments but have no desire to do so, thank you very much. The old folks back home read these letters, and continue to blame taxation. I don't think it's a case of not believing so much as being unable to comprehend.
So much of conservatism's Bonsai resistance to taxation is based on the idea that physical property is the means of judging ones worth to society and gaining access to the elite. Now there are many white-collar workers who have rejected "The American Dream" out of economic self-interest. Owning a home would only tie them down, much better to rent a place a cheaply as comfort allows so as to be available to whoever will pay them the most in any region the work happens to be. Many who could afford a new car have none at all, sometimes for political reasons, though those who peddle out of principle have always been among us, and have always been few. More threatening to the traditional ideal of success are those who ride the bus out of pure indifference, and their numbers are growing.
And what of the suburbs, the domain of the twentieth century ruling class? Crumbling and receding. The most ostentatious subdivisions empty and moribund even while Detroit still gives the occasional gasp, sheltering only coyotes and the occasional impromptu teenage kegger.
Whatever truth there may be in this "New Economy" idea, it is clear that the traditional means of gaining and conveying power have been thoroughly discredited. There will of course always be a power structure of some sort or another, and the rise of Barrack Obama would seem to suggest that the new-collars are firmly in charge now and will be the ones who will determine what the new power structure will be.
A structure that, with luck, will emphasize the best values of the post Apple 1 generation; creativity, openness, variety of interests, the ability to be fascinated by all and awed by none. Inherited privilege and social patriarchs dead once and for all. The old American pipe dream of true meritocracy finally and miraculously realized.
But I don't mean to gush. What I'm trying to do is warn of the harsh reaction to the threatened end of inherited hierarchy will surely bring. Denial of reality will be the glue that ties those cast into the heap by the new reality together. closely related to creationism are the crackpot tales of global warming being a socialist conspiracy, involving the entire field of climatology and all of academia; espoused from those who will never accept that uncontrolled industrialization can possibly lead to any ill effects, that there could possibly be anything wrong with buying the largest possible private vehicle to convey virility and power.
And of course that old time religion of anti-"Darwinism" will still be there for quite sometime, and is likely to get a renewed push in the remaining red states. Always there to remind those newly disinherited from undeserved power that the changes happening around them are not actually real. God is the eternal father of the universe. And the eternal fathers of this world are those whom he has chosen to rule over the non-white, the non-male, the unmonied and the unpropertied, the unchurched, the arrogant skeptics, those who reject or ignore the old customs. The hierarchy of the universe is forever, so long as we just teach the controversy that this is so.
Dé hAoine, Aibreán 03, 2009
A Little Ditty
Oh camo Budweiser hat
Stop Looking at that girl's ass (Hey)
Fifteen years younger than you
What the hell she gonna do
with your camo Budweiser hat. (Hey)
Stop Looking at that girl's ass (Hey)
Fifteen years younger than you
What the hell she gonna do
with your camo Budweiser hat. (Hey)
Déardaoin, Aibreán 02, 2009
A Little Note on a Tweaker
I once met a man who stole a garage door opener.
He punched out the drivers window of a fairly new $30,000 van, stole a garage door opener, took nothing else, and left.
He said he could get some "street money" out of it.
I was telling this story to a few fellows last night. It had become just another thing in my list of experiences to me. I had forgotten how funny it was.
And there's really no denying that it is. I wonder if this incident could be stretched out into a movie?
He punched out the drivers window of a fairly new $30,000 van, stole a garage door opener, took nothing else, and left.
He said he could get some "street money" out of it.
I was telling this story to a few fellows last night. It had become just another thing in my list of experiences to me. I had forgotten how funny it was.
And there's really no denying that it is. I wonder if this incident could be stretched out into a movie?
Dé Luain, Márta 30, 2009
Than There Was This One Time
A couple Valentine Days ago. A chicken plant worker offered me three Dorals in return for a ride from Alps to Uni Place. A girl whom he was keyed on lived there. He didn't have her number yet.
They hit it off just fine. And he got her number.
They hit it off just fine. And he got her number.
My Dad Was Shocked to Hear That There's Usually no Meat in my Breakfast.
He had a heart attack at forty seven. I was twelve. He was unloading his semi in Lincoln at the time. It just of easily could of hit him somewhere out in the wilderness and that would have been that. There was a trucker on the interstate near North Platte once who had a heart attack, crashed through a fence on the side of the road, and deep-sixed himself and his rig into a nearby pond. Two days before they got him out. The press were told that he probably died instantly. Dad quit smoking after the heart attack. Still eats like he thinks he's a tiger.
Two days after Dad got out of the hospital we were helping my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tim load a U-Haul van for Arizona. Tim has asthma compounded by several allergies so his doctors advised him to move where nothing grows. You'll be glad to hear that he's much fatter than Doc Holiday.
My father of course was extremely weak and of little help to anyone. It was early May, unseasonably hot. My mother has some condition where she doesn't sweat enough so she had to sit down quite often. It was my cousins and I who did the bulk of the lifting.
My father complained all day about being unable to help my mother and not being a man. Toward the end of the day she saw mom straining to help my cousin Richard carry a bookcase to the van so he stood up to help her. He had to be restrained by several family members and it took several minutes of being yelled at by mom before he sat down.
The fact that he had a penis was more important to him than the fact that he had had a heart attack. So far as he was concerned, the fact that my father had a penis instead of a vagina was automatically, unquestioningly, the most important detail in all situations, sexual or otherwise. I remember feeling a deep sense of shock when I realized this; shock and, in spite of myself, a good deal of disgust.
This was the day I learned that the traditional masculine ideal is suicidally moronic and insane. The biggest lesson that my father taught me was completely accidental, in fact the exact opposite of what he intended to teach me.
This is perfectly common and good. My gratitude is sincere.
Two days after Dad got out of the hospital we were helping my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tim load a U-Haul van for Arizona. Tim has asthma compounded by several allergies so his doctors advised him to move where nothing grows. You'll be glad to hear that he's much fatter than Doc Holiday.
My father of course was extremely weak and of little help to anyone. It was early May, unseasonably hot. My mother has some condition where she doesn't sweat enough so she had to sit down quite often. It was my cousins and I who did the bulk of the lifting.
My father complained all day about being unable to help my mother and not being a man. Toward the end of the day she saw mom straining to help my cousin Richard carry a bookcase to the van so he stood up to help her. He had to be restrained by several family members and it took several minutes of being yelled at by mom before he sat down.
The fact that he had a penis was more important to him than the fact that he had had a heart attack. So far as he was concerned, the fact that my father had a penis instead of a vagina was automatically, unquestioningly, the most important detail in all situations, sexual or otherwise. I remember feeling a deep sense of shock when I realized this; shock and, in spite of myself, a good deal of disgust.
This was the day I learned that the traditional masculine ideal is suicidally moronic and insane. The biggest lesson that my father taught me was completely accidental, in fact the exact opposite of what he intended to teach me.
This is perfectly common and good. My gratitude is sincere.
Dé Máirt, Márta 24, 2009
The Sandlot
While I'm reminiscing I'd like to make a shout out to a film I'd sure you'd agree helped to mold all of the males of my generation. Who among us can think about "The Sandlot" without feeling something warm in his eye? Oh, Hammy, you lovable fat disgusting fuck. Here's some of my favorite quotes from the movie, enjoy.
[Hams] I'm the Great Bambino.
[Boys] What?
- I'm the Great Bambino. - [ All ] What?
I'm the Great Bambino.
[All] Oh!
[Smalls]Who's that?
[All] What?
[Smalls] Sounds like some rapper. Are you all a bunch of nigger lovers or
something?
[Mother] I don't want you sitting around in here all summer fiddling with
this stuff...
like you did last summer and the one before.
I know you're smart, and I'm proud of you.
I want you to get out into the fresh air and make some friends.
Run around, scrape your knees, get dirty.
Climb trees, hop fences.
Get into trouble, for crying out loud.
Not too much, but some. You have my permission.
[Smalls] Bitch I make trouble! What the fuck you know trick?!!
[Mr. Mertle] Yep. I used to crowd the plate...
so the strike zone almost disappeared.
[ Laughs ] Pitchers hate that.
That's the way I played-- 110% all the time.
Baseball was life.
And I was good at it, real good.
And then... one day,
a high fast one, and pow,
lights went out.
[Bennie] (Points 12-gauge shotgun against Mertle's head)
It's time to take out the audio motherfucker!
(Pulls trigger, cloud of blood and brains envelops the room)
[Scotty Narrating] Even though Bill loved the Murderer's Row ball,
he was still plenty mad about me having swiped...
his Babe Ruth autographed ball and ruining it.
So I didn't feel too bad when he made me play naughty nun for a week,
instead of the rest of my life.
[ Timmy ] She don't know what she's doing.
[ Tommy ] She don't know what she's doing.
[ Benny ] Yeah, she does.
She knows exactly what she's doing.
[Squints] I've swum here every summer of my adult life.
And every summer, there she is,
lotioning, oiling, oiling, lotioning.
I tell you fellas what. I'm going to break into that bitches
house tonight, right through her bedroom window. I'm going to
beat her face in a bit, just to bring her to her sense ya dig?
Then I'm gonna give her a choice between my dick in her mouth
or my knife in her throat.
[Benny] Hell yeah Squints! Show that bitch what's up!!!
I Dreamed of A tornado Last Night
I saw it forming over a lake I used to swim at when I was a kid. I was forced to take cover by breaking into a house filled with a sassy chain-smoking woman and her children.
Per usual.
Per usual.
In Eleven Days I'll be 28
In two years and eleven days I'll be thirty.
My sister and I are the only members of the extended not to have kids yet. Most of my cousins have children. All of these children are loud filthy brats, raised by parents wholly incompetent in running their own lives. Only my Uncle Tom's younger ones don't have kids yet, but they are just turning twenty, and they were raised in California and Maryland. They don't have that North Platte weirdness and dirtyness about them. At any rate they will probably get married younger than I will.
My mom will often-mention my still-single status in a half-joking manner. I feel like a good comeback would be to say "oh sure Ma, isn't it a shame I didn't knock up some girl when I was a college dropout so that now you could be grandmother to a brood of vile, disease-ridden, vaguely mammaloid creatures just like Aunt Sue." Half-joking of course.
My mind turns to Ann Coulter and Bill Maher, two undeniably amusing moral degenerates who've been rumored to be dating each other several times. They both insist that they've never been dating, and of course they haven't been. They're both middle-aged and confirmed bachelors after all, why would they bother to form an official pair?
There's a strong likelihood that they've been fucking though. Sex more angry, bitter and intense than anything that those too cowardly to let loose the bonds of convention and sanity could ever imagine. Any unfortunate outsider who walks in on Coulter and Maher would surely pray for blindness before losing faith in a benevolent god altogether. But for them it is probably as visceral an experience as anything they had in their twenties, and they are satisfied.
I mention this because, well I guess it's an option for me, albeit a last resort. I do think that it would be much better for me if I found a woman I loved and settled down. And at any rate my older sister is childless, so there's that.
My sister and I are the only members of the extended not to have kids yet. Most of my cousins have children. All of these children are loud filthy brats, raised by parents wholly incompetent in running their own lives. Only my Uncle Tom's younger ones don't have kids yet, but they are just turning twenty, and they were raised in California and Maryland. They don't have that North Platte weirdness and dirtyness about them. At any rate they will probably get married younger than I will.
My mom will often-mention my still-single status in a half-joking manner. I feel like a good comeback would be to say "oh sure Ma, isn't it a shame I didn't knock up some girl when I was a college dropout so that now you could be grandmother to a brood of vile, disease-ridden, vaguely mammaloid creatures just like Aunt Sue." Half-joking of course.
My mind turns to Ann Coulter and Bill Maher, two undeniably amusing moral degenerates who've been rumored to be dating each other several times. They both insist that they've never been dating, and of course they haven't been. They're both middle-aged and confirmed bachelors after all, why would they bother to form an official pair?
There's a strong likelihood that they've been fucking though. Sex more angry, bitter and intense than anything that those too cowardly to let loose the bonds of convention and sanity could ever imagine. Any unfortunate outsider who walks in on Coulter and Maher would surely pray for blindness before losing faith in a benevolent god altogether. But for them it is probably as visceral an experience as anything they had in their twenties, and they are satisfied.
I mention this because, well I guess it's an option for me, albeit a last resort. I do think that it would be much better for me if I found a woman I loved and settled down. And at any rate my older sister is childless, so there's that.
Dé Luain, Márta 23, 2009
Heard "Hey Ya" at O'Rourke's Today
The way that song clicked with the mainstream and so became ubiquitous had caused me to forget what a delightful little number it is. I love Outkast, and I've always been somewhat adamant that "Stankonia" was slightly better than Speakerbox/Love Below. I am now willing to concede that "The Love Below" is at least as good as Stankonia.
In related news, Prince's "Little Red Corvette" has been in my head all day even though I haven't heard it for several weeks. I've been thinking that the image of a small fiery red "car" is a about as settle a sexual metaphor as a wet dildo, but then I remember that it's Prince.
In related news, Prince's "Little Red Corvette" has been in my head all day even though I haven't heard it for several weeks. I've been thinking that the image of a small fiery red "car" is a about as settle a sexual metaphor as a wet dildo, but then I remember that it's Prince.
Dé Sathairn, Márta 21, 2009
There was This time
I've never asked my mother who my biological father was, and I'm not going to. It's nothing against him. How, after all, can I hold a grudge against a man who for all intents and purposes doesn't exist. I am here for no reason. I come from nothing and I am going to nothing. The culture of my ancestors is a meaningless coincidence. Even when I believed in God I knew these things, and was unbothered by them. There are many who yearn for purpose in life and influence upon others. And then there are those who are otherwise. We are all completely rootless and meaningless however we feel about it.
I had a psychologist once who asked me why I didn't know the name of my biological father. I told him it was because I hadn't asked. When he asked me why this was I said it was because I was incurious about the matter. He didn't believe me.
I was speaking with my cousin sometime in my teenage years. He said it must of been tough to spend my early years without a dad. The truth is that I didn't notice. I did notice my stepfather after my mom married her. He who never shuts up. The one who will invariably drag you into his inane raving conversation whenever you're within twenty feet of him. The one whose face will curl up into this disgusting grimace of pain whenever there is a moment of silence in the room.
Whenever I consider the possibility that my mother married him because she thought I needed a father, I am deeply haunted. I can only hope she married him for herself. The alternative is unbearable.
I had a psychologist once who asked me why I didn't know the name of my biological father. I told him it was because I hadn't asked. When he asked me why this was I said it was because I was incurious about the matter. He didn't believe me.
I was speaking with my cousin sometime in my teenage years. He said it must of been tough to spend my early years without a dad. The truth is that I didn't notice. I did notice my stepfather after my mom married her. He who never shuts up. The one who will invariably drag you into his inane raving conversation whenever you're within twenty feet of him. The one whose face will curl up into this disgusting grimace of pain whenever there is a moment of silence in the room.
Whenever I consider the possibility that my mother married him because she thought I needed a father, I am deeply haunted. I can only hope she married him for herself. The alternative is unbearable.
Dé Céadaoin, Márta 18, 2009
St. Pat's Notes.
Those who with you "The Luck of the Irish" clearly know nothing about Irish history. You could hardly be worse off if they wished you the luck of the Jews or the luck of the Indians.
It's been said that the Irish are "the Blacks of Europe" and I suppose that they have a decent claim to the title. Though one could say the same thing about anyone with the bad luck of being next door to England, France, Spain, Germany, or Russia. I myself have a smidgen of Irish along with a dab of Polish. Poland was invaded by Hitler and Stalin at the same time once. What the fuck do you know about that Ireland?
Of course, for those who know their history, there is no question that the "Blacks of Europe" title rightfully belongs to the Blacks of Africa.
Oh but the Irish are rebellious in a non-threatening sort of way, and it's just adorable that they have their own holiday where they can pretend that they haven't been perfectly assimilated for a hundred years.
St. Patrick, by the way, is the patron of my high school Alma mater, which as far as I know is still the dirty, rat-fuck ugly, non-air conditioned place it was when I graduated. But that's neither here or there.
Filled out an official NCAA bracket for the first time in my life today. Kept it conservative. The only "upsets" I have is one 9 over an 8, one 5 over a 4, one 3 over a 2, and one 2 over a one. Louisville over Memphis and Pitt over UNC in the national semis, with Pitt taking the title due to its proximity to Detroit.
That's what I got.
It's been said that the Irish are "the Blacks of Europe" and I suppose that they have a decent claim to the title. Though one could say the same thing about anyone with the bad luck of being next door to England, France, Spain, Germany, or Russia. I myself have a smidgen of Irish along with a dab of Polish. Poland was invaded by Hitler and Stalin at the same time once. What the fuck do you know about that Ireland?
Of course, for those who know their history, there is no question that the "Blacks of Europe" title rightfully belongs to the Blacks of Africa.
Oh but the Irish are rebellious in a non-threatening sort of way, and it's just adorable that they have their own holiday where they can pretend that they haven't been perfectly assimilated for a hundred years.
St. Patrick, by the way, is the patron of my high school Alma mater, which as far as I know is still the dirty, rat-fuck ugly, non-air conditioned place it was when I graduated. But that's neither here or there.
Filled out an official NCAA bracket for the first time in my life today. Kept it conservative. The only "upsets" I have is one 9 over an 8, one 5 over a 4, one 3 over a 2, and one 2 over a one. Louisville over Memphis and Pitt over UNC in the national semis, with Pitt taking the title due to its proximity to Detroit.
That's what I got.
Dé Luain, Márta 16, 2009
WSJ Allows Incontinent Street Preacher to Write About Soccer.
Believe it or not, there are still humanities professors who hold to the old ideals of essence before existence, gender roles that are divinely mandated and universal, and an unabashedly tribalistic understanding of national identity. Stephen H. Webb, professor of theology at Wabash College, is one of them. He has taken time from his busy schedule to write an old school anti-soccer screed for the Wall Street Journal, excerpts an commentary follow.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680101041299201.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_H._Webb
1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.
Another way of saying that soccer creates a "uniform disability" is to say that it requires a highly rarefied skill, that of manipulating a rather heavy ball into a rigidly guarded net while running full bore. A sport simply isn't a sport unless there is some kind of "uniform disability" in the rules. An eighty-year-old man could carry a football into the end zone if there was no threat of being clobbered by a three-hundred-pound linebacker at twenty miles an hour.
Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with his feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone's face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, "Trick or Treat, smell my hands"? Did Jesus wash his disciples' hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption.
Ohhhkay. First of all, the fact that our forelimbs are not committed to walking, and are equipped with opposable thumbs that give us the ability to grasp things, is one of the things that distinguishes human beings, and is damned convenient at that, but it is not the thing that most defines humanity. That would be the ability to reason much, much better than Dr. Stephen H. Webb. As for the assertion that we are universally inclined to use our feet when enraged, it is clear that Dr. Webb has never seen a real fight in his life, and that his knowledge of human violence is based chiefly on Bruce Lee movies. Finally, the part about hands being "divine" and feet "in need of redemption was just damned weird. I myself have gangly legs, and I've been know to pick up a dropped pencil or what have you with my toes from time to time. Was that, blasphemy?
This entire section is the sort of 'eight ball and a twelve pack' lunacy one typically finds in letters to the North Platte Telegraph. To see it presented in the Wall Street-Journal, for serious intellectual consideration; is just, wow.
Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals
Baseball is so fucking hardcore, the players have to stand up during the ninety percent of the game when they're doing nothing!
The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.
Oh I'm sure he did Dr. Webber, you naughty slut.
Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score.
Ah yes, soccer is a foreign invasion. Professor Webber could have spared himself a great deal of time and embarrassment if he had simply written three lines stating what is clearly his true reason for hating soccer.
1. "America=Godmangood"
2. "NotAmerica=Devilwomanbad"
3. "Soccer=NotAmerica"
As for the old line about soccer being low-scoring, well this is true. Keep in mind though that most American exposure to the game is through either the World Cup or the Champions league, and that scoring for high-stake championship games in all sports is lower than average. It is simply not true that most soccer games end in scoreless ties or that "the better you get the less you score." Here, for example, are the scores from last weekend's English Premier League games.
Manchester United 1-4 Liverpool
Arsenal 4-0 Blackburn Rovers
Bolton Wanderers 1-3 Fulham
Everton 3-1 Stoke City
Hull City 1-1 Newcastle United
Middlesbrough 1-1 Portsmouth
Sunderland 1-2 Wigan Athletic
Chelsea 1-0 Manchester City
Aston Villa 1-2 Tottenham Hotspur
West Ham United 0-0 West Bromwich Albion
Out of ten games played, seven produced clear-cut winners and losers, and there was only one scoreless draw. We now move from the categorically wrong assertion to, something very special.
And then there is the question of sex. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
Words fail. Save them for someone who hasn't exhausted his supply of repressed gay insinuations long ago. Let's just all take a moment to imagine Dwight Schrute saying the exact words quoted above and bathe in the glory.
I must say that I find Webb's undiluted sexism strange; considering that he has a daughter and, presumably, a very satisfied, thoroughly destroyed wife. Perhaps he yearns for unencumbered Spartan virility not in spite of his experiences with his daughter but because of them, something about having a female in an eternally subordinate position to him, or perhaps I speculate too much.
Soccer is a fine game, one that requires unbelievably precise skill and athletic fitness. to try to dismiss the sport as foreign and unmasculine requires the sort of delusional fever-dream logic that we see in Dr. Webber's column. It really is tragic that even apparently smart people can be so overcome by xenophobia and an infantile need to consider themselves The Subject that they lead themselves headlong off the intellectual cliff. But I suppose that's how it's always been and always shall be with the asshole segment of the population. Nothing to do about it except point and laugh and for the love of God don't let one of them gain leverage on you.
Damn it must suck to be this man's student.
God damn it must suck to be his wife.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680101041299201.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_H._Webb
1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.
Another way of saying that soccer creates a "uniform disability" is to say that it requires a highly rarefied skill, that of manipulating a rather heavy ball into a rigidly guarded net while running full bore. A sport simply isn't a sport unless there is some kind of "uniform disability" in the rules. An eighty-year-old man could carry a football into the end zone if there was no threat of being clobbered by a three-hundred-pound linebacker at twenty miles an hour.
Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with his feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone's face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, "Trick or Treat, smell my hands"? Did Jesus wash his disciples' hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption.
Ohhhkay. First of all, the fact that our forelimbs are not committed to walking, and are equipped with opposable thumbs that give us the ability to grasp things, is one of the things that distinguishes human beings, and is damned convenient at that, but it is not the thing that most defines humanity. That would be the ability to reason much, much better than Dr. Stephen H. Webb. As for the assertion that we are universally inclined to use our feet when enraged, it is clear that Dr. Webb has never seen a real fight in his life, and that his knowledge of human violence is based chiefly on Bruce Lee movies. Finally, the part about hands being "divine" and feet "in need of redemption was just damned weird. I myself have gangly legs, and I've been know to pick up a dropped pencil or what have you with my toes from time to time. Was that, blasphemy?
This entire section is the sort of 'eight ball and a twelve pack' lunacy one typically finds in letters to the North Platte Telegraph. To see it presented in the Wall Street-Journal, for serious intellectual consideration; is just, wow.
Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals
Baseball is so fucking hardcore, the players have to stand up during the ninety percent of the game when they're doing nothing!
The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.
Oh I'm sure he did Dr. Webber, you naughty slut.
Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score.
Ah yes, soccer is a foreign invasion. Professor Webber could have spared himself a great deal of time and embarrassment if he had simply written three lines stating what is clearly his true reason for hating soccer.
1. "America=Godmangood"
2. "NotAmerica=Devilwomanbad"
3. "Soccer=NotAmerica"
As for the old line about soccer being low-scoring, well this is true. Keep in mind though that most American exposure to the game is through either the World Cup or the Champions league, and that scoring for high-stake championship games in all sports is lower than average. It is simply not true that most soccer games end in scoreless ties or that "the better you get the less you score." Here, for example, are the scores from last weekend's English Premier League games.
Manchester United 1-4 Liverpool
Arsenal 4-0 Blackburn Rovers
Bolton Wanderers 1-3 Fulham
Everton 3-1 Stoke City
Hull City 1-1 Newcastle United
Middlesbrough 1-1 Portsmouth
Sunderland 1-2 Wigan Athletic
Chelsea 1-0 Manchester City
Aston Villa 1-2 Tottenham Hotspur
West Ham United 0-0 West Bromwich Albion
Out of ten games played, seven produced clear-cut winners and losers, and there was only one scoreless draw. We now move from the categorically wrong assertion to, something very special.
And then there is the question of sex. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
Words fail. Save them for someone who hasn't exhausted his supply of repressed gay insinuations long ago. Let's just all take a moment to imagine Dwight Schrute saying the exact words quoted above and bathe in the glory.
I must say that I find Webb's undiluted sexism strange; considering that he has a daughter and, presumably, a very satisfied, thoroughly destroyed wife. Perhaps he yearns for unencumbered Spartan virility not in spite of his experiences with his daughter but because of them, something about having a female in an eternally subordinate position to him, or perhaps I speculate too much.
Soccer is a fine game, one that requires unbelievably precise skill and athletic fitness. to try to dismiss the sport as foreign and unmasculine requires the sort of delusional fever-dream logic that we see in Dr. Webber's column. It really is tragic that even apparently smart people can be so overcome by xenophobia and an infantile need to consider themselves The Subject that they lead themselves headlong off the intellectual cliff. But I suppose that's how it's always been and always shall be with the asshole segment of the population. Nothing to do about it except point and laugh and for the love of God don't let one of them gain leverage on you.
Damn it must suck to be this man's student.
God damn it must suck to be his wife.
Dé Domhnaigh, Márta 15, 2009
Fuck Yeah Amtrak
I've had a thing for trains since I was a toddler, and I loath driving for long distances or through big cities, so the emergence of a new president who seems to take rail-travel seriously makes me happy. With the century-old phallic cult of the automobile finally taking some severe body blows in the form of the new depression and the recent spike in oil prices, the time for making American train travel something other than a hideous joke is clearly at hand.
High-speed rail is, unfortunately, something for the distant future here, even though it's been the reality in supposedly lesser, insufferably hippyish nations for longer than I've been alive. All the same it would require not just an infrastructure upgrade but the invention of entirely new infrastructure, on the level of the interstate highway system. Whole new lines of rails would have to be invented, and something like a Denver to Salt Lake Meglev line would require some serious blast-work to make the path smooth enough. Alas.
But there are some practical measures that could be taken right away. One would government compensation to private rail companies to allow right-of-way to passenger trains, so that the Cali Zephyr doesn't have to wait at the side of the tracks for half an hour somewhere in Phosphorous Fumes Iowa while a Santa Fe Coal train passes by. Another would be to convince the UP and other big rails besides Burlington-Santa Fe to allow Amtrak to run on their lines, so that cities like Des Moines aren't bypassed by the Zephyr and places like Billings aren't completely missed by the Empire-Builder. Let the trains role unencumbered through the actual population centers of where they role through, and there is no reason why the American train as-is can't be a faster and cheaper means of medium-range travel than the car. Even old-school locomotives, ones that aren't streamlined and electrified can easily break 100 mph. on empty straightaways.
Now lets talk new routes. The interstate highway system did a very good job of linking major cites via the most important market towns in between, and I see no shame in the new Mecha-Amtrak following its lead. One look at I-29 reveals that a Kansas City-to-Winnipeg line via Fargo, Omaha and St. Joe's is a damned fine idea. Reroute the LA-to-Chicago Southwest Chief along old Route 66 instead of having it go through the empty quarter of Colorado. The lack of LA-to-Phoenix and LA-to-Vegas service is unacceptable, and speaking of unacceptable, have you seen just how pathetic the entire Amtrak system west of the Mississippi is? I could go on.
There are some who are still enamored with the old General Motors propaganda from the early 20th century, which established in the American mind that spending a hundred million on a highway was the American capitalist thing to do while spending the same on public transportation was the foreign socialist thing to do. The automobile became intimately entwined with every right-thinking Americans sense of personal dignity and every American man's sense of masculinity.
This, it becomes more apparent each day, was profoundly stupid. A quick locked-door drive through Detroit reveals what awaits those who continue to assume that the American auto industry has any idea of what its doing. To subsidize these industries; both through direct funds and by artificially spiking demand for their products by encouraging suburbanization (in the name of "individualism") has been a suicide pill, one that I'm just not going to get shoved down my throat anymore; and it seems that I'm not alone here. Bravo.
High-speed rail is, unfortunately, something for the distant future here, even though it's been the reality in supposedly lesser, insufferably hippyish nations for longer than I've been alive. All the same it would require not just an infrastructure upgrade but the invention of entirely new infrastructure, on the level of the interstate highway system. Whole new lines of rails would have to be invented, and something like a Denver to Salt Lake Meglev line would require some serious blast-work to make the path smooth enough. Alas.
But there are some practical measures that could be taken right away. One would government compensation to private rail companies to allow right-of-way to passenger trains, so that the Cali Zephyr doesn't have to wait at the side of the tracks for half an hour somewhere in Phosphorous Fumes Iowa while a Santa Fe Coal train passes by. Another would be to convince the UP and other big rails besides Burlington-Santa Fe to allow Amtrak to run on their lines, so that cities like Des Moines aren't bypassed by the Zephyr and places like Billings aren't completely missed by the Empire-Builder. Let the trains role unencumbered through the actual population centers of where they role through, and there is no reason why the American train as-is can't be a faster and cheaper means of medium-range travel than the car. Even old-school locomotives, ones that aren't streamlined and electrified can easily break 100 mph. on empty straightaways.
Now lets talk new routes. The interstate highway system did a very good job of linking major cites via the most important market towns in between, and I see no shame in the new Mecha-Amtrak following its lead. One look at I-29 reveals that a Kansas City-to-Winnipeg line via Fargo, Omaha and St. Joe's is a damned fine idea. Reroute the LA-to-Chicago Southwest Chief along old Route 66 instead of having it go through the empty quarter of Colorado. The lack of LA-to-Phoenix and LA-to-Vegas service is unacceptable, and speaking of unacceptable, have you seen just how pathetic the entire Amtrak system west of the Mississippi is? I could go on.
There are some who are still enamored with the old General Motors propaganda from the early 20th century, which established in the American mind that spending a hundred million on a highway was the American capitalist thing to do while spending the same on public transportation was the foreign socialist thing to do. The automobile became intimately entwined with every right-thinking Americans sense of personal dignity and every American man's sense of masculinity.
This, it becomes more apparent each day, was profoundly stupid. A quick locked-door drive through Detroit reveals what awaits those who continue to assume that the American auto industry has any idea of what its doing. To subsidize these industries; both through direct funds and by artificially spiking demand for their products by encouraging suburbanization (in the name of "individualism") has been a suicide pill, one that I'm just not going to get shoved down my throat anymore; and it seems that I'm not alone here. Bravo.
Dé Céadaoin, Márta 11, 2009
Home Alone
The name of the villains of the film, "The Wet Bandits", is clearly meant to evoke pedophilia in the mind of the viewer, encouraging him to cheer at the medieval abuse the bandits suffer in the climax of the film.
Just look at Daniel Stern's face in the photo, it's clearly the sneer of someone about to do something naughty. While it's possible that amateur thieves, college boys stealing a rival school's mascot, for example, may sneer at the cleverness of their actions, it simply isn't the look of a professional thief robbing a house for the fiftieth time. No, this is the look of someone who has just found out the girl next to him in bed isn't really eighteen, and is glad to hear it.
As if to remove all doubt in the manner, the DVD cover of "Home Alone 2" shows the Wet Bandits gleefully plunging a "skyscraper" into young Kevin's rectum.
Yet another case of supposedly light entertainment being used to enforce puritanical notions of sin and righteous punishment. The highly professionalized crime of house burglary is associated with unspeakably vile acts, so that the average citizen will equate common criminals with the lowest of the low, and acquiesce to any act of brutality against the common criminal that is done in the name of clensing him of his affliction, returning him to the dominant paradigm.
I have some friends who are new parents, and I have already warned them to never allow their children to see "Home Alone" at Christmastime unless they want to raise the next Torquemada.
Sweet Dreams
It was sometime around this time of year when Marilyn Manson's cover version came out back in 96. I heard the original Eurythmics version last night while driving.
I used to be a Marilyn Manson fan. Everyone my age USED to be a Marilyn Manson fan. The best barometer of character and good judgment within my generation is how long one stayed on the Manson boat before jumping ship. Among those who STILL like Marilyn Manson, I can assure you that every single man and woman among them is saddled with a crippling meth habit, no fewer than three illegitimate children, and at least one borderline felony on their criminal records. Search far and wide for a Manson fan who breaks this rule, you will never find him. There are some who have achieved modest financial stability as construction foremen, but only if everyone else on the crew is a juggalo. That's as good as it gets for the poor bastards.
I have metured I have come to realize that not only is the original "Sweet Dreams" superior to the Manson cover, but that the Eurythmics were a vastly superior band. Annie Lennox affected a more commercial version of Grace Jones' androgynous ice woman thing; and you know what, it was pretty cool.
Of course I couldn't allow myself to like the Eurythmics in 1996. I'm afraid that pubescent males are highly prone to homophobia. The years of ambiguity over whether or not we are MEN leads to all the sorts of foolishness that has been documented to the point of truthful cliche. Give me some credit for being one of those who grew out of it. There are a lot of "men" who buy truck nuts and join the NRA instead.
But I can be hard on myself at times, and though I was a culturally ignorant North Platte boy of fourteen I just can't forgive myself for liking Marilyn Manson. Was I really so young and stupid, such a short time ago? To be so impressed by a skaghead holding down two notes on a keyboard while the singer growled some of his middle school poetry in that fucking ridiculous 'Pit of Dispair' voice of his.
Well, I never did believe the rumors that the man could blow himself, so there's that.
Dé Máirt, Márta 10, 2009
Just Phoning it in Today
While digesting Reader’s Digest
In the back of a dirty book store
A plastic flag with gum on the back
Fell out on the floor.
Well,I picked it up and ran outside
And slapped it on my windowshield.
And If I could see ol’ Betsy Ross
I’d tell her how good I feel.
(Chorus:)
But, you flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven anymore.
They’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now Jesus don’t like Killin’
No matter what the reasons for.
And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.
Well,I went to the Bank this morning
And the cashier said to me
If you join the Christmas Club
We'll give you ten of them flags for free.
I didn’t mess a round a bit
I took him up on what he said
And stuck them stickers all over my car
And one on my wife’s forehead.
(Chorus:)
But, you flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven anymore.
They’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now Jesus don’t like Killin’
No matter what the reasons for.
And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.
Well,I got my windshield so filled with flags I couldn’t see
So I ran my car upside a curb and right into a tree
By the time they got a doctor down
I was already dead,
And I’ll never understand
Why the man,
Standing in the Pearly Gates said…
(Chorus:)
But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore,
We’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war
Now Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reasons for.
And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.
John Prine
Dé Luain, Márta 09, 2009
Expect Trouble In China Soon
"The petition system provides people with the semblance of an appeals process that top leaders hope will keep them off the streets. But for officials at all levels, it seems, the appearance of order — measured by reducing the number of petitions — is an acceptable approximation of actual order." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/asia/09jails.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Surely the happiest lesson of our age is the discovery that Orwell's eternal boot in the face is a near impossibility. The scenario described in 1984 requires a ruling elite wholly unencumbered by any illusion that power has any object but itself. The truth of the matter is that tyrants and authoritarians are hopelessly addicted to illusion; completely obsessed with the idea that society is analogous to the family, that the individual's loyalty to society is based on the same things that make one loyal towards one's parents, gratitude for the protection and sense of identity they provide.
A quick study of modern dictators makes it clear that they consider themselves the literal fathers of their nations with perfect sincerity. Joseph Stalin never bothered appointing a successor. He was convinced that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly function without him and that his own death would be the communist apocalypse. Robert Mugabe, with his Homeric threats to those who would remove him from power, seems to believe he can become some sort of godhead if he can only manage to die as president of Zimbabwe instead of retiring to some beachfront resort.
The NYT article I quoted is about the Chinese government's practice of detaining and sometimes torturing those who file official grievances against local officials. (The right of 'petitioning' the central government goes back to imperial days.) Judging from the amount of trouble they go through, it seems clear that Chinese officials sincerely believe that silencing a complaint effectively prevents that complaint from having ever existed.
The prevalence of religion and chop-down-the-cherry-tree hero sagas in all human societies makes it clear that we need our self-justification myths. Orwell's nightmare of evil geniuses who enjoy dominating for its own bestial sake is impossible because it is the authoritarians among us who need these myths the most. They are the ones who will tear down civilization brick by brick if it would make civilization's reason for being as physical and tangible as the wall in front of my face. To make truth something more real than the electric currents that pass from the logical to the emotive centers of our brains, this is the motivation of the tyrant and those who acquiesce to him.
If an authoritarian regime holds power for an extended amount of time it will eventually forget that there had ever been any competing notions of truth. The collective subconscious of the ruling elite will start to believe that they have the power to will its truth into being while at the same time willing unpleasant or contradictory truths out of existence.
To put it more simply, multiple generations of official propaganda will eventually produce a generation of elites who believe their own bullshit. Orwell's fear was that this belief in official bullshit would gain an intractable hold on the masses, and it seems this does indeed happen in some places for short amounts of time. But of course any regime that zealously believes itself to be inerrant will invariably become corrupt and inept, so that the average citizen will eventually suffer too much outrage to her own self-justification to be able to share the official delusion, regardless of how much pride or sense of security she may have originally gained from embracing Leviathan.
We in the USA have just booted out a regime that embraced its own bullshit with record alercity. We Americans have made the happy discovery that a government that is receptive to its people (though some of us would argue that it is not as receptive as the people think) is actually good for order. Very few countries, rich or poor, have gone as long as we have without a total societal collapse. Even our civil war was remarkably well-organized as far as those things go.
When elites are forced to compete for power in some structured and peaceful way, it forces society to rewrite its self-justification myths as it goes along. This on-the-run sophistry is completely necessary and good. It is what has allowed a society that was avowedly and violently racist to become one in which Martin Luther King is used to sell big macs and, oh yeah, that last election was sort of a big deal.
It's hard to imagine how Africans, women, Latinos, Natives, etc. would have ever brought themselves to express their rage peacefully unless they had some way of knowing that it could do some good. they were able to see a society that jerry-rigged itself as was necessary and was even willing to give up some old sacred piety from time to time.
Authoritarians, along with their authorasexual followers, have always believed in the slippery slope idea that allowing a little bit of dissent here and there will eventually produce chaos. The truth is exactly opposite. A population that cannot express its sense of being wronged will not accept their governments stated reasons for being entitled to rule over them, even more dangerous is the fact that a government of people who believe their own bullshit, unresponsive to the people, will lose all touch of what is happening beneath their feet, so that they will try to reign over society as it existed thirty years ago, or perhaps never at all.
We have seen how this can happen even in a democracy, a party in power that truly believed it could win fifty one percent of the votes forever, wholly ignorant of how dependent they were on the Electoral College and the amplified voice it gives to rural, traditionalist areas. If a regime subject to election can become so blind to what threatens it after eight years, how long can the communist Chinese remain in the dark about the popular discontent under their own feet?
Probably until the peasants break down the palace gates while drunkenly fornicating on top of tanks. That's just history.
Surely the happiest lesson of our age is the discovery that Orwell's eternal boot in the face is a near impossibility. The scenario described in 1984 requires a ruling elite wholly unencumbered by any illusion that power has any object but itself. The truth of the matter is that tyrants and authoritarians are hopelessly addicted to illusion; completely obsessed with the idea that society is analogous to the family, that the individual's loyalty to society is based on the same things that make one loyal towards one's parents, gratitude for the protection and sense of identity they provide.
A quick study of modern dictators makes it clear that they consider themselves the literal fathers of their nations with perfect sincerity. Joseph Stalin never bothered appointing a successor. He was convinced that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly function without him and that his own death would be the communist apocalypse. Robert Mugabe, with his Homeric threats to those who would remove him from power, seems to believe he can become some sort of godhead if he can only manage to die as president of Zimbabwe instead of retiring to some beachfront resort.
The NYT article I quoted is about the Chinese government's practice of detaining and sometimes torturing those who file official grievances against local officials. (The right of 'petitioning' the central government goes back to imperial days.) Judging from the amount of trouble they go through, it seems clear that Chinese officials sincerely believe that silencing a complaint effectively prevents that complaint from having ever existed.
The prevalence of religion and chop-down-the-cherry-tree hero sagas in all human societies makes it clear that we need our self-justification myths. Orwell's nightmare of evil geniuses who enjoy dominating for its own bestial sake is impossible because it is the authoritarians among us who need these myths the most. They are the ones who will tear down civilization brick by brick if it would make civilization's reason for being as physical and tangible as the wall in front of my face. To make truth something more real than the electric currents that pass from the logical to the emotive centers of our brains, this is the motivation of the tyrant and those who acquiesce to him.
If an authoritarian regime holds power for an extended amount of time it will eventually forget that there had ever been any competing notions of truth. The collective subconscious of the ruling elite will start to believe that they have the power to will its truth into being while at the same time willing unpleasant or contradictory truths out of existence.
To put it more simply, multiple generations of official propaganda will eventually produce a generation of elites who believe their own bullshit. Orwell's fear was that this belief in official bullshit would gain an intractable hold on the masses, and it seems this does indeed happen in some places for short amounts of time. But of course any regime that zealously believes itself to be inerrant will invariably become corrupt and inept, so that the average citizen will eventually suffer too much outrage to her own self-justification to be able to share the official delusion, regardless of how much pride or sense of security she may have originally gained from embracing Leviathan.
We in the USA have just booted out a regime that embraced its own bullshit with record alercity. We Americans have made the happy discovery that a government that is receptive to its people (though some of us would argue that it is not as receptive as the people think) is actually good for order. Very few countries, rich or poor, have gone as long as we have without a total societal collapse. Even our civil war was remarkably well-organized as far as those things go.
When elites are forced to compete for power in some structured and peaceful way, it forces society to rewrite its self-justification myths as it goes along. This on-the-run sophistry is completely necessary and good. It is what has allowed a society that was avowedly and violently racist to become one in which Martin Luther King is used to sell big macs and, oh yeah, that last election was sort of a big deal.
It's hard to imagine how Africans, women, Latinos, Natives, etc. would have ever brought themselves to express their rage peacefully unless they had some way of knowing that it could do some good. they were able to see a society that jerry-rigged itself as was necessary and was even willing to give up some old sacred piety from time to time.
Authoritarians, along with their authorasexual followers, have always believed in the slippery slope idea that allowing a little bit of dissent here and there will eventually produce chaos. The truth is exactly opposite. A population that cannot express its sense of being wronged will not accept their governments stated reasons for being entitled to rule over them, even more dangerous is the fact that a government of people who believe their own bullshit, unresponsive to the people, will lose all touch of what is happening beneath their feet, so that they will try to reign over society as it existed thirty years ago, or perhaps never at all.
We have seen how this can happen even in a democracy, a party in power that truly believed it could win fifty one percent of the votes forever, wholly ignorant of how dependent they were on the Electoral College and the amplified voice it gives to rural, traditionalist areas. If a regime subject to election can become so blind to what threatens it after eight years, how long can the communist Chinese remain in the dark about the popular discontent under their own feet?
Probably until the peasants break down the palace gates while drunkenly fornicating on top of tanks. That's just history.
Dé Sathairn, Márta 07, 2009
I've Never Wanted Anything
I've had plans that I've consciously made, after recognizing the need to go somewhere, and these plans can become important to me, but never a spontaneous desire, certainly nothing approaching a dream.
I've heard it said that we find ourselves in others and I suppose there's some truth to that. I've also heard it said that most people consider themselves better than average and this is quite self-apparently true. I was recently thinking that I consider myself better than average just like most people, but then I realized that I am completely indifferent to myself. I have no opinion of myself and never had one. I have never compared myself to others. It's obvious enough that I am the same creature as the people around me, but this has never meant anything.
I have never been anything but baffled when my mother or, worse, some long ago friend inquires about my welfare. I cannot conceive how I could have ever possibly affected the thoughts and feelings of others. What terrible thing have I done to deserve the punishment of influencing somebody else? What have I done to deserve being noticed?
Dear God but I hate being noticed. Nothing is more intolerable than the sight of another pair of eyes on me, smiling.
I have no idea of what would make me happy. I have never given any sincere thought to what would make me happy. There is no desire or expectation of happiness. All I have is a burden, a realization that I am sharp-minded and I have some moral obligation to enrich other lives. This, of course, would require being noticed and being known, which I could never live with. But that will take care of itself eventually.
I've heard it said that we find ourselves in others and I suppose there's some truth to that. I've also heard it said that most people consider themselves better than average and this is quite self-apparently true. I was recently thinking that I consider myself better than average just like most people, but then I realized that I am completely indifferent to myself. I have no opinion of myself and never had one. I have never compared myself to others. It's obvious enough that I am the same creature as the people around me, but this has never meant anything.
I have never been anything but baffled when my mother or, worse, some long ago friend inquires about my welfare. I cannot conceive how I could have ever possibly affected the thoughts and feelings of others. What terrible thing have I done to deserve the punishment of influencing somebody else? What have I done to deserve being noticed?
Dear God but I hate being noticed. Nothing is more intolerable than the sight of another pair of eyes on me, smiling.
I have no idea of what would make me happy. I have never given any sincere thought to what would make me happy. There is no desire or expectation of happiness. All I have is a burden, a realization that I am sharp-minded and I have some moral obligation to enrich other lives. This, of course, would require being noticed and being known, which I could never live with. But that will take care of itself eventually.
Dé hAoine, Márta 06, 2009
My Mom Recently Learned How to Text.
She'll reach me that way three or four times a week now.
I didn't teach her how, nor would I have, knowing what it would lead to. It was my cousin DJ, one of the cousins that lives on the other side of the country who I've seen six or seven times in my life, the sort of cousin whose affairs my mother will tell me about every now and again and I have to pretend to care so as not to shock her out of her sensibilities.
Dj texted me a few months ago. I didn't know who it was and so told her to fuck off. This is still a great joke within the extended family, or at least it provides them with one more excuse to carry on with their endless crude loud-mouth yammering over the holidays.
It was my dad who suggested that DJ send me a text, since, after all, I "like to text." Is that how he actually sees it? He's at least vaguely aware of the endless and ever-growing means of interpersonal communication available today. Does he not realize how matter-of-fact and natural it is for those of us who grew up with it? Text messaging is a tool that I've had for five years, which practically speaking is forever. It is a tool that has a specific place and specific function just like any other. I take no personal pleasure in texting that I don't get from Facebook chat or actually talking over the phone, and why would I? There is no piece of technology that has fascinated me since I was twelve years old Dad. Once it became clear that technology is indeed capable of everything, well, what is there after that? Pretty categorical isn't it?
It's a pity that my sister is a confirmed bachelor. I've missed the chance to see if I am doomed to assume that my children are hard-wired to be fast friends with distant cousins.
I didn't teach her how, nor would I have, knowing what it would lead to. It was my cousin DJ, one of the cousins that lives on the other side of the country who I've seen six or seven times in my life, the sort of cousin whose affairs my mother will tell me about every now and again and I have to pretend to care so as not to shock her out of her sensibilities.
Dj texted me a few months ago. I didn't know who it was and so told her to fuck off. This is still a great joke within the extended family, or at least it provides them with one more excuse to carry on with their endless crude loud-mouth yammering over the holidays.
It was my dad who suggested that DJ send me a text, since, after all, I "like to text." Is that how he actually sees it? He's at least vaguely aware of the endless and ever-growing means of interpersonal communication available today. Does he not realize how matter-of-fact and natural it is for those of us who grew up with it? Text messaging is a tool that I've had for five years, which practically speaking is forever. It is a tool that has a specific place and specific function just like any other. I take no personal pleasure in texting that I don't get from Facebook chat or actually talking over the phone, and why would I? There is no piece of technology that has fascinated me since I was twelve years old Dad. Once it became clear that technology is indeed capable of everything, well, what is there after that? Pretty categorical isn't it?
It's a pity that my sister is a confirmed bachelor. I've missed the chance to see if I am doomed to assume that my children are hard-wired to be fast friends with distant cousins.
Dé Luain, Márta 02, 2009
Most Absurd Thing Ever Written
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/02/rush-to-judgment-a-media-hopelessly-divided/
Only talk radio with its emphasis on Socratic debate over raw emotionalism and with Mr. Limbaugh in the driver's seat has escaped the left's clutches of pure media dominance.
Only talk radio with its emphasis on Socratic debate over raw emotionalism and with Mr. Limbaugh in the driver's seat has escaped the left's clutches of pure media dominance.
Dé Céadaoin, Feabhra 25, 2009
Thoughts on Jindal's response.
"Kenneth from 30 Rock" comparisons are in vogue, as are comparisons to Mr. Rodgers. Jindal was wretched all right. He had been a popular contender for the 2012 GOP nomination, and probably still is even after his bizarre and thoroughly insulting speech. After all who else do they got?
Give Republicans credit for noticing how President Obama has inspired people with his personal story, how he has given national confidence a boost by displaying the incredible amount of social mobility there is in this country; in spite of efforts to retard that mobility made mostly by Republicans, but never mind.
So send out a brown skinned immigrant son of your own. One who has had a similarly impressive political rise. (A rise aided by the drowning of even browner people who had made Louisiana a reliably Democratic state, but never mind.) Put the young buck in front of a camera and have him spout sunshine and endless possibilities. That's all there is to the Obama formula, isn't there?
If you saw the response and wondered why Jindal was talking to you like a child it is because this is what conservatives consider anyone without power over others to be.
'Americans can do anything, so long as that blasted government isn't involved. Who can forget when General Motors landed on the moon, or Goodyear built the interstate highway system, or Dow Chemical invented the atomic bomb?'
Of all the things that went terribly, terribly wrong with Jindal's response, the stilted delivery, the childish tone, the robotic sloganeering, the biggest laugh lines undoubtedly came with what Jindal considers to be wasteful spending in the stimulus bill. His attempt to paint volcano monitoring as pie-in-the-sky pork just might be the most absurd statement ever made to the American public. Republicans have historically stressed the importance of order and security. Does Jindal really not see how volcano monitoring could be useful as far as that goes?
"Volcano monitors? What the hell could you possibly do with those? Those silly libs and their pipe dreams. LOL!!"
When Sarah Palin mocked government spending on fruit fly chromosome research (Responsible for the bulk of what we know about genetics.) I thought it had to be the absolute peak of Luddite madness. But apparently there's some sort of contest among GOP hopefuls to see who can dismiss the most undeniably useful government project as needless waste. Expect Mitt Romney to dismiss sewage treatment plants as socialist boondoggles any day now, and just how much hard-earned taxpayer money is being spent on those damned traffic lights anyway?
Also dismissed by Jindal was a proposed maglev line from Las Vegas to "Disneyland." Aka Los Angeles, aka the thirteenth largest metropolitan area in the world and certainly the biggest one without high-speed rail to other large cities in its own region.
The delusional dogma that private business is the only source of progress has caused the U.S. to fall technologically behind the filthy Eurotrash (not to mention the Chinese commies) in several important areas. I've commented before on how the Republican aversion to public transportation is particularly weird; considering that, if there is a choice between road and railroad, some sort of government spending is going to be involved either way.
The maglev train, (Short for magnetic levitation, perhaps Jindal mistook it for some sort of new-age cult.) is exactly what it sounds like, a train that can break 300 mph. running on magnetic rails. It's perfectly reasonable to put the Maglev on the short list for most badass invention of all time. The sort of thing Americans used to invent with regularity before we turned the free market into a jealous Old Testament God.
And at any rate we have our other cults to worry about; the cult of the automobile, which feeds into the cult of vast land ownership as universal ideal, which feeds into the cult of property ownership as source of personal dignity and sign of social worth. Americans can do anything. But if it involves challenging our all-encompassing dogmas of unshakable truth than never mind.
Or perhaps the difference between capitalistic highway spending and socialistic public transport spending lies in the amount of social interaction. The risk that families traveling by private car will actually talk to other different from themselves is quite low. The responsible driver can be counted on to listen to the music that he personally likes, eat the fast food that suits his own palliate, and generally develop his own personal taste for shit he would like to buy. Well fret not conservatives. Ever since the rise of the laptop and the mp3, citizens can be counted on to stay wrapped up in their own materialistic bubbles even in the largest of crowds.
Americans can do anything. All it takes is the willingness to accept that any internal improvements to the country in general would necessarily make life better for the stinking underclasses. That's fine by me. I am the stinking underclass. Yet I must admit that there is something admirable in the way leading Republicans are more or less honest in their belief that they prefer a descent into Bartertown over progress.
And now that I think about it, who the hell wouldn't?
Afterthought:
Give Republicans credit for noticing how President Obama has inspired people with his personal story, how he has given national confidence a boost by displaying the incredible amount of social mobility there is in this country; in spite of efforts to retard that mobility made mostly by Republicans, but never mind.
So send out a brown skinned immigrant son of your own. One who has had a similarly impressive political rise. (A rise aided by the drowning of even browner people who had made Louisiana a reliably Democratic state, but never mind.) Put the young buck in front of a camera and have him spout sunshine and endless possibilities. That's all there is to the Obama formula, isn't there?
If you saw the response and wondered why Jindal was talking to you like a child it is because this is what conservatives consider anyone without power over others to be.
'Americans can do anything, so long as that blasted government isn't involved. Who can forget when General Motors landed on the moon, or Goodyear built the interstate highway system, or Dow Chemical invented the atomic bomb?'
Of all the things that went terribly, terribly wrong with Jindal's response, the stilted delivery, the childish tone, the robotic sloganeering, the biggest laugh lines undoubtedly came with what Jindal considers to be wasteful spending in the stimulus bill. His attempt to paint volcano monitoring as pie-in-the-sky pork just might be the most absurd statement ever made to the American public. Republicans have historically stressed the importance of order and security. Does Jindal really not see how volcano monitoring could be useful as far as that goes?
"Volcano monitors? What the hell could you possibly do with those? Those silly libs and their pipe dreams. LOL!!"
When Sarah Palin mocked government spending on fruit fly chromosome research (Responsible for the bulk of what we know about genetics.) I thought it had to be the absolute peak of Luddite madness. But apparently there's some sort of contest among GOP hopefuls to see who can dismiss the most undeniably useful government project as needless waste. Expect Mitt Romney to dismiss sewage treatment plants as socialist boondoggles any day now, and just how much hard-earned taxpayer money is being spent on those damned traffic lights anyway?
Also dismissed by Jindal was a proposed maglev line from Las Vegas to "Disneyland." Aka Los Angeles, aka the thirteenth largest metropolitan area in the world and certainly the biggest one without high-speed rail to other large cities in its own region.
The delusional dogma that private business is the only source of progress has caused the U.S. to fall technologically behind the filthy Eurotrash (not to mention the Chinese commies) in several important areas. I've commented before on how the Republican aversion to public transportation is particularly weird; considering that, if there is a choice between road and railroad, some sort of government spending is going to be involved either way.
The maglev train, (Short for magnetic levitation, perhaps Jindal mistook it for some sort of new-age cult.) is exactly what it sounds like, a train that can break 300 mph. running on magnetic rails. It's perfectly reasonable to put the Maglev on the short list for most badass invention of all time. The sort of thing Americans used to invent with regularity before we turned the free market into a jealous Old Testament God.
And at any rate we have our other cults to worry about; the cult of the automobile, which feeds into the cult of vast land ownership as universal ideal, which feeds into the cult of property ownership as source of personal dignity and sign of social worth. Americans can do anything. But if it involves challenging our all-encompassing dogmas of unshakable truth than never mind.
Or perhaps the difference between capitalistic highway spending and socialistic public transport spending lies in the amount of social interaction. The risk that families traveling by private car will actually talk to other different from themselves is quite low. The responsible driver can be counted on to listen to the music that he personally likes, eat the fast food that suits his own palliate, and generally develop his own personal taste for shit he would like to buy. Well fret not conservatives. Ever since the rise of the laptop and the mp3, citizens can be counted on to stay wrapped up in their own materialistic bubbles even in the largest of crowds.
Americans can do anything. All it takes is the willingness to accept that any internal improvements to the country in general would necessarily make life better for the stinking underclasses. That's fine by me. I am the stinking underclass. Yet I must admit that there is something admirable in the way leading Republicans are more or less honest in their belief that they prefer a descent into Bartertown over progress.
And now that I think about it, who the hell wouldn't?
Afterthought:
Dé Sathairn, Feabhra 14, 2009
Caribou Madonna
Bill O'Reilly said that she sounded like the Wicked Witch of The East the other day. That would be funny, except the woman is eighty eight years old. everyone who lives that long has a voice that grows weak and quivery. (Right-wing bloggers have savaged Thomas for her opposition to the Iraq War, often grotesquely mocking the unattractiveness of a woman who, again, is eighty fucking eight. More mainstream conservative voices have cautiously pecked at Thomas in the manner that O'Reilly did the other day. The public generally respects Thomas and won't stand to see her take the all-out savaging on TV that she gets on the internet.)
Feminist groups publicly called for an apology from O'Reilly, and one of them, Women's Media Center, sent a representative to his show. O'Reilly demanded to know why Women's Media Center hadn't complained about Tina Fey's mockery of Sarah Palin. When the poor woman meekly said that she supported Palin's right to run, O'Reilly said that she failed to do so in "public debate" which is the same as never saying anything at all of course, and so the hypocrisy stood.
If this strikes you as an extremely odd apples and vaginae comparison, well then you should have heard the passionate conviction in O'Reilly's voice. Fey was a woman mocking another woman, sure. Political figures have historically been considered more open to ribbing then civilians, true. And at any rate it was done on a show dedicated to satire while O'Reilly's show is presented as a perfectly sober news program, fair enough. But the voice man. The voice.
The Tu quoque is very much in vogue with the right these days. Right-wing radio is full of 'when Bush did A liberals screamed bloody murder! But when Obama does B what do we hear from the mainstream media? Silence, that's what. and You know why? Because they're all a bunch of traitorous Marxist god-hating commie flag burning...'
The rhetorical impulse to reach for any tattered thread that could lead to a charge of hypocrisy against ones' opponent is of course a childish one, revealing a segment of the population that feels deeply powerless and afraid.
If you listen to all of this you-too overload you will find that Sarah Palin comes up quite a hell of a lot. ('Liberal woman does A, but when Sarah Palin, terrorist commies..) Even Palin herself got into the game, complaining that the media treated her much more harshly then east-coast elitist Caroline Kennedy. (This despite the very public split among New York Democrats regarding Kennedy and a chilly air of doubt on the NYT editorial page, and oh by the way the vice-president has a higher profile then a Senator.)
On the one hand it's easy to suspect that Palin was nominated to the vice-presidency partly because of the knowledge that normal political attacks wouldn't go over so well when directed against an attractive woman. On the other hand any sincere belief that all unflattering things said about women in the public eye are basically the same would reveal one's sexism much more clearly then some crack about Helen Thomas.
But perhaps there's a perfectly good explanation for this. Perhaps Republican lust for Palin has been transformed into something higher, even sanctified. When a woman is publicly criticized conservatives reflexively think of Palin not because she's a woman too but because she is Womanhood. Sarah Palin Mater Dei. Even now my mind drifts to thoughts of the Mother Of All Tender Mercies killing and gutting a reindeer, and it's unbearably erotic. Or that time Our Lady endured a birthing labor silently so that she could give a speech in Texas; damn that's hot. How could one not be inured to protect the vehicle of our Redemption from all vulgar insults and indulge her with any office she may request? This, my friends, is why Sarah Palin won't 'just go away' She is as eternal as the cloak of stars which covers her sacred loveliness, and all we her children can do is bow and sing ave.
Feminist groups publicly called for an apology from O'Reilly, and one of them, Women's Media Center, sent a representative to his show. O'Reilly demanded to know why Women's Media Center hadn't complained about Tina Fey's mockery of Sarah Palin. When the poor woman meekly said that she supported Palin's right to run, O'Reilly said that she failed to do so in "public debate" which is the same as never saying anything at all of course, and so the hypocrisy stood.
If this strikes you as an extremely odd apples and vaginae comparison, well then you should have heard the passionate conviction in O'Reilly's voice. Fey was a woman mocking another woman, sure. Political figures have historically been considered more open to ribbing then civilians, true. And at any rate it was done on a show dedicated to satire while O'Reilly's show is presented as a perfectly sober news program, fair enough. But the voice man. The voice.
The Tu quoque is very much in vogue with the right these days. Right-wing radio is full of 'when Bush did A liberals screamed bloody murder! But when Obama does B what do we hear from the mainstream media? Silence, that's what. and You know why? Because they're all a bunch of traitorous Marxist god-hating commie flag burning...'
The rhetorical impulse to reach for any tattered thread that could lead to a charge of hypocrisy against ones' opponent is of course a childish one, revealing a segment of the population that feels deeply powerless and afraid.
If you listen to all of this you-too overload you will find that Sarah Palin comes up quite a hell of a lot. ('Liberal woman does A, but when Sarah Palin, terrorist commies..) Even Palin herself got into the game, complaining that the media treated her much more harshly then east-coast elitist Caroline Kennedy. (This despite the very public split among New York Democrats regarding Kennedy and a chilly air of doubt on the NYT editorial page, and oh by the way the vice-president has a higher profile then a Senator.)
On the one hand it's easy to suspect that Palin was nominated to the vice-presidency partly because of the knowledge that normal political attacks wouldn't go over so well when directed against an attractive woman. On the other hand any sincere belief that all unflattering things said about women in the public eye are basically the same would reveal one's sexism much more clearly then some crack about Helen Thomas.
But perhaps there's a perfectly good explanation for this. Perhaps Republican lust for Palin has been transformed into something higher, even sanctified. When a woman is publicly criticized conservatives reflexively think of Palin not because she's a woman too but because she is Womanhood. Sarah Palin Mater Dei. Even now my mind drifts to thoughts of the Mother Of All Tender Mercies killing and gutting a reindeer, and it's unbearably erotic. Or that time Our Lady endured a birthing labor silently so that she could give a speech in Texas; damn that's hot. How could one not be inured to protect the vehicle of our Redemption from all vulgar insults and indulge her with any office she may request? This, my friends, is why Sarah Palin won't 'just go away' She is as eternal as the cloak of stars which covers her sacred loveliness, and all we her children can do is bow and sing ave.
Dé hAoine, Feabhra 13, 2009
Well, The Holocaust Sort of Came Up.
I was texting with Becky and she brought up the rehabilitation of the Holocaust-denying Bishop, and how it was causing a major ruckus in Europe, particularly in France. Though why a historically Catholic country that was occupied by the Nazis would worry about this sort of thing I don't know.
And it just got me thinking, of all the inconceivably moronic things that otherwise intelligent people believe, Holocaust denial, I mean seriously, where did the Jews go? Where did all of the skeletons come from? Fucking Holocaust denial.
Fuck.
And it just got me thinking, of all the inconceivably moronic things that otherwise intelligent people believe, Holocaust denial, I mean seriously, where did the Jews go? Where did all of the skeletons come from? Fucking Holocaust denial.
Fuck.
Dé Céadaoin, Feabhra 11, 2009
I've Had The Flu This Week
I've been spending my twelve hours of wakefulness reading "Innocents Abroad" and editing the Wikipedia entry on Mean World Syndrome. This is how I convalesce. I'm getting better now, able to drink my usual daily dose of coffee, able to stand in 50 degree weather without being blinded by my own sweat, and I seem to have completely lost the taste for nicotine. We'll see if it holds this time.
Déardaoin, Feabhra 05, 2009
Post D
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world."
H.P. Lovecraft
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
Confession
Its long been that the human word is by far the least reliable form of evidence in any court case. Deliberate lying from guilty persons or false accusers is a problem of course, but this isn't even the tip of the iceberg.
If sociological inquiry compelled me to beat a nun to death with a shovel in front of a stadium full of people, no two people out of thousands of witnesses would give the same description of me to the police. Ask any cop yourself and he'll tell you the same thing. Human beings tend to perceive passing glances of strangers to be much more accurate then they are. The human brain is morbidly obsessed with 'knowing". It has a hard-wired intolerance for ambiguity that is usually subconscious. The only way police "know" that witnesses are talking about the same person is if they generally agree on the most obvious physical characteristics; skin color, hair color, some unavoidably noticeable deformity, etc. Have you ever heard a conspiracy theorist make a big deal out of the fact that witnesses to the Tippet shooting described Lee Oswald as fat, bald, middle-aged, etc? Nothing at all suspicious, as it turns out. This is the norm.
To make things worse it turns out that all of the supposed walls between the rational brain and the emotional brain have never existed, and that imagining is essentially the same mental process as remembering. If I were to hold someone else in such contempt that I wouldn't be remotely surprised to hear that they killed somebody, it becomes very easy to start daydreaming about the hated foe doing just that, and then to become convinced that this daydream was a real-life murder that I was witness to. Real-life cases of this scenario are abundant. Just think of the elderly parents thrown in jail because of middle-aged children who suddenly remembered a hellish childhood of rape thanks to a "repressed memory specialist," or the child who feels he's disappointing an authority figure when a detective sternly asks him if he's "really sure" that his teacher didn't touch him inappropriately.
There is a scientific probability bordering on certainty that you, I , and everyone around us knows something that isn't true. The brain's hatred of ambiguity is just that strong, even for those of us who know it's there. So it goes without saying that people don't like to be told that they probably have a false belief or two, and when people hear a fact that's either unpleasant or frightening... Well, let's put it this way; global warming is a lie because Al Gore thinks he's better then me. Need I say more?
Why do I bring up Al Gore of all people? Well, it seems that the forces of intolerance for ambiguity and delusion are especially strong in societies that are educationally underachieving yet materially prosperous. Welcome to America, land of the spoiled, stupid, and clinically insane. The land where respectable conservative columnists cite Jack Bauer as justification for real-life torture with perfect, blissfully unaware sincerity.
Which finally brings us to our point; The sacred and mystical criminal confession. Police know full well that forensic evidence is far more reliable means of discerning the truth of some ugly occurrence. Still they stay awake past their children's bedtimes and stress themselves into early graves trying to squeeze the confession out of a perp. Because they know that's what the jury cares about more. There are plenty of cops aren't above going Jack Bauer to get the confession, not because they are manfully outraged by the continued cries of innocence from a man who evidence says is obviously guilty. Oh no, at least not usually. The fact of the matter is that when police beat a confession out of a subject it is typically due to a lack of evidence. Because they know what a jury will care about more.
Once when I was watching television I happened across an interview of jurors who had convicted a man of rape and then some years later was proven innocent by DNA. Not a single one of the jurors could bring themselves to believe it. How could a man possibly confess to a crime he didn't commit.? I killed three hookers last night. I'm three hundred and fifty seven years old. The planet Mars is my stillborn daughter. How could it possibly be done?
In order to accept that there is nothing special about a verbal confession we must first accept that there is nothing special about our own words, that there is no mystical force of truth in our own mental processes or interactions with each other.
As long as there are people who blame Darwin for the Holocaust, this simply isn't going to happen.
And so all the constitutional safeguards, all the grand notions of innocent until proven guilty, are nothing but wet toilet paper in the hands of a species that is universally schizophrenic.
If sociological inquiry compelled me to beat a nun to death with a shovel in front of a stadium full of people, no two people out of thousands of witnesses would give the same description of me to the police. Ask any cop yourself and he'll tell you the same thing. Human beings tend to perceive passing glances of strangers to be much more accurate then they are. The human brain is morbidly obsessed with 'knowing". It has a hard-wired intolerance for ambiguity that is usually subconscious. The only way police "know" that witnesses are talking about the same person is if they generally agree on the most obvious physical characteristics; skin color, hair color, some unavoidably noticeable deformity, etc. Have you ever heard a conspiracy theorist make a big deal out of the fact that witnesses to the Tippet shooting described Lee Oswald as fat, bald, middle-aged, etc? Nothing at all suspicious, as it turns out. This is the norm.
To make things worse it turns out that all of the supposed walls between the rational brain and the emotional brain have never existed, and that imagining is essentially the same mental process as remembering. If I were to hold someone else in such contempt that I wouldn't be remotely surprised to hear that they killed somebody, it becomes very easy to start daydreaming about the hated foe doing just that, and then to become convinced that this daydream was a real-life murder that I was witness to. Real-life cases of this scenario are abundant. Just think of the elderly parents thrown in jail because of middle-aged children who suddenly remembered a hellish childhood of rape thanks to a "repressed memory specialist," or the child who feels he's disappointing an authority figure when a detective sternly asks him if he's "really sure" that his teacher didn't touch him inappropriately.
There is a scientific probability bordering on certainty that you, I , and everyone around us knows something that isn't true. The brain's hatred of ambiguity is just that strong, even for those of us who know it's there. So it goes without saying that people don't like to be told that they probably have a false belief or two, and when people hear a fact that's either unpleasant or frightening... Well, let's put it this way; global warming is a lie because Al Gore thinks he's better then me. Need I say more?
Why do I bring up Al Gore of all people? Well, it seems that the forces of intolerance for ambiguity and delusion are especially strong in societies that are educationally underachieving yet materially prosperous. Welcome to America, land of the spoiled, stupid, and clinically insane. The land where respectable conservative columnists cite Jack Bauer as justification for real-life torture with perfect, blissfully unaware sincerity.
Which finally brings us to our point; The sacred and mystical criminal confession. Police know full well that forensic evidence is far more reliable means of discerning the truth of some ugly occurrence. Still they stay awake past their children's bedtimes and stress themselves into early graves trying to squeeze the confession out of a perp. Because they know that's what the jury cares about more. There are plenty of cops aren't above going Jack Bauer to get the confession, not because they are manfully outraged by the continued cries of innocence from a man who evidence says is obviously guilty. Oh no, at least not usually. The fact of the matter is that when police beat a confession out of a subject it is typically due to a lack of evidence. Because they know what a jury will care about more.
Once when I was watching television I happened across an interview of jurors who had convicted a man of rape and then some years later was proven innocent by DNA. Not a single one of the jurors could bring themselves to believe it. How could a man possibly confess to a crime he didn't commit.? I killed three hookers last night. I'm three hundred and fifty seven years old. The planet Mars is my stillborn daughter. How could it possibly be done?
In order to accept that there is nothing special about a verbal confession we must first accept that there is nothing special about our own words, that there is no mystical force of truth in our own mental processes or interactions with each other.
As long as there are people who blame Darwin for the Holocaust, this simply isn't going to happen.
And so all the constitutional safeguards, all the grand notions of innocent until proven guilty, are nothing but wet toilet paper in the hands of a species that is universally schizophrenic.
Dé Luain, Feabhra 02, 2009
The Schafly Impulse
Recall the end of "Pan's Labyrinth." The villainous stepfather, Captain Vidal, is perfectly willing to face death in a calm military manner until he is told that he will be persona-non-grata to his infant son. The desire for a male heir had been the only independent, internally conceived desire the loyal fascist had throughout the film. He is indifferent when his wife dies in the birthing of it, and he is perfectly willing to murder his stepdaughter to make sure the boy doesn't leave him. Vidal is a man who 'obeys simply to obey' while in turn violently enforcing obedience from those deemed subordinate to himself.
I once read a National Geographic article from the sixties in which the writer reported a Barcelona man who crossed himself at the sight of a digital watch. There are many who will accept oppression so long as there is someone beneath them that they can oppress themselves. More importantly we are inclined to accept oppression in return for the promise that society will not change. A society that doesn't change is one where new thoughts do not exist. A father can be assured that his son will inherit his own station, occupation, thoughts, and personality. Accept slavery and live forever.
And indeed it seems that Phyllis Schlafly, eighty-three and still zestfully battling The Other, will do just that. Madam Schlafly is a profoundly strange bird, an indisputable alpha-female who claims that there is no such thing as marital rape, who calls herself a homemaker by profession in spite of making a great deal of bread traveling the country to denounce the dark conspiracies of liberals.
One who reads the drivel of either the elder Schlafly or her dingbat Conservapedia founder son Andrew will clearly discover a morbid obsession with public education,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2009/jan09/psrjan09.html a passionate belief that schools are being used by all of the right's old boogeymen as social engineering factories. One is quickly reminded of the battle cry of fellow lunatic Gary Bauer "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."
The theocratic cranks of the world tend to wear themselves on their sleeves. To oppose them there is no need to conjure strawmen of secret thoughts as they do but merely comment on what they admit to. On the one hand there is a strong dose of intregalism here; the belief that society is an organic reflection of nature. In regards to sexuality this leads to a tendency to dismiss the academic distinction between sex (the physical ownership of a pee-pee or hoo-hah) and gender( the meaning that any given society ascribes to having one or the other) as mere politically correct twaddle. It simply doesn't occur to them that there was probably never any such thing as "naturally ordained" sex roles in the first place, that even if there were they couldn't possibly have been filtered through dozens of generations of human kink to emerge in the present day undistorted, and that finally there is no reason to think that human perception regarding sexuality is more accurate then our perception of anything else.
And so we have Madam Schafly's famous predictions of manditory unisex bathrooms and mass lesbianism during her anti-ERA crusade. If social gender is the same thing as natural sexuality, then it follows that the end of whatever legal privilege for this or that gender is the same thing as being physically desexed.
But Schafly would also rail against the dark specter of 'homosexual school teachers' in these halcyon rants, and this brings us back to the original point, slavery for immortality. Phyllis Schafly was willing to sign ownership of her vagina over to her husband in return for the comfort of knowing her place in the world. This was her choice, and people have been known to get quite a bit kinkier then that. So far so good. But Schafly had no hope of living forever unless she could compel all women to wear her gimps mask. Only when slavery is universal does time freeze and mortality cease, and slavery can only be universal when those who have already chained themselves control education. Andrew Schlafly's Conservapedia was built primarily as a home-schooling resource. He has referred to politics as "the battle for control of the future" The Schlafly hatred of education is not based on politics but dynasticism. Their core anger is not directed against pernicious ideas but simply ideas, not liberal teachers but simply anything that may influence their children besides themselves.
Phyllis Schlafly will die wealthy and well-aged. I do not begrudge her this. May every woman who is battered and forcibly kept ignorant in the name of an imaginary God someday enjoy the same fate. At any rate Schlafly has already lived to see her son John admit to flaming gayness and several other children grind through divorce and stunted relationships. The mirage of immortality has dissolved before her eyes, and now there is nothing left to do but spend her days warbling about lesbians and William Ayers for whoever will listen.
No one but each other in the modern right wing.
I once read a National Geographic article from the sixties in which the writer reported a Barcelona man who crossed himself at the sight of a digital watch. There are many who will accept oppression so long as there is someone beneath them that they can oppress themselves. More importantly we are inclined to accept oppression in return for the promise that society will not change. A society that doesn't change is one where new thoughts do not exist. A father can be assured that his son will inherit his own station, occupation, thoughts, and personality. Accept slavery and live forever.
And indeed it seems that Phyllis Schlafly, eighty-three and still zestfully battling The Other, will do just that. Madam Schlafly is a profoundly strange bird, an indisputable alpha-female who claims that there is no such thing as marital rape, who calls herself a homemaker by profession in spite of making a great deal of bread traveling the country to denounce the dark conspiracies of liberals.
One who reads the drivel of either the elder Schlafly or her dingbat Conservapedia founder son Andrew will clearly discover a morbid obsession with public education,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2009/jan09/psrjan09.html a passionate belief that schools are being used by all of the right's old boogeymen as social engineering factories. One is quickly reminded of the battle cry of fellow lunatic Gary Bauer "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."
The theocratic cranks of the world tend to wear themselves on their sleeves. To oppose them there is no need to conjure strawmen of secret thoughts as they do but merely comment on what they admit to. On the one hand there is a strong dose of intregalism here; the belief that society is an organic reflection of nature. In regards to sexuality this leads to a tendency to dismiss the academic distinction between sex (the physical ownership of a pee-pee or hoo-hah) and gender( the meaning that any given society ascribes to having one or the other) as mere politically correct twaddle. It simply doesn't occur to them that there was probably never any such thing as "naturally ordained" sex roles in the first place, that even if there were they couldn't possibly have been filtered through dozens of generations of human kink to emerge in the present day undistorted, and that finally there is no reason to think that human perception regarding sexuality is more accurate then our perception of anything else.
And so we have Madam Schafly's famous predictions of manditory unisex bathrooms and mass lesbianism during her anti-ERA crusade. If social gender is the same thing as natural sexuality, then it follows that the end of whatever legal privilege for this or that gender is the same thing as being physically desexed.
But Schafly would also rail against the dark specter of 'homosexual school teachers' in these halcyon rants, and this brings us back to the original point, slavery for immortality. Phyllis Schafly was willing to sign ownership of her vagina over to her husband in return for the comfort of knowing her place in the world. This was her choice, and people have been known to get quite a bit kinkier then that. So far so good. But Schafly had no hope of living forever unless she could compel all women to wear her gimps mask. Only when slavery is universal does time freeze and mortality cease, and slavery can only be universal when those who have already chained themselves control education. Andrew Schlafly's Conservapedia was built primarily as a home-schooling resource. He has referred to politics as "the battle for control of the future" The Schlafly hatred of education is not based on politics but dynasticism. Their core anger is not directed against pernicious ideas but simply ideas, not liberal teachers but simply anything that may influence their children besides themselves.
Phyllis Schlafly will die wealthy and well-aged. I do not begrudge her this. May every woman who is battered and forcibly kept ignorant in the name of an imaginary God someday enjoy the same fate. At any rate Schlafly has already lived to see her son John admit to flaming gayness and several other children grind through divorce and stunted relationships. The mirage of immortality has dissolved before her eyes, and now there is nothing left to do but spend her days warbling about lesbians and William Ayers for whoever will listen.
No one but each other in the modern right wing.
Don't You Dare Call Us Bitter You Big-City Commie Fagots
Village Voice food blogger Sarah DiGregorio, acting on the express orders of George Soros and William Ayers, wrote the sort of post that only the most degenerate America-hating atheist could possibly conceive of. She poked fun at the jello salad recipe of Rush Limbaugh's mother. This was clearly part of a coordinated attempt to vilify the Limbaugh family and thus destroy the conservative movement, leaving the Muslim Communists free to ship true Americans off to the gas chambers and be rid of their meddling once and for all. Rather than allow this to happen, a brave platoon of online ditto heads, temporarily blessed with Dear Leader's ability to know the hypocrisy of liberals secret thoughts, stepped forward to avenge this unspeakable outrage. Here's some of their comments. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/index.php?pagenum=2
The media is out to destroy RUSH. Make him look loony! How the Democrats can't compete with ideas; so they are out to destroy Rush Limbaugh!
Clearly: http://www.270towin.com/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)
Liberals keeps attacking Rush for abusing drugs even though he had severe pain, but notice the liberal drive bys don't bring up the fact that our president, barack hussein obama has delved in drugs purely for recreation.
And...he can't stop his nicotine ADDICTION which is also a drug. A little unfairness going on here? Liberals cannot see the forest for the trees!!!
Elizabeth
This has got to be the most pathetic hit-piece EVER. Jello salads were a big thing in the middle class America of the 50s and 60s. Who CARES?
Most pathetic hit piece ever!! http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/23/of-donuts-and-dumb-celebrities/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)
"Sarah DiGregorio reminds me of man-hater feminazis' who never bothered to learn to cook themselves since that would be denegrating to women "of power" everywhere. Perhaps Mz. DiGregorio has a fine recipe passed down from her grandmother, something along the lines of "Che Guevara murdered-innocents topped with burned bra." She of the morning-after pill popping and nonsensical man-hater tirades."
In fairness, I think this might be a case of Poe's Law here. Nobody is this stu... what am I saying?
I dream of a day when yella can be mella, when the redman can get ahead man, when white will do what right, and when the black man will stop sell crack man.
Liberals, the champions of drug addicts and the down-and-out. They pick and choose who they attack. They call Rush Limbaugh a pill popper even though he was not convicted of anything. We see where the real prejudice comes from, the left.
Elizabeth is a cunt
Fight on brave warriors. Fight on.
The media is out to destroy RUSH. Make him look loony! How the Democrats can't compete with ideas; so they are out to destroy Rush Limbaugh!
Clearly: http://www.270towin.com/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)
Liberals keeps attacking Rush for abusing drugs even though he had severe pain, but notice the liberal drive bys don't bring up the fact that our president, barack hussein obama has delved in drugs purely for recreation.
And...he can't stop his nicotine ADDICTION which is also a drug. A little unfairness going on here? Liberals cannot see the forest for the trees!!!
Elizabeth
This has got to be the most pathetic hit-piece EVER. Jello salads were a big thing in the middle class America of the 50s and 60s. Who CARES?
Most pathetic hit piece ever!! http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/23/of-donuts-and-dumb-celebrities/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)
"Sarah DiGregorio reminds me of man-hater feminazis' who never bothered to learn to cook themselves since that would be denegrating to women "of power" everywhere. Perhaps Mz. DiGregorio has a fine recipe passed down from her grandmother, something along the lines of "Che Guevara murdered-innocents topped with burned bra." She of the morning-after pill popping and nonsensical man-hater tirades."
In fairness, I think this might be a case of Poe's Law here. Nobody is this stu... what am I saying?
I dream of a day when yella can be mella, when the redman can get ahead man, when white will do what right, and when the black man will stop sell crack man.
Liberals, the champions of drug addicts and the down-and-out. They pick and choose who they attack. They call Rush Limbaugh a pill popper even though he was not convicted of anything. We see where the real prejudice comes from, the left.
Elizabeth is a cunt
Fight on brave warriors. Fight on.
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