R.I.P. Tracy Chips

Tracy and I had been friends since middle school. He was always a good one for getting me into trouble. His favorite drink was Sailor Jerry. I'll never forget that.

Tracy and I were playing beer pong one day when he asked me if I was getting bored with it. I told him that I was, and that in fact I never really liked this game at all.

"Me neither man." He said. "Every drinking game I can think of is a bunch of dumb bullshit. We ought to come up with something new."

"What would you suggest Tracy?"

Ideas were batted around and rejected for awhile until finally Tracy said, "You know Al Gore man?" I said that I had heard of him.

"Well check this out, how about you and I carry a bottle of Sailor Jerry everywhere we go and take a shot every time somebody cites their personal dislike for Al Gore as proof that global warming doesn't exist."

"I don't know Tracy. Sounds like a bridge too far to me."

"A bridge too far? Shit man that's the only way to ride!"

"Well, We really shouldn't. But all right."

The first night was great. We put the radio on Neal Boortz and the two of us went through a liter of Jerry in twenty minutes. Before I knew it we had the swingingist place in town. Our midweek Fox News parties became legendary. Local bars started copying our style. A popular favorite at Brother's was the "Al Gore drives a car bomb" which consisted of having half a bottle of rum poured down ones' throat while watching random Glenn Beck clips.

But it was only a matter of time before things got out of control, just as I had worried. I lost my job at the bank after making the mistake of reading the letters to the editor over breakfast and having to down ten shots. No need to describe the fool I made of myself when I stumbled into work. "Al Gore drives a car bombs" inspired so many downtown street fights that the city council had them banned, and after somebody invited a couple truck drivers to one of the ragers that Tracy and I threw the game spread among their colleagues and drunk driving deaths soared nationwide.

But it was Tracy who really fell hard. At started to let himself go, not showering for days at a time and letting his side of the house turn into a pigstye. Than came the incidents. Tracy Chips had never done a violent thing in his life until his girlfriend found him passed out on the bathroom floor one day and tried to switch the radio to the FM. The poor girl was in intensive care for a week. To this very day, whenever her little boy asks her who his daddy is or where his headaches come from, all she can do is send him to his room and weep bitterly.

The police got to know Tracy very well. He would get arrested for things like stealing back copies of "National Review" from the library, or driving to a small-town bar and grill, striking up a conversation with the chain-smoking eighty-year-old in the corner, and then running off without paying for the fifty dollars worth of Sailor Jerry's he had drank. Then came the day he told me I would have to find a new roommate.

"I gotta get out of here man. My life is out of control. I mean don't even recognize myself. I mean every time Hannity starts railing about Bill Ayers or Rosie O'Donall for five minutes it feels like these hot little bugs are crawling all over my body, and eventually I'll just start shaking and sweating all over until I start screaming at him to go back to demonizing Al Gore. I can't take it anymore man. I gotta get out of this scene before it kills me."

So far so good. But the words he said next gave me the sort of chill that you pray never comes again.

" I'm moving to Oklahoma man. I'm going to work for an uncle I got who runs an oil rig down there."

I knew then that this was the last time I would see my friend alive.

Things went back to routine. Over the next few months we all got used to Tracy's absence. Every now and again I would get a three a.m. voicemail from a strange area code consisting of incoherent weeping, and I had a pretty good idea who it was. But eventually these stopped coming and the only remaining trace of the was his learning-disabled bastard child. Everything I know about Tracy's last days is what I've been told by his mother Vicki. Vicki and I have grown very close since our mutual loss, she's a warm and lithe brunette of fifty five who doesn't look a day over forty and whose breasts have maintained a perfect round shape and firm texture without artificial enhancement. She tells me that I'm like her son now and it excites me in ways that can't be described.

Tracy came to his parents house in Council Bluffs three years after leaving Oklahoma looking tired and gaunt. He told his mother that he had stage 3 cirrhosis and was unlikely to live long enough to make it to the top of a transplant list. The noble and immaculate Vicki Chips was heartbroken but accepted her boy back into her bosom all the same. They settled into a sort of routine and for awhile it was like being a young family again. But of course the treatment regimen was severe and medical bills were sky-high.

Vicki could see how much Tracy hated being a burden on the family every time she looked into his eyes. It was clear that he wanted to let go, and the day she came home to hear "Rush Limbaugh" emenating from his room was no surprise. That Tracy was dead when the medics opened his door was a foregone conclusion. The doctors had told him, over and over again, that his next drink would be his last. He knew exactly what he was doing. He simply couldn't tolerate being twenty nine with an old man's body anymore.

In order to make sure that no experienced, exquisitely smelling mother ever again has to suffer what Vicki Chips did, she and I founded the Tracy Chips memorial foundation in June of 2008. Since then we have toured the country together, speaking at junior high assemblies and developing lesson plans warning children about the dangers of building drinking games around right-wing sloganeering. It is my fervent hope that tragic story might inspire some parent somewhere to teach their children that it might be all fun and games at first, but right-wing parrots have no shame, and they are never going to shut the hell up or embrace alternative boogeymen.

If you would like to know more about the Tracy Chips memorial foundation, or even make a small contribution, please call 1-800-la-la-la-I'm-not-listening. Again that's 1-800-la-la-la-I'm-not-listening. Be sure to hug your children tonight, and thank you for your support.

Top 10 F.C.'s (as of Right Now)

1. Man U.
2. Barcelona
3. Inter
4. Chelsea
5. Liverpool
6. Real Madrid
7. Sao Paulo
8. Arsenal
9. Juventus
10. Porto

Spring Reminds me of This one Time

It was a couple years back. I was pulling out of the Super Saver parking lot when a bearded man lost control of his shopping cart and let it crash into my car. He said he was sorry and I told him it was nothing. He offered to pay to have the dents and scratches fixed and I said no need. "Are you sure?" he said, "Oh I'm sure I'm sure" I said.

Later that day I had my people trail his youngest child home from school. When he reached a stand of tall trees that one couldn't see through my people pounced upon the boy and raped him to death, recording the incident on a small digital camera. That night we broke into the home of the man who had hit my car. He and his wife were worriedly eating dinner when we seized them at gunpoint. We blindfolded them, threw them into the back of my van, and drove them to a place that you must pray to your God you never see. Man and wife were each strapped to chairs in seperate movie theaters with their eyes forced open, and I'm sure you can guess what the feature presentation was.

It was about three weeks before the wife starved to death, the bearded man needed a month. In the meantime all they had for company was the footage of their beloved child being torn to ribbons by savage pedophiles being played in a never ending loop.
When it became clear that the bearded man was finally fading away, I made had the volume in the theater cranked up to its highest possible level, so that his son's screams for mercy would fill his entire being as he entered oblivion. The incoherent sobbing of his beloved would be the moment of his eternal return. This is my bliss.

The Terrorist Squirrel Scenario

The power of backwards or 'deductive' logic is something that is truly frightening to behold. Whenever a perfectly smart person has a self-evidently stupid or insane idea, it is usually because she is clinging to a predetermined 'truth' that she feels she must believe in order to legitimize herself as a person. Facts and logic are subservient to this supposed truth and exist only to reinforce it. Those facts that fail to do so must be written off as inventions of the liberal media, Jews, Freemasons, Hollywood, or all the above. This is why we live in a world where Antonin Scalia, associate Justice of the Supreme Court magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law, indisputably brilliant; cited a television character in defense of state-sanctioned torture. This is why we can't have nice things.

It was unsleeping '24' ubermensch Jack Bauer that Scalia cited at a Canadian gathering of major Western jurists back in 2007. The major pretext of '24' is, or course, the 'ticking time bomb scenario' in which some major American city is on the verge of being nuked by a hidden bomb; year after year, over and over again. Bauer will frequently torture fictional subjects in order to find the bomb, and as if guided by the hand of a benevolent and all-powerful screenwriter the most visceral and telegenic means of extracting information always seems to work.

Another remarkable element of '24' is how often close friends and old flames of Jack Bauer manage to get themselves tangled up with radical Muslims. Yet Justice Scalia has not called for the forced detention of everyone who knows Keefer Sutherland.

The Obama administration's release of Bush era 'torture memos' brought to mind this lovable old nonsense statement from Scalia, because it illustrates perfectly my original point about backwards logic. Jack Bauer manfully provided evidence of what Scalia wanted to be true. The fact that the evidence itself was untrue was inconvenient to his predetermined conclusion, and therefore immaterial.

With the exception of Andrew Sullivan's passionate wailing on his 'Daily Dish' blog the reaction to the torture memos release has been surprisingly muted. Or perhaps not so surprising. I mean we knew after all didn't we? The information on waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the like has been available for some time. Extraordinary rendition, Camp X-Ray, the semantic fellatio that Bush legal adviser John Yoo gladly performed for his employer; the news of all this has been available for some time. It is up to the individual to stare at him or herself in the mirror and gather the strength to say that I Knew.

<span style="font-weight:bold;">The 'I Was Not A Nazi Polka

--As you travel through Der Schöne Deutschland,
--A melody will greet your ears.
--It's a melody that's been around in Deutschland
--For fifteen to twenty years.

Each and ev'ry German dances to the strain
Of the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
All without exception join in the refrain
Of the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

Göring was a crazy we wanted to deport.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
We all thought that Dachau was just a nice resort.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

The German is so cultured, he does not like to fight.
The peaceful life is what he most enjoys.
For years, the German people were utterly convinced
I. G. Farben manufactured children's toys.

I never shot a Luger or goosed a single step.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

--Was you not an SS guard? --I was not an SS guard.
I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
--Did you not love Ilsa Koch? --I did not love Ilsa Koch.
I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
--Did you not despise the Jews? --I did not; some were my best friends...
I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
--Did you not think Adolf great? --I did not. Adolf who?
--Adolf who! --Ja, Adolf who?
--Fritz, you're putting me on. --Was bedeuten dieses, "Putting me on"?
--Are you kidding me or something? --Nein, I'm not kidding you. Adolf who?
--Adolf Hitler. --Should I know him? Is he a folksinger?
--You don't remember. --Nein, I don't remember him. Who was he?
--Well,...

A little man, very mean, very loud and brash. --Mm-mm.
Not too tall, he never smiled, wore a black mustache. --Nein; I never heard...
He had a girl, Eva Braun, hair as red as flame. --Ah, ja, ja.
He papered walls for many years till his moment came. --Of course!

He's the one who clapped his hands, went into a dance. --Ja!
When the news came to him that we had conquered France. --That's him!
He once said, when our flag proudly was unfurled,
"Today, Germany, tomorrow, the world!"
...tomorrow, the world! ...tomorrow, the world! ...tomorrow, the world!
--I never heard of him. --Neither did I.

To our Israeli allies let us raise a toast.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
Sure there were some Nazis, two or three at most.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

We tried to throw out Hitler right from the very start.
That's what ev'ry hist'ry book should tell.
We hated Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, too.
We believe as Sherman did that war is hell...hell...hell...hell...
...heil!...heil!...Seig heil!...Sieg heil!...Sieg heil!

Germans are as gentle as flowers in the spring.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
Germans are a people who love to dance and sing.
Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

--Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You there, you are not singing. Did you not like to sing? Tell me, you still have a family in Germany, nicht wahr? Sing.

Sing the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.
Sieg heil!

An especially forgiving person could easily emphasize with the general public's early acquiescence. There's no denying that 9/11 was a terrible blow, and it's long been known that everyone becomes more authoritarian and obedient when frightened. Of course we wanted to believe that our leaders knew what was best, and that furthermore what was best was best because they were the ones who said so.

But then there were those who gave the Bush administration another four years, just long enough to bring the republic to its current moribund state. These are the thuggish. The ones who reduce the whole of human existence to nothing but unending tests of masculinity and struggle against The Other because they are too stupid to appreciate anything else. These are the ones who overtly supported abusing terrorism suspects, the ones who profanely mocked the fortitude of those who objected to this obscene treatment.

And let there never again be any confusion that it is the treatment and only the treatment that is the issue here. It was utterly predictable that the patriotic thugs among us would cite the innocent blood on the hands of those being abused, actual or suspected, and claim that they deserved it, childishly claim that the only way one could possibly object to simulated rape or smearing a helpless and confined human being in his own shit was out of misguided personal sympathy for the suspected terrorist, or even approval of terrorism.

The concept of deserve is a funny thing. What courageous act of pure nobility have you or I done to deserve to be here? Not a thing. Daddy fucked Mommy and that was that. Now here we are as creatures with the strange ability to notice the way that the girl down the hall keeps staring at us, and we are neither deserving or undeserving of food, water, oxygen, the ability to trust that we will not be harmed by those around us, aspiration, or love. these are things that we simply need. Needs that come from nothing and are neither justified or unjustified by anything. Deserve does nothing but clutter up the mind and the dictionary.

The morality of an action is wholly independent of the person being acted upon. This is not to say that it is wrong to use force to defend oneself from attack, for the state to defend itself with its military, or for civil society to defend itself with its prisons. It is to say that anything that is not direct self-defense, anything that is punitive for the sake of being punitive, is savagery, and that savagery justified by your God or your flag is savage hypocrisy.

After dealing with those who are fooled some of the time and those who are fooled all of the time we turn finally to why Justice Scalia, and many others whose talent and intelligence should rightfully make them members of the leadership class, believe and abide so much patent nonsense. As I wrote before, it is chiefly because of deductive logic; Self-delusion, false consciousness, mauvaise foi, call it what you will.

In the judicial realm backwards thinking is officially known as "strict constructionism" This is the doctrine that calls for necromancing the 'original intent' of the writers of the Constitution,(which the historical record makes clear they themselves were in profound disagreement about) when deciding how the document applies to a case. If you know history, you might think that this would completely negate the role that Chief Justice John Marshall defined for the court in the first half of the nineteenth century: that of deciding how the Constitution's static ink on paper applies to different situations, new technologies, and evolving social mores.

That would be true. In fact it's the entire point of strict constructionism. At it's core democracy is nothing but a reversal of the traditional justification for social hierarchy. Those who have the power are responsible to those who do not. There are those who cannot accept this. For those who spend a lifetime accruing legal knowledge so that they may one day be able to say "I am on the Supreme Court and you are not" constructionalism serves as a stern-sounding rationale for refusing to acknowledge the civil rights of a filthy commoner who has dared to challenge his betters. It is a doctrine that lends itself very well to Jack Bauer citations.

And so I'll end this screed with a reflection on the "ticking time bomb" scenario that Jack Bauer specializes in defusing . The 'ticking time bomb' is the hypothetical situation cited by respectable, mullet forgoing think-tank conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer or Cal Thomas. If the authorities are aware that a nuclear bomb is set to go off at any time,(so the thinking goes), and they have reason to believe that a detained suspect knows where the bomb is, then it would be to not extract the vital information by any means possible.

The key premise of the argument is that there is some mystical power to torture that will make the victim spout pure truth. Torquemada believed he could justify his bloody hands before God by willing those he suspected of being secretly Jewish into being loudly Jewish, one spiked anal pear at a time. It doesn't work that way of course. The biggest motivation for torture throughout history has not been to extract accurate information but persuading false witness against the torturers enemies. Running a close second is the humanity-negating ecstasy of dominating another.


The truth is that there is nothing about torture that gives the human word any more or any less accuracy than it generally has, which is very little.


Go ahead and see for yourself. Have your best friend bash the shit out of both your knees with a sledgehammer and see if you magically confess your lust for his wife. My guess is that nothing but pleas for mercy would come out of you.

And there's the logical problem with the ticking time bomb scenario. It is of course an extremely unlikely situation, though I suppose that if civilization keeps chugging long enough something like it will eventually occur. What's unlikely to the point of impossibility is a situation where authorities would know enough about a terrorist plot to know precisely who was involved, what they planned to do, and where they planned to do it, without knowing 'where the bomb was' long before hand. I would think that would-be terrorists would be very careful to keep their baby close at hand, instead of burying it in some random spot and scampering away. Losing the bomb would hardly be any better than getting caught.





















There are consequences to diction. The way that pundits and politicians phrase themselves is highly strategic. Everyone knows this. Republican stratigest Frank,Luntz, among others, was famous for manipulating language in a way that seemed to legitimize selfishness and social animosity among the public, leading to big gains for the GOP. On the other side we have no one less than President Obama, who replaced the technocratic language of Kerry and Gore with emotive appeals to mutual goodwill and common purpose, and of course it caught fire after a decade of grim survivalism. The revivalist nature of his language also had the happy effect of illuminating the conservative counterattack for the petulant barbarism it was.

So in the much the same way that conservative talking heads refuse to add the suffix to "Democratic Party" I propose that liberals never argue against the 'ticking time bomb' scenario but rather the 'terrorist squirrel' scenario. This would be a far more productive means of countering arguments for torture than eight more years of long-winded moralizing. Right wingers get angry when they get laughed at, this causes them to make even dumber arguments than usual, and so they get laughed at some more, and the cycle continues until whenever they figure out the game for themselves.





Do you see what I'm getting at here?

Monday Observation

I saw a church sign earlier advertising a spaghetti feed tomorrow, five dollars for adults and three for children. I've had church spaghetti before. It is composed of noodles, water, and Ragu. The church dupes a few poor people into thinking that it's doing them a favor by feeding them their normal diet for twice the price.

I make this point to ease you into the idea that Karl Marx had a few good points. I'm fully aware of the trouble here (Marxism, boogadah) and I'm certainly no Communist myself. I'm fully aware of communism's tendency to empower psychopaths who think exterminating the literate is the way to utopia, and that life under Marxist regimes that aren't quite genocidal is still boring as hell. I'm not asking you to be a Marxist. You and I are both independent minds free to judge any individual point of a supposedly all-encompassing philosophy on its merit. There are people who think public schools are a bad idea just because Karl Marx thought it was a good idea. Surely you're not one of those silly bastards. You're a 'Mr. Heartland' reader, the very cream of intellectual froth.


Karl Marx thought that public schools are a good idea, and they are. Another good idea he had was that religion was a shell game for delusional optimists. So I told a little church spaghetti story to illustrate that point.

I'm sure that you, intellectual froth that you are, have heard the phrase "false consciousness" before. To put it simply, the instillation of "false consciousness" (through media, bad faith education, and especially religion) is the means by which the ruling class (No need to be a Marxist to admit that there is one) convinces the common people that their interests are one and the same. It's been noticed that one of the most effective means of leading common people to support the current power structure is to convince some large segment of the common population that they themselves are privileged members of that power structure because of something inherent about themselves. This is where we meet our old friends race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender roles, and oh yes don't forget religion. I love how religion always shows up at the party.

So who are the members of our own society that have been suckered in this manner? White male Christians of course! Who the hell else? You knew where I was leading you on this all along didn't you you frothy son of a bitch?



This is well-worn territory I know. I mean I do feel rather lazy for being yet another person covering this ground yet again. Yet the fact is that, just that there are a few silly bastards who think public schools are communist just because Karl Marx liked them, so must anyone who recognizes a false consciousness in society necessarily be Communist. I mean it does betray a certain lack of faith in society doesn't it. A lack of faith in this Godly/God fatherly/father that was put here just for you because holy father Amerigod loves you so much Joshua and he just wants you to follow the rules so someday you can be on TV and have a really big car and eat at Denny's anytime you want. Why do you like making daddy cry Joshua? Are you a faggot? Is being a real man too much for you?

Let us be reminded again that we or free to take or leave individual points of grand ideologies as we please. It is nothing but simple observation and common sense to recognize that false consciousness is real. Many of my fellow Nebraskans loudly boast the praises of Midwestern work ethic and frugality. There are even those among us who sincerely believe that we are the ones propping up the state of California instead of vice-versa. Isn't that funny? Right now you might be asking yourself if everyone but you and me is a moron . I know that's something I ask myself obsessively, except I don't ask about you. The answer to the question is yes and no. Our neighbors aren't morons per se. What they are is chemically altered, high on the idea of a mirror-image God and delusions of holding semi-autonomous fiefs in a mighty scrubland empire.

If all that was a little too purple for you, than just consider the above photo of Uncle Teddy. Ted Nugent is a sixty year-old man who thinks dressing in a sleeveless Confederate shirt, Old Glory guitar, and a motherfucking camo hat is a perfectly normal and dignified way of expressing his innermost beliefs. Draw your own conclusions.

Brent Bozell III Still Thinks You're Stupid

"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

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.

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)

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?

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.

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.

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!!!

Tales From North Platte

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.