Bells On

And you can tell everybody, this is your song.

2011-12-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

I have come to the conclusion that it’s not Christmas unless I am newly in possession of every available variety of Avon Naturals shower wash. This occurs because my mother, an Avon Lady in remote Nebraska, cleans out her sample cabinet every year and sends me a box full of soaps and lotions that smell like bubble gum approximations of fruits, and cosmetics that seem more appropriate for a daughter half my age. Still, I tear into the box every year with relish, and look forward to briefly sporting taxi-hued eyelids and glittery pink lips that are then washed away in raspberry-scented showers. This year, I’m sure because I am currently unemployed, she also sent me a check for an amount large enough that it inspired in me, her 50-year-old daughter, not a feeling of happiness or relief, but of shame. So I sent her an email thanking her, but also broaching the subject that the amount was, I felt, more than she should be sending. I got this in return:

I am sure you remember the Christmas you and your friend won one of Marsh's money cards, and you bought us presents. Mine was Windsong, so the other day I was ordering from my drug store and needed a few bucks to make free shipping, so I bought a bottle of it!!!! I still love it. Don't tell anyone your Avon Mom bought Windsong!!

Sitting there at my desk in my bathrobe, I read her email, closed my computer, walked into the living room where my boyfriend was watching television, and burst into tears.

It was 1974, seventh grade, and I was thirteen years old. A boy liked me. His name was Mike, and he wrote a poem about me, the first verse of which I can still recite from memory:

You’re a special lady

A little kinky maybe

You sure know what’s going down

Just to see you makes me glad

That I found

Someone like you

What do you want? It was the ‘70s, and we all thought Rod McKuen and Bernie Taupin were poets.

Mike was a little chubby. Just a little, though, and his height and broad shoulders allowed him to carry it well. He wore the dark turtlenecks and corduroys that were favored by the serious, non-athletic boys of that era. He had pale skin and plenty of freckles and thick, coarse red hair that was cut to look like he was wearing an orange football helmet. But he loved science fiction, and his favorite subject was English, and he was smart like me, and funny, and in our moments together between classes we were beginning to formulate our first tentative theories, fueled by the more sensitive musicians that populated our local Top 40 station and the pages of Creem magazine, that adults, and particularly teachers, didn’t really care about us at all. Plus, the ruination of the Earth by pollution and greed was imminent, we both concurred.

Mike had a job as a bag boy at the local Marsh’s grocery store, and that Christmas, he asked me to go with him to the Marsh’s annual employee Christmas party, which was being held at the fanciest restaurant in our small town. The restaurant was called Emily’s, and it was dark inside with candles on the tables, and one wall near the entry was all rocks with water trickling into a pond at the bottom where patrons of the restaurant threw wish-laden pennies. Next to the waterfall was a stuffed brown bear standing on its hind legs and with front paws raised back in a menacing manner. As you might imagine, it was not the kind of restaurant that a kid forgets about easily. I had been to Emily’s only once or twice before on very special occasions in the years before my parents divorced, so I was pleased to be doing something that was reminiscent of my previous life, and not the one I was living now where I fretted with my mother over the paying of rent and how much my school shoes cost.

That night I wore my best maxi dress, the one with the black quilted skirt and the ruffled yellow collar. It was over a year old and my skinny wrists hung too far below the ruffled cuffs, and the hem was a little too high on me now as well, but I was glad that I had something that I considered fancy enough for Emily’s. When I opened the front door, Mike was standing there in a tie and sports jacket, and with a red carnation corsage inside a clear plastic shell. It was all quite impressive, and I might have begun to feel nervous about how I was going to act the right way and say the right things if Mike’s mother, who was to chauffer us that evening, hadn’t been so calm and friendly. After she dropped us off outside the restaurant entrance, Mike took my hand in his for a few brief seconds before he opened the door for me. I don’t know why it hadn’t really occurred to me earlier, but I was on an actual date.

All the guests were seated at large round tables with white tablecloths and pinecone centerpieces, and we were the only teenagers at our table. All the rest seemed to be older female cashiers and their bored husbands, whose conversation I remember consisted mostly of remarks about the quality of the establishment’s prime rib. When the waiter came to ask us what we wanted to drink, Mike thought for a moment, and then ordered a Pepsi, and I ordered a Shirley Temple. At the time I was proud that I had been in so many grown-up bars with my mom that I knew how to order a real mixed drink with a name, even if it was kind of a kiddie drink, and it seemed to have made an impression on the staff as well, because when I ordered another from a different waitress, she laughed and exclaimed “Oh, you’re the Shirley Temple!”

At the end of the evening, there was a drawing for cash prizes from $25 to $200, and the store manager called my name for the $100 prize! When I walked past the bar on my way to the front of the room to claim it, the bartender said “Hey, Shirley Temple won!” and he clapped for me. The waitresses heard him, and soon all of the staff in the dining room appeared to be applauding and calling out “Shirley Temple! Hey, good for you, Shirley Temple!”

As I was walking back to the table, it occurred to me that Mike would probably be disappointed that he didn’t win, and I knew that I should share my money order with him. Mike’s mother was there at the table waiting to take us home. I told Mike that I would split the $100 with him, and he looked surprised, but I told him that I had planned all along to share if I won, because I wouldn’t have won if not for him inviting me. I don’t know why I’d told him that my act of generosity had not been spontaneous. Maybe I had surmised that by appearing to have thought it out beforehand, I would seem resolute, and so avoid any discussions of the deal. I don’t know, but in any event, he quietly accepted his half of the prize, and as I glanced around, I remember his mom looking at me with an approving smile. People I did not know were walking up to me and congratulating me! The evening was an unmitigated success!

That’s all I remember. I take my mother’s word for it that I used my $50, which was a considerable sum for a teenager in 1974, to buy Christmas gifts for my brother, my sister, and her. I do remember that Windsong bottle sitting on my mother’s dresser, because of course her mother’s dresser is an altar of worship for every girl; I’m pretty sure I could still draw my mother’s jewelry box and hand mirror from memory. And I hope she forgives me for squealing on her regarding her recent purchase of non-Avon perfume.

But so there was that email from my mother, and there was me, trying to tell my boyfriend the story, while still sobbing, of the Marsh’s cash prize and how I had forgotten what I’d done with the money and when he asked me why that would make me cry so hard, all I could only say in response was, “I was a good kid.”

By the end of 7^th grade, I had broken up with Mike, such as we were, because I just didn’t feel romantic about him. Not like he wanted me to. I did still truly want to be his friend because I felt like no one else understood me the way he did, but he was bitter about being relegated to “just a friend” status, and then soon thereafter his family moved away. He wrote me another poem right before the last time I saw him, which I still have, in his handwriting, on lined yellow paper, the last verse of which is this:

I think I’ll be a lot better off

Lost in a trillion

Knowing that somewhere

You’re out there.

I’m still out here, Mike. It’s not easy, sometimes, but I’m still out here. I miss you. I miss all the Mikes. I was a good kid, and I’m still out here.

It's only a model

2011-09-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

I had expected it to be more difficult.

All of the other anniversaries I had ignored, switched past the programming to a movie channel, turned off the radio at work, gone outside and spent the day puttering in the yard, or at the beach pedaling my bike or wandering amidst the tourists on the boardwalk. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know where I spent those days, so studiously had I ignored that they were those days.

But this year, I found myself at the airport, returning home from Denver. I found myself standing in the enormous, snaking line of travelers at DIA, watching officials from the Department of Homeland Security on television screens placed at the end of each switchback of the queue drone on about the importance of the process to which we were about to submit ourselves. It was difficult to place much importance in their arguments, given that the situation required all of us to not stop and listen to the officials on the screens, but to shuffle past them and out of earshot and then eventually into the sphere of another screen, where another, different official was going on about another different aspect of their argument, the gist of which was, of course, that everything was fine, and we were all an important cog in the machine of everything being fine, in spite of the mildly 1984-ish feeling of never being able to walk outside of the glow of those screens, or to not see the not-too-broadly-smiling faces of officials in navy blue blazers and unremarkable haircuts. Everything is fine, citizens. Everything is just fine.

As I approached the Transportation Security Administration agent who checks boarding passes and identification, I began to hear snippets of his conversations with those ahead of me. He asked one woman what is the state flower of Arizona? I could not hear what she answered him, but he smiled and said “That’s right,” and checked her pass with a red pen and sent her on. To the next gentlemen in line he asked what ice cream franchise operated in the airport to which he was returning home, and the gentleman thought for a second, and then said “Baskin Robbins.” And the TSA agent again said “That’s right,” and then the gentleman added, as if to further cement his familiarity with the franchise, “They’re good,” and the agent concurred that they were, in fact, good.

I was a tad dumbstruck by what I was hearing and I searched the face of the agent to see if I could determine if he was being serious, or merely trying to lighten the mood, or perhaps even attempting to pass the long hours of his day amusing himself by toying with us, his captive prey, in the same way the a cat allows a mouse to think that he is winning at escape before he brings his paw down again upon the mouse’s neck.

It occurred to me that the situation unfolding in front of me resembled the scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which the knights must correctly answer the bridgekeeper’s questions before passing over the Bridge of Death to continue their quest: “What is your name? What is your quest? What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

Would I get a difficult question? I didn’t think I could tell him what the name was of the bar in the Burbank airport in which I almost always killed time before my departing flights. Or maybe, like Sir Lancelot being asked his favorite color, I would get an easy question, like what brought me to Denver. Would I tell him that it was simply to visit my sister, or would I say, trying not to look too self-satisfied, that I had successfully assisted her in her search for a wedding gown? Was that too much? Would that much detail be suspicious, or even merely annoying? Don’t try so hard, I thought to myself. You’re always trying too hard.

Nevertheless, I mentally assembled a checklist of home state trivia. State flower? California Poppy. State bird? California Quail. State tree? California Redwood. Probably that government employee Alex Trebek up there was no match for a flora and fauna nerd such as myself, I thought. I got this in the bag.

When it was my turn, I thought to smile in a relaxed way, and to look him in the eyes, and then he glanced over my boarding pass and said “Burbank, huh? That’s a small airport.”

He looked at me.

“Yes, it is,” I replied.

And he checked me off with his red pen and waved me on my way. I picked up my bag and then moved along to the line for the scanners. And I instantly knew that the point of the question was not to know the answer, but to allow the questioner to hear you speak, to evaluate the ease of your tone and the origin of your accent.

I felt that combination of triumph and disappointment that all nerds feel when they’ve over-prepped for a test.

And then I wondered, if all of your life, you cannot help but compare and contrast the events you’re experiencing to those that formed you, that occurred in your childhood, then why don’t we give our children a better baseline than a series of brick and mortar Skinner Boxes, in which they are tasked with distinguishing themselves to those that operate the boxes from a horde that must be, if only by the relentlessness of its onslaught, indistinguishable? No wonder so many children feel as though they can’t win. They literally can not win, and those that think they have are merely more successful at deluding themselves.

It’s not the best mindset with which to begin a journey home.

Especially since I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go home anymore. I haven’t been sure for a long, long time now. For ten years, I haven’t been sure if I even wanted to go home.

It’s not that I don’t love my boyfriend, my pets, my house, my yard and the intermittently successful life I have fashioned for myself on this piece of land outlying the second largest collection of Americans in the world. I do. I do love all those things.

And it’s not a question of loving them enough. Loving them enough to overcome the other stuff. It’s more that loving them is irrelevant to the other stuff. How could that be true? And yet, ten years in, it seems pretty damn true.

I used to be able to push this feeling I had aside. All those years of yelling about what a fucked up mess we were making of this country, I still thought of it as my home, my place, my country, I guess because I thought that someday the trauma would end. I would no longer feel like I had to jump out of this speeding car that was headed in a place I did not want to go, a place that was a crazy, bad place to be. Bad for everyone. Why couldn’t they see that? Why wouldn’t they listen to the people that were screaming about the bad direction we were going in? Where did they think this car was going, to a good place? To a place where we were all safe again? Couldn’t they see that was wrong?

I guess I thought that someday we would collectively, as a people, stop and decide to go somewhere else. I thought that when we changed leaders, and we started to officially do less bad stuff as a people, that I would feel different. That it was our actions as a nation that mattered. But inside, it didn't seem true at all.

And I didn’t figure it out until just the other day, when I saw them, those people on the other side, screaming “We want our country back!”

Hey, I remember thinking, that’s my line.

Because remember when we said that? But it was about the other guy? Remember when he did stuff that we thought was wrong? Criminal, even? And we were not being listened to at all, or taken into account in any way? Remember? I’m not saying we were wrong to think that. We weren’t wrong. I’m just saying that now they feel that way. They feel that same way, and how can they? How can they feel the same way that we did? What the Left is doing, and trying to do, it’s not wrong for the country, it’s not evil, it’s not illegal or against the Constitution, but they’re saying that it is all those things, just like we did. How can they say that?

I don’t know how they can feel now like we did then. But it makes me feel like giving up. It makes me feel like nothing I have is of any use.

It makes me feel like I have no home.

Chiaroscuro

2011-07-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

So lately I've been thinking about Pete Rose being excluded from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

No, seriously, I have been thinking about it. Because I think it's bullshit. It's the Baseball Hall of Fame, not the Not Betting On Baseball Hall of Fame, which he should definitely be excluded from, and, by the way, I should definitely be in, because I have never bet on baseball, in spite of having a wicked hot dream in October 2004 in which Johnny Damon personally guaranteed me, between make-out sessions in the Fenway dugout, that the Curse was "so ovah."*

But if baseball is the quintessential American sport,** then our attitude about Rose's ostracization from the Baseball Hall of Fame is also quintessentially American, because we are as a nation so sort of comically terrible at viewing our famous people in any kind of nuanced way. Rose was a bad boy and so he must be punished, the end.

A couple of days ago, some friend of a friend wrote a short essay, which made the social media rounds, on the death of Amy Winehouse, and in which he chastised the public at large for being angry at her for being a junkie. I understand his point that Amy Winehouse owed us exactly nothing, but if you ask me, anyone who feels angry at Winehouse because they feel like they had a stake in her life through her music is showing a much more invested approach to her art than someone who's main argument appears to be that we should not speak ill of the dead. Because, you know, she can't hear us anymore. And speaking as someone who grew up with an addict, I understand being angry at junkies. Personally, I can shake my head at the colossal self-involvement that it takes to make those life vs. junk scales come down on the side of junk every single goddamn time, and ALSO marvel that she managed to create such beautiful and evocative music.

But I'm not here to eulogize Winehouse. Listen to the song "Back in Black," one more time if you want a eulogy, because she's only about 10,000 times more brilliant than anyone else could ever hope to be on the subject of Amy Winehouse. So, in short, please please stop hectoring people about their feelings about a dead junkie singer, oh social media scold. If it upsets you so much, stop reading Yahoo comments for fuck's sake.

And of course I could bring up the media makeover of Rupert Murdoch, who, after his testimony before a Parliament committee, morphed magically from ruthless greedy bastard scumbag yellow journalist and bobby briber to sad old man who nods off during questioning, and so therefore in spite of being a notorious control freak and micro-manager, is now not even aware of anything going on anywhere in his empire, ever. The chorus of people, and I'm not even counting the yammer heads on Fox News, who suddenly felt sorry for Murdoch - poor, old, out-of-the-loop Murdoch, was really pretty shocking.

And yet entirely predictable. Because he can't be evil AND an old fool at the same time, can he?

Look, I know Murdoch's not the Devil, because the Devil doesn't exist, but whoever that fucked-up long-ago biblical scribe was who first invented the Devil - he was definitely thinking of someone exactly like Murdoch. Because what's more terrifying than someone who can carry the most powerful nations in the world in his pocket, and who can buy their opinions and subvert their legal processes and write their narratives to benefit himself? Murdoch owns our history, my fellow citizens, so if you feel good about that, then you're in luck, because the Teabaggers, and their contradictory priorities about NOT wanting Obama to cut Medicare or Social Security, but YES wanting the Republicans to cut entitlements, are born directly out of that uptight Aussie sphincter. They've set up their lawn chairs and unfurled their hilariously dumbass opinions in front of every media outlet in America, and the media can't get enough of them. They love the Teabaggers, and why not? They're custom made for the 24 hour news cycle, because their opinions can be constantly and continuously analyzed forever without ever making any sense. So they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

A couple of weeks ago, a sort of semi-humorous essay was written on Jezebel about how the author felt bad about rooting for the USA over Japan in the Women's Soccer final, because, well, Japan has had a rough four months. And I suggested in the comments section, also semi-humorously, that a sure-fire cure for feeling guilty about rooting against Japan as a nation was to remember that they are as a nation capable of some pretty nasty business, i.e., the completely senseless slaughter of dolphins and illegal selling of their meat to schoolchildren, the slaughter of protected whales and the decades-long stalling of meaningful whaling agreements at the IWC and bribery of its members, i.e. you know, your standard nasty nation business. Please note that I did not accuse the women's soccer team, or the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, of anything. I was of course vilified. Because it's Japan's turn to be a blameless victim nation, and whatever the fuck we do, let's not allow any nuanced thinking into any discussion of world affairs, ever. I've been told it's in bad taste.

And if your mind is naturally wandering now to 9/11, so did mine. I recall saying at the time, on some now-defunct blog, that of all the crimes of the Bush administration, the very worst was telling us that al-Qaeda hated us for our freedom. Because it was more than just a lie. More than just a self-serving lie, even. It was a red cape waved in front of a bull that had been speared by the picadors within an inch of his life. And so the bull charged ahead, blindly, hating, branding as traitors anyone who dared ask why, listening to every lie that reinforced our infantile notions of ourselves as blameless, perfect patriot heroes, which we are not, none of us.

I love my country. I endeavor to one day deserve her. But for now, it appears I'm just a nuance monkey.

*Yeah, I know Damon's not from Boston. IT WAS A DREAM.

**It's not.

This is where we swam

2011-07-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

I get why Nancy Grace wants to whip up outrage over the Casey Anthony case. It inflates her ratings, which increases her TVQ and her net worth. And I get why the prosecutor would want to cast the verdict as the greatest WTF ever in the history of jurisprudence, because he brought the case under the wrong charge and with insufficient evidence, and then tried to convict the defendant in the Court of Outraged Moms.

But why on earth this country was witness to such an emotional display by, as I so even-handedly put it on Twitter yesterday, the "self-righteous indignation monkeys," is a trickier question.

I have no idea whether Anthony killed her child or not. But given the murkiness of the evidence in the case, I doubt that yesterday's verdict is significant for any reason other than so many people seem to be so upset about it. Personally, I resent the prosecutor's strategy of trying to convict Anthony by casting her as a drunken whore, because I think that it damages women everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that women, especially moms, can only be chaste, self-sacrificing martyrs, or else we are guilty of failing society's expectations, and as such deserve whatever charge an ambitious camera-hungry prosecutor can make stick. And also, speaking as a drunken whore myself, I resent the implication that we're necessarily toddler-killers. I have hardly ever advocated toddler-killing. I mean, sure, on airplanes, but I think we can all agree on that.

Look, I know dead babies is sad. But you know what, besides Tot Mom, actually does kill a hell of a lot of children? (And no, Leah Remini, it's not psychiatry.)

Ask the EPA. The EPA knows what kills, cripples, and permanently disfigures and disables children. It knows what gives babies brain damage. It knows what shuts down their internal organs and puts them into comas. And the EPA does more to prevent the taking of childrens' lives in one minute than all the tsking, yammering heads on television will ever do. And if you doubt this, or even if, holy shit, you're just interested in the health of the next generation, check out what the EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection is up to, because it's pretty damn impressive.

And, needless to say, like every other governmental agency that looks after the people, (that's people-people, not corporation-people) they're under attack by Republicans, including those who wish to become president in 2012. But this is not the ordinary "less regulation!" attack that voters hear every election cycle. This time, they mean it. They don't just want to appoint a bunch of industry hacks to head the agency and play fiddle while the Cuyahoga burns, because, unfortunately, even under Republican hood ornaments, the agency remains full of a bunch of career do-gooders who take their jobs seriously. So, what they want to do is de-fund it completely and take away not only its teeth, put its tongue, lips, mouth, voice, everything.

But why especially now, you ask? I mean, beside the fact that the Republicans have never been more in the pockets of the industries that pollute our air, water, and land?

Well, whatever the reason, I'm sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with fracking.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with our struggle to find inexpensive domestic fuel, and especially now with natural gas being touted as a clean energy source that can replace fossil fuels in certain applications, and the need to extract oil and gas from the ground cheaply becomes more urgent to U.S. companies, and therefore the need to control the EPA becomes more urgent, because we wouldn't want some ole' big government job-killing agency to tell us that it's a kind of a huge deal if your tap water bursts into flame, now would we?

And since we're asking rhetorical questions, why aren't the TV ladies crying over self-proclaimed mother of 28 Michelle Bachmann's threats to shut down an agency that saves the lives of children every goddamn day? Why is that? Why would the media be afraid to attack a woman who wants to hurt children? I'm pretty sure Nancy Grace and Julie Chen have heard of the GOP, and so I can't imagine what they could be waiting for.

You may already be a wiener!

2011-06-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

This week, I was reading a story about the 46^th anniversary of Americans’ right to use birth control, and – huh? What’s that you say? 46 years since what, now?

Yeah, in 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, and the ruling declared unconstitutional a state law that forbade the use of birth control - and I’m not talking just birth control pills here, I’m talking any birth control device or drug, used by anyone, including married couples.

This ruling, made in my lifetime, mind you, has been decried ever since by conservatives claiming that we cannot construe freedoms where they are not specifically spelled out by the Constitution, and that the majority 7 justices who made the ruling were being “activist.”

Sound familiar? And are you, once again, trying to wrap your mind around the idea of freedom-loving small-government conservatism being opposed to a freedom as simple as sticking a sock on your dick?

Because make no mistake, the conservatives of today would have supported that Connecticut law, and would have decried that “activist” ruling.

And I’m not talking about some early ‘60s version of Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Sessions, et al. I’m saying take those exact same Republican jackasses, with their current sensibilities; send them 46 years back to a time when the highest court of the United States was trying to decide whether to allow American citizens the right to use otherwise legal birth control and I guaranfuckingtee you that immediately after the decision, they would be urging the Congress to pass a bill to strip the operating budget of the Supreme Court, and planning to launch an amendment to the Constitution that would forbid interfering with the Earth-bound destiny of God's little bundles of joy.

Don’t think so? How about if I told you that the Griswold in Griswold v. Connecticut was Estelle Griswold, Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut?

It's just so typical of this fucked up country that we choose as our boogeyman a plucky, low-rent little organization like Planned Parenthood, which is comprised of underpaid doctors and overworked nurses and harried administrative people who devote their hours to explaining to dumbass teenagers that pouring Bud on your boyfriend's dick won't make his sperm too drunk to swim.

Because by all means lets ignore the bankers throwing people out of their homes, and the arms makers and the oil men who keep sending us to die for the rights to Middle East crude, and the kids murdered on the streets every day warring over who gets to sell drugs on which corner, and the schools where they're being taught to love football and Jesus instead of science and mathematics, yeah, lets ignore all that, because some fucking Jezebel somewhere is sitting on a table in a paper apron being told that it's her body, after all. Yeah, that's the real goddamn emergency.

Some fucking asshole said to me the other day "Well, you know that MSNBC is no better than Fox, don't you?"

Well, I walked away from that argument, because it wasn't the time or the place, and to tell you the truth, the dude who said it has his head so far up his ass that not even I can scream loud enough for him to hear me. But let me just outline my response here, because it's something that comes up for me a lot.

No, they're not the same.

Yes, both networks are full of windbags who love the sound of their own yammering, and yes, both sides revel in the scandals of the other, and blow the missteps of the opposition out of all proportion, yes, in that way, they're very similar.

Here's how they're different. One side worships money. And they will do or say anything, anything to make and keep more of it. They tell anyone who will listen to them that we're all alone in this world, and we should look out for ourselves, and the way you look out for yourself is to keep other people from getting something that you would like to have. So let's make sure the billionaires and corporations pay no taxes, so that the black woman in line in front of you at the checkout can't buy Dove bars with her food stamps.

And the other side, as flawed and cheating and douchebaggy and pompous as we are, believe that we're all in this together, and that we have an obligation, as the most powerful country on Earth, to set an example of compassion and peace. We should lift each other up, with our dollars, with our ingenuity, and with our love for each other. And then we should take that lesson of how you do that, and teach it to anyone in the world who asks it of us.

That's right, I'm suggesting we should become Canada. Only with less hockey.

Asking for it

2011-03-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

There are now four different posts begun and abandoned in my post corral, so don’t think I’ve been sitting here for two months doing nothing. They were abandoned because they sucked, because I yammered on or meandered across various topics aimlessly, or because I committed the bloggy sin of TMI. I mean, as much as I would like to believe that y'all would be fascinated by the details of my menopausal symptoms, I know better than anyone what makes my readers skim my semi-carefully-crafted paragraphs over quickly, looking for Boehner jokes.

Don't worry readers, I'm not going to elaborate on the many ways in which my hot flashes make me feel like killing everyone I know. I have no desire to become the Erma Bombeck of the 21st century.* But it's difficult, when you wake up drenched in sweat for the 14th time in one night, and then can't get back to sleep because you keep thinking about how little ultimately seems to have changed for women since you first became one, not to feel like the Right's war on women has become a little personal.

And after all, it was feminists who were the first to observe that the personal is political, and why wouldn't we still feel that way today, when we must still suffer the fools of (self-proclaimed) small government, with their big ideas about how they can make women conform to their own personal ideals through legislation? Because of course anti-choice legislation is not really about preventing abortions, if it were, then the annual funding of Planned Parenthood might approach the subsidies we already pay for March Madness and SUVs. Or to put it more succinctly, Planned Parenthood prevents more abortions in one day than all the bullshit so-called pro-life Jesus warriors put together since Roe v. Wade, combined.

And let's face it, when the governor of South Dakota, a state that is already on my list of top ten states I cannot hide in, tells the women that pay half his salary that he passed the new 72-hour-wait-and-mandatory-Christian-harangue law because he hopes "that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices," he doesn't really hope that women will "make good choices." He hopes they will be inconvenienced enough or poor enough that the law will force them to carry their pregnancy to term. He's treating the women of his state like they're 3-year-olds who have to sit in a corner until they learn to behave, and you'd think the women of South Dakota, no matter where they come down on the issue of abortion, would feel insulted by this treatment, whether they actually had to be subjected to it or not.

But that's too much to hope for, I guess. Female solidarity has ever been a tricky thing, and the Right's indignation over sexism waxes and wanes according to whether anyone has insulted half-governor Sarah Palin in any particular week. So the political climate is always balmy for a-holes like Mark Krikorian of the National Review, who accuses several female members of the Obama administration of being nagging, pants wearin', ball-bustin' shrews, and also to say rather plainly that our president's virility has been diminished by allowing his female counselors to, well, counsel him, and that he is a less effective leader, and we are therefore less safe, because he listens to women. If this were true, lord, can you imagine what would happen if a female were actually president??? Every nation in the world would feel free to terrorize and/or carpet bomb us!

So, no testicles in the Oval Office clearly = open season on

America

Unless it's President Sarah Palin, of course. Which forces me to conclude that the only female politicians that the Right trusts to safeguard our nation, are the astoundingly stupid ones.

No? You explain it then.

If you haven't already seen Krikorian's inane diatribe, don't bother to read it. Like the Republicans' daily legislative assault on female autonomy, it's all about women getting too big for the britches they shouldn't even be wearing. I experience a form of it myself almost every day when I get into comment wars with older white men whose writing starts to take on that distinctive, shrilly defensive tone that they lapse into whenever their entire world has been shaken to its foundations by being contradicted by a woman. I also experience it when the routine passing of a car on the freeway becomes a battle of retribution the other driver must wage in order to prove that his automotive virility has not been usurped by a middle-aged woman in a station wagon. It's funny how much more rapidly such men suddenly feel inspired to drive when they see who it is who wants to pass them.

It's sad, really, not just because some people will never change, and you have to wait for them to die or to be too old to hobble into the voting booth before our country can take its next step forward, but also because it forces you, a woman, to continually react to other people's ideas of what is appropriate conduct for your gender. As far back as I can remember, I've listened to other people feel absofuckinglutely free to comment upon the way that I sit, stand, walk, talk, swear, the frequency with which I smile, my failure to follow appropriate body hair removal guidelines, and whether my menstrual cycle might be affecting my judgment. And they felt that freedom because I am a woman, and was I aware that I was deviating from how women are supposed to behave?

Frankly, I wish I spent a whole lot less time thinking about what it's like to be female. Or I guess I wish I didn't have to. And I don't understand why, in the aftermath of CBS reporter Lara Logan's sustained sexual assault by a mob of male protestors in Egypt, some people are saying, effectively, that there are certain places where a woman provokes an attack simply by being a woman.

They’ve got it wrong, obviously. There are no "certain places." It’s every place.

And now Egyptian women themselves, welcomed as fellow protestors during the revolution, are being intimidated, harassed, tortured, and excluded from the political fruits of their labors. Because let's face it, if you intimidate women, tell them it's too dangerous where they are, or that the work is too hard, or that they should be at home looking after their families, or that they are too old or too fat or too ugly to deserve success, or that there's only room for one woman in here and so their real enemies are other women who want to take their slot, then you knock out half the competition in one fell swoop, right?

I don’t have any answers for it. I can’t even get most of my readers to make it to the end of this post, once they’ve figured out it’s one of those boring feminism diatribe pieces. I’m not pissed about it. I can’t be. Lord, if shit like that pissed me off, pissed would be all I ever was.

*Unless, of course, there's any money in it, in which case - kids make you crazy! Amirite, ladeez?

I would like you to dance

2011-01-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Is there any way to avoid contemplating your accumulated wisdom when you approach a momentous birthday, such as, say, your 50th?

I would love to do exactly that. Well, that's not exactly true. I would love to be the person who would love to do that, but I'm afraid I'll need another 50 years or so to achieve that kind of self-disinterest.

If there's anything I've learned, and I think, you know, there is, it's that in spite of what everyone says, no one gives a shit what you think about them, really. They just don't want too big of a hole blown in their own idea of who they are. Once I figured that out, I started worrying about what people thought about me, and what they thought I thought about them, a WHOLE lot less.

Which is not to say that I worry less. I worry the same as I always have, otherwise known as a lot. I think I am genetically disposed to worry. I worry so much that I sometimes believe that it defines me, as in:

I fret, therefore I am.

or

If a tree falls in the forest, it will damage your house and your insurance won't cover it.

or

And in the end, the love you take...will probably be way more than you deserve.

You get the idea. So if that last bit didn't get the point across that I'm not really the best person from which to solicit advice, then geez, you might just be stupid enough to actually benefit from my advice.

So here it is, 50 years of wisdom, earned the hard way. Well, not exactly the hard way. A pretty soft way, actually, considering everything.

BELLS ON WISDOM:

Don't ever fight with your girlfriends. That's what boyfriends are for.

If you learn the difference between "its" and "it's," no one will ever think you are stupid.

When you see some jerk giving a waiter or a cashier a hard time for no reason, speak up. You'll feel good about yourself, and you might even get some free stuff.

"Sexy" Halloween costumes are actually neither.

Don't ever date anyone who quotes Ayn Rand to you.

If you freely admit when you don't know things, people will regard you with respect and awe.

Women who are being abused really want you to call them on those made-up excuses that they give. Trust me. Ditto women who are throwing up their food to stay thin.

"The Little Prince" is a dumbass book. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Nothing makes a person happier than telling them that you thought about them when they weren't even there.

It's never too late to have better taste in music.

You know that saying about how you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? So true.

Be realistic about how much booze you can drink.

Don't let people hurt your feelings by calling you fat or ugly. If they're calling you a pretentious asshole, however, a little self-examination would not be out of order.

Before you go sticking it to the man, you should make sure you understand who the man is.

There's nothing wrong with a little schadenfreude. It's not a profession, however.

And regarding relationships, resist the temptation to count coup on your partner's head. You must remain absolutely and steadfastly on his or her side, always. And not just when other people are around, either, but even when it's just you two. For example, when your partner breaks a wine glass, the correct response is always "That's okay, it's just a wine glass," no matter how many have been broken in the past, no matter how stupidly they have been broken, no matter how many times you warned about their breaking. Because, no matter all the circumstances, it remains only a wine glass. Not a metaphor for your relationship. Just a wine glass.

And that's all I know, I guess. Except for one more thing.

Contrary to what the current crop of Republicans think, this country is a work in progress. Our Constitution did not spring forth fully formed like Athena from the head of George Washington. And I'm sure I don't have to tell my readers - although apparently I do have to tell Michele Bachmann - the Founding Fathers did not eliminate slavery. Many of them didn't even want to. I daresay all of them were deeply flawed, and if you read the Constitution, and I mean the whole thing, not the tidy version read on the House floor at the beginning of the 112th US Congress - a deliberative body that promises to bring new meaning to the word "incredibly fucking stupid," you would see that we have struggled all along to form a more perfect union. I don't understand why, for some people, to admit a thing's imperfection equals an unbearable admission of frailty, or irrelevance, or obsolescence. Maybe admitting that those that began this country, while accomplishing awesome feats under the circumstances, didn't even come close to getting it completely right, is akin to facing one's own mortality, and so it is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means engaging in mind-boggling feats of reality-denial.

And speaking of the Tea Baggers, I guess then the one thing that I can agree with them on is that growing old sucks ass. It sucks hard ass. Although unlike them, I have resolved to grow old without growing afraid.

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?

2011-01-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

Well, now that the shooting has once again died down, and those on the sidelines have stopped comparing themselves to Jews and anyone who doesn't agree with them to Hitler (What? You didn't know that "Mein Kampf" is a liberal manifesto?), I guess we can all finally take a sincere look at ourselves and what role our own attitudes might have played in our cocked-up national zeitgeist.

Or not. I mean, who are we kidding here? There will be lots of examination, or the 24-hour news channel equivalent, anyway, but no real change. President Obama, in a speech that was apparently designed to appeal to Arizonans in that it was long on references to the Bible, heaven, heroes, and gumption, and short on self-awareness, asked us to make sure our debate is "worthy of those we have lost."

I think Jon Stewart cut more quickly to the bone when he said that it would be nice if our political speech didn't so closely resemble the ramblings of a crazy person.

But I get why our president is compelled to point out that a high road does indeed exist. I'm just not sure why he feels the need to take it all the time. Especially when the White House is surrounded by idiots with placards exclaiming that "high road = socilism."

Not to mention that the tea-baggers are using the events in Tucson as a fundraiser, and the very gun and clip that the shooter used are selling out in gun stores across the country. Yeah, the right wing is definitely going to be turning up the paranoia on gun control, with one genius even suggesting that members of Congress be allowed to carry guns on the House floor, a position that I must admit seems fairly attractive to me at the moment. In fact, I think the only place in America where Republicans don't want guns is at Republican political conventions. That's right, you have to go through a metal detector and surrender your firearms to get up in that mug. They must not be reading their own literature about how an armed citizenry makes you more safe.

But it seems to me that those who died in that parking lot in Tucson were unlucky enough to have been labeled guilty by association to Representative Giffords, a woman who had apparently become the obsession of a defensive white male with a fondness for guns who had the good fortune of living in a state whose motto is "home of the defensive white male with a fondness for guns."

But the question is not whether Sarah Palin's adenoidal sniveling awakened a sleeping Manchurian Candidate - so far, the shooter seems to have been the only white male in Arizona NOT preoccupied with McCain's vice maverick - but whether our culture eased him along on his path.

I don't know the answer to that question. But I think neither do you. And so in the absence of any definitive blame-laying, which would be summarily ignored by the tea-baggers anyway, I think that a reasonable course of action would be for the Right to stop pretending that President Obama is the anti-Christ and Democrats are his demons sent to plague the Earth, and for the Left to, once the Right has stopped doing that, stop saying that the Right is doing that.

Because here's the thing about that whole "violent rhetoric" argument that nobody seems to be acknowledging: it matters not one whit what that asshole's political leanings are. The point is, that when you insinuate, especially from a position of power, that your political opponents are less than human, that they deserve a "Second Amendment solution" nudge nudge wink wink, YOU LEGITIMIZE THE VIOLENT YEARNINGS OF EVERYONE, LEFT OR RIGHT, CRAZY OR SANE. I mean, John Wilkes Booth didn't kill Lincoln with the expectation that Southerners would regard his actions with horror and shame, now did he?

And secondly, the rhetoric on the Left does not equal that on the Right. It's a nice try, Fox News, but it just ain't so. We don't put rifle sights on their candidates, or if we do, we stop it and apologize, we don't claim that they're fucking "surveyor's marks," or whatever dumb childish shit Palin's camp offered up, I mean surveyor's marks? Really? So did I miss all those tweets wherein Palin urged her mama grizzlies "Don't retreat, re-sight your coordinates for proper bearing to the azimuth!"?

And once more, for the record, not allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, and not allowing gay couples to marry is not the "other side" of the issue, it's the wrong side. It's the side of all that is backward and mean and fucking Evil Empire about us. And letting citizens die because they can't afford medicine is not the conservative view of the health care debate, it's the fucking immoral and wrong view, and I would like to stand up and be counted among those who wouldn't mind if our president just goddamn said so for once.

I just hope that Obama realizes that compromise is not some kind of honorable end in itself, it is a path to what we want - no, make that what we need. It's a path to what everyone in this country needs, whether they're able or willing to admit it or not - let's not forget that. So yeah, Mr. President, take that high road, and speechify about how we all need to respect one another, and then please go back to Washington and drag those motherfucking scared shitless morons with you into the 21st century.

Us, everyone.

2011-01-03T23:57:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays, Spooney and I indulged our obsession with "A Christmas Carol" by watching every version we could trap within our DVR web. Spooney is partial to the older films, which he refers to as his family's "classics," as if they were broadcast for, and belong to, his clan alone, and I dig that. However, I love above all others the 1984 George C. Scott version, even though he is rather well-fed for a Scrooge and also not so convincing in his character's giddier moods as others have been. The Scott version does most succesfully pull off the darker moments, though, and for me it is the darker moments that elevate the tale above the rest of the sickening pap the holiday season is wont to produce.

Because for me, Dickens's entire message can be distilled down to the following exchange between the miser and the second spirit, wherein Scrooge inquires about the hideous, groveling, ghoulish children that hide inside the spirit's robe:

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.

I remember watching "A Christmas Carol" as a child, and I remember my ears pricking up when the ghost said "but most of all beware the boy..."

Because why beware ignorance more than want? After all, it seemed to me that you could be ignorant and happy - in fact my hometown in rural Indiana provided many examples proving that you could indeed be thus - but it was almost impossible to feel content when you didn't have sufficient money to pay the rent or the power bill or buy enough food. I was rather newly acquainted with the last reality, and although my instinct was to trust my own experience, still, there had to be something to what Dickens was saying, or else the tale around that message would not be so exaulted in such a beloved medium at such a spritual time of year.

I must admit that I have labored, intermittently, to understand his point ever since.

And I think that the audience of "A Christmas Carol" is tempted to view ignorance as being embodied by the poverty-stricken characters of the story, consumed as they are with their petty needs, and deprived as they are of the education that could improve their condition, or indeed, as our last elections have shown, even identify those responsible for their condition.

But I have come to believe that the ignorance that spells our Doom is not the ignorance of the unfortunate, but the ignorance of Scrooge himself, and those like him. It is a self-imposed ignorance, perhaps, or perhaps one into which so much is invested that it is, ultimately, a most devout stupidity.

Much is made of the smugness of the liberal. It is said that we always behave as if we know better, as if we know what others do not. Well, I'll let all you so-called conservatives out there in on a little secret:

We do know something you do not know.

But we're not going to tell you what it is.

You may figure it out for yourselves, however, after you have been visited by 3 spirits.

The first, the Ghost of America Past, will show you visions of our forefathers, and you will hear them, with all their imperfections, try to craft the foundation of a government that would free us from the tyranny of state religions, and from a class structure that sentenced all but a lucky few to a lifetime of laborious misery.

The second, the Ghost of America Present, will walk you down the corridors of hospitals wherein the fate of the patients is decided not merely by the graveness of their conditions, but by the figures in their bank accounts. He will escort you through our capitol halls and meeting rooms, so you may overhear our lawmakers conspire to allow corporations to rule over citizens, and he will lead you through the foreign battlefields where you may witness our young servicemen and women grasp for a meaning to dignify the deaths of their comrades.

The third, the Ghost of America Yet to Come, will give you a brief glimpse, for a brief glimpse will be all that you can bear, of a future where cities sink beneath oceans, green landscapes shrivel and turn to dust, and humans retreat to those smaller and smaller bands of Earth wherein life is still possible. Then you will see what shall come to pass if these current shadows remain unaltered by the future.

The bell will soon toll one. It is not yet too late.

Yogi Berra was right

2010-12-10T17:59:00.000-08:00

At first, it was a huge relief to bid farewell to Bush the warmonger. And all us Democrats were excited to have found a leader who could win an election, finally. Young people came out in record numbers to vote, and knowing that that's what swept our guy into office gave us a huge boost. The worm had finally turned. Change is really possible, we all thought.

That didn't last long, though. The opposition to the President's agenda was united and unprecedented, whereas the Democratic members of Congress squabbled, refused to work as a team, and generally acted as though the control of Congress would be theirs forever.

The White House learned quickly that to govern, they must learn to compromise. And so they did, which only made the Republicans' demands more outrageous, and the Democrats' complaints about the President's competence more strident.

The Left bitched about Republicrats, and intimated that the President needed to grow a pair. The Right accused the President of being a socialist and a degenerate. Their list of the President's supposed crimes became absurd; their spokespeople began to seem seriously unhinged.

Not that it mattered. Whatever trumped-up nonsense the Right put into their talking points instantly became the prevailing news story of the day, no matter how self-serving or farcical.

And then the voters swung back, and the Democrats lost the Congress. If the Left thought that the President's agenda was compromised now, they hadn't seen anything yet.

All of this came back to me today, as I watched President Clinton in the White House briefing room, defending Obama's tax cut compromise. So, for those of you too young to remember the Clinton presidency, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. Take the Obama presidency, minus being African-American, add a huge dose of hound dog, and you have the Clinton presidency, right down to the Right's desperate maneuvering to define the administration by their support of gays in the military.

Watching President Clinton tack right back then was a hard lesson for me, but I only had to learn it once. And the unhappy truth is that you cannot govern this country from the left, folks. You cannot do it with a Democratic majority in Congress, and you sure as hell cannot do it without one. And anyone who thinks otherwise is Nader-voting fool.

You can't do it because the President doesn't have enough power to overcome the resistance of the Americans who do not want to be governed from the left. Our government is not structured that way. It's checks and balances, folks. That is our strength - that the President does not have total power over what legislation is passed.

And something else to all you Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatevers out there.

It is stunning to me, stunning, that you so smugly snipe about the ignorance of many people on the Right, and yet you behave in many of the same ways for which you ridicule them. I mean, look, personally, I am further left than anyone I know, but when I listen to Olbermann, or Maddow, or Maher, I am fully aware that they are trying to sell me their point of view, and they're not going to please their bosses by leading every show with a 3 minute rant about how the President is making compromises that are reasonable, given the political climate.

Of course the professional Left is riled up and ranting about Obama's lack of backbone. That's their job. And we can agree with their world view in our hearts, but when they start trying to tell me that Obama could have gotten a health care bill with a public option passed in that Congress if he'd only tried hard enough, that's when I get off the train. Because he couldn't. He could not do that. No one could have done that. And if you think otherwise, then you are as gullible as the people who watch Glenn Beck and staple tea bags to the brims of their hats.

Because politics is not what you read in Howard Zinn. It's not what Noam Chomsky said in that documentary you saw in college. Politics is the art of the possible, you fucking babies. And frankly, I wish you would grow a pair.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

The other day I was at a stop sign, waiting to turn right onto a well-traveled street in Los Angeles, and a young man on a bicycle rode towards my car on the sidewalk, and then dramatically stopped just short of my passenger door and performed an elaborate dumb-show, the point of which appeared to be that it was outrageous that he, a young man well-appointed in expensive kicks and elaborately stitched jeans, and no doubt on his way from one of the more socially relevant offerings of the local community college, and sporting a hair cut that I would know looked nothing like Justin Bieber's if I weren't so fucking uncool, yes, it was outrageous that he had to interrupt his illegal sidewalk odyssey to allow for the normal driving activities of some stupid fucking old bitch.

Readers, it is times like this when I frequently admonish myself for not being more, ah, ZEN I think they call it. Who cares if the little twerp made gestures at you that he copied from some rapper who probably had real problems that were much more deserving of such emphatic miming? Why do you care? Let it go. Breathe. Signal your lane change. Breathe some more.

But then I always remember that I fucking HATE Zen. Zen sucks. Zen is for people too self-involved to give a shit. What I really need, is better punchlines. For instance, when the aforementioned helmet baby was all up in my Volvo wagon grille, I should have rolled my window down and said "Why yes, it IS a '96. Jealous?"

Instead I screamed at him in a manner that no doubt exactly fulfilled his expectations of me, and he rode away the morally triumphant one, and I imagine laid his aggressively styled head on his pillow that night and dreamed of vanquishing all the haters with the righteousness of his gesticulations.

A lot has been made of us haters recently. We've been a busy bunch, all wrapped up in our efforts to keep Bristol Palin off the celebrity dance competition throne. If I were a Zen-type person, I might muse for a moment on Bristol's surprisingly ill-informed beliefs of how the voting system on Dancing With the Stars works, and that it is, in fact, impossible to vote against any contestant -- it's only possible to vote for them. And then I would remind myself that in the grand scheme of things, none of this matters. As Gandhi once said, all tyrants will fall in the end. And besides, what if all of us, what if our entire universe were merely a speck of dust underneath the fingernail of a giant...something. A giant...tuba, I don't know, I suck at this, clearly. And I'm not Zen, and so I just want to tell Sarah's jackass-in-training that the definition of a hater is one who harbors malevolence without justification, and who broadcasts her resentment with self-satisfaction and a sense of superiority. Just a little something to think about, dear.

Look, I had no intention at all of thinking, much less writing, about That Stupid Dance Show, even though both my parents were dance instructors and I LOVE dancing. But when I'm watching my show, I don't want to be called a hater just because I want someone with talent to win over someone without talent. And goddammit it bothers me when people say I don't live in the real America, because I do. I live in the real America. United lost my luggage last week. My old dog is dying and it makes me sad. I don't know what my company is going to do for revenue in six months. I need to lose weight. I'll probably get screwed out of my Social Security by those goddamn Baby Boomers. My last haircut was disappointing. There are so many homeless on the streets it feels like the '80s. I can't afford to replace my brakes right now. And I worry that it is already too late to reverse my country's slow circling of the global drain.

I secretly think we may all be fucked.

How to succeed in politics without really trying

2010-10-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

If I live to be 100, and right now I'm just about halfway there, I will never understand the feelings of adoration and respect the workers of this country have for CEOs, and why on this green earth anyone would ever say that a CEO knows how to fix one damn thing, ever.

It's the new economy, which means that people like me are forever having to change jobs in order to progress and stay employed, so I've personally known and worked directly for several CEOs, and I've closely followed the careers of quite a few more from inside the companies they run. And it's not that they're stupid, necessarily, although quite a few of them are stupid. It's that they're lazy. They're greedy bullshit artists, most of them, and they don't deserve your respect.

Here's my disclaimer: many CEOs are quite brilliant. Those that are, are almost always those who have been with the company since inception, frequently founders, and they understand not only the product, but the market, and their employees. Mayor Bloomberg in NYC seems to be doing a pretty good job overall, okay, but he's an exception.

Oh sure, you're thinking to yourself, it's compelling to want to believe that CEOs are shallow scheming con men, because they're so rich and privileged and it would be awesome to feel superior to them. But could they really get where they are if they were?

Absofuckinglutely. Seen it. Seen it again and again. And by all means, feel completely free to feel superior to CEOs, because they are, taken as a lot, simply reprehensible people.

How can that be? How can they advance in the corporate world if they're such douchebags? Well, you have to remember that corporations love douchebags. Douchebag is pretty much their business model. And besides, most CEOs only really have to know two things:
1. Firing people
2. Driving up the stock price

So, for example, if the corporation is losing money because their supply chain is for shit and they can't get their product to the places where people want to buy it in sufficient numbers to match demand, you think the CEO knows how to fix that? HELL no. He just knows how to fire the top operations guy, and bring in one that he hopes will solve the problem. That's his entire bag of tricks as far as problem-solving goes. And even the new chief operations guy won't know how to solve the problem - but he'll probably bring with him a bunch of his own guys, and although they won't know how to solve it either, they will either find the guy who does know, and enable him to do it, or ignore the guy who does know, because it's too much work to change the corporate culture/expose a powerful exec/re-write all those SOPs. And in that case, they'll just ride out the wave of failure until their guy gets fired and they get to move onto the next big gullible dinosaur of lumbering corporate stupidity.

And as far as #2, driving up the stock price goes, that's easy, because it's basically a variation on #1. The easiest way to drive up the stock price is to increase profits (it's called "productivity," though, so as not to sound quite so craven and soulless). The easiest way these days to increase profits is to fire everyone you don't play golf with, and send their jobs to India, or Mexico, or China, or just simply make those left behind work harder to absorb the loss of their colleagues.

And make no mistake, that's exactly what Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman did. Yeah, it'd be pretty hard to find two better examples of unimaginative insipid chief executives pulling their one fucking trick out of their dumbass stock CEO playbooks than Fiorina and Whitman.

So anyway, if you want to vote Democratic on November 2nd because Whitman was mean to her maid, or because she paid off Princeton to make her son's rape accusation go away, that's fine. If you want to vote Democratic because Fiorina said mean things about Barbara Boxer's hair, or because she's vociferously anti-choice, you'll get no argument from me. But it would be nice if people also rejected them because CEOs don't make good public servants. Because public servants serve the public, and CEOs have no fucking idea how to do that.

Nor do they have any inclination to learn.

They're simply just bad people. Look, let me put it this way: if government is a hen house, and, you know, it kinda is, then they are the foxes. They're not there to restructure the coop. They're there to eat chickens and move the fuck on before anyone figures out what it is they've done.

And if you, dear deeply credible voters, still need one more piece of evidence that the whole "what we need is a CEO!" meme is complete fucking hogwash, then I invite you to think back a mere ten years, when Al Gore was beaten over the head with his own lifetime of public service by serial CEO George W. Bush.

Yeah. That's what I thought.

That cuckold lives in bliss

2010-10-07T16:49:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, one of those trite signs that people tack to the walls of their cubicles actually catch you off guard, and a tiny bubble of futility pops in your brain and for just a second you look around and you think the biggest WHAT THE FUCK? you have ever thought in your life. And that WHAT THE FUCK encompasses not only what you're doing with your life, and the absurdity of your choices, but also the deeply, deeply confounding nature of this existence that we have crafted for ourselves. And then the next second, you're thinking again about whether copier repairs can be amortized on the same schedule as the assets.

The sign that I saw, by the way, said "Where am I going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Yeah, I'm aware that it's somewhat anticlimactic to actually tell you what the trite sign said. I just think it's important for you to understand that for me, at least, my willingness to play along in this crazy-ass Angeleno Californian American Earthling solar system resident of the Milky Way thing is extremely tenuous, and it doesn't exactly require profundity to set that willingness caroming off into the psychological ether.

Because where are we going? Really. Where are we going?

How you doing, readers? I know I've been gone for a while. I'd like you to know that I don't stop thinking about you, both the real yous out there and the make-believe yous that exist only in my head. I'm sorry that I haven't written, and it's nice that many of you have let me know that you consider it unacceptable. I consider it unacceptable as well, and I have nothing to say about it other than that for the last couple of months, I sort of have that feeling all the time like you get when your mouth drops open and you mean to speak, but you are so dumbfounded that you sort of can't? Like that.

It's not pleasant, that feeling. Also, it's difficult to look tough, or serious, or even just unmoronic with your mouth always hanging open.

How else to describe what I've been feeling, watching us, as a city, a state, a country, a planet, continue so deliberately down such a destructive path?

Israel clearly doesn't give a shit about peace with the Palestinians. We don't give a shit about making Israel give a shit. There will therefore never be peace, and chalk it up to the endemic corruption of our political system and good, old-fashioned ignorance of the issues, and our supremely arrogant belief that we will, in spite of a 3000-strong evidence to the contrary, never have to pay for what we do.

Americans, in particular, don't seem to think that we will ever have to pay for anything. We can continue to say and eat and buy and drive and throw away anything, and it will never affect us. We are a nation of perpetual motion machines, forgetting that less than a decade ago, we were brought screeching to a halt by the simplest and cheapest of enemies. And what is perhaps the saddest part of it all is that we were set back into our blind motion by our own leader, who chose not to lead, not to examine, not to question, even, but to say to us, as if we were all children, that our enemy was merely jealous. Jealous of us.

Do mosquitoes bite humans because they're jealous of the blood that flows through our veins? Did David sling that rock at Goliath because he envied his prowess with a giant spear? Did all those Japanese military men hurl those missiles at Godzilla because they wished they could crush the city of Tokyo beneath their own feet?

Yes, we have freedoms. Some of us have more freedoms than others. Meg Whitman can buy herself 119 million dollars worth of freedom. That's a lot of freedom. Enough, it would appear, to rewrite history. An illegal immigrant can leave work at the end of the day, buy a 40, get drunk and shout obscenities at the sky, or loudly sing songs about a home he probably will never see again. That kind of freedom is cheap.

I write this thing that you're reading. It, too, is a relatively cheap kind of freedom, which is, I suppose, why blogs are so widely reviled. But I can't help thinking sometimes that it's all I have.

Ugh.

2010-08-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Okay readers, if you have any interest in hearing what I have to say when technical constraints prevent me from being long-winded, I'm on Twitter. Vikki_Tikkitavi

Tripping

2010-08-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

While the rest of America seems to be tilting at 9/11 windmills, on this 90th anniversary of women finally being granted the right to vote by American men, I find my mind going to that Palin woman.

No, not the one who took Dan Quayle's "Dumbest Vice Presidential Pick EVER" title, although since I've gone there, how about that Ben Quayle, son of Dan Quayle? The Quayles are an established Hoosier dynasty, but Ben apparently left Indiana and is running in Arizona. I guess even Indiana has a limit on how much stupid they'll buy, although, wow, I thought once you were done in Indiana, you were pretty much done. It's like finding out that there's an NFL team you can be traded to after the Lions don't want you anymore.

Ah, Arizona. Remember when they were merely cranky about black people?

So, no, I don't really spend time thinking about Sarah Palin, although she did blip on my radar today when I found out that she criticized liberal women for "crucifying" women who don't support women's rights, and then she referred to us as witches. I think. She called us a "cackle of rads," although maybe she meant a gaggle, and meant to call us geese. Frankly, I'm not sure what she meant, and it's best not to try to examine Palin-speak too directly, lest the sight of it turn you to stone.*

The briefly governor Palin also accuses us rads of "hijacking feminism," although if you ask me, she's the one who's driving it like she stole it.

But it's the unfortunately-monikered Bristol Palin that I've been thinking about, because, for several months now, the Palin camp's message regarding Bristol has been that she has her life pulled together, and is totally still on message about abstinence being the only method of birth control that works, although, frankly, it certainly didn't work for her, did it? I mean, other methods of birth control have "failed to use correctly" statistics built into their effectiveness rates, so I don't know why abstinence shouldn't. If it did, can you imagine how low the effectiveness rating would be? I mean, when I was a teenager, I failed to be abstinent almost all of the time. I was smart enough, however, to have a back-up method - hence the gloriously child-free years that followed, during which I managed to not become the country's most egregious cautionary tale. I mean, unless we're talking about how ill-advised it is to marry an actor, because then, yes, I would probably qualify as a precautionary tale.

But anyhoo, in short, the Palin camp message has been that Bristol is just fine, which, I have to admit, puzzles me.

Because is she's fine, and not crazy, or damaged, or slutty, or disease-ridden, then what the fuck are we talking about with all this blather about teenagers needing to avoid sex?

If she's fine, then no harm done, I mean, except for the unwanted baby part, which could have been avoided if she'd slipped a raincoat on Levi's Johnston. So, except for having to drag that kid around, she's okay, right, Palins?

Then why not solve the having-a-baby part of the equation, Mr. & Mrs. Palin, instead of trying to prevent the sex part? Because I don't know if you know this - I mean it seriously seems like you may not - but you can easily prevent sex from resulting in babies. Seriously, you can - it's almost laughably simple. Whereas, trying to keep teenagers from having sex...pretty much impossible.

Unless...they have another reason for keeping teenage girls from having sex? Because we all know that it's teenage girls that we sort of collectively are really interested in keeping celibate, right? Take a look at that picture of that "Purity Ball" I put up there. You don't see any little dudes hanging out making creepy-ass pledges to their opposite-sex parents, do ya?

And look, there was just this study done, that proves that merely having sex does not affect a student's academic performance, either.

So can we all just agree then, that what we really want to control, is not the consequences of sex, but the sex itself?

And if we'll admit to that, then why not just name the grizzly in the room, and say that what we really want to control is female sexuality? And we want to control it not just by keeping females from engaging in sex as long as we can, but also keep them from avoiding the unwanted and avoidable consequences of some sex acts, and also keep them, once they are fully into adulthood, from enjoying sex in the same non-judgemental atmosphere in which men enjoy sex?

Bristol is a cautionary tale only because her parents never taught her how to procure, use, and insist upon, birth control. All Bristol did was exercise the autonomy that was rightfully hers, and for that she has become the go-to joke about dim-witted baby-having sluts by stand-up comedians everywhere, and she doesn't deserve that. I have no idea how bright Bristol Palin is or is not, but it was her right and her time to consent, and instead of it being one step on the path to healthy adult relations, that one night of sex became a millstone around her neck, and all because her parents buy into some dumbass Christian hoo-hah about the role of women. If you ask me, they should apologize to her for thinking that she wasn't worthy of knowing everything that they knew, and more. If I had a girl of my own, you can bet your ass I would know her worth.

And Bristol, if you're out there, you're worth everything, sweetie. Everything. Come and sit by me, and I will tell you more.

*See what I did there, Sarah? That's how you call someone a nasty name in a roundabout, mythical allusion-y type way.

The damage done

2010-08-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

In one of the many strange jobs I have had along the crazy-ass road to where I am now, I used to analyze claims for a company that, legally, could only pay out if there had been a violation of an obscure little corner of the legal codes. Okay, so figuring out if the law had been violated was frequently easy, but there was always a more basic question to be answered before any checks got written:

How are they damaged?

And I don’t mean how were the people that made the claims damaged as humans, although lord knows I could’ve written a book about that. What it means is, upon what is their claim for damages based? It’s such an important question, and yet one that’s so easy to lose sight of as you slog through the piles of facts and allegations, that at the time of my employ I wrote it large on a piece of paper and tacked it to the wall of my cubicle: How are they damaged?

Later, when I served on the jury at a civil trial wherein an inmate of LA County’s correctional system sued the county for allegedly denying him medical treatment during his processing, the question would take prominence in my life again, as I sat in the jury box for 6 weeks watching the plaintiff’s lawyers bark up a succession of wrong trees.

We denied the plaintiff an award, mostly because he was caught in a lie in court - and caught on film not using his arm sling by a private detection hired by the county. But what bugged me most was that his attorneys had ignored the most important question to be addressed in a civil suit. When the jury was released and the lawyers from both sides stopped us in the hallway and asked us why we had gone the way we did, I couldn’t help but let my long-stewing frustration escape. “You never demonstrated damages!” I said to the plaintiff’s side. “Even if we had believed him, we were supposed to base an award on – what?” I recall that the attorneys for the plaintiff looked a little stunned at my intensity – or maybe they were just pissed that they had spent months working for no payday. When I looked over at the county’s attorneys, I expected them to nod in agreement and murmur something along the lines of “she’s quite right, of course.” Instead they eyed me suspiciously, as lawyers are wont to do when someone outside of their profession borrows their language and employs it to make a point of her own.

And the point is, if you’re going to drag all those people into a hideous paneled room with uncomfortable chairs and no internet access for a month and a half and make them listen to how you’ve done been wronged, then you damn well better say exactly what’s wrong with you, and exactly what it’s going to take to make it right. But the good news about that whole waste of time was that although points of order and the rules of hearsay and the citing of precedents can all get pretty complicated, the basic principles of law can be so refreshingly simple, that even a woman trained as an actress can understand them.

Which brings us to last week, when Proposition 8, the ban on gay marriage, was overturned in court. The proponents of P8 argued the case alone because the Governator and our Attorney General and former Linda Ronstadt beau/current gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown declined to defend the vile piece of legislative caca. And those proponents failed to accomplish, and perhaps even to identify, the one crucial goal of their case.

Bet you can guess what that was.

And for those of us who have spent the last couple of years arguing with homophobic idiots, saying “tell me how it hurts you if gay people get married!” vindication has come at last. Whether we knew it or not, we had put our fingers on the pivotal argument of the case, and just like in real life, wherein our asshat relatives stammer about the sanctity of an institution that they themselves have managed to unsanctify on occasions too numerous to numerate, the proponents of P8 failed to address the crux, and the judge quite rightly called them on their weak-ass shit. They could not demonstrate damages, my friends, and that, as my mom used to say, is the name of that tune.

Of course the final word has yet to be written on Prop 8. It’s difficult to imagine that those five uptight SCOTUS motherfuckers wouldn’t be game to fuck it all up. After all, they’re all Catholics, a church that might not win the gold medal for homo-hating, but it’s certainly, you know, on the podium.

Meanwhile, Judge Walker has set the clock ticking on the stay that keeps gay people from marrying right now in the wake of the overturning of P8. The proponents of P8 are being allowed a chance to argue that P8 should remain in force until the appeals are exhausted, but in another glorious turn of the legal screw, they might not have grounds to even argue the stay in court because…get this, now…they can’t demonstrate that lifting the stay would damage them.

Fuck yeah.

How glorious would it be if the court decided that all those meat-headed hatemongers don’t even have a dog in the gay marriage hunt?

If that day comes, and 5pm Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 brings an end to religion-backed bigotry in California, then rejoice, readers, for Lady Justice has shown herself to be not only blind, but maybe a tiny bit butch as well.

An Open Letter to Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown

2010-08-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Genius,

After reading what you said about your "no" vote on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court of the United States, I am including a link (you click on the words "a link" and it takes you there) to a list of U.S. Supreme Court Justices that have no prior judicial experience. See how many? There are 40 of them! Did you know that there have only been 111 Supreme Court Justices, like, ever? So 40 is actually kind of a lot. In case you have trouble with fractions, (and a lot of people do so don't start tripping) that is about 36%. More than a third!

Just something to consider before making a whole speech about how you couldn't vote for Elena Kagan because she didn't have any judicial experience. Oh, and regarding your point about how, given a lack of judicial experience, you would prefer more "practical courtroom experience" than Kagan has - did you know that's kind of a dumbass point of view?

It's true!

See, because if you are hiring a lawyer to sue someone who screwed you over, then yeah, you probably want a good amount of practical courtroom experience. But if you are looking for a judge for the Supreme Court of the United States, practical courtroom experience is actually not really the most important thing. Because Supreme Court judges don't argue cases. What they do is, they listen to the guys arguing cases, and then - and pay attention, Scott, because this is the important part - then, they draw upon their vast knowledge and understanding of the law, and they use it to decide who wins.

Okay, so, if you look Kagan's resume, and here it is (again, click on the words to see it) compared to former Chief Justice (the Chief Justice is like the head guy of all the Justices) Rhenquist's resume, you know, just FYI (For Your Information) on that, you can see that wow! She had some jobs where she really probably had to know a lot about the law! And not just like who-can-sue-who-type law, but really complicated law, like the kind of laws that senators vote on. And you are a senator, so you can ask one of your assistants to show you a copy of a law that you have voted on recently, and you can see for yourself that it's pretty complex and frankly, not just anyone can make head or tails of it.

Also, I don't know if you know this, and it's not bad if you don't, because it was only a news story for a couple of weeks and it's summer - right? - and who really pays attention to the news in the summer? - but Elena Kagan used to work for a Supreme Court Justice! No, she totally did!

I know, weird, right?

So anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up, you know, so just in case you wanted to maybe cool it with what you're saying? Because it's not that smart?

xoxoxox!
v.

p.s. And also BTW (By The Way), you can tell all your friends that when you criticize someone for not really being super open about their point of view on a lot of stuff, and you hint around that maybe they are kind of a liar, then really, if you ask me, you totally should not then go and lie about why you are not voting for that person. Are you feeling me? Just say you are not voting for her because you don't like the way she thinks about stuff. That's all. You shouldn't make up reasons that are just totally transparent. Because it makes you hypocritical. For real.

Hey momma, look sharp

2010-07-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Lately, Sarah Palin has given up on comparing herself to a pit bull with lipstick, and has instead employed a "mama grizzly" analogy. I'm not sure how she, and the people who pay to hear her speak, are like female grizzly bears, because she did not elaborate. She never elaborates. I don't think she knows how.

If I were to give her the benefit of the doubt, which I suspect she relies upon pretty heavily, I would speculate that she is invoking a protective ferocity regarding one's offspring, which I am not against out of hand. In fact, I admire female bears generally for their willingness to die in order to save the lives of their cubs. Although I should point out that these are actual cubs, mind you, not pre-cub fetuses still in-bear-utero.

What Palin doesn't mention, of course, because I think she can only utter variations on 3 or 4 sentences per event, is that male grizzlies will kill, and even eat, grizzly cubs, even if they were fathered by him. So I'm guessing that Todd won't be invoking any "papa grizzly" comparisons any time soon.

Parenting is not easy, and lord knows that you encounter plenty of bad examples, usually right in front of you on line at the supermarket. When I used to wait tables, I saw all kinds of parenting on display in the restaurant, including the kind where toddlers were basically set loose in our dining room as if it were their own private play room.

Of course, the inevitable occurred one day, and a child was injured as a result.

The child, a four-year-old boy, ran full steam out of the restroom and straight into the legs of a server in the hallway who was carrying one of those giant trays absolutely loaded with dishes. And although the waiter actually had the agility and the presence of mind to regain enough control of the tray to slam it into the wall with the dishes trapped between the wall and the tray, rather than let the whole kit and caboodle fall on the boy’s head, one small dish from the tray did fall on his head, causing a one-inch bruise under one eye.

Of course, the parents sued the restaurant. I don't even have to tell you that, do I?

They were also very nasty to the waiter, which struck me as particularly vile, since it was his fast thinking that kept 50 lbs. of heavy-duty stoneware from raining down upon their offspring’s little fontanelle.

Don’t get me wrong, I also saw some exemplary parenting in the restaurant. I once saw a woman dining alone with her toddler look at the menu and exclaim loudly "Look, Geoffrey! They have salade Niçoise!" Think how differently your life might have turned out if your mother had done that for you! Also, many times, I saw parents tell unruly children that if they didn’t behave, then they would have to leave the restaurant. And once, I saw a parent actually follow through on that threat.

The thing is, when you see parents who think their children can do no wrong, and then you see parents who are really dedicated to making sure their children grow up to be good members of society, you may have vastly different views of their parenting skills, but you don’t generally doubt, at least not on that criterion alone, that they love their kids. They all love their kids, right?

I would venture to say that there are those out there who maybe even think that the conscientious parents might love their kids a tiny bit more. Because they are willing to take the heat and work just a little harder.

And yet how funny that the Democrats, the ones who are willing to give this overgrown bully of a country a little tough love, a little correction, we are the ones who are said to not love the U.S.A. Because we criticize the country we are raising up, we therefore do not sufficiently love it.

Yeah, see what I did there? Y’all didn’t even know you were mid-metaphor, didja?

Look, I fucking love my country as much as the next guy. I love it as much as that meathead in line behind me at the hardware store with the Toby Keith t-shirt and the Bush/Cheney sticker on the rear window of his 4x4, whether he thinks so or not. Because I’m there, buster, buying mulch for my front yard so it looks well-kept and the property values stay up and the gangs don’t move in and your kids still feel safe cutting down my street on their way to school.

And I’ll be there in that voting booth, whenever the state needs to authorize another bond to pay for their education. Even though I don’t have kids myself and it means higher taxes for me - I’ll be there.

I’ll be there wherever there’s the LAPD beating an immigrant protester. I’ll be in the way gays yell when they’re angry that they can't marry the one they love. I’ll be in the way people say yes to their doctor, even though they know what he's about to do will send them to the poorhouse. And I’ll be in the way soldiers fight back their tears as they unload the coffins from overseas in the dead of night, so that no one can see the cost that we pay for this war that we’ll never win and this victory that we'll never have. I’ll be there, too.

I’ll be everywhere. Because I love my country. And I’m not giving it up without a fight.

Small people got no reason to live

2010-06-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

Say what you will about Obama’s handling of the oil spill, that he got BP to put up not only 20 billion for spill-related claims, but 100 million for unemployment compensation in advance is brilliant. Hopefully the deal is structured in such a way that BP can’t split and pawn its debt obligations onto some unprofitable subsidiary, whilst taking the profitable part somewhere else.

Oh, that’s right, BP cares about small people, so they won’t do that. I forgot.

The Republicans have been falling over one another trying to show how much they are on BP’s side in this whole thing. It’s a little puzzling until you remember that the Republican political strategy since 2008 can be summed up in 2 words: Batshit Crazy.

And speaking of batshit crazy, what about the residents of the Gulf, whose feelings about this disaster can pretty much be paraphrased thusly: I can’t believe Obama let the oil companies jeopardize our livelihoods with that dangerous deep water drilling and…you’ve suspended deep water drilling – how dare you!

Pro-deep water drilling Louisiana Parish President Charlotte Rand has proclaimed to the media that her community is being used to promote the president's agenda. Shocking! Except, wait, what is that agenda, again? Oh, it's energy independence and lower emissions and more green jobs and um, really good things that we all want? For shame, Mr. President!

Is anyone else getting the feeling that it is not possible for Obama to win? Americans want government to be smaller but do more things. They hate deficit spending but don’t want their (fill in the blank with any government benefit program) to change or run out. They want unfettered capitalism, and they want the government to force private industry hire more people and treat them better. They decry the nanny state, except when they need Washington to come in and clean up the messes that others have made. It reminds me of the old engineers joke: You can have it good, you can have it cheap, you can have it fast. Pick two.

Well, America, you can have a government that is effective at doing what you want them to do, or you can have a Libertarian government that leaves you to fend for yourself. YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH.

In fact, considering that the Supreme Court has already let it be known where they stand on the whole small people vs. big oil deal, I’m surprised that they haven’t declared that BP’s oil spill is protected free speech, and it is unconstitutional for the government to limit what they spew.

My bad

2010-06-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

I have friends who will go see any dumbass vampire whatever that comes along. I have friends who went fucking apeshit over that ridiculous Harry Potter hoo-hah. I have friends who think nothing of forking over their hard-earned money to watch lame CGI car-monster things blow up other lame CGI things. I know people who just want to watch movies where cars are driven fast and that’s all. I know people who will go to see any comic book-inspired movie, no matter how lame, and will insist that these movies are really, really good, and even that the actors in them should win Academy Awards.

Everyone’s entitled to their own peculiar brand of Crap That They Happen To Like, and I’m no exception. But I take pride in at least knowing that the Crap That I Happen To Like is crap. I don’t try to pretend that it’s not crap. I know it’s crap, but it’s Crap That I Happen To Like, and so leave me alone and let me enjoy my crap and I promise I won’t bore you at some party or in your cubicle by waxing rhapsodic for twenty minutes about how some actor of middling talent has elevated the franchise.

So here’s the Crap That I Happen To Like: Sex and the City. Yup. It’s bona fide crap, but I like it. And, yeah, blah blah blah it was a pretty funny tv series but the movies suck blah blah blah. Believe me, I, unlike the people who think Watchmen wasn’t awful, harbor absolutely no illusions about the level of crapitude that I am endorsing every time I shell out to go see SATC on opening day, or pre-order the latest DVD on Amazon. The scripts are awful, the filmmaking is beyond hacky, the plots are just the worst, and the costumes are, well, they look like they were the product of some kind of dare. I don’t care. Well, of course I wish it were good, but it’s not good, and I’m still going to see it any way.

What I object to, is not any legitimate criticism of any of the above. I could read reviews that complain about the implausibility of the characters’ dialogue and wardrobes all day long and it would not bother me a bit. I would probably agree with them on all of their points, in fact. (Speaking of which - Michael Patrick King, if you are out there somewhere, please – I beg of you – please bring back the series writers for the next one.)

What I object to is the hate. My crap isn’t hurting anyone, and it’s certainly none crappier than most of the other crap out there, so why make it so personal?

Because when reviewers ridicule the aging faces and bodies of the women in the movie, and express disgust at the thought of them having sex, I have to take it personally, because I AM THE SAME AGE AS THEM. I am hanging out there myself, about halfway between Carrie and Samantha, so if the thought of their middle-aged lady parts is grossing you out, then fuck you. You’re a hater, and you’re not even an imaginative one, because it’s the easiest fucking thing in the world to make fun of women who are not as young as the women that you think are hot.

Older women have always been Hollywood’s reliable punching bags, and so it’s no surprise that critics are particularly hostile to movies where the joke is not on us. Normally, when we’re not being mocked for daring to still possess a sex drive, or for having the gall to believe ourselves to be still vital and sensuous, we’re being told to make ourselves invisible, because once the cooch dries up and the skin goes “leathery,” as one reviewer so tactfully put it, then what the fuck are we still hanging around for?

Holy fucking shit, y’all, why do you think so many women happen to like this crap, anyway? Because it means someone cares about us. Because someone still thinks we are worth the bother of making terrible, shallow, mindless crap for. Someone still thinks we are worthy of a hilariously relentless product placement assault. Someone still thinks that there’s a sliver of market that would rather look at a really expensive impractical shoe than a really expensive impractical piece of automobile nonsense. It’s because someone out there knows that for us, “Lawrence of my labia” is way funnier than some pimply young dork fucking an apple pie. I know, hard to believe. But then, you’re not a ridiculous gross old dried-up wrinkly-faced cougar like me.

But it's a dry heat

2010-05-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Arizona, apparently not satisfied with the amount of public ridicule being leveled against them, has decided now to outlaw the studying of non-white culture in public schools. According to the governor and the state school czar, ethnic curriculums, such as those focusing on Latino, African-American, and Native contributions to American culture, promote hating on white people.

Um, I have news for you, Arizona, it’s not “The Influence of Zuni Decorative Motifs in the Art Deco Movement” that’s prompting the brown people of your state to give you the collective stink eye, it’s…well, it’s a lot of things, not the least of which is that little “show me your papers” thing you’ve got going on now.

It’s hard to imagine the Republicans, who are always yammering about how much they love freedom, and how much everyone else hates how free we are, backing laws that restrict freedom of speech and movement.

Just kidding. It’s not hard to imagine at all. Nobody really thinks that Republicans love freedom. I mean come on. If it’s one thing the W years taught us, it’s that Republicans don’t give a good goddamn about freedom.

Come to think of it, it’s hard to say what Republicans do love. I would say that they love other Republicans, if they weren’t so found of throwing one another to the lions whenever one of them strays too far towards the center of an issue.

I would say that they love money, except that the majority of them tend to do better financially when a Democrat is in office.

I would say that they love the military, except they don’t really treat them very well, and no Republican administration has tried harder to reform the VA than Obama's has.

I would say that they love their god, except I don’t see how that could be, since they’ve made him out to be such an asshole. For one thing, he’s always causing homosexuals to be born, and then turning right around and trying to wipe them out with hurricanes and such. Hey Republican God, why not send a hurricane or typhoon or something to wipe out bin Laden, if you’re so simultaneously pro-America/handy with the catastrophic storms?

I would say that they love the flag, except they’re always disrespecting it by pretending that it represents their anger, or their insecurities about minorities, or their ignorance of our foreign policies, instead of what it really represents: The United States of America.

I love America. But America is not perfect. We’re like a family that way. It’s okay to say that. It’s okay to want to make it better. I mean, if you can’t even admit that we made some pretty bad decisions when we were younger, then I don’t even know how we can move forward at all.

And as a special message to those Americans who got their shit kicked by those floods in Tennessee: I’m sorry about what happened to you and your homes and your stuff. And it sucks that all that coverage of the world’s lamest terrorist, and the world’s shoddiest oil rig, pushed the spotlight off of you in your hour of need. Truly. The media was bored by your disaster, I guess, and it shouldn’t be that way. I could not agree more. I’m glad you banded together, and that your politicians are working with the various branches of government to enable your recovery. You have behaved admirably under unbelievable adversity, and that truly makes me feel proud to be an American.

But what hurts me, my brothers and sisters, is when you take what the media has done, and you construe it to mean that we don’t care about you because you are not New Orleans, nor Haiti. Or when you say that we only care about the things that Oprah tells us to care about. Whatever you think of our president, you weren’t cheated out of your due because you are white. It hurts me that you think that. That you maybe know in your heart it isn’t true, but say it anyway, hurts me even more.

Look, we don’t love you any less because of who you are, no matter who’s got his ass in the big chair in Washington. We love you the same, goddammit. That’s the whole point of it all, of everything we’re supposed to be about. So what good does it do to continue to count coup upon one another’s heads?

Here’s an idea: let the schoolkids read about Pancho Villa if they want to. Meanwhile, let’s all set about to prove to those kids that’s it’s not 19fucking10 in America anymore. How about that?

You're doing fine, Oklahoma!

2010-04-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

As we inch ever closer to women having fewer rights in this country than they did 40 YEARS AGO, I have become gradually inured to the idiocy and cruelty of those in the anti-abortion movement.

So it came as no surprise to me that the Oklahoma legislature has decided that women (all women - without exception for rape victims, or those who have conceived through incest) seeking to have an abortion must not only submit to an ultrasound, as several other states already require, but that the doctor must position the ultrasound monitor where the woman can see it, and (in case she chooses not to look) the doctor must also describe the physical characteristics of the fetus, including its limbs and organs.

Pfft! Snooze. Why don’t you call me back, Oklahoma, when you pass a law requiring women to name the fetus, paint the nursery, and buy one of those really expensive strollers? Then we’ll talk. Until then, you’re fucking rank amateur female subjugators. You’re like the Bristol Palin of women hating. You’re all blah blah blah, don’t have sex if you aren’t rich enough to hire someone else to take care of your baby for you, sluts. I challenge you, Oklahoma, to get all medieval on us women, and I mean literally medieval. Like, pass a law that any woman wanting an abortion must be burned at the stake first. Then we’ll know you’re really serious about this oppression of women shit. Until you do that - fuck off, Oklahoma. Go stage another production of that nancy musical with your name in it that you love so much, you fucking pussies.

Except, uh-oh, it appears that Oklahoma took me up on my dare, readers. Because they just also passed a law that “protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a (sic) unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion.”

Wow. Just fucking wow, Oklahoma. You got me. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to come at us from quite this angle but I got to say…wow.

You’ve just legalized doctors lying to women so that doctors can make women’s medical decisions for them.

Ah…it’s fucking brilliant. I applaud you, and your stupid musical, too. And I expect you not to rest on your laurels Oklahoma, but to muck back in straightaway and start passing some legislation that will enable others to lie to us too, like pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers, and oh, fuck it, why not include the people who make tampons and douches and feminine hygiene sprays and Pamprin and condoms and spermicides and all that shit that women use to deal with that nasty fucking hole they got between their legs that separates them from all the real people walking the face of this earth? Because bitches be some dumb fucking bitches, bitches. And the fewer things they got to think about, the better.

¡Atienda, usted dumbass gabachos conservadores!

2010-04-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Latino activists have been using re-fried beans to smear swastikas on the windows of the Arizona state capitol building to demonstrate that in terms of fascism, extending healthcare benefits to the poor, and reining in corporate greed, really can’t hold a candle to enabling the police to detain anyone, at will, and demand proof of citizenship before being released. I mean, weren’t you paying attention during any of those World War 2 movies I know y’all love to watch? At the very least, you must remember that having one’s papers in order was a very big deal every week on Hogan’s Heroes, right?

Sooooo….maybe you should stop complaining about Latinos, because they seem to have a better understanding of history, government, and, um, what words mean, than you do.

They’re also funnier than you - admit it. I mean, you guys didn’t even know what teabagging meant - you had to have the media explain it to you. Whereas Latinos employed refried beans, a substance that A) they love, B) looks alarmingly like shit, and C) has been used against them via pejorative stereotypes for decades! It’s the perfect medium for their political statement, and what’s more, there’s none of that pesky sniggering over unintended gay-adjacent innuendo.

You’ve been outplayed, dumbasses, and if you had the sense god gave a gander, you’d slink back home and think about what’s really making you mad, and stop pretending it has anything to do with how much money the government spends.

And speaking of fascists, as a special bonus to those right-wing dumbasses out there who also happen to be Catholic, I challenge you to go home and also think really hard about this bureaucratic demi-god you’ve got lounging about in Vatican City. Are you aware that he’s basically hiding child molesters, and those that covered up the crimes of child-molesters, behind the drapes in the Basilica? Doesn’t that…bother you at all? Are you going to try to oust him, ever, or do you intend to give your highest spiritual leader on earth the kind of free pass you wouldn’t give to a grade school principal?

Also, Catholics: no more making fun of Scientologists, or Mormons, or any other sect in the Pantheon of Preposterous Beliefs. You’re officially ridiculous now, so sign over the great art and buildings and fade into history, already, wouldja? Thanks.

Everybody must get stoned

2010-04-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

The recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the twin U.S. and Mexican border cities of Calexico and Mexicali on Easter Sunday raises two issues in my mind:

God must be hella pissed at Mexico and Mexico-adjacent Southern California! I’m not sure why he would miss LA and our even more godless and even more latte-swilling and lord knows, gayer neighbors to the north, and hit all the Catholics on the border! Maybe he’s trying to tell them that it’s time to dump that Nazi pope guy and found a church not based on buggering children. If so, he’s going about it exactly the wrong way. Everyone knows that the more you fuck with a people, the more they will loyal up to the worst kinds of leaders. Can I get an amen up in here on that?

And given the contrast between the two towns in terms of the kind of damage done, and the amount of casualties, I would say that it’s become clear that stringent building codes, and the enforcement of same, are clearly life- and property-savers in events such as this. The recent quakes in Haiti and Chile also prove this fact.

But what I want to know is, when are the teabaggers going to march in protest of these socialist building codes? We are being forced into a government-run safety program, financed with not only our tax dollars, but our take-home pay as well! It’s the nanny state again, people, telling us that we can’t be trusted to keep ourselves safe and healthy!

Okay, look, you know what? I am tired of this.

I mean it. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep doing this stupid sarcastic parody of someone who believes this idiocy.

So listen up, teabaggers, because I’m going to give it to you straight: building codes are yet another example of why you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. I don't know what kind of wild west fantasy you think you're living in, but I can guarantee you that you are not really living there, and if you did, believe me, you would tuck tail and run back to the real USA, where the government tries its best to keep at bay the thousand different corporate fuckers who are trying to poison and/or cheat you and yours. And just because the media is too chickenshit to say WTF when you assert that the government’s role is too keep us from doing bad things, not to make us do good things, doesn’t mean that your fact-free shit don’t stink.

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, I would like a pledge from each and every one of you that you will never go on Medicare, Medicaid, or receive any kind of VA-financed health care. Plus, a pledge to never show up at any public hospital emergency room, unless you have the means to pay in total for the care you receive.

In addition, if your spouse, children, mother or father, grandparents, or any other close family member receives any of the above services, you will need to remove them from that program, and pay for the equivalent level of health insurance for them as well.

I believe this requirement falls under “family values.”

When you have done this, then you may hurl your bricks. Until then, maybe you should think about what Jesus said about glass houses.

The best medicine

2010-03-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I certainly hope that everyone who considered voting for Ole Whitey McCain in 2008 is breathing a huge sigh of relief with accompanying exaggerated forehead-wiping gesture. Whew! What a dodged bullet that was, eh?

And if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, please to check out Grumpy’s reaction to his party being unable to stop the health care reform bill:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year…they have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

It goes on in typical McCain keep-away-from-my-Gran-Torino fashion.

In response, Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid released the following statement.

Reid of course makes an excellent point about the revelation of McCain's brazen hypocrisy on the ol' "Country First" front. I guess country only comes first when it's a Republican country. Democratic countries can go fuck themselves, apparently.

"For someone who campaigned on ‘Country First’ and claims to take great pride in bipartisanship, it’s absolutely bizarre for Senator McCain to tell the American people he is going to take his ball and go home until the next election."

But Reid also, and in typical Democratic leadership fashion, misses the bullseye on one crucial point: the Republicans can't take their ball and go home, because IT'S NOT THEIR FUCKING BALL. So, they can go home if they want to, but no one's going to chase after them and beg them to come back, nor is the scoring going to cease in their absence.

Yeah, the ball belongs to the Dems, and if the Republicans want to play, they have to play according to the rules of the playground, the most important of which are these:

1. Stop fucking whining about the rules.
2. Cop to your own fouls, if you want a call to go your way.

If you don't follow 1 & 2, then no one will ever want to pick you again, no matter how good you are.

Ah, but just like every thickheaded jackass bully you ever met in your childhood, the Republicans just can't seem to figure out why everyone is laughing at them. They can only rage and stomp their feet and shout words whose meanings they do not understand, and then become even more enraged when they discover that their demonstrations have only made people laugh even louder.

And I think laughter is a perfectly fine reaction to have to all this. Yes, it's troubling to hear their bench yell "Nigger" and "Faggot," and yes, it's heartbreaking to see them treat a sick man with a disrepect you wouldn't show to an organ grinder's monkey, but in the end, their histrionics have become so telling that it's just sorta sad.

The best was when Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) said on the floor of the House, "If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the war between the states — the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

First of all, "free insurance card" is pretty funny. Perhaps no one has ever hipped Broun to the fact that Congress is pretty much the only place where health insurance is still free.

Secondly...The Great War of Yankee Agression. You know, when the overly-agressive Yankee types tried to tell the Southern man what he could do with his own hard-earned darkies.

I told you it was sad. Because they have no idea, no idea that we're onto them. They think they're pretty clever, with all their talk of deficits, and future generations, and constitutionality, and interstate commerce, but really, it's all about the colored boy in their White House, giving away free health care to all his no-account jigaboo cousins. It's all about health insurance welfare queens, my friends. Because some people, and yes, they're mostly old white dudes, believe that every thing they have ever gotten they have earned, whereas every thing non-old white dudes have ever gotten has been handed to them, completely undeserved. This is a necessary belief, if they are to continue to perpetuate a system that favors them, you understand. They must believe it, in order for the planet they inhabit to remain in place, and not get knocked out of its orbit of presumption like some juiced-up Barry Bonds dinger.

So we may as well laugh at them, because there is certainly no talking to them. How do you talk to someone who has free health care from the government, but doesn't think anyone else deserves it? How do you talk to someone who believes that a seven hundred billion dollar mistake in the desert is a bargain, but that same amount spent on the health of our people is a scam of historic proportions? How do you talk to someone who, when confronted with the tragedy of the thousands of people who die in this country every year due to lack of coverage, wants to quibble over how many thousand?

And in the end, we may as well laugh because this bill that they have demonized, does precious little to deserve its reputation. It doesn't really help people who can not afford coverage at all. It makes health care more expensive for many women. Many of its most important reforms don't take place for years. It's a step. A very small step. And very dearly paid for by those who fought for it, yes, but much more dearly paid for, of course, by those it disappoints.

Why does the Lone Star State hate our fifty stars?

2010-03-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

Well, now that they’ve discovered a blonde, white woman from Texas who’s a terrorist, I certainly hope that the right wing will subject the Lone Star State to the same kind of pejoratives that they did California in the aftermath of the hoopla over John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” AKA the “misguided Marin County hot-tubber.”

I can’t wait for all the televised hand-wringing about how the conservative Christian climate in Texas makes it a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment. I want Texas listed alongside of Syria and Iran as state sponsors of terrorism. I want to erect a fence around Texas to keep them from crossing the border into the real America. When we do allow them to travel, I want them to be searched, x-rayed, and body-scanned. I want to see their passports; I want their Lone Star beer confiscated if it exceeds 3 ounces, or is not contained in a clear ziplock bag. If someone in a cowboy hat prays to their “god” or goes to the bathroom while on a commercial flight, I want crazy hysterical fucking hell to break loose.

And I call for the government of Mexico to enforce the border along the Rio Grande with national troops, and to stop allowing Texans to cross over to trade guns for cheap hooch, illegal drugs, and sequined sombreros.

I want an apology from the governors of Texas from 1985, when Colleen LaRose (What is that, French?)was first arrested, to when she was allowed to escape their jurisdiction in 2005. That means you, Rick Perry, and you, George W. Bush. Please explain to the American people how you allowed the radicalization of Jihad Jane to happen on your watch.

And I call for the people in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana to build new settlements along their borders with Texas, in order that Texans may be contained within their existing lands. And I call for patriotic Americans to populate these settlements in order to ensure that the country of the United States of America is not threatened by the growing menace of domestic Texan terrorism.

Lastly, I want to remind the American people that the Lone Star State did secede from our Union once, and had to be forcibly integrated back into these United States by order of a treaty of war. And it has not escaped my notice that Texans, including their terrorist-colluding Governor Perry have frequently expressed a desire to secede from us once again. And so I say unto them…now seems like a really good time to do that.

So, you know, feel free.

Oscars 2010: Let's face it, everything below the waist is kaput!

2010-03-08T17:28:00.000-08:00

Whoever said there is no balm in Gilead wasn’t lulled into an insensible stupor last night by the 82nd Academy Awards telecast. Hey, world, got earthquakes? Tsunamis? Crazy teabaggers flying into buildings? Crazy teabaggers setting their houses on fire? Crazy teabaggers trying to storm the Pentagon? Crazy teabaggers refusing to admit that their central beef, i.e., government giveaways to the banks and corporations, can only be solved by more government and not less? Just curl up in front of the world’s most predictable media event and wash all that scary hopey changey stuff right on out of your hair.

The Oscars!® It’s good for what ails ya!®

The Oscars have long suffered by comparison to other award shoes, and have famously sought to distinguish themselves from them, so of course the show began with a musical number danced and sung by Neil Patrick Harris – which was a completely new and original idea if you do not count the last Tony Awards show. Or the last Emmy Awards. Oscar then followed that up by proceeding to reward exactly the same people it always rewards and be ridiculously overblown in all the same ways it always is.

Case in point is that a major acting award went to someone who does a lot of crap but who managed to pull off a respectable serious performance. And no, I’m not talking about Sandra Bullock. Jeff Bridges finally won the Oscar on his fifth try for what was basically Tender Mercies 2, and I’m fine with it even though he is frequently terrible because he did Starman, and I love Starman, and he was really really good in Starman. The academy, like Olympic judges, prefers performances with a high technical difficulty, which usually means that they’re unduly impressed when an actor plays a real person. Morgan Freeman must’ve thought he had it all sewed up then, since he played not just a real person, but a real black person. A real, cool, black person – everything Hollywood loves, in theory. But I think the voters realized that Bridges, the Dude, was not, you know, getting any younger, and it was time for him to have his little statue.

Similarly, Sandra Bullock won for Steel Magnolias 2 under the Ron Howard Provision of academy voting, which is, if you stick around long enough and don’t rock the boat and do reliable box office, you will be rewarded, even if your work is mediocre.

And so, blah blah blah, predictable awards, predictable witty banter, predictable self-effacing visual humiliation of Ben Stiller, predictable terrible dance number in which the dancers’ interpretation of the song tends toward the hilariously literal…

The only mild surprise was that The Hurt Locker managed to hang onto what everybody figured it would get, in spite of a last minute whispering campaign against the filmmakers (financed by, oh, I don’t know, the producers of Inglorious Basterds, maybe?) and a rather suspiciously-timed lawsuit filed by one of the soldiers that the screenwriter interviewed before he wrote the script. But the Academy was rather obviously prepared for their first female Best Director, as they had long time bridesmaid Barbra Streisand there to hand over the award for which she was at one time herself famously snubbed. Also, they had the band poised to play “I Am Woman,” because hey, that’s not dated and cheesey!

Another predictable result of the Oscars was Japan’s reaction today to the Best Documentary win. The film, The Cove, tells the story of a small Japanese town and their horrific and secretive culling of the local dolphin population for food. If you’ve never seen film of what they do, they trap, drown, and spear the dolphins in numbers sufficient to turn the water of the cove completely red with blood. It’s barbaric and ugly, to say the least, and Japan has shut their eyes to it for years, saying that, essentially, we should respect the practice because it is a very old practice. As if that makes it okay.

I’m not sure why, if they’re so miffed and defensive, they don’t simply point out the incredible hypocrisy of our position. After all, lambs are cute. Pigs are intelligent. What exactly is the basis of our objection to this? There’s nothing going on in that cove that doesn’t happen on the kill floor in slaughterhouses all over the United States in every single minute of every single day.

You know what else is predictable? That there will be two reactions to this part of my post: 1. crickets, or 2. but I love bacon! Man, that shit is tired.

So go at it. I’ll be in the bar, trying to replicate that insensible stupor.

Grating expectations

2010-02-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

According to a new study, that tracked fifty thousand cell phone users through logging their locations when calls were made, you could write an algorithm that would predict the current location of any particular person with 93% accuracy.

Yeah, right. You know what this really means? That people who are on their fucking phones all the time are unimaginative slaves to tedium. What the fuck else is new?

I object to being judged based on such a selective sample, mostly because I already live in a city that admittedly loves to hear itself talk, especially via the latest technology. In fact, I would pay cash money for someone to do a study that would consist of walking up to people who are on the phone in public and shaking them silly and yelling “Who the fuck could you possibly need to talk to for 18 hours out of every single fucking day?”

Come to think of it, fuck the study. That sounds like an awesome reality show to me. Someone get my agent on the phone.

Not that we aren’t a highly predictable species, because we are – although if you were paying attention, you might have noticed that something fairly unpredictable happened last night.

An American skater won the men’s figure skating gold medal, even though he didn’t attempt a quadruple jump – a Russian skater (barely) landed a quad, and didn’t win! Yes, it was a victory for skating over jumping, which was an unexpected direction for the stodgy and normally predictable Olympic judges. Of course, this unexpected event was immediately followed by an eminently predictable Russian response from silver medal consolation prize winner Plushenko and his coach, who ventured that any male skater who couldn’t land a quadruple jump was, essentially, a fag – a fine statement from a dude who minced and air-kissed his way through a long program so pandering and cutesy that it made Johnny Weir’s routine look like Don Imus on ice.

Unlike those conservatives who have been in a perpetually apoplectic state since November of 2008, I welcome the occasional bout of unpredictability. I voted for change not just as a catchy slogan, but as an actual means of progression toward a goal. Unfortunately, it’s been lean times for the unexpected, especially in the good ole’ US of A.

I mean, it’s all wealthy powerful male role models apologizing for shagging skanks here, and delusional religious meatheads dictating America’s education curriculum there. Yawn. Total snoozeville - although I have to say I never have figured out why conservative types home-school their kids, I mean, except, I guess, unless they’re worried about their kids forming opinions about racial minorities based on their own experience, instead of their parents’ rabid pronouncements. But no doubt conservatives own the public school curriculum. The only soupçon of progressive a kid in America is likely to get is from the teacher her/himself, who is, after all, still a mammal, and is still capable of catching the stench of bullshit wafting off his or her teaching materials.

But make no mistake, the course we are currently on, wherein progressives become disillusioned with the man they voted into office because he has to, after all, be president of a country wherein not everyone is as progressive as they, was predictable. Progressives deserted Clinton in droves in his first year in office, vowing to NEVER VOTE AGAIN! Fucking pussy-ass so-called liberals give liberals a bad name, if you ask me. I mean, I’m grateful that they delude themselves long enough to get to the polls for a Democratic presidential candidate, but their subsequent four-year-long case of the political vapors has become quite tedious, and it also makes me want to upchuck on their Shepard Fairey collectibles. I long for them to buck the fuck up, but I know in my heart it will never happen.

And adding to the general atmosphere of been there, done that thing, is the omnipresent shit-for-brains conservative Washington Post columnist writing a smug, condescending and factually-challenged column about how smug, condescending, and untruthful liberals are. Dang! If I had a dime for every time I’ve read one of those in the last year, I could buy myself a latte and start on to swillin’ it.

Also predictable? That some right-wing-fed looney bird, no doubt feeling the flames of white man entitlement like the heat from a thousand white-hot suns, would attack hapless federal employees in their cubicles. It’s been done before, remember? And conservatives failed then, and will fail now, to convincingly distance themselves from the murderer. In other words, Joe Stack is NOT Joe 6-pack. Joe 6-pack works in a goddamn cubicle at the Austin office of the IRS, assholes.

But the all-time queen of the clockwork reactionary is, of course, former governor Sarah Palin. As appalling as it is for such a prominent political figure to openly mock the sincere and even desperate dreams of the majority of Americans, as the former governor did when she fake-asked Obama voters “how’s that hopey, changey stuff workin’ out?”, it is, at the same time, neither surprising that she did it, nor that she proclaimed herself a proud American in the next breath with a straight face.

Of course I have lots of sympathy for anyone trying to raise a mentally disabled child, because I think no other group of Americans is more consistently discriminated against.

Hopefully the former governor will forgive my liberal stance on that subject.

I also personally feel that when the soup goes bad, you need to stop serving it up. So, put a rubber on it, Todd, because Mother Nature is telling you that you’re done. You’re in your forties, you have five kids now – which seems to me to be more than sufficient - and besides, your offspring have demonstrated that they’re more than capable of picking up where you left off.

It’s a shame that pimping out your children for praise while also insisting that they remain off limits to criticism doesn’t pay sufficiently to keep the Palins in ammo and snowmobiles, because without a doubt it is there that the former governor’s talents truly lie. Palin has recently appointed herself the arbiter of all things retard, and apparently has no compunction regarding the hypocrisy of using political affiliation as the determining factor in her pronouncements on acceptable use of the term.

And so, predictably, the Palin retard alarm went off this week when an episode of the network cartoon “Family Guy” featured a character with Down syndrome who identified herself in the script as a child of the “former governor of Alaska.” Palin described her reaction to the line as feeling like a “kick in the gut.”

Predictable results ensued. Right and left talk-show yammerers lined up and duked it out, no doubt for significant personal compensation, although no actual edification on the subject was produced.

Until yesterday, when, quite unexpectedly, the actress who played the character, and who has Down syndrome herself, weighed in:

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is "sarcasm".

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

I don’t know if Palin felt a kick in the gut when she read what someone who is actually “retarded” thinks of her, but if not, I certainly volunteer to fly to Alaska and deliver one.

How you like me now?

2010-02-01T15:57:00.000-08:00

I have been mulling President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, and the controversy over Justice Alito mouthing the words "not true" after Obama criticized the recent court ruling granting corporations "free speech" rights to use unlimited sums to influence elections.

My feelings about the ruling I've already made known, but what about the feathers that this incident has ruffled in Washington?

Some say that by, in effect, talking back to the president, Justice Alito has damaged the veneer of SCOTUS political neutrality.

Others say that Obama committed a grave breach of etiquette by criticizing the ruling in a forum wherein the justices could not defend themselves.

I say WHO GIVES A GOOD GODDAMN? Oh, and also SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING IRRELEVANT HACKS.

It's just so typical of our self-important legislators, and the press that enables them, that this became such a huge story. As if their make-believe world of "esteemed colleagues" and decorative judicial gold sleeve bars matters one tiny fucking bit now, or ever did.

The SCOTUS decision was recent, it was huge, and it matters a lot to the business of the American people. And oh, look, it just so happens that Obama has a pretty important speech to give wherein he's supposed to inform the American people what the fuck is going down right now in the country and uh-oh! Too bad! He can't talk about the decision because 3 of the dudes who voted for it are in the room. Once again the rights of the people have been thwarted by the false propriety of a room full of bastards who hate each other so much that one side wouldn't piss on the other if it were on fire.*

Well, here's my message to the pitiful Roman circus that we call the fourth estate: stop fucking talking about yourselves! No one gives a shit about your insular world and its inane code of conduct! It's not your job to tsk tsk over meaningless protocol and fret about who was verbally served. That's why we have rappers.

And it's all very well and good for the press to look down their noses on entertainment fare like The Housewives of New Jersey, but let me tell you readers, before the next season starts they'd better take a long look in the mirror and decide exactly what it is that distinguishes them from a room full of preening ignoramuses obsessed with who said what about who and who does she think she is, anyway. Because the distinctions are thin on the ground, guys, and the perceived slight is no basis for a system of government.

And before SCOTUS and its defenders decide to continue crowing about this veneer of neutrality, I would like to point out what motherfucking veneer of neutrality? I mean, huh? If there is a veneer, that is one thin mamajama veneer. I mean, the last time I saw anything as thin as the Supreme Court's veneer of neutrality, it was styling Nicole Richie for the red carpet.

As far as all future communications from our government go, I would like to suggest that they take the form of Obama's recent address to the Republican Cry-baby Club. Because if we stop with all the holy holy Washington protocol and let them go at Obama over policy in a real battle of the wits, guess who dunks on them all day long?

And so yeah, I think it's great that the president is doing the town halls on job creation blah blah blah. But I would like to see him face those who don't think that the perpetrators of the crimes on 9/11 should be tried in the U.S. justice system.

I would like to see him take it to that hack Giuliani, who you just know would be SO on board for a New York trial if it had been proposed by the Bush administration.

I would like to see him smack down Lindsey Graham, and ask him why exactly he hates the U.S. justice system so much.

I would like to see him ask Joe Lieberman what it is about our policies regarding Israel that he doesn't want publicly examined.

Okay, that last one will never happen, but still, a gal can dream, can't she?

And I would like to offer the people of New York - if they really really feel like they can't stand the heat of a trial - the venue of the Los Angeles Staples Center.

Because LA knows security. We know celebrity security. We know fucking hip hop security, which is the most serious security in the world. We do the Oscars. We do the Grammys. We did Michael Jackson's funeral, for fuck's sake, we can do the trial of some self-important deluded Kuwaiti goon. Of course, they'll have to work around the Lakers schedule, but we can give the trial some of the Clippers' slots. They won't mind.

*Unless there was a primary challenger threatening to drive the party even further from center.

Me and Bobby McGee

2010-01-21T10:54:00.000-08:00

I can appreciate a true Libertarian when I meet one. That is, I can appreciate that they are vain, cruel, naive, self-centered assholes.

But a true Libertarian is a rare creature, thank god. Usually you only meet the fake ones that attend protest meetings with badly-spelled and punctuated placards, or troll the internet armed only with a Caps Lock button and list of words whose meanings they are not so familar with, like "socialism."

True Libertarians would have taken to the streets yesterday with spittle-flecked lips and pitchforks after the US Supreme Court's absolutely fucking stunning decision to negate a century of precedent and lawmaking when they elevated the rights of corporations above those of American citizens. But the silence from those who supposedly value liberty above all was pervasive, revealing that 99% of those tea-bagging jerks are actually Republicans who want, above all, to see the GOP dominate our government, no matter what the fuck they get themselves up to. And dominate the Republicans will, as it is the party of corporate ass ponies that are poised to benefit the most from SCOTUS's latest valentine to corporate America.

See, what these so-called Libertarians never seem to get through their thick skulls is that less restriction does not always equal more freedom. This is a concept that most 4-year-olds grasp easily, as they ponder what life would be like outside the safety of their parents' influence. Freedom may be what we all want, but other people's freedom tends to fuck you in the ass, don't it? It's, um, kind of a basic concept of civilization that you trade some measure of your own liberty in exchange for the freedom to be able to walk down the street without being Shanghaied into a cage match with Tina Turner in a mohawk and chain mail.

Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. I may be allowed to tell a cop what I think of him (unless I'm a black man standing in my own house, of course), but I'm not allowed to give him a fifty as a means of persuasion. If you equate money with speech, then every corporation on Wall Street has the voices of a billion people, except it's not the voices of a billion people really, it's one voice, a billion times louder than yours or mine, and it only cares about one thing: going about its way unfettered from concerns about the quality of our air, or the price of our utilities, or the passability of our roads and bridges. It doesn't care about our health, our wages, our working conditions or whether our kids go to school or what they learn. It wants the path of least resistance, no matter what the cost to us. It only wants to grow and amass more wealth and grow some more. And it owns us, completely, because it owns the people who have to win campaigns in order to write our laws.

And, as for the cherry of cynicism on top of the sundae of doom, this ruling obliterates John McCain's supposed life's work, McCain-Feingold's campaign finance reform. One would think that the ruination in one fell swoop of all that he claimed to care about would have elicited an immediate reaction from the self-proclaimed reformer, but McCain was too busy trying to prevent others from affording a health care plan one tenth as good as the one he enjoys for free to bother commenting. And then, when he did comment, his disappointment was less than convincing. Perhaps McCain is envisioning a future wherein he can run for higher office again, this time with an unconstrained corporate bankroll. Well, the jokes on you, old man. As far as your party leaders are concerned, from now on, non-centerfolds need not apply.

I remember when I was a little kid, listening to my Dad playing Janis Joplin singing "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." I remember being a bit shocked at that assertion. I remember thinking "Oh, I hope not." But maybe songwriter Kristofferson knew something we still haven't figured out. Maybe the whole damn thing has to burn to the ground before we can finally understand what makes it worth the trouble. I'm not saying I got nothing. To the extent that I have collected money, I did it to ease my life, and to enable its longevity. And when my government takes my money from me, I hope, I try my best to ensure, that it is with that same goal in mind for my countrymen. I wish we all felt the same way. It seems like such a simple thing to want. How, I wonder, how, from where we started, how the fuck did we get here?

Self-satisfaction guaranteed

2010-01-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

The ink was barely dry on Haiti's "you're fucked again!" certificate before the usual cadre of Christian meatheads started in with a chorus of victim-blaming. Those guys remind me of those gorgeous Italian and French actresses that starred in some American films in the '50s even though they couldn't speak English - they learned their lines phonetically, and delivered them on cue, but they had no idea what they were saying. Thus, useless bags of flesh like Pat Robertson either have clue zero what Jesus Christ was on about, or they're all liars who have somehow convinced themselves that they alone are immune to the punishment that god metes out to all others, ostensibly at their request. The worst part is that it's not even worth it to discover which circumstance is the more likely, because they're both pretty equally terrible.

If I were a Christian and believed that Jesus was the Son of God, I might take some comfort in the thought that if Christ were returning some day, the odds of him coming back through Haiti - probably number three with a bullet on the list of Top Ten Desperate Hellholes on the Face of the Earth - are pretty damn good. So condemn away, preachers, because it's well known that Jesus had a huge hard-on for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and an appetite for righteousness is pretty much the only commodity that Haiti has in abundance. In fact, I believe it's what their GDP is currently based upon.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I am not a Christian, however, and so I tend to look at the situation in a more psychological context. If the wretched people of Haiti can be made to appear somehow deserving of their plight, then it's just that much easier for us to plunk down five easy payments of $19.99 each for Ab Circle Pro, an amazing fitness breakthrough that will banish those love handles in 30 days or your money back! It's in our nature, I guess, to want the universe to make some sense, and if the Haitians are all evil voodoo whitey-haters, then a 7.0 nation leveler TOTALLY makes sense, brah.

No doubt the universe is a crazy-ass place. I mean, you don't have to be stoned (although, as usual, let me emphasize that it wouldn't hurt) to quickly become overwhelmed with confusion and angst when contemplating the question "Of all possible worlds, why this one?" - especially if you happen to be watching Bridezillas at the same time. Every time I ponder the profusion of professional wrestling organizations, or the latest hipster fashion trend, I can't help but marvel at the incomprehensibly trivial nature of the majority of our endeavors.

Maybe Jesus, if he truly lived and said all those things, felt the same way. Maybe that's why he reckoned that anyone asking for your shirt might as well have your coat, too. I would never recommend such a drastic liquidation of one's wardrobe; the best that could be said about me, I suppose, is that I am on board with spreading the wealth around - although that only puts me at the 53rd percentile. Not exactly illuminated company.

And look, no one's asking you to personally donate any of your hard-earned bucks to the citizens of Haiti. You can decide that they're all heathen jigaboo thugs, or that our government will send aid using your tax dollars anyway, or that you're suffering already in this tight economy and don't have any dough to spare. That's cool. It's not my business what you do with your money. So, like I said, no one's forcing you to lend a hand up, although, if you ask me, membership in the human race should require, at bare minimum, not kicking them when they're on the ground. I'm looking at you, Reverend.

Also, I will admit that after spending the better part of an hour this morning shopping for a pair of shoes I don't really need at DSW before my $5 birthday discount could expire, I suddenly hit a wall of shame I could neither scale nor circumvent. So maybe the Haitians deserve at least what I would spend on a pair of last year's strappy sandals, no?

After all, it is tax deductible.

Talking to Twins

2010-01-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am a huge fan of The Watson Twins. A few months ago, I was privileged enough to be invited to hear a (mostly final) mix of their new album, Talking to You, Talking to Me.

It's an amazing breakthrough album for the gals, and one of my favorite songs from it is Today's Top Tune on KCRW. Download it for free!

E pluribus stupid

2009-12-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

In “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Jared Diamond examines the decisions that various cultures have made that have led to their own extinction. He famously wonders what went through the mind of the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island - if you ask me it was probably something about how his god had ordained that man would have dominion over the Earth.

He also quotes one of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide, who explains the killings in his village, including the murder of his wife and four of his children, this way:

“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for [their children.]”

Readers, if that statement doesn’t send chills down your spine, then you haven’t been watching enough Fox News.

The genocide in Rwanda wasn’t just a centuries-old tribal conflict taken to its terrifyingly logical extreme, it was also a culture war; a war in which politicians, motivated by a desire to stay in power, urged the Hutu majority to rise up against the Tutsi, a tribe they characterized as privileged snobs who were attempting to take over and impose their elitist agenda on the hardworking regular Joe Hutus.

Yes, if the Tutsis had lattes, they would have been swilling them. Consider them the liberal elite in this cautionary tale. And while you’re at it, consider that Rwanda was a land in which a growing populace found itself in constant competition with each other for a dwindling amount of resources: money, land, food, jobs. In a situation like that, it became advantageous for the rulers to designate one group as an oppressive “other,” and set about to blame the country’s problems on that other, rather than work together to sacrifice and conserve what resources they had, and to agree on methods to renew resources for the future.

Got the chills yet?

And once all the Tutsis in any particular village had been rounded up and killed, the mobs would then turn their machetes on fellow Hutus that they didn’t like: those who owned land or cattle that they coveted, those who were educated in far-off places…

Those whose children wore shoes to school.

Apparently the leaders of Rwanda had to do little more than point and say “he thinks he’s better than you,” for gangs of murderers to turn and converge with a force deadly enough to rank Rwanda as second only to Cambodia in terms of percentage of the populace killed by their own countrymen since the end of WW2.

Now, I’m not, I swear, attempting to force some overworked comparison down your throat. I’m not saying that what happened there could happen here. I’m just saying that…well…I’m just saying.

I’m just saying that, as Jon Stewart pointed out, one of the most successful contributors on Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, attended Oxford, graduated from Stanford with distinction, plays classical violin, and yet on television, she pretends that she doesn’t know what the word “czar” means. She also emphasizes that she has to Google economic terms in order to understand them. Now, why would she do that? Why would someone who is paid to talk about politics and policy on television want to behave as though the only thing she brings to the table is the ability to navigate a QWERTY? Is it because she understands that it wouldn’t do to appear to have more going on upstairs than the average viewer of her network?

Unfortunately, Fox News isn’t alone in fetishizing ignorance. I mean, come on, we live in a country where we are gleefully admonished for being dumber than 5th graders by a man who's made his fortune unironically espousing the charms of living a life of unapologetic ignorance and bigotry.

Even on NPR, a news organization so obsessed with neutrality that even their test of the emergency broadcast system is followed by an opposing point of view, in a story about an “emerging leader of the Dallas Tea Party,” that "leader" was given whole minutes of national airtime to enlighten us with the following explanation of why Obama “annoys” them:

"You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do, and like past presidents do."

And the reporter interviewing this emerging political "leader" responds by saying what, do you think?

a. Can you give an example of an Obama administration policy that you oppose and tell us why you oppose it?

b. When, or during what overseas speech, did you feel that Obama was apologizing for our country?

c. Other presidents have advocated policies very similar to Obama’s. What specifically has he done that you would characterize him as not loving his country?

d. Nothing.

If you guessed “d,” you’d be right. The reporter had nothing to say. When faced with an alarmingly colossal show of ignorance about things that really sort of matter from someone they themselves refer to as a local political leader, they opted not to follow up. Why? Did he think that he had stumbled into some kind of political Special Olympics, where everyone gets to win?

Readers, I had dared to believe that the Age of Ignoramus might be on the wane. After drinking deeply from the golden chalice of stupid for eight long years, I thought that maybe, MAYBE we had finally figured out that “CEO presidents” were about as swift as most CEOs are in real life – which is to say, pretty fucking stupid. I mean, look at the U.S. auto company CEOs. In a market where American consumers are clamoring for innovative vehicles such as Toyota Priuses and Smart cars, our home-grown titans of industry decide it’s time to…rerelease the Ford Fiesta?

And I dared to think we were on the intellectual mend because at least that willfully moronic Mike Huckabee had been defeated for the 2008 presidential nomination. I dared because while I believed McCain to be an unabashed butt boy for unregulated capitalism disguised as a reformer who gives a shit about anyone other than himself, at least he wasn’t running on a platform of God Hates Book Learnin’.

But I had dared too soon. Because McCain brought to the national stage a running mate so dim that she made the Three Stooges look like Nobel Prize Winners - and not Peace Prize winners, either – I mean one of the hard prizes. The very personification of the blind, the halt, and the lame, this woman captured the heart of about half of America. Unfortunately, it’s the half that’s armed.

Just like her intellectual doppelganger George W. Bush, the jokes about the stupidity of Palin could not compete with the reality that assaulted us like so many drunken baby daddies every time she opened her mouth. Palin’s mental shortcomings were not so much epitomized by her failure to, at Katie Couric’s urging, name one publication that she read, but by the fact that she later characterized the query as a “gotcha” question.

Stupid people love Palin, and it’s hard to imagine a reason why other than she makes them feel less stupid. She also tells them that their dumb-ass religious bigotry is straight from the mouth of God. You can just imagine how relieved they must feel, hearing that! She’s also the living embodiment of the notion that it’s okay to suckle at the government teat, as long as you simultaneously condemn everyone else who wouldn’t mind a squirt or two.

Yes, it’s the numbskull triple-play, the George W. Bush hat trick, and it hasn’t gone out of style at all, not even close.

Tammany Hall was a corrupt political organization that ruled New York City for decades, and it was the poor that suffered under it the most. But Tammany leaders continued to be elected by the very people they victimized. The same men who let the docks rot and the buildings collapse and the dead horses pile up in the streets, also came down into the slums before every election, and handed out pennies and glasses of beer. And all the Joe Six-Tankards decided that hey, those politician guys might not be so bad after all. They understood their needs. They were just like them: concerned about negroes being able to marry, worried about illegal Irish immigrants taking over their culture, and convinced that the Italians were religious extremists beholden to a foreign leader who wanted them murdered in their beds.

And so it goes, readers. So it motherfucking goes. For all our steps forward technologically, we still fall for the same shill every goddamn time.

We’re about to cut down the last tree on our own big Easter Island, but we don’t care, because we heard somewhere that those liberal pro-tree scientists are conspiring to exaggerate the benefits of trees, anyway.

Peace On Earth

2009-12-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

It couldn't hurt.

An Immodest Proposal

2009-12-02T10:52:00.000-08:00

Wow, seems like you can’t swing a disabled child whose lifetime insurance coverage has been maxed out in this country without hitting some pundit whose take on health insurance reform is based on the notion that using tax dollars to fund universal coverage is akin to having his pocket picked by some deadbeat who is too poor (read lazy) to buy insurance for himself.

I couldn’t agree more. And if US citizens are going to continue to die because they can’t afford to buy the health care their body needs, then excuse me, but they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

But believe me, the cost of health care is peanuts compared to what US taxpayers are paying to support a system that hasn’t been relevant to their own lives for many, many years. But because the operating budget is primarily comprised of state and local dollars, and only about ten percent on average comes from the federal government, it’s difficult to get the national pundits worked up enough to lobby for its demise.

Of course I’m talking about public education.

Like most responsible adults, I don’t have children. And I fail to see why I should have my pocket picked to pay for the progeny of those less fiscally conscientious than I.

Look readers, I need roads to drive on. I need this fakakta LA freeway system improved so that I can get to work faster. I need the FAA to get its shit together before I have to do any more holiday flying. I need the CDC to get me some of that swine flu vaccine. I need farming subsidies that will quit propping up livestock feed and instead bring down the price of the things I eat, and I really, really, need more public radio and television funding so I don’t have to sit through so many pledge drives.

And while I’m at it, I would like a nice subsidy on a new football stadium so that LA can attract an NFL team, and local meatheads will stay contained in their homes and sports bars on Sunday and stay out of the public places that I like to frequent for one goddamn idiot-free day a week if that’s not too much to ask.

Those are the things I need. And yet my money is going toward an educational system I don’t need anymore, and couldn’t be admitted to even if I did. Say, for instance, I should discover that algebra is useful in life. Well, I’ve forgotten algebra. It’s not my fault. I only have so much memory available, after all, and operating my TV/DVR is not getting easy easier. So, in order to make room in my brain, algebra had to be sacrificed, along with chemistry, world capitals, and pre-WW2 European heads of state. That’s right readers, Franz Ferdinand is just a indie band to me. So what would happen if I showed up at my local high school, and asked for an algebra refresher? I mean, after I was tackled to the ground, frisked, and held for observation? Why, they’d tell me to take a hike, of course, and I’d have to find a way to pay for algebra myself. Whereas, any snot-nosed brat with a pencil and a zip code can walk into their own local completely free-of-charge school and avail him or herself of thirteen years of education that is no longer offered to me – and all on my dime.

So how is that fair? I’m the responsible one. I’m the one not taking off work to watch some badly-performed recital or some soccer game in which one would be hard pressed to determine which side were the more untalented. I’m the one who uses my sick days when I’m sick, and not because my kid’s day care isn’t insured for a fever above 99 degrees. Let’s just say it - I’m the one who figured out how birth control works, and for that I am punished not only with the theft of untold thousands of dollars from my hard-earned salary, but also by having to hear, year after tedious year, about how little good my money is doing, and how generally stupid those ungrateful brats are for the passport to the good life that I am subsidizing for them.

Well, I’m finished being gracious about the whole goddamn thing. Let the fucking rugrats pay for their own goddamn education, and if they can’t, let their parents do it for them. And until they do, I don’t want to hear one more person with children in public school complain about universal health coverage, or unemployment assistance, or the stimulus package, or even the goddamn price of a fucking postage stamp. You free public education people have gotten away with the biggest fucking socialist scam ever pulled on the fine and patient and totally non-hypocritical American public, and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.

#25 Humorless Blogger

2009-11-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

Much has been made in the last couple of weeks of the iPhone app released by PepsiCo’s AMP “energy drink,” and the feminists whose criticism of it caused it to be removed. The app instructed men on how to “score” with 24 different “types” of women by supplying them with pick-up lines tailored to each “type.” It also provided practical information, such as nearby hotels where the “scoring” could take place, and finally, it encouraged men to share a "brag list" that contained the details of the “scoring” via that preferred medium of self-important douchebags everywhere: Twitter.

AMP’s irony-free and apparently straight-faced “apology” was also delivered via Twitter: “Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste and appreciate your feedback.”

Yes, it’s the classic “I’m sorry if you’re offended” non-apology apology, delivered with preposition-dropping and character-conserving numerical lol speak.

Who could ask for anything more? Surely not the bonerkill feminists, who had criticized the app by once again advancing the tired argument that women were being objectified.

Yes, that old chestnut.

Readers, I would never suggest anything so esoteric and also impossible to prove, statistically. Besides, it’s not as if we’re still living in the ‘80s, when women had to sleep with dogs to gain access to cheap beer. This is the 21st century - an enlightened, post-feminist era when you don’t have to be a GOP broodmare to come terrifyingly close to being terrifying close to the employment of the 25th amendment, but it sure helps.

My argument against AMP, I mean, besides that I find the term “energy drink” to be a hilariously obvious attempt by marketing men to sell a cultural zeitgeist in which a man drinking a “soft drink” would be roughly equivalent to him cutting off his dick and lobbing it into the crowd at Lilith Fair – besides that, my argument against AMP is simply that I find 24 “types” of women to be a fairly confining number.

For example, I find no entry in their list of “types” of women that would advise men on how to score with chicks like that 15-year-old girl in Richmond, California who was gang-raped by ten males after a homecoming dance for two and half hours while as many as 20 other men and boys looked on and recorded photos and video. I mean, sure, she’s proven she’s not difficult to “score” with, but still, you’d expect a conscientious corporation like Pepsi to at least provide guidance on the best ways to inebriate and overcome your average underage girl. Maybe a companion app that figures pounds of resistance times blood alcohol level divided by the number of bros in your posse?

Come on, Pepsi, get on it, before Budweiser beats you to the punch!

Also disappointingly absent from their list of “types” of women is your basic women with power-type deal. Your Nancy Pelosis, your Hilary Clintons, your Sonia Sotomayors. I mean, sure the app offers “married,” and “businesswoman,” and “political girl,” and even “women’s studies major,” but none of those “types” really adequately covers a group with such aggressive unwillingness to concede to the broham desire for conquest that is so fundamental to his nature, not to mention Madison Avenue’s bottom line. So exactly how does one go about tapping a choice piece of wise Latina? Thanks to Pepsi, a bro will never know. Seriously, they could at least offer a few strategies for getting around the security detail, because in spite of their gender makeup the Secret Service has in the past shown a real reluctance to play wingman.

Sadly, I find myself also absent from AMP’s helpful guide to the 24 flavors of female. My age and sexual appetite might suggest I fall under “cougar,” I suppose, but then again, I think I am disqualified from that group by my aversion to stupid young men. So, in the interest of post-feminist helpfulness, I now offer to iPhone app programmers the outline of a guide to “scoring” with me.

1. Get a real drink
2. Take off that stupid hat
3. Put down your fucking iPhone

See? I’m easy.

hold on

2009-10-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

I'm not gone, just buried. I swear I'll be back.

A free ride when you've already paid

2009-10-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush?

Maybe, although, hey, let’s not underestimate the value of not being George W. Bush.

Across the country, the heads of right-wing chicken hawks are exploding, as they are confronted once again with proof of their own ideological isolation, and the possibility that their emotional investment in their belief system might be preventing them from seeing a more moderate truth.

One dinkus I saw this morning even quoted Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. I mean, come on, right wingers, quoting Neville Chamberlain is so 2008. Neville Chamberlain quotes are the wingnut version of Tuesdays with Morrie. So here’s the quote:

"I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds."

The above was said after Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, which essentially was the treaty version of giving a shark a nice big piece of chum in the hope that it will agree to stop being a shark. The right-winger who was quoting Chamberlain was attempting to make a point about appeasement and Iran. Because Obama, who has agreed to actually talk to the leaders of Iran, is an appeaser. GET IT?

What conservatives miss…um…or rather, one of the myriad of things that conservatives miss in this analogy is that ENGLAND WAS NOT PREPARED TO GO TO WAR. England had fuck all to fight with, people. They were still in the process of building up their armaments, including what would eventually become the truly awesome Royal Air Force of WW2.

Mmmm…Spitfires…

But the analogy is perhaps apt in an unintended way. Because beginning in the early 1930s, Chamberlain embarked on a controversial policy called rationalisation, in which the obsolete and crumbling industrial infrastructure of the country was knocked down and rebuilt with government funds. As in taxpayers’ moolah. The conservatives in the government (including Churchill) opposed this, shall we say strongly? But it was this initiative that allowed, among other things, for the buildup of the U.K.’s war machine. Until then, the RAF was still flying WW1-type biplanes, for pete’s sake. If England had entered WW2 before 1939, it would have been fighting against Germany’s state-of-the-art Messerschmitt with what was essentially Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel.

So, I’m not going to speculate about whether Chamberlain would have entered WW2, and at what time. His support eroded, and he stepped down to make way for Churchill, so we will never know. What we do know, however, is that he negotiated peace as he prepared for war, and I really find it interesting that any person claiming to be a conservative would find fault with such an eminently practical policy.

Also, for all those conservatives out there who use the Chamberlain quote in an attempt at irony…please don’t. Don’t attempt irony. Because irony is, contrary to popular belief, nothing like rain on your wedding day. Irony requires self-awareness, and an ability to see situations from a perspective other than your own self-centered one. So you kinda suck at it.

A much more relevant ironic observation we could make, as the world attempts, with this Nobel Peace Prize, to nudge the American people toward peace, involves Iran. Because I personally find it ironic that during the Clinton administration, when Iran elected a liberal leader, it was the opposition conservatives in that country’s government who stymied progress to end their isolation. Even now, as the people of Iran once again show overwhelming support for a more liberal government, it is the conservatives who keep the country from agreeing to the U.N. initiatives, and they do so because they object to a policy of appeasement.

Perhaps the conservatives of the U.S. and Iran would agree to duke it out in some remote corner of the world, so that those who are truly interested in peace could go about making it manifest. I would be in favor of this policy. And as for that remote corner where they may proceed to battle to the death – may I suggest Alaska?

Many thanks to my blogger friend SJ for the inspiration for this post.

Oh, God! Book III

2009-09-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Some would say that God is clearly punishing Georgia with floods of Biblical proportion. The question, I guess, is why? When presuming to know the mind of God, it’s important to get your facts straight, otherwise you might, for example, jump to the conclusion that God hates fags.

We now know this to be false. God doesn’t hate gay people. He hates people who hate gay people. Actually, God might be a total fag hag, although the evidence on this is not yet in. We’ll have to see what kind of weather He dishes up for Maine this winter.

Personally, I don’t think Georgia is being punished. That would be cruel. I think what’s happening is that Georgia is experiencing what President Obama would call a “teachable moment,” and no, I’m not talking about its 2004 referendum to bring back the Confederate flag.

That Georgia’s two Republican senators are opposing health care reform is not a stunning revelation to anyone, even to those north of the Mason-Dixon. However, a few people on both sides were perhaps mildly surprised when Senator Saxby Chambliss warned Obama that he should address the joint session of Congress “with humility,” even though, according to Chambliss, “that’s not his inclination.”

Uppity negro-esque comments aside, or, on second thought, perhaps not aside, Georgians seem to like Chambliss, and his chances of reelection are good. He’s a tough campaigner! What other candidate with a deferment from serving in Vietnam would dare to compare his rival, a wounded Vietnam vet - a triple amputee, no less – to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in a campaign ad? That takes balls, my friends, and Saxby Chambliss has them in no short supply.

You know what else takes balls? Joining the other Republican Senator from Georgia to vociferously oppose Obama’s stimulus plan, then arranging for a healthy portion of the funds to go to your own constituents.

To say nothing of the two senators’ recent pleas to our president to declare Georgia a federal disaster area, thus enabling the state to access federal funds and resources for rescue and clean-up.

Of course I would never, ever, deny my brothers and sisters in the great state of Georgia any help that they needed. We are, after all, one nation, and we fought hard to keep it that way. At least, my side did.

What I would suggest to Georgia, is that when they watch the news, and they see the victims of the floods of their state being sheltered & comforted with my tax dollars, that they stop and consider that we are all in this together, and that doesn’t mean that we’re socialists. And if they were fortunate enough to have purchased the flood insurance available to them that is subsidized with my tax dollars, then maybe they should also consider that what we do for property, we should do for people.

Just one more little story for 9/11

2009-09-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

Several days after 9/11, my then-husband and I ordered dinner from our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. When the delivery guy pulled into our driveway, I saw that it was the same guy as always, the one who loved our little mutt, Comet, so much that he could barely tear himself away from her after his business had been concluded. So I opened the front door to let her run to him, as usual, and he knelt down to pet her and rub her ears, as usual. A moment later, he looked up, and I saw tears running down his face. I was confused, and he turned back and gestured to a sign that my husband had hand-lettered and stuck in the ground in our front yard.

The sign said "Justice, not war."

"Thank you for that," he said. "Thank you." He wiped his tears with the back of his hand and walked toward me, handing me our order. "It has been so hard. We get calls all day long. Threatening calls. And my cousin...someone threw a rock through his window."

"That's terrible," I said. "That's shocking," I said, though I did not really think it was shocking.

"We are Lebanese," he continued. "We are Christians. We are not Muslims."

"It shouldn't matter," I countered, softy. He looked at me, and I shrugged.

"You are good people," he said finally.

"So are you."

After I paid him and he drove away, it occurred to me, I mean I think it really hit me hard for the first time that a tremendous price was about to be paid for what had just happened, and it was going to be paid by all the wrong people.

Take your stinking paws off me

2009-09-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

Does anyone remember the old short story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which the holder of a magical talisman is granted three wishes, but because of a curse from a dead Indian fakir, the wishes are granted in the worst possible way?*

For example, in the story, the couple who held the monkey’s paw wished for two hundred pounds, and they received it – but as compensation for the death of their son who was horribly mangled at work in an industrial accident immediately after the wish was made.

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but since November 4, 2008, I have been living the curse of the monkey’s paw.

First of all, I wished for a fairly elected president, the first fairly elected president in eight years, if you ask me. And we got one. Oh, we got one, all right. The only problem is that, during the W years, people who spoke of Bush’s illegitimacy were told that they were “Sore Loserman,” and to get over it and move on. Yes, we were told by the media that it didn’t matter who really got the most votes or what either side did and whether it was legal, because the Supreme Court had crowned Prince Bush and why the fuck are you nitpicky Democrats still harping on this anyways? But now, now, NOW those same Republicans are entertaining/agreeing with/refusing to denounce loonies who have taken the most enraged and unhinged ramblings ever made against W as some kind of motherfucking dare. It’s as if they took the craziest theories the left had to offer, and multiplied them by an order of magnitude and spewed out this fucking batshit crazy bitch:

This crazy-ass bitch is interviewed on television news shows, people. And every couple of months, she reaches into her big quilted bag of insanity and pulls out another fucking document that some ignorant hillbilly who didn’t bother to look up what fucking country Mombasa was in, in 1961 created at his local combination Kinkos/Pizza Hut/Militia Supply Superstore and starts waving it around like it’s some kind of lost version of the Constitution in which our forefathers finally had the foresight to include “Oh, and by the way, no negroes allowed.”

Which brings me to my next wish, which was for the citizens of this country to finally break the monopoly that old white dudes have had on the highest office in the land.

That one was granted as well, but it wasn’t long before the cruel twist of its granting was revealed: The man who broke the monopoly, a half white, half African man who grew up in a white family in America and married into an African-American family, is destined to spend his time in office answering to repeated charges that he is a racist. (Racist against white people, that is, just in case the diversity of his background might lead you to become confused about which part of his family he hates.)

And not only is the man who broke the color barrier accused, time and time again, of racial prejudice, but so is his wife. And his church. And his friends. And his appointees.

Readers, let us ponder for a moment. Let us ponder all the doughy old patriarchal windbags we have elected in the last century, and all the incredible good-ole-boy white power shit that has gone down in the Oval Office and its environs. I mean, wow. Remember Reagan’s support of apartheid? And all that coded “states’ rights” crap? Remember W courting Bob Jones University? And when his dad called his half-Latino grandchildren “the little brown ones”? Or, for that matter, when his mother said that Katrina victims living in the Astrodome were lucky to have the upgrade from their regular living conditions, and that it was “scary” that they might all stay in Texas? On the other side of the aisle, Truman never met a racial epithet he didn’t like. And Nixon…well…I mean, come on. He was Nixon. He didn’t invent white male Christian paranoia, but he pretty much perfected it. And yet, where were the cries of racism then? Where was the endless media examination? Considering the shit that these guys pulled, you’d think there’d be a little more serious public dialogue on the question of their racial attitudes. Or, in fact, any. But no.

When you think about it, it’s quite a feat that the first black president would be the one whose administration ends up being perceived by many as one peopled almost entirely by racists. It’s such an incredible feat of balls-out stupefying chutzpah that it could only be the work of the curse.

My third wish, if you haven’t figured it out already, was for health care reform. And, true to the nature of my little simian talisman, our president’s efforts to save the lives of Americans have been significantly stymied by charges that – natch – he is trying to kill Americans. Another goal of the reform is to decrease a rapidly expanding deficit, fueled by the cost of health care and health insurance. Of course, the effort to squash health care reform also charges – say it with me – that reform will only expand the deficit. And in the end, it matters not that our president is trying to save government-run health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, because those who shout him down are convinced that he is trying to destroy government-run health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, while also simultaneously never realizing that Medicare and Medicaid are government-run.

Whew! Readers, I don’t think I can take another 3 and a half years of this.

But the good news is that I am now out of wishes and the monkey’s paw can no longer wield its awful power. I only hope that the next person who gets a hold of it is not a Democrat. Otherwise Rush Limbaugh will indeed be found murdered – but Al Franken will be arrested for the crime.

*Yes, it was also made into a “Simpsons” episode, okay? In case you haven’t noticed yet, everything has been made into a “Simpsons” episode.

Sometimes a Dick is just a Dick

2009-08-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

Sigmund Freud was the first to describe the phenomenon of transference, in which a subject transfers their feelings for one person to another person, or redirects their feelings toward an event on to a different event. It is not an unusual pathology in a serial killer, for instance, to believe himself to be the victim, and to transfer his feelings of guiltiness and rage onto those he victimizes.

I once had a rather difficult time with a mentally ill woman whose MO was transference taken to a stupefying level. She was assigned to the same precinct as me once when I served as a Judge of Election in Chicago.

Chicago. You don’t have to be crazy to be a Judge of Election here – but it helps!

The voting place was in the lobby of a senior center, of course, and of course the judges were all seniors except me. I was doing it for the cash – then 80 clams for about 15 hours of work – nothing to sneeze at when you normally spend your days pretending to fill yuppie coffee cups with decaf for crappy tips. Also, since I was politically active, I found that if you were working as a judge of election, the campaign office couldn’t make you stand outside the polling place on Election Day holding a goddamn placard or handing out fucking leaflets and taking the abuse of people whose inclinations ran toward your candidate’s opponent. The best part is that when I'd inform whoever managed the volunteers that I could not work outside of the polling place on Election Day because I was working inside the polling place, they were usually impressed and believed me to be an even greater martyr for democracy than they did when I was merely a campaign pawn. But really, all I wanted was to be inside in a semi-heated/cooled room on a semi-comfy folding chair, instead of outside in whatever hellish weather Chicago had decided to dish up.

So what for most people would have been a clear case of “I’d rather stick needles in my eyes” ended up being a win-win for me.

I learned a lot of things being a judge of election in Chicago. For one, candidates would absolutely come right into the polling place and bring you candy or donuts or whatever. I mean, in full campaign garb with aides and balloons and buttons and shit. And when I told them they had to leave because it is illegal to electioneer in a polling place, they definitely give me that “you’re new around here, aren’t you?” look.

Plus, there is, or at least there was, pretty much a cop assigned to every precinct in the city. Sometimes they would actually stick around for their entire shift, too. Yeah, Election Day is probably an overtime bonanza for cops. And cops are great to talk to because they have amazing stories. Unlike the seniors, who never seemed to have anything to say except that the folding chairs were very uncomfortable, and that they couldn’t hear me, and that the huge print on the registration documents was too small for them to read and I needed to read it to them so that they could then tell me again that they couldn't hear what I were saying.

Rinse. Repeat.

One year I worked all day with a younger cop who told me he’d been shot three times and stabbed once. All in separate incidents, too. His beat was in the infamous Cabrini Green housing project. I asked him who at HQ had it in for him and he just laughed and shook his head and told me that that was a story for another time. He was a cool guy, though.

That was the same year I had some asshole looking over the voting booth partition at his wife while she was marking her ballot. He was actually pointing at her ballot and criticizing who she was voting for! So, I told him to stop.

Me: Sir, you can’t do that.

Asshole: What? Are you talking to me?

Me: Yes, sir. You can’t spy on people while they’re voting, and you certainly can’t make comments about their choices.

Asshole: It’s okay, she’s my wife. (he resumes his criticism)

Me: I don’t care who she is, sir. You can’t do that.

Asshole: Oh, for Pete’s sake. (to his wife) Will you tell this girl that it’s okay?

Wife: Leave me out of this. I am trying to vote.

Asshole: (to his wife) What?

Me: Sir, if you’re finished, you need to leave the polling place.

Asshole: Are you kidding me?

Me: No.

Asshole: Oh, come on! Who do you think you are?

Me: I’m a Judge of Election, and if you won’t leave because I say so, then I’m sure this nice policeman will show you to the door.

I swear to god readers, that I said exactly that. And I swear to god that that fucking awesome cop took a step forward at that moment and rested one hand on his holstered department-issued .38 revolver, and with the other hand, gestured toward the doorway.

You know, it’s moments like those that make life worth living.

Another time, the polling place was in a firehouse, and we had to set up right alongside the engines. When I went to use the restroom, I noticed that a picture of Mayor Daley (fils), who was then embroiled in some rather nasty negotiations with the firemen’s union, was posted in the middle of their rec room dart board. Let’s just say that Hizzoner had become quite a popular target. In the middle of that Election Day, the firehouse got a call, and all the vehicle doors suddenly went up in preparation for the engines to pull out, and I had to dive on top of the judge’s table to keep our voting records from blowing out the doors and into the middle of Lincoln Avenue.

Or was it Halsted Street? I don’t remember. But I do remember the year with the crazy woman judge. First of all, she was a Republican judge, which was kind of crazy in itself, because there were no discernible Republicans in Chicago, and you usually had to wrangle some Democratic judge into playing the Republican just so you could fulfill your fairness quota and get your polling place open. Anyway, most of the day this crazy Republican Judge of Election sort of yammered away, kind of to herself, taking a moment out, from time to time, to announce to the entire room what tv show she was missing, and what she thought was probably happening on that show at that particular moment.

Then, for no reason that I could fathom, she walked into the middle of the room and decided to speculate, out loud, on the probable ethnic backgrounds of various candidates, and how their ethnicity would affect their ability to perform their jobs. She started by announcing that she was pretty sure that a particular candidate was a Jew, and that Jews were not the most trustworthy of people.

I was stunned. Several voters stared at her with jaws gaping. Seeing as how there was no sympathetic cop around that year to help me out, I grabbed one of her senior friends by the arm and hissed at them all that they had to stop her. They all shrugged. That was who she was, they said. You couldn’t stop her. After several minutes of absolute mortification, I finally thought to suggest to that crazy bitch that she was neglecting her ballot box-stuffing duties, and that seemed to bring an end to her discourse.

The next day, I called the Republican ward office and told them what happened, and said that I wouldn’t want that woman representing my party. I thought it was nice of me, considering how she was making a jackass of herself whilst where a large badge that said “Republican” in bold red letters. The woman on the phone thanked me profusely for calling. I thought that was the end of it.

Until I was called in to testify downtown at a hearing to remove her, officially, from ever being a Judge of Election again.

Yeah. I took 80 bucks away from a crazy old lady.

Anyways, during my testimony, her “defense strategy” was to accuse me of everything she had read in the statement that I’d made regarding her actions on that day. So, the crazy lady would stand up periodically and point at me and say, for example, “That’s nothing! You know what she did? She called the alderman a Jew! In front of everyone!” Or she would say “Well, she said that Mexicans didn't even bother to vote!” Or “Well, she said the ballots didn’t have to total up exactly right!”

And each time, I would reply, “No, that’s what you said.” Over and over, I corrected her, until I was so completely frustrated and worn down that I finally actually contemplated, for a moment, just confessing to everything myself, because it would have been easier than having to answer back to every one of her transparent fucking idiotic lies.

So, I suppose you all heard that Dick Cheney this week accused Obama of “politicizing the Justice Department.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.

Yield

2009-08-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

Perhaps there are no better words to eulogize Ted Kennedy than those he used to eulogize his own brother Bobby in 1968. It is a brilliant speech that builds to these famous lines:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

There was a time when we all thought that that speech would be all Teddy would be remembered for.

Poor Teddy. Teddy the baby brother, the fat one, the fuck up. Teddy who came too late to benefit from the press's reluctance to air the soiled skivvies of the Kennedys. But in the end, Teddy reformed himself and became the best thing he could have become: a wealthy man who fought against his own interests and for the benefit of those less privileged than he.

It is a shame that he died without passing health care reform. If all those senators on the other side of the aisle who have occupied themselves today with expressing their affection for their old nemesis, the Lion of the Senate, would only consider how they might more appropriately honor him.

I know that they don't want to pass a bill that would be viewed as a Democratic success story. Social Security and Medicare were both passed by Democrats, and are two of the most popular, ahem, socialist programs in the history of that legislative body. The Republicans don't want a repeat of those victories, plain and simple. And if you think their obstruction of reform amounts to much more than that, then I have a little bridge in Chappaquiddick I'd like to sell you.

But those distinguished senators should consider that instead of obstructing an acheivement that will save thousands of American lives, and impove millions more, they might instead reflect upon some lesser known words of the Lion:

"Surely we can learn to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us, and become in our own hearts, brothers and countrymen once again...Moral courage is a greater commodity than bravery in battle, or great intelligence. Yet is is the one essential vital quality for those who seek to change the world that yields most painfully to change."

The crowd goes wild

2009-08-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

Some of my longtime readers will remember this post from nearly two years ago, in which I rail against the worship of political unicorns.

It starts out like this:

Anyone out there who still believes in a politician who is without strategic lapses of morality, even his or her own morality, please come and stand next to me.

So that I can kick you in the ass.

Look, baby, politicians compromise. That’s what they do. They can not, and do not, get where they are without compromising. A lot. More than the most jaded among us would like, in fact.

Ad infinitum, in perpetuity throughout the universe, forever and ever, amen.

And ends like this:

Because I am tired of you fucking idealistic Democrats. Because once you find out your candidate is human, you become the most tiresome, whining, petulant, bitter people on the face of the earth. You swear you will never vote again, ever! You issue stern warnings to your friends that even though you do not agree on any issue, you will vote Republican, because at least they’re not stupid Democrats! You are the people I see walking around with a martyred expression and a “Ron Paul for President” button. You are the people standing at those tables outside the grocery store, trying to convince me that Lyndon LaRouche is not a card-carrying loon.

And so people, I hope that this little incident from the Obama campaign drives home my point, which is that there is no magic candidate. There is NO ONE running in this race who hasn’t done some pretty stinky things because he or she thought it would help them politically. There are no fairy tale contenders. No Prince Charmings, no wizards, no vaguely Christ-like talking lions – nothing.

Except for Kucinich, who I’m pretty sure is some kind of elf.

Ha! Ha! Kucinich jokes! Remember those?

But I stand by my post, and it’s more relevant now than ever, as scores of lefties begin their quadrannual migration away from the balmy climes of idealism and into the frigid regions of realization that their candidate is, after all, a politician, and no politician has ever succeeded at being a politician without also being a politician.

To translate this into more prosaic language for those who are too busy donating their old Shepard Fairey t-shirts and deleting Will.i.am campaign videos from their hard drives to be able to catch my drift – to translate this for them – Obama is doing the best he can.

Yes, I understand that it’s not good enough for you. And that’s fine. Continue to push for what you want, of course. In fact, please do, because it’s my personal belief that the leftist agenda is where all, or in fact any, hope for us lies. Please, make a stink. Write letters or emails. Vote in online polls. Give your elected representative a piece of your mind, goddammit. Write smug, long-winded political rants on your personal blogs. Please. Really, please. Because without the left, the middle is in the right.

Know what I mean?

What you should please not do, or at least please not do in front of me, is fucking whimper about how disappointed you are that Obama is not who you thought he was. Because who the fuck did you think he was, and, more importantly, who the fuck are you?

Obama will get a health care reform bill with a public option passed if he can. If he can’t…he can’t. Now, you may not like that. I don’t like it. I think a health care reform bill without a public option is fairly close to being a fucking oxymoron, and I’m not alone, by the way. And you may disagree with what constitutes the “can’t,” but you should also realize that we have only the tiniest crumb of an idea of the stuff of which that “can’t” consists. There are ten thousand ways he tries that we will never know about, not because we shouldn’t, but because that’s just the way our government rolls. He will bargain away things that we would rather he didn’t. He will pay any price he considers worth paying to get what he wants. That’s how it works. And you can argue the value of the chips all you want, but you can’t put the system on Obama’s head. Sorry. It’s not within his power to change that. And if he told you that he could, he was lying.

Is that shocking to you? Really? If so, may I recommend that you give up the following of current events, and instead immerse yourself in the glorious world of science fiction? You’ll have lots of company, and no one will ever make you know the name of another congressperson or cabinet member or undersecretary of the blah blah blah ever again. Sure, you’ll have to learn Klingon, but at least SoH DIchDaq Hegh tlhej quv!

And I swear, you can hate Obama for making you believe that he could change the world if you want to, but it’d be just another foolish action by just another fool. Obama is not the boss of us. He’s not king. He’s not your god, either, he’s just a good player in a very fucked up game.

And besides, who’s not to say that he hasn’t already changed the world? Maybe we’re just not looking in the right place. Obama stepped up and volunteered to be our collective Jackie Robinson. And sure, he’ll be in the history books just for managing, and I’m still not sure how he did it, to get elected president. And if he also accomplishes something in the next four to eight years, he’ll get credit for that, too, and lots of it. But in the meantime, he’ll have to take a few spikes to the shinbone. He’ll have to listen to the taunting, and the name-calling, and he’ll never be able to answer back the way he’d really like. But that’s what he signed up for. He could’ve stayed down in the minors, but he didn’t. And so, the pressure’s on him. I hope he can take it. I hope that he, like Jackie, keeps his head down and learns to shut out the insults and plugs away the best he can.

And you know what? Here’s something I wouldn’t admit to just anyone: I believe he has my best interest at heart. What he can manage to accomplish in this ferkakta cesspool of a rich man’s world, is another story.

It's people!

2009-08-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Look, it’s not ignorance I object to, it’s willful ignorance. Americans have made a religion of elevating their opinion, or their “gut,” to such an extent that it occupies the same rarified strata as the facts, and the worship of this religion of ignorance has gained such a foothold in American culture that its proponents were even able to propel their King of Dumbass Kings, George W. Bush, to the highest office in the land for 8 long, unabashedly and gleefully ignorant years.

But what do you expect from a country in which NASCAR drivers are admired as heroes, and activists like Al Gore are reviled as dorks and losers?

And before the liberal sniggering begins over the admittedly inexplicable worship by one half of this nation of dudes who excel at driving cars fast in a circle, let me propose a less popular target amongst the latte-swilling crowd: Lance Armstrong. Because the hero worship of Armstrong is such a typically American load of horseshit.

I have nothing against Armstrong personally. He seems to be very good at riding a bike. He also survived gonad cancer, which is great for him, but my point is that surviving a disease isn’t a selfless act. It is an act of immediate self-preservation. It may be inspirational for those who suffer from cancer, and perhaps those enamored of brightly-colored formulaic arm accessories, to recall Armstrong’s various feats of strength and stamina, but nothing he has ever done, including enduring the taunts of Frenchmen, will ever make the cancer of a single one of his fans go away. You know who might make cancer go away one day? Some dork. Some long-hour-working, incredibly smart and dedicated dork in a lab – just like the other smart dorks in different kinds of labs all over the world who are, at this very second, calling up Al Gore and saying “You know, this whole global warming thing is looking a little worse than we thought. Could you maybe make another documentary, or win another Nobel prize, because no one seems to give a shit. They’re all too busy watching alpha rednecks drive cars very fast in a circle, or wondering if Lance Armstrong emerged from the mountains with the yellow jersey.”

Maybe the global warming people should come up with their own stretchy colored bracelet. It could be green, to commemorate the color the earth used to be before the oceans rose and our civilization was reduced to the plot of a spectacularly bad Kevin Costner vehicle. I’m not sure what they should write on the bracelet, though. Lance’s says “LIVE STRONG.” Maybe theirs should say “HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!”

Again, I’m not impugning Armstrong’s character. And I don’t mean to pick on athletes in general. Athletes, usually, just want to play and get paid. It’s our culture that worships or condemns them out of all proportion. And ultimately, it’s wrong to blame the fiddle for the incineration of Rome.

And speaking of allusions to the demise of a great civilization, if the McCain/Palin platform wasn’t the very embodiment of Nero fiddling, then I’m not sure what could possibly ever be.

Palin, the acknowledged heir apparent to the Dumbass crown, continues, long after the point when anyone should be listening to her, to yammer on about completely stupid, disingenuous self-serving crap. And her inexplicable worshipers – who apparently follow after her because she’s a mom*, or because she drops her Gs, or whatever stupid goddamn reason they follow her, continue to think that she makes sense. And why? Because – here we go again – they feel it. In their guts.

Well, maybe it’s better if they think back to their school days, back to when education perhaps actually meant something to them, and think what their teachers would’ve made of what passes for acceptable political discourse these days. Yeah, maybe they should ask their old English teachers what they think of Sarah Palin, because I’m pretty sure that the two words that won’t pass their lips in response are “makes sense.”

Goddamn but the whole country seems addicted to dumbassery these days, whether it’s the fucking stupid old people who think that now that Charlton Heston is dead, the US government is finally free to initiate Operation Soylent Green, and euthanize their moronic asses under the guise of healthcare reform, or the comically enraged white dudes who believe all the congressional and radio and TV yammerers who say that Obama and Sotomayor are racists.

Yes, they’re my favorite dumbasses of all, those who refuse to see that an acknowledgment of the struggle is not an endorsement of favoritism. But then, the only thing those old white dudes have to struggle with is to not say the N word when their mike is live.

I dunno, though, we’re all so invested in the ignorant and the dumbass, how can we just give it up, cold turkey? How can we put down the reality television and the Fox News and the “Transformers” franchise just like that? And what would happen to Christianity, if people stopped attributing the outcomes of their lives to a mythical being, and believed that their own actions had the power to move us all forward? Would the world crumble? I mean, more than it already is?

Stay tuned, readers. The pendulum may have reached the furthest point on its dumbass swing, which, if true, means we may finally be on the verge of an age of enlightenment. We may, as a collective human society, finally begin the essential movement forward and away from our own destruction.

Or not. You know. What the fuck do I know? All I know is that I am beat, and besides, all those episodes of “Bridezillas” on my DVR aren’t going to watch themselves.

*Like there's never been an ignorant one of those.

Don't bother, they're here

2009-07-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Every time I think that the Republicans are going to find a way to halt their rapid succession of credibility implosions, they up and prove me wrong.

Granted, I thought that it was smart of them to ultimately not stand in the way of Sotomayor’s confirmation, and then I read that except for Lindsay Graham, who had perhaps mistakenly committed to voting her up before receiving his RNC-issued “no fucking way” memo, the Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee decided to have one last wise-Latina-riffic bitch-out. Whew! And I was worried that the Republicans might shave off some percentage of conservative Catholic Latinos in the next election! No need to fret about that any more.

You know, readers, I was a waitress and a bartender for about ten years of my life, and during that time I was treated just about every way a human being can be treated. But let me just say, if anyone had asked me, in a tone that brought new meaning to the word condescension, “Do you have a temperament problem?” I would’ve been over that bar and swinging my trusty Chicago bartender-issued Louisville Slugger, hoping to teach them what a temperament problem truly looked like. Believe me, in my day, I went over the bar for a lot less.

Also, it might help establish Republicans as something other than racist idiots if they stopped with the Birther stuff already. Even now that it’s clear, as anyone who can read words or understand speech will tell you, what a pathetic empty hoax this whole thing is, there are still lots of Republicans that would rather look like idiots than admit that a black Democratic president is a bona fide American.

It’s a pretty pathetic effort, compared to the last time Republicans sabotaged a fairly-elected commander in chief. That one was well done. Maybe the Birthers should call James Baker, you know, see what he’s up to. He might be available, like, for cheap.

Senator Voinovich of Ohio is upset about his party’s image, make no mistake, and he’s willing to name names, too, regarding who’s responsible. Well, not exactly “name names.” More like “toss around the kind of vague, insulting generalities for which his party has become known.” Voinovich blames, ahem, “Southerners,” and their yammer show version of the Rebel Yell, for the state his party is in.

Republicans like Texas Senator John Cornyn tend to give credence to Voinovich’s argument, especially when Cornyn argues in public that the US government needs to fund expensive planes that don’t work in case we have to bomb India.

What the?

Oh, wait. Did he say India? He meant China. In case we have to bomb China. China. Bomb. China.

It’s a unique way to deal with our largest creditor and the country that holds our financial future in its hands, I guess. I guess if someone offered me a chance to bomb the offices of Citibank Visa, I’d have to think about it pretty hard.

Also giving credence to Voinovich’s theory is Rep. Sen. DeMint of South Carolina, who claimed that the GOP would use the health care issue to “break” Obama, and that it would be his “Waterloo.” I presume DeMint means that health care would be a major losing battle for Obama, and not that it would be the first of his many top ten pop hits.

And I wonder where the outrage is, over a United States Senator who has no qualms about stating publicly that he is going to do everything in his power to crush efforts to solve the problem of 46 million Americans who are sick, dying, or denied basic care for want of health insurance. 46 million Americans who have been, or would be, turned away even from emergency room treatment, because they aren’t one of the lucky ones who has been offered coverage at a price they can afford to pay. It is the shame of our generation that we have allowed Wall Street to flourish while citizens all over this country line up for days for donated medical services at regional fairgrounds where "health care expeditions" provide care for uninsured Americans in the stalls normally reserved for show cattle.

In fact, show cattle receive better medical treatment than most Americans do.

You know who else gets better treatment than most Americans? Members of Congress. Their health care plan is pretty flippin sweet. Just a little something to ponder while they vote to deny you your health care plan.

You know who else gets great health care at government expense? Veterans. Of course no one would deny that they deserve the best medical treatment this country can provide. What surprises me is that Republicans are allowed to state, quite openly and without any ensuing backlash, that the rest of us "do not deserve" the same level of healthcare as veterans receive.

I'm not going to argue that I do deserve the same as them, I'm just arguing that we've proven that we can run an excellent health care system. So why do they get to keep arguing that we can't?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Voinovich, determined to make his point, also called out Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), he of the Ricky Ricardo-esque admonishments to Sotomayor. And while I’ll agree that a lawmaker who calls the “gay agenda” the “greatest threat to our freedom we have today,” is an embarrassment, I don’t think you can really sell Oklahoma as a “Southern” state. Texas, maybe. Not Oklahoma. Also, let’s not forget that one of the most embarrassing fools to ever hold national office, Michelle Bachman, comes from a state north of Ohio. Not to mention western state douchebags like Senator Ensign of Nevada, who wailed from the Senate Floor about the sanctity of marriage even as he was cheating on his own wife with the wife of one of his best friends. So sorry, Voino, but you’re going to have to stop the geographic profiling and face the facts that although not all Republicans are lying cheating dumbfuck clowns, these days, if you come across a lying cheating dumbfuck clown, chances are, they’re a Republican.

You're going to feel some pressure

2009-07-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Jeezy creezy, readers, we suck, and allow me to explain why.

If the next presidential election were to be held right now, Obama would be neck and neck with Mittens and Alaska Spice.

I know, it’s hardly surprising. And I suppose I should be glad that the Republican 2012 field so far consists of the dude who couldn’t out-charisma Gramps McCain in the last primary, and the dumbest goddamn woman to ever hold a political office higher than Chicago Alderwoman or Congresswoman for California’s 45^th District.

But I can’t be glad. Because Americans are so proud of their stupidity that Romney and Palin actually qualify as viable candidates to us. I mean, we elected a “CEO President” who had never been a successful CEO. We thought renaming fried potatoes would make people respect and fear us. And some of us, probably a lot more of us than we would like to think, believe that Obama faked his US birth certificate, and that he is therefore not legitimately our chief executive. I’m not sure how his birth in Honolulu could be considered such an unlikely event that it requires its own conspiracy theory, but let’s just say that the so-called “birthers” bring new meaning to the phrase “sore loser.”

Oh, and also “dumbass.”

Oh, and just for the record, dumbasses, you know who really wasn’t born in the USA? The other one.

Americans are so stupid that it seems as likely as not that we will demand that our elected representatives kill the only chance we’re going to get in the foreseeable future to end the vicious, deadly stranglehold that insurance companies have on our health care system. We’re going to listen to all those Republican and “centrist” Democrats whose voting hands are firmly planted in the pockets of industry lobbyists, and let them talk us out of a decent health care alternative and back into a system that is not only more expensive than a Federal option, but also allows people whose only motive is profit to hoodwink us out of the healthcare we already paid for. Personally, my insurance company just declined to cover a diagnostic procedure that my doctor wanted me to have. And why? They couldn’t give me a reason. Just because. Just because they can.

But hey, if you don’t have your own healthcare insurance horror stories, you can always listen to other people’s. You could listen, for instance, to this woman, who was kicked off her policy the weekend before her double mastectomy. Blue Cross claimed that she had not disclosed to them a previous condition: acne.

I shit you not.

Or you could listen to this dude, a former executive for Cigna, who also testified before Congress after experiencing a swift kick to the conscience about the policies his industry was engaging in. He admits freely that the healthcare insurance industry is primarily concerned with the value of its stock, and they keep the value high by unfairly denying claims and coverage, betting that the vast majority of people will be powerless to fight against them

And they’re exactly right about that.

But go ahead and whine about socialism and the far reach of the Federal government, ya big fucking dumbasses. You probably hate your insurance carrier, but let me tell you, your insurance carrier loves you. They love you, because they can take your money until you start to cost them money, and then they can drop you like a hot tumor, buddy, and there will be not one damn thing you can do about it. They love you because you and your ignorant Republican talking points make this massive fraud they are perpetrating possible. Goddamn but they do love you. They love you to death.

Jonah and the flail

2009-07-14T18:18:00.000-07:00

I support freedom of speech. So if Jonah Goldberg wants to write a column suggesting that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants to kill ghetto babies, and the LA Times, a paper apparently sorely in need of an audience, sees fit to publish his meandering, slack-jawed drivel, then fine by me. I guess since they’re done calling the Obama girls “monkeys” and “whores,” his fans at the Free Republic could use some red meat anyway.

Let’s just jump right in, shall we?:

Here's what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided," Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, "there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of."

The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times -- or any other major news outlet -- was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had "too many" of, you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.

Left unclear is whether Ginsburg endorses the eugenic motivation she ascribed to the passage of Roe vs. Wade or whether she was merely objectively describing it.

Oh, is it? Is it “left unclear”? Perhaps if one excerpted the entire quote (such as we must accept it in an edited interview), what Ginsburg meant might be a little clearer. This is directly from the interview itself:

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

How’s that, Jonah? Clear things up for you any?

Having convinced himself that he has successfully associated our only sitting female member of the Supreme Court with eugenics, a movement most notoriously equated with Hitler and the Nazis, Jonah goes on to drop the bombshell that one of the pioneers of birth control and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was substantially motivated by eugenics. Wowie! Shocking! To find that out, Jonah must have done some serious digging! In fact, he probably dug up a high school level social studies book, because that’s where I read about it.

I think Jonah’s point is that 1, the early proponents of reproductive choice were racists, and 2, maybe they still are.

Regarding 1, I wonder if he’s aware that many early members of the women’s suffrage movement opposed voting rights for African Americans?

It’s true. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if maybe it was feminists, and not all those good ole boys down South, who were responsible for all that Jim Crow nonsense?

And don’t forget about those lily white founding fathers, man. They owned slaves. AND they wrote the Constitution. Does Jonah know this? Because maybe he should do a column about how people who support upholding the Constitution might secretly be trying to bring back slavery.

Regarding 2, Jonah invokes two dudes with absolutely no business representing modern liberals, and tries to imply that liberals want ghetto babies to die because otherwise they will grow up to steal our iPods.

I think Jonah, who has a tendency to infer a lot from things, might want to think twice before entering the whole does-abortion-reduce-crime fray. Because that fray has a whole lot of smart, statics-savvy dudes in it who would not only eat him alive, but would probably also prove to him that, statistically speaking, he sucks ass.

Furthermore, it’s certainly no surprise that Jonah either forgets, or is too stupid to have figured out, that it’s not the children of minorities that probably disproportionately wreak havoc on society, it’s unwanted children. And the well-off have, as Ginsburg pointed out, never especially needed Roe v. Wade. It’s poor and middle-class women who need Roe v. Wade, but especially poor women, who are more likely than others to not be able to afford preventative birth control, either.

Lastly, I think anyone with even a conservative-sized brain can see that modern eugenics is peopled pretty exclusively by conservatives, and not just the extreme, violent skinhead types, either. Take the members of the Quiverfull movement, whose goal is to push out as many fundamentalists whelps as they can in the hopes of keeping their own kind the dominant population in America. And Michael Medved, a prominent conservative, who wrote a column in which he postulated that “American DNA” is choice, because it’s all up-and-at-‘em and pioneer-y, and oh, a certain population that was brought here by force instead of by gumption might just be peeing in our DNA pool. Also, let’s consider everyday conservative dunces like this Fox correspondent, who’s just, you know, a fucking tool.

So, to take the concern that a lot of feminists have for women who have difficulty financing reproductive freedom, and to imply that that concern is motivated by racism, is fairly despicable. To attribute that motivation to Ginsburg, who is clearly not guilty, and then even to Sotomayor, which Jonah shamelessly does, is beyond even the Jonah Goldberg pale.

But, nevertheless, I continue to believe in freedom of speech. I also believe in reproductive freedom. Even Mama Goldberg’s.

All over again

2009-07-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

I was walking down the corridor of the place where I work today when I was hit with a powerful sense of the ole déjà vu. I stopped for a moment, as I always do, to see if I could muster forth a premonition of what would happen next, but I was unsuccessful, as usual. I admit that it’s a fairly childish piece of behavior on my part, a bit like crossing my fingers and making a wish whenever I see a white horse, which I still also do, despite my abysmal success record in that area as well. Although you never know. Someday I might still marry David Cassidy.

I read a really interesting explanation for déjà vu somewhere. Basically, it postulated that the feeling could be chalked up to a small, momentary brain malfunction; that a neural misfire could cause a new experience to be routed through the brain on a pathway normally reserved for memory, thus making the present “feel” like the past.

I like that explanation. Now it makes sense to me to that feelings of déjà vu never come at significant moments, but always come at the most mundane of times, e.g., when I am pulling a long string of cheese off a piece of pizza and dropping it into my mouth, or sitting at the interminable red arrow traffic light near my house, or lounging in my backyard on a summer’s eve, plotting the violent death of the Freecreditreport.com guy.

Amazingly, I don’t believe I have ever experienced an episode of déjà vu while learning that some right wing ideologue is actually a miserable lying hypocrite, which just seems like a stupendous defying of the odds, doesn’t it? I mean, I don’t know about you, but it seems like, if I were to estimate the time I spend each day learning of the real-life hypocrisies of the holier-than-thou, it would have to be about 9 waking hours, plus also about 40 minutes of sleep time a day during which I am hitting the snooze button on the clock radio whilst subconsciously absorbing news from our nation’s capital delivered by the soothing tones of Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne. So…call it 10 hours of hypocrite revelations a day, give or take.

So, no, when I hear that another one of the congressmen who stood at our nation’s seat of government and condemned President Clinton to the damnation of eternal hellfire for cheating on his wife, has in fact actually cheated on his wife, I don’t think “Wow. Déjà vu.” I maybe think, “Another brick in the wall, huh?” or “What a huge fucking surprise,” or sometimes even “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT FROM THESE PEOPLE? HONESTY? INTEGRITY? THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THOSE WORDS MEAN.”

Similarly, when I find out that the $1.9 million (she referred to it as “millions,” but we’ll let that one pass) that Sarah Palin’s office estimated the state of Alaska has spent on defending her against scandals, was comprised mainly of the salaried hours of state attorneys who would’ve had to draw a paycheck anyway, and did not, as she so emphatically assured us, divert money from state troopers or education, I do not feel a sense of déjà vu, even though it is yet another Sarah Palin convenient lie in a veritable avalanche of convenient lies from Ms. Alaska. What did divert money from education was Palin herself, as it turns out. Also, just for the record, she didn’t sell the jet on eBay, she did campaign for the “bridge to nowhere,” she and Todd actually did have health insurance during that time that she said they didn’t even though it was pointed out to her by Todd himself that they did, they were involved in the Alaska separatist group, she did fire that librarian and that police chief, she never met with Russian trade officials, her teleprompter did not break, the Branchflower Report did state unethical activity, holy fucking Christ on a cross I could go on, y’all, but I think probably the recitation of Palin’s prevarications have already caused enough of you to drift away from this post and onto less predictable fare.

The thing is, with Palin and Sanford and Ensign and loonies like Bachman and Santorum and all the others is, they know that they can sell their fucked-up agendas to a certain portion of the public. They know that there are people out there who, for reasons past all sensible understanding, think that their wages are shitty because of Mexicans, and not because of Wall Street, and that gay people are disgusting sinners who do not deserve to live like “normal” people, and that the world was a better place before blacks got all uppity, and that if the government offered them health insurance, then our health care system would be in worse shape than it is now, as if that were possible, readers. As it that were even remotely fucking possible. And they sell themselves to those people as champions of their misguided ideals, and they repeat those ideals, and they tell them that those are the only real ideals, the only truly American ideals, and they enable those people, who, by the way, know in their heart of hearts that they are bitter, and they do embrace guns and religion as a way to comfort their own powerlessness; they enable the ignorance of the people who support them, and those people continue to support them, and it all goes on and on as a part of the huge cyclone of shit that American politics ever has been and probably ever will be, amen.

No, there’s no déjà vu here, folks, because that would suggest that the exposure of right-wing hypocrites is some kind of aberration, some kind of fluke, or trick of the mind. No, there is no such luck for us – as long as politicians make their living selling lies, there will be those who eventually become exposed as liars. What frustrates me is that generally, no one yet seems willing to infer that maybe, maybe they’re all liars.

Well, let me put forth, then, that if you are selling a lie, you’re a liar. And let me suggest to CNN and MSNBC and NBC and CBS and ABC and even Fox – let me suggest that if you pretend to us that you believe that the way to present an issue is to balance every truth with a lie, and let the viewers figure it out, then you’re liars as well. Every time you bring out an Ann Coulter or a Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity to represent “the other side,” you’re a big, fat, stinking, soul-stealing, will-to-live-crushing liar, and if there is a punishment meted out after this mortal life to those who sin against humanity, then yours will surely be colossal, but, hey, there’s nothing new about that.

No time is a good time for goodbyes

2009-07-06T17:01:00.001-07:00

Well, readers, I’ve spent the weekend trying to make sense of Governor Palin’s resignation speech, which wasn’t easy considering the only thing more fucked up than the content was the delivery. Is this something they teach you in the beauty pageant world, to talk like your speech is written on the bodies of thousands of tiny bats flying around inside your skull?

First of all, I think that her usual M.O. of making her family stand up next to her was an excellent choice to make for a speech complaining about how the media exploits her children. It’s irony so thick and meaty you’ll be tempted to eat it with a fork – but use a spoon, of course, readers, to get every drop.

Drops such as the one in which she asserts that deserting the governor’s office while Alaska descends into perhaps unprecedented economic hard times is what’s best for Alaska. Frankly, I couldn’t agree more, but I had no idea that Palin and I would be on the same page on that issue. Hunter S. Thompson once said that when the going gets tough, the tough turn pro. No doubt Palin will come to appreciate that thought as she struggles to deliver on her 11 million book advance from Rupert Murdoch.

Another drop: Palin compared her decision to the inspiration she found when recently visiting American troops in Kosovo and Germany. And what did she find inspiring about the troops there, you may ask? They “don’t give up.”

Palin also went out of her way to crow about how the Supreme Court had reversed their favorite whipping boy, the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, on two recent decisions in which the state of Alaska was defending what Palin describes as “states’ rights.” One decision ruled that a mining company does indeed have the right to deposit slag into an otherwise clean, freshwater lake. The other ruled that the state has the right to deny a defendant access to crime scene DNA to test against their own, even if the defendant pays for the tests.

Hey, way to go, Alaska. Now there’s some rights worth fighting for. No wonder your former governor is so proud. Freedom ain't, as country stars and bumper stickers are so found of reminding us, free.

Palin also quite rightly pointed out that part of the reason she was quitting was because she was, by virtue of the announcement that she would not seek re-election that she had just made 30 seconds ago, now a lame duck governor, and lame duck governors do not get anything done, so she had just as well quit in the middle of her first term anyways. I can’t help but wonder if any of the governor’s aides had pointed out that such reasoning was not very sound, since she could’ve easily not announced that she wasn’t running for a second term, and therefore not given away her lame duck status, if that status was so meaningful that she was using it to justify walking away from the office that the voters of the state of Alaska had elected her to. But I’m nitpicky like that.

And not to get into uncomfortable subjects, but did she really say that the world needed more retarded children? Because, Sarah, darling, no matter how much you love your retarded child, and lord knows I believe you do – the world does not need more retarded children. Nor does it need more blind children or deaf children or children born with bodies that do not allow them to run and play. No one thinks things like that. Jesus Christ, think about what you’re saying once in a while, will you?

Some people will no doubt point out that she didn’t really say the world needed more retarded children. She said, in the context of complaining that people were making fun of her son, that “the world needs more ‘Trigs’, not fewer.” And yes, she did put her child’s name in quotes in the official text of the speech. I CANNOT DEAL WITH HER GRAMMATICAL SHORTCOMINGS, PEOPLE. WE DO NOT HAVE TIME.

So what does “Trig” mean, if not a retarded child? A child people make fun of? The world needs more of those? That can’t be right. Maybe she meant a child used as a political prop, but could never be referred to in that way by anyone else but her?

I bet that’s it.

And here’s the last drop: after an entire speech spent denigrating the “REAL climate change” (ho ho!) that occurred in Alaskan politics, and painting the situation there as one completely unworthy of her considerable attentions and talents, she then went on to state that the dude taking over for her was going to be really good at governing it, and she didn’t want to discourage young people from going into politics. Because it’s so worth it! But not for her. And you can change government for the better! If it were even worth changing, which it isn’t. Public service, people! It’s for losers! Or not!

Overall, I think I was somewhat stunned that the entire speech was delivered in a manner so stammering, halting, and disjointed, and with such poor skill and technique that it was hard to believe that the woman stood on the floor of the RNC last year in front of twenty thousand people and lied her ass off with a straight face and wink. If McCain had won, she would’ve been one cantankerous septuagenarian’s heartbeat away from being president! President! Of the United States! I mean, sure, we’ve succeeded in lowering the bar to a stupefying level over the last eight years, but still. Even George W. at his most mind-bogglingly obtuse would’ve had trouble coming up with this:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.

In other words, only quitters keep trying. Only lazy people continue to work.

OMG, readers, it almost came to be. Remember that, every time you hear McCain prattle on about teaching Iran a lesson or you hear that stupid, bullying, coward of a moron whining on and on about how hard it is for her to stay awesome. Remember. It almost came to be.

Bells On wonders...

2009-06-30T14:21:00.001-07:00

I think the only sector of the market that Ed Hardy has not penetrated is women's hygiene products. Is that because an Ed Hardy douchebag would be redundant?

Don't be callin out mercy

2009-06-26T09:11:00.001-07:00

I have to admit I am a little relieved Michael Jackson is dead. He was messed up beyond all measure, but he was too famous and powerful to ever be helped by anyone. He only ever made the news when he did something appalling, and come on, he was never actually going to make that comeback or make another good piece of music, so all the "how ironic that he died just as he was about to reclaim his status" stuff is bullshit, and we all know it.

He was the quintessential imploding star, yes, although he took that paradigm to a stupefying level. He was incapable of distinguishing reality from the narrative that he paid people to perpetuate. Whatever it was that had scarred him, he was so frightened of it that he retreated from the responsibilities of adulthood entirely, and that's beyond sad. It's sickening.

He was used by everyone around him, from his parents, to his siblings, to his stunt wife Lisa Marie, who I think took off as soon as she figured out she couldn't secure a nice paycheck for Scientology. The failures of those who purported to care about him were colossal.

I find it hard to even be sad for his devoted fans, because they seem so deluded. He wasn't "innocent," he's not "the prince" anymore, and he only seemed to care about his fans to the extent that they reinforced his self-aggrandizing and self-damaging world view.

When I watch one of his old videos, back before he Frankensteined himself, I just feel sad. What a waste of talent. What a waste of a fortune. What a big fucking waste.

Never did far away charge so close

2009-06-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

You know, I find it really touching that the Republicans care so much about the stolen election in Iran. I mean, they care enough that they are demanding that President Obama issue threats against the government of

Iran

, even though those threats could very well escalate hostilities between us, and cause their government to clamp down on protesters even more. That is a hell of a lot of caring. Good for them. I’m impressed.

I guess they have finally learned their lesson from 2000 - that stolen elections and illegitimate leaders mean dire consequences for the country that allows such crimes to take place. I mean, I'm grateful that they finally have learned, but I just wish they had let us know before BushCo ransacked the fucking country for 8 years, but, you know, whatever. Kudos.

Who'll stop the rain?

2009-06-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

I always tend to feel a bit like Goldilocks when I’m away from home. All the different beds. Some too soft. Some too hard. Sometimes, the elusive “just right.”

Spooney and I started out our tour of the East Coast having a pretty good time. Sure, United demonstrated that they really don’t understand the “confirmed” part of confirmed seat assignments, and they seem to be of the opinion that eight rows away is really close enough to sit to my boyfriend on a six hour flight, but we managed a trade and the flight attendant skated us some free drinks and an apology. I love the flight attendants and the cockpit personnel on United. Everyone else who works for that airline can go fuck themselves as far as I’m concerned, especially those completely useless twats on their reservation line. United used to have great phone reps, but they’ve recently outsourced to someplace where poorly enunciated English, and the ability to read words off a screen, seem to be their only marketable skills.

So it was great seeing relatives in New Jersey, and my dear friend Kate in NYC, but once we got to Boston, the wheels started to come off. Yes, we had some great dinners with old friends at first, and everything seemed to be going swell, but then we hit a real losing streak near the end. First, due to my own dumb error, we showed up one night too late for our much-anticipated Red Sox game, and then, after I shelled out additional dollars to a scalper for 2 more tickets, the game got rained out after five crappily played innings.

Then, the seas were so stormy and rough during our whale watch that not only did we not see any whales, but half the passengers were freely spewing chunks. It was a five hour lesson in endurance and self-control. Forget waterboarding, man, if you want to torture a detainee, put them on the Boston Aquarium Whale Watch Cruise with six foot swells and a poop deck full of barfing schoolchildren.

On the morning of our 6 a.m. flight home, we got lost trying to find the car rental return. And then, just to up the anxiety ante, we got pulled over by a cop in Revere, because at 3 a.m., it is apparently difficult to distinguish the way lost people drive from the way drunk people drive. The cop berated us for our infraction, wondered aloud (and definitely rhetorically) as to whether we might be humans of the moron variety, gave us some very rapidly and impatiently delivered directions to our destination, and then walked away without saying a word of farewell, shaking his head in disgust.

And then United lost my luggage.

I was so relieved to be home at that point that I didn’t mind the thought of going to work the next day with my au naturale curly poodle bangs. What I did mind, is that I knew I would have to spend the day telling people that they no longer had a job.

Yeah, I found out right before I left what I was going to be doing the day I got back. And I’m ashamed to admit that it hung over me like a thundercloud the entire time I was gone. No matter how many times I told Spooney that I was definitely not thinking about it the whole time…I was definitely thinking about it the whole time. I was lying awake nights and stewing, constantly stewing and fretting.

I’m even more ashamed to admit that after a day of laying off talented and dedicated employees, I feel sorry for myself, and it’s not because I know that the clock has started ticking on my own job. It’s because it shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t be here, doing this bullshit thing. This incredible company, with its brilliant technology, should survive. It’s the new economy! So why does it feel so much like the 1980s?

Actually, now that I think about it, it feels like Carter’s first term. If you were alive and coherent in the ‘70s, you might remember that Carter tried to turn this country around during the fuel crisis. He proposed a plan for energy independence, practically invented industry and consumer conservation, funded alternative power sources, and even put solar panels on the White House.

Then came Reagan, who proceeded to, in one of his first acts as president, very publicly remove those solar panels. His second act was to take all the money for solar and other fuel technologies, and give it to the oil companies so that they could find more freakin oil. They did, they got richer, the price of gas went down, and Americans promptly forgot why they cared about fuel efficiency in the first place. They decided that Saint Ronnie knew best, and if he told us that the man standing behind us with his cock in our ass was Big Government, and not Big Oil, then by god that was good enough for us.

What kills me, is that if we had followed through on Carter’s plan, we’d be energy independent today. Yes, it would’ve been a major expenditure. Solar power is expensive, but you know what? It goddamn works. So does wind power. Think about it - we’d be off the Mideast grid by now, motherfuckers. I mean, can you imagine where we’d be right now, if we didn’t need OPEC? 5000 American veterans and millions of civilians from both Gulf Wars would be alive. There’d be less oil money to support Islamic terrorism all over the world. Also, with no need for a U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, we’d miss being branded as the Great Satan by Osama bin Laden. 3000 people get to go home to their families at the end of the day on September 11, 2001. The war in Afghanistan never happens, but it’s okay because without the US meddling in the Mideast, the USSR never invades Afghanistan, the US never funds the Afghani warlords, and the Taliban never takes hold. So the next time someone is droning on and on about what a terrible president Jimmy Carter was, shove that in their pipe and tell them to fucking choke on it.

And while you’re at it, tell them to shut the fuck up about socialism and the stimulus bill and their fucking goddamn tea parties. In case you haven’t noticed, American capitalist ingenuity ain’t shit right now, people. The profit for the technologies that will save our lives will always be too far away for those greedy fucks and their stupid, stupid short-sighted goddamn Wall Street crybaby investors. The only place where real innovation is taking place around the world is in places where the government is biting the bullet and funding it. Wake the fuck up. Wake the fuck up, people, and join me. Because I tell you, lately, I cannot sleep at all.

Hang on

2009-06-22T09:55:00.001-07:00

Sorry. I've been gone, and I've been real gone.

Events developing. Issues mulling.

xoxox
v

Bizarro Jerry

2009-06-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

Holy cow, readers, what kind of bizarro world are we living in these days, anyways?

Darth Cheney is supporting gay marriage.

President Obama is refusing to release detainee photos

Michael Moore is a millionaire. GM is bankrupt.

Eminem has a sense of humor. (Seriously, I mean, wow, who’s next? Sean Penn?)

And white men are the victims of racist Latina women.

You know, I remember when the CTA finally put wheelchair lifts on the city buses in Chicago. At the same time, they also tore out several rows of seats in order to make a sort of wheelchair cubby – they’re everywhere now so you know what I’m talking about. But I remember, many years ago now, the first time I saw the new arrangement put to use. Many other riders that day were transfixed by the sight of the man being lifted in his chair by what I must admit was a very slow mechanism. Everyone was kind of staring. And this middle-aged businesswoman standing beside me made a point of looking at me and rolling her eyes. “I don’t understand why they can’t have their own buses like before,” she said. “They slow everyone else down, and if they hadn’t torn out all those seats for them, then we could be sitting down right now.” She paused, and then narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you think so?” she said, rather aggressively.

“I think,” I said “we should get down on our knees and thank our lucky fucking stars that we can walk onto this bus on our perfectly functioning legs.”

Okay, maybe I didn’t really say that. Maybe I’ve only spent the last twenty years formulating the ultimate trepverte response. Maybe at the time I only glared back in a sullen twenty-something way. But even back in my sneering, snotty, black-clad, self-absorbed salad days, readers, I knew she was an asshole. Even I knew that.

And I feel similarly about the LEGIONS of white dudes who are complaining about the “racism” of SCOTUS nominee Sonya Sotomayor. It’s just so unseemly. It’s just…so fucking obscene that a white man, or a white woman for that matter, would hear the following quote:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

and would have the gall, the unmitigated fucking gall, to call it “racism,” instead of – hey, I’ll say it – instead of…truth.

Because isn’t it true? Isn’t it?

If you’re having trouble with her statement, perhaps it might help if you consider that she might very well have had someone like our current chief justice, John Roberts, in mind when she spoke about that nameless white male. Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote in The New Yorker:

“In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.”

Yes, it’s quite a record. No doubt influenced by his background and his heritage as a proud white male Bush campaign supporter and general legal toady for the right. That kind of influence is apparently okay, however, the influence of an upbringing that takes you from the Bronx projects to the Ivy League to the federal bench – fuckin’ Latina fuckin’ racist, y’all.

And if you buy that, then I got a La-Raza-is-the-Hispanic-KKK to sell you, cheap.

Also, I would just like to state once and for all, for the record, that no matter how many times the yammering idiots on TV say otherwise, you cannot substitute “white” for “Latina” or “black” and prove racism. It just don’t work that way. There are, as I noted previously, LEGIONS of bitter white dudes out there who desperately, desperately want it to work that way. But it don’t. It ain’t so black & white, white dudes. “It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand” is not okay. “White power” is not okay. The National Association for the Advancement of White People is not okay. And if there were one, and you called it “The Race” (La Raza), it would be SO not okay that I’m pretty sure the Feds would be knocking down your fortress walls and blasting your compound with Jay-Z (with special guest Ciara) in order to make you and your similarly brainwashed comrades come out with your hands behind your heads, you fucking redneck racist AK-7 totin' motherfuckers.

Deal with it. And while you’re at it, get down on your knees and thank your lucky fucking stars that you were born white and male in a time and place where it remains, by far, the easiest thing to be.