Monday, December 26, 2005

I don't like the drugs, but the drugs won't take the hint, and keep calling me, asking if I want to hang out or something.

The brain trust at the National Board of Drug Control Policy, a bunch of people who collectively resemble a giant douchebag shaped like Don Quixote, has launched a new ad campaign aimed at discouraging you people not to try marijuana (also known as "demon weed," "hippie marlboros," "jazz fuel," "giggle smoke," "the laughing ghost" and "Old Kinderhook"). The ads are designed to ridicule kids for submitting to peer pressure, suggesting that they'd be stupid and therefore uncool to let their friends force them to take drugs. The commericals also direct said kids to a website called abovetheinfluence.com. (that's a period, not a dot) The website, which is very sleek and well designed and probably cost a few millions dollars that isn't going to help get Hurricane Katrina victims permanent housing or get health care for uninsured children, just like the high-production-value commericals, reminds kids that they shouldn't listen to their friends, that drugs are really bad, mmkay, and that their future depends on a drug-free, abstinent lifestyle.

Besides the hilariousness of the government using the same commerical techniques as soda companies to tell teenagers that they shouldn't listen to what other people tell them is "cool," there's another even hilarious-er thing about this boondoggle. It's the idea that these plugged in government types, dedicated to getting inside kids' heads and getting them to avoid drugs, are seemingly under an unshakable conviction that the only possible reason that a young person could want to do drugs is because of peer pressure. I really wonder if any of these dipshits have had any social interactions more intensive than a church weinie roast. Has it ever occured to these motherfuckers that a teenager, or hell, an adult, might want to do drugs once in a while because they're fun? If you've got personal opposition to taking drugs, that's fine, and addiction to anything is dangerous and unhealthy, but can you really deny that taking drugs can be a fun time, and, incidentally, have no real negative effect on your life whatsoever? Good christ, when you're a dateless, ragingly horny, pustule-coated teenager living in a podunk town with nothing to do and no money to not do it with, I really don't think it takes a pack of peer pressuring friends to strap you down and force you to do a bong hit. There's a good chance that you could come home from a day at school of mindsplitting boredom punctuated by soul-crushing humilation and think to yourself "fuck, I need to do some pot" all by yourself. As for the potential harmlessness of doing some drugs, the propaganda-tools have bit of a paradox to deal with: some of their ads detail the myriad ways that any drug use by a teen will lead to some horrific development (from date rape to accidentally shooting your friend in the face to running over a small child on a bicycle while at a drive-thru), while some of them are aimed at the parents of these kids. One of the latter breed tells parents who feel hypocritical about lecturing their kids on drugs since they did drugs themselves when they were cool...I mean, young, that they've got to suck it up and start lecturing, to save their kids from the same horrors that they experienced. Horrors that, the ad suggests, led to a nice suburban split level with a wife and kids and a steady job. Yes, it terrifies me, but I'm not sure it's such a horrible outcome as far as the Control Board is concerned. So, in their anti-drug ad, they are admitting that you can have some youthful experimentations with drugs and NOT end up a broken-down addict, pissing in your own mouth while being sodomized by a frenzied pimp and injecting heroin into your ballsack.

Luckily for the Drug Control Policy Board, the choad-smokes who staff it are blessed with the gift that all life-less bureaucrats have, the uncanny ability to turn that screaming crescendo of cognitive dissonance that would crush the brains of most human beings, into the gentle sounds of smooth jazz paragon Chuck Mangione.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Operation: Krumpus.










Above: Said Krumpus


It's the night before Christmas....now how do we put an end to this stupid shit?

Outside of the fevered minds of Fox News anchors, there is no war on Christmas: but I'm starting one, motherfuckers! And the key to the downfall of Christmas as we know it, an end to the cloying sentiment, the crass, mindless materialism, the trauma of forced family commiseration, the spiraling consumer debt, can be found in one simple word: Krumpus.

Santa Claus, the mascot of Christmas's secular, consumerist identity, was essentially created at the turn of the 20th century as an advertising mascot for, among other products, Coca-Cola. It's no coincidence that Father Christmas became a pop culture icon at the dawn of American consumer society. Christmas, with it's tradition of heedless gift-giving, was a holiday tailor-made as an engine for consumerism. The figure of St. Nick had been a folk legend in Germany and Eastern Europe for centuries, but he was codified as a jolly, red suited gift giver in order to aid in the transformation of Christmas into the tinsel-and-garland-dripping monstrosity we know today. Those same be-spatted Victorian ad men who hoisted Santa Claus as the hood ornament for the new Model T o' consumption left out anther figure from the European folk Christmas pantheon: the krumpus.

While Santa made the rounds at the homes of Teutonic boys and girls on Christmas eve, doling out gifts to the good children, he traveled with a companion, a red-furred, switch-wielding, horned demon called the Krumpus (or, less humorously, the Krampus). His job was to swat the bottoms of bad children with his switch and, in extreme cases, carry the naughtiest of children away in the wicker basket strapped to his back. Anyone familiar with the sadistic German children's book Struwwelpeter will recognize this as good old fashioned Kraut child rearing: scare the shit out of kids and they'll behave. Effective as a parenting aid the Krumpus may have been, but it didn't make a good incentive to buy, so the folks who popularized Santa left the Krumpus wandering through the Black Forest.

What does this have to do with destroying Christmas as we know it? Well, it has to do with a simple fact: people go through horrible stresses year after year during the month of December, running themselves ragged, buying gifts they can't afford, spending time with people they hate, and struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder the whole time, and they hate every minute of it. So why do they do it? For the kids. Kids love Christmas. Because, for kids, Christmas is an unadulterated joy, a total win-win: they get presents, but they don't have pay to give them, they get to see their wacky relatives, but don't notice that some of them have drinking problems and other ones have a habit of making cutting remarks about their children's sexual preferences. Because Christmas is so much fun for children, their parents are compelled to indulge, year after year, in the holiday charade, lest they traumatize their kids for life. The answer is clear: Christmas has to be less enjoyable for children.

And that's where the Krumpus comes in.

Kids lay awake on Christmas eve, stomachs churning with anticipation, waiting for a happy, kind old man to come down their chimeny and shower them with gifts. What's not to like? Maybe, if we threw in a little angst, a little terror, on that Christmas eve, the kids would cool on the season a bit. If they lay awake in their beds, sweat streaming down their temples, terrified that a snarling, horned demon might sneak into their home and beat them with a stick or carry them off to hell. With Krumpus, comes terror, and with terror, comes a massive decline in childhood delight regarding Christmas.

That is why I propose that those of us who are strong of heart and dedicated to the end of Christmas spend the next December dressed in red fur, fangs and horns, and stalk this nation's shopping malls, swatting chilrden on the behind and haunting their nightmares for years to come. The ripple effects will be felt throughout the world, and eventually, the garish obscenity of Christmas will slowly fad from our memories.

And so I hereby declare the Krumpus to be the official mascot of Christman-mas.

Just saw Munich.

It's Steven Spielberg's first movie for grown ups. I honestly didn't think he had it in him, but he has managed to make a really dark, compelling, challenging film that doesn't pad the soft corners for anyone's comfort. It also has a theme with more real-world relevance than "family is important" or "slavery was bad" or "war is unpleasant, but unfortunately necessary sometimes" or "sharks are scary." For that, I credit screenwriter Tony Kushner, but give Spielberg props for seeing it through without compromise.

I have no doubt that it will be Spielberg's least successful film commerically since 1941, but he can take heart in the knowledge that it is definitely one of his very best.

A matter of principle

Recently, a guy wrote in to Dan Savage in an attempt to clarify the exact meaning of the word "MILF." This guy had a douchebag friend who made a habit of banging young mothers, then exulting in the fact that he'd fucked a "MILF." Now, the guy writing in pointed out to his friend that most of his conquests were in their early-to-mid twenties, women who had gotten pregnant at a very young age, so they aren't really MILFs in the traditional mold. The douchebag disagreed, stating that any woman who had a child was a mother, and therefore, if she was hot, she was a Mother I would Like to Fuck. Dan Savage responded that the douchebag was technically correct. And, indeed, he was. But technicalities are the enemies of meaningful communication. We need to take a stand against the technical application of language. Language is meaningless in the abscence of context, and, in any significant application of context, MILF is a term meant to refer to middle-aged women with children of teen age or older. If we allow the technical constrains of the individual words "Mother" "I'd" "Like" "To" "Fuck", then language loses all its ability to communicate meaning.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Just saw King Kong.

The movie is three hours long, features a twenty five foot tall gorrilla, and there's not a single glimpse of massive, flailing primate genitals.

To me, that's more unrealistic than all the dinosaurs and whatnot.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Are you a potential war criminal? Take our quiz!


I consider myself a student of history. And, like most males who consider themselves students of history, that means that I know a shitload about war, atrocities and genocides. It's not true that history is simply a litany of bloody conflict, but that is the most interesting stuff, at least for a dude. I've read avidly about all manners of mass slaughter, ancient and modern. Be it the trenches of the Great War, the clinical death factories of the Nazi state, the frenzied blood-lettings of Rwanda, I am routinely horrified and titilated by the cruelities of the past. At the same time, of course, I am mulling over my own moral superiority to the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes. Surely, I think, were I to find myself holding a machete over the head of a weeping Tutsi tribeswoman, or marching through Lithuania with the Einsatzgruppen or riding into a vanquished city with Gengis Khan's horde, I would, at the very least, refuse to kill or, hopefully, try to save lives. I am made from purer stuff than these antique murderers.

That was before I drove to work yesterday.

I work at a shopping complex (also known as a mall, but the stores aren't connected and there's no food court, so let's stick with shopping complex) and yesterday I had to drive across seven or eight nautical miles of "shopping complex" parking lot on my way to work. As you can expect, on the last Sunday before Christmas, it was a fucking zoo. I had to crawl at motorcade speed as legions of soft-middled, fanny pack bedecked, shopping zombies waddled in front of my car. And my inner Heydrich rose from the morass. I had to fight an overwhelming urge to hit the gas and send these sack of gravy pinwheeling through the air. Now, I get those kinds of feelings all the time, but in this case, I was already a little late for work and the blood was thrumming in my veins and it occured to me that I could rather easily kill some of these people, and that was with me just being a few minutes late for work! Imagine how I would react in a war situation, under the threat of bombing, or minutes away from a strom of metal at the front, facing people who were even more dehumanized to me as the people in the parking lot. It occured to me at that moment that, in all likelyhood, I would have made a fine war criminal. That's a scary idea, and one I would much like to prove wrong. But I don't know any way to do that other than to get myself into a war/genocide type situation, then try to avoid doing any murdering. Too bad I'd probably get killed by my crappy soldiering before I had a chance to find out.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Dude, the NSA has been conducting illegal wiretaps of American citizens at the President's request for over a year...

and the New York Times sat on the story of 12 months because the White House asked them to.

Remind me again why we aren't building fucking barricades in the street?

(By "we" I mean you guys: I'm too important to the movement. Plus, I'm a gimp.)


BTW, some people are amazed that the right wingers are willing to create such terrifying precedents of executive power. They seem not to have considered the fact that there might, in the future, be a possibility that one of the dreaded Clinton Commissars might regain the ring of power and weild these same fearsome, unchecked spyin' and torturin' powers. There are two possible explanations for this: 1. they're a bunch of short-sighted, dumb motherfuckers 2. they're all positive that the rapture is coming within the next three years or 3. they're all positive (for some dark reason) that they will never give up power again. I would give serious consideration to option 3.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

A QUESTION OF SIGNIFICANT IMPORT!

If you had to eat a hamburger made out of one of your family members, which one would it be, and why?

ANSWER ME!

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Boobies









Would you like your Hot Wings with a side of Shame?



I find it facinating when mid-sized American cities attempt to sluff off the post-industrial decay that turned pretty much every U.S. city into a festering open sore during the 1980s and reclaim a position as a home for hip young professionals, not to mention a happenin' stop for monied tourists. Cities like this are faced with at least one significant paradox: how do you build a downtown crawling with the chain retailers and restaurants that Americans find familiar and want to visit without making the place so non-descript that tourists wouldn't bother coming because the place looks just like their crappy hometown?

I visited the tourist moneypot in downtown Baltimore called the Inner Harbor today, and the way Baltimore handled it is with an emphasis on the nautical. They docked a fleet of olde timey looking ships in the harbor, put a slew of chain stores and restaurants in low-slung, glass-fronted buildings along the water, and put some more chain stores in brick, faux-warehouses meant to harken back to the days when the Inner Harbor was stacked high with fish and durable goods and shop-worn hookers. Then, to top it all off, they built a fucking gigantic aquarium to bring in the families and keep everybody thinking OCEAN! Some of the buildings are actual pretty neat, but the glass pavilions next to the water just look like mall-lets (not mallets).

And inside one of those two-story mall-lets is a Hooters. You can see where this is going. Yes, I dined at a Hooters for the first time in my life. And Holy Fucking Criminy! I have been aware of the existence of the Hooters franchise since I was a mere stripling, and have always consider them to be, of course, a monument to idiocy/sexism/more idiocy, but they didn't occupy a lot of my mind-space. I didn't contemplate the essential meaning of Hooters. In a very real way, the Hooter experience was purely abstract in my mind. Having stepped through the very gates of a Hooters, having been greeted by smiling young women wearing hydraulic tit-slings and translucent white tank tops, having tasted of the hot, moist wing meat, I can honestly say that I wasn't ready for the experience. Now that I know that the Hooters restaurants actually take up physical space, are staffed by genuine, flesh-and-blood women, and patroned by men, women and children of all races and creeds, my head is in danger of collapsing. How can such concentrated, crass, moronic, exploitation exist? The existence of this place challenges ones' notion of reality. It's like discovering a retarded unicorncaught in the wheel-well of your car.

Friday, December 09, 2005

"Here's your fucking stability, my main man."


Just saw Syriana.

Two Words: God. Damn.

I am having a hard time imagining the pitch meeting at Warner Brothers. Writer/Director Stephen Gahgan goes in and says to some dope with a pony tail and a Hugo Boss suit: "Okay, I want to make a dense, complicated geo-political film about United States policy in the Middle East, the international oil industry, with a lot of dialogue, a downbeat ending, and an underlying theme that the U.S. is an amoral oil addict willing to subvert democracy, and murder innocent people for the benefit of transnational corporations and in order to maintain the precarious balance of the American economy. Can I have fifty million dollars now?" And the motherfucker says, "Sure!"

That particular pony-tailed dope will likely be fired soon, because there is no doubt in my mind that Syriana is going to bite it hard at the box office. In the season of low budget period pieces and maxi-budget kids movies, I don't think there's room for a brainy, left-wing political critique. I guess Warner Brothers will have to console themselves with the fact that they might not make a profit, but they did buy themselves one amazing film.

Yes, Syriana is left-wing, but it's left wing in a bracing and honest and generally unfamiliar way. Syriana is refreshing in its non-partisan leftism. It is the first Hollywood studio film I have ever seen (or even heard of), that offers a systemic critique of the American political and economic system.

I'll let everyone in on a little secret. O'Reilly and Hannity and all those faux-populist fuckholes are right about one thing: Hollywood is, indeed, filled with liberals. Most actors are liberal, most producers are liberal, most directors are liberal, most writers are liberal. I'd be willing to wager that most grips and craft service people are liberal. It's all true. Now, the faux-populist fuckholes would have you believe that this means that there is some Hollywood conspiracy to undermine American values through brainwashing films and television. That's where they go off the deep end. They forget that the entertainment industry is just that, an industry, governed by the same mindless thirst for profit as the rest of the capitalist edifice. Most Hollywood types, no matter how blatant their libealism, are most interested in turning a profit, and will therefore subornate every principle they ever thought they had to give the public what they hope they want. That attitude kills most of the potentially subversive energy of "liberal" filmmaking. The rest of it is murdered by the fact that most filmmakers are liberals, not leftists. I know that the supposedly polarized political landscape has obliterated all nuances when it comes to political affiliation, but there really is a lot of real estate seperating liberals from leftists. Leftists tend to think that the political, cultural, and economic structures of their society are fatally flawed engines of injustice, created by and for the benefit of that societies wealthiest citizens at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, not to mention poor people the world over. Liberals, on the other hand, think that the social structure is basically just, that it merely needs people of the right ideology running things to keep it that way. In the liberal worldview, America is a great country with great institutions, temporarily hijacked by greedy, corrupt thugs, and the restoration of liberal (read Democratic) governance will set all (or most, anyway) to rights.

These two realities of Hollywood (the addiction to profit and the mainstream liberalism), mean that it is almost impossible for a studio film to generate a systemic critique of American politics or economics. First of all, Hollywood wants to make crowd pleasing films: people like happy endings, and are more likely to see movies that end happily. As such, movies that seek to address politics are shaped by the need to wrap things up neatly in the third act so people will leave with a smile on their faces. Also, Hollywood believes in the system, so movies that critize the current political climate end up blaming one party (usually the Republicans) for screwing things up for the rest of us. The twin impulses dovetail nicely: set up a scathing critique of the current state of America, blame it on a nefarious plot by a bunch of political ne'r-do-wells, and have the forces of truth and justice vanquish the bad guys just before the credits role.

Look at the two most brazenly American political films of the past few years: Fahrenheit 911 and the Johnathan Demme remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In both cases, the directors set up a scenario of horrible injustice and corruption; the real-life Iraq war and the fictional "Manchurian Group" conspiracy respectively, pin the blame on a small group of corrupt blackguards; the Bush administration and the Manchurian group respectively, and wrap things up by banishing the threat from our shores. Fahrenheit ends with a call to mobilize for the defeat of Bush's re-election (how'd that work out again?) and in Manchurian the conspiracy is thwarted by the actions of the U.S. military and everyone involved gets arrested. Both movies, while attempting to unsettle their audience regarding the present state of the nation, end up serving up a feel-good idea of how American could be with the right leadership. It's the Abu Ghraib defense writ large: a few "bad apples" spoiling the political barrel. Hell, even the ur-text of American political movies, JFK, indulges in this Mr. Smith Goes to Washington bullshit: Kennedy is portrayed as a shining knight of pure good intent, and suggests that the exposure of the government figures who killed him will restore the nation to its former glory. The closest thing to a recent subversive political film is the Three Kings, which supplied the bit of dialogue that is the title of this post, and even it dulls down the razor's edge of its critique with a load of whiz-bang action and a classic Hollywood happy ending.

As a result of this ideological and economic nexus (isn't it funny how often ideological commitment follows a person's economic interests?), a truly penetrating Hollywood political film is almost impossible. And yet, somehow, somebody left the gate open and Syriana came galloping out in a lather of outrage and insight.

Syriana doesn't play the liberal game. The movie features not a single elected official, and even the occupation of Iraq goes largely uncommented upon. The events of the film, corrupt international business dealings among oil companies, subversion of reform movements, U.S.-backed assassinations, and the facile covering up of all of the above, happen regardless of who occupies the White House or Capitol Hill. The U.S. bribes and threatens and bombs the oil rich parts of this world not because of any political ideology, but because of economic necessity. The economic stability of the United States is entirely predicated upon an uninterrupted supply of cheap oil. As such, there is nothing that the United States will not do to ensure access to said resource. That's why it doesn't matter who is in charge, and why Syriana doesn't end with a catharic perp-walk of corporate and government criminals meeting their reckoning at the bar of justice. A few low-echealon crooks are offered up as sacrafices so that the public and government can continue operating on the illusion that an abiding rule of law exists, but the real malefactors go unpunished. Hell, they fucking thrive. Not only that, but the viewer is left with the distinct impression that, even if the big wigs did go down, they would merely be replaced by the B squad of corridors of power.* The satisfaction of America's demand for oil is the only mandate that must be met.

That oil supplies and demand are the engine of American foriegn policy is such an obvious truism that it has become invisible in the popular political debate. During the run-up to the war in Iraq, to discuss the issue of oil was to indulge in crazed conspiracy mongering, instead of being the first step in any rational discussion of American Mid-East policy. The entire structure of Syriana is designed to make that truism visible again. And in doing so, it does a tremendous service to the national dialogue (such as it is). Only when Americans really confront the reality of our oil situation can we start asking and hopefully answering questions of actual import. Not sideshow fun and games like "Did Saddam really have WMD?" or "What must American do to win in Iraq", but serious questions, like "If oil really does keep our society intact, must we accept any course of action, no matter how amoral, to keep it flowing?" and "If we reject an amoral foreign policy, what do we do to end this cycle of dependence and cold-blooded aggression?" Even though Syriana will surely fail at the box office, it will be a smashing success if it refocuses these issues for even a few Americans.

Politics aside, Syriana is also a really effective piece of pure filmmaking. The verite' style immerses the viewer in every one of the film's disparate cultural and geographic settings; from foreign worker camps in the Gulf to the streets of Beirut to the air conditioning and throaty bonhomie of Houston conference rooms, every set-up feels vividly realized. Contrary to the blathering of a bunch of critics, the plot is not too hard to follow: if you shut the fuck up, turn your goddamn cellphone off and listen to the dialogue above the sound of your mouth full of Milk Duds, the film is actually quite clear. Plot machinations largely overshadows the characters, but the film gives them enough texture to provide depth without slowing down the procedings. The acting is uniformily excellent, with George Clooney providing the film's soul as a world weary CIA agent, beaten down by years of fighting for unclear causes, of using people and being used in turn. When pressed on issues of his ultimate purpose or alliegiences, he responds again and again with what might well be the film's signature gesture: a wordless, befuddled shrug. He is helpless to name the forces that have manipulated his life; all he can do is look on like a beaten dog and try to survive with some sense of personal integrity intact. It's a tall order, one that, in the end, is impossible to fullfill in a world where the demands of the market batter all human considerations into pulp.

*This is a fact that is very important for those of us gleefully observing the various and sundry criminal contrempts of the congressional Republicans to remember. Even if the Abramhoff investigation ends up sending half of the Republican congressional delegation to prison, it's not going to change the underlying structure of corruption and power that allowed it all to happen in the first place. The indicted will shuffle off, and be replaced in turn with a fresh generation of dewy-eyed idealists who will learn quickly how the game is played.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Words and Phrases that have made me laugh recently.

"I'm Horror Claus!"

"Gibbet"--as in, "to gibbet" a corpse; the Medeval European punishment in which an executed criminal's body was covered in tar, placed in a metal cage, and suspended above the city square as a warning to others (think Robin's dad in Prince of Thieves)

"Hornswaggled"-- this word needs to get back into heavy rotation in the English language, like, yesterday. Let's make it our mission in life.

"Turducken"

"Git-R-Done"--funny because it's true: tasks should, indeed, be accomplished.

"Hobo Matters"--as opposed to Matters Literary.

and, most recently...

"Osama's Homobortion Pot'nCommie Jizzporium"--I'm applying for work there as an apprentice uterus scraper/Darwin impersonator.

The Straight Talk Express is coming to your town.

Yesterday, as I wrote my "war on Christmas" post, I kept thinking to myself "Is Christmas the 25th or the 26th?" I was really afraid I'd get it wrong, and goddamn it all, I did. When this was brought to my attention (thanks, Carolyn), I considered using the handy "edit post" feature on blogspot to whip out the mistake, so that no one would be the wiser. As I settled in to do a little Winston Smith-style historical revisionism, it occured to me that this was exactly the sort of shit that the Bush administration loves to pull: in dozens of cases in the past five years, portions of the official White House website have been altered, redacted and mysteriously deleated, even transcripts of press briefings have undergone furtive editing. No! I am better than Bush's army of pen-wielding ghouls! Let my fuck-up blaze forth across the whole of the internets for all to see. I'm dumb...dumb as hell!

Cthulhu: it's what's for dinner.



Every pre-packaged snack treat, every pipping hot fast food burger, every sip of carbonated deliciousness you imbibe contains the flesh of nameless, timeless Dread. Inside of us, it incubates; dead, but dreaming. And goddamn if it isn't tasty.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

On Flanders Field...Santa bravely steps into battle.









Behold, the Great Christmas Douchebag!



Some more nonsense regarding the so-called war on Christmas.

As an employee of a nation-wide retail chain working during the "holiday" (yes, holiday: I am a Communist, after all) season, I'm in the trenches of this supposed battle, and have emerged from the fray with a few insights.

One of the chief complaints of "war on Christmas" douches is that big retailers are forbidding their employees from greeting customers with "Merry Christmas," and insisting on "Happy Holidays." I can tell you that my retailer, for one, has no announced policy about what the employees should say to the ill-tempered ass-baskets milling around the aisles like stunned beeves. I could say "Happy Kwaanza," and no one would probably notice.

Also, I've noticed that customers, obviously not bound by corporate policy to use one greeting over another, overwhelming prefer to say "Happy Holidays."

Now, maybe they've been brainwashed by the liberal shock-troops at the ACLU, but, the more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that "Happy Holidays" isn't just some craven PC invention meant to de-Christianize the month of December: it's actually a far superior greeting than "Merry Christmas" on the merits.

Does it really make sense to say "Merry Christmas" to someone on any day besides December 26th? "Christmas" refers to a single day, and telling someone to have a "merry" Christmas, means you're telling them to enjoy Christmas. What the fuck kind of sense does it make to tell someone to have a good December 26th on December 3rd? Think about it: Christmas is supposed to be Jesus's birthday. Would you say "Happy Birthday" to someone nearly a month before their actual birthday. No! Stupid!

Now, "Happy Holidays," in its non-specificity, covers a lot more ground, and, as such, makes more sense as a generic, seasonal greeting. You're acknowledging an extended, holiday-esque time frame, and enjoining those around you to share in the merriment: there's no pre-mature awkwardness.

Of course, while "Happy Holidays" has now been scientifically proven to be a superior seasonal greeting to "Merry Christmas," it's still not my preferred thing to say to people you meet during the month of December. That would be: "Fuck you."

Friday, December 02, 2005

The War on Christmas

Last year, Fox News unvieled a genuis bit of misdirecting horseshit to distract and outrage their pudding-brained slackass viewers: the "war on Christmas." Supposedly, there was a nation-wide conspiracy of "secular" liberals bent on eliminating the very holiday of Christmas! The word itself was to be outlawed! Christmas trees would be burned in street by PC stormtroopers! Nativity scenes would be replaced by scenes of Sado-Maschocist sex acts involving the baby Jesus! It was a huge deal! Much more pressing an issue than piffle like the Iraq war. Now, mind you, the evidence for a war on Christmas pretty much boiled down to a few public nativity scenes being challenged in court, and a few private (PRIVATE) retailers having their employees say "Happy Holidays" to customers instead of "Merry Christmas."

This year, with Republicans in the midst of eating a gigantic, dripping, choleric, corn-and-potato-skin flecked shit sandwich on asiago cheese bread, there is an even more urgent push to get the rubes whipped up in defense of Jesus's birthday. One of Fox's anchor-douches, John Gibson (pasty-faced, bleach-blonded taint-licker that he is), has even written a book about the non-topic with the thunderingly original title "The War on Christmas." I'm sure it's filled with horrifying tales of retail clerks failing to acknowledge the reason for the season while ringing up some jagoff's Red Lobster gift certificates.

Now, it goes without saying that there isn't a plot to destroy Christmas. And that's what really pisses me off about this shit: O'Reilly and this Gibson pile are raving about a plot to end Christmas, and meanwhile, no actual left-wing commie pinko Christ-haters are actually trying to destroy Christmas. What the hell is wrong with you people?!? You all know what a boil on the ass of society Christmas has become! A month-long orgy of consumption and debt-accumulation, topped off by a night of awkward small talk and restrained animosity with ones family members. Fuck that noise. Let's start plotting to get rid of this shit! If the propaganda nozzle-heads are going to work themselves into a lather and bring the mass of perpetually-outraged red state proto-fascists to screaming orgasms of self-righteousness, we might as well give this whole "war on Christmas" thing a shot! C'mon, people, let's use the magic of Ye Olde Internets to bounce around a few ideas to get this idea off the ground. I've got a few ideas of my own already, which I hope to share soon enough.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

"This racism is killing me inside!"

Today is apparently "blog against racism" day. So, what the hell, let's do that.

A lot of white folks have been getting angry lately, especially in Northern Virginia (not to mention the Southwest, but those motherfuckers are crazy anyway), about all the Latin American immigrants running around the place. I live in a section of Alexandria that is damn near ground zero for immigrant congregation. The nearest main drag, Mount Vernon road, might as well be in Juarez: day laborers stand around, waiting for work, cars drive by blaring mariachi music, Spanish is the language of choice for passersby. This situation is driving white homeowners into a lather of outrage, and, as a result, there is a predicition that immigration policy is going to be a big issue in the elections from now on. There are votes to be had, both among the growing Hispanic community, and among pissed-off white reactionaries who want to close the border.

I understand where a lot of this anger comes from. I'll admit it: when I walk down Mt. Vernon, I'm not exactly comfortable. I'm not afraid for my life or anything, not even a bit, but it does feel somewhat alienating and strange to walk around surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, whose complexions are unfamiliar. Like the pissed-off legions of whities, I feel that way. It's not optimal, but I don't feel that bad about it. Part of the reason I don't feel bad about it is that, unlike the anti-immigrant suburbanites currently up-in-arms, I don't expect the government to crack down on a bunch of poor people's ability to support themselves and their families in order to make me feel more comfortable. Right-wing, racist belief systems are largely supported by the resolute belief among white males that they are entitled to be utterly at ease, at all times. That means keeping their women comfortably subservient, their minorities comfortably distant, and their immigrants comfortably diluted to prevent the creation of scary, unfamiliar ethnic enclaves. I tend to believe that the rights of all people to basic equality and opportunity trump the rights of a powerful minority to unfettered feelings of domination.

Being Dumb For Dummies.

I've always hated the "....For Dummies" series of books: it seems that millions of people have no problem admitting that they're idiots with a single book purchase.

But since I've been working at a bookstore, I've gotten to see a whole bunch of these books, and some of their titles seem a bit redundant. I think you've already admitted that you're an idiot by buying a book on some of these subjects: the "For Dummies" doesn't seem necessary.

For example:

Astrology for Dummies

NASCAR for Dummies

Thinking that the President's Iraq War speech is anything more than Pie in the Sky bullshit designed to trick people into thinking these assholes have a fucking clue about what they're doing...for Dummies.

That last one is pretty new.