Handjobs for Third Stringers

Atlas Tugged

2009-03-13T18:14:00.001-07:00

I saw this Atlas Shrugged shit coming a mile away.

The internet has been crackling of late with the ramblings of rightwingers so outraged at the prospect of paying a slightly higher top marginal tax rate starting in 2011 that they're threatening to "go Galt," like the protagonist of Ayn Rand's unreadable dooorstop Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the nation's "productive class," also known as rich douches, lead by John Galt, a brilliant inventor, stages an exodus from a society that taxes them in order to support the existence of poor moochers. Now a legion of web dorks are trying to start a movement to have the richest Americans reduce their productivity in order to avoid the top marginal rate. There are yeomen among the left=leaning blogosphere who have done a fantastic job of annihilating this idiocy, so I won't bother. I just want to point out that I saw this shit coming down the pike.

When I was working at Barnes and Noble in Wauwatosa earlier this year, Atlas Shrugged started flying off the shelves shortly after Obama won the election. I had hoped that it was because of a school assignment or something, but sure enough, in February a dude asked for the book and I pointed out that it was selling well, hoping he would explain why he wanted it. Sure enough, the dipstick says "It's happening right now." I resisted the urge to smack him across the grill with a copy of Das Kapital.

This was in February, before the budget proposal and its sunsetting of Bush era tax cuts was even released and this fuckstick was already horrified at the prospect of his fantasy quarter million dollar earning power being taxed at the rates they were during the 90s. What makes me want to peel my skin off is the fact that this legion of Randites were gnashing their teeth as soon as Obama was elected, not remembering for a second how in the hell a gay Communist Muslim abortionist who was actually born simultaneously in Kenya and Indonesia was able to get elected president in the first place.

THE ECONOMY HAD JUST COLLAPSED THANKS TO THE VERY LOW-TAX, DEREGULATED REGIME THAT RANDIANS SUPPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The most powerful and influential Randian in America is Alan Greenspan. When I say "Randian," I don't mean the motherfucker read The Fountainhead on summer vacation once, I mean the dude was one of her proteges. He worked with her, he studied at her "institute," she was the signal influence on his intellectual life. He took her insights on the nature of economics (he wrote a letter to the New York Times rebutting their criticism of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, writing,"Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should") and applied them as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. From that post, he endorsed a policy of lax regulation on derivatives trading and even went before Congress in 2004 to tell every homeowner in the country that adjustable rate mortgages were the greatest thing since the invention of the glory hole. This all lead directly to an unprecedented meltdown, and the shit of it is is that Greenspan himself has essentially admitted that his theories were horseshit! He went in front of Congress again a few months ago and said that there was a "flaw in the model" he used to determine "how the world works."

It seems to me that now would be a time for anyone who ever said a kind word about Ayn Rand (or Alan Greenspan for that matter) to keep a low profile to avoid being pelted with rotten vegetables. Instead, you see this defiant embrace of Atlas Shrugged as holy writ. Not just among the conservative blogs, but on the floor of Congress, as well. This points to a fundamental fact about the modern conservative movement, one that helps explain how they're able to continue holding influence over millions of people regardless of the fact that they've been wrong about every major social and economic issue since forever. They cannot be shamed.

Fuck Yeah/Fuck It... Volume I

2009-03-11T19:05:00.001-07:00

Now that I've been exiled to the ice planet Hoth, I'm fixin' to resurrect this here blogspot to vent my spleen all over the internets for the benefit of my long suffering friends who just can't get enough of my spittle-flecked rantings. Now that Obama is president, writing this thing is a whole new challenge. The institutional criminality of the American government remains, but it's hard to avoid the siren call of Obama's eloquence and seeming commitment to something called "change." As I wrestle with alternating bursts of despair and delirious hope, I'm introducing a periodic feature in which I catalogue the various ways that the Obama administration is filling me with optimism and making me want to punch a baby.

Fuck Yeah!

Attorney General Eric Holder announces that the Justice Department will no longer prosecute medical marijuana growers or raid dispensaries. New Drug Czar is a cop with a drug using stepson, not a military general and he no longer enjoys cabinet level status.

Fuck it...

There still IS a fucking Drug Czar. And Joe Biden is as big a wrongheaded, gung ho drug warrior as Barry McCaffery ever was.

Fuck Yeah!

All U.S. Troops out of Iraq by 2011.

Fuck it...

2011? Seriously? And that date is only certain because the Iraqis insisted on it when they signed the Status of Forces Agreement last year.

Fuck Yeah!

Executive orders closing Gitmo and banning torture.

Fuck it...

Gitmo still holding "enemy combatants" for the foreseeable future. Obama Justice Department continues to use Bush administration interpretations of executive authority in federal court.

Fuck Yeah!

Proposed budget is a radical departure from thirty years of supply side corruption. Cuts in farm subsidies to agribusiness giants, slashes in wasteful defense projects, more money for health care and education, and the end of Bush era upper class tax cuts

Fuck it...

Senate filled with bursting with grandstanding "centrist" cockslaps who won't rest until they've gutted every decent reform in the budget.

Fuck Yeah!

Stimulus package passed with relative ease, points way to worthwhile expansion in public transit and infrastructure

Fuck it...

Had to get rid of a lot of worthwhile projects and lard in bullshit tax to appease above mentioned cockslap centrists. And, it's probably not big enough to really have an impact. Not to mention that the whole idea of an economy based on exponential growth of consumer spending is a recipe for cultural bankruptcy and ecological collapse.

Fuck Yeah!

Reversal of Bush era policies on stem cell research, family planning, federal land use, government transparency, and a bunch of other stuff

Fuck it...

Being a better president than George W. Bush is like being a better parent than Susan Smith. Pretty much the very least you can do.

Caribou Barbie: She-Wolf of the GOP

2008-10-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

The slavering freak show that is the McCain-Palin campaign has made for some rivetting public theater the last few weeks. You just can't beat the sight of hundreds of paranoid, delusional racist lizard-brained right wingers working themselves into a lather over the prospect of terrorist Muslim commie Barack Hussein Obama becoming president.

The lusty boooing, catcaling and microphone ranting by wild-eyed retirees and bedraggled women in purple sweatpants is a fascinating break from rote stump speech blather. There's also something hilarious in seeing the terror and hysteria caused by the creeping realization that Obama is probably going to win. They are already envisioning a future of strike teams composed of black gang members and Al Qaeda operatives conducting house-to-house sweeps to confiscate the firearms of godfearing Americans. As a veteran leftist American-hater, I think that's probably a bit unrealistic. I'd settle for universal health care.

The most interesting part of this ritualized group therapy for dumb bigots is the role the candidates themselves play in it. McCain, of course, is the person most responisble for this outpouring of venom. Stuck with the shit end of the stick, issue-wise, during an economic meltdown and soundly defeated in three straight debates, McCain needed to change the subject. And what better subject than: OBAMA IS NOT ONE OF US! There's also McCain's personal anger at the effrontery of Obama, depriving McCain of the prize he rightfuly deserves: HE WAS A POW, damnit, we owe him this! Still, you can tell that Johnny boy isn't really comfortable demagouging the rubes with red-meat stemwinders. When the crowd starts their bloodthirsty baying of "terrorist!," McCain's eyes start flitting around nervously and that rictus grin of his wilts into a grimace of discomfort. McCain's squeamishness is partly due to the fact that he clearly hates hobnobbing with te unwashed. For all his supposedy "straight talk" bluster, McCain is first and foremost a creature of Washington. Getting down in the mud and rolling around with the fascist hogs is a far cry from Georgetown cocktail parties and the high roller room at the Bellagio.

McCain's identity as a D.C. fixture relates to another reason he doesn't seem to savor his new role as the avatar of white reactionary resentment. McCain's entire political career rest on his chummy-to-worshipful realtionship with the Beltway media. He may be "playing to the base" of the Republican party with his rightwing identity politics, but the Republican base has never been his base: those are the same Washington scribes who have spent the past decade knob-slobbering St. Maverick of Hanoi for his impeccable character and forthrightness. The David Broders and Richard Cohens of the world don't look kindly on rabble rousing of any political hue, it's improper! So, you had the surreal spectacle of McCain being hooted down by his own partisans for trying to reign in their Obama hate. It was shocking, but inevitable: McCain was never the candidate of the Republican base. He was the carbuncular booby prize left over when the GOP carnivores split between Romney, Huckabee and Guiliani. McCain isn't really ONE OF THEM either, but he's certainly closer than Obama.

The real blood and thunder doesn't flow at a GOP rally unless Sarah Palin is there to work the crowd into a frenzy. Palin is emphatically ONE OF THEM. In fact, she's the physical and intellecutal incarnation of a particular American way of life that fetishizes "authencity" and demonizes rationality and empiricism. These people pride themselves on their genuine "small town values," but the flipside of this is a violent revulsion to anything that smells faintly of THE OTHER. This dual character: immense pride in one's friendliness of those of like mind combined with viper-like hostility to "un-American" types, has been on perfect display in Palin's transformation on the campaign trail. She started out as America's Hockey Mom, but after several pathetic attempts at feigning competence in media interviews and the continuing Troopergate imbroglio brought some of the bloom off of the rose, she morphed into Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. You can see the dark energy flowing through her when the congregation shouts "Amen" to her denunciation of Obama and his terrorist buddies. She is in her element in these moments: riling up a savage mob that would gleefully chew their own brains out if they could reach them.

Mindless, animal grunting is what Palin is looking to provoke because she is at war with the very notion of verbal communication. She aims to strip politics of any meaningful discussion of anything, let alone actual issues. That's why her main target of contempt, even more than Obama, is the "media elite." Whatever you think about the media (commie symps or handmaidens of corporate brainwashing, discuss!), most people would agree that a crucial part of their job during a political campaign is to measure the statements of political candidates against the known facts. Since her entry onto the national scene, Palin has brazenly lied, time and again, and essentially dared the media to call her on it, confident that she could summon enough hostility to these "elitists" to nullify their criticism among the electorate. Practically the first words out of her mouth as a national figure "I said 'thanks, but no thanks' to that bridge to nowhwere," were false, and since then she's been steadily shoveling bullshit. From a bizarre and easily-disproven claim that the teleprompter malfunctioned during her RNC speech to saying that the recently released Troopergate report cleared her of any unethical action even though the report explicitly labeled her conduct unethical, the manure keeps pouring out of her mouth.

Her anger at the press isn't just that they call her on her falsehoods, but that they insist that words have to mean things. After her incoherent ramblings to Katie Couric, Palin went on the offensive, complaining about a "media filter" that consisted entirely of Couric asking follow-up questions when Palin spewed mindless talking points. During the vice presidential debate, she came right out and said that she wasn't going to address the questions that moderator Gwen Ifill posed to her. She wants to reduce political rhetoric to a series of images and gestures that bypass the frontal lobe and arouse the basest possible emotional responses. Droppin' the "g" from all words with gerunds, saying a few words (Maverick, Hockey, Small Town, etc) over and over so that they become incantations, winking at the camera so that the middle-aged white men in the audience who long for a hot piece of ass who won't give them a lot of feminist backtalk can fantasize that she's looking right at them. If Palin could make it happen, she'd strip campaigns of their annoying chatter and simply appear before her worshipful crowds with a shotgun in one hand and an apple pie in the other, bend over a few times, pantomime a quick prayer, and close with the ritual slaughter of a gay Islamic moose.

Isn't It Pretty To Think So...

2008-09-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

So the Republican Convention is finally over. The delegates have packed their jowls and departed for sun-blasted concrete hellscapes like Sugarland, Texas and Orlando, Florida, which their porcine little minds convince them are paradises, and the poor workers at the Xcel center are just now starting to get the stench of BrylCream and prostate cancer out of the fabric. The entire affair was an airless recitation of classic Republican bullshit and vitriol, alternate fawning hero worship of John McCain with vicious contempt for anyone who lives outside the imaginary Republican America of white fences and white faces. It was hollow and stupid and hateful and boring, but it did leave us with a couple of interesting insights.

1. Communities are for losers.

The biggest laughs from the crowd in St. Paul came when goblins like Rudy Guiliani and Sarah Palin invoked Barack Obama's time working as a community organizer. The very word sparked waves of derisive guffaws. For Republicans, any community that needs organizing isn't worth a damn in the first place. Hell, communities are only for people who don't have the intelligence and wherewithal to live in a gated suburb. The sort of urban, minority communities that Obama helped organize in the early 90s are to be subjugated, not empowered. Republicans have been at war with the very idea of "community" for thirty years now, destroying these neighborhoods with deindustrialization, cuts in social spending, and the "war on drugs." All with the goal of destroying the urban working class as a political force, turning its people into an atomized social detritus, good for hard labor in the prison industrial complex and the neo-feudal service economy. The last thing Republicans, secure in their exurban bunkers and hostile to anything smacking of collective action want is to see some uppity* Negro organizing these people into an effective grassroots movement to push back against their re-enslavement.

2. Drill, Baby, Drill!

One of the most striking things about the Republican Convention, other than the fact that it set the world record for number of middle-aged pricks in cowboy hats assembled under one roof, was the complete and total lack of policy discusion on display. In a country facing economic crisis and a disastrous foreign occupation, there was nary a hint of actual proposed solutions to the nation's problems. A lot of bullshit about how awesome John McCain is for being a war hero and how delicious mooseburgers are, but nothing in the way of discussion of domestic or foreign issues. Except one: More offshore drilling! These asswipes talked about drilling so much you'd think there was some sort of subconscious psycho-sexual release to be had in all that discussion of plunging deep into the earth to unlock gushers of hot, sticky, sweet light crude. That offshore drilling is THE Republican issue of the election speaks volumes about the essential nature of Republican governance. Offshore drilling will accomplish absolutely nothing by way of reducing fuel prices or oil dependency, but it WILL create massive environmental damage AND make billions of dollars for oil companies. This has been the GOP gameplan for a generation: propose solutions that do more harm than good, while simultaneously enriching their corporate benefactors.

It's a sweet con, but this time around it might just be too much for even the remarkably bullshit-tolerant American electorate. This time, my disgust with the spectacle of Republican hatefulness and venality on display at the RNC was tempered by the strong, thrilling suspicion that these jizzbag's days are numbered. There are too many angry, fed-up people struggling in a failing economy, too many people killed in a pointless war, for the old snake oil to work anymore. Add to that the fact that the GOP is facing a once in a lifetime political talent with a shitload of money and an amazing ground organization, and it looks like the wrecking crew may well finally get the gasface from the American people.

And there's the goddamn rub.

You see, all of this awful Republican-ness is really, really making me want Obama to win in November, and that makes me feel like a goddamn chump. I know that on the fundamental issues, it simply does not matter who wins. We live in the international empire of corporate transaction that Ned Beatty rhapsodizes in the film Network,a "holistic system of systems" designed to generate profit for the shareholders at the expense of the many. All significant decisions of state are made not in by the political process, but by the sociopathic needs of the market economy, an empire of dollars as well as armies.

Elections are fought over the aesthetics of this empire. The sad fate of the Iraqi people over the past sixteen years serves as a perfect case study. It may disturb a lot of anti-war liberals to hear this, but Bill Clinton is responsible for the death of as many Iraqis as George W. Bush. The difference is that the Iraqis who died during the Clinton administration were killed by a merciless sanctions regime that denied the people of Iraq access to life-saving medical supplies, and technology to repair the water treatment infrastructure destroyed during the first Gulf War. The United Nations estimates that more than half a million Iraqi children died as a result of these sanctions, which liberal heroine Madeline Albright declared to be "worth the cost." Now, George Bush is certainly no slouch at killing Iraqis, of course. His invasion has destroyed the lives of millions of them. In Iraq, the result of Clinton foreign policy was similar to that of Bush's:
death and pain and horror. The difference between the two policies lay in the way they are perceived by the American electorate. People of the liberal temperament prefer the Clinton approach because the deaths are quiet: no bombs, just starvation and untreated disease. Quiet enough to allow people who prize their ability to empathize and live humanely to feel self-righteous. Folks of a conservative bent like the Bush method because the deaths are loud. The cluster bombs and depleted uranium rounds pound out a rhythm of American power and domination, gratifying people who cherish righteous displays of violence. These two groups of Americans fight tooth and nail in elections to determine what political aesthetic tendencies will determine the superficial shape of the empire. Either way, the result in Iraq is the same: industrial-sized misery doled out in order to "stabilize" the world energy market.

So why the hell do I care who wins?

Part of it comes from my addiction to electoral politics. I follow it with the same rapt attention to the details as I do baseball, and like baseball, I know that I can only truly enjoy it if I pick a team to root for. Mainly, though, I long for the chance to really be disappointed by a politician. I came to political consciousness in the waning days of the Clinton administration. His craven triangulations were taken for granted as part of the political landscape. Then, came Bush, who I despised as a witless, entitled rich kid disphit from day one. I never had the experience of having my giddy hopes for change crushed under the heel of political reality. Clinton's mushy, pro-corporate third way and Bush's psychotic end times warmongering are all I've known. I'm a political cynic, but I haven't earned it. I want to experience that sinking, gasping realization that the man who filled my with a real sense that a better world is within our grasp was just another conman shoveling bullshit down my windpipe. I want to test my reason, which tells me that the game is rigged and that politics is a farcical kabuki show, against a political reality with the potential to upend my theoretical understanding. If Obama ends up sucking, at least I'll know I was right all along. And if, by some amazing chance, Obama doesn't end up revealing himself to be another gutless cog in the machinery? If he does succeed in at the very least humanizing the empire, of taming it and forcing it to serve the needs of humanity and the planet and not simply profit, if we find ourselves in 2012 living in a world where Guantanamo Bay has been shut down, where quality health care is affordable for all, where we are really turning away from an carbon-based economy, where no more children are shredded by American-made cluster bombs in Baghdad or the Gaza strip...well, that sure as hell would be something, wouldn't it?

*That's straight from the mouth of Republican Representative Lynne Westmoreland, who called Obama "uppity" in a recent interview. He says he doesnt' think there's a racial connotation to that word: the cocksucker's from Georgia.

Abu-Jamal/Zubaydah '08!

2008-09-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

Republicans mock Barack Obama for presiding over an empty cult of personality, but their geriatric dog-and-pony show in St. Paul consisted almost entirely of paens to John McCain's personal heroism as a POW during the Vietnam war. Health care? Jobs programs? Global Warming? Iraq Exit Strategy? Who needs that shit, this dude was a fucking prisoner of war for like, five years. The entire argument for McCain's candidacy consists boils down to this: He was a POW for five years. You people owe him.

Beyond the fact that this is a punishingly stupid and mendacious way to pick a president (Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in a tiny cell for a lot longer than John McCain ever was. Write in!), it speaks to the historical amnesia and immorality that goes into the way McCain's time in the Hanoi Hilton is remembered.

In the bathetic introductory video to McCain's speech Thursday night, Fred Thompson gurgled his way through this line: "When you spend five years in a box, you dedicate yourself to making sure other people don't have to live in that box." As though John McCain's top priority as president will be safeguarding American citizens from being taken prisoner by Vietnamese communists. You know what, John? I'm not too worried about that happening. There's pretty much zero chance that I'll be taken prisoner by the Vietnamese...because I'm not going to drop a bunch of fucking bombs on their country for no good reason!

None of the billion or so retellings of the John McCain imprisonment story told during the RNC contained any sort of context. He wasn't kidnapped by the SLA or something. He was shot down on during his 23rd bombing mission over Vietnam. A duty that he volunteered for. McCain wasn't some poor bastard drafted off of the back of a tractor. He was the son of an admiral who was already 30 years old, a man who could write his own ticket in the Air Force and chose to fly payload after payload of explosives into the heart of a third world country that had never attacked the United States, in order to help prop up a corrupt illegitimate government that wouldn't have lasted a day if free elections were held. His endurance and sense of personal honor are certainly impressive, but it doesn't abnegate the fact that he willingly participated in an air war that killed around three million Vietnamese people. Even scarier is the fact that McCain seems to take his suffering as proof of the righteousness of his actions.

In any event, it was certainly surreal watching a gaggle of red meat Republicans celebrating the bravery and character of someone who was tortured and imprisoned. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida the U.S. government has got a bunch of guys who've been jailed for longer than McCain, subjected to many of the same "enhanced interrogation techniques" as McCain, and all are being held on far flimsier pretexts. Something tells me, though, that the Gop-bots wouldn't say that Abu Zubaydah is ready to lead.

Winston Churchill can suck my dick.

2008-06-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

At work today I saw the new issue of Newsweek staring out at me like a grinning death mask. The article within is a typical Evan Thomas snorefest about how comparisons of contemporary world politics to the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler are ahistorical and fatuous. That's true as far as it goes, and important to remember as John McCain continues his mushheaded analogizing from coast to coast. What chapped my hindquarters was this blithe invocation of Churchill as a symbol of political wisdom, especially given the fact that almost all of the foreign policy debates currently raging in this election are over the Middle East.

Because nobody in this goddamn country (including members of the supposed elite media) can remember more than one fact about any given historical figure or event, Winston Churchill is known exclusively for his stiff-spined opposition to Hitler. The man had an incredibly long, varied career in British politics, and for some crazy reason, the part of his career that is most directly relevant to the current geopolitical clusterfuck has completely dissapeared from memory. After World War One, the defeated Ottoman empire was portioned out between the victorious Entente powers. France got what is now Syria, while the British gained control of Palestine, Jordan, and what is now Iraq, which was essentially invented by the British by unifying three Ottoman provinces under an imposed Hashemite king.

Then, as now, British troops occupied the territory now called "Iraq" in order to prop up a handpicked ruler. Winston Churchill was instrumental in that occcupation, first as minister of war and air power, then as Colonial Secretary. Then, as now, Iraqis responded to the occupation of their land by a foreign army with violent uprisings. The British, lead by Churchill, responded with a campaign of terror that was even more naked in its brutality than shock and awe. Not only were villages burned to the ground and civilians shot, but Churchill, a devout fan of the air power as a tool for maintaing imperial tranquility, authorized a campaign of bombing, including the dropping of poison gas, on recalcitrant tribesmen. During the early 20s, air raids, sometimes featuring mustard gas bombs, were visited on rebellious Iraqi villages and cities, as well as peaceful communities that had committed to capital crime of refusing to pay taxes to the regime. Some weak sisters in the colonial office objected to the practice, but Churchill was adamant: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes."

So, on the most pressing foreign policy question facing a prospective American president: what to do about the occupation of Iraq, we don't have to resort to speculation when considering what Winston would do. We know exactly what he did! It's easy to imagine him proudly puffing on a stogie while advising Bush to deal with the Mahdi army by dropping a few tons of mustard gas on Sadr city to keep the wogs in line.

The reason Newsweek, in their haste to play the guardian of historical truth, has displayed, once again, the horrifying blind spots that plague established media and ensure that any halfway ambitious politician who wants to start a war will always be able to count on the press as an eager accessory. In any given policy debate, you can guarantee that no one will be able to keep more than one historical fact in their heads at any one moment. So, whenever the sacred name of Churchill has been invoked during the debate over Iraq, from before the war until now, it has always been in the context of Munch, Appeasement, and how much of a douchebag pussy Neville Chamberlain was for not standing up to Hitler, who, like Saddam Hussein, had a mustache. AT NO POINT did any of the elite media types use the introduction of Churchill into the debate to remind people that a Western country invading and occupying Iraq in order to secure "stability" and "democracy" (wink) was not a new development. In fact, the reaction of the Iraqi people to a foreign occupation that proclaimed itself to be a force of liberation was easily predictable: it had already happened. Also predictable is the reaction of an Imperial power who sees its well intentioned gift of liberty rejected: it drops bombs. In 1920, they were filled with mustard gas. In 2005, they were filled with napalm and white phosperous. That's called progress.

On the suckiness of Justice Samuel Alito. (You asked for it!)

2006-02-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

It is total.

Also, did anyone notice that during the State of the Union speech, Bush didn't mention the fact that a significant portion of said union is still waterlogged and depopulated, six months after a hurricane strike?

Joel Stein: Fuck the Troops!

2006-01-25T19:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-stein24jan24,0,1803125.column?track=hpmostemailedlink

Finally! Somebody makes the obvious and similtaneously unspeakable point that, if you think that innocent civilians are being massacred in Iraq, as they have for the past three years, it means that somebody, namely the troops, has been massacring them. All those families shot to pieces at checkpoints were killed because there were people willing to invade a foreign country and shoulder rifles at those checkpoints. I really don't know how much moral responsibility "the troops" hold for what is happening in Iraq, but I do now that the current situation: in which the actual perpetrators of the war are completely off-limits from consideration as moral agents, is morally untenable. And watch as Joel Stein is destroyed by pundits of the left and the right, in order to maintain that ridiculous taboo.

The Red King

2006-01-18T19:13:00.000-08:00

I know Martin Luther King Day was Monday, and I'm writing this on Wednesday night, but that's one of the benefits of being an anarchist: you can tell federal holidays to go fuck themselves.

Martin Luther King gives me mixed feelings. Part of me chaffes at honoring him because of the fact that he has been officially sanctified as a secular American saint. I hate the way that messy, complicated, vastly multifaceted history is denatured by defining social movements by one man's actions. Whenever I hear people blandly praise MLK in the knee jerk fashion customary to dead figures of symbolic history, I feel the need to mutter "he plagarized his thesis!" or "he humped everything that moved!" And part of me is repelled by the fact that every jerkoff in America, no matter what their political persuasion, is pretty much legally required to offer hosannahs to King's memory. It makes you wonder, what else can be said?

There is one thing that can be said. Martin Luther King was astoundingly left wing. I mean, hard core. And his prescription for healing America's racial divisions went far beyond intergration. He envisioned a full scale revolution in American economic, political, and ethical values. That vision is most startlingly illustrated in his controversial 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam."

Here are some snippets:

"The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.

During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it haseverything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.""

All you need to know about Ambassador L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III's book "My Year in Iraq"

2006-01-11T21:49:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know, "Jerry" Bremer* was the incompetent ass put in charge of Iraq for the first year of the occupation. He was responsible for such winning strategies as disbanding the Iraqi army, sending the marines into Fallujah to destroy the entire city, trying to arrest popular radical shiite cleric** Muqtada Al-Sadr, not to mention somehow losing nine BILLION dollars in reconstruction funds. Anyway, this idiot has written a book trying to divest himself of responisiblity for the Iraqi clusterfuck, like every other douchebag in the Bush administration. I haven't read the book, and don't intend to, but I still know enough about it to impart to you the exact value of said book. The index has all the answers.

Not in the index:

Halliburton

In the index:

Hitler, Adolph, Saddam compared to

* full disclosure: I don't trust anyone with a nickname.

**Band Name.

My Hump.

2006-01-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

The aforementioned hump.

It occurs to me that, with my impending return to Cream city, this here blog may well cease to be in the near future. Now don't get me wrong, I love spewing half-informed profanity at my friends and loved ones. However, since I will shortly be able to spew said half-informed profanities to said friends and loved ones in person, and since said friends and loved ones are the only people who read this thing in the first place, the blog reaches a point of existential crisis.

Now, I'll probably keep the blog active to occasionally post the occasional fevered apocalyptic vision, but the frequency of posts will be drastically lower. As such, I think I should get the most out of this last month, instead of letting whole weeks go by without posting. The only problem is that I don't have anything to say, really. I know that this fact has never stopped me before, but it's been a slightly larger problem lately.

I do have one thing to say, though, and it is somewhat controversial.

It is this: the Black Eyed Peas My Humps is the single dumbest song in the history of the world. Without a doubt. If you don't believe me, take a gander at the lyrics, in their entirety.

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside your trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,Get you love drunk off my hump.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps. (Check it out)

I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these icies.
Dolce & Gabbana,
Fendi and NaDonna
Karan, they be sharin’
All their money got me wearin'
flyBut I ain’t askin,
They say they love my ass ‘n,
Seven Jeans, True Religion's,
I say no, but they keep givin’
So I keep on takin’
And no I ain’t taken
We can keep on datin’
I keep on demonstrating

My love, my love, my love, my love
You love my lady lumps,
My hump, my hump, my hump,
My humps they got u,
She’s got me spending.(Oh)
Spendin’ all your money on me
and spending time on me.
She’s got me spendin’.(Oh)
Spendin' all your money on me, up on me, on me

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What u gon’ do with all that ass?
All that ass inside them jeans?
I’m a make, make, make, make you scream
Make u scream, make you scream.
Cos of my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps. (Check it out)

I met a girl down at the disco.
She said hey, hey, hey yea let’s go.
I could be your baby, you can be my honey
Let's spend time not money.
I mix your milk wit my cocoa puff,
Milky, milky cocoa,
Mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky riiiiiiight.

They say I’m really sexy,
The boys they wanna sex me.
They always standing next to me,
Always dancing next to me,
Tryin’ a feel my hump, hump.
Lookin’ at my lump, lump.
U can look but you can’t touch it,
If you touch it I'ma start some drama,
You don’t want no drama,
No, no drama, no, no, no, no drama
So don’t pull on my hand boy,
You ain’t my man, boy,
I’m just tryn’a dance boy,And move my hump.

My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
my hump, my hump.My lovely lady lumps [x3]
In the back and in the front.
My lovin’ got u,
She’s got me spendin’.(Oh)
Spendin’ all your money on me
and spending time on me.
She’s got me spendin’.(Oh)
Spendin' all your money on me, up on me, on me.

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What you gon’ do with all that ass?
All that ass inside them jeans?
I’ma make, make, make, make you scream
Make you scream, make you scream.
What you gon do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off this hump.
What you gon’ do wit all that breast?
All that breast inside that shirt?
I’ma make, make, make, make you work
Make you work, work, make you work.

She’s got me spendin’.
Spendin all your money on me and spendin’ time on me
She’s got me spendin’.
Spendin' all your money on me, up on me, on me.

It's breathtaking, seeing it in print like that. Reading that, how can any self-respecting person who has ever owned a Black Eyed Peas record not fight the urge to commit ritual seppukku. Where to begin? The rhyming of "sexy" with "sex me" and "next to me" with "next to me"? That "milky milky cocoa puff" business? You know what, it's just too baroque an atrocity to even begin to parse. The one thing that really, really boggles my mind about this song, though, is the insane conviction of it's authors (to sully the word) that the words "hump" and "lump" somehow connote sexiness. Frankly, I can't think of two less sexy words in the English language. You know what I think when I hear the words "hump" and "lump"? I think abnormal growth, tumor, goiter, cyst. In short, something that they find inside of you on a disturbing X-Ray, then have to have surgically removed. Something dense and sweaty, pulsing with deadly energy, maybe with hair and teeth growing out of it. That's David Cronenberg's idea of sexy, but not mine.

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.

2005-12-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

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.

Operation: Krumpus.

2005-12-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

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.

Just saw King Kong.

2005-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Are you a potential war criminal? Take our quiz!

2005-12-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2005-12-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

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.

A QUESTION OF SIGNIFICANT IMPORT!

2005-12-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

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

ANSWER ME!

Boobies

2005-12-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2005-12-09T20:34:00.000-08:00

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.

Words and Phrases that have made me laugh recently.

2005-12-07T21:19:00.000-08:00

"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.

2005-12-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-07T19:07:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2005-12-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

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."

The War on Christmas

2005-12-02T22:03:00.000-08:00

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.

"This racism is killing me inside!"

2005-12-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Debbie Does Market Research

2005-11-28T19:40:00.000-08:00

An oft-stated lefty premise is that the United States is a "puritanical" nation with a repressive attitude towards sexual expression. The quickie rejoinder to this argument is simple: "Look at the sex-drenched media we are surrounded by! You can't turn on your teevee without seeing some buxom young nympette cavorting about in a wanton Dance of Lust! We're a sex crazed society!"

Watching the documentary Inside Deep Throat, about the most popular adult film of all time, you get a sense of what the difference is between the culture we currently have, and an actually sexually liberated one might look like. When Deep Throat opened in 1972, it played in actual movie theaters across the country, and ordinary Americans lined up, in the daytime, to see it. Middle aged suburban couples, professionals, pillars of the community, showed up at public auditoriums, sitting next to each other to watch a woman take a man's cock tonsil deep into her mouth. Now, I know that porn has become a multi-billion dollar a year business; more money is spent on porn than first-run movies these days, but that doesn't mean that we live in a sexually uninhibited society. The porn that people consume by the metric ton nowadays is viewed behind locked home and hotel room doors. It's completely private, and not talked about. Sure, mainstream publications and news programs will do stories about the porn industry, but those articles and segments might feature a bunch of quotes from porn producers, actors, and a few egghead sociologists, but, most likely, not a single quote from an actual porn consumer. An entire industry churning out product for two or three affluent perverts. There is absolutely no way that something like the Deep Throat phenomenon could ever happen again. Porn is everywhere, but it's nowhere at the same time. This situation allows for denial on a society-wide scale: if the millions of people who watch porn are watching it in their basements, then hiding their DVDs in their crusty sock drawer, and never discuss it with anyone else, then it's easy for those who would persecute pornography and project a national moral character to campaign against this thing that no one will admit to consumming. In a society where people stand together in the daylight, waiting in line to watch porn with their neighbors, it becomes harder for our moral policemen to try and perpetrate the fraud that we are a "moral" society. Just like those hypocritical, kinky Victorians, we maintain a mask of sexual decorum in our public pursuits, then whip out the ether rag and cum-stained corset when the blinds are drawn. So, instead of being sexually uninhibited, we're just schizophrenic, which is just another word for repressed. And this doesn't even begin to address the question of how much the solitary consumption of pornography warps our perceptions, expectations, and relationship to actual sex.

Besides the popularity of porn, the other oft-noted component of our culture that supposedly indicates America's status as a libertine nation is the ubiquity of sex in American media. But consider all that so-called "sex": it isn't sex at all. It's titillation: suggestions of sexuality meant to arouse the senses, to get your attention, but devoid of any real sexual content. More depressingly, all that sexual imagery is not used to promote thinking about sex, but rather to promote thinking about consumption. "Sex Sells" advertising philosophy is designed to create sexual thoughts, but instead of connecting that aroused state to its logical, sexual conclusion, it seeks to connect that sense of arousal to a highly illogical conclusion: products. Sexy ads don't want you to have sex (that's usually free, and there aren't that many necessary acutrements...at least not ones that advertise on television), they want you to associate the tingly frission of sexual excitement with the product their hawking. Even television and film depictions of sex are largely meant to tease, to suggest, but to turn away from the act itself. A society with media devoted so fervently to utilizing sexualized bodies in the interest of attention-grabbing, but which can't bring itself to contemplate the actual act, is not sexually liberated: if we weren't repressed, the juvenile titillation wouldn't be effective.

"Black Friday"

2005-11-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

Today, on local and national newscasts across the country, the lead story was probably "Black Friday", the biggest retail day of the year. The day when countless stores finally go into the "black." (Hence "Black" Friday! Don't you just love book-keeping related humor?) Every goddamn year, we're told that the Friday after Thanksgiving is going to be a shopping pandamonium, and, sure enough, like clock-work, every Friday after Thanksgiving roles around...and we pack ourselves like sardines into our vehicles, fight to the death for mall parking spaces, and are herded through retailer after retailer, a trail of coupons in our wake. Then, that night, there are a hundred thousand television news stories about all the people at the mall. And we watch it, hoping, maybe, that we'll be in one of the shots, lugging a bag of cargo pants behind the reporter.

So why the hell do we still go shopping when we know it's going to be crazy and crowded and there are thirty more days after Friday when we could shop in a more relaxed environment? There are reasons, and some of them are the same reasons people started stampeding to the mall the day after Thanksgiving in the first place: one-day special discounts, and the fact that you've got a house full of family members you're deeply sick of being around and fifteen pounds of congealing leftovers; suitable motivation to get the hell out of the house any way possible. Still, those are only some of the reasons. I think a big part of why we are compelled to follow the "Black Friday" ritual is because it has become just that, a ritual.

Historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term "pseudo-event" in his 1961 book "The Image."* A "pseudo-event" is, according to Boorstin, a public spectacle that exists soley for the purpose of being observed. Things like press conferences, campaign stops, and other political events that are staged by those who want people to attend, and to see and read about them on television and in print, and would not happen otherwise. These events have no content, no meaning, outside of being observed. Since Boorstin wrote his book, the number of pseudo-events has expanded to include almost everything we consider to be "news": a political campaign, not just speeches and photo ops, but party conventions, as well, which used to be fraught with tension, but have been slowly bled of meaning over the years, is one long pseudo-event. Even media coverage of actually spontaneous news, such as wars or natural disasters, devolves into a series of pseudo-events almost instantly. The first few hours of September 11th media coverage, for example, contained actual news. From that point on, the attack, for all practical purposes, became a pseudo-event: day after day of interviews with people who had nothing new to impart to our understanding of what happened, just pathos and drama to entertain the audience. There is no purpose to this coverage outside of its value to the viewer as spectacle. Same goes for the Iraq war, Katrina, etc, etc. By this point, almost all news is pseudo-news.

Part of this phenomenon has been the creation of "Black Friday" as an actual news story: "this just in: women be shoppin'!" Under no serious definition could this possibly qualify as news, in the abscense of the media's desire to cover it as such. And, I think, there is a significant, subconscious desire on the part of many Americans to take part in a "historic" moment. This act of utter mundanity (is there ANYTHING more mundane than shopping?) having being transformed into a collective national experience by the prescence of the television camera's unblinking eye. At least, I think that might be the case: there's no way I know of to prove it.

*Speaking of "pseudo," here's how you can tell that I am a pseudo-intellectual: I knew what "pseudo-event" meant before I wrote this post, but I had to google it to remember who originated the term.

The Ice Harvest

2005-11-24T19:33:00.000-08:00

Today, instead of passing out in front of a Cowboys game in a tryptophene haze, I went and saw "The Ice Harvest." I liked it a lot. It contains some depressingly realistic strip club footage and a penetrating sense of confused desperation, all wrapped up in a mundane, suburan Wichita setting. Plus, Oliver Platt in one of the funniest drunk asshole performances of all time. Capsule review: About Schmidt + Double Indemnity.

Definitely an excellent alternative to Thanksgiving bullpucky. Oh fuck, I acknowledged it again!

Still to see in the next two weeks:

The Squid and the Whale and Syriana.

"When God gives you AIDS, make Lemon-AIDs!"

2005-11-24T14:52:00.000-08:00

I saw Sarah Silverman's comedy concerte/musical film "Jesus is Magic" yesterday. It was pretty darn hilarious: much fun was had with religions, Mexicans, Asians, cripples, midgets, the elderly, porn stars, AIDS-sufferers, Jews and, of course, black folks. I laughed pretty much through the entire thing with no guilt or self-consciousness. Part of the reason for that was due to the fact that my fellow film goers were, to a one, youngish-to-middle-aged urbane white hipsters. Emphasis on WHITE. The whiteness of the audience, which I noticed before the movie started, was made even more obvious when the movie was over and we made our way to the exits. The theater we were in, a Landmark in downtown DC, was staffed, to a one, with young black people. I just imagined a few of the ushers standing in the back of the theater during the movie, watching all of us "liberal" honkies cackling at jokes laced with racial slurs. Now, I don't think that Silverman is racists, that her jokes are racist, or that I'm racist for thinking that they're funny. I endorse the explaination that Silverman's humor subverts stereotypes and cultural beliefs by taking them to their most absurd conclusion. However, I do think that the kind of taboo-breaking, stereotype defying humor that is Silverman's stock in trade can only really be enjoyed by white people. After all, the jokes are aimed at THEIR positions of privilidge, cluelessness and prejudice. What the hell kind of fun are black people, or Mexicans, or midgets going to get out of jokes about how they smell bad or are members of an inferior race? I just can't see it. I'm not saying that minorities can't understand the humor, but that they probably wouldn't get the same giddy, transgressive thrill that makes "liberal" white guys like me crack up. None of this means that I disapprove of the movie, or Silverman's act, or racial jokes in general. The experience of seeing "Jesus is Magic" brought me to one realization: it should carry a rating, in addition to it's well-earned "R": FWPO, For White People Only.

I will not acknowledge Thanksgiving.

2005-11-24T10:40:00.000-08:00

For the first time in my life, I am alone on Thanksgiving. No family, no turkey, no awkward conversation with alcoholic relatives who don't know they're alcoholics, no football or post-meal coma. Good I say! Good! It's a stupid goddamn holiday that commemorates a mythical event (just like Christmas and Easter) for the purpose of nationalistic aggrandizement (like Independance Day). Thanksgiving was made a national holiday by Lincoln in the depth of the Civil War as a way to remind Americans of their shared national orgins. It's just as dumb as every other holiday (except Halloween, natch), but, like most of these really dumb holidays, I usually end up getting dragooned into observing them by my family. For the first time, I am able to freely and completely ignore this holiday, and I intend to do so. It'll be great: I remember the first Easter Sunday I spent away from home as a freshman in college. I ate a few Taco Bell Chalupas, watched "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and finished reading "American Pscyho." In fact, I could go for some T-Bell...I might have to make that a holiday non-observance tradition.

Wait...by writing all of this stuff about Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving...I really am acknowledging the holiday. In fact, I'm acknowledging the hell out of it! Shit...how do you deleate these things?

The Environment.

2005-11-21T20:51:00.000-08:00

I don't really like it personally, but I think it's a good thing, generally.

Too bad it'll be gone soon.

"4th Circuit Superior Court Judge Arnold Beinbacher has bewitched my milking cow!

2005-11-19T19:02:00.000-08:00

According to the Sacramento Bee:

"The Southern California-based sponsors of the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (JAIL) have taken aim at what they call “black-collar crime” across the country. They already have their sights set on the 2006 ballot in Nevada, and they report related efforts in Idaho and New Mexico.

They hope to start the ball rolling on a path that will lead to California.
The South Dakota initiative would create a special grand jury to hear complaints against judges based on an open-ended list of possible grievances. The list specifically includes not only crimes such as graft but certain flaws in reasoning, such as ignoring evidence and “sophistry.”

The grand jury would have power to set aside judges’ immunity from civil suits by the people they rule against. It also could levy fines or hand down indictments, subjecting judges to criminal proceedings before special trial juries with the power to sentence as well as convict. After three missteps, a judge would be disqualified from holding office.

The initiative author is Ron Branson, a Baptist minister, a former minor Republican party official in Los Angeles County and a frequent unsuccessful litigator in the state and federal courts."

I wonder if they'll allow spectral evidence at the proceedings.

Once Again, A Booze-Addled Half-wit Shows Us the Way.

2005-11-19T17:26:00.000-08:00

Ye Olde Internets are ablaze with yet another question that can be easily settled...by me. Seems people are fussing over the question: did the Bush administration LIE about Iraqi WMD? Most people will grant you that they gave out bad intelligence, but some argue that they didn't konw it was bad! The international community thought the intel was good! The Senate Democrats had the same intel! It was an honest mistake.

No. They lied.

And I can prove it...with lazers.

Let's start off with a fact, then an analogy. Fact: The Bush tools are yelling that congressional Democrats who voted to give Bush war authority re. Iraq received "the same intelligence" as the White House: that's bullshit. Think about it: intelligence agencies brief the president EVERY DAY. Some of that intel trickles down to congress, but the White House gets all the raw data. The WMD "evidence" that Bush let congress see was phrased in unambigious terms: Iraq has aluminum tubes that are used in uranium enrichment. Iraq has such and such amount of chemical and biological weaponry. Iraq is searching for uranium around the world. When the White House got that intelligence from the CIA and other agencies, it was riddled with caveats: Iraq has aluminum tubes....some of our analysts think they could be used to enrich uranium, but the majority think that they are rocketry tubes that couldn't possibly be used for that purpose. Iraq is trying to reconstitute it's nuclear program and is seeking uranium...or so says a defector provided to the CIA by Achmed Chaladi's Iraqi National Congress, whose honesty has been questioned by intelligence agencies around the world. And so on, and so on. The White House sanded off all of the untidy questions and dissentions and credibility issues, then presented Congress with polished jewels of pure, unadulterated, compressed bullshit.

Is that lying?

You tell me.

Here's the analogy: a man is selling a used car. He has had the car inspected by a mechanic before putting it on the market. The mechanic tells him that the axles on the car have about a 50-50 chance of snapping in half sometime in the near future: it wasn't critical, but there was suspicious metal fatigue that suggested collapse. Some dope comes to this guy's house, test drives the car, and, as he's getting ready to purchase it, asks "so, is there anything wrong with this vehicle that I should no about?" The man answers: "Nope. Just got 'er checked up with a mechanic, said everything's fine." Now, you could well argue that the purchaser would be a goddamn moron for taking this asshole's word for it and not checking himself, and you'd be right (are you reading this, Kerry, you loser?) But you could not argue that the seller was a lying piece of shit.

There we go.

On to the next electrical robot conflict...

I've been drinkin' Hater-ade since before you were born, son!

2005-11-16T13:28:00.000-08:00

You know that movie, or band, or television show or book that you nurse a fanatical love for? The one that is hopelessly obscure, the one whose mention brings nothing but puzzled expressions to the faces of friends and acquainatences when you mention it? You know how the utter lack of respect this movie/band/t.v. show/book gets similtaneously enrages and satisfies you? How the fact that this brilliant piece of/producer of art is underappreciated validates your place as a person of uniquely well-honed taste? How, if said move/band/t.v. show/book starts to gain mainstream notice, you're saddened because it means you've lost your specialness, and the singular brilliance of said art work that was previously noticable only to you is now appreciated by legions of mouth-breathing choad-smokes?

That's pretty much how I feel about the currently dismal approval ratings of President Douche-Nozzle von Cokemeister. I've been hating this dipshit for FIVE YEARS! Fuck, I was hating him BEFORE he was elected! I hated him before 9-11, and no, I wasn't one of those weak-bladdered simps who rallied brainlessly to his banner of idiocy after the attacks. Not even for a minute. My refrain has been unwavering: fuck that guy. Now, five years later (and a year after it would have done any fucking good) people are beginning to realize that this fuckstick doesn't know what he's doing, and even if he did, what he would do if he knew what he was doing is as fucked up as shoving puppies up your ass. Also, that the current Vice President of the United States is a portrait of cartoonish super-villainy. This national satori moment is vexing on two levels. For one, it lessens my personal satisfaction with being in the righteous minority, and it demands an answer to one gigantic question: WHAT THE FUCK TOOK YOU MOTHERFUCKERS SO FUCKING LONG?!?!?!?!

George W. Bush is as venal and stupid today as he was when he was snorting coke off a hooker's ass in Houston twenty years ago. Dick Cheney is as evil was he was zapping his children with cattle prods in order to achieve erections ten years ago. The WMD arguements for invading Iraq were bullshit before the war, and, more importantly, informed individuals could TELL that they were bullshit before the war. The lies were blatant: unmanned Iraqi airplanes spraying anthrax on American cities? Yellowcake uranium from Niger? Thalidomide babies could tell that this was a load of fiction. But it took three years for that simple fact to dawn on people. What does it say about this country that a single terrorist attack can derail its citizens critical capacities for four years.

So, a word of warning for all you jag-offs who want to brag about your newfound comtempt for the president: I will treat you with the same disdain a record store clerk shows to someone asking for Good News for People Who Love Bad News, but has never heard of The Lonesome Crowded West.

The Crazies: Fuck the Troops.

2005-11-13T22:23:00.000-08:00

Earlier, I demanded that Hollywood do a remake of John Carpenter's anti-capitalist/pro-alien killing movie "They Live" on the logic that, if they're going to remake Carpenter movies, they might as well remake one that has an idea or two going for it.

Recently, I watched one of George Romero's first films, 1973's "The Crazies." It's a explicit Vietnam allegory about a U.S. government biological weapon spill in a small Pennsylvania town and the Army unit sent in to contain the disease, which makes everyone exposed to it go insane. The movie contains some really bracing scenes that are blantantly, and deliciously, anti-troop. U.S. soliders kick down people's doors, shoot civilians, and steal shit out of abandoned houses and rifle the wallets of dead folks. In 1973, this shit must've been like a shot to the nuts for most of your patriotic Americans, and that was during Vietnam, when there was a generally ambigious feeling about what U.S. soldiers were really up to over there. Imagine how that kind of imagery would effect an audience TODAY, when we're in the middle of re-doing Vietnam in the desert, but the ambigious feelings about the moral culpability of American troops has been replaced by a mindless, knee-jerk endorsement of every person wearing combat fatigues that reaches across the political spectrum.

A remake of "The Crazies" is currently in the works, hot on the success of the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, another Romero film chock-a-block with social commentary that was watered-down for a big-budget studio. Now, although I revere George Romero, and think that "The Crazies" is pretty awesome, it was shot with a budget that seems to have consisted of a half-full bag of returnable soda cans. Romero did a valiant job working with the resources at hand (there's some striking compositions, including a stark, unsettling and highly memorable opening sequence), but the wires are definitely showing. Decent production values could turn this great idea into a truly excellent film. However, the big budget pretty much guarantees that the cool, subversive, troop hatin' stuff is going to be the first thing tossed in the waste basket. That's a goddamn shame, but I do wonder how the hell they're going to suck the social criticism out of a movie about a U.S. city being driven mad by government criminality and incompetence, then corralled by clueless and casually violent American soldiers. "Dawn of the Dead" was easy, just stick to the original plot skeleton: people hiding from zombies in a mall. Most of the satire in that one was produced by clever shot selection. But even the most elemental plot points of "The Crazies" are subversive as hell, especially with Iraq going on as it's being made. The Hollywood hackmeisters have their work cut out for them. Maybe the biological weapon will be released by terrorists instead of a plane crash, and at the end, some Army private discovers the cure in his bible. Ah, I can smell the suck from here.

America, Fuck No!

2005-11-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

There's been a recent spat of stories in the media that suggest that the United States government has been less-than-respectful towards the human rights of individuals of the Muslim persuasion. You've got your Abu Ghraib story, still a doozy after all this time, reports of literally dozens of detainees being tortured to death in Afghanistan and Iraq, extraordinary rendition of detainees to torture-happy countries, the revelation that the CIA is running a bunch of "black sites" for off-the-books imprisonment (some located in the former Soviet Union!), the white phosporous story (following on the heels of the long-forgotten cluster bomb and depleated uranium stories), and, as a delicious cherry of evil on the sundae of monstrousness, you've got Bush threatening to veto a defense bill (which would be the first veto of his administration) if it contained a prohibition banning torture and inhumane treatment of terror-related prisoners. None of these things are particularly surprising, considering how eager so many of us were after September 11th to shed as much foreign blood as was deemed necessary to maintain an illusion of security. For a good four years, this machinery of torture and mass death has been humming along smoothly with nary a whimper from the public at large. Now, the public at large, sheep-like as it is, has started to turn on Bush and his policies, so suddenly these human rights violations are a matter of national distress. As the debate about human rights heats up, a refrain has been struck up by left-ish commentators, and is carrying into the mainstream: THIS IS NOT WHAT AMERICA STANDS FOR!

The motivation for this outrage is the underlying belief that the United States is a nation of ideals, chief among them being the idea of equal human rights for all. When I hear people talking about this mythical America, I can't help thinking: have these people actually BEEN to the United States? Cracked a book about the nation's history? Read the country's fucking newspapers at any point in their lives?

Even if you ignore the more controversial, commie-type criticisms of America's national ideals (you know, the wealth concentration/exploitation of workers at home and abroad/relentless, potentially catastrophic environmental degradation in the name of production and profit, etc, etc.), just sticking to cut-and-dried murderousness, there hasn't been a decade in the nation's history that has not featured massive, state-sanctioned, unjustified blood-letting. Everybody knows about the whole slavery/indian genocide thing, but it's usually considered by American mythologizers as some sort of hundred year long abberation. But it didn't stop there. Just as the end of slavery signalled the ramping up of Native ethnic cleansing, while the gunshots of Wounded Knee were still echoing through the plains, the Spanish American war brought with it a forty-year occupation of the Phillippines that featured the deaths of over 100,000 Filipinos and sundry massacres by American Troops. The Philippines were still being scoured with bayonets when the U.S. invaded Haiti, beginning a ten year occupation that killed tens of thousands. During World War One, thousands of Americans were imprisoned for opposing the draft. A few more Central American and Carribbean countries got saddled with trigger-happy American occupation forces during the inter-war years. Now, the U.S. gets a lot of credit for helping defeat the Nazis (although the rape-happy Red Army probably deserves that particular fruit basket the most), but we did it while imprisoning tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans due to racial hysteria. As soon as the Big One ended, we were back to killing people in foreign countries, including engineering the overthrow of the elected governments of Iran and Guatamala, acts that lead directly to political repression and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Barely enough time to catch a breath before the U.S. jumped into Vietnam with both feet: we know how that turned out; maybe three million Vietnamese killed by American troops and bombs, Cambodia illegally bombed and lethally destabilized (hello, Khmer Rouge!), over the course of a decade. Somehow, Nixon and Kissinger found time during this busy period to sanction a coup in Chile (Allende, torture chambers, Caravan of Death, etc.). The Eighties brought us proxy wars in Central America in which perhaps as many as half a million peasants were killed by American military hardware. In our own conscious lifetimes, we bombed the fuck out of Iraq twice, fitting a decade of near-genocidal economic sanctions in between, tortured the fuck out of a bunch of people and discarded the concept of habeaus corpus. Even this abbreviated list, overlooking hundreds of incidents as it does, leaves only a handful of years in which the U.S. government was not actively involved in the extreme abnegation of human rights across the globe. So, tell me again, WHAT THE FUCK DOES AMERICA STAND FOR?

We can't be so fatuous to believe that what America tells itselfs about itself means more than what the ostensibly democratic government of that nation actually does in the world. So it follows that America's ideals mean exactly squat.

Having said all that, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I do not hate America. Not because of some goofy infatuation with our hypothetical political ideals. Not because I want to cover my ass against accusations of disloyalty (like all that "I oppose the war, but I support the troops!" lameness). I don't have America because America is a meaningless term. Hating America is like hating goblins or evil spirits. America does not exist. It is a term of art used by those who wish to advance a particular agenda. The trick is easy and well-worn: simply identify "America" with something you like (be it George Bush, free speech, the war on Iraq or a belief that you shouldn't electrocute folks' genitals), and accuse those who don't like said thing to be against America. It's a dynamite rhetorical move because it's impossible to argue against: the implicit assumption regarding what America means has already framed the debate on your terms. So, no, I don't hate America. I hate the government of the United States, pretty much all of its economic, cultural and religious institutions and a good majority of its citizens, but I don't hate America.

Melted Baby-Flesh: Smells like Freedom

2005-11-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article325560.ece

What the hell can you say about something like this? What do you need to say? The only thing that comes to mind is a quote from everyone's favorite slave banger, Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."

Oh wait, there is no god. Cool! Melted babies for everyone!

Delicious Link Sausage.

2005-11-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

I finally gots me a handle on the linking technology on this here website. As such, I now possess the magical ability to create one-click access to other sites of my choosing. While this may well be the finest site on the whole Interweb, here are some recommendations for those who grow curious as to what other (albeit clearly lesser) delights exist in the cyber garden.

dailykos.com: liberal political analysis for those, like me, who are viciously addicted to polls and election results. There's some good stuff on there today, what with there being two off-year gubunatorial elections, not to mention state-wide ballot initiatives in Maine, Ohio and California! Christ, the nerdery!

aspecialthing.com: one stop shop for discussing alternative comedians and their projects. Sorry, not much coverage of Larry the Cable Guy or Dane Cook, but Patton Oswalt and the other comedians of comedy are all well represented.

imdb.com: that guy, in that one movie, with the head...what was his name again?

xenu.com: everything you always suspected about Scientology, but assumed was too crazy to be true.

chick.com: Behold Jack Chick, the greatest Christian artist since Michaelangelo

wikipedia.com: are you puzzled by my dense, brilliant Pynchon-esque web of historical and litery allusions (like Pynchon-esque)? Just look 'em up on wikipedia, the people's web encyclopedia; it makes Diderot look like Parson Weems! (Note to self: I suck)

diy-punk.org/anarchy/: a comprehensive, (relatively) easy-to-read guide to my personal favorite political philosophy, anarchism, AKA libertarian socialism. Let's get working on this, people!

fatchicksinpartyhats.com: beggars description. Sufficit to say: Wizard Fatty never forgets the butter. Truer words were never spoken.

mcsweeneys.net: David Eggers-approved arch pop culture-based comedy for the twentysomething dorks who keep the Internets thrumming with activity.

Happy surfing...dudes!

Christ, do I suck.

I'm so full of shit I've started weeping tears made of corn nibblets.

2005-11-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

So the entire country of France is descending into anarchy, for those of you who haven't been keeping up on the news. Apparently, disenfranchised African and Arab immigrants from the depressed suburbs of Paris (yes, in France, they keep the dark folks in the suburbs and the inner city is reserved for Whitey...it's BIZZARRO WORLD...with a dizzying cheese selection) have been burning down buildings, torching cars, shooting at police, and setting fire to bus passengers for ten days now and the riots have spread to areas of significant immigrant population across the country. Ten cops just got shot today, in fact.

Now, what does this have to do with my being full of horse-pucky? Regular readers of ye olde bogge (all two of you...hi, John!), know that I like to talk a good game (or is it "type a good game?") about how the end of the world would be sweet. But I know, down to the bottom of my tiny black heart, that if I were in Paris this week, I would have spent the entire time hiding in my apartment with the door bolted, peeing in the sink and eating my dandruff for nourishment.

Ah, I suck.

Now that's more like it.

2005-11-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Somehow, I think this here blog format might be a bit more appropriate for my overall weltanschauung.

(look it up...then mock me for misspelling it)

This might just be the coolest thing ever:

2005-11-05T20:21:00.001-08:00

From the A.P.

'Pirates armed with grenade launchers and machine guns tried to hijack a luxury cruise liner off the east African coast Saturday, but the ship outran them, officials said.

Two boats full of pirates approached the Seabourn Spirit about 100 miles off the Somali coast and opened fire while the heavily armed bandits tried to get onboard, said Bruce Good, spokesman for the Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp. The ship escaped by shifting to high speed and changing course.

"These are very well-organized pirates," said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program. "Somalia's coastline is the most dangerous place in the region in terms of maritime security."

The attackers never got close enough to board the Spirit, but one member of the 161-person crew was injured by shrapnel, cruise line president Deborah Natansohn said. . . ."Our suspicion at this time is that the motive was theft," Good said, adding that the crew had been trained for "various scenarios, including people trying to get on the ship that you don't want on the ship."'

No word yet on the fate of the Belafonte.

Seriously, I would give my a chest of doubloons to have seen the slack, pasty faces of the cruise-goers as rocket propelled grenades fired by swarthy boat people wooshed over their heads. Science has proven that, while Americans are essentially two-legged cattle, cruise-going Americans are the most bovine of all. The only way to graze your way through five all-you-can-eat buffets in a fourteen hour period is to have four stomachs. Just thinking about a herd of them looking over the guardrail, chewing at mouthfuls of cud, staring at a boatload of slavering water bandits brandishing automatic weapons, some of them no doubt recording it on their camcorders and cell phones, is too delicious for words. The entire point of the cruise ship experience is to expose lard-assed First Worlders to the exotic sights and sounds of the Third World. The only problem is that a combined metric ton of fanny-bepacked suburbanite waddling through the village square pretty much invites the one thing that these adventurers certainly aren't seeking: actual contact with the inhabitants of said Third World, outside of a souvenir shop/scuba guide capacity. Cruise travel keeps the dirty natives at bay, managing every aspect of the excursion to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the precious, dough-filled wayfarers. When that pirate boat (not quite a ship) made it's steady but futile way towards the towering mass of first world machinery, it was the closest that a lot of these blubberpots are ever going to come to the raw desperation of the majority of the earth. These pirates, had they gotten on board, would have torn through their pampered lives like tissue paper. Entrails strung across the lido deck and hollowed-out skulls filled with Mai Tai. Instead, sadly, they'll just go home with a great story for the neighbors: much better than those folks a few years ago who contracted a virus on a cruise ship and spent two weeks shitting out their intesines.

The All-Muppet Cabinet:

2005-11-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

No way would these folks be carrying a 35% approval rating.

Inspired by my most recent cyber-flailing, I have decided to propose the Cabinet of an all-Muppet administration.

Some of the positions have already been filled: NSA director Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Press Secretary Beaker, indicted-vice-presidential-chief-of-staff Scooter (no change there).

Time to create a government that would certainly be more compotent, less corrupt, and less prone to waging imperial wars than our current one.

Secretary of State: Sam the Eagle

Secretary of Defense: Animal (more cogent, less bellicose than Rumsfeld)

Attorney General: Gonzo (that is EXTREMELY funny if you're a huge political nerd)

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: what the hell was the name of that piano playing Muppet, you know, the one who was obviously black, but was also a dog...Rowlf!

Secretary of Agriculture: Swedish Chef

Surgeon General: Dr. Teeth

Secretary of Education: Camilla the chicken

Secretary of Energy: the Flying Zucchini Brothers

Vice President: Fozzie

The rest of the cabinet would be filled out with fraggles, doozers, and Statler and Waldorf.

and, of course,

President Kermit and First Lady Piggy.

Who could argue that they'd do a better job than Bush and Company?

Okay, My Brain is Melting...

2005-11-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

No word yet on potential indictments of Press Secretary Beaker or National Security Advisor, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

So, the Fitzgerald indictment hammer comes down on everyone's favorite Muppet-named Bush administration war criminal. Hot Karl escaped the scythe, but barely, and the possibility of further indictments hangs in the air.

Certain anti-American traitors such as myself rejoiced at this news, but secretly knew that the propaganda whores in the White House were sure to find a way to minimize the issue and distract the news media from further investigation.

And, sure enough, on Monday, just as the Libby indictment was settling in as the news story of the moment, Bush announces his Supreme Court pick, a creepy, misogynistic douchebag who thinks that the uterus is essentially a male appendage.

It looked, for a moment, like the Mayberry Machiavelli's had pulled off another PR coup, keeping the ADD-having media dumbasses jumping from one story to the next. And, I sighed, and muttered, "not again!" Surely, the bumbling, spineless Democrats, who have shown little to no ability to frame issues or dictate the terms of debate, would not be able to mount an effective counter-offensive.

Then, this afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid demands a closed Senate session on the subjects of the Plame leak AND, as a delicious bonus, the faulty pre-war "intelligence" that Bush and company spoon fed congress and the media. Bill Frist could do nothing but sputter and whine like a retarded socialite getting bitch-slapped by Mr. T. Meanwhile, the hot story of the moment for the Ritalin-addicts in the media once again becomes the Plame leak with a side-dish of war lies.

The dumbfoundment is so total, that I'm going to call up my Mom and make sure she still acknowledges me as her progeny.

Halloween Costume Suggestion:

2005-10-30T20:09:00.000-08:00

If "killing a hobo" is the funniest phrase in the English language (I recommend making it an all-purpose metaphor for anything you do in life: on your way to the bathroom, announce "I'm going to go kill a hobo..."), then it stands to reason that the best possible Halloween costume would be a murdered hobo...or, maybe a hobo murderer. (For those wondering "what kind of costume would a hobo murderer wear? My guess: a gory shirt, a knife, and a handful of blood-stained bindles.)

What did people actually wear as costumes this year? Keep in mind that whatever you picked, it wasn't as cool as killed hobo/hobo killer.

Who said off-year gubunatorial elections aren't hilarious?

2005-10-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

For some dumb reason, Viriginia elects it's governor on the year AFTER each presidential election. So, that means that they're campaigning hard right now in the lead up to the November 8th vote. The Democratic candidate is the current Lieutenant Governor, Tim Kaine. The Republican is current state Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. The race is a dead heat going into the last two weeks of the campaign.

None of this is, as of yet, hilarious.

However, by watching a few slices of the televised debates and some broadcasted publicity events, I've discovered something hilarious: Kilgore, the Republican candidate, has an EFFEMINANT Southern accent. I'm sure that everyone is familiar with the "effeminant Southerner." There's nothing inherently funny about this...although the fact that Kilgore is the candidate of the infinitely heterosexual Republican party is worth a chuckle or two. What's funny is that fact that, because of the noted anti-gay bias of your average knuckledragging Republican voter, Kilgore's campaign has used his actual voice and image extremely sparingly in their ads. The McCain-Feingold-mandated "I'm Jerry Kilgore and I approved this message" is the only time he actually speaks in any of his ads.

The question this raises is: did Kilgore realize on his own that he sounds kind of fruity and opted to keep his twangy lisp out of the public domain, OR, much more humorously, did one of Kilgore's campaign flunkies have to break the news to his boss that he sounds a bit too lavender for the cracker barrel of southern Virginia, and couldn't do his own spots?

One more post about cartoons and I'll be forced to renounce puberty.

2005-10-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

The absolute worst thing about Fox getting the broadcast rights to the baseball playoffs, including the World Series is that it has postponed the Simpsons Halloween Specials until November. That's just lame. Halloween-based programming is the the television equivilent of delicious taffy.* But that's only if it thrillingly anticipates the coming of October 31. If it's being shown in November. while people are already taking down their skeletons and putting up pictures of those adorable religious-fanatic-leprechauns, the Pilgrims, it's just sad, like a sack of drowned puppies left over fromthe traditional drunken Labor Day pet sacrifice. This is, as I wisely pointed out earlier, lame, but necessary if the World Series lasts through the end of October.

However, last year when the Red Sox swept the Cardinals in four games, there was no baseball on the last Sunday of October, leaving a big, juicy space for the Simpsons Halloween special. But since Fox had been advertising their Simpsons Halloween special for the first weekend of November, they ran some bullshit, non-Halloween-related reruns on the last Sunday of October. It was a sacrilege on par with shitting in your mom's mouth while she's passed out on the couch. And, worst of all, they're going to do it again this year! The Sox just won the Series (I'm pleased: Fuck Houston, Fuck Barbara Bush's reptilian jaw gnashing behind home plate, hurray for the smashing of jinxes!), so there won't be any baseball THIS Sunday, either. And yet, because they've already been advertising the special for November 6 (a Halloween special on November Sixth? Christ!), they'll probably dump some horseshit on this Sunday instead of sweet, sweet Simpsons Halloween creamy goodness. Goddamn it! That's all I've got to say. Goddamn it!

Fuck.

*Christmas-related programming, on the other hand, is the television equivilent of being force-fed rusty barbed wire wrapped around pages of John Grisham novels.

"Hey, what's wrong, baby?"

2005-10-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

Bill Frist announces his candidacy for Earth Overlord.

John Carpenter, a seminal master of schlock cinema, capable of spinning the most tired genre premises into compelling, atmospheric, ass-kickingly entertaining films. "Halloween" essentially invented the slasher genre. "The Thing" contains an aura of suffocating paranoia and some of the best special effects of the 1980s. And what can be said about "Big Trouble in Little China" that hasn't already been said by a room full of stoned hipsters? However, somewhere around the late 80s, Carpenter lost his commercial appeal, his budgets and distribution dried up, and he's now scampering from one underfunded retread idea to another. If he directs another movie before he dies, I'd be surprised.

There has been a recent trend in Hollywood, one on par with the Tuskegee Experiment and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, to remake John Carpenter movies with big budgets, blank young actors, and helmed by hack video directors. Instead of giving that money to a proven craftsman like Carpenter to make a movie that will undoubtably be more interesting than anything these uninspired, glorified salesmen could ever dream up, they throw the cash at a pack of chimps and set them to work fucking with Carpenter's movies. It's a monumentally dumb idea, because the reason that these films are memorable isn't their thin, gimmicky plots, it's the eye that Carpenter brought to them. So, by remaking his films with suck-ass hacks at the helm, they're left with nothing more than the thin, gimmicky plots.

The two examples released so far speak for themselves: "Assault on Precinct 13" and "the Fog" bite dog wang for weeks.

However, in violation of everything I just wrote, there is one John Carpenter film that I really hope the Hollywood jizz-sacks get around to re-making, because it has a thin, gimmicky plot that happens to be AWESOME!

"Rowdy" Roddy Piper, wrestling super-star, plays a drifter in Los Angeles who discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the Truth: which is that there are hideous, bug-eyed aliens living amongst us in disguise. They compose the top 1%, the movers, the shakers, politicians, lawyers, media figures. All advertising is, under it's colorful exterior, a simple order: OBEY, CONSUME, REPRODUCE. This reality is obfuscated by a microwave that makes the aliens look like people, and the stark, black-and-white orders look like media content. The sunglasses, manufactured by an underground cell of human rebels, block that wave. Roddy eventually joins these fighters and takes out the main microwave dish, revealing to the horrified human population the reality they've long ignored. You don't have to be Umberto Eco to get the symbolism here.

However, the movie featured crappy special effects (the alien's walkie talkies were clearly left-over PKE meters from "Ghostbusters"), less exposition of the alien control mechanism than I would have liked, and it starred Rowdy Roddy Piper. So let's remake this fucker: throw in some WB rent-a-hunks, decent CGI, and finally make a disposable Hollywood action time filler with an actual idea in its celluloid head.

Sons of Aqua Teens

2005-10-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

The certified comedy geniuses who brought us "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" (also known as the greatest invention of Western Civilization since slavery), Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis, have split up temporarily to produce two new shows for the justly worshiped Adult Swim lineup. Both of these shows premiered last week. This offers those of us who consider ATHF to be a piece of brilliance a chance to see which member of this animated comedy powerhouse duo is the Simon, and which is the Garfunkel. Below you shall find the definitive evaluations of these programs, and the human worthiness of their creators, based on the two episodes of each that I have seen.

Squidbillies

"I don't consort with those of the robot race."

This is Dave Willis' creation. 50% more plot driven and 50% less random than "Aqua Teens", but, so far, approximately 90% as funny. It's the tale of a father-son team of hillbilly squids. Lots of the expected humor at the expense of dumb crackers, mixed with plenty of casual violence and a goodly dose of absurdity. However, it also figures set ups, punch lines, and an extensively realized universe with a buttload of humorous ancillary characters, including a snake with a mullet whose only goal is swallowing and digesting the town sheriff. In short, this is exactly the show to rebut the criticism of people who claim that Adult Swim humor lazily gets by on random absurdity. Clearly, thought and imagination went into every joke in this show.

Funniest Lines so far:

"For the next ten years, Early was raised by wolves...horribly" (cue wolves eating Early's face)

"Man Flavored Baby Tacos!" (Cut to picture of smiling Mexican) "So delicious, I was glad to die for it!"

Twelve Ounce Mouse

Maiellaro's contribution. This show, on the other hand, is almost a parody of Adult Swim-style comedy, even more reliant on lazy absurdity than the harshest Swim critics would dare to suggest. In significant ways, its the same show as "Squidbillies" in that it follows a protagonist, the "12 oz. Mouse" in question, who, like father-squid Early Kyler, is prone to alcohol abuse and random gunfire. The difference is that it sucks with a white-hot intensity rarely found among earth-bound periodic elements. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some galactic suckiness involved in this thing. As you can see from the jpg, the show is insultingly poorly drawn, basically demanding that you concentrate on the cutting edge dadaist dialogue. Too bad the dialogue is as sloppy and uninspired as the animation; a string of non sequiters devoid of any characters, plot points, set ups, jokes, or pay offs. The essential truth that Maiellaro seems to have forgotten is that out-of-the-blue absurdity is only funny if it stands in contrast to some sort of ordered universe. Aqua Teens works because, although the idea of living foodstuff renting a house in New Jersey is ridiculous, it's nevertheless a coherent world, and the madness of the characters pops out only in relationship to that consistently presented premise. 12 oz. Mouse is an fifteen minute long, unrelated string of the most off-the-wall moments of Aqua Teens, devoid of context or characters. The shit of it is that there's bound to be a bunch of comedic avante gardists who are going to champion 12 oz. Mouse for it's "bold" anti-style. But fuck those guys.

The Verdict:

After two episodes, it is crystal clear that Dave Willis has been carrying Matt Maiellaro like a sack of wet manure for years. In much the same way that Paul Simon would write, arrange, and play the instruments on each song while Art Garfunkel dropped in to lay down some high, fruity vocals that Simon couldn't reproduce, Willis lovingly crafted each Aqua Teen episode's character, comedic set up, the jokes and punch lines, then brought Maiellaro in to sprinkle a few out-of-left-field lines to make it all come together perfectly. Now, this isn't to say that Maiellaro isn't a valuable part of the Aqua Teen process, just as it's hard to imagine those classic Simon and Garfunkel songs without Art warbingly along. However, it's now painfully clear which member of the duo is capable of a strong solo career, and which one doesn't have the complete comedy skill set necessary to sustain their own creative vision.

Overrated or Underrated?

2005-10-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

You. Make. The. Call!

Explorers:

Vasco De Gama

Ponce DeLeon

Henry Cabot

Snack Foods:

Funyuns

Candy Corn

Pudding Cups

Presidential Assassins:

Leon Czolgoz

Charles Giteau

Lee Harvey Oswald (wink, wink)

John Wilkes Booth

Sexual Fetishes:

Tea-bagging

Armpit Humping

Scat Munching

Taint Scrubbing

Ass-Based Insults:

Asshole

Dumbass

Assface

Assbutt

Human-Animal Hybrids:

Turducken

Jackalope

Mandingo (no, not that one)

Chimpizard

Another Question for the Ages: Who Wins in a Fight?

2005-10-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

Bloodthirsty Zombie?

Or

Kool Aid Guy?

The zombie thirsts for human flesh and blood, and the delicious red Kool Aid within the Kool Aid Guy would probably serve as adequate motivation for the zombie to attack him. However, the Kool Aid Guy has no similar desire to attack a zombie: he is only interested in serving delicious Kool Aid to children from the inside of this giant head, so the zombie gets points for determination. On the other hand, the Kool Aid Guy is ostensibly made of a sturdy glass which is, in all likelihood, impervious to the zombie's tooth-and-fingernail-based assault. If we're dealing with an evolved "Land of the Dead"-era zombie who has learned rudimentary tool usage, then it could easily cracked the Kool Aid Guy's shell with any available metal impliment. Still, the Kool Aid Guy has shown repeatedly that he is both boisterous and resilient.

I'll put my money on the Kool Aid Guy, especially if he get his hands on a shotgun.

A question for the ages:

2005-10-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

Which one of these indicted or soon-to-be-indicted (fingers crossed) nutsacks would you most like to see sodomized in the shower room by the Aryan Nation while they're serving time?

The Contestants:

Dr. Douche

Turd Blossom

Grimma Wormtongue

Lord Scum...ah, forget it, I'm not that lucky.

"And it done got a bun in it..."

2005-10-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

"My water broke!"

Babies are small, meat-filled noise-makers. You can hang around with one or less of them at a time and it can actually be entertaining, but once they start stacking up, it turns into a pants-shitting "Dawn of the Dead" re-enactment. As with zombies, the prime rule regarding children is: never get outnumbered.

Ignoring these sage words, basic common sense, and centuries of birth control advances, some toothless yokel in Arkansas has just popped out her 16th young 'un. Unless you're using some of them for spare parts, I think that's overkill. Somehow, I don't think these rubber-headed crackers are going to make up the world's greatest rock band or combine to form some kind of Hillbilly Voltron. Most likely, they'll just end up building the biggest meth lab in the lower 48.

But the best part is that all of the kids have names starting with a "J". According to Associated Press, those names are:

Jehosaphat

Javalin

Jhonny Peralta

Jizzblast

Jasper

Jerk Store

Jodhpur

Jazz June

Jesus H. Christ, give my battered vagina a rest!

Juan Valdez

Jake and the Fat Man (kid with partially developed twin brother protruding from shoulder)

Jukebox Hero

Jezebel

Junk-in-the-trunk

Jam Band

Just another day, livin' in the hood, just another day in the neighborhood, today...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

2005-10-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

There is a very real chance that we are witnessing the destruction of the Republican Party. Fueled by astonishing amounts of corruption, , incompetence and imperial overreach, the political machine which has strangled American government for nearly a decade, enforced a vulgar capitalism not seen since the Gilded Age, and purged all remaining elements of traditional liberalism from the mainstream political landscape, may very well be falling apart before our very eyes. That’s hard for a lot of folks who've been paying attention for the last five years to process. We've watched as this band of cutthroats, fueled by sadism and rampaging greed, unencumbered by shame, conscience, respect for truth, or basic human decency, utterly destroy their nominal Democratic opposition and impose an unprecedented one party rule. Their allies have been the inherent ignorance, insecurity and fear of the American people and a Democratic party utterly without mandate, direction, or decent leadership. They've exploited fear and spread around corporate cash so effectively that, until very recently, they seemed totally invincible, on the verge of permanently recreating the American political landscape: slashing and burning all the old growth forest and turning it into an asphalt hell of mega-churches, army recruiters and big box retailers.

But the past few months have shown that all that concentrated power has fed a deadly sense of invincibility. Having unaccountable control for years on end tends to make one sloppy, and the chickens are starting to come to roost. Currently, a perfect shitstorm of political horrors has engulfed the Republican party: an increasingly unpopular Iraqi quagmire, stunning federal incompetence dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, two indictments of the House Majority Leader, a supreme court nomination that reeks of cronyism and has seriously alienated conservative activists, SEC investigations of the Senate Majority Leader, rising gas prices, and major corruption scandals among the state Republican power structures in Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois. Not to mention the promise of coming indictments in the Plame investigation that could likely reach Karl Rove and the office of the Vice President. All in all, it's shaping up for an historic comeuppance for the Republican party in next year's congressional elections; a shift in the electorate that could rival the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 in impact.

But maybe not. The Republicans have been in this situation before. Many people, myself included, were certain that George Bush was headed for an asskicking last year. We underestimated the depth and fanaticism of Bush's "Christian" base as well as John Kerry's utter lameness. No matter that the war in Iraq had already revealed itself to be a monumental cock-up and that the debates highlighted Bush's pettiness and blinkered ignorance; people just don't pay that much attention, and a campaign with the lack of scruples and media influence of the Bush machine, not to mention the corpses of 3,000 Sept. 11th victims to rape, is usually going to win.

Still, the 2004 election was probably a case of good timing for the Bush volk more than anything: they managed to avoid any real reckoning on their myriad criminalities and fuck-ups: Delay's corruption machine hadn't been outed yet, the Plame grand jury was still in the middle of investigations, and Iraq hadn't become self-evidently lost (at least not to the majority of Americans). You've got to believe that, if Bush were up for re-election THIS November instead of last, Ted Kennedy's enlarged liver could probably beat him like a rented donkey.

Thinking about the situation NEXT November, it's hard to imaging the Republicans being in better shape than now. In fact, it's likely that they'll be stewing in an even bigger crock of shit than they are currently. Karl Rove could be facing prosecution, Tom Delay might be in jail, or at least on trial at that point, the myriad state-wide Republican scandals will have doubtlessly led to indictments and/or convictions, and the Iraq occupation will continue to ruin American and Iraqi lives by the thousands. Not to mention all the people who got hypothermia in the North-east due to prohibitively high heating oil prices, and the people skipping lunch to pay for $5 a gallon gas. There are already stories about the difficulty that the RNC has had in recruiting prime candidates for competitive races in '06.

So let's bow to the reality around us, defy our innate pessimism and assume that the '06 elections are the beginning of the end of Republican domination: the Republicans lose seats in the House, maybe even lose control of the Senate, the Democrats start investigating the several kajillion Bush administration crimes of the past term and a half, and the 2008 election becomes the Democratic candidate's to lose. Frankly, I think that such a scenario is the only hope for the nation: if the Republicans can weather the current political shitfit and STILL scrape out a win, then the public is apathetic and hateful enough and/or the Democrats are vapid and incompetent enough that even the trappings of representative democracy in this country are done with.

Anyway, if that happens, if the next five years sees the demise of the Republican Death and Greed Cult, a lot of people, including myself, will find themselves dehydrated from all the spontaneous ejaculating we'll be doing. In the ecstasy, there will be a real danger of thinking that the battle has been won. In reality, the fight will have only begun.

One of the most pernicious effects of Republican hegemony has been to identify the imperial, corporate capitalist state exclusively with the Republican Party. Since the Democrats have been pathetically powerless for years now, they have become the all-purpose dream depository of those who are repulsed by the current regime. It's been easy to forget given the madness of the Republican powers that be, but it needs to be stressed: the Democratic Party is essentially the same as the Republican Party. They represent the interests of corporate capitalism, the continuation of the drug war, are largely supportive of an imperial foreign policy. In fact, their very purpose in being is to provide an illusion of contrast, emphasizing cultural issues and the finer points of running a mixed economy (tax cuts! social spending!). In effect, the very existence of the Democratic party helps to retard social change, especially in our current situation: once the Republicans are out, many of your leftier types are going to be happy just to have those fuckers gone, and will probably tolerate all manner of slack-ass centrism from the national Democrats.

Even if the Republicans finally get the Gas Face they so richly deserve, it’s going to be our job to ensure that the Democrats get their feet held to the fire and actually present an alternative mode of governing and society than that offered by the Grand Old Pud-wackers.

The Perfect Name for a Hipster Male Porn Star:

2005-10-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

Lester Bangs.

(It's not that far-fetched. Apparently, there's already a porn dude with a Master Shake tattoo.

"Bring out your dead!"

2005-10-07T19:55:00.000-07:00

In 1918, a virulent strain of influenza spread across the world like a brush fire. World War One helped it along: massive numbers of soldiers, packed ear to ear, shipped half-way around the world and back, served as perfect transmitters of the disease. Every country on earth was affected. Unlike most flu viruses, this one killed not only the very young and very old, but those in the prime of life. People in their twenties and thirties made up the bulk of the dead, who numbered somewhere north of 50 million. Even in the United States, which was spared the worst of it, horse-drawn ambulances trotted through major cities, calling for people to deliver the corpses of their dead family members.

Analysis of the 1918 flu strain has shown that it was a mutated version of bird flu which combined with a human variant to become a super-virus.

Right now, there's a bird flu strain going around Southeast Asia. It has killed more than 60 people so far: it's more than fifty percent lethal, just like the 1918 strain. The only difference is that the current strain can only travel from birds to person, but not from person to person. However, it is likely only a matter of time before this avian flu strain does what the 1918 strain did: combine with a human strain and make the leap from person to person. Then, international air travel will do what the troop ships of WWI did before: send the virus across the globe. At that point, the World Health Organization has estimated that such an outbreak could kill anywhere between five and ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY million people.

Now, this is scary shit, especially since I'm right in the fat part of the death bell curve of the 1918 flu. But goddamnit it if the prospect of an apocalyptic flu pandemic doesn't get me a little bit jazzed. I know that makes me a bad person. But, what makes me an even worse person is my deepest hope: that the flu strain mutates to go from person to person, then mutates to go from live people to recently deceased people, which it turns into bloodthirsty zombies.

Funniest Phrase in the English Language?

2005-10-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

"Killing a hobo."

Why?

1. Killing things is funny.

2. "Hobo" is a funny sounding word.

3. It's funny because it's true.

Seriously, who wouldn't want to kill that?

"Oh, I´m afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive."

2005-10-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Anybody else concerned that Bush has nominated Emperor Palpatine to the Supreme Court?

I don't know what this means for the future of abortion rights, but Alderaan better shape the fuck up in a hurry.

Personally, I was pulling for Admiral Akbar, but I guess he was too much of a judicial activist.

Droppin' the Can't Miss Movie Pitch Bomb, Bizznitches!

2005-10-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Uber-Awesome Movie Idea #1:

FahrenChrist 3:16: The two most profitable films of 2004 were The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 911. Logic dictates that a movie combining elements from both of these blockbusters would be the biggest film hit of all time. It's a shot-for-shot remake of Mel Gibson's Passion, with Michael Moore playing Jesus....and Nick Nolte playing the evil suckling infant.

Stu-tacular Movie Idea #2:

The Fartening: The fart, nature's perfect comedic vessel, finds its ultimate expression in this tour de force of body function-related hilarity. A mysterious space virus causes an epidemic disease which makes everyone on earth fart uncontrollably. The high point of humor is a twenty minute montage of people from different nations farting in culturally-specific ways. It's up to Nick Nolte and a super-intelligent, sentient fart to find a cure before the built-up methane causes a global explosion of apocalyptic proportions.

Spec-pendous Movie Idea #3:

"Goddamnit it!:" The Nick Nolte Story: At turns humorous, heart-breaking, hair-raising, alliterative, and inspiring,this is the tale of one of our finest film actors. We chronicle his triumphs, his loves, his losses, and his heroic struggle with the demons of his psyche. Featuring Chris Rock as Eddie Murphy, Kathy Griffin as Vicky Lewis, and starring Steve Buscemi as Nick Nolte. Nick Nolte plays Barbara Streisand.

I just made a cream-cicle in my pants.

2005-10-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Tom Delay indicted...AGAIN! This time for money laundering.

If this keeps up, I'm finally going to have to buy a new pair of underwear.

What does Mick Jagger's dong have in common with Christian Slater's shattered pelvis?

2005-10-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

I just watched a criminally stupid movie called Mindhunters, a recent box office bomb directed by Cutthroat Island and Deep Blue Sea auteur and Euro-trash knucklehead Renny Harlin. I'll spare you the details of the moronic plot. Sufficed to say that there's a serial killer on the loose: the kind of serial killer who creates incredibly convoluted traps with which to slay his victims, in other words, the kind of serial killer who only exists in movies. His first victim is dispatched when he trips a Rube Goldberg domino contraption that results in him being blasted with a tank of liquid nitrogen which freezes his legs. Then, his legs snap, his body falls to the floor...and shatters into several pieces. It's more hilariously dumb than watching two retards hump on a beanbag chair. You have to wonder what is going through the mind of a director who shoots that scene. Is he really thinking: yeah, the guy freezes, then falls over, then shatters on the ground! Critics will call it "heartstopping!" My guess was that the filmmakers went through with this idiocy because it hadn't been done before. Sure enough, when I watched the scene with the director's commentary on, Renny Harlin said that his main obsession during the film was to find creative ways to kill the cast. It's the exact same reasoning as the makers of Swordfish, a festering wound on the ass of cinema from about five years ago starring noted air travel enthusiast John Travolta. In that film, there is a scene in which a city bus is hooked up by cables to a helicopter and flown around Los Angeles. Trust me, it's as dumb as it sounds. The makers of that crap pile were proud as punch to have thought up something as unprecedented in an action film as a flying bus! Cinematic history had been made!

This kind of competitive idiocy is the inevitable consequence of the action/thriller filmmaking mindset. When films are nothing but empty spectacle, the only real creative endeavor left to a director or screenwriter is to come up with inventive spectacle, endless variations on the same tired setpieces.

It reminds me of the old story/urban legend about Mick Jagger and David Bowie. According to legend, sometime in the mid-70s, one of Mick's wives caught him in bed with Ziggy Stardust. Neither of them were really gay, they were just curious about what it would be like. Personally, I have a hard time keeping my lunch down at the thought of all that pasty white English skin and protruding ribs, but hey, maybe it was wonderful. The point is that both of these men, Rock n' Roll gods at the peak of the sexual revolution, were able to spend years humping their way through every size, shape, race, pigment, deformity, and handicap of woman on earth, and in every conceivable numerical permutation. As such, they eventually exhausted their own capacity for excitement in conventional heterosexual sex, so they decided to bang each other. It might not be particularly sexy, but at least it would be novel!

In both the Jagger/Bowie case and the Swordfish/Mindhunters one, the common failing is reducing the activity involved, be it sex or filmmaking, into a rotely technical exercise. When sex is emptied of love, or movies are empty of emotional resonance, the result is an inevitable spiral of diminishing returns.

Cry Havoc and let slip the SUVs of war.

2005-09-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

A jabbering baboon at a website called "Blogs for Bush" had this to say about the Tom Delay indictment, referring to the Democratic party, I'm assuming:

"This is not the actions[sic]* of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority - it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and seize all power for itself...it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made..."

Now I've never been in a physical confrontation in my life. I've only fired a gun on a mere handful of occasions. I am, as a matter of fact, a goddamn gimp. If armed conflict were to break out in the United States, I'd most likely end up as a pile of minced organs in the bottom of a smoking crater. But if these motherfuckers want to go to war to maintain the power of a mob of power-mad, corrupt, criminal scumfucks who won't rest until this country is jointly ruled by the Book of Leviticus and the Wal-Mart Employee Manual, I for one couldn't be happier.

Like I said, I'd probably die in the conflagration, but at least I'd take a few of them with me. Sure, probably not any of the Ted Nugent-type survivalists who would surely rally to the Red banner: those guys are generally rangy, adept at firearms, and good with the bobbing and weaving. But I'm pretty sure that I could take out a whole platoon of squishy, fat-ass suburban reactionaries; the type of limp dicks who generate a sense of personal empowerment by identifying with the actions of the military, read a lot of Tom Clancy, but don't get any closer to danger in their day-to-day lives than eating that morning McMuffin. No doubt, if a civil war came, they'd sign up in droves to prove their manhood and skin a few leftist hippie pelts. They'd waddle into battle in their Dockers, ass-fat slapping in the breeze, and I'd mow them down with a belt-fed M-60: me, a frail, near-sighted commie faggot, would personally bury more than a few pig-eyed suburban brownshirts.

And then I'd probably get garrotted by the sea-shell necklace of some College Republican douchebag in an Abercrombie & Fitch flak jacket.

C'est la guerre...

*[sic] is an editorial term for "this motherfucker is too dumb to string a sentence together without his Cheetoh-coated fingers murdering the English language with each butter-soaked keystroke."

The Best Birthday Present I've Ever Received.

2005-09-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

You know, it's easy to look upon the world, upon life, upon the central paradoxes and travails of existence, and despair. We live in an artificial, hermetic universe of synthetic experience: fake food, fake drink, fake emotions, fraudulent conceptions of what it means to connect with other human beings, or even to perceive ourselves as individuals. Worst of all, there are no meaningful avenues of expression left to us: all transmission systems are co-opted to the purpose of a corporate hive mind that assimilates all dissent and commodifies all angst. What we are left with, too often, is a life of numb compliance, mild discontent that rests in the stomach like a bit of bad roast beef that is never digested, a life that never achieves visceral satisfaction or even visceral horror. We will die, most likely, without ever having tasted blood in our mouths. So, in other words, life can be a downer.

But then, something really hilariously wonderful will happen and the clouds will part, if only for a moment, to let you bathe in the pure rays of sunshine.

Tom Delay got his greasy ass indicted today.

It feels like a batch of honey-dipped kittens are nuzzling my small intestine.

My god, I'm turning into Andy Rooney!

2005-09-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

I have to write about this shit: there's a show on Comedy Central these days called "Too Late with Adam Carrolla" that is, without a doubt, the least funny thing in the history of the universe of the galaxy. It's so unfunny that prolonged exposure to it will actually reduce your ability to be funny or to appreciate humor. If you watch it, the part of your brain that identifies and produces irony, absurdity and other comedic properties will slowly liquify, and is replaced by an image of your mother being raped by Carrot Top, projected onto your corneas.

Also in the field of TV banality, there's a show on FX network called "Over There" that is unique in television history. It is the first weekly television series to depict an ongoing war: it's about U.S. troops in Iraq. The other amazing thing about this show is that, while it's the first televised depiction of an ongoing war in TV history, NO ONE GIVES A SHIT. The show is so obsessed with avoiding taking a stand on the war, or depicting plots that raise any sort of question about the war, that it might as well be about World War Two. Not to mention the fact that the plots are heavy on home-front family soap opera bullshit and recycled premises from cop shows.

The moral of the story: TV makes you retarded.

On the other hand, who wouldn't want Retard Strength?

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho...ah, forget it.

2005-09-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

Today, I attended my first anti-war march in D.C. Absolutely massive: north of 100,000 people, easily. Pleasingly, the percentage of gray-bearded, broken down hippies and, even more loathsome, young, smelly neo-hippies, was startlingly low. For the most part, the demographics of the rally were similar to a Summerfest crowd: young people, old folks, hippies, hipsters, punks, wide-bottomed soccer moms, grampas, grammas, yuppies, clergy, college kids and, of course, hot young chicks (I may be anti-war, but I'm staunchly pro-tits) The politics were similarly diverse: anarchists, socialists, ANSWER-type Stalinists, the Communist Party-USA, libertarians, Democrats, even a few alienated Republicans were all in attendance. The day started with a rally on the south lawn of the White House: Cindy Sheehan, George Galloway, and a bunch of other folks talked for an unnecessarily long time. Annoyingly, there was a bunch of loose talk about non-Iraq issues (end U.S. imperialism in Haiti? Haiti?), but for the most part, it was a well-focused presentation, with a lot of emphasis on New Orleans and the relationship between the gratuitous suffering there and the diversion of National Guard troops to Iraq.

The march featured some of my least favorite components of the genus political demonstration: excessive chanting ("Hey, hey, ho, ho...1,2,3,4...this is what democracy looks like...what do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"...the people united can never be defeated...all the lame 60s retreads you can think of) and big, dumb-looking puppets that look like junior high school art projects...that will BLOW YOUR MIND! And bongos. Goddamnit, I hate bongos. How the fuck does a bongo signify opposition to war? Are you banging out "Troops Out Now" in Morse code, you patcholi-soaked burnout?

It was still a charged experience: thousands of people crushed together, making their way through downtown Washington. For a moment, you could feel the power of mass mobilization...until you realized that the parade route was a giant, fenced in circle next to the Mall. Then you could feel the return of flailing impotence.

The jerk-ass counterdemonstrators were there, of course, many of them combat aged, physically fit young men who apparently think that waving a sign at some chick in a peasant blouse is a greater blow to their terrorist enemies than actually toting a weapon in the cause they believe in. I counted less than a hundred, total, and I'll be willing to bet dollars to cockrings that they get as much play in the media accounts of the march as the hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators.

Celebrity sightings: Ward Churchill, the most hated Indian since Crazy Horse, waiting for a bus, Al Sharpton (damn fine hair process you've got there, Al), Harry Belafonte (day-o!), Jim Hightower, and your mom.

Best signs: "End the Mass Killings: Iraq, Darfur, Canada's Seals" and "The Politics of Failure Have Failed!" Simpsons references will always score high with me, especially references to Citizen Kang: Best. Political Satire. Ever.

The whole experience was interesting, but as I left, the inevitable surge of futility overtook me: us protestors all undoubtedly feel better about ourselves for marching, but beyond that, I don't know what effect we could possibly have. The media will downplay the massive demonstration (with Rita making landfall, it's that much easier) and even if they didn't, most Americans think protesting is sort of gay: too much drumming, too many long haired men, too much earnestness. I'll admit it myself: as a card-carrying member of the Irony Generation, all that passion is a little discomfiting, especially when you're right in the middle of it. My overpowered self-consciousness chip is part of the reason that I can't bring myself to chant and sway as I march, but mainly I don't want to fully embrace the self-satisfaction of righteous protest. I fear that making yourself feel better is the only reason to do this sort of thing, and so I figure if I don't feel any better afterward, then feeling better isn't the only reason. If that makes sense.

Pro-Life Politics for the 21st Century.

2005-09-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

During the Roberts confirmation hearings, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a staunch (code for fucking nuts) conservative opponent of abortion, brought along a very unusual visual aid, a visual aid who loves McNuggets. It was a 14-year old girl with Down's Syndrome named Abby Loy. Brownback showed her off as an illustration of one of the less well-known aspects of the abortion issue: the extremely high rate of abortions performed on fetuses identified as possessing the genetic precursors for Down's Syndrome. About 80% of pregnancies diagnosed with the genes are aborted. Brownback poked the young, smiling Abby with a pencil as she danced about in glee, making the argument that it is morally wrong to deny people like her the right to live due to a genetic disorder. There's an argument to be had there, I'm sure, but it's an argument designed to engage people already inclined to opposes abortion. Brownback is forgetting a crucial constituency with his line of reasoning: people (I won't name names) who want to turn retarded folks into surgically enhanced sex slaves! These people probably don't give a shit one way or another about abortion, abortion having nothing to do with retarded sex slaves, but they could be swayed decisively to the pro-life side by making this point: if fetuses with Down's Syndrome are aborted at such high rates, who can be turned into bio-engineered sex robots? It's a sobering thought that could easily turn more than a few votes to the Red column.

Can't Miss Movie Pitches the Second!

2005-09-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

Back, by popular demand, more of my guaranteed blockbuster movie ideas. Take, use, become fat with wealth from my genius.

Idea One:

Freddy v.s. Jason v.s. James Garfield: It's a well-known fact that kids love pizza, and they love squalor! They also love recreations of presidential assassinations as performed by their favorite horror bad guys! See Freddy enter President Garfield's dreams in the form of rival Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine, see Jason chop up an entire battalion of the Grand Army of the Republic! Nick Nolte cameos as Charles Giteau, the hapless drifter who is framed for the assassination.

Idea Two:

Sexual Heeling: The distraught ex-boyfriend (the part screams Affleck!) of an obedience school trainer (Nick Nolte in a sundress) infiltrates her class disguised as a basset hound in order to win back the love of his life! The third-act conflict comes as Affleck must choose between continuing his pursuit of the woman who scorned him, or accept the affections of a classmate: a randy German shepard named Peaches.

Idea Three:

A Barrel of Chimpanzees Electrocuted with Cattle Prods: Self-explanatory. Nick Nolte as the the barrel.

Can't Miss Movie Pitches.

2005-09-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

I just watched "Overnight", a documentary about "Boondock Saints" director Troy Duffy, his unprecedented screenplay sale to Miramax, his astounding assholishness and hubris, and his highly amusing and utterly total collapse. Duffy is revealed to be a racist, sexist, brain-dead, singularly narcissistic douchebag whose film aesthetic makes Quentin Tarantino look like Kurasowa in the maturity department. But also on display is the terrifying capriciousness of the film business, where Industry assassins grind up the hopes and dreams of countless would-be writers and directors and snort them off of the asses of transexual hookers. When Duffy goes before a group of film students at Boston University after Miramax has chewed him up, spit him out and placed a black mark on his film that makes it untouchable by all other studios, he tells them, basically, to give up. And as much as a scumfuck as he is, it's hard not to agree with him.

So I'm jettisoning any lingering dreams I may have had of becoming a film writer or director. And to show how serious I am, I'm putting my can't miss movie ideas, which I have guarded for years with a badger's tenacity, out onto the Internets for all to see. Let someone with a heart greater than mine take them to the City of Broken Dreams and spin this shit into gold. If you can make it through the Hollywood minefield intact, you're welcome to all the riches, glory, and candy-coated blowjobs you can get your hands on.

Super Awesome Mega Cool Movie Idea Number One:

Cool Runnings 4000: The year 4000: humans are an endangered species, refugees from a destroyed Earth who wander the galaxy, hunted by intergalactic bounty hunters. Humans haven't competed in the Universal Nuclear Winter Olympics in centuries. It's up to a motley band of Space Jamacians to enter the 2000 Light Year Rocket Bobsled competition. There's only one small problem...they don't know how to ride the rocket bobsled! They enlist the help of grizzled ex-rocket bobsled champ Nick Nolte, and the cryogenically frozen head of John Candy to train them. Will they win the Plutonium Medal away from the evil Robotic Rocket Bobsleds, who've won for five hundred consecutive Olympiads? Or will John Candy's thirst for human brains derail their chances?

Mega Awesome Super Cool Movie Idea Number Two:

Gay Midget-Palooza: The two biggest trends in young male comedy going, midgets and homosexuality, together at last! Throw in some full-grown tits, and it'll make Wedding Crashers numbers look like Arrested Development's viewership. Nick Nolte on his knees plays King TinyQueer the First.

Cool Super Mega Awesome Cool Movie Idea Number Three:

Blowjob: The Movie: It's a no-brainer: if people love the sex act, they'll love the film! Nick Nolte plays the penis.

Just you watch: some young go-getter with a spine, talent, vision, and the willingness to jettison all of those traits in a seconds notice for a single swipe at glory will turn these ideas into million-dollar pitches.

Apocalypse Wow!

2005-09-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

It has been recently brought to my attention that this blog's obsession with the end of the world makes it about as cheerful as a bathtub full of rotting clown carcasses. What I think is being missed is how much FUN Armageddon is going to be!

For one thing, you'll never be bored again. Whether your time is spent trying to flee the burning wreckage of a burning, plague-ravaged city while losing as few of your family members to crazed militia bands and tube-neck along the way, or trying to start a fire from twigs in a refugee camp, you'll never have to worry about finding a way to entertain yourself again.

Similarly, all that post-industrial angst we've all been wearing around our necks like burning tires of existential despair vanish in the time it takes for martial law to be declared and the rape gangs to hit the streets. No time to wonder what your purpose in life is, whether or not you're exploiting someone when you buy a fleece pullover, whether you're destroying the environment every time you get in the car, if you're wasting your life when you turn on the television. Your purpose in life will finally be clear: SURVIVE!

Speaking of the environment, nothing is going to stop global warming except for a world-ending catastrophe, so that'll be good in the long run.

And the Republicans won't be running things anymore. That'll be fun. As a matter of fact, the fat-ass, neutered suburban marshmallows who find their only sense of power in life in the destruction wrought by their countries military will die in swarms. When the Big Ugly hits Mall-topia, these doughy sadists will watch, paralyzed, the scene on their plasma screens of the panicked hordes descending upon them.

The above douches will wait for Jesus and the 42nd Airborne to save them, and it won't happen. They'll be forced to take the death-fetishism that leads them to worship blood-drenched military machinery as the embodiment of the Sacred and do their own killing in the name of. They'll die, and kill, and will scatter into the winds, and, most importantly, THEY WON'T HAVE ANY MORE GODDAMN POWER! Who wouldn't trade undetermined decades of numb mundanity and spiritual abnegation for the chance to view such a reckoning?

And, of course, there's the slim glimmer of hope for the aftermath. The murmur of a chance that things could be different, something better could rise from the ashes. Communities based on trust, sharing and mutual aid, devoid of hierarchy, greed, and militarism. People living for the love of each other, instead of the love of accumulation, domination, status. Not likely, but goddamn it, POSSIBLE.

Even if it doesn't happen, the fireworks will still be a hoot and a half.

Political Calculus in the Age of Retarded:

2005-09-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

Bush=Jesus=A shitload of high-end military ordinance capable of incinerating, disemboweling, and vaporizing thousands of people from long distances, not to mention small arms for when you want that personal touch of looking the person in the eye when you put a bullet into it.

or, expressed in denotation:

=

=

Express the degree to which these people are soulless cockholes in positive integers. Show your work.

What'll it be, Heat Death or the Big Crunch?

2005-09-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

In the field of astrophysics, an unsettled and deeply intriguing question is: how is the universe going to end? One popular theory holds that the universe, which has been continuously expanding since the Big Bang, will continue to do so indefinitely, until all of the energy of that initial explosion has been spent, at which time the lights all gutter out . Party's over. Another, infinitely more interesting theory, the Big Crunch, posits that the universe will expand continuously until a given point of maximum stress when, like a rubber band, it snaps back, contracting at the same rate that it expanded, until all the matter of the universe imploded back into the pre-universal speck that preceded the Big Bang. Recent data has pretty much confirmed that we're in for a long, slow, steady expansion into the nothingness of entropy. No Big Crunch coming.

Needless to say, when I found out, I was bummed.

All around us are signs of a looming End. If you've been at all paying attention during this century, you can't help but get a sense that all of the wires that suspend us comfortable Americans above the abyss of Hobbesian struggle for existence are beginning to fray. Cheap oil, the lubricant of empire, is running out. Climate change continues to destabilize the environment. The imaginary economy is losing its necessary impenetrable mystery. And let's not forget the potential wild cards in the deck: global pandemic and nuclear annihilation.

It's scary, but maybe not as scary as the alternative. The Heat Death of civilization. When I think about the current carnival of grotesque excess and soul-crushing mundanity grinding on and on and on, mummifying us, drying us out into human shaped husks of dead flesh, I find myself secretly yearning for the iron broom of history to sweep it all away in one bold, charismatic stroke. To be there, to witness the destruction of all that is familiar, and homogenized, and commericalized, and exsanguinated by banal efficiency, might be worth trading an uninterrupted lifetime of mundane suffocation.

But probably not.

Shit, I should just get a hobby or something.

People who make me want to Live, and People who make me want to Eat Fiberglass and Dead Fetuses until my Organs Burst

2005-09-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

Guess Which Ones Are Which.

John Roberts: Satan's Cabbage Patch Kid.

2005-09-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

My god, I can't wait for the Roberts confirmation hearings to end! An empty charade that is nothing more than an opportunity to see firsthand how truly pompous, witless and moronic the members of the Judiciary Committee are. Joe Biden, as usual, talks like a gunsel in a thirties gangster movie, but puts up a fight like a moistened schoolgirl. Chuck Schumer yammers like the utter prick he is. Ted Kennedy sounds like a mixture of Barney Gumbel and Jabba the Hut. Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions show why some sort of IQ tests (not to mention psych evaluations) should be mandatory for congressional candidates, and Arlen Spectre is just creepy. Meanwhile, Roberts sits there, listens to the boozy wind gust off of the committee dais, and then proceeds, again and again, to sound brilliant, articulate and informed, while not saying a goddamn thing about what kind of judge he would be.

The few nuggets of potentially pertinent information Roberts has let slip so far are a mixed bag for those obsessed with the prospects of Roe v. Wade in a Roberts court. Roberts has made a lot of noise about his belief in stari decicis and the value of precedent in the law, which suggest that he might very well decline to overturn Roe, which has been reaffirmed by 38 subsequent S.C. decisions. But, of course, like almost every nominee, he just won't give any hint about how he would apply all of his high-minded judicial philosophies to the job of, you know, judging. So it's up in the air.

Still, if I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Roberts is NOT going to vote to overturn Roe, because Republican strategists like Karl Rove, who has publicly declared his goal of creating a generation of Republican hegemony in America, DON'T WANT ROE TO BE OVERTURNED! Abortion is the single most important engine for grass roots conservative political mobilization of the past thirty years. It's the unholy affront to decency that so many Christians see in legal abortion that has done more than any other issue to meld Christianity and the Republican party in the popular mind. The power of this issue is contingent on the perpetual outrage provoked by legal abortions, especially legal abortions decreed from the Supreme Court instead of through legislative means. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe, thereby returning the issue of abortion legality to the individual states, all of that righteous fury and mobilizing energy would be re-directed into state politics. Meanwhile, the mere majority of Americans who favor legal abortion but, having never really lived in danger of experiencing the alternative, are currently complacent about the issue, would become the new center of mass politics. The momentum, as it were, would switch to the pro-choice side. In politics it's easier to play offense than defense: defense holds the aforementioned danger of complacency. Meanwhile, when you challenge the status quo, not only are you harnessing a more aggrieved and therefore more energetic power base, but you don't really need immediate results to keep them happy. Power players like Rove, who dream of perpetual Republican dominance, require perpetual Republican outrage. Losing the abortion issue on the federal level would be the worst possible thing for their long-term plans. So, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they put up Roberts knowing he was a cautious, stari decisis Anthony Kennedy type and not a Scalia bombthrower, and trusted in the long-held practice of nominees not revealing their intentions to mask that fact from their base.

While the abortion issue is being chewed over by both sides, no one of course notices that Roberts is most definitely a pro-corporate, anti-labor judge who would have fit right in with the nineteenth century robber barons, handing out injunctions against striking workers with a stogy in one hand and a snifter of brandy in the other. And the game will continue: the high court failing to relieve the outrage of the Republican mass base while gratifying the wildest dreams of the real Republican base: that pesky upper 1 percent.

Greatest American Ever:

2005-09-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

Forget all the usual suspects, your Lincolns, your Roosevelts, your Washingtons, all those power-mad, bloodletting douche nozzles whose only real claims to fame are wars started and fortunes plundered. Forget also the politically correct choices, folks like your Martin Luther Kings and your Susan B. Anthonys. Sure, they were really good people, they fought for far-sighted and noble goals and did so effectively, but not a one of them could tell a decent dick joke. That is why Bill Hicks is the greatest American of all time. He spent twenty years beating against the stone walls of American cracker dumbassery, mixing dizzying hope and vision with blood-curdling bitter invective. He would stare out EVERY NIGHT at a sea of bleeting, drunken sheep and try to get their blood moving and brains firing for the first time in their entire lives by weaving an impossible combination of black humor and social insight. It didn't work forty five times out of forty six. The audiences surely filed out confused and angry, wishing they'd gone to see Gallagher smash fruit instead. But throughout this country, in the audiences he played to and in the bedrooms of young people finding his stuff on one of his albums or rare television apperances, thousands of individuals made personal communion with his words. And that's what made him the greatest American: the power of his words and worldview and sheer, blistering heart to alter the brain chemistry of young impressionable minds on an individual basis. He was a public performer, but his power was personal. Sure, he didn't save the world. But he did die young, killed, I'm sure, by his own broken heart and churning guts. The only hope is that his word virus continues to infect the unsuspecting youth of the nation, hollowing out our Empire of Hatred and Dumb-Assness from the inside. Listen to him, and pay him forward.

Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly II

2005-09-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report

These are public servants, answerable to the people. And when the people came, fleeing pestilence, chaos and dehydration, they sent the people running back into the abyss, plucking buckshot out of their behinds. Why? Good old fashioned racism, classism, fearmongering. New Orleans had been destroyed, and it was the fault of those who had stayed, the "looters", whose numbers were made up primarily of children, parents, and the elderly. These police officers could look at huddled masses of bedraggled and stricken people, obviously in distress, obviously helpless and harmless, and see waves of the iconic priapic, razor-wielding Negro rapist who has haunted the white Southern mind for centuries. They could point shotguns at them and send them to their deaths.

This is how things will be during the Big Ugly. When the economy collapses, stranding everybody but that lucky 1% in a Hobbesian nightmare, the forsaken aren't all going to take it lying down. Some of them will escape the cities, looking for sustenance and salvation in the rolling exurban hills. And there, they'll meet the local equivalent of the Gretna, LA police department, guns drawn, ready to happily open fire on the unfortunates. They might be private security people, but, as we've seen, they could just as easily be public officials. As we've seen, "protect and serve" means protecting the property and serving the interests of the white and the connected. That is always the case, of course, but during times of crisis the inhuman nature of that order, which is hidden during the slow motion carnage of the day-to-day, comes into stark relief.

There is One Man who can save us from the Apocalypse.

2005-09-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

His name is Krumholtz.

Midnight at Bohemian Grove.

2005-09-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

The child is taken in the middle of the day, and no one notices.

Her parents are sitting, swollen, in front of their television. They are weighed down by a combined fifteen pounds of cholesterol sitting in their circulatory system. Dorito crumbs and cockroachs race through their hair. Tapeworms and cancer cells plot treason in their dank colons. Brain tissue dries, cracks, flakes away. Gas fumes smell like rose petals.

The long black limo purrs through the street. The child watches from the back seat through tinted glass at smeared streaks of neon. She is pulled towards sleep by the rythmn.

She awakes in the woods. On a pyre. Staring up into the dead eyes of a giant wooden owl. She hears the murmurs around her, but she can't move her head to see. The voices are mummified, cracking with age and affluence. She can't see the faces, but the shadows dance across the trees: hunched, frozen, slavering. Some chant in a dead tongue, some mutter with restrained lust, others scream wordlessly into the wild. She hears a voice, one deeply familiar to her, one heard hundreds of times on television, float into her ear. The voice says "you will burn well, tender one." Faces fill her vision. They are starkly white, flesh hangs in sacks, lips curl back on hard white plastic teeth. Knives glint in the fire.

The body is discovered next to a McDonalds. The organs had been removed. Some suspect that they made their way into the McNuggets. No one notices.

I've run out of contemporary insults to hurl at the President.

2005-09-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

I've been forced to revive olde timey ones:

Blackguard.

Poltroon.

Jackanape.

Mountebank.

Pillock.

Bampot.

Coxcomb.

Varlet.

Malt-worm.

Gudgeon.

Moldwarp.

Apple-john.

Pignut.

Whey-face.

Ratsbane.

Pumpion.

Dewberry.

Clotpole.

Skainsmate.

Puttock.

Crumbum.

Flapdoodle.

I'll post some more after I watch a few "Three Stooges" shorts.

New Orleans: Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly.

2005-09-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

This is going to get kind of nutty, so let's get a few things straight right from the top: I don't think that the Bush administration WANTED New Orleans to be completely flooded, nor do I think that the FEMA-tards INTENTIONALLY let tens of thousands of people languish without food or water in the waterlogged ruins of the city for nearly a week. I don't think that they CARE that it happened, but it wasn't like they planned it.

However, for all the potential political fall-out that the botched relief effort might generate, in the long run, the New Orleans apocalypse will serve as good practice for the upper 1% when things got to shit on an international level.

The single unifying thread of the Bush administration's policy over the past five years has been the hollowing out of the federal government: cutting budgets, benefits, services, stuff you would think would be pretty goddamn essential (like, say, LEVEE MAINTENANCE AND IMPROVEMENT!) , and, when money is spent for politically expedient reasons (starting a cool war in Iraq, trying to bribe old voters with a Medicare drug benefit), financing it through borrowing, while cutting the taxes of the upper 1%. No matter the situation, no matter the crisis, no matter the cost, upper class taxes get cut. Even as congress reconvened to vote on a 10 Billion dollar aid package for hurricane-damaged areas, the first order of business is ending the estate tax permanently. Meanwhile, millions more Americans have fallen under the poverty line, health care costs and consumer debt spiral out of control, and the permanent underclass struggles through lives of unmanagable difficulty. The conditions that allowed so many to die in New Orleans did not start with the flood: they had been created by generations of systemic poverty and institutional neglect.

What's the long term goal here? It may not be conscious, but I believe that what the upper class is doing is essentially girding up for the end of the world. They are redirecting the flow of capital to such an extent that the gap in wealth between them and the other 98% of Americans (not to mention other 99.9999999999999999999% of the world's population), so that, when the government eventually collapses under the weight of its unmeetable social obligations, they will be able to survive. With their vast monies, they won't have to rely on a crumbling government and infrastructure. Gated communities, cleaned and sanitized by private contractors, guarded by private security details, travel via individual helicopters to visit their fellow oligarchs in other gated communities: safe, at all times, from the rabble, who will become more and more desperate as the tax-starved skeleton of the federal government begins to fall apart. Peak oil, the bursting of the housing bubble, rampant deficits, will combine to create an unprecedented, irreversible Depression.

The top 1% will be protected by the hermetically-sealed Halliburton universe that their tax breaks will buy for them. For the rest of us, American cities will all start to look like New Orleans on day three of the flooding. And the government will behave similarly. Witness the militarization of the Federal response to the New Orleans evacuation crisis: National Guard units surrounding the city, putting up cordons and preventing people from leaving the city, or the Superdome, at GUNPOINT. Witness the Hyatt hotel company sending a private convoy of water and food to the tourists and employees trapped in the New Orleans Hyatt on Wednesday while people were literally dying of thirst a block away at the Superdome. Witness those same tourists and employees being evacuated from the city on Friday BEFORE thousands of people who had been waiting at the Superdome for days in much worse conditions (National Guard soldiers even helped them with their bags). Witness the instant demonization of those who were trapped in the city, derided as looters, rapists, even insurgents (according to the Army Times). When the military finally entered the city, they talked of securing it, as if it were Tikrit.

This is going to be the drill from now on when the inevitable economic collapse causes cities across the country to fall into chaos. Those rich who had not yet repaired to the secure exurbs will be quickly spirited away, either by their private guards or the Army (even when the economy falls, there's always money for the Army, and plenty of people desperate enough to join, even if it means turning their guns on their own people). Everyone else will be corralled, contained, shot if necessary, and dehumanized into irrelevance by the media (there will always be a media: even the rich need distraction), and the destroyed cities will become permanent military encampments.

While the New Orleans disaster may prove sobering to those souls who worry about the capacity of their government to protect America, for the elite, it was a reassuring reminder that the government will always protect the right Americans.

Why isn't it legal to set these people on fire?

2005-09-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

Another pearl of Katrina-related compassion from the mouth of a Bush, this time it's rusted vagina Barbara Bush:

""And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckled slightly)--this is working very well for them."

These people have abdicated their status as human beings. They lack any semblance of humanity. They truly view those less wealthy than themselves as lesser beings. And they rule us.

And, of course, no compliment of patriotic Americans are going to gather the kerosene tanks and light the funeral pyres for these amoral, murderous corporate pirates. One of the big reasons for this is that so many white people, including a thundering dumbass blathering at the table next to me at dinner tonight, have bought the O'Reilly line that "a lot" of the people who stayed in New Orleans did so with the express purporse of looting the city. Now, I know that the words "a lot" are vague (intentionally so in this case), but I've got to figure that, to be accurate, A LOT must connote at least 30% of a given whole. Given that there were more than 50,000 people stranded in New Orleans after the levees broke, that would mean that 15,000 or so people were hanging back, just waiting for the chance to wade through a waste-high pool of sewer water to lift some Nikes from Payless. Sure it's racist, but it's also stunningly idiotic. A much of white folks will buy it, though, because it gives them a nice excuse to justify their lack of compassion or concern over the fate of a bunch of poor black folk that they where never going to be terribly moved by in the first place. And so, the reign of the Crimson King and his inbred whore-mongers continues.

We're Fucked.

2005-09-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

I've recently posted about my hopes that the Hurricane aftermath would finally snap people out of their Bush-trance. It was the only way to stay sane while watching people scream for help and die in front of my eyes while FEMA and the National Guard sat on their asses waiting for that criminal fuckhead Bush to finish his guitar solo and order them in. The horror, the frustration, was too much to bear without envisioning a redemptive national awakening of conscience.

But now, with a bit more perspective, a bit less alcohol, some time to reflect, I can say that nothing will probably end up happening. The Bushites are crafting their cover story that it was all the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor's fault (Democrats, both!): his base, who already have limited empathy for a bunch of poor black people who were too "stupid" to leave the city before the hurricane (in the cars they didn't have, powered by the gas they couldn't afford), will buy it. Democrats and Bush-haters will, rightly, blame the feds. Instead of actually informing people about the reality of the situation, the press will move on to the next runaway Aruban teen, and let the mushy middle figure that it's another case of political "he said-she said" and shrug their shoulders: Football season is starting, after all. The Democrats will whimper like scolded curs, Republicans will end the estate tax and role on to another election victory based on whipping up hatred. (crazy black looters joining gays, atheists and Arabs in the pantheon of threats to the Nation)

Some people are saying that the oil pipeline disruption caused by the hurricane will have a massive impact on the nation's economy, that we're poised on the brink of social collapse. Then every smug, comfortable, full-bellied suburban cockroach who tut-tutted those unruly colored folks for stealing jewelry, will find themselves cut off, for the first time in their lives, from the conveniences and privileges that they consider their birthright.

To quote our president, I say: "Bring it on."

The Worst People in the World.

2005-09-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

In the 1980s, as the apartheid controversy ripped through the U.S., Hunter Thompson boldly proclaimed that white South Africans, if they didn't knock off their heinous racist shit, would be considered THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.

That phrase has always stuck with me. If the New Orleans disaster doesn't wake us the fuck up as a nation, then we will officially take up that mantle. If we let this shit go, if we don't ask the questions that beg to be answered and DEMAND a fucking answer from these incompetent, bloodless scumbags, then we will have abdicated all of our claims to genuine humanity, will deserve the worst that nature and man can offer.

Earlier today, I wrote, optimistically, about a potential satori moment in American politics, when the sheer horror, and the sheer lack of concern, competence and compassion among the ruling class will become impossible to ignore and we will collectively demand a real change. As horrible as what we've done in Iraq is, our blind complascence in that war is, to a degree, understandable: people, too busy to immerse themselves in the facts of the issue and traumatized by the September 11th terror attacks, trusted that their government was telling them the truth. This continuous murder in New Orleans is another story altogether: there is NO EXCUSE. There is NO EXPLANATION that does not conform to partisan bullshit. My earlier posts belied a goofy optimism in the character and intelligence of my fellow Americans.

Now, I'm drunk and it's past 1 in the morning, and America looks like a cold-blooded monster. Compassion, reflection, thoughtfulness, seem like completely foreign concepts. It seems much more likely that the Administration can hold out for a few months, talking about people who "chose" not to get out of New Orleans and those damn kill-worthy looters, waiting out the questions about Iraq and its impact on the hurricane relief effort until they can whip up some more hatred of gays or wild negroes. If that happens, if the potential mass realization that tantalizes behind every horrified newscaster's report from the disaster zone dies from our notoriously short memories, petty, stupid prejudices and penchant for distracting shiny objects, then we will pass forever out of the human family, becoming nothing more than vile, stupid, hateful pigs worthy of the blade.

"Viva La Muerte!"

2005-09-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Millan Astray was a gnarled gargoyle of a man. By the start of the Spanish Civil War, this founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, a militant supporter of Franco's Nationalists, had lost his left arm and right eye fighting colonial wars in Africa. He was a bloodthirsty, war-ravaged tryant whose endorsement of Franco was driven more by a desire for continued warfare than any ideological commitment. He taught his Legionaires the rallying cry "Viva La Muerte!" or "Long Live Death!" The only thing that got his desiccated old pecker to stand at attention was the smell of gunpowder and the screams of the dying.

Right now, this country is being run by a pack of Millan Astrays: all of them in love with death and utterly disinterested in helping those who are still living. They are abetted by millions of tiny little Millan Astrays who are even more repellent than the original: at least he, for all his cruelty and blood-lust, paid a physical price for his addiction to murder. These modern day variants cry for carnage and death, but from the saftey and comfort of American living rooms, expounding from their ergonomic computer keyboards, commanding others to shed the blood for them, so they can enjoy the fireworks on Fox News without any threat of injury.

Witness the vile, scumfucking right-wing commenators (Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen and Glenn Reynolds among them) who, having spent the last five years calling for the September 11th attacks to be met with blood, and blood and more blood spilled, demanding that the slow-motion massacre in Iraq continue indefinitely, now have to confront the non-terrorist-related disaster on the Gulf Coast. Without a Bin Laden to demonize and Arabs to destroy, the only comment that most of them can be bothered to make is to CALL FOR THE SUMMARY EXECUTION OF LOOTERS. Considering how many questions are raised by this tragedy, considering the massive charity mobilization that must take place to alievate the continuing misery, the only sentiment that these people, with their paid positions of punditry, can think to express is not compassion or righteous anger at the murderous ineptitude of the rescue operation, but rather the fantasy of machine-gunning people carrying big screen TVs. Only violent death dealt by vicarious authority figures can arouse their imaginations.

Allegorys R' Us.

2005-09-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

From the A.P.:

"The evacuation of Superdome refugees was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt hotel.

They were move to the head of the line to be evacuated -- much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome for days.

The 700 had been trapped in the Hyatt just like the others, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome."

There she is a nutshell, folks, the fundamental, but almost entirely invisible (to the majority) impact that race and class have on Americans. Ten thousand impoverished black people, having spent the past five days in a literal hell, covered in filth, subject to violence, standing in the sun, in lines, for DAYS, are made to wait so that 700 presumable well-off, presumably white tourists and staff from a luxury hotel can be evacuated in front of them. And the shit of it is: for those people doing to evacuating, and the Hyatt evacuees, there is probably NO REALIZATION THAT ANY OF IT IS FUCKED UP.

And then, of course, there's this, from the Head Impossibly-Priviledged-Asshole-With-No-Consciousness-of-his-Priviledge, George Bush, in Mississippi:

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"

What the fuck goes through a person's mind when they say something like that? Tens of thousands of black people are dying a hundred miles to his west and he's talking about the destroyed house of a Senatorial dickwad who HARKENS BACK FONDLY FOR SEGREGATION?

This shit is so utterly egregious that even a hardened cynic and misanthrope like me can't believe that it can go ignored. The bedrock racism and classism that has already condemned millions of Americans to second class citizenship and which has now MURDERED perhaps tens of thousands more, will have to be dealt with if there is even a shred of remaining collective decency left in this country: In the absense of a terrorist enemy to hate, our anger MUST finally turn to those who warrant it; the oblivious white upper class who let this happen, and don't see to have even registered the magnitude of their crimes, who see no crimes at all, but merely THE WAY THINGS ARE.

"That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more..."

2005-09-01T18:17:00.000-07:00

New Orleans has turned into Bartertown, and George Bush didn't get back to Washington until YESTERDAY, after going to California to make insane comparisions between World War II and the war in Iraq and STRUMMING ON THE PRESIDENTIAL GUITAR. All while New Orleans was already flooding.

Now, tens of thousands of people in New Orleans are living in puddles of disease-riddled water, bodies rotting in the heat, shit-crazy, gun toting looters and rapists making like Janjaweed, with no food, no water, no police or National Guard presence, no transport out of town, FOUR DAYS AFTER THE HURRICANE HIT LAND! Why is this happening? The list is long: money diverted from levee-strengthening to the Iraq war, National Guard troops diverted to Iraq, a cold-bloodedly Randian pre-storm evacuation ("If you've got a car, get out of town! If you don't, grow gills, you poor douchebag!") and the fact that the entire federal government, starting with the Guitar-God-in-Chief, who took three days to even acknowledge what was happening, then cut his vacation short two days to look like he was actually doing something, acted like a pack of retarded midgets trying to drive a Hummer.

The only silver lining to be found in this horror show is the fact that the rescue operation has been such a Brobdignagian fuck-up, the consequences so bone-chillingly horrible, that people are actually demanding to know why. Why are the victims overwhelmingly poor and black? Why has it taken nearly a week to get any sort of effective force inside the city while people are literally dying to get out? These are the sort of questions that could lead to answers exceedingly uncomfortable to those in power. My hope is that this disaster could turn into the Anti-9-11: a devastating mass tragedy that, rather than bringing out the base, trollish violent nationalism in Americans, instead exposes compassion and, for the first time in my lifetime, THOUGHTFULNESS. Now, that is hugely optimistic, but there are some factors working in favor of such an outcome. Chiefly among them is the fact that there is no ENEMY that caused it. There are no "evil-doers" who transform all of the confused emotions that such an event triggers into pure, mindless hatred. Questions can't be shouted down by accusations of being "objectively pro-hurricane" or "supporting severe tropical weather systems." Without the escape valve of a foreign enemy to cathartically destroy, perhaps this nightmare can propell us towards a greater awareness of how far we've collectively fallen.

Actually Mr. Daniels, it is just a rag.

2005-08-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching the pro-war circle jerk in Crawford on the teevee, and the images are of a bunch of sweaty, fat, flag-bedecked crackers on horses and motorcycles (just to make sure no one thinks any of them might be gay), holding charming signs calling Cindy Sheehan the "bitch in the ditch,” and making calls to "kick their ass and take their gas.” Did I mention they were fat?

Anyway, one of the organizers (who is a professional Republican political operative, by the way: there's your rightwing grass roots in action!) was flapping his gravy-filled jowls. "Cindy Sheehan is encouraging terrorists!" was the gist of it. The crowd, of course, mooed in agreement as, I’m sure, did millions of smooth-lobed fellow travelers across the nation. Of course, their excitement was not in any way dulled by the simple fact that the argument DOESN’T MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE!! One of these mullet-heads could sit me down for a week and not make the whole “dissent emboldens terrorists” idea plausible. Same goes for the “we’ve got to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” (or WGTFTTSWDHTFTH) drivel. I’m not going to go into WHY these arguments are retarded: that gives them too much credit and, frankly, it should be obvious to anyone who knows ANYTHING about the world or basic geography. All you need to know to disprove the WGTFTTSWDHTFTH thesis are the following facts: a.) Most of the insurgents in Iraq are native Iraqis b.) Iraqi was not a significant source of terrorists before the invasion and BAM! there goes the last Bush administration war rational.

So, the question arises: if these arguments are transparently false to anyone with the faintest familiarity with the facts of the situation, HOW can the “grassroots” organizations herd thousands of wool-noggins to pro-war demonstrations in the Texas sun where they can slag on a grieving mother? As in most situations, Occam’s Razor suffices: THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE THE FAINTEST FAMILIARITY WITH THE FACTS OF THE SITUATION!

Sure, some (like the organizers) are partisan hacks who would support Bush if he declared war on Narnia. But most of them earnestly believe that if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, there would be terrorists in their Lucky Charms. Now why would people who don’t know a goddamn thing about what they’re talking about feel strongly enough about the issue to waddle all the way to Crawford?

Partly, it’s because getting really worked up about things you don’t know anything about is an American pastime on par with date rape and killing hoboes for sport. Another significant factor is the centrality of symbolic meaning to contemporary “conservative” Americans.

To whatever degree “conservatism” was a rational theory based on observation of empirical data, that all started going out the window in the early 90s when Bush the First picked up an anti-flag-burning amendment to the constitution as an issue. For him, it was a cynical attempt to boost flagging support in the recessional aftermath of the first Gulf War, but for millions of Americans, the amendment became (and to some degree still is) a powerful rallying cry. It was (and is) a thunderingly stupid idea, but what matters is the WAY that is was stupid. The error of pro-amendment folk was the confusion of the SYMBOL of the American flag with the network of civil rights and duties that it represents. It’s the kind of mistake a five year old would make but one you would hope that an adult wouldn’t. Yet, millions of Americans made that mistake, continue to make the mistake, and are damned fierce about their mistaken beliefs.

I think that the reason grown ups make these sort of errors is due to their overwhelming belief in the literal power of symbols. The American flag has the power of a totem, as does George W. Bush, the World Trade Center, and the “Troops.” Now, the power that these icons hold is entirely contained within the confines of the right-wing brainpan, but in that murky depth, that power is absolute. These symbols don't connect to any system of observed phenomenon (none of these people have ever met George Bush, but are utterly confident in his status as an "authentic" American and all around old salt), but are instead constellations of emotional imagery that create powerful emotional responses. Facts are impervious to the blazing charisma of AMERICAN symbology. My god, these are people willing to shit on the constitution in order to protect a piece of cloth! What the hell is are they going to do with a quick overview of modern Middle Eastern history?

The virgins are trimming their wicks, and filling out their brackets.

2005-08-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

Building on the idea of imminent apocalypse mentioned previously, I think it's time to start an End of the World Pool, because if people are dying by the millions, why not take the edge off of the horror by savoring a few dollars...that you can promptly burn in order to warm your cardboard shack and cook the toddler you stole from the refugee camp that day.

Some possible squares:

Nuclear annihilation (can't go wrong with the old standards)

"Day After Tomorrow"/"Waterworld"-style global-warming related environmental catastrophe

Terrorist-released biological attack

Bush-initiated economic collapse leading to social breakdown

Peak Oil Crisis (oil prices continue to skyrocket, leading to wars and the aforementioned economic collapse)

Avian Flu (That's where my money be at)

The Rapture (you can get odds with this one)

Zombies

Feel free to lay your money on any of the above or your very own.

To the Four People Who Read This Shit:

2005-08-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

I want to remind you fellows that you are free to comment on any post I may make on this here blog: just click on the "comment" button at the end of the post. Go ahead and drop whatever question, comment, or random, all-caps exclaimation of "TITS!" you may desire. I would like very much to make this as interactive as possible.

Peace out.

"So the cops KNEW that Internal Affairs was setting them up?"

2005-08-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned, my main political home slice is Wisconsin Senator Russell "The Muscle" Feingold, a ballsy motherfucker who just raised his stock in my eyes another billion percent by being the first national Democratic figure to call for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq while "serious" would-be presidents like Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden snivel a line of mindless, Bushian "stay the course" crap. It was the right thing to do and, perhaps coincidentally, though probably not, positions Feingold as potentially THE anti-war presidential candidate in 2008, when the idiotic debate about how many imaginary Universal soldiers we should send to the glowing crater formerly known as Iraq. If Feingold were to become a serious contender in 2008, it would create an unprecedented situation for me: a general election in which a candidate from a major party was something other than a corrupt, venal, power mad sociopath.

This brings us to a Terminator 2-type paradox: it is a vivid conviction of mine that ONLY corrupt, venal, power mad sociopaths CAN become president. Remember, the president of the United States is essentially hired during the primaries by the corporate order and his job while in office is to do as little as possible to threaten an exploitative and deadly status quo. The sort of cold-blooded disregard for ethics, personal relationships, principle and basic human decency that is required to crawl to the top of the sweaty clusterfuck of greasy-palmed politicians, coupled with the monomania necessary to WANT to have the job, means that no decent person could successfully run for president and stay decent. You have to have a pathological drive for self-aggrandizement at all costs that allows you to make any number of massive compromises in your most basic beliefs like Nixon, Clinton or Kerry, or a breathtaking vacuity without beliefs to compromise, like Ronald Reagan and the current vandal. You have to back-stab, sell-out, allow yourself to become a hollow vessel for the vision of donors and the media, you have to have your personality steamrolled into oblivion, smooth off every rough patch, reduce your formerly passionate and complicated political views into a simple, easily-digestible, meaningless paste. You have to repeat the same dead phrases until the very idea of political rhetoric being connected to actual policy or vision is as foreign as Sanskrit. When you finally take that oath to uphold the office of the president, anything even vaguely human has been buffed away like the finish on one of Condi Rice’s dildoes.

So, that means that if Feingold WERE somehow to emerge from a field of craven douche nozzles to claim the Democratic nomination, providing the American people with the first time in a century with someone WORTH voting for…it would already mean that he WASN’T worth voting for.

Shit, “Donnie Darko” wasn’t this confusing.

Balance tastes good in my tummy

2005-08-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching the Paula Zahn show on the CNN and they're talking about shriveled fascist nutbag Pat Robertson and his creative solutions to America's foreign policy problems (namely wacking out those foreign leaders, like Venenzualen president Hugo Chavez, who could possibly cause us trouble), and Paula actually begins her report by asking the question: did Robertson go too far...or does he have a point? They then went on to detail the many crimes that Hugo Chavez has committed against the United States, namely that he has called George Bush bad names on numerous occasions, the whole time leaving the unstated idea lingering in the background: maybe we SHOULD just wack this dude out!

The sensible, ever-so-balanced folks at CNN can't just call out Robertson for the hateful cracker that he is, they have to take a few moments to give his ravings credence.

On the other hand...

Night of the Long Knives

2005-08-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

The end of the world will be a disappointment. It’ll be a frat party at a small Midwestern liberal arts college: damp walls and listless drunks, poor lighting and a thumping baseline, guests slowly dwindling through the night until nothing’s left but a half-finished keg of Miller Lite and a few shucked condoms writhing in the shag carpet.

We have lost the capability to obliterate life on this planet impressively. Mutual Assured Destruction is a cozy memory, the days when it was a reasonable possibility that all life on the planet would end in one flash of light are gone. Now the most we can hope for is a biological plague to wipe us out, but without any real panache. Just months and months of increasing body counts and fraying infrastructure until finally the wheels of civilization fall off and the survivors scatter to the winds. Or maybe it’ll be unchecked environmental degradation slowly but steadily choking us to death on our own waste. Either way, it’s Armageddon without the money shot.

What made the Cold War so charismatic was that whole Dr. Strangelove promise that if things went bad, they were going all the way bad, and quick. One second you’d be watering your lawn or pledging allegiance to the flag, the next, you’d be a permanent shadow on the wall behind you. The planet would be awash in the man-made majesty of blooming mushroom clouds and radiation winds. Every species of every plant and animal ever catalogued by man and the thousands we never even knew about would go with us. Nothing left but a fried crust and maybe the cockroaches. Every destructive urge ever harbored in the secret human heart would find a moment of exultant apotheosis. It was a nice thought, comforting in a way: if we did somehow succeed in destroying ourselves, we would take down the whole planet in the process. None of those inferior beings would get to graze on the grass of our graves. No hypothetical future civilization would be able to look back on our folly with bemused dismay. We would be spared one of the great agonies of every poor bastard who has died until this point in time; we wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything. We would have the last laugh.

Now, when the end comes, it’s pretty much sure not to be with a bang, but rather the damned, dispiriting whimper T.S. Eliot warned us about. Ebola, smog, AIDS, medical waste, maybe some creative application of smallpox bacilli, one way or the other, there will be no painless, momentary triumph of the collective death urge; just millions of terrified lonely ends to millions of terrified lonely lives, bodies piling up like cordwood before the dwindling numbers of glassy-eyed survivors. And worst of all, the planet will have the last laugh. Weeds shooting up through cracks in the asphalt of deserted cities, deer grazing in the produce isles of vacant suburban supermarkets, and maybe, somewhere in the distant future, a group of wiser beings smiling crookedly at our non-biodegradable residue. My guess is that they won’t judge the Hardees California Raisins commemorative figurines kindly.

Cock-punching Cheney

2005-08-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Today I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill. In the lobby, there was a wall of signed portraits from various politicos who have eaten at the establishment, including Botoxed loser John Kerry and my main home-slice Russell "The Muscle" Feingold. One of the shots was Dennis Hastert, the fat sack of diseased pig lard who presides over the organized hate-fuck known as the house of representatives. He was standing next to the woman who I presume owns the restaurant, looking for all the world like he had just polished off everything on the menu and was mulling whether to dip the woman in mustard sauce and start chewing. I felt an instant surge of bile looking at his smug, vacant, foot-wide head. "If he were here right now..." I thought.

Then it dawned on me: he just might be!

Now, it turns out that Hastert was not there when I was, but the fact remains that he could have been. For my entire adult life, I've been hating the scumfucks who run this country from the comfortable distance of Wisconsin. I could watch Bush or, say, Rick Santorum on the C-Span and become consummed with rage, but the fact remained that they were a full days drive to the east of me and, as angry as I ever got, I was never angry enough to sustain a road trip to D.C. From now on, since I live in Alexandria, Virginia, the next time I see some well-lacquered dipshit spew a line of poisoned horse jizz, I'm really only a ten minute drive (excluding parking) away from planting my foot in his nutsack. Even worse, I could come face-to-face with one of these fuckers leaving a slime trail on the sidewalk mere feet away from me!

It'll take either Zen Buddhism or a nice Halcyon prescription to keep my off the Secret Service watch list.

And Starring Hugh Jackman as Little Red Riding Hood

2005-08-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

"The Brothers Grimm" SHOULD be a movie I'm dying to see. I certainly was dying to see it when I only knew the basics: movie about the Grimm brothers directed by Terry Gilliam. But once I started seeing the trailer, I got cold feet. At first, I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but now I know: it looks EXACTLY like "Van Helsing," another movie I was dying to see until I watched a trailers. It's got the same shakey Gothic CGI, the same Black Forest-Oktoberfest setting, the same scruffy facial hair...it's even got crossbows, fer-chrissakes! Pass.

The Crux of the "Chickenhawk" Issue

2005-08-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

A lot of bandwidth on these here Internets has been spent debating the "chickenhawk" question. Namely, is it valid to criticize healthy, military-age war supporters (paging Ben Shapiro and every college-age douche nozzle with a clam shell necklace and a copy of Toby Keith's Shock'n Y'all in their Jeep Grand Cherokee) for not enlisting in the military to fight in Iraq for the cause they have been so vocal in advancing?

The answer, of course, is yes, and yes for one simple reason. The war in Iraq is teetering on the brink of disaster due to a laundry list of Bush administration fuck-ups and the criminal stupidity (not to mention stupid criminality) of the whole venture, but one of the biggest problems is the massive, critical recruiting shortfall in the armed forces. The current troop strength in Iraq is already insufficient for the task (whatever the hell it may be) and the numbers are likely to go down rapidly as the military runs out of ways to manipulate the over-taxed regular army and stretching the active duty tours of reserve and National Guard units. Back home, reasonable young people are not lining up for the opportunity to catch shrapnel in Tikrit, even for that juicy scholarship package because, let's be honest, what good is going to frat parties if you have to shotgun your beers through a hole in your neck? Because there are so few fresh troops ready to send to Iraq, it is far more likely that the U.S. will pull out before "finishing the job" (a phrase just as meaningless and deadly now as it was thirty years ago) than is the possibility of maintaining a strong presence or increasing the troop numbers. As such, if one were a fervent believer in the U.S. mission in Iraq, and one were able-bodied and in the right age bracket to volunteer, one would be OBLIGATED by their convictions to go to Iraq and help shore up the U.S. military position. To ignore the shortage of soldiers is to abet the eventual withdrawal of American forces.

Bottom line: since a shortage of soldiers is the most serious threat to continued American occupation of Iraq, those who believe that Iraq still needs a mess of occupation have no plausible excuse not to join the fight there. Period.

The Brewers Vex Me

2005-08-19T13:46:00.000-07:00

So, the Brewers were shut down three games in a row at home (where they've been excellent)by the ass end of the Cardinals pitching rotation, then go to Houston, where they NEVER win, and hand Roger Clemens his ass on a platter.

What the hell.

Is the Bush Administration Fascist?

2005-08-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Short Answer: Nope.

Slightly Longer Answer: George W. Bush doesn't have the imagination to be a fascist, and Dick Cheney's too busy counting his money to put up any kind of kampf about anything.

However, and this is the main reason that so many lefties bring up the spectre of Nazism and fascism when they talk about Bush and company: at least 25% of Bush's supporters ARE fascist. George Bush is not interested in the kind of total social mobilization that is the goal of fascism: he wants a public as disengaged, self-absorbed and distracted as possible: keep the taxes low, send the poor kids to do the fighting, and let the next guy deal with the fallout while as much cash as possible is shoveled to the upper one percent.

Sometimes, especially during elections and when the polls are shakey, Bush likes to pull out some moves from the fascist PR playbook to work that 25% into a frenzied lather. A good example of that would be the uber-creepy "Freedom Walk" being planned for September in D.C. (I'm hoping I can check it out), which is being designed to boost flagging support for the Iraq war by reminding people of September Eleventh and dazzling the rubes with formation marching and the soothing reactio-country sounds of Clint Black.

It's those rubes who are pinning for total social mobilization around the twin poles of radical domestic Christianization and a foreign policy of perpetual war against alien cultures that represent fascism's face in the United States. Bush and company will always care more about money than about Christ, but the true believers are dreaming of a Bush-lead New Age, in which secular humanists, atheists, Muslims, gays and sundry unbelievers are swept away by a government in which democratic institutions have been replaced by a neanderthal vision of Christianity that guides all lawmaking.

Historian Robert O. Paxton's book The Anatomy of Fascism offers a list of what he calls "mobilizing passions" which form the basis for mass fascist movements. Any of this ring bells?

"A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions."

"The primacy of the group, towards which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it."

"The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external." (Apparently the 9/11 attacks justify any horror or crime against humanity: witness right-wing reaction to Abu Ghraib)

"Dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences." (Stop me if you've heard any of this!)

"The need for closer intergration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary."

"The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny."

"The superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason." (Fuck the reality-based community, Bush creates new worlds with every trip to the bathroom!)

"The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success." (Fox News ran clips of the air bombardment of Bagdad with accompanying musical score...seriously)

"The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle." (The right might not like evolution much, but they're sure down with "survival of the fittest")

Spend some time on FreeRepublic.com or Little Green Footballs (if you can stomach it), listen to the crazy spewing from the mouth of your radicalized relatives or co-workers and see how many of these "passions" you can identify within a week. Bush might not have the vision to see a New Christian World Order, but his sign-wavers and goose-steppers sure do. Paxton also stresses that a significant crisis in the democratic order must occur for the ruling class to turn to a fascist movement to save them from revolution from the left or social collapse. We're not there yet, but imagine what might happen if the economy collapses or the U.S. is hit with a nuclear or biological terror attack. These rubes, who until now have been content to write checks, go to rallies and write brain-numbingly stupid letters to the editor, might find themselves some leaders who will give their vision of the world more than lip service. (Rick Santorum has the glassy eyes and droolingy insane rhetoric of a True Believer.)

Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart...

2005-08-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

So it's come to this: one more violently self-absorbed, pampered, aimless voice nattering away into the cyber-void. One more whining, powerless, dyspeptic, no-dick Internets loser ranting about the slo-motion horror show of American decadence and destruction as an excuse to avoid doing anything about it. All for the reading pleasure of literally dozens of fellow political eunuchs. Why? What purpose does it serve?

Absolutely none.

However, since I'm currently languishing in a crap-job purgatory having recently moved to within a brick's toss of Capitol Hill, and in command of the first home-based Internets connection I've had since finishing college, I figure I may as well burn away the hours before sleep with a few salvoes of vitriol directed at the idiocy and/or malice of the American people and their vile, corrupt and blood-coated leaders. Why not? We're all just making time until the Apocalypse, so what's a little masturbatory self-righteousness between friends?