The kind of people who like to get upset about things are upset about some Muslims trading in Labor Day for the Islamic feast called Eid al-Fitr. (Read the comments. Priceless). So they want to exchange one totalitarian based holiday for another. Big fucking deal. Try talking to your children instead of getting sending outraged emails to people who don’t give a shit. Maybe your kid won’t grow up to be a single mother giving handjobs for drugs in truck-stop parking lots. Maybe.
Now this here story I’m about to unfold took place in the early ’90s – just about the time of our conflict with Sad’m and the I-raqis. I was learning how to savvy the I-raqi language in what, according the Arabs who taught there, was a US Army madrassa.
One of the testing methods was the fabled oral examination. Not nearly as erotic as it sounds. Most folks who have taken a foreign language have had to sit through the awkward exchange of the fluent instructor talking to the student in the native language in much the same way one talks to a small child or a mentally retarded adult.
I always found that having a wee dram or three would help loosen my lingua franca come test time. Like making the sexy talk to women in the bar, speaking Arabic for test purposes is a lot easier with a couple of highballs in the bloodstream. Same principle. It lowers inhibitions and allows one to bullshit with impunity.
One day I’m flop sweating my way through one of these tests, only understanding about a third of the words being asked. The stern faced team of bitter, expatriate Levantines are clearly not impressed with my mastery of their language. They miraculously proceed to ask me a question that I happen to understand. Or at least I presume to. They asked me to tell them a story. Or a joke. I’m still not clear which. The only word I could recognize means BOTH story and joke. Fucking Semites!
The joke I told went like this: “What does the Chancellor of Germany and an Islamic feast have in common?”
No reaction from Mr. and Mrs. Kill the Infidel.
I went on with an air of desperation, “One is Adolf Hitler and the other is Eid al-Fitr.”
With that, the test was over. I was relieved to get out of there, regardless of how badly, if you’ll pardon the expression, I bombed.
I just don’t think those folks have much of a sense of humor.
I especially love the well measured and not at all overwrought response of the parent in the piece.
If I didn’t have my friends around me, I probably would’ve had a heart attack or stroke because I was so scared,” said parent Frances Lopez.
In a related story, the CDC has announced that the presence of friends can reduce your risk of heart attack or stroke by 1000%.
Mrs. Lopez’s reaction is sadly all too typical. Especially around my house. We received news about this directly from an unnamed seventh grade source. The thing with the middle school grape vine is that the facts tend to get mangled after the initial telling of the tale. Making a bigger deal out of this isn’t helpful. Among the rumors that were passed on was that the girl might have brought a gun to school.
Never mind the media adding to the pants shitting hysteria of neurotic parents. But go ahead and read the lede from Channel 4.
A local school system is dealing with hit lists, and they believe they are coming from an eighth-grade student.
Oh. Now it is multiple lists? Not multiple lists! Oh, the humanity!
Mrs. Sarcastro went into full panic mode over this stupid damn thing. She started railing about whatever it is that Security Moms get worked up about.
I foolishly tried to extinguish this blaze of outrage.
“What’s the big deal? This kid made a list. So what?”
“What if one of our kids was on that list?”
“So what? It’s just a list.”
“It was a KILL list!”
“So kids are getting expelled from school for making lists?”
“She brought a gun to school!”
“No. She mightor might not have brought a gun to school, and if she did, then she should be expelled and charged. If she really brought a gun to school, don’t you think that would be the story instead of this stupid list bullshit?”
“If 13 was on that list, I would have him in private school so fast…”
“Like that is a solution. Nothing bad happens in private schools. Just ask those Amish girls.”
“What if she brought that gun to school and started shooting people in the cafeteria.”
“I would expect someone in that room to be able to disarm an eighth grade girl.”
“You just don’t get it.”
“You’re right. I don’t. Kicking a girl out of school for making lists of the kids who are being shitty to her doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“You don’t know if that girl was being picked on.”
“No. You are right. Middle school is a Utopian paradise full of peace and love. There can’t be any likely reason why she would make a list of her tormentors. Errr, I mean kids who are just minding their own business.”
This back and forth went on for awhile with no resolution or apparent end.
School massacres are, by and large, an aberration rather than the norm. The hysteria about this sort of thing is generally fueled by emotion rather than the facts. Statistically, a kid has a better chance of being strangled by a parent than gut shot by some other kid with a grudge list. On average, about two thousand children are murdered in this country every year. Out of that number, around twelve of those kids are killed at school. When you figure out where the remaining 1,988 are killed, you get a cookie.
It just seems un-American somehow to cultivate the idea in children that putting their thoughts onto paper is a crime. We aren’t making our kids safer, we’re just making them better sheep.
Hillary ClintonFormer First LadyDemocratic Front Runner You make my skin crawl Rudy GiulianiAmerica’s Mayor Endorsed by Pat RobertsonYou lost my vote, pal Barack Obama
Endorsed by Oprah
If not for your skin color
Would anyone care?
Mitt Romney
You have five adult sons
And support the Iraq War
Send the neighbor kid
Mortgage ‘Crisis’
Bad loans and defaults
No one likes “I told you so”
But, I told you so
Return of Imus
Turkey-necked old fart
Welcome back to radio
Nappy headed ho’s
British teacher in Sudan
Muhammad the Bear
Muslim fanatics urge death
Religion of Peace
Evel RIP
Snake River Canyon
You were in the pantheon
Of childhood heroes
Isn’t this the real goal of today’s environmental movement? It ain’t authentic Global Warming without Man Made™ Global Warming on the label. We’re told that humans are using up all the oil, burning down the forests, paving over the wetlands, expanding their settlements into the heretofore peaceful critter’s habitats. The unspoken inference is that the world would be a whole lot better off if there were less humans.
Personally, I would feed the still-beating heart of the last, lazy panda to my children if it meant our survival. What we are being fed, thanks to the Humans Are Bad movement, is a steady diet of thin gruel based on the assumption that the snail darter has as much, if not more, right to live here as I do. Bad or not, I’m the one with the fishing pole and the opposable thumbs.
One of the cool things about the internet is that you don’t have to be Adrian Veidt to suss out the collective zeitgeist. Population Reduction is in the hidden gremlin in all of these conversations. Over at Slate they are openly considering the idea.
A new non-fiction release that I’m looking forward to, but can’t summon up the lack of decency to purchase, isThe World Without Us. A book that postulates what the earth would look like and how things would be “better” for the environment. Proof of concept as reviewed with breathless anticipation to join the dinosaur over at Salon. I am not willingly going to slouch towards extinction, thank you very much. Earth First? How about, You First.
If it has to happen, let us make sure it happens on our terms. Seems that a billion Chinese and a billion on the subcontinent would be as good a place as any to thin the herd. Hell, the Indians think they are going to be reincarnated anyway, so no big deal. According to their religion, we’re doing them a favor, or something.
According to God’s Favorite Republicans, we aren’t making white people fast enough. If we thin out the numbers of the Indians and Chinee, we might stand a chance, statistically speaking. Crank out a vicious little bug of the superflu in Shanghai, Beijing, Islamabad and Dehli. Concurrently open up a canister of the same in Mecca, Mogadishu, Tehran and Khartoum. That should get the Mohammedans to simmer down for a few centuries with all that irresponsible talk about holy war.
I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed, but we’re talking ten million, twenty million dead…tops. That still would leave us in a decent position population wise to rebuild society.
What about all those hurricanes that Jor-Al showed us in Power Point? Maybe next year. I know Sheryl Crow was really looking forward to them wiping out people’s homes and businesses so she could be right. The scientists whose funding depends on making dire predictions aren’t even behind this myth.
Now Jor-Al has won a prize. For Peace. Sure a billion people will have to die for us to have that peace, but it will be peace at last. From the Nobel Committee’s press release:
Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.
Now we’re talking!
Think of the world you want to leave your children? Doesn’t the one with less people sound better? Are you going to be able to afford to launch your only son into space in a flying Prius? Drunkenly bouncing around the galaxy looking for a suitable planet to colonize and maybe get a little high. I don’t think so.
No, you’ll be stuck here, watching the fall and rebirth of human civilization.
What would local news be without manufactured parental outrage? Yes, your child was sobbing so hard you could barely hear your new attorney mention he is asking for six figures in imaginary damages. Poor you.
These parents should be grateful. It takes most kids until at least their early twenties to find out that other people in general, and authority figures especially, are assholes. Consider this an early lesson in life. No charge.
If you haven’t spent any time there, trust me, this can only be an improvement. There’s a reason this was a buffer area between the colonies and the Spanish a couple of hundred years ago. In a way, it still is. It keeps the Mexican pickers down Orlando way. They call the area, Tierra del Culos.
I imagine that Hell is a place where The Price is Right is the only show broadcast on Hell’s TV station. All day. Every day. For Eternity. Soon enough, Bob will be reunited there with Johnny Olson and Rod Roddy. They are already rehearsing for the show.
If you listened closely last week, you could have heard them say, “Philip Workman, Come on down!”
Why don’t you have a subscription to Reason magazine? The best thing about having kids who are forced into these odious school magazine sales, is that I get to have subversive libertarian periodicals delivered to my door. This months issue contains gems like:
In his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek wrote that his real quarrel with conservatives was not their opposition to drastic change in institutions but their readiness to use government force to curb such change. To Hayek, moral and cultural standards were the product of spontaneous order emerging from the interplay of economic and social forces, from evolution and experimentation unguided by any central authority. Yet noncoercive criticism of what some of us deem to be negative social and cultural trends is itself a vital part of that evolution. It’s one thing to demand a federal virtue police; it’s another to write and market a book about virtue and hope that its lessons will catch on.
As long as the Bill Bennetts of the world are intent on using not just persuasion but force (and public funds) on behalf of their favorite virtues-promoting premarital abstinence through federal programs, banning legal protections for same-sex unions, censoring sexually explicit materials, waging the war on drugs-libertarians can be forgiven for fearing even noncoercive moralizing on their part. But it’s important to remember that cultural progressives have not hesitated to use the government on their side: to promote liberal attitudes toward sexuality and sex roles through public education, say, or to compel landlords to rent to unmarried cohabiting couples even if they have religious objections to such a lifestyle. The backlash from the social right is directed at such social engineering as well as spontaneous cultural change.
There are also excellent articles about how Castro had a useful idiot at the New York Times and an investigation of the body parts trade. I particularly liked the piece about how government’s protection from harmful products like asbestos, cigarettes,guns etc. tend to cause more harm than good. Like when cities resale dangerous guns that are either police surplus or were seized in order to make a buck at the same time they were filing lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Guns are so dangerous that the city of New Orleans saw fit to put 7300 of them on the open market without any of the safety features they were suing the gunmakers to install. Priceless.
How come the Scene didn’t have a blogger on their reeks-of-New Times-influence Lust List? When all else fails, rip off Creative Loafing. I’ll be the first to admit that as a whole, Nashville’s bloggers are a motley looking bunch. But, there are a few exceptions to the Cheetoh-fingered fatties who seem to populate the imaginations of the Committee of Insiders.
What the hell is going on over at NASA? How did that place go from attracting the guys with The Right Stuff to being the nation’s repository of whackjobs and fruitcakes? This latest bit with the diaper-wearing Astronut is only the tip of the iceberg. Any place that employs Rusty Yates, John Jameson, Roger Healy, Garrett Breedlove and Maurice Minnifield is a whacko magnet.
What’s the big deal with the gay ex-NBA player? You know, the guy you never heard of until he came out with a book to pimp about being a gay ex-NBA player that you’ve never heard of. Thing is, he’s British. So saying he’s gay is like saying that the ball is round. It’s just redundant. His first day in the NBA, the other players knew he was gay the minute he started talking like Rupert Everett.
Is there anything sadder in a bookstore than the remaindered section? All those books that someone thought would sell. They didn’t. There’s a great scrapbook/biography of John Belushi for six bucks at the Border’s on West End. Sadder still, was the pair of losers taking a break from camping out in line for the next Hobbit or Star Wars movie to read aloud passages from the remaindered copies of Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way. Even sadder, I waited in line to get Bruce to sign the copy I paid full price for.
How long has it been since you’ve had some tasty Mothership BBQ? You know what would be delicious right now? A pulled pork plate with crackaroni and cheese. Make the drive to Berry Hill for lunch today. You won’t be disappointed.
Thanks to the vagaries of the holiday season, I’ve been forced at gunpoint to go shopping. Let us now call out various sins of the restaurants and retail establishments by name:
Raz’z: Despite the annoying name, this place serves up some solid American fare. Chef/Owner Raz Admuso has a Horatio Alger-esque story that they made feel-good TV Movies of the Week about, back in the day. The food was nothing spectacular, but good. Our repeat business was earned by Chef Raz coming out and talking to the table. The personal touch makes all the difference.
All The Damn Baby Stores: What a fucking racket you people have got going on! How was it that the human race survived so long without all the completely unecessary baby junk you try to foist upon gullible parents? By taking a page from the drug companies, you manufacture dangers to the newborn child and then offer some snake-oil to alleviate the worries of the fearful parents. Brilliant! You should sell Restless Leg Medicine with the impulse items near the cash register.
Target: You bastards got some esplainin’ to do. If you are selling, say, a baby crib. Said baby crib is put on sale for $200. When the Hickory Hollow Target is sold out and refers you to either Brentwood or West Nashville, as they have them in stock, it is totally uncool to then charge $280 for that same crib. Thanks for the bait and switch. Dick.
K-Mart: You aren’t much better. I understand that you are barely surviving in Sam Walton’s world. Still, with most of your employees actively avoiding customers or playing with their extra chromosome, don’t get all pissy with me that I went behind your high security “Employees Only” door to find a manager. Don’t get all sullen because the sanctity of your Fortress of Sulkitude was breached by someone looking for a handcart to haul out $150 worth of baby crib. That one purchase probably represented 25% of your sales that night. You’re welcome. Dick.
Baby Crib Manufacturer: There is no getting around this. You get what you paid for. If I could crap Krugerrands, I would have bought a Stickley-style Crib. Instead I bought your cheap piece of junk. The cheap piece of plastic that broke during my rage filled assembly may be your fault, it may be mine. Now isn’t the time to point fingers. What is important, is that you are sending me a replacement part absolutely free. Now I have nothing but nice things to say about your company, the cheap-ass crib, and the fact that my kid won’t fall to his death when the front of the crib collapses like an Iraqi cease-fire.
Logan’s: This will only take a second. I guess we were imposing when we came in and said we wanted to eat. I had no idea that you weren’t expecting guests. The half empty restaurant confused us. It wasn’t that big a problem that our server was clearly someone who was not a server, but rather a stressed out manager trainee or possibly the dishwasher. All of that was fine. No my problem is that when I order the tilapia with the cilantro-chipotle sauce served over a black bean & corn relish as described in the menu, that doesn’t mean tilapia with motherfucking peppercorn ranch dressing dumped on top.
Ruby Tuesdays: You’ve come a long way since I bartended at the shithole on West End. Much improved in both menu, decor, service, food quality and presentation. Good job.
Office Depot: You haven’t really done anything wrong. The only kink in the plan was the dumb bitch in front of me wanting to argue with your employee over a three dollar rebate for buying paper or something. I don’t remember. After ten minutes of being stuck behind this pinhead haggling over three goddamn dollars and letting my mind wander to a happy place full of pirates, beer volcanoes and a stripper factory, I kind of forgot what she was going on about. As I followed her out to her car in a homicidal fugue state, I noticed the War Is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things bumper sticker on her Saturn. Evidently, she had already been caught and released with that tag so that everyone would know she is a moron. As for Office Depot, would it kill you to have more than one register open at a time, ever?
With all of that in mind, enjoy your trip to the mall this Christmas.
Update on Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 08:14AM
I almost forgot…
West Nashville Strike & Spare: I took the kids bowling the other day. As is our custom, we had pizza as part of the bowling alley experience. I went to the snack bar, even though the lights were out. Apparently, keeping the lights out reduces the glare on the television that the snack bar employee was glued to. All the while keeping an eye on whatever was on BET, she asked me what I wanted.
“We’d like a large pepperoni pizza and three Coke Icees,” I replied.
“Are you closer to Circus World? Cuz dat’s where da pizzas come from.”
“So you’re saying I need to go down there to order pizza?”
“It’d be easier.”
So, I trudged back down towards where we were rolling and into Circus World.
“Didja order the pizza,” the boys shouted.
“Not yet,” came my through gritted teeth answer.
Down at Circus World the girl behind the counter was friendly and helpful. She promised to bring us the pizza. So, I tipped her two bucks for her mad customer skillz.
Five minutes later, I see her walking out the door with her purse and belongings in hand. Questions began to arise. She’s obviously leaving. Who is making our pizza? Why did I give her two damn dollars?
After waiting an appropriate amount of time, I walked back to Circus World. Cries of “How much more longer for the pizza?” still ringing in my ears.
Back in the kitchen was my freshly baked pizza and a guy who looked unmistakably like Magilla Gorilla, standing over it counting pepperoni. He may have been touching each and every pepperoni in what can only be considered some form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
“I’ll bring it to you sir,” he said in a startled voice.
Two minutes later, Magilla brought out the pizza. We were famished and had been subsisting on only our Coke Icees.
Magilla had scampered off by the time we got the pizza box open and realized that not only had he not cut the pizza all the way through, but had not brought any plates.
Luckily, the boys and I were able to survive this nightmarish experience by clinging to our shared disdain for the mother and two kids at the adjacent lane. She had dressed her sons, who were about five and seven, in adorable matching outfits. And by adorable, I mean totally gay. My boys were not only glad that we don’t dress them alike, but that they aren’t named Dylan and Austin.
If Chuck Klosterman were a manufactured food item, he would be the Rice Krispie Treat. A tasty morsel composed primarily of air and sugar, yet enjoyed by many. You loved it in small bites-sized portions, but couldn’t make a meal of it. For many reasons, both Klosterman and the Treats bring back memories of childhood. If Proust were alive today and smelled a pan of freshly baked Rice Krispie Treats, he would have written Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Or at least a shitty review of it on his blog.
In his latest essay, Chuck takes a break from sports, heavy metal, failed relationships and hipster metaphors to tap into the national subconscious. Either that, or he’s been reading the blogs. Aren’t they the same thing, really?
Something has been occupying my mind as of late, and I can’t tell if this thought is reassuring or terrifying: I’ve been thinking about the possibility of revolution, or—more accurately—the impossibility of revolution. I’ve started wondering what would have to happen before the American populace would try to overthrow its own government, and how such a coup would play itself out. My conclusions are that a) nothing could make this happen, and b) no one would know what to do if it somehow did. The country is too large, its social systems are too complex, and its people are too complacent, too reasonable, and too confused. I’ve decided that the U. S. government is (for lack of a better, preexisting term) “unoverthrowable.” And this would probably make a man like Patrick Henry profoundly depressed, were it not for the fact that he’s been dead for 207 years.
What is being asked here.. is simply… is it Go Time?
The answer is obviously no… because if the answer was yes, we wouldn’t be reading silly things on the net right now… we’d be shooting, looting, hiding, being shot at, blowing things up, and generally having a great time. These things are not happening… so clearly its not Go Time.
Yet.
But when is Go Time? To answer the emailer, we really do need to sit and wait. Its coming… for sure. The dollar is rapidly falling to hell. Big Oil is converting their pricing to Euros. China has made it clear that they are getting out of the dollar. At best, recession is on the way… at worst?
Roughly at the same time, the proprietress at Tiny Cat Pants starts kvetching about the 2nd amendment at her place:
I have a few thoughts. I think it’s clear that the intent of the second amendment is to insure that ordinary citizens can pose a credible threat to the government, if it should ever become necessary. As scary as I find guns, I think that, if we agree that that’s the point of the second amendment, there really should be no ban on what kinds of arms individuals can own.
What is it in the national zeitgeist that has folks wondering about the stability of our government? It isn’t that anyone necessarily agrees on the who, what, when or how, but something in our lizard brains is triggering the “fight or flight” mechanism. Like when animals can sense an earthquake before it happens, our collective spider-sense is tingling.
Be it the Left Behind cash-cow of the Religious Right or the current popularity of zombies in film and fiction, it seems like everyone has the end of the world on their minds.
“People have apocalypse on the brain right now,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s from terrorism, the war, natural disasters like Katrina.” Several zombie aficionados said there was a zombielike quality to the spread of the bird flu.
Zombies, Mr. Brooks said, are the perfect goblin for such times, in part because they suggest broad social collapse, when anyone — a policeman, a nurse, a friend — can turn into a force of evil. With a werewolf or vampire, all the evil is concentrated on a single creature; with zombies, the evil is everywhere.
“They go hand in hand with apocalyptic scenarios,” Mr. Brooks said. “You can’t have one zombie. You’ve got to have millions of them. Society has to be breaking down. And zombies aren’t in conventional horror settings. Zombies find you. The sun comes up, and they’re still there. You call the cops, and they’re still there. They create a chain reaction of societal collapse.”
Societal collapse. We see it every night on the news. You can’t run the Baghdad office of Randstadt without half of your workers going up in a fireball each and every morning. It is happening right in front of us. The obvious question then becomes, “What if that happened here?”
Klosterman brings up the scenario of what if the Feds did even less during the Katrina mess. What if they wrote off New Orleans as a bottomless pit of despair and futility? Imagine Brownie saying, “This filthy city will always be under sea level, no amount of levee building and local corruption will stop it from flooding again. So, we’re cutting our losses and blowing the bridges. If you choose to remain, I suggest you rent a copy of ‘Escape From New York’. Good Luck.”
DC Comics did the same thing after Gotham City got levelled by an earthquake a few years ago. The Feds just wrote it off as a lost cause and it became a dystopian nightmare, rather than the run of the mill crime-ridden nightmare.
Will it be a natural disaster that causes folks to overthrow the authorities? It probably came close in New Orleans as FEMA officials kept citizens from going out in private boats to look for survivors. At what point, say, in the increasingly boring show Jericho, will the residents tell the government to “fuck off, we’re doing just fine without you?”
The question we have to ask ourselves is, “If one of these nutty predictions came to pass, do we have the skills necessary to survive?” That doesn’t mean, “Do you own a gun?” Although, that would come in handy. More like, can you grow your own food? Do you know first aid? Can you do any number of things that our grandparents knew how to do back when people were a little more self-sufficient?
When this apocalypse/societal collapse comes, guess who is going to wind up at the top of the heap? The illegal aliens, that’s who. They grow our vegetables, butcher our meat, repair our machines and build our shelters. The skill sets they posess will be in far greater demand than political science professors, record executives and C++ programmers.
All I know is that I’ll be safe in my cabin in the woods.
Today is going to be a great day. I had a fairly good night’s sleep. Upon awakening, The Sugar Momma and I engaged in behavior that can only be considered life-affirming, pleasurable, and an excellent reason to get up in the morning. Or it was the most awful, filthy thing on earth that you should save for someone you love. Either way, I’m a big fan.
After flipping on the TV, it became clear that the day was only going to get better. Al-Zarqawi is dead. Finally some good news. He got blowed up real good. Thank Allah for the JDAM.
Monica Crowley just said on the air that this news is better than sex. Which is a sad commentary regarding her current boyfriend, more than it is an accurate view of the latest development in the War on Terror.
Sugar Momma announced from the bathroom that I won’t be a father, at least for the near term. This day can’t get any better, can it?
Watching The Defectives 
