Asking for it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No?  You explain it then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would like you to dance

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

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

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

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

I fret, therefore I am.

or

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

or

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

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

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

BELLS ON WISDOM:

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

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

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

"Sexy" Halloween costumes are actually neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be realistic about how much booze you can drink.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Us, everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do know something you do not know. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yogi Berra was right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I secretly think we may all be fucked.

How to succeed in politics without really trying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nor do they have any inclination to learn.

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

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

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

That cuckold lives in bliss

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

Tripping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The damage done

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

How are they damaged?

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

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

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

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

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

Bet you can guess what that was.

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

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

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

Fuck yeah.

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

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

An Open Letter to Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown

Dear Genius,

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

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

It's true!

See, because if you are hiring a lawyer to sue someone who screwed you over, then yeah, you probably want a good amount of practical courtroom experience.  But if you are looking for a judge for the Supreme Court of the United States, practical courtroom experience is actually not really the most important thing.  Because Supreme Court judges don't argue cases.  What they do is, they listen to the guys arguing cases, and then - and pay attention, Scott, because this is the important part - then, they draw upon their vast knowledge and understanding of the law, and they use it to decide who wins.
 
Okay, so, if you look Kagan's resume, and here it is (again, click on the words to see it) compared to former Chief Justice (the Chief Justice is like the head guy of all the Justices) Rhenquist's resume, you know, just FYI (For Your Information) on that, you can see that wow!  She had some jobs where she really probably had to know a lot about the law!  And not just like who-can-sue-who-type law, but really complicated law, like the kind of laws that senators vote on.  And you are a senator, so you can ask one of your assistants to show you a copy of a law that you have voted on recently, and you can see for yourself that it's pretty complex and frankly, not just anyone can make head or tails of it. 
 
Also, I don't know if you know this, and it's not bad if you don't, because it was only a news story for a couple of weeks and it's summer - right? - and who really pays attention to the news in the summer? - but Elena Kagan used to work for a Supreme Court Justice!  No, she totally did! 
 
I know, weird, right?   
 
So anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up, you know, so just in case you wanted to maybe cool it with what you're saying?  Because it's not that smart? 
 
xoxoxox!
v.
 
p.s. And also BTW (By The Way), you can tell all your friends that when you criticize someone for not really being super open about their point of view on a lot of stuff, and you hint around that maybe they are kind of a liar, then really, if you ask me, you totally should not then go and lie about why you are not voting for that person.  Are you feeling me?  Just say you are not voting for her because you don't like the way she thinks about stuff.  That's all.  You shouldn't make up reasons that are just totally transparent.  Because it makes you hypocritical.  For real.

Hey momma, look sharp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small people got no reason to live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My bad

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

But it's a dry heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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