Another alternate reality

Well, no one should be particularly surprised at my silence here lately, since I said on 2 June (“Have a nice day”) that I was running out of anything worth saying. However, in my wanderings around the blogo-
sphere, or just in my casual encounters with what claims to be the real world (filtered through such windows as The Funny Times and the Onion newspaper), I frequently run across little items that strike me as so insane that they seem to deserve some comment, although I rarely get around to making any. But this one can hardly go by unnoticed.

As usual, I ran across this in a long and complicated sequence of following one Internet link after another—a sort of Internet free-association—and eventually ended up in a blog called “Dadahead”, where a post on 29 March 06 (“Galileo was wrong”) mentions the work of Robert Sungenis and his argument that Earth really is the center of the universe and does not rotate, and the Sun rotates around Earth. This is, of course, simply another instance of the same sort of lunacy as Creationism/Intelligent Design, and although one would think that “geocentrism” would be somewhat more difficult to sell, it turns out that Sungenis, while probably the best known proponent, is by no means the only one; there are several other such fruit-loops. And the kicker is that Sungenis is not, like most proponents of Intelligent Design, an evangelical fundamentalist, but a Roman Catholic—president of “Catholic Apologetics International.” And it turns out that, even though both beliefs are based on biblical literalism, the Creationists don’t always support the Geocentrists. Even among the literalists, there is disagreement about which parts of the Bible are more literal than others. I once asked a literalist how she reconciled the belief that Creation was supposed to have occurred in six “days” with the fact that a day is biblically defined as the rotation of the Sun around Earth and the Sun wasn’t created until the fourth “day.” Or, for that matter, where the “light” on the first “day” came from before the Sun was created. She looked vaguely uncomfortable and lamely muttered that it was a matter of “faith.”

What is there about religion that brings out the worst in people?—the worst stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst fanaticism, the worst hatred and intolerance. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; it was supposed to bring out the best in people—and occasionally still does, although apparently to an extent that seems to be diminishing daily. Those whose religion inclines them to love and peace and justice and acceptance are rapidly losing ground to the growing number of those who use their perversions of religion to justify ignorance and hatred and intolerance and war and murder, and of atheists who dismiss all religion because of the evils perpetrated by the fanatics and theo-fascists.

Several years ago, the Onion ran a story about a new movement among fundamentalists to replace the (Newtonian) theory of gravity with the theory of Intelligent Pushing: objects do not fall to Earth because they are “pulled” by gravity but because they are pushed by God. Someone once said that a satirist is always faced with the problem of dreaming up a story so manifestly absurd that it won’t eventually become a fact in the real world.

Monty Python’s The meaning of life features a song in which the last line is: “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.”

Reality imitates psychosis

Back in 11 February, in “The Kill Everyone Project,” I wrote about a Finnish group called “The Sect of Homokaasu,” or just plain “Homokaasu,” a Finnish word which means “gay gas.” The source of the name “involves a long, breathtakingly paranoid rant by some guy who claims the Roman Catholic church was pumping poison gas into his room to make him a homosexual.”

Then a few weeks ago I ran across a post on “Only in America” (“Democracy at the end of a barrel, gayness at the end of a bomb,”
4 June), based on a BBC News article of 15 January 05, that says the geniuses of military strategy and guardians of American morality whose work our tax dollars pay for really were thinking, in 1994, of “building a ‘gay bomb’, which would make enemy soldiers ‘sexually irresistible’ to each other. . . . The plan for a so-called ‘love bomb’ envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.” Of course it never occurred to the rocket scientists behind this idea that in certain historic cultures (like Greece during the Trojan War; see Achilles and Patroclus), gay attachments among the troops were an important factor in strengthening morale, although it would have the desired effect among Muslims who, like fundamentalist christo-fascists, are rabidly homophobic. (However, the terrorists do not “fight” in troop formation, so it really wouldn’t work after all.) Fortunately (or unfortunately?), the plans “were never pursued.” The same BBC story also says that “researchers pondered a ‘Who? Me?’ bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.” I like that idea even better. Turn our enemies into farting gay-boys. (“Well, I’d really love to kiss you, if you’d only stop that horrible farting!” “Who, me? It’s you that’s polluting the air!”) Is this a great country or what? How often are the Roman Catholic Church (in Finland) and the U.S. Department of Defense on the same page?

Have a nice day

Let’s face it, that half-assed piece of shit about “Martyrdom and Hate” which I was talking about working on all the way back in March has suffered a well-deserved abortion. Yup, vacuumed all the little bloody pieces out of the, no wait, that’s something else, I mean it’s been on the back burner for so long that it’s simply burned or boiled away. And good riddance; it was me at my most insufferably pompous and bombastic. Besides, I’m not only running out of anything I consider worth saying, I’m running out of any motivation for saying it if there were any such thing. In fact, I’ve become rather more depressed than usual at the rapidly mounting piles of shit which seem to be smothering the world. Joe Bageant, whom I mentioned with such praise back in 24 March (“Life without blogging”), is such a mercilessly acute critic of the present descent of Babylon into chaos and madness that reading him can quickly become something of a bummer. Basically, he seems to destroy any reason for anyone to hope that anything can get any better. His scorn and contempt for the Dummy-crats is, if anything, more savage than that for the Republicans, because the former have treacherously betrayed all the principles for which they are supposed to stand, whereas the latter have steadfastly upheld all those for which they stand. And his loathing for the Dummy-crats extends to all liberals generally, whom the party is supposed to represent. Even before the entire Congress recently begged the Mad Emperor for the privilege of standing in line to suck his cock by writing him a blank fucking check for his evil war, Bageant was warning that any appearance of the “liberals” attaining victory because of pissed-off conservatives leaving the ranks was an illusion because their defection was only a temporary aberration and they would come flocking back to the True Faith when the chips were down. Bageant grew up in the belly of the Beast and speaks from first-hand experience when he says that these people—his people—basically welcome any kind of catastrophic shit which they think will hasten the Second Coming of their sick, vicious, heretical version of kick-ass, meaner-’n-shit Jesus à la that Left Behind vomit—and that includes continuing and even worsening conflict in the Middle East, where the occurrence of Armageddon is an important part of their vision of the future.

Regarding the recent Congressional gang-bang of the Mad Emperor, the satirical White House has a cheerful and typically sarcastic take in “Iraq Funding Approved: President lauds Democrats’ courage to stay true to their spineless jellyfish convictions”: “[A]fter all their chest-pounding and tough talk about pulling the plug on my pet abortion of a war, [they] done went and tucked their packages between their legs. … Hot diggety, I love the smell of political cowardice in the morning.” So much for the so-called Democratic “victory” in November; I was by no means the only one who suspected all along that it was a hollow, fraudulent scam.

Yes, a faithful reading of Bageant has made me lose all hope of anything getting any better, at least in my lifetime, which, at the age of 70, I don’t expect to be much longer—or hope it isn’t. I really don’t want to be here when the shit seriously hits the fan and civilization collapses in anarchy. And when you factor in the accelerating pace of global deterioration from warming, now seen to be happening at a much faster pace than previously thought, it’s not gonna be just here in the Divided States that it’ll happen. We will be in the unenviable position of having been primarily responsible for the collapse of the entire fucking planet.

One of my crazier friends (a lot of them are more or less off), who died about two years ago, had a small arsenal in his home in suburban Lyons CO (have I told this already? do I repeat myself?)—at least twenty weapons with ammo, most of which I can’t even remember the names of, several of them illegal to own—which he said he was prepared to use when the above scenario occurred and marauding hordes of savages came pouring over the top of the canyon ridge across from his house, which he expected to happen in his own lifetime. He also expected to live more or less indefinitely by having all his failing body systems replaced by artificial ones, making him a kind of bionic man. Fortunately, neither of his expectations came to pass. But if I live longer than I want to, or if the shit-storm occurs as quickly as some of the gloomier prophets predict, I might yet see it. And so might you—almost certainly.

So, have a nice day.

Flappy-bedded toes

Yes, I hate to admit that I’m going to be yet another of the hundreds of people weighing in with an opinion on the pious sacrifice of Don Imus to the vengeful gods of Political Correctness. In a brief survey of the Internet, I have found, for starters, only the Rude Pundit and Kinky Friedman (though there may be more) coming to his defense, as distinguished from the dozens who have disemboweled him and fed his entrails to the jackals. It naturally stands to reason that the Rude Pundit would defend him, since he himself actually brags about a level of political incorrectness which exceeds that of Imus by orders of magnitude. Friedman not only passionately protests Imus’s sacrificial slaughter but goes on to praise him for his charitable work and to compare his martyrdom with those of “Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, [and] Mozart.” (Excuse me? Mozart?) I, on the other hand, tend to agree with Pundit, who maintains that Imus was an insufferably obnoxious asshole (and who should know better than Pundit?). But that’s the whole point of freedom of speech. As I have vigorously argued for years, freedom of speech means absolutely nothing if it does not mean the freedom to be an obnoxious asshole. Evidently none of Imus’s executioners ever heard, or if they heard, ever took to heart, the maxim attributed to Voltaire about disagreeing with what someone says but defending to the death his right to say it. And to call it hate speech? Come on, pussies! There wasn’t a trace of hatred in Imus. Recklessness and imprudence perhaps, but nothing approaching hatred. Anybody who could not recognize to begin with that it was just another of his many thoughtlessly crude attempts to be funny, or who could not accept his apologies which tried to point this out to the humor-impaired, just needs to stop taking themselves so fucking seriously and get a goddamn life! If I were anywhere near that pathologically sensitive to being called a fag or a homo, I’d be a worse basket case than I already am. He apologized, fer crissakes, but this does not satisfy the tar-and-feather mob. They want blood, not contrition.

No, this is just another sorry spectacle of what we get when we let the Political Correctness fascists run rampant and unchecked, as they have been doing for decades, to the grievous detriment of any open and honest communication in the pitiful pack of sniveling losers and self-declared victims that this sick fucking society has become. When I get further depressed by reading Joe Bageant, I lose all hope of ever seeing this tragically failed nation of ours get its shit together and pull back from the brink. A growing number of recent cartoons depicts us as lemmings happily running over a cliff. (“Well, if everyone’s doing it, it must be all right.”) A sadly apt metaphor, I fear.

Life imitates comedy

Way back in 16 December, in my post on “Books I’m reading,” I referred to a passage in Lenny Bruce’s How to talk dirty and influence people (1965) in which he uses a humor skit, presented as a hypothetical argument between Bruce and a night club owner, to discuss the hypocrisy of the latter refusing to put “Tits and Asses” on his marquee because they are dirty, vulgar words.

“Titties are dirty and vulgar?”

No, … it’s not the titties, it’s the words, it’s the way you relate them. You can’t have those words where kids can see them.

“Didn’t your kid ever see a titty?”

I’m telling you, it’s the words.

“I don’t believe you. I believe, to you, it’s the titty that’s dirty, because I’ll change the words to ‘Tuchuses and Nay-nays Nightly!’ ”

That’s a little better.

“Well, that’s interesting. You’re not anti-[Yiddish] idiomatic, you’re anti-Anglo-Saxon idiomatic. Then why don’t we get really austere? Latin: Gluteus maximus and Pectorales majores Nightly!’ ”

Now, that’s clean.

“To you, schmuck—but it’s dirty to the Latins!”

Now, to show how little progress has been made since Lenny died for our sins, this just in from a recent “News of the Weird” column. “The Atlantic Theater in the Jacksonville FL suburb of Atlantic Beach planned to stage several dramas this winter, including Eve Ensler’s ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ but following an undisclosed number of complaints from parents who said they were uncomfortable seeing that title, management changed its marquee to ‘The Hoohaa Monologues.’ (The change lasted one day, until management realized it was barred by contract from calling the play by another name.)” A Google on “hoohaa” hits a story from News4Jax.com, which was probably the source for the “N-o-t-W” piece, and which reveals, as I suspected, that the complaint(s) came from just one woman. Makes you wonder what kind of problems the poor lady had. (“Well, just seeing it up there in public made me feel funny in my, uh – hoohaa. And I didn’t like the feeling!”)

Countereffective christo-fascism

Having left “Martyrdom and hate” on the back burner for so long that it’s now stone cold, all I can come up with in the meantime is an observation that just occurred to me the other day, which seems so obvious that I wonder why it took so long. (Well, actually I have a pretty good idea why: my brain is slowly rotting away.) Having just now put together, on the one hand, the growing volume of atheistic writings I’m seeing that attack Christianity in particular and religion in general, and on the other hand, the increasingly fanatical and psychotic crusade of the christo-fascist evangelicals to make the U.S. a “Christian nation,” I’ve finally come to the realization that the former is a direct result of the latter—i.e., the fanatical, psychotic christo-fascists are turning the U.S. into a nation, not of more right-wing evangelicals but of more atheists. It would be nice if they could figure this out for themselves, so that they could stop pissing everybody off with their efforts, but the whole nature of fanaticism and psychosis is to be willfully blind to all the evidence of reality. I even think I’ve begun to detect (though it may be little more than wishful thinking) the beginnings of a movement of disillusioned evangelicals away from the lunatic fringe and a little bit more to the center—not to atheism, of course, but simply to a more reasonable form of Christianity. (Yes, guys, there is such a thing.) But the monster is still powerful enough politically to wreak havoc throughout the land and make our dearly beloved nation an object of ridicule and contempt to most of the civilized world.

Life without blogging

In case anybody noticed or cared that I’ve been absent from the Blogosphere for the last month and a half, it’s because I’ve been incredibly busy with music gigs—like “collapsing in exhaustion in the windows between gigs” kind of busy. I’ve also been working on another one of my typically long-winded, pompous rants, on “Martyrdom and hate,” which is taking more time and difficulty than usual because I’m kind of ambivalent and unclear as to what I think about it, and stuff I wrote a week ago looks like bullshit the next week. However, I still manage to waste untold hours surfing in cyberspace, and recently ran across a gem so precious that I feel I have to share it. He’s Joe Bageant, a not-quite-old (i.e., 10 years younger than me) curmudgeon in Winchester, Virginia, of all places (until recently fleeing to Belize), who writes with more rage and less humor and scatography than The Rude Pundit but with some very good ideas, very articulately stated. His particular shtick seems to be “class warfare,” between most of humanity and the incredibly small minority of blood-sucking parasites in the corporate plutocracy who control all the world’s wealth and governments, and for whom war is so profitable that it becomes their top priority to have as many as possible being fought on a constant basis. His observations on the witless sheep which the American people have let themselves be turned into are truly blistering. And his essays are even longer than mine, as well as angrier and more articulate. Check him out while you’re waiting for me to get back on line.