Britney Spears and the downfall of America

I have often mentioned that Joe Bageant and his blog are among my favorite sources for depressing insights into the discouraging state of this once great nation as it plunges headlong into catastrophic collapse. Here lately he has filled in the spaces between his own thoughtful but rather long essays by printing letters from his correspondents and his replies to them, which often amount to mini-essays. And in a recent letter from “Robert (from) New Mexico” (which is the only identity he vouches to his correspondents), one line jumped out at me as a sort of crystalline summary of what I’ve been thinking for years: “Any system that encourages the participation of stupid people, is doomed to fail.” I think that encapsulates my attitude in a pithy (or pissy) apothegm.

I’m not sure why I’ve picked on Britney Spears as a symbol of this, except that Bageant himself has occasionally mentioned our national obsession with the pitiful shenanigans in the personal life of this half-witted loser; and just this morning, during the five minutes of mainstream-media newsertainment in which I sometimes indulge while eating breakfast (although I don’t know why it doesn’t take my appetite), sure enough, another item about America’s Favorite Vagina managed to crop up in that short time span. And one can hardly avoid the conviction that a nation which sits spellbound at the latest trivia about the life of some witless Barbie doll whose single claim to fame is her exposure of her snatch to cameras, is indeed stupid enough to be doomed to fail. (I’m not sure what conclusion can be drawn from this, but I’m convinced that if someone like Kevin Federline, a similarly hollow cultural nonentity, had exposed his cock to cameras, it would never have been shown the first time, far less become a national obsession viewed thousands of times. He’d simply have been arrested for indecent exposure and the case closed. There’s some sort of sex-discrimination at work here.)

However, one of the themes of Bageant’s criticism is that the nation is not really as stupid as the mainstream media treat it, a vaguely optimistic belief which he bases on the intelligence of his own readers. On the other hand, the number of people waking up and smelling the vomit, while probably growing, is still such an infinitesimally small proportion of the total populace that their increasing awareness can hardly be called a groundswell just yet. But if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the people are not really as stupid as the media treat them, then why do the media treat them that way? They claim that if it improves their viewer ratings, that must confirm their assumptions. But there is a darker possible explanation: they treat their viewers like imbeciles in order to make them imbeciles. The system doesn’t just encourage the participation of stupid people, it encourages them to be stupid; it creates stupid people! (It’s plain as a pikestaff that the system actively discourages the participation of the growing minority who are figuring things out.) And why would they do that? Because they don’t know that this dooms the system to failure? Or because they want the system to fail?

Which system are we talking about here? I think there are two, or at least two levels to the one system. The level I think “Robert” is talking about above, the one doomed to fail, is that on which the system of democratic government is supposed to represent and serve the needs of the people, regardless of how smart or stupid they may be assumed to be. The level which seems to be deliberately encouraging that level to fail is the level of corporate power barons who control every facet of society, and whose control is ensured by a populace who either don’t know what the power barons are doing (because they’ve been fed pictures of celebrity snatches rather than real news), or know and don’t care. Their abuse of control thrives at the expense of the people who have to be kept anesthetized to the fact that their lives are being sacrificed to the power structure. And as long as these deliberately created morons are participating in the system to the extent of legitimizing it—by such banal exercises in pointless futility as voting for which branch of the corporatist party will be propped up as a façade for the power barons for the next four years, and by feeding it with their lifeblood by consuming the tons of useless shit which become a major part of the anesthesia—then the system which should succeed is indeed doomed to fail, and the system which has doomed it will survive and continue to rape the people and the planet.

And we’ll all settle back and listen to another story about poor Britney’s poor kids. (And I’ll take some lessons in rhetoric and syntax—when pigs fly.)

Bah, humbug!

Yes, it’s Scrooge talking to you here—Scrooge, the Grinch, any character you can think of who will rain on the orgy which Krismus has become in the last however many years you want to date it back to. Decorations? Right after I bought my mobile home back in October ’89, my friends at church had a house-warming party for me, and as it was then close to Krismus and the house-warming gifts were all supposed to be tacky and tasteless, I got several tacky and tasteless Krismus decorations, the details of which I will not go into. I never took them down. They have been in the same place 365¼ days a year for 18 years now, not only just as tacky and tasteless but now covered with 18 years of dust as well. That’s my Krismus decorations.

No, I won’t go into how the “true spirit of Christmas” has been corrupted and raped by commercialism; that ground has been gone over so many hundreds of time by so many hundreds of people that it’s a dead horse (block that metaphor!). My diatribe is simply that IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET! Re-read that carefully: IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET!! I have no objection to Christmas being properly celebrated when it is Christmas, but in the liturgical calendar (look it up; I’m not going to explain here what the liturgical calendar is), Christmas starts on the 25th (and runs until 5 January), it does not end then. Up until then, it is Advent: looking forward expectantly to Christmas, preparing for it. For this reason, I refuse to sing or play Christmas carols (or whine and moan if I’m pressured into it) and am, if anything, perhaps more upset by the blasphemous mangling of them which is blared in every store than I am by the commercialism. (And when I use the term “Christmas carols,” I mean Christmas carols, not secular abominations like “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon” and “I’m dreaming of a green cash till” and “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire”—although I am rather fond of “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” I kind of like to hear the secular songs mangled; it somehow seems appropriate to the spirit of commercialism.) I guess it’s supposed to be a well-intentioned effort to put some kind of half-assed “Christmas spirit” into the spending frenzy, but for me it has the opposite effect of making the spending frenzy a little more obscene.

This confusion of seasons adds an extra dimension of irritation to the continuing circus side-show of that obnoxious, demagogic clown O’Reilly when he keeps yapping about how one symptom of the alleged “war on Christmas” is the fact that salespersons in stores have the temerity to say “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Actually, the first is considerably more appropriate than the second: it is a secular holiday, but it is not Christmas, and it is therefore incorrect to chastise people for failing to say “Merry Christmas.” Of course, one could hardly expect such an ignorant twit as O’Reilly to know this; he probably never heard of Advent or the liturgical calendar. But even though his trumped up war on Christmas is a hoax, I must admit to being slightly saddened that the singing of Christmas carols is no longer allowed in schools.

The city of Boulder (Colorado) has for decades put a large star made of lights (I’m not sure how large, maybe 100 feet end to end?; large enough to be visible from 20 miles away) on the prominent hillside (Flagstaff Mountain) west of town during the holidays, and it’s a tradition dearly loved by almost everyone in the city. Almost. As you might have expected, some obnoxiously militant atheist got up in arms years ago about the display of a Christian symbol on government land (it’s part of the Boulder Parks system)—you know the routine. A friend of mine had an editorial letter published in the local paper, in which he suggested that if it would make this person feel better, we could change the display to a symbol of her faith: a huge zero. We need more sarcasm in daily affairs.

And don’t get me started on outdoor decorations, the most opulent of which can be seen from outer space without magnification. These are people who have obviously never heard of energy conservation. . . .

Joining the rabble

I have a horrible confession to make—a terrible, shameful, humiliating confession of a shocking plunge into depravity and loathsomeness. Sorry, nothing to do with sex; that’s old hat. No, it’s worse than that: I’ve started dieting. Oh, please forgive me! I don’t know what I was thinking of when I did it! Well, yes, actually I know perfectly well what I was thinking of: I was thinking of 195 pounds on 5 feet 7 inches, among many other things. My chagrin regarding this derives from the fact that I’ve always had a sort of supercilious contempt for people who felt they had to indulge in such vain attempts to improve their appearance or health or whatever. Well, I said to myself arrogantly, I’ll never descend to that level. And here I am, down with the rabble.

Spent Halloween with my niece and nephew-in-law and their two kids, who said they had recently started the South Beach diet (a.k.a. the South Park diet to the cynical) because they had felt the need to trim weight off what looked to me like healthily trim bods, and they raved about the results they had seen in only a few weeks. And it was only a few days earlier that I had suffered the shocking reality check mentioned above at a doctor’s visit. (The pain in my leg mentioned in the last post turns out to be superficial phlebitis, which always sounds to me like flea-bites but is actually inflammation of arteries—or, in bad cases, deep veins—in the legs.) So I thought, well what the hell, I have to do something, I might as well try this.

I enrolled for it online instead of buying a book. Online enrollment costs some bucks, but not nearly as much as wine or high-speed internet. And it involves the option of journaling, if you want to keep track of your “progress,” and the chance to browse other journals to see how their authors are doing. It’s supposed to motivational, I guess. Most of the others restrict themselves to a line or two of telegraphic brevity, but yours truly, of course, could not resist the temptation to use a dieting journal as yet another platform for the display of his keen, insightful intellect and deathless, scintillating prose, and turns his journal entries into small essays. And, not very surprisingly, I don’t have any more audience in this medium than I do in this blog. In my browsing journal entries, my own never show up. Once more, my fragrance wasted on the desert air. I was tempted to widen the scope of my oblivion by copying the journal entries into the blog, but they involve too many details of the diet which would be boring and meaningless to anyone not sharing it.

But browsing the other journals has been a bit of an eye-opener and, I hate to say, has rather confirmed my perception of dieters as rabble. A not-surprisingly-large proportion of them are what are called yoyo dieters—people who try again and again and again, often with several different diets (Atkins often being mentioned), and either fail to lose any weight because they keep falling off the wagon, or lose it and then gain it back (I’ve seen a few of my friends do that). And their woeful tales of weakness and despair are full of guilt and remorse, sometimes approaching self-loathing, and they often come across as losers, whether born that way or made. One woman blamed her fall from grace on the fact that she was missing the boyfriend she’d broken up with. And yes, not at all surprisingly, the vast majority are women—hardly any men, from what I can tell. This could be expected on the basis of the numerous obscene cow whales I see in supermarkets, their carts piled to overflowing with junk I can’t even stand to look at, and the general obsession of this nation’s women with their appearance. Only in Boulder do the men seem to be as vain as the women everywhere else.

I’ve been on SBD (as it’s called by its users) only four days, and I’ve already failed to maintain the discipline for two of those, once when a dear friend invited me to dinner, and once during the weekly Sunday brunch of the church choir. And, as I have discussed in detail in the journal, I refuse to feel guilty about it. “The essential issue is, who’s in control, the diet or me? If the diet is in control, I’ll feel guilty about failing to keep it; if I’m in control, I won’t. It would be easy to say that if I were really in control, I wouldn’t break it in the first place, but the point is, I’m in control when I break it.” Yes, the other journalers have indeed motivated me: they’ve motivated me to avoid falling into the guilt trap they’ve fallen into. “The point has been made elsewhere that it’s as easy to become addicted to dieting as it is to suffer the addiction to food that made dieting necessary. Addictive behavior can attach itself to almost anything anyone does: eating, dieting, drinking, exercise, religion, work, you name it. If it’s intrinsically good, it can be turned bad by addiction.” The rabble are diet addicts—dietoholics, to coin yet another loathsome neologism. I am not one of the rabble, and I will not let South Park turn me into a dietoholic.

And I’ll probably never lose much weight. C’est la goddamn vie, as one of my teachers used to say.

Just checking in

Oh, gosh, has it been two months since my last post? Ask me how much I care. Time flies when the world is coming to an end. Has anything important kept me too busy to write during this time? Ask me what I consider important. I was once criticized, by a friend who herself took things entirely too seriously, for my not taking music sufficiently seriously, to which I replied, “Music is entirely too important to take seriously.” It seemed like a clever paradox at the time, and had the desired effect of making her do a mild double-take, but in fact, not even music is that important. Yes it is; why did I say that? Because I’m trying to make a case for not taking seriously even things which deserve to be taken seriously. To quote the motto of the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers (ANAL) Party: Nothing really matters; and even that doesn’t, really.

I waste hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on the computer. I almost wish I’d never gotten one. I originally got one—a model I can’t even remember the name of, back in the cybernetic Stone Age—for the purpose of processing music. Now, about 5% of my computer time is devoted to music-processing, about 45% to word-processing, and about 50% to web-browsing. I almost never walk any distance of more than 2 miles anymore, and most of that is around the city, not up in the mountains where I ought to be. My dog sits and looks at me wistfully and whines every once in a while. My health is going to hell in a hand-basket. The computer is ruining my life.

But I guess it’s still better than the idiot box. I find it easy to wean myself away from that because I don’t have cable and my reception of the mainstream channels is so lousy that it’s not very enjoyable to watch. So I read. Books. I gather I’m in a vanishing minority in that pastime. And the only one of any importance I’m reading now is Beckett’s Watt.

Beckett is well known to the cognac-scented, pardon me, cognoscenti, and perhaps to a large number who are not, or may arguably be, among the cognoscenti, as probably the greatest Irish writer since James Joyce, and was in fact himself deeply influenced by Joyce, as well as being considered, generally but perhaps arguably, an existentialist, and certainly and unarguably an absurdist, and in fact, one of the founders, so to speak, of the theatre of the absurd, as in Waiting for Godot, famous for the savage humor with which he portrays not simply the absurdity but, according to some, the pessimism of the human condition, although others argue that he is really not pessimistic, since, for all its absurdity, life, in his vision, has a certain grim nobility, this vision being expressed in a style which is noted, particularly in Watt, for sentences of labyrinthine and at times almost incomprehensible complexity, running on for pages on end, although still, at that, more easily comprehensible than, say, The unnamable, in which the text runs on for page after page without the slightest comforting landmark of any punctuation or any other sort of break whatsoever, reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s free-association soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, to refer back to Beckett’s indebtedness to Joyce, and reminding one, in the case of Watt, in terms of bewildering sentence structure, of some of the more distinctive idiosyncrasies of German, a language whose tendency to turgidity is perhaps most famously exemplified in the critical works of Kant, and which is notorious for its use of separable-prefix verbs such as, say, zurückhalten, to hold back, in which the prefix zurück may be separated from the root halten by twenty lines of text, so that, by the time one gets to the prefix, one may very well have forgotten what root it was attached to, although this does not, of course, occur in English, so that one of Beckett’s distinctive trademarks is the stringing together of subordinate clauses that have their own subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of the subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of those subordinate clauses, creating the same effect of losing track of whatever verb started all this, as well as running through all the permutations and combinations of a series of items, such as a series of people, or a series of physical attributes, or a series of dogs, such combinations, again, running on for line after line after line, and adding to both the humor and the absurdity, since it is, after all, both humorous and absurd to mention that a followed b and b followed c on Monday, but a preceded b and b preceded c on Tuesday, and both a and c followed b on Wednesday, and both a and c preceded b on Thursday, and so on, thus giving the impression that life is so pointless that one is reduced to such desperate devices to try to give it some meaning.

I don’t do it as well as Beckett, obviously. Imitation is the easiest form of laziness.

Time for a drink. My leg hurts. I’m probably suffering from some terminal condition—besides life, I mean. I’ll probably die soon. If you don’t hear from me for another two months, assume the worst. It’ll be Christmas then, which is an appropriate time for catastrophes to happen. A friend of mine actually told me she worried about me when I didn’t return her phone calls because she wondered whether I’d died or not. How touching.

Save the Planet: Kill Yourself

Remember when I wrote (11 Feb) about Homokaasu’s “Kill Everyone Project”? Not surprisingly, they finished virtually killing everyone months ago, so that’s kind of obsolete by now. But now the stakes have been upped from the weirdly bizarre to the disgustingly sick, from killing the entire world population to killing yourself. As an example of the strange connections one can find in Internet links, I was linked to this from the Wikipedia page on “Sacred geometry,” of all things, to which I had been led in researching the “music of the spheres.” On the “Sacred geometry” page, there was this note: “Chris Korda, an infamous software engineer and leader of the Church of Euthanasia, designed an open-source software — ”

Wait a minute. The Church of Euthanasia? Is this for real? Yes, kiddies, it’s for real: its website is www.churchofeuthanasia.org, and they even have their own Wikipedia page, which quotes CoE’s own FAQ page, where we learn: “The Church of Euthanasia is a non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth. We believe this can only be accomplished by a massive voluntary population reduction. … The Church has only one commandment, and it is ‘Thou Shalt Not Procreate.’ In addition, we have four ‘pillars’ or principles, which are Suicide, Abortion, Cannibalism and Sodomy.” (They explain that cannibalism refers to consuming the already dead—as if it didn’t by definition—and sodomy refers to any sexual act that doesn’t lead to procreation. Also, “voluntary” is emphasized in order to eliminate any impression that they’re advocating killing others. Glad they cleared that up.) Their quarterly publication is called Snuff it, and their usual slogan is the title of this post: “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself”—and that’s a relatively innocuous one. They go downhill from there, with such gems as “Eat people, not animals” and “Eat a queer fetus for Jesus.” Of course, population reduction is a worthy cause to support, but their tactics may not be the best way to support it. The “Family album” shows photos of their actions at various demonstrations intended to promote their cause, but many of the actions depicted and signs displayed (such as a 15-foot inflatable penis and “Sperm-free cunts for the Earth”) are so deliberately offensive and provocative that I can’t imagine them winning very many sympathizers. I think they consider it a form of Dadaism, but it’s Dadaism with an attitude (which is okay, since the original Dadaism certainly had an attitude). Some of their stuff is sick enough to push even my envelope, and I have a pretty liberal tolerance for sick humor; I will spare you the details on these. If you have a really strong stomach, you can research the site yourself, but be forewarned.

It gets worse

I wish I’d known this when I wrote the previous post. Only hours later, I hear on the 10:00 news that biology professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder are receiving threatening e-mails, including death threats, for teaching evolution at the university. Whether or not the perps are college students has not been determined, but it’s fairly clear that they are, like the maniacs who murder abortion doctors, confessed followers of the God of peace and love. One group “protects life” by killing others who they think don’t “respect” it, the other protects doctrinal purity by threatening to kill people who teach heresy at a state university. These monsters cannot and should not call themselves “Christian”; they should be locked up in mental institutions. We worry about Islamo-fascist terrorists and yet seem to accept with little question the growing number of Christo-fascist terrorists in our midst. Can we blame this on the climate of intolerance and paranoia fostered by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the pack of vicious thugs who are destroying this nation from their positions in the national government? Will we ever recover from the damage those psychopaths have done and will continue to do for the next nineteen months? Stay tuned for breaking developments, as the simpering androids who do newsertainment cheerfully tell us.

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.”