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 You may not want to read this. I’m just saying. If you know what I mean, then you know what I mean.
I’ve either been a big disappointment or a great grand joy this week; hard to tell sometimes. The mail often splits: hey, I come here for bilious intemperate political remarks, and you’re talking about Bounty Towels? Or it’s please, I really enjoy the domestic stuff, but don’t care much for the rants. I can either try to please everyone most of the time or some of the people all of the time, and most days I prefer the former.
Today is not one of those days. The spleen, she hurts. I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.
Unicameral house! Two year term! One term limit!
(Deep, cleansing breath)
There have been many things I’ve wished to write about this week. Michael Moore went to Germany and slammed America up and down for all the usual reasons – we don’t have passports! We only speak English! Our stupid minds! Stupid, stupid! We’re not like the cultured Europeans, who – aside from their occasional continent-shattering spasms of facism – are the epp-ee-tomay of culture and enlightenment. This, in the same week that a survey of EUians named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. (Sometimes I swear that if a European hits his thumb with a hammer when no one’s around, he shouts GODDAMN JEWS!)
Show Michael Moore a man in jeans holding a rake and a man in a suit with a briefcase, and he will not only automatically side with the guy who has the rake, he will assume that the briefcase contains plans to move the rake factory to Mexico, as well as documents that prove the company knew that its rakes gave people painful splinters at a rate 150% above EU standards. That’s what Moore sees. Could be true. Or the guy with the briefcase could be someone who runs a lawn-care company, and the guy with the rake is a parolee who did six years for murder, found Christ, and got hired when he met the CEO in the church basement for coffee after services. Could be true. But even if the latter is true in the specific example, Moore is sure it’s wrong in the greater sense.
Then Ted Rall wrote a column called “Why We Fight” in the voice of an Iraqi “resistance” fighter. I suppose it’s intended to help us understand the mindset of the enemy. Eh. The French have a saying: his head, it is filled with urine. Or they should have such a saying; I’m sure it would sound elegant and dismissive. These people aren’t the loyal opposition anymore; they’re just the opposition. They may say they love America, but they love some idealized nonexistent America that can never exist as long as there’s individuality and free will. They’re like people who say they love women and beat their wife because she doesn’t look like the Playboy centerfold. I’m sick of the lot of them. As for Rall, who cares about him? He’ll get his reward: the great yawning indifference of history. If people barely remember Kelly and Capp nowadays, what are the chances that they’ll remember someone who appeared to draw with his thumb?
I was worried that if I did write about the war, and urge courage and steadfastness, I would be branded one of those chickenbloggers, a phrase that’s going around the blog-world once more. Really? I have to fight before I can express my opinion? That’s like saying I have to live in Antartica to draw penguins. I was tempted to write about George Soros comparing Bush and America to the rise of the Nazis, but I’ve just had it with these people. I’m more interested in those who ride the coattails of their rhetoric. I want someone to ask Dean this question in the Presidential debate: “Governor Dean, one of your wealthiest backers has compared America in 2000s with German in the 1930s. Do you agree with this analogy?” The only acceptable answer to my ears is “No, I don’t.” Period. Any elaboration, any “no, buts,” any “nevertheless there are worrisome trends” will mark Howard Dean as a truly dangerous man, for he will show himself willing to use the most debased and paranoid argument in modern politics to put his butt in the big chair. Extreme? Okay: imagine a big Bush backer who explicitly made ties between Clinton and Stalin; imagine Bush saying “I don’t agree, but I do worry about the Democratic Party’s desire to socialize the economy; they had that in Soviet Russia, and we all now how that led to the gulag.” Inexcusable.
Elsewhere, in the heart of our Moral Better’s capitol, a flap over Sniper: they’re French rappers (yeau yeau hommeboix, j’avais le mic! E U Hammeur c’est ici, dans la maison!) who have been criticized for violent, anti-Semetic lyrics.
The interior minister on Wednesday promised legal action against what he called "racist" rap music, saying democracy grants free speech but not "the right to swear, to scorn and to humiliate."
I am now on record as being opposed to Sniper, but the Interior Minister has his tete up his interior, frankly. We should emulate the French? The Effin’ French? France! It has the F for Effin’ built right effin’ in, eff it! Here’s your nuanced approach, right here – Free Speech, oui, but not if it humiliates. The country that gave the world Voltaire is telling us the right to free speech doesn’t include the right to be scornful?
(Side note: wihle googling around to find out something about old Volty, I discovered that the phrase often misattributed to him – "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" – was probably said about him by a fellow named Tallentryre. Anyway, I was googling for another matter; I’d recalled from “Citizens,” Simon Schama’s incredible account of the French Revolution, that Voltaires pen-name was meant to capitalize on the great fascination with that new technology, Electricity. Can’t prove it, but I’m certain that’s the case. And it cracks me up – imagine walking 200 years from now to learn that one of the most esteemed thinkers of the end of the 20th century was someone named Cyberdude.)
Deeeeep breath.
Sorry. Long day, and many deadlines. And by long day I mean: trip to the pediatrician for the flu shot, tears, Gnat’s first dentist visit, school, the mall, home, dinner, playing for three hours before Mommy arrives – and that’s all before I got the chance to get to work. Come Friday night I will relaxed, though. It’ll all be better Friday night one way or the other.
Big news on Monday; stay tuned, and have a merry weekend.
I’m better now. Really. Really! Life is good. Even when you feel like you're chewing tinfoil all day, it's a reminder: you're alive. Zombies chew tinfoil, they feel nothing. And don't think it doesn't bother them.
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