Eugenics Begins With You!

Beauty Queens

I thought about this as I went to bed last night... and I've been shaking my head about it all day today.

Sarah Palin, meet Miss South Carolina...

Jebus bless America and other countries like The Iraq and Such As...

We're gonna need it.

McCain/Vaginas '08

Yeah, I said it... sorry.

No I'm not.

I know that picking on Sarah Palin is kindof old hat at this point - especially since there are bigger issues at hand... such as the complete implosion of our country's economy... but I just can't let this go.

Every time I hear this dolt open her mouth, I hear George W. Bush.

I watched a few clips of her with Katie Couric... and I just can't get it out of my head.  She wears the same expression I've grown so accustomed to after these last eight years, "Oh God... what do the words I'm saying mean?"  She had weeks to come up with a capable answer regarding the geography = foreign policy blunder from before... and when Couric lobbed her the opportunity she stared at her (borrowing from Bill) like a dog that'd just been shown a card trick.

On Israel - she tossed out an absurd statement, "we can't second-guess Israel..." without any thought at all about what it meant.  She just barfed out a talking-point... and the moment Couric countered her, (paraphrase) "So we don't have a say in our foreign policy when it comes to Israel?  We just do what they say?"  Palin goes on to contradict herself... and when faced with the contradiction?

The expressive equivalent of white noise.

shhhhhhhhhhhhcccccchhhhhhhhhchcccccchhhhhhh...

She had to think!  And you could smell the gears melting in her skull.

She's not evil.  She's not a Hitler.  She's a friggin dope... chosen for her position ENTIRELY because of her gender and arch-conservative social leanings.  Now it doesn't surprise me that social conservatives are rallying behind her... I'm used to them finding gimpy figureheads to uphold their absurd philosophies (see: the last eight years). 

But women?

Comeon.

More and more polls have shown a shift of white women behind Sarah Palin...

Are you really that stupid?  Really?

You're going to support this woman... just because she's a woman?

You're not voting on her positions... except for those of you who are, and you people are fucking crazy so I'm counting out you... you're voting for her because her personal experience supposedly matches your own.  Chicken-fried white chick with action-mom hair and a doughy ass, with a litter of redneck kids swinging from her teats. Nice call.

White women... you're not voting for an idea.  This isn't feminism - or maybe it is... I've never pretended to understand what that social movement has become.  You're not supporting a party.  You're certainly not voting for McCain.

You're not even voting for Sarah Palin!

You're voting for Sarah Palin's vagina.

Way to go.

Cont...

Going back over my last post, I realized that I paused at the WORST possible place imaginable:

"I made my earlier suggestion to African-Americans that, if they're not going to get behind (pardon the pun) gay rights, then they have to become second-class citizens again..."

YIKES!

I'll go over that again.  In my opinion, if black people - the one segment of American culture that is most connected to the notion of bigotry, intolerance and institutionalized hate - aren't going to get behind (there's that delicious pun again) the gay rights movement, they have to become second-class citizens again.  I am baffled by the rather strong anti-gay sentiment that exists in the black community.  Real freedom (which, admitteldy, continues to elude their community as a whole... but that's everyone when you get right down to it) is still warm for the black community.  The civil rights movement hit its stride forty years ago - that's nothing.  We're just now at the point where the perfectly-designed black guy might, MIGHT be President of the United States.  How could this group of people, still so addled by the poison that is bigotry, both personal and institutional, feel anything but solidarity for the gay community.

The answer is, of course, religion.  I'm not going to totally hate on religion right now - I do that enough in other blogs... but the strongest voice, in every racial and cultural group, against equal rights for homosexual-Americans always seems to come from the pulpit.  It's disgusting.

So that was that part... just my little, "woah, better check myself before I wreck myself" (man that was really white of me) before I move on.

I just got out of class.  They were, by and large, totally down with gay rights.  I'm oddly disappointed... I had set up the prior blog to prepare myself for their bigotry... and they were okay.  Hooray for learning lessons!

It's only fitting that they displayed exactly what Sullivan was talking about - a softening public perception of the gay community.  He later goes on to suggest that it is that very event that will eventually kill gay culture as we know it... and that such a reaction occurs for every group - racial, sexual, cultural - as our society progresses towards an ultimate sameness.  So hooray all around.

This leads me to wonder - since I'm still a miserable old cooter who refuses to see the sunny side of anything - what our culture's next great divide will be.  I'm not going to pretend that Barack Obama's candidacy and 21 students are going to change my opinions on the state of bigotry in the US.  It doesn't.  We're still totally unwilling to give homosexuals a fair shake, as a culture.  Give it another twenty years, I guess.  I'll wait.  But still, I'm not sure if the major divides of the past (racial, sexual) are what are really preventing the coalescing of a unified American culture.

I wonder what it is?

We're in the home-stretch of the Bush years now.  I'll be blogging about this a lot in the next few weeks.  It feels like an entire age is coming to an end - at least, I hope it is.  Never in my life have I seen a people so divided as I have in the last eight years.  Something about Bush's presidency - maybe it was Karl Rove's tactics, maybe Bush's rhetoric, maybe just the growing-pains of a culture... maybe, and hopefully, it's the death throws of Reagan's America - seemed to catalyze the two major sides of the American public.  The Reds and the Blues.

When did we start using those terms?  Red States/Blue States?  Have we always been this divided?  Can we continue to be, now that the cause of it is slinking from office?

I feel like the whole world as I know it is about to change... though I wonder if I'm right to think so.  I don't lend any of the credit for these feelings to either candidate - I think they're both full of shit... I think it's Bush.  We can't do this without him.  Removing him from our politics completely changes the America we've had... the America we were.  What's next?  Business as usual, harkening back to the pre-Bush days?  Is that even possible? 

Bah!  I'm a mess!  None of this is interesting!  I don't even want to write it... I'm just trapped in my office hours, and have already dealt with my students' problems.  Fuck it, I'm going home.  I'm gonna go rub the orange loaf that's certainly dozing on my couch right now.

I'll write about this again... and interestingly next time.

As for now... I dunno.

As for now, go fuck yourself.  How's that?

Dear Brothers and Sisters...

So I'm about to go talk to my students about gay culture.  I assigned them "The End of Gay Culture" by Andrew Sullivan - my favorite pink elephant on the planet.  For those who don't know him, Andrew Sullivan is a gay, republican journalist... who'd have thought, right?  He's a good republican - a fiscal conservative for all the right reasons (even if I don't agree with every one of them), and a fierce advocate for social progressiveness.  You've probably seen him on Real Time with Bill Maher - a show I've started to like less and less as time has gone by.

An aside:  Bill Maher annoys the living shit out of me.  We agree on nearly every issue - atheism, social liberalism, personal responsibility, the abject stupidity of the collective American voice... etc.  But he's just so in love with his own invented badboy image.  He behaves as though he's some grand advocate for social change - subverting the cultural norms by dating black porn stars and smoking pot.  Really, the guy's just a sleaze.  I agree with his ideas on marriage - that it's a floundering and archaic institution that doesn't have to be for everyone - but find his rhetoric on the subject to be horribly arrogant and divisive.  I realize the irony here... me criticizing another person for being crass, when the title of this blog (one which is the home of countless vitriolic rants) makes light of  one of the most horrible ideas ever to be put into practice - eugenics... but there's a difference between Bill Maher and myself.  I've never held myself up as the paragon of rational thought.  I know that I'm a loudmouthed complainer - a hysterical prick ranting into the vacuum of cyberspace.  Bill Maher has a television show and millions of viewers - and he acts as though that show was the last bastion of mature political debate.  It isn't.  That show died with Tim Russert.  I'm still not over that.  Anyway.

I don't know what to expect from these kids.  I'm far from hopeful.  Sure, Saint Joes is a Jesuit institution, and therefore a little more open-minded when it comes to social justice than the rest of Catholicism... but these kids come from all over the Catholic spectrum.  I've had a few namedrop God's providence - wipe away national and personal tragedy with the wholly flaccid, "God's will" argument.  Maybe it's Maherish of me... but I doubt a person's intellect when they resort to that.  It's so simple - so cruelly lazy.  Just like hate.  Hate is easy too.

I don't know what I'll do if I'm faced with bigotry.  How do I remain unbiased when I am so purely the opposite?  I'm furiously pro-gay rights.  Not because I hold any emotion in my heart for homosexuals - I don't give a tinker's damn about who a person takes to bed... it isn't that at all.  It's that our culture still seems to see homophobia as acceptable hate.  That just because God said it was wrong 2000 years ago, in a poorly-written book that's been translated and translated and translated a million times... that seems to justify their contempt for homosexuals.  We live in a country where equal rights for homosexuals (ie: marriage) is actually up for debate.  What's to talk about?  You're either equal or you're not.

I got a lot of pissy hate mail when I made my earlier suggestion to African-Americans that, if they're not going to get behind (pardon the pun) gay rights, then they have to become second-class citizens again.... shit... have to go teach.  I'll be back to finish this in a moment.  I'll keep you updated.

Since you all care so much.

On Hearts...

I've been especially introspective these last few days.  Lovelorn and mopey.  Here are my two most favorite quotes on the human heart.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime.  So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.  We are utterly open with no one, in the end - not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend.  We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.  Perhaps we must.  Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart.  When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.  You can brick up your heart stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

                                                                                       -  Brian Doyle
                                                                                              Joyas Voladoras

The worst stab wound is the one to the heart. Sure, most people survive it, but the heart is never quite the same. There’s always a scar, which I guess is meant to remind you that, even for a little while, someone made your heart beat faster. And that’s a scar you can live with. Proudly.  All days of your life.

                                                                                       - Oz

I love...

I write about what I hate so often.  It comes naturally to me - I'm a sour old wart.  But I think people get the wrong idea about me... probably because I'm always acting like such a sour old wart.  Recently, someone very dear to me commented on my propensity toward acting like a "sociopathic automaton."  I thought it was very clever of her - if a little inaccurate.  I'm hardly an automaton.  "Automaton" implies a lack of will - that I'm a slave to my wickedness.  I'm not.  Not at all.  I'm a Gemini.  A cop out, sure.  But it's still true.

To be fair, her suggestion was really that I put on that facade in order to disguise my vulnerabilities... which, to a large extent, is true.  But that doesn't mean that it isn't honest, even if it is a lie.  Yes, there is a part of me that boils with frustration, fury and outrage.  There is a part of me that wants to tear the sky down and set the world on fire.  Do wicked things, just for the perversity of it.  But that's a small part.  A very small one.  And I believe that we all have a part like that in us - I'm just honest enough (and hammy enough) to wear it on my sleeve.  Not to pretend like this blog is totally honest or anything - I think my readership (since I've actually developed one, if you can believe it) understands that a great deal of the surreal outrage and spleen I vent onto this blog is part of a character.  A version of myself - not the wholeness of me.  There are about four people on earth who know the truest me.

Sadly, I'm not one of them. 

ANYWAY!

Sorry about that absurd digression.  I'm hiding from the last three pages of my critical paper.  I always do this - get up to the very end, and then go limp.  Feel free to take that however you like.

Back to my original point:

An impromptu list of things I love.

I love a woman's ponytail.  I love how they bounce, and how their hair catches sunlight.  Bouncing ponytails connect to a very primordial part of me - my inner-Neanderthal.  I see them and am simultaneously enraptured and aroused.  I adore ponytails.

I love minute flaws in a person's face or body.  A tiny mark on someone's cheek.  A slightly wandering or crossed eye - not Marty Feldman or anything - just a slight skew to someone's eyes.  It's like they can see something I never can.

I love the smell of a bowl of really good hot and sour soup.  There's something about the tang of its scent that causes the soft bits in my mouth to convulse.  One whiff and I start to salivate like a bulldog - my salivary glands contorting like little, nude Romanians.

I love the Ode to Joy.  I love it.  I cannot make it through the Ode to Joy without falling apart.  There are a few pieces of music that cause me to break down - but that's the king.  I hear that piece - or pretty much anything by Beethoven - and every cynical thread in me snaps... unraveling into a quivering mound of pure, seething love.  If I could die to a piece of music, it would be the Ode to Joy.

I love cracking my knuckles.

I love the smell of books and antique book stores.

I love physics - and I love that I don't understand it.  I love that it's an endless struggle for me - that it refuses me the gratification of ever allowing me to know it, and that through that refusal it allows me the ability to see beyond it to its endless and profound beauty.

I love Star Trek.  I love that it's an entire universe - a whole reality constructed entirely out of science, literature and hope. 

I love animals.  Foxes, Corvids (ravens/crows), and Lemurs especially.  I love how their beauty is accidental - simply the reachings of genetic chance.  The same could be said for all of nature, I guess.  Yeah.  I love nature.

I love collective nouns.  To harken back to my corvid friends - an "unkindness of ravens" or a "murder of crows."  A "convocation of eagles."  A "cult of hyenas."  I get drunk on collective nouns like that.  It's indescribable, the joy I get from them.

I love the clarinet played in calypso, blues and jazz.  I love how soft and round it sounds.  How it croons like a ghost, or some dense, black voice.

I love typewriters - even though I hate using them.  I've got a growing collection of them.

I love the color blue and the color black.

I love scarves.

I love the shape of Star Destroyers - there's something so terrifyingly spare to them.  A wedge in space.

I love the Dyson Sphere.

Okay, last one.

I love this passage.  It's probably my favorite passage in American literature:

Down there fooling with that horse.  He will go on through the barn, into the pasture.  The horse will not be in sight: he is up there among the pine seedlings, in the cool.  Jewel whistles, once and shrill.  The horse snorts, then Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows.  Jewel whistles again; the horse comes dropping down the slope, stiff-legged, his ears cocking and flicking, his mismatched eyes rolling, and fetches up twenty feet away, broadside on, watching Jewel over his shoulder in an attitude kittenish and alert.

"Come here, sir," Jewel says.  He moves.  Moving that quick his coat, bunching, tongues swirling like so many flames.  With tossing mane and tale and rolling eye the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again, feet bunched, watching Jewel.  Jewel walks steadily toward him, his hands at his sides.  Save for Jewel's legs they are like two figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun.

When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel.  hen Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the upreared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake.  For an instant before the jerk comes onto hsi arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horozontal, whipping snake-limber, until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again.  Then they are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heals, shutting off the horse's wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.

They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning.  Then Jewel is on the horse's back.  He flows upward in a stooping swirl like th elash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse.  For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion.  They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.

"Well," Jewel says, "you can quit now, if you got a-plenty."

Inside the barn Jewel slides running to the ground before the horse stops.  The horse enters the stall, Jewel following.  Without looking back the horse kicks at him, slamming a single hoof into the wall with a pistol-like report.  Jewel kids him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, crop-toothed; Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and mounts upon it.  Clinging to the hay-rack he lowers his head and peers out across the stall tops and through the doorway.  The path is empty; from here he cannot even hear Cash sawing.  He reaches up and drags down hay in hurried armsful and crams it into the rack.

"Eat," he says.  "Get the goddamn stuff out of sight whil you got a chance, you pussel-gutted bastard.  You sweet son of a bitch," he says.

                                                                              - William Faulkner
                                                                                     As I Lay Dying

When old age shall this generation waste...

I was listening to my iPod as I walked into class today.  One of my students - a particularly delightful smart ass - asked me what I was listening to, and was shocked when I told him that it was the Chili Peppers.  "You listen to RHCP?" he asked. 

How old do these kids think I am?  How old do I look?  They know that I'm twenty-seven by now, I'm sure I've mentioned it before - but what do they associate with that number?

I've been kicking that kid's surprise around in my head for a while.  I think his surprise speaks more to his being eighteen than it does to my being twenty-seven.  I remember being a teenager - and a student especially.  Your professors don't have lives - they live in a creepy dream world.  They live in Plato's garden, eating grapes and talking about economics and poetry.  They're poor and unfortunate and losery.  It's fine that he thinks that of me - he's kindof right, if he does.

But still, I can't shake his surprise.  Not because it makes me feel old - but because it reminds me that I'm no longer young.

I'm comfortable with who I am - perhaps too comfortable, but that's a different subject for a different blog.  I'm no longer the effusive wastrel that I was in my early twenties.  Nor am I the paralyzed ferret I was in high school.  I'm twenty-seven - I've broken some hearts and had mine smashed up a bit, too.  I've run the gamut of sexual encounters, from the doldrums of smile-like-you-mean-it sex to wall-shattering fucking.  Not like you wanted to know that, but here we are.  I was a genius - and then a knownothing - and am now ingenious in knowing that I don't know anything.  I was a romantic, and a cynic, and a Buddhist (for like a hot minute) and a nasty old atheist.  I've performed every ugly growth ritual required of someone under the age of twenty-five.

And now I'm twenty-seven - and my Zen has sapped me of those disgusting little notions of youth.

I'm such a fan of my late-twenties.  If I could stop time, I'd stop it here. 

The late-twenties seem to be the coiling period in life.  You've got everything basically figured out - all of the emotional bullshit is basically solved, or so beyond repair that it doesn't matter anymore.  You've developed your path, or your rut, depending on how you view it.  You've had enough experience in relationships to know what kindof a partner you are... and what kind of partner you're looking for.  Nineteen year olds, while attractive in their own way, are totally desexualized - at least they are for me.  They're just little kids who are poised to begin the ruination of their lives that comes from being twenty to twenty-five.  They're not even people... not yet.  They're working on that.

Being in my late-twenties is like finding the perfect spot on a hike.  You've clawed through the bramble of your early years... you're on the mend from all of the damage you did to yourself.  And you pause there - because while you're afforded a perfect view of where you've come from... you also have this really lovely glimpse of where you still have left to go.  I wish I could just stay here.

A person's twenties are all about solipsism.  It's about developing and fostering identity... and then broadcasting that identity in the hopes that it'll get you laid.  It's hedonism - pure fucking hedonism. 

Your thirties are about other people - whether that be a kid (no thank you), a wife (thank you, no) or your older self - your retired, "I'd better start to save up some money so that I don't have to work in Walmart like those tragic old people I see whenever I go out to buy a teeshirt with a clever catchphrase on it."  What looks you have start to go.  Your joints begin to hurt.  You "aren't a kid anymore."

Well I don't want to be a kid.  I don't miss college like some people do.  Nor do I miss the psychological experiment that was high school.  I want to stay here, where the view is perfect.  Where I can breathe easy now that my baggage is gone... and imagine where I'm going to take myself.

But I can't do that.  My smart assed student reminded me of that today.  He found my little clearing and started dumping redbull cans all over it.  "Get moving, old man," he's saying to me.  The little asshole.

I really want to stay as beautiful as I've felt these last few years... but I know I cant.

That blows.

I guess I'll just have to take consolation in the fact that getting older brings certain cool things.  Gray hair, for one.  I long for the days of salt-and-pepper hair.  That'll be good. 

That's about all, though... now that I think about it.

Do I have to have a kid?  A wife?

I don't like people that much.  Why can't I just keep things as they are?  A stable girlfriend... a few latent heartaches for my pasts and futures... a cool hairdo and a nice ass?  A creaky apartment, not a house to own.  Bah!

Fuck that kid and his redbull - he'll just use my clearing to have bad sex with a blond girl named Kiersten and listen to a baseball game on the radio and call everyone "bro'." 

Surprised that I knew about the Chili Peppers... bitch I was listening to them before you were running down your mother's leg.

There we go!  Soupy romanticism is back!  I'm out of my rapture... back to my appalling vulgarity!

Fuck that bitch.  I'm not moving.  I'm gonna stay here...

Puddle Wonderful

In my endless crusade to not do my work, I came across this charmingly clever quote a woman left on some Australian guy's blog.  This lovely darling, whom I now want to bed, submitted it in response to the now tired and dusty theistic design argument - the one which harps on the amazing luck that life would come into being on a perfectly designed world, in a universe which works.  Everything works.  Isn't it strange that that would happen?

It's a watchmaker's argument, essentially.  And it's hogwash.

She found it to be, "rather like a puddle being impressed by the perfect fit of its pothole."

I would make love to that woman's wit.

That's it.  Just wanted to share that.

Oh, this too.

[when faced with a similar theistic claim] "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

                                                             - Professor Richard Feyman
                                                                         Nobel Laureate in Physics

Charlie Gibson Gives Me Boners

Based on her adorably confused and woeful performance in her interview with Charlie Gibson, I don't see how any intelligent American citizen could consider Sarah Palin a legitimate option as President of the United States.

Yes, I said President.  Not Vice... but Prez. 

Why?

Because the McCain campaign isn't about him anymore.  It's all about her: The Republican Christian-Rock Star.  Chances are that McCain wont even survive his first term... so if elected, we've got a great chance of seeing his nattering familiar assume command of the country.

So I measure her by the Presidential yard-stick... not the Vice Presidential one.  That being said...

I'm a huge fan of schadenfreude.  Like, big time.  And while I swam for a moment in the perverse glee that flowed from Sarah Palin's desperate floundering over Gibson's question regarding the Bush Doctrine - I found myself ultimately terrified.  There is a gathering doom around that woman.  She has no idea what she's doing - no idea what she's talking about.  She's the secretary/treasurer of the PTA, not the leader of the Free World.  Not if she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is.

Not if she writes a blank check to Israel to be as hawkish as they like.

Not if she perpetuates the horribly ignorant mispronunciation of the word "nuclear."

I wish the American people shared my beliefs... but they don't.  We're so fucking backwards in this country, that millions probably watched her drown in that interview and said when it was done, "Gee... I didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was either.  She's just like me!"

I've always found the McCain = Bush argument to be somewhat dubious.  Sure, the guy has whored himself out over the last six years... and he's lost any respect I ever had for him in doing so.  But the guy isn't Bush. 

Sarah Palin, however, is.  She's a shit-kicking moron who trades in eight-grade metaphor and political absolutes.

Someone get the hook and drag this clown off my TV.

By the way...

Who the fuck is this Russel Brand asshole, and when do I get to stab him in the stomach?  He's like if Sebastian Horsley and Jesus got together and had a child.

Listen, dude. It takes real goddamn panache to pull off being a Dandy.  Ask Horsley - the guy's got that shit nailed.  You're not a Dandy... you're barely a Fop.

You know what you are, Russel Brand?

You're a wanker.

Pip pip, cheerio.

Fucker.