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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 4, 2010 15:01:46 GMT 12
From SFGate.comI Hate You I Hate You I Hate YouThere's nasty, there's puerile, and then there's Mark Morford's hate mail. Wake the kids!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 05, 2007You are a hateful and deeply troubled person. I feel nothing but pity for you and your utter contempt of Christianity. I can think of dozens of vile and hurtful things to say to you, but you, my poor fellow, simply are not worth it. Good luck in the unemployment line. Looks like The Chronicle is headed the way of the dinosaur. It is about time.
God Bless You!
— Steve V————————————————————————— There's no better example of an elitist, condescending, snide and UNINFORMED liberal progressive. A commune-living, bike-riding environmentalist could write a scathing article like this, ripping your Audi (I think you wrote an article on it), which you must assume runs on progressive ideals or your sex toys instead of gasoline. But they DON'T — because they are different than simple, narcissist progressives, who pat themselves on the back for being marginally less polluting than the next guy. You're sick, offensive and laughably hypocritical — you're a perfect San Francisco progressive liberal. I've been reading your nonsense since 2002 and I have no idea why.
— Brendan————————————————————————— I can't wait to read your articles once Mitt Romney takes the white house. Honestly, there's nobody on either side of the aisle that can challenge him. i wish there were. it would make for a better election. He's ronald reagan part deux. and guess what dude.....he's MORMON!! oh this is gonna be so great! you are gonna be SOOOOO angry! he's gonna take away all your freedoms mark!! all your freedoms and liberties!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!
— Joe G————————————————————————— Thank God you're a NOBODY who writes for a NOTHING rag......Morford, you're one L-O-S-E-R...by the way, why don't you just move out of this country and join your Islamo-facist friends?? You'd be doing us all a favor.
— William S————————————————————————— The reason you jokers want everybody to drive hybrids and tiny cars is because you are jealous of the giant SUVs and pick-ups that we drive in the Midwest. We have huge lawns bigger than city blocks that you can only dream of owning in San Francisco. We also own our own homes which are much nicer than those half a million or more houses you have there. You pay 1 grand to 2 grand a month to rent what is considered a joke and a dump here and you will always rent. Enjoy!
— David R————————————————————————— You are the ugly disgrace, Mr. Morford. Not our military. Not our attempts to stabilize a region long overdue for an intervention not at the hands of inept appeasement types like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. You and the rest of the spineless Chronicle, and invertebrate media, that celebrate bad news like it was a happy event are the true losers.
Every conflict, every confrontation, every attempt to eradicate the forces of evil have been met by doormats such as yourself and the execrable newspaper for which you write with platitudes, pontifications and pusillanimity. It has been that way throughout history, and here's what wil happen.
Good will triumph over evil, and yes you sancitmonious putz, the United States is good. Al-Qaeda and the rest of the soulless, seventh century maniacs are evil. You're neither, Mr. Morford. You and your paper are mouthpieces for a submissive and cowardly approach to the bad guys of the world.
— George Y————————————————————————— I can't believe your audacity. We live in a death culture where people are contracepting, murdering children on a daily basis (abortion), and the world's population is growing eerily older as we speak. There will be no more children to support your sorry bum when you are older. Why?? Because NO ONE is having children!!! There will be no more social security and no more "workers" in your nursing home. Why?? Because you all chose to have no more children. Look at Europe!! The Muslims are taking over because the Europeans are too selfish to have kids of their own!!!!!!
God Bless You.
— KP————————————————————————— You are a filthy liar. I know and most of the people who read the sf gate know it. go over the case for of scooter libby. I may not agree with most of bush's actions. But, he is right on this one. and you are a clown propagandist hoping the ultimate-hate-bushers are going to prop up your sickly penis by taking the side of the soros' corporate control freaks. You are a LIAR and your mom knows you are a LIAR.
— Michael————————————————————————— Conservative values and the people who adhere to them are going to crush you liberals. I don't care if you do elect Hillary, which you won't, we will crush you. I despise liberal values, your cowardice and blind stupidity. We will finish you off. You are a danger to the country and with the help of talk radio we will destroy you. You are cockroaches, nothing else. Reading your newspaper is like paying the cops to beat you, then thanking them.
— Steven S, Lincoln, California————————————————————————— I used to read your columns months back and I couldn't remember them mentioning sex as often and in such the manner as your most recent one (March 07). What is with that? Why are you promoting sex so intensely? Wet, slippery, dirty sex? Do you really want our population to exceed maximum amount? Not to mention STDs and AIDS. Why is your attitude such that you take the sweetness out of relationships and romance? Why can't people just kiss and stuff? Can't you promote that? Innocence DOES exist and it is nice every once in a while.
— Tiffany————————————————————————— You love that piece of sh*t [Apple laptop] so much why don't you stick your divinely inspired c*ck in it. Your article made me puke. If I could e-mail that puke to you, you'd have a very messy lap right now. More messy than the ejaculatory stain your Apple made you project. Get a f-ing life, you bandwagon whore.
— Rob O————————————————————————— Since you spend most of your life in never-never land, you might not be aware that you have an appointment to stand before the God of the Bible, and be judged by Him for your sins. And your contempt for God will be on the agenda. Try to enjoy the rest of your miserable, worthless life. Eternity is a long, long time.
— Gary B————————————————————————— San Francisco and Oakland are the cesspools of immorality, sexual deviance, homelessness, and anarchy. I've been there on business many times and found your enlightened city to stink, be full of trash, slobbering/groping same-sex couples, homeless drunks, mental misfits, prostitutes and criminals. I swear it was one of the most unpleasant and unattractive places I've ever been to. In contrast, beautiful small towns found in the Northwest, the Midwest, and even the South are clean, with little-league ball fields, bright white churches and Fourth of July parades instead of freak sex parades. When are you freaks going to wake up and realize the rest of the country finds you and your lifestyles are deviant and offensive?
— Bkuck————————————————————————— I dont read that much I admit, someone sent me some of your articles. I cant tell if you are a sarcastic prick or a real witty guy that makes valid points. I am suspicious of anything or anybody from San Francisco, from my vantage point from a MD suburb, it seem like a freak show out there.
— Matt————————————————————————— Sir, you are absolutely classless, colossal slob, and if it were at all possible under any conceivable legal precedent, I would sue you to recover the wasted electrons that pinged off of my CRT monitor to display the swill that you vomited into the body politic. At the very least, had I a hard copy of your column, I would have headed directly to the bathroom and put it to suitable use, but your presence on the Web has denied me even that minor moment of utility.
— Tony L————————————————————————— Maggot, bottom feeding swill sucker. You wouldn't know the TRUTH if it bit you in your sorry rat infested ASS. By the way, YO MAMA BLOWS!
— Charles G————————————————————————— You are great where you are. Why don't you depart this life to maybe with your Patron Saint Lucifer. They should rename you Berg San Luciferein.
— Anthony, Rochester, New York————————————————————————— The answer is No!
Why because we do not want it! Gay people have money and political power, but you cannot force us to do what we do not want to do, no matter what you want to do. You are in America and you can do whatever you want in the privacy of your home. You have forced us to put up with men kissing in public, but you cannot force us to give you the ability to marry each other.
We do not like what you do! You are trying to force us to agree to something that we (of course dislike does not describe how we feel about your behavior) do not want and will not want. Does that mean hundreds of thousands of men and women, who are "strait", do not have sexual intercourse with the same sex no it does not. Yes, that makes them liars but this is the real world, and in the real world, we do not like people having sex with the same sex Period. We think that it is wrong. So you are trying to force us to agree with something we think is wrong. This mean it aint gonna happen, Period so cry on, whine on, dream on, wish on!
The answer is no!
— Apro________________________________________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 4, 2010 15:02:46 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHey kids! Love will destroy you!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, December 30, 2009I'm guessing 17. Maybe 16. Although I must admit I'm finding it very hard to tell anymore because the older I get the more I notice this odd, unstoppable inversion taking place in my wayward perceptions, rendering my ability to accurately assess the ages of members of Generation Facebook wickedly futile.
Anyway. There they were, the pair of them, right next to me on Muni recently, two loud, gum-snapping, shamelessly teenaged girls, both dressed in some sort of adorable sweatshop clown chic, nearly identical in getup except for the fantastical color schemes.
Imagine: sausage-tight velour sweatpants — one bright orange and the other bright green — rainbow print shirts and orange gloves and yellow shoes and striped choppy tiger-print hair, both basically looking like a Lite-Brite exploded all over a box of crayons, and both girls texting like mad and yelling across the aisle to each other in that hypercondensed, consonant-slurred teen gibberish that makes you sigh and smile and worry just a little about the fate of our flailing species.
But that's not what I noticed most. One of the girls, the one in the orange pants and the short, fruit-stripe hair who was standing right in front of me, I couldn't help but look down and realize she had something inscribed high up on the back of her neck, just beneath the hairline.
It was a tattoo. A bad one, naturally. Crooked, wobbly, amateurish in that way that makes me sad because I fully believe bad tattoos are a scourge on the American animal and crappy tattoo artists should be punished and get their goddamn slacker butts to art school, and Something Must Be Done.
Anyway. High up on the back of this girl's young, perfectly smooth neck, in large, clunky script, I saw these words:
"Love is pain."
Next to the words, a small, red cartoon heart torn in two, serrated like shark's teeth, a droplet of blood pouring out.
I blinked. Love is pain? Really? Can that possibly be true for this shiny tiny teenaged creature snapping her gum and misspelling her text messages in front of me? Such a harsh, declarative statement, such a dour and irrefutable pronouncement, made before you're even old enough to buy booze or porn or cigarettes, when you're still full of energy and potential and friendships, and you have what, about 70 more years to go before you even have a clue as to what your life was all about?
I found myself flashing back to about eight years ago, when I attended some sort of delightfully mushy, yoga-filled, trance-dancey, patchouli-'n'-Ecstasy New Year's Eve party thing, and I remember meeting a very young friend of my then-girlfriend, a sweet, dreadlocked, hippie-ish seeker dude who must've been about 22 or 23 at the time. My ex was talking him up and asking how he was doing, and he got this dramatic look on his face, scrunched and painful. "Oh, you know, just dealing with all my shit, lots of peeling away, lots of hard work to get through it all."
I remember my reaction. I remember this big internal recoil, struggling not to roll my eyes and shake my head and slap the kid awake. I mean, come on. You're 22. You don't have any shit yet. I knew he'd never even been married, no kids, divorces, mortgages, spiritual crisis, age issues, body breakdowns, addictions, health problems, asylums, dumb tattoos on the back of his neck. He was from the north shore of Chicago, fer chrissakes. Not exactly drug-addled povertyland. Hell, I was only in my early 30s, and even I knew the basic rule of life: Dude, you have to actually live a little first. You have to earn some shit before you can claim to be digging out from under it.
I don't taste quite that flavor of judgment anymore. At least, not as frequently. I've come to realize that the darkness takes many forms indeed, from abusive childhoods to karmic repayments to all sorts of trauma of varying degrees and maturity levels, and that, in many ways, your life can indeed be piled high with horror and sadness by ages far younger than 22. All paths are unique, individual, unknowable from the outside.
But can you really believe, in your core being, in your whole world, that "love is pain," before you're even old enough to buy a goddamn vibrator? Can this be your great, fist-raised statement to the world? Sure it can. It's just a bit, you know, immature. Premature. And wildly incomplete.
A dozen questions drifted through my bus-bored mind as we lurched from block to block. What does she really know about love? What happened to her? What triggered the idea for such a lousy tattoo? She seemed healthy and vital, all faculties intact, no major limbs missing. Abusive father? Alcoholic mother? Both? Slew of skuzzy deadbeat boyfriends? Beloved puppy got run over by a Buick? I wanted to lean over and ask. I wanted to know what inspired such a fatalistic worldview before she seemed old enough to even have a worldview.
I also pondered what might happen to her in the coming years to make her regret that tattoo. Maybe she'll get out of the housing projects. Maybe she'll build her own loving family. Maybe she'll meet a fantastic spouse who shows her love is many things indeed besides a source of pain, even though we still have no clue what the hell most of them are or what it all might mean, and in truth that's what makes it so goddamn tasty and slippery and addictive, how it hits us square in the divine mystery spot in our deepest core.
(BTW, I also acknowledge how it's entirely possible I am way, way overanalyzing. Her phrase might just be, say, some dumb Rhianna lyric. A Jay-Z song title. A cheeseball line from a vapid vampire movie. Hey, impressionable young girls with no real life awareness are right now getting far, far dumber things tattooed across their bodies in the name of soap-opera romance and malformed identity. But what sort of column would that have made?)
What I do know is, it's taken me many, many years indeed to figure out exactly what love is (God's Viagra, obvs). Pain is just one of its many dark incarnations. But pain is also a choice. This is something you can only realize over time, and which you can never know at age 16. You can actually choose how to use, or be used, by love's insane, impossible, narcotic energy. You can, every day and every moment and every breath, decide which of its billion catchy little slogans, if any, you wish to abide.
Love is pain? Hell yes. But also: Love is bliss. Love is energy. Love is divine. Love is all you need. Love is perfect. Love is magic. Love is God. Love is Hell. Love is like oxygen. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is a many- splendored thing. Love will keep us together. Love is madness. Love hurts. Love bites. Love stinks. Love's a bitch. Love is a battlefield. Love is blindness.
Girl better have a long neck.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 4, 2010 15:30:46 GMT 12
From SFGate.comDear 2010; Be not like 2009Please let us never go through shit like that ever again!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 01, 2010Did you feel it? Did you reach up and lick the full, pregnant, bursting blue moon on New Year's Eve? Did you howl and wail and stomp your feet and raise your glass high and say oh my God let us now move and dance and shimmy and finally, finally get this nasty nefarious monkey of a doomed decade off our collective backs once and for all? I hope you did.
It was a portentous night in many ways, this particular New Year's Eve, and not just because of the auspicious moon. It was, most notably, the end of the Aughts, the Zeros, the Zips, and everything they contained, hurled, dragged us down into like a Goliath tarantula drags down an unsuspecting sparrow.
(And yes, I also acknowledge how, technically speaking, the real end of the decade isn't until this time next year. Whatever. We're going with feel, energy, the flip and lurch of time and consciousness. You going to argue with that)?
Let us just say it outright: Good riddance to the Zeros. It was, as widely noted, the decade from hell. It was easily one of the worst periods in recent American history, upwards of 3600 days drenched in fear and ignorance and bitter divisiveness, nipples and anthrax and macho shock n' awe, economic implosions and endless conservative puling about God and gays and terrorism, all slashed through with so much political misprision and presidential ineptitude it's going to require many more years until we the deep, humiliating scars inflicted by Dubya & Co. are fully healed.
But at last, we now have a moment, a ripe opportunity to turn away from that dark period, that rank era, and look ahead. What will next the decade hold? What magic and pain, splendid innovation and unexpected smackdown could it possibly offer up? The possibilities are astounding. The possibilities have rarely felt so... possible. This much we know: It almost certainly can't be worse than the last decade. And in fact, the signs are plentiful indeed that it will be much, much better.
Evidence: We finally have a president — and will have a president, for much of the next decade — who is simply light years more gifted, articulate, diplomatic, calm, fair-minded, astute, eloquent and (still) downright globally inspiring than any in decades. No matter your stance on the inherited war in Afghanistan, no matter the fistful of failures and disappointments to date, I remain fully convinced I'm witnessing the finest, most exciting, historic, deeply effective president in my lifetime, and probably yours. Don't believe it? Call me in 2020, and let's review.
The best part: We don't yet know his full capabilities, his true range. Right now Obama remains saddled with merely trying to unbury us, stem the hemorrhaging, recover some of the brutal BushCo losses. Such a task can't help but be frontloaded with bad news. But here's my prediction: once he can more fully dedicate his energies toward creating something new, instead of repairing the old and decrepit? Exhilarating.
Already we have a huge, historic new health care bill, the biggest shift in a bloated, impossibly fragmented industry in six decades. No one thought it was even possible, much less in his first year. The bill is imperfect and gutted and contains no public option or single-payer plans and appears to make no one happy on any side of the debate. But the truth is, it just might actually be far more loaded with potentially revolutionary ideas than many, including me, even realize. Is it worth considering?
What else? Take your pick. Assuming even modestly successful scenarios, the coming decade will see the end of two botched, miserable, costly wars begun by a president who had little clue as to what the hell he was doing but plenty of hawkish cronyism and false cowboy Christian machismo to make him do it.
A collapsed auto industry is cross-breeding with a green energy revolution and consumer awareness to create an unprecedented influx of cool, small cars not seen since the Japanese invasion of the '70s, plug-in and hybrids and tiny badass European models and who knows what else, as ingenuity kicks in and automakers finally realize Americans don't necessarily want 18 cup holders and 7mpg and the ability to traverse a Tasmanian flood plain when all they ever do is traverse a Walgreens parking lot.
There is no more Michael Jackson. There will soon be no more Oprah. There will be no more Tyra Banks. There will be less Simon Cowell. There will be far less Jay Leno (praise!) No more Jon & Kate. Harry Potter will wave his wand one last time and explode in a shower of Flugglewumps and repressed hormonal Zigglewaddles, or whatever he does at the end of that insufferable series. See? Things are looking up already.
Will Facebook and Twitter survive? Sure. Will something new and potentially even more useful and addictive come along in a dizzying tidal wave of confounding tech joy to supplant their power and influence in nearly the exact the same way they supplanted MySpace and Friendster? Count on it. Right along with an Apple iSlate/iPad world-altering game-changer. Hey, no one thought Apple could possibly make a dent in the cellphone world either. And then, boom: One gizmo to rule them all.
There might very well be a revolution in Iran, on a scale and of a fiery democratic pulse no one really thought possible, given the oppressive, pathetic, ultraconservative regime in power. So impressive and inspiring might this revolution be that lazy, fat America might just sit up and go, oh right, that's how you fight for your freedoms and hold your government accountable and push back against religious intolerance, misogyny, dogma. Now I remember.
China will outpace the US in every category except porn and gun murders and tongue kissing in the streets. Meanwhile, India will finally allow its first on-screen kiss in a Bollywood movie, if they really want to be taken seriously as a true international film powerhouse and not a brightly colored cartoon factory. Just a thought.
Climate change will cause enough ice to melt in the mountains of Turkey that Noah's Ark will finally be revealed as verifiable truth. Archaeologists will discover the big ol' boat was full of Buddha statues and Shakti icons and golden Dionysus sculptures and huge stone fertility penises, giant wine vessels and goddess offerings and the seeds of many hallucinogenic plants, indicating it was actually the site the first and greatest pagan bacchanalia party cruise of all time.
Gay marriage will continue apace, as increasing numbers of states and nations across the planet understand that love is indeed liquid and dynamic and evolutionary and is not, and never really was, meant to be defined/confined by narrow-minded, lumpish religious misinterpretation.
Will all be positive and inspiring? Will there be dancing in the streets and recovered tuna stocks and free Wi-Fi in the Gaza Strip? Will all brooding teen vampires shut up and die? What are you, high?
A million things could go wrong, and almost certainly will. There is no shortage of ignorance, religious puling, teabagging deathpanel birther Palin-esque whinebot Glenn Beck laughingstocks. But if the '00s were the decade of alarmism and a desperate clinging to Christian Puritan myth, let the '10s be the decade of integrity and movement, experimentation and possibility and a complete, messy, fundamental overhaul of all we thought we were. What, you have a better idea?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
To get on the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing.
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This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/01/01/notes010110.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 7, 2010 13:47:33 GMT 12
From SFGate.comA brief interview with the devilGiven how he was a little busy, what with the world the way it is, and suchBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, January 06, 2010The devil wore patent leather Bruno Magli wingtips, a Dolce camelhair jacket, houndstooth fedora.
We met at a small café on the outskirts of Amsterdam; he was dashing off to a climate meeting where he planned to heckle scientists in the form of a trembling flat-earther before cruising over to North Korea to whisper backwards Latinate phrases into the tormented ear of Kim Jong Il. Then on to Alberta to broker some new oilsands deals, and finally, off to Rome to further tempt Vatican clergy in the form of a beautiful, smooth-skinned altar boy named Rodrigo.
Not bad for an afternoon's work, he said, grinning.
Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. I understand you're very busy.
Hang on, just finishing up this text to Ballmer. "Congrats on Windows 7! We finally did it!" Now let me just Twitter about finding irrefutable proof that Obama is a Nazi sympathizer, then plant this item on Drudge about the new health care bill secretly taking H1N1 vaccines away from white Christian children and giving them to Mexican illegals. There.
OK, make it quick, I gotta pack for a petrochem summit in Davos. Keynote, as usual. Those boys f**king love me.
I appreciate your time. Now, many say the world is in a horrible state of turmoil...
Isn't that great, by the way? That's just f**king great. Dear God, I rule.
I'm sorry?
It's not, actually, just FYI. Here's a little secret I don't talk about much, but you'll forget it the instant I leave anyway: The world is actually teeming with beauty and life and rejuvenation, hope and awe and epiphany, every moment of every day. There is pure bliss, entire universes of knowing, pure God consciousness available in the smallest instant, the complete breath, the gentlest human touch. But you didn't hear it from me! (Laughs, concrete curdles).
Well, there have been some pretty difficult, even horrifying events in the past few years...
Let me just clear up one misconception right here. People thought I was swamped during the Bush years, running that whole glorious, bloody spectacle. And it's true, I was busy. But it was also wonderfully easy.
What do you mean?
Honey, I had armies of devoted minions in power back then. I basically sat back like a fat, narcotized Hamptons housewife while my staff brought me cupcakes made of war and fear and homophobia, Christian evangelicals and Muslim hysteria and economic failure. Glorious, glorious time.
But now? Now it's ... different. Bloom is off the black rose, you might say. I'm still busy, still plenty of ugly out there, but I'm not in control anymore. Now I'm just herding cats. Very, very dumb cats.
But we still have all these problems...
Sure you do. But now there's this sickening movement toward responsibility and progress that I find totally nauseating. I spend all my time planting these ridiculous stories, going lower and lower on the intellectual food chain just to get the dittoheads to scream about, what's that crap again? Birthers? Death squads? Teabagging? ACORN? This is what I'm reduced to. F**king hate it. But at least I'll always have oil. And guns. Talk radio. Monsanto.
But even the world's finest scientists say we're on the cusp of meltdown, what with global warming and ...
Global warming? Please. Total hoax. Evolution? Hoax. Electric cars? Hoax. All of existence? Hoax. The Bible? Actually not a hoax — the true, literal, perfect English transcript of floaty magic-winged creatures living on sparkly clouds and judging what you eat and how you have sex, because everyone knows the Almighty loves war, college football, and large caliber handguns, hates gays, Muslims and the French, and wears a U.S. flag lapel pin that was actually made in China. Ha!
I don't see how that relates to...
You don't? You don't see how I can hurl BS into the culture on a spit and a whim before I even eat my morning sacrifices? Let me put it this way: Millions of you actually believe the Bible is literal fact, but you think climate change is a grand, devious ruse. Come on. Who but me could pull off such a masterstroke? I should have my own goddamn reality show. Oh wait, I have all the reality shows.
So you're saying humanity's really not on a collision course with destruction?
Oh hell, of course you are. It's all decay and annihilation and flow and flux. Human civilizations come and go like a divine menstrual cycle. I set my Panerai by it. Never forget, sweetheart: change is the only constant. But as any good mystic or pagan will tell you, destruction and creation are the same god with two intergalactic calling plans. Existence bounded up in a nutshell, the king of infinite space. This is all just a delightful illusion. I should know; I co-designed it.
But what about all the corruption and deception?
Look, I don't care how you measure. Trilateral commission, U.N. security counsel, NSA, CIA, Blackwater, communism, shadow governments, all of them. It's just a grand circus, you know? This is all just a ride. My day-to-day power lies in making millions forget what a cosmic joke it all is.
You take yourselves so damn seriously: your raging political parties, the "crucial" issues, Wall Street, gun control, organized religion, banks, credit card companies, big oil, even the endless wars, dictators, all this nefarious churn. You know what it is? It is the silliest charade. It is monkeys playing piano. It is a grand flea circus on the back of a celestial dog, and he's about to scratch himself.
But what of the pain and suffering? The agony of existence?
Oh my sweet Allah with steaming pork sandwich, what an egotistical species you are! Millennia of war and death and pain and fighting over tiny scraps of land, little dusty strips of nothing, thinking God bestowed it upon you! Let me tell you something: the divine has no agenda whatsoever except to know itself in myriad form. God is a life energy. I am a death energy. Creator/destroyer. Light/dark. Inhale/exhale. Shiva/Shakti. Spit/swallow. Both vital. Both omnipotent. Both essential. You have to choose to see it. You feel me?
I think I do.
How about now?
Please take your tail out of there.
Sure thing, lovebug.
All right, since we're already out of time, let's do a quick lightning round.
Love lightning. Drizzle it on my virgin sacrifices every morning.
I'll toss out some names and current events, and you tell me the first thing that comes to your mind. All right?
Bring it.
Barack Obama
Ha! Dude pisses me off. Can't seem to rile him. Thinks he understands things. Actually does. Know what I hate more than anything, and that includes laughter and singing in the shower and multiple orgasms? Wisdom. Calm, assured wisdom in the face of all the whining and screeching I can muster from my minions. Such gall. Makes my soul pimple.
Rush Limbaugh
I have hangnails more interesting.
Glenn Beck
Who?
Ann Coulter
Has a bizarre thing for dwarves dressed in Chewbacca costumes while she's in full body latex and covered in Crisco. Oh wait, Glenn Beck? Now I remember. All about yodeling, self-flagellation, sniffing the tailpipes of monster trucks, usually simultaneously. They make a cute pair, like a puppet show in an asylum.
The world's dictators. Mugabe, King Abdullah, Hu Jintao...
Ah, now we're getting somewhere! My boys! Some of my best work at the moment. Monsters in different skins, the shadow side incarnate. Love them. What a terrific mirror they are for that part of you so many of you refuse to see!
How about the "New Atheists?" Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, et al?
Cute. Harmless. Completely missing the point. Look, it's way too easy to point out the childish folly, the cute mythology of every major faith in the world. Of course they're fiction. Of course they're totally absurd. Of course those in charge use them to keep millions weak and guilt-riddled and forcibly detached from the idea that they already are divine. A no-brainer, really.
So they're misinformed?
To say the least. They're also only half right. Atheists have merely cut off part of their soul to spite their fate.
After all, it's far more interesting, more challenging to peek behind the silly religious rulebooks and church politics and the obvious myth-making, and taste the source, the wider energy at play. Believing in floaty angels and immaculate conception is for children. Not very bright children, at that. The tantrikas had it absolutely right: the divine is available in an instant, in every moment — no rules, no complicated hierarchies, no institutions. You are god. You are the devil. Everything else is just maya — illusion.
But wait, what about...
Whoops, hang on, that's my phone. It's a text from Jesus. Wants to meet for a drink. And it's only noon! That kid is so crazy. If you people only knew. Bye now.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 9, 2010 13:49:44 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWhen scary Jesus makes the newsBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 08, 2010Will it be drugs? Will it be gays? Will it be an unwieldy sex scandal featuring seedy hotels, bad cologne and grossly detailed text messages you never want to read? How about another "family values"' congressman busted for cruising gay chat rooms or hitting on young male pages in the congressional bathroom? That's always heartwarming.
Or maybe it will be another enchanting case of sexual abuse and pedophilia in the Catholic Church! What, too 2001? Fine, how about six decades of child rape and beatings at the hands of countless nuns and priests in Irish Catholic orphanages? Oh right, that was last year. The pope slamming birth control in Africa? Megachurch pastors shamelessly fleecing their gullible flock for still more millions? Some spectacular combination of the above? So many choices! What's your pleasure, good reader?
Of one thing you can be absolutely certain: whenever self-righteous Christians make the news, it's going to be... embarrassing. Sad. Sickening. Disingenuous. A little dangerous. A lot pitiable.
Homophobic? Frequently. Hypocritical? Invariably. Deeply ignorant of the real teachings of the true, mystical, renegade, anti-authority Jesus, who was about as far from the modern Pentecostal evangelical fundamentalist organized-religion worldview as a vegan from a Kansas slaughterhouse? You already know the answer.
All of which makes it delightful — in that nauseatingly familiar sort of way — to read the story about the Northern California evangelicals whose repulsive views on homosexuality and "curing" gay people reportedly helped shape a new, violently anti-gay bill in Uganda.
Did you see? The New York Times piece about how Ugandan officials took the American evangelicals' beliefs about the best ways to punish/reform "evil" gays to its natural conclusion, and decided, if all other forcible rehab options fail, it would be perfectly appropriate to simply exterminate the homosexuals?
I mean, why not? If it's certifiably evil, if you can't "cure" it, if it scares the livestock, transmits disease, preys upon young boys and makes the older men fantasize in dangerous and uneasy ways, if God (not really) said it was an abomination, what's the problem?
Of course, the radical evangelicals in question were — or at least pretended to be — horrified at this practical summation of their views, immediately wrote panicky letters to Ugandan officials to correct their unfortunate "misinterpretation," as damn well they should have.
"No, no, no!" they sort of said. "We didn't mean actually kill them. That would be wrong. We simply meant gently, lovingly rehabilitate. You know: drugs, imprisonment, maybe some beatings, public humiliation, brainwashing, genital torture, electroshock therapy like the Mormons used to do.
"Barring that, just do what we do in America: psychological torment in the form of relentless, crushing guilt. This will make the evil gay feel so suicidally depressed about his perfectly natural desires, his body, his emotions, who he is as a living soul on this planet, he's bound to come around. See, like most major religions of the world, we work to shame the sinner so horribly that if he doesn't kill himself, you'll end up with a fine, completely numb soldier of Christ! But don't actually kill them. Heavens!"
Ugandan officials, apparently a bit confused about just how this crazy evangelical thing works, agreed to re-draft the bill and take out the killing stuff. "You extremist Christians are so weird," they seemed to say, rolling their eyes.
It's a story that folds in nicely with the sad little furor regarding tired ol' Brit Hume over at Fox News, a slumpy veteran talking head who recently muttered something gently asinine on the air about Tiger Woods, Buddhism and converting Tiger to the land of happy fuzzy Christ.
Indeed, Hume suggested during a broadcast (see YouTube video clip below) that Tiger would do well to renounce his sinful ways, pack up his little Temple O' Buddhism and move to Sweet Home Jesuslandia, home of Ted Haggard, Carrie Prejean and thousands of priests who are no longer allowed to touch children — where all is safe and redemptive and no one has much sex, and if they do it's certainly not very much fun and doesn't last more than 90 seconds in the dark in the congressional bathroom. So thoughtful you are, Brit!So then. Is the mildly offensive part how Hume tried to convert Tiger on national TV? Is it how he obviously doesn't understand much about Buddhism and how it pre-dates Christianity by hundreds, if not thousands, of years? Or is it how Hume won't apologize and is now claiming Christian persecution as a result of being so pseudo-righteous? All of the above? Does it even matter?
Of course it doesn't. But I have to admit, ever since Dubya so mercifully slumped off the national stage and hauled his fractured, dejected army of Christian fundamentalists with him, the stories about unfortunate imbecility, sexual misadventure and righteous indignation in the name of Christ have slowed to a mere trickle. Which is not a bad thing at all, really.
Oh sure, they're still out there, but the Christian right no longer dominates the national dialogue as it once did. Now the Jesus crusaders have largely been replaced by an even sillier and more fringe bunch — birthers and teabaggers and such — citizens who don't even have the excuse of a misinterpreted, fear-based faith to back their biases and anxieties. Now they just have ... Glenn Beck.
No matter. We can all safely assume millions of good, reasonable Christians were just as disgusted as anyone over the fringe evangelical hatred on display in the Uganda story. And most would even agree that Hume was a bit of a jackass for daring to "correct" anyone's faith, especially one of the great, peaceful religions of the world, even on a network as shamelessly right-wing and morally unhinged as Fox News.
In that sense, these two stories point to a broader truth: Never forget to be thankful, humble pilgrim, when you stumble over barbed tales like this, that times have changed, are changing, keep right on changing ... usually for the better. In other words, as dire or inane as these stories may seem, offer a moment of heaping, divine gratitude that it's not like it used to be. And with any luck, it never will be again.
Hell, you can bet even Jesus is grateful for that.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 13, 2010 23:31:45 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWhat to wear to the ApocalypseBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 13, 2010Always a pressing post-apocalyptic question: Where can one find a nice scarf and good pair of leather gloves after the Earth has imploded and all hope is lost and humanity is eating itself alive and you're off on a murderous rampage? Is Macy's still open? — Photo: David Lee David Lee/Warner Bros.Because you can never have enough black trenchcoats. — Photo: Warner Bros.This much we know for sure: The End Times are going to look extremely cool. Have you noticed? Have you seen the previews, the TV shows, the films, the sneak peeks, the fine cinematography? Apparently the end of the world as we know it will be a full-on, grunged-out, epic rock n' roll fantasia, a massive, ruined spectacle of post-industrial chic, all cool grays, charred whites and musky sepia tones bouncing off bombed-out landscapes and towering mountains of smoking wreckage, flaming buildings that look like fantasy sculptures worthy of a Bosch painting and intergalactic doomsday fireworks that make Burning Man seem like a Cub Scout cookout. Sexy!
Do you like leather? There will be a lot of leather. Shredded, strapped on, tied off, animalistic, godless, tasty. It will go well with all the smoke and dirt, exposed beams and angular glass shards, a landscape full of endless, mysterious possibilities for looting and ransacking and generally just looking superwastedcool as you try desperately to dig up tiny slivers of hope for the future of humankind. Together with your team of young and leather-clad co-survivors you'll fight off all the other freaks who appear to be rather vile and unshowered and want only to harvest your large intestine for a snack.
You have but to examine the pop culture evidence. "Legion". "Book of Eli". "Road Warrior". "2012". "The Matrix". "Terminator". "Day One" (new TV show, upcoming — see the video clip below on YouTube). "FlashForward". "Lost". "12 Monkeys". "Deep Impact". On and on, an endless variation on a singularly delicious theme: Baby, we love us some apocalypse. We love to fetishize and fantasize how it all might go down because, well, destruction is built into our very cells, it feels like a foregone conclusion anyway, and of course God is all about the wrath and the blood and the wild techno orgies at the end of time. I mean, isn't She?Hell, we've been sensing the apocalypse, subconsciously planning for it ever since the first cave paintings of Keanu Reeves dodging a bullet in extreme slow motion. But does that mean, when the meteors hit and water riots ignite and you lose all access to the App Store, you have to look all tired and emaciated and Viggo Mortensen in "The Road"? Verily, it does not.
There are, from what I can tell, a few rules:
You do not wear shorts to the Apocalypse. You do not wear flipflops or capri pants or a kicky little pink halter from Betsy Johnson. You certainly don't wear skinny jeans or a nice pea coat and some Mary Janes. There are no Ugg boots at Judgment Day. Tasseled loafers? Please. Sweatpants are sort of tacky, but hoodies are widely accepted if you really must go the bleak oatmeal route. Then again, this is the apocalypse, sweetheart. Isn't it about time you got serious?
We're talking badass dusters and jet-black sunglasses and cool black boots, filthy fitted T-shirts and fingerless gloves and a few rugged industrial-strength duffel bags — sorry hipsters, no Chrome Messengers at the Rapture — to lug around your collection of giant sawed-off shotguns and/or enormous machetes, all of which you drive around in your mutant Hummer abomination thing — a mammoth vehicle, by the way, that must be either black or gray or military green and never bright red or blue or in the shape of a Ford Festiva or Honda Accord or a Chrysler Town & Country. Hey, that's what Jesus drove to cart away all the slobbering faithful, and he's long gone, sucker.
Overall, Armageddon has one hell of an irresistible appeal. Sexy, dirty, dangerous, liberating, stripped to the raw, bare-bones morality of it all. Total bonus: You get to eat whatever you want, because there isn't much food left, and anything you can find/pillage/kill is yours to munch, unless the scary inbred hill/sewer people get to it first.
(Note to self. Insta-book idea: "The Apocalypse Diet". Copyrighted right here and now. Just registered it. What to eat when all hell breaks loose and then invites you over for dinner and some drunken Scrabble. The ultimate field guide/cookbook/fashion reference. Who's got recipes?)
The Rapture is also a terrific social medium, in a land without Facebook. You just never know who you might meet, what sort of dating possibilities might arise. Did you notice that the only female humans who ever seem to survive Armageddon fully intact are skinny, smoking hot brunettes who know martial arts and can slice up large moose a with a pocketknife while not caring a whit that their ragged leather bra strap just fell off their shoulder again oops oh dear? You gotta be ready.
I am right now particularly enjoying this trailer for "Legion". Have you seen it? God has apparently become completely fed up with humankind and all our whining and Starbucks and Rick Warren-itis, and decides to send down his army of furious angels to wipe us out once and for all. There are wonderfully kinky full-body tattoos, giant leathery black wings, massive piles of guns like an NRA member's wettest possible dream. You know, just like they taught back in Sunday school.
This is the other thing about the Apocalypse: It makes no sense whatsoever. Let's see if I have this straight: God is omnipotent and all-powerful and created the universe in a hot fast week, and yet He still has to send an army of winged lemmings to wipe out pesky, flea-bitten mankind? And these angels can be killed? With guns? What sort of dorky God is that?
Look, if God really wanted to annihilate humankind forevermore, would He not just, say, blink or something? Snap His fingers? Think a deadly thought? Belch three times and do a little jig? Wouldn't make much of a movie, but come on.
Of course, none of that matters. The excuse for Armageddon doesn't matter. Hell, God doesn't even matter. What matters is the look and feel, the insane battle scenes, the killer weaponry, the brand of sunglasses. What matters is the big fight between heavily tattooed, badass white angel and the black-winged mace-wielding angel fighting like demented demons in a dusty highway truck stop.
In other words, what matters is how the Apocalypse is totally giving me some sexycool ideas for next year's Burning Man costume. Thank you, Jesus!______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 15, 2010 22:29:37 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHope and horror in Haiti and MexicoBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 15, 2010It's difficult to tell which story struck me more intensely: the heartbreaking images of devastation in dirt-poor, slum-ravaged Haiti, the result of yet another unstoppable and harrowing act of nature, with tens of thousands presumed dead and billions in damages in an already devastated, environmentally gutted country, or the story of the sharp increase in nauseating ultraviolence in the border towns of Mexico, a country that began the new year with its bloodiest day on record (see YouTube video clip) — 69 murders, many so shockingly gruesome it would make a horror movie director shudder.How do you parse and turn? Where do you look for relief, for a sliver of understanding? The Haiti drama is so overwhelmingly tragic, so much pain and suffering on such an enormous scale, you can barely get your mind — much less your heart — around it.
But it doesn't stop there. If you begin to dig into the Haiti story at all, it only leads you down a cruel rabbit hole of unspeakable desperation and horror, as you read further about the ravaged history of Haiti and its brutalized people, and just how destitute and violent, doomed and impossible the overall situation is in the western hemisphere's only third world country.
Here's a fascinating, albeit hugely depressing, Times story from back in May, to give an overview of what current Haiti earthquake relief efforts are up against. While the U.S., China, Venezuela and many others are already sending millions of dollars in food and relief, you read a story like this, in a country with 80 percent unemployment, where U.N. and relief workers have frequently been directly involved in drug deals and gang wars, where the children eat mud, and rape is common, you can only ask: what does the international aid actually mean? How does it serve anything? Wasn't the situation already so awful, so destitute and fraught, it's as though Haiti has been in a state of perpetual emergency for more than 50 years?
Do not misunderstand: relief efforts are mandatory and helpful, and I've already donated as best I can (Partners in Health was my choice), and I very much hope you do the same. But even so, something seems dreadfully broken, at the very core.
You might even go so far as to suggest that a place like Haiti is cursed, not merely by its terrible location in the hurricane track or by tectonics, not merely from environmental squalor or its crushing poverty, but by God himself.
Indeed, you might go so far as to agree with the eternally vile Pat Robertson, never one to let a massive human tragedy go perversely unblamed on the victims, saying Haitians brought on the tragedy themselves, because they made a deal with Satan nearly 200 years ago, exchanging their very souls for freedom from horrific French enslavement.
Isn't that sweet? Oh, Pat, you contemptible Christian reptile. Don't you know it's exactly the other way around? That, according to the Times piece, it was France's rather evil demand for fiscal reparations after the Haitians won their freedom from slavery that caused much of the country's downward spiral into near-permanent ruin? Say hi to Jerry Falwell in hell for us, Pat.
But whereas the Haiti situation seems impossible from just about every angle, the Mexico scenario offers a different assortment of nails and razor blades, mostly because, while the death count in Haiti is far higher than Mexico, the latter's deadly violence is a man-made brutality, a conscious and active thing wrought by humans on other humans, the direct result of one of ugliest machinations of our severely distorted capitalist system.
Which is to say, Mexico's appalling savagery is driven almost solely by the insatiable and highly lucrative American appetite for drugs. Cocaine and pot, we just can't get enough. And Mexico drug lords are happy to supply it, at a price of about, oh, 17,000 vicious murders since 2006, the year Mexico's president Felipe Calderon launched an army-led crackdown on drug gangs, igniting one of the most brutal turf wars in the country's history. Upwards of 2,500 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, the drug-haven border town, last year alone. Beheadings, bodies burned alive in acid, slicing off the face and sewing it to a soccer ball. Someone should make a movie.
So, I ask again: how do you parse? How does it all slot in? After all, you don't have to look far to feel how such tales swing close to home, how these stories resonate across the miles and the ideologies. For one thing, living in California, stories of ferocious, city-demolishing earthquakes have a special reverberation, a fearful tang. We see those images and hear the tales of bodies lining the streets, and can only think, oh my God, when the Big One hits here, just how bad will it be?
Of course, we know our infrastructure, our building codes, our overall ability to handle such devastation are all countless times greater than ramshackle, poorly built, slum-laden Haiti. We are, in a sad way, morbidly reassured by this, even as we humbly offer mountains of gratitude for our blessed lives, our immeasurable wealth. What a bizarre world.
With Mexico, the line is even more direct. Our happy vice equals its deplorable violence. We appear to be only too happy to let them massacre each other way over there across the border, so long as we get our fine chemical enhancements and it doesn't scare the horses. Would legalizing cocaine and marijuana solve the problem? Maybe. Doubtful. But we're still miles from such a possibility. Meanwhile, the blood keeps pouring.
Every day and every moment they come, these never-ending reminders of the endlessly harsh and violent planet we live on. Right down to the tale I read this week of the sweet, 24-year-old jazz bassist driving to rehearsal in Oakland, shot dead on the freeway, no known motive or reason. That's not 3,000 miles away in Haiti. That's not 1,000 miles away in Mexico. That's a handful of miles away from my house, just over the bridge, another dead body by the side of the road.
I don't know the answer, by the way. I struggle all the time with how to acknowledge and respect and even analyze the devastation and the horror that streams across the media wires every day without letting it turn my bones ashen gray.
I think we can only try to realize, as best we can, just how deeply tied into the tangled web of humanity we really are; all the wars and suffering, drugs and gangs, pain and loss, even as we try — sometimes very weakly indeed, sometimes in the face of devastating counterevidence — to remind ourselves that there really is an equal amount of beauty and joy, hope and positivism to be had in the world. Isn't there?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 14:34:54 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOpen letter to the new Apple iTabletBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 22, 2010What, you were expecting an actual photo of the iTablet/iPad? OK, imagine a delicate silvery thin gossamer electric wafer made of precious metals, flower spit, and the sweetest dreams of baby pandas. Then, strike yourself in the head with a large mallet exactly seven times. See it yet? — Photo: Apple.Dear imminent newborn world-altering Apple iWondergizmo, you who is right now being hyped to breathless orgasmic meganirvana by every tech columnist, gizmo blogger and swooning gadget pundit from here to Steve Jobs' personal foot masseuse:
If all excitable hints, whispers and established track records are to be believed, you're about to revolutionize the worlds of media, entertainment and finger-flicking, multi-tapping, picture-dancing habituality yet again, just as your creator's previous devices transformed the way we click on cute little pictures, compile eccentric dinner-party playlists, shake $300 chipsets to choose a local restaurant, and consistently misspell "agalmatophilia" in our hot sexting exchanges.
It has become apparent, dear Thing of the Future Now, that no one has the slightest clue just what the hell you're capable of. Indeed, the rumors regarding your potential feature set are rampant and giddy: Will you have this futuristic wireless acronym? Will you have that mind-melding throughputocity? Will you have this backlit bulbtuner or that supercompressed videogorithm? Who the hell knows?
And what of your appearance? Your materials? Will you be razor thin and gleaming like the mysteries of the fifth dimension? Made of rhodium, dark matter and the hymens of lost pagan goddesses? Will you smell like cake, feel like baby skin and taste like the hot roadkill of love? No one has a goddamn clue. Hence, the excitement, as they say, mounteth.
One thing we now know for sure: You will appear in a burst of dazzle in just a few short days at another special Apple media event, revealed in all your iWonderglory, ogled and cheered and turned over in the hand like an electric gemstone unearthed by trembling archaeologists who do not dress very well and seldom have sex.
So then. Before you are completely smothered in love and attention, criticism and resentment, I would like to make a humble request. I would like to add my own very late, exceedingly impossible list of demands for your imminent feature set, because those of us living in the modern era are nothing if not loaded with ridiculously high expectations for newfangled devices we suddenly cannot live without, even though we did for thousands of years prior.
Shall we, then?
Of your unforced beauty and sleekness, no one has any doubts. But will you be helpful in the ways that truly matter? Can you, say, crawl suggestively across the room on all fours in silver boy shorts whilst mixing the perfect rye Manhattan and reciting Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium"? It is unlikely that you can. But I thought it worthy of a request, because I find such talents sorely lacking in the modern era. A guy's gotta have his standards.
Speaking of anatomy, a rather inane debate has recently been renewed about the existence of the mythological G-spot in the equally mythological female sexual anatomy. British researchers are claiming the luscious bump of cervical goodness doesn't really exist. Of course, being British, anything they say about sex must be instantly disregarded, if not automatically reversed. Can you do something about the British? Perhaps a special app?
On the topic of health and happiness, it would be tremendously helpful if I could, say, hold a given food item in front of your gleaming screen and have you instantly reveal, via an intricate array of special sensors, the exact nutrient value, fat quotient, caloric assessment, global carbon footprint, potential colonic damage and overall dietary necessity of said comestible, along with exactly how amped or sluggish, healthy or regretful I will feel for the next three days if I consume it. Also, please perform the same function for potential girlfriends. Sexual playthings. Children. Pets. Politicians. Religions. Vitamins. Illegal drugs. Grand unification theories. Sunshine.
Meantime, I would like you to thoroughly organize my 8,000+ song library, my 20,000+ photo library, along with all article clippings, porn collections, shopping habits, grocery lists, cocktail recipes, address books, mailing lists, fond memories, future plans, unicorn-adorned dream journalings, sleep mutterings, in-shower brainstorms, post-coital poetics, childhood traumas, spiritual longings and nagging subconscious lifelong anxieties that are now manifesting as mysterious pains in my kidneys.
Please sync it all with my Vedic astrological chart, my delta sleep cycles and my yoga teaching schedule, cross reference it with my various moods and meditative temperaments, and then automatically play the exact song/photo/article/whatever my deepest soul was hoping to experience at the exact moment I was wishing to experience it, so as to alleviate all personal sadness, fears, doubts and suffering for all time. Or at least while I'm in the tub.
You are not perfect. I forgive you for this in advance. Nevertheless, when you freeze up, crash, accidentally erase a brilliant brainstorm for a new book, or fail to sufficiently scour my Facebook fan page for mentions of free foot massages, oral sex or complimentary flights to/guest rooms in Paris or Thailand, I would like to be able to hurl you against the wall in a sudden vent of frustration, only to have you bounce tenderly off said wall and float back to me as gentle as a summer's breath, as soft as a fistful of feathers thrown by nubile wood nymphs, as you forgive me all my pathetic human flaws and temperamental foibles. This might require some special engineering?
You are reportedly a Kindle-killer, a device that will instantly put an end to the timid and blessedly short reign of Amazon's bland, beige slice of ugly. Thank you for doing this. Can you also put an end to, say, Pizza Hut? North Korea? The NRA? Saudi Arabia? Soccer hooliganism? HFCS? Comic Sans? "Twilight" tattoos? Jay Leno? Thank you.
Your manufacturer is reportedly winning accolades for its green initiatives, eliminating harmful gasses and plastics, improving recycling, and so on. Even so, you are assembled in a giant factory in China, a country where fully half of your astonishing features are completely illegal, a place where your very freedom-loving existence poses a dire threat to the stability of the oppressive oligarchy. Please reconcile.
Did I fail to mention the basics? Locate lost keys? Identify mysterious rashes? Reveal the World Bank to be run by superintelligent lizards? Provide the extra vote so we can have even modest and hugely flawed goddamn health care reform in this country? Explain how the same species can possibly be responsible for something like the Large Hadron Collider and the Creationist Museum in Kentucky? Is that asking too much? I really don't think it is.
What about the ability to remotely start my car? Why, sure. Also, please move it across the street to a pre-determined spot during Tuesday/Thursday morning street cleaning, maybe have it washed, shake out the floor mats, protect it against drunk cyclists, wayward maniacs and incessant bumper acne.
Of course, I would like to be reading a book while this happens. At home. In a hot tub. A printed book, by the way, without you getting all jealous and stuff. Can you get me a great deal on a hot tub? And a cool house to put it in? And that silver hot pants thing? Because that would be really great.
Look forward to meeting you. Don't disappoint me, OK?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 22:51:48 GMT 12
From SFGate.com10 amazing truths you already suspectedVolume III! Muslim punks, lonely Chinese, very pink labiaBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, January 27, 2010Did you already know? I bet you already knew. Or at the very least, had a sneaking suspicion ...
(Volume I here, Volume II here).
1. Did you already know about those damn kids these days, what with their heaps of stress, anxiety and depression, who suffer from upwards of five times more mental issues according to one study than their same demographic during the Great Depression, back when the boys were grumpy, girls wore burlap underwear and the Wi-Fi totally sucked?
What the hell's wrong with them? Too many Facebooks? Sextings? Drugs? Standardized tests? Unrealistic dreams of fame and wealth, beauty and popularity? Well, yes. It would appear they're sort've prematurely wiped out, overloaded with too much external stimuli, educational pressure and that pesky burden of, you know, figuring out how to save the overheated planet. Same as it ever was? Sort of. Only worse.
2. But maybe it's not all bad. Because after much debate, controversy and sweat soaked, coke-snorting, skirt-lifting in the nightclub bathroom, it turns out kids and their dirty rock n' roll really can change the world. Or at least, slap it around a little, insult its more dogmatic and ancient whinings, and reveal some of it to be sort of small-minded and ludicrous because, well, isn't it? It absolutely is.
Witness, won't you, the wild new music microtrend in Taqwacore, a terrifically loud n' rude coming together of Muslim and Hindu youth from religiously conservative communities who are right now defying pretty much everything their faiths command, by forming angry punk rock bands and making all sorts of unruly, blasphemous noise to wake the gods and exasperate the church fathers. Is it not wonderful? Screw peace accords, disarmament, multithousand-year wars. Let the kids form anti-establishment punk bands, and watch the barriers implode.
3. Speaking of music-empowered kids, did you hear the one about the strange study that suggests how playing a bit of Mozart seems to help premature babies get a little bit stronger? True. Seems that piping in some nice, repetitive concertos or whatnot while the wee worms wiggle in their incubators has some sort of unexpected positive effect, probably something to do with all the cellos, vivace presto and the powdered wigs. Similarly, playing Spoon, Metallica and the new Massive Attack also made the fetuses really, really cool.
4. Do not get carried away. Remember: all that Mozart effect/Baby Einstein stuff? That insufferable Disney-owned product line that claims to make your tots better by shoving them in front of a computer or TV screen for endless hours and pumping a billion brightly colored images into their tiny prefrontal cortexes? Pretty much a total sham. Even Disney admitted they weren't educational. But you probably knew that already.
5. If you are reading my words right now and you just so happen to be a young American male of marrying age, now would be a very good time indeed to fall to your knees and kiss your girlfriend's tailbone as you offer up a mountain of gratitude that you are not young, male and living in China.
Can you already guess? It would appear that, due to the ongoing practice of gender-based abortions in rural China, it is now estimated there will be roughly 24 million single Chinese males of marrying age by 2020, with decreasing numbers of females to go around. Call it a testosterone time bomb, a gaypocalyse, one hell of a violently depressed bar scene. What's brutally patriarchal oligarchy to do?
6. Flipside: You could also argue that it would seem to be a very good time to be a young Chinese female. But somehow, given China's rather horrible track record for female rights, it rarely ever seems like a good time to say that.
7. Speaking of needful females, as mentioned in a previous column, after a million years and two million studies and roughly three billion fake orgasms, the female anatomy remains as inscrutable as a gay Republican at an anti-gun rally. Recent example: Try as they might, British scientists simply could not prove the existence of the acclaimed G-spot, that mythological cervical hotbutton in the female anatomy reportedly responsible for laughter in small children, peace in the Middle East, the perfect Manhattan, and — perhaps quite literally — the Big Bang.
Of course, being British, they were reportedly employing large hunks of fried cod, heavy dark beer, and an antique brass 1874 ship's compass to try and find the damn thing. Also, they were looking in the ear. So, you know, caveat emptor.
8. But really, ladies, who needs a G-spot when your tired ol' labia can now look refreshed and perky as pink lipstick on a pack of Bubble Yum? It's true. While you may be tempted to believe we've maxed out on bizarre ways to puncture, inflate, accessorize or otherwise embellish the human genital tastiness, a strange woman from Northern Idaho (!) has apparently come up with a new tub of labia-enhancing dye to, well, pinkify women's nether regions.
It's called My Pink Button. Think of it as make-up for the vagina. Vulva blush. In four colors/shades to choose from. Be sure to pick the one that best matches the couch. Or your shoes. Or your nightmares.
9. It's happened. Time has officially passed, an era has come to an end, another generation must sacrifice its perky little idol to the altar of adulthood and imminent rehab. Yes, the Hannah Montana franchise is hereby entering its final season, thus ending the run of the insanely chipper, saccharine, hyper-commodified girlbot who was aimed squarely at making 10 million 'tween girls feel entirely inadequate because they can't sing or act or make $100 million off the back end on DVD sales before puberty.
There is, alas, no truth to the rumor that the final episode features Hannah Montana finally discovering Buddhism, vibrators and single-malt Scotch, and adding some extra pink to her, uh, button. I know! What a shame.
10. But it doesn't really matter, does it? Nothing really matters. We are, after all, a tiny, infinitesimal speck of nil, stuck way off in the corner of a vast sea of teeming planetary foaminess. Hell, just last year, godless astronomers recently discovered a whole heaping fistful of new planets just beyond our own solar system, 32 of them to be exact, some about the size of the Earth and some far, far larger; some are so enormous they effortlessly dwarf our little blue lint-ball of dust.
It's a discovery that merely hints and winks at the billions of other galaxies and planets that surely exist, reminding us, in our ever-present, childish megalomania, to always at least try be a little humble and awestruck. Didn't you already suspect as much?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jan 31, 2010 23:24:55 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWhy are you so terribly disappointing?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, January 29, 2010What the hell is wrong with you? Are you really going to wear that? Why aren't you right now cooking me a nice meal and wearing those hot boy shorts you know I love and saying those words you know I want to hear at exactly the moment I like to hear them, to make me feel better about everything, even though I probably won't?
What happened to my bonus? What happened to my job? What happened to my country? Why can't it all go the way it's supposed to go? You mean having a kid won't solve my marriage problems? Why don't these drugs make me feel better? Where's that goddamn waiter with my salad? Have you seen the stupid weather today? Is this really all there is?
These are, from what I can glean, the most important questions of the day, of the month, of modern life itself. Hell, what with the economy and job situation, the housing market and the overall feel and texture of the nation right now, it's no wonder Americans are, by and large, a goddamn miserable bunch. We don't like anything right now. No politician, no decision, no situation, no inhale, no exhale. We are sick to death of all of it, including ourselves.
Can you blame us? Have you seen how many things there to be disappointed about these days? Love. Sex. Marriage. Stock market. God. Gas mileage. Death. Air travel. 5/9ths of the Supreme Court. It's all just a big goddamn letdown. The list is endless. And getting endlesser.
The evidence is everywhere. I calculate it took about seven minutes, give or take, after Steve Jobs finished introducing the shinypretty iPad before the whiny attacks on the wondergizmo began flooding in, how it didn't have this or that expected feature, how it can't do live video chat, doesn't have Flash, the bezel is too big and it won't double as a meat thermometer, how it doesn't really revolutionize much of anything despite how it's, you know, this gorgeous 1.5-pound slab of aluminum and glass that works flawlessly and can perform roughly one thousand tasks in a more fluid and astonishing way than any device of its kind in history.
Big f**king deal. We just do not care. It's all a big disappointment. Hey, I was expecting to be blown away. I was expecting miracles and transformations and multiple twitching orgasms on sight. Do not come at me with tantalizing promises only to reveal that you can fulfill most of them to a fairly good degree, and not far exceed all of them in every imaginable way. We're Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.
Also, global warming? Total effing letdown. Americans are no longer believing in it. Do you know why? Not because the mountains of scientific proof aren't there. Not because it's not happening. But because it's not yet happening to us like they said it would in the movies and those worst-case scenario books. Where are the zombies? The ice forests? Where's the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas? I want my goddamn apocalypse, and I want it now.
Hey, you annoying gay people? Ditto, to you. All this uproar about rights and gender, all this talk about how gay marriage is now legal in a handful of states, and still the very fabric of whinysad 50-percent divorce rate Christian society has yet to unravel and cause riots and induce all white Midwestern children to spontaneously combust. I mean, WTF? So disappointing.
My God, did you hear that pathetic State of the Union? That guy, that President Obama? Disappointing times a thousand, am I right? What the hell happened to him? Why is he so weak and ineffectual? Why the hell can't he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms? Doesn't he know I put a goddamn bumper sticker on my Subaru for him? I've never done that for anyone. Bastard.
He's only accomplished what, about 100 of the things I expected him to accomplish by now? Big deal. I have, like, 5,000 more. Health care reform has failed. Guantanamo is still open. Wars are still warring. Jobs are still sucking. Gays are still unhappy because the entire human understanding of love and gender in this nation has not completely transformed within a year. Infuriating!
But the biggest disappointment of all? Turns out one calm n' brilliant Barack Obama isn't enough to solve the problem of 535 vile n' slothful congressional jackals who aren't Barack Obama. Go figure.
Shall we recall just how violently disappointed those fundamentalists were when Bush bumbled off the stage, the single greatest disaster as president we will ever know? They were, of course, mostly disappointed Bush wasn't able to do far more repellant damage than he did. They wanted nothing less than full-scale war on Islam, death to all abortion doctors, creationism in schools, homosexuality banned outright, all you scary women to please stop it with your needy n' terrifying vaginas. You know, the usual.
And now it's the hardcore Dems' turn, in reverse. Obama cannot do enough good, fast enough. He is failing as our personal SuperJesus. Not because he's not accomplishing volumes and making all sorts of history, but because we were expecting total mindblowing revolution. Hey, it's his own fault, right? He's the one that set out one of the most ambitious agendas in presidential history to go along with the million-mile hole he has to dig us out of first. Can you blame us for whining?
But we don't stop there. Not only are we disappointed, we need to express it. Vent it. Hiss it and spit it and hurl it like fistfuls of mental manure at the great wall of hey, screw you.
You have but to take a peek in the comments section below this column, any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama's speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother's cookies. The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can't help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.
Maybe this, then, is the ultimate upshot of our endless, self-wrought swirl of sour disappointment, of never having our impossible needs fully met, of constantly being thwarted in our desire to have the world revolve around our exact set of specifications and desires.
Our disappointment begins to curdle, to turn back on itself, poison the heart, turn us nasty and low. It shifts from merely being a national mood or general temperament, into a way of being. A wiring, deep and harmful and permanent. It's all very disappointing, really.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 3, 2010 23:13:23 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSex and death the Facebook way!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, February 03, 2010About 40 people, mostly teen girls, gathered for a fight outside Bartram High School. Rival groups of girls ... were involved in a conflict on Facebook before the shooting. At least 15 shots were fired from two handguns after the brawl started. — Associated Press______________________________________ Behold, our beloved mechanisms of fear and desire, doom and delight! How they dance and sing in ways that make us giggle like obese children at the county fair, like drunken bears let loose at the campground. How they make us so very happy, horny, powerful like gods, and then turn right around and kill us dead. Ain't it a bitch? Is it not true? Have you seen how every new and once-benign invention, creation, gizmo, service, blip and hiccup in the man-made maelstrom seems ultimately to result in someone getting blown away, raped, kidnapped, drugged up, beaten, gutted and filleted and eaten alive by angry beetles in a garbage can? What a bizarre little species we are. What a surreal culture we hath wrought.
Same as it ever was? Hell yes. Only now it comes with USB!
Allow me to clarify. Let's momentarily flash back to the very first iPod, all those ages and eons ago. Do you remember? A sensation! A mindblower! A staggering runaway smash hit, the thing that changed everything, even though no one had the slightest clue what everything was in the first place! Oh how we were in thrall. Still are, mostly.
Do you know how the iPod finally cemented itself in the public consciousness, for real and true? What gave it actual weight and gravitas? It wasn't when it sold eight gazillion units in a month. It wasn't even when "playlist" and "iTunes" and "ear buds" anchored themselves in the American lexicon forevermore.
No, the iPod became a real fixture in the human consciousness when people started killing each other over it. The headlines began trickling over the newswires like freakish UFO sightings, tales of sudden muggings and beatings, murders and knives in the night, those famous, tell-tale white ear buds suddenly serving as targets in the darkened streets and murky subways. Holy crap! Death awaits the lonely music fan! Do not wear your iPod in public! Steve Jobs killed my sister!
Nike Air Jordans. Remember? Ridiculous $300 Chinese sweatshop-made hunks of plasticky leather, synthetic rubber and massive celebrity ego; they wouldn't even go down on you or make you breakfast or let you call Argentina for a nickel.
Still, they were so white-hot popular at one point that inner-city thugs were popping each other to steal a pair so as to wear them around the streets in order to get themselves popped and perpetuate the glorious circle of life. Killed over a shoe. And it wasn't even Prada! Silly, silly children.
Throughout history, the same. Not 48 hours after Alex Bell invented the very first telephone, his mistress rang him up for a fine Victorian booty call at 2 a.m., and his wife answered and she freaked the hell out and killed the cheating bastard in his sleep. True story! You can Google it!
Verily, every advent, miracle, revolution in cultural gizmongery ends up with someone six feet under. This is how we know said thing has really arrived, has become a true and binding part of who we are. The graveyards are full of people who died over a TV set, a tulip, a traffic jam, $2 and a pack of Marlboros.
Of course, everyone's gotta die sometime, of something. Is there ever a truly worthy reason, a valid mechanism? I mean, besides "he died of whilst levitating in a field of butternut pancakes over a lake of Scotch whilst being fellated by 10,000 angels and also Isabella Rossellini circa 1986?" Well sure, just kill me now.
And now, here we are. Evolution. The next phase. Well, sort of.
Witness, won't you, the great and bizarre era of the great and bizarre Facebook. It has become terribly real. It has moved from silly novel dorky sorority-girl hookup bubblegum pop, into something darker, harder edged, lethal.
Facebook is no longer just a fun little distraction, a tool to peer into the life of the guy you're dating and see what kind of morons he hangs out with, nor is it only the means by which you discover some hottie is actually Mormon and a Dave Matthews fan, hates sex and has a profile photo featuring four cats and her mom, thus allowing you to run, appropriately, screaming.
Like the iPod, like basketball shoes, like God, Facebook has changed cultural position, not because 15 million people use it to post bad poetry or talk about their love of "Mad Men" and Lady Gaga, but because Facebook — and its brethren MySpace and Twitter (and email and SMS and etc) have become one of those mechanisms, a means and mode of true love, deep pain, and yes, very real death.
Did you hear that Facebook was cited as a factor in about 20 percent of divorce cases (it's an "evidentiary goldmine"! squealed some very happy divorce lawyers)? Or that some very sad guy in Staten Island actually used Facebook to announce, via the Ultimate Status Update, his impending suicide, and then actually followed through? I mean, of course that finally happened. Inevitable. Still, a little weird.
How about the above-linked story, surly gangs of trash-talkin' inner-city girl-thugs in Philadelphia exchanging indecipherable teen gibberish on FB, and then meeting up after school to rumble and shoot each other in the ass? Delightful!
It's just the next mechanism. Another thing. We already had breakups over voicemail. Adultery via email. Suicide notes over SMS. Post-It Note flake-outs. Orgasms by webcam. Bizarre trysts via World of Warcraft. People are insane. It just keeps going.
Right now, the juxtaposition is still a tiny bit jarring. Facebook? Murder? Twitter? Rape? Text message? Death? All in the same breath? Twitter still makes you think of cutesy stupid birdies and whales and chirp, chirp, chirp. Facebook is still only a tech toddler. Implicating them in murder and misery seems a bit, you know, premature. Then again, this is the '10s, baby. We don't do patient.
Soon, of course, it will all fall in line. Soon enough the novelty will wear off, and Facebook, Twitter, et al will weave invisibly into the great human tapestry of love and death and pain. They will add themselves to the Grand List, just more modes and means to perpetuate our madhouse fetishes and desperate desires in this tragicomic circus of life.
There is, I suppose, some good news. For the exact reverse is also true. For every Facebook murder, MySpace suicide, text message heartbreak, there are 100 more juicy hookups and meetings, love-links and heartful ignitions, hopeful longings, eventual marriages, a hint and lick of bliss. Aren't there?
How many orgasms hath Facebook wrought that never would have occurred otherwise? How many compliments, accolades, messages of support and love, photos that made you smile or laugh or go holy god I had no idea? What about rallies, protests, parties? Is anyone tracking that? Is it all just part of the grand tapestry? All of a piece? Of course it is. A piece of what? No one has a goddamn clue. Isn't that wonderful?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 6, 2010 1:09:52 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHi! Come in! Please, no murderingBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, February 05, 2010While Peet's Coffee & Tea respects all individuals' rights under local, state and federal laws, our policy is not to allow customers carrying firearms in our stores unless they are uniformed or identified law enforcement officers. — The Scavenger.______________________________________ Hello and welcome to our store! Please, feel free to look around, make yourself comfortable, enjoy our fine offerings and, oh yes, by the way? Please, no murdering. Also, no raping, gang-banging, popping off, stabbing, mauling, stealing stuff, or walking around in a confrontational macho huff, ready at a moment's notice to harass any of our normal patrons with a snarl and a vague threat of violence because you feel it is your God-given right, given how you are a card-carrying member of a pro-gun "Open Carry" sect that likes to strap unloaded handguns to your Wranglers, walk around in public places and freak people out. Thank you so much!
I'm sorry, I see you are still wearing your little weapon and strutting about like you are the rather doughy, bad-skinned king of the sand castle. Perhaps we were not clear? Shall we try it again?
Clearly, you are not a police officer. Therefore, the management, our employees and pretty much everyone within a 100-mile radius would very much appreciate it if you would put away that ego-fluffing man-toy that is designed solely to kill other living creatures and induce fear and ignorance as it regresses every hesitant advancement in the human soul back to caveman grunting lunkishness. Thank you again!
Oh, please do not misunderstand! We are all terribly impressed. It is so very patriotic of you to show off your little popper! Are you in a gang? Are you a drug dealer? Are you going to shoot some scary terrorists, Mr. pallid paranoid Constitution-misquoting videogame-addicted guy? Protect all of us here in the casual neighborhood coffee shop from those crazy liberals and their health care reform and organic pretzels? Thank you so much! But really, I think we'll be OK without your little display. Enjoy your frappucino, won't you?
What, no drink? You now wish to order nothing at all and instead plop yourself down in the corner, plug in your laptop and angrily scour Facebook all day for evidence that your ex-girlfriend, the one who left you two years ago at a full, what-the-hell-was-I-thinking sprint, is now dating a liberal or a pacifist or an atheist and is far, far happier than she ever was with you? We understand. We appreciate your desire to partake of our free Wi-Fi, buy nothing and not give a damn that we can't really stay in business that way.
Why, look at you! Refusing to step away from the counter and instead choosing to read aloud from your little card that says how it's completely legal to carry an unconcealed, unloaded firearm in a public space! Way to stand up for your rights! God bless America!
Turns out you are right. It is legal, sort of. Then again, so is eating gravel, wearing a giant hat made of cow manure and squirrel tails, and slapping yourself in the face repeatedly while ranting semicoherently about Jesus, masturbation and Shania Twain. And you don't see anyone doing that, do you? Except Carl over there?
We realize it might seem unfair. Far be it from us here at the neighborhood cafe, where families and small children and book readers come to chat and feel slightly better about their day, to ask you to leave because your energy is so low and repellant and also downright silly.
But nevertheless, I'm afraid that's exactly what we're going to do. We would appreciate it if you would take your business elsewhere. Right now. No? Very well.
We had hoped it wouldn't come to this. We had hoped to find a better resolution. However, in response to your insistence on carrying a firearm into our premises, we have no choice but to change our official policy, right here and now, on the spot.
Again, we mean no offense, you jingoistic lump of mancrazy. You are indeed well within your rights to be a thoroughly paranoid coward who has no real inner strength, confidence or social skills, to a degree that you feel you must carry a deadly weapon around to feel like you even exist. We understand your thinking completely. It's basic psychology. Very, very basic. Childish, even.
So then. Like any business, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. But we realize there are some people for whom this is not specific or clear enough. We realize some people have to have it, you know, spelled out and publicly displayed.
Therefore, we have revised our list. Please note the new sign we have just posted on the front door. We have expanded and clarified a few things. We hope it helps.
Effective immediately on these premises, there will be:
- No murdering;
- No raping;
- No pillaging;
- No gun slinging, pistol-whipping, sucker-punching;
- No mauling, jabbing, stabbing, hating or undermining;
- No screaming bloody murder;
- No morons;
- No panicking;
- No testing on animals;
- No jumping for Joy. While she appreciates your enthusiasm, our cashier is happily married. Thank you;
- No live birthing;
- No dumping;
- No livestock;
- No smoking;
- No smoking the livestock;
- No exit;
- No way out;
- No diving;
- No spitting;
- No way!
- No Crusades;
- No "Star Trek" re-enactments;
- No skinny-dipping in the half-n-half;
- No doubt.
Thank you so much for understanding. Free sample biscotti on your way out?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 15, 2010 15:13:43 GMT 12
From SFGate.comFree indecent grope click here!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, February 10, 2010It has come to my attention that you are perhaps wildly understimulated. Or maybe just mildly? Whichever. Either way, not getting quite enough of the good stuff, the kick and juice that makes you feel alive and awake and happy to be barely surviving on this little blue speck of space lint we call home.
Does that sound about right? Is that you? Are you aching and craving and moaning deep in the night, and not just because the dog won't shut up, the kids are stabbing each other with forks, Obama has yet to fix the pothole in your driveway, and no one seems to understand your deepest desires and most obvious tell-tale facial expressions? I know just how you feel.
It has therefore come to my attention that you could use some additional, shall we say, titillation. Pleasure. Awareness. Consciousness. Muscles better and nerves more, as the poet said. Something electrifying? Revitalizing? A little bit of the up and under, wink and tickle? Damn straight, as the poet added.
You are far from alone. They say we are an increasingly desensitized country. Or a decreasingly sensitive one? Whichever. Either way: we just ain't feeling it all that much anymore. We are dejected and perpetually jaded, numbed out at a very deep level. Everything's amazing and nobody's happy, as the comic said (see YouTube clip below), smartly.In fact, they say we are becoming so far removed from our own bodies, from the lick and heartbeat of true knowledge and the wisdom of the immediate moment, that we are actually demanding more and more extreme experiences for most of us to feel, well, anything at all.
Have you noticed how we are increasingly seeking the limits of human endurance and nerve damage, just to know we're awake? Hardcore sex, torturous body mods, nauseating tattoos, wild drug abuse, extreme sports, binge drinking, radical politics, ultraviolence, cruel reality TV, butcher-horror porn movies, fundamentalist gods, Glenn Beck, neon blue energy drinks, not to mention everyone banging and screaming and howling in the anonymous commentings area of every website in existence, trying to cough out the phlegm of their general displeasure in the vain hope that someone, somewhere, will understand, will respond, will see through the charade and note our deep and trembling fear. You know? Of course you know.
Why, just look around. It's like you can't get a tolerable cup of coffee without someone's giant lingerie-clad breasts offered up to your greedy mitts for 80 bucks plus tip. It's like you can't watch the homoerotic lugnut Super Bowl without some hugely ignorant group of sperm fanatics telling you far too much about some dimwit quarterback's mother's thoughts about her ovum circa 1988.
(Do you find it amusing, btw, how the pro-lifers don't talk about murderers and rapists in the same way they talk about people whose sole value is that they play sports really well? How they never seem to flip the idea over: "Gosh, if only Hitler's mother had decided to abort her fetus ..." But never mind that now).
This is really our level of our discourse now? This is how we process and move through life? Verily, it would appear so.
Where do you look for stimulation? Where do you find that vital and bracing slap to your id? More importantly, just how intense and/or petty n' trifling do you need it to be before you feel it worth your time, attention, reaction?
We have few real limits anymore. Over at SF's beloved pervert factory, kink.com, they offer a whole slew of beautiful, weird and slightly insane sexual experiences for the well-heeled deviant. Hogtying and water-torture, public shaming sex and giant dildos strapped to jackhammers, all manner of happy bizarre degradation that, on one level, I fully celebrate and adore for its gleeful and responsible, utterly shameless experimentation with the wide range of human sexuality, and on the other makes me sort of sad, for how violently it shoves us away from fully appreciating the utter raging ecstasy inherent in a simple human touch.
Do you live in Fresno or maybe Reno? Oh, you poor sod. You are lost and sad and ill, and I can say that without fear of repercussion because chances are you are far too drunk to read this anyway, what with you living in one of the drunkest cities in America. We binge drink to benumb, right? To block it all out? Of course, it could be worse. You could live in Britain, where binge drinking to the point of kidney-failing, naked-in-the-streets, vomit-in-your-hair stupor every other night isn't just a right, it's some sort of law. God save the Queen... from slamming down another beer bong.
Of course, radical sexuality and self abuse are only a couple of the ways we torture ourselves alive. Behold, the Winter Olympics, soon upon us, the "purest" sports spectacle we can concoct, seeking the best and the fastest and the most perfect in a rather dazzling range of peculiar sporting events that no one anywhere actually undertakes in real life because they're just too strange and dangerous and ridiculous, but when you wrap them in a flag and start the clock ticking it's all, "Go, Belgian luge cross-country rifle-mogul ice-jumping squadron!"
This is the other big way we try to slap ourselves into existence: We choose our tribes, we take our sides, we don our armor and dash into battle, fighting for the absolute silliest things imaginable — the best triple-Lutz triple loop layback spin, who has the best coffee in this particular three-block radius, which college hates their cross-town rival more than any other, which tiny sliver of useless dust-choked land God totally promised he would hand over to which group of tiny dust-choked people thousands of years ago during a poker game in a drunken haze. (Yes, God lives in Fresno. It explains a lot, really).
The wise ones and the ancients are, of course, more than slightly baffled by all this, dumbfounded even, in how we are forever seeking the answer, the fix, the solution, the drug or the priest or the wayward, desperate, completely irrational, downright inane, faith-glutted belief that will make sense of it all, even though, deep down, we know damn well it can't, and never will.
They do not understand how we could have forgotten the simplest truths, the most basic ideas of nature and time, how all our sound and fury signifies, well, nothing at all, and if we're really dead serious about deep stimulation, about wanting to feel alive and present and fully aware at any moment, what's required is the exact opposite of extreme action, of body-slamming, face-jamming, genital-pounding pulverizations and mutilations.
They've known since the very beginning of consciousness itself that what's actually required for full participation in a wildly animated universe is nothing less than the scariest, most dangerous and unsettling thing of all, the thing that tends to freak out modern culture the most, simply because we are so unused to it.
What's required is the really simplest thing of all: it's just silence.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 15, 2010 15:46:25 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOde to the whipped white maleBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, February 12, 2010Let me just ask you this: Do you pity the sad n' squishy white guys of America right now?
Do you feel any empathy for their perilous plight, their incessant sexual frustration, their terrible taste in light domestic beer and that tell-tale slumping paunch, as they are slowly crushed under the relentless demands of their wives, the ruthless wail of their kids, the frightening instability of their job status, all overlaid by a thoroughly devastating female empowerment movement that has successfully mocked, derided and shamed every formerly proud dumb-guy thing — cars, beer, barbecue equipment, porn — down to a quivering puddle of don't-even-think-about-it?
Perhaps you should. Perhaps you should look on in compassionate wonder at what hath become of this bizarre and lost creature, so commonplace in America as to be a kind of lumpy epidemic, some sort of surprising suicide statistic, so crying out for help and definition and, well, a reason to exist at all.
Verily, if all the vaguely sexist, slightly angry, carefully dimwitted advertising that surrounded the Super Bowl was any indication — and rest assured, at $2.5 million for 30 seconds, with every moment focus-grouped and milked for maximum effect, that five-hour swath of homoerotic gladiator spectacle is about as dialed in to the modern male id as you can possibly get — pasty white American guys are under serious duress indeed.
This was the message, reinforced a hundred ways from Sunday: Modern males are dead inside. They are whipped and weakened and have little left to call their own, so they run around in hideous underwear and never go out in the sun because personal hygiene and mindful grooming are essentially an afterthought, given how once you're glumly married and stuck in the dead-end job in a miserable economy, well, who the hell cares about looking or feeling good anymore?
Hell, even the "hip" dudes of America are dressing more like lumberjacks, miners and survivors of the Great Depression. In post-Bush America, everyone's in rehab. Tough times call for lots of heavy wool and checkerboard plaid, copious facial hair and knit skullcaps. Fun!
But the one thing many of these generic dudes apparently long for? The one thing they crave above all else besides a modest raise and/or the begrudging oral sex they never get from their newly empowered women? Easy: A crappy American muscle car they can drive really fast for very short bursts of time, before pulling into their driveway to be swallowed whole by their inexorable misery all over again. God bless America.
OK, that was just one vile commercial (see YouTube clip below), for the quite thoroughly awful Dodge Charger (Along with one fashion article/spread, detailing the new lumberjack/Great Depression chic). But it was endlessly revealing, and bled over into all the rest.By and large, it's an overall theme of confused males moving through the world as numb as frozen cod, because (we are told) they have no idea who they are anymore. It's the new American checklist: Residual homophobia? Check. Junk food and domestic beer? Check. Blind sports mania? Check. A sense of fatalism and hopelessness, of no longer understanding one's role in the grand scheme of gender, home, labor force, life? Jackpot.
I wrote a column a few years back during the peak of the metrosexual movement (era? Detour? Heyday?), all about the difficulty major advertising firms were having at the time, trying to sell crap to the "new" modern male, this weird, amorphous Renaissance man who appeared to be branching out in (mostly) wonderful ways, trying on new guises, identities and sexualities, paying more attention to so-called "feminine" things he never cared about before, like yoga, home decor and fine cookware.
The advertisers' Big Five fallbacks: cigarettes, booze, cars, watches and, uh ... booze, just weren't sufficient anymore. Guys were getting into fashion. Art. Pedicures. Electronica. Orchids. Designer drugs. They were starting weird little businesses that had nothing to do with alcohol, knives or the military. They were buying European cars and French porn and Belgian cheese and German-engineered strap-ons. They drank sake and Prosecco and artisan small-batch whisky. They shaved their genitals. Proudly.
Not anymore. The creative, slightly blasphemous, adventurous days of New Guydom appear to be over, and advertisers have happily glommed on to the change (or perhaps they're the ones who triggered it? Is it their fault? It's all very chicken-and-egg).
Their target demographic seems to be much clearer now: He is adrift, emasculated, slightly pissed off. The metrosexual wave passed right by him, the economy tanked, and suddenly he's been dumped into giant void, a gaping hole where the power tools and tailgate party used to be. What a horrible message.
So, if he's no longer the center of the universe, no longer lord of the manor or even the primary breadwinner, what the hell is he? Where shall he hang his gilded armor of battlefield glory?
Answer: Just over there, around back, behind the garage, next to the garbage cans and the cobwebbed fishing boat. See it?
Behold, the man cave. Witness the cute, surprisingly likable, totally harmless but still rather sad TV show of the same name over on the DIY Network, where a talented carpenter and some giant Italian ex-NFL player who looks like a "Sopranos" leftover and who doesn't seem to do much of anything at all except give meaty, awkward, non-gay hugs to other meaty, awkward men, pick some unsuspecting "guy's-guy" in need, swoop into his New Jersey house and turn his spare carport into the "ultimate" guy hangout his mom is totally not allowed to enter, like, ever.
Can you guess what they put in these "caves"? Of course you can. Hydraulic pool tables. Flat-screen TVs. Golf simulators. Revolving motorcycle pads. Harley Davidson icemakers. Sports team logos from floor to ceiling. Red Sox carpeting. Shiny black leather reclining couches that 1988 really, really wants back.
It's pretty much every classic male cliche writ large, because if there's one hallmark of this dumbed-down American male, it's utter lack of intellectual range, subtlety or refined taste. Is this really the message? Is this really the new male ideal? Farewell "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," hello "Lair for the Lugnut"? I'm not buying it.
I really do not wish to begrudge. I do not wish to overly criticize, even as I lament the loss of what I saw as a damn fine and long overdue trend, a healthy, if subtle, cultural shift away from the macho, simpleminded energies that seemed to have gotten us all into so much trouble lo these past, oh, two million years or so.
I am simply here to note, with attendant sadness, what the man cave ideology/ethos represents, just how demeaning this new American advertising message appears to be to men, even if I think it's a total lie, ridiculous and misleading, and completely full of shit.
Do you know what that awful message is? Can you read the sign over the door?
It says: "When the going gets tough, the tough get totally bummed out and slump off to the basement to drink too much beer, watch ESPN and quietly resent every aspect of their lives, as they deeply wish, just once, they could drive a turbocharged Z06 Corvette flat-out for 10 minutes straight on an open road with no cops anywhere, laughing and screaming and crying all at the same time, straight off a cliff."______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 19, 2010 15:44:43 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHi! Everything wants to kill youBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, February 17, 2010Then I happened to read a charming, albeit nauseating little news item that tried to skulk by unnoticed recently, wherein it was announced that the Huntington Meat Packing Co. of Southern California was expanding its recall of possibly E. coli-tainted meat, from just over 860,000 pounds to ... wait for it ... five million pounds.
Five million pounds of bad meat. Sounds like a fun movie title. Or maybe a nickname for Congress. While pondering the number, I did some quick math. But being lousy at math, I also did some quick research.
All-knowing Google informed me that the average head of cattle, say a 1,200-pound animal, results in something like 500 pounds of usable meat, give or take. Interesting! Or not.
Ergo, five million pounds is the rough and chopped-up output of about 10,000 animals. Ten thousand head of cattle is, freakishly, only about a tenth — if that — of what the largest industrial feedlots in Idaho, Texas, California, Nebraska and elsewhere have on their tortured and tormented, methane-choked properties at any given moment (Broken Bow in Nebraska can hold 85,000 head. Simplot in Idaho can process up to 150,000. ConAgra's frightening Montfort lot in reeking Greeley, Colo. is so big it chokes your very soul). Which is just all sorts of disgusting. But there it is.
(Oh and btw, five million pounds of meat is also the equivalent of about 30,000 average-weighted humans, or one big, sold-out Dave Matthews concert in San Jose. Hey, we're all dead meat in the end).
It gets so you lose sight of the scale of things. Five million pounds? Seems like a lot. It seems epic and sickening and a little horrifying.
And then you realize that it's not. Really it's just a drop in the giant meatbucket that is the Western diet, a thimbleful of the staggering tonnage of industrial foodstuffs we consume every day, much of it loaded with poison and antibiotics and hormones and environmental burden; that includes millions of enormous animals that should be eating grass but are instead being force-fed land-ravaging grains and 10 billion gallons of drugs per year so we may satisfy our ravenous appetites for far, far more unhealthy meat than we actually need.
Which in turn makes you sort of amazed that there aren't more meat recalls, more epidemics and outbreaks, more McDonald's restaurants spontaneously combusting from all the chemicals. It makes you wonder why the hell we aren't all dead right this very moment. Perhaps we are? Wait, is this heaven? Nah. Just the Internet.
Speaking of McDonald's. Did you hear? A woman was sitting in the McDonald's over in the Great Mall in Milpitas just recently, consuming her capitalism-approved portion of hormone-blasted industrial feedlot beef and HFCS-injected everything (though, to be fair, it could have been one of their "healthy" prepackaged nuclear salads), when, of course, she went into labor.
And she gave birth, right there in the food court, in the McDonald's, in a giant suburban shopping mall, because there is possibly no more quintessentially American scenario than birthing a human being in a fast food outlet in a shopping mall food court, unless she also happened to be thinking about firearms, watching "American Idol" and listening to Dave Matthews whilst something something NASCAR.
Reading that story, it was impossible for me not to note how this woman, this divine fertile feminine life force, was likely consuming some of the worst possible processed foodstuffs imaginable right up to the moment she birthed a human baby — a child, we can politely surmise, that had been nourished through much of its gestation by a veritable pharmacy of bloodstream toxins, fats and salts and corn syrups, synthetic flavorings and hormones from that selfsame feedlot beef.
Do you think this new mom was also perhaps drinking a fine beverage made by the Coca-Cola corporation at the moment of labor pains? Sipping maybe a Dr. Pepper or a Sprite? The odds are reasonably good she was, a Coca-Cola product being something of a prerequisite to browsing Champs, Foot Locker and Kay Jewelers in any shopping complex in modern America.
Mmm, soda. Have you heard that soda is the new tobacco? A demon in angel's clothing? Well, it is. Quite the sickening swill, really, far more unhealthy and dangerous than we readily acknowledge because gosh, how can something so happy, so all-American, so polar-bear Christmastime Homer Simpson I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing wonderful, possibly be all sorts of cancerous and sickening and Sarah Palin-grade wrong? Well, it is.
Like cigarettes, they say soda is in dire need of regulation, heavy taxation, warning labels, the works. Do you imagine Coca-Cola cares all that much about the anti-soda campaign being waged against its wares right now? Hell yes, it does. But maybe not as much as you think, given how it has pretty much maxed out the U.S market anyway. After all, how many blue sports drinks, pink energy beverages and nefarious Coke Minis can you cram down one country's gullet? We simply can't get much less healthy. Time to move on.
And so it did. The Coca-Cola company just reported big profits last quarter, despite how there's no one left in America to poison (except the tiny, precious children). Do you know how it did it? Can you guess how it made more millions? That's right: by slowly poisoning India, China and Brazil.
They call them "emerging markets," because these countries are just now emerging from millennia of drinking various liquids that were not exceedingly good at killing them by way of high fructose corn syrup and unpronounceable chemical additives. What, the western gift of fast food, industrial meat and oil dependency weren't enough? Let's give them all diabetes and obesity and even worse teeth? Fabulous. Have a Coke and a smile, indeed.
It doesn't really matter. Might as well eat that industrial burger and inhale a giant Coke as you speed down the freeway in your tiny Japanese car. Do you know why? Because your airbag may kill you anyway.
Amid the furor over Toyota's massive recall of stuck accelerator pedals, a lesser-seen item about Honda Motor Corporation, itself quietly recalling about a half-million Accords and Civics over dangerously high airbag pressure, which they say could knock you dead if deployed.
Wait, what? Death by airbag? Isn't that just a little bit of irony overload? Isn't that a comedy routine somewhere? In hell, perhaps? Then again, it would be a simply spectacular way to go, really, if you think about it, if you really love irony, if you think God is basically just a wickedly devious cosmic trickster. I mean, why the hell not?
It all balances out in the end, anyway. It's all just the grand and dreamlike circus spinning and laughing and churning its cotton candy profundity into the Void. For every adult human ironically sent to the great feedlot in the sky by a misbehaving automotive safety device, a child is born in a shopping mall food court, pre-addicted to Quarter Pounders, ready to take on the overheated, surreal world all over again. And lo, the great play continues ...______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 19, 2010 22:09:33 GMT 12
From SFGate.comAll politicians are madhouse freaksBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, February 19, 2010Is that headline overstating things just a little? Do you think I am perhaps engaging in a small amount of hyperbole to draw in your jaded eyeballs and make an otherwise obvious point? You might be right. Then again, perhaps you are not.
Fact is, I think you sort of agree. I think you understand it's not really that far from the absolute truth; all politicians really are freaks, completely and down to the very bone. They are freaks not merely because they must be so in order to be drawn to such a heartless, ruthless, bizarre, meat-sucking, powermad soul-death of a slime-laden profession in the first place, but because — no, wait, that's about it. That's the reason.
Moderate Democrat Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate. Did you hear? His announcement of not being at all interested in licking Congress' malicious bootheels anymore is now causing quite the uproar, largely because Bayh is youngish and handsome and smart and well-connected; he was one of Obama's top-tier choices for VP, and he seemed ideally groomed for bigger and better things in the political sphere.
Why the hell would he give all that up, the power and prestige, the fame and the acclaim, the hookers and the nubile pages, the Cuban cigars and the kickbacks? Is some sort of scandal looming? Drug addiction, perhaps? Did he have sex with Tiger Woods? I mean, powerful, connected, well-liked guys like that don't just leave. Do they?
His answer is ridiculously simple and, if true, makes all sorts of depressing sense. Bayh says he is not running for re-election because Congress has become far too acidic, poisonous, "brain-dead partisan," ineffectual, useless, mean-spirited and polarized. Nothing gets done. There is no discussion, no more middle ground. There is no working together to solve anything, for anyone, at any time. Same as it ever was? Well, yes. Only now, far more so.
There was a poll, a fairly significant one but also fairly plain, saying things you already suspected but perhaps hoped were getting better, even though you suspect they are not.
Part of what this poll revealed is that a mere eight percent of Americans want the current members of Congress to be re-elected. Which appears to be another way of saying a whopping 92 percent of the country wants Congress gone. All of them, each and every one. Because, as noted, nearly all of them are ruthless schizoid madhouse freaks. And not in the good way.
Is that not startling? Is that not amazing, our near-unanimous abhorrence of our own government, of the people we the people put in power to lead us?
I already know your answer: nope, not surprising at all. You might then rightly ask, are we alone in this? Is there a populace anywhere in the world that deeply loves its elected leaders, one that's proud of and happy with a majority of its officials?
Answer: sort of. Sure, hating politics is damn near universal, and appears to be second only to expecting them to be good and decent and get everything done for us. Then again, the U.S. is down near the bottom insofar as believing our leaders have our best interests at heart at any given moment. First-world power and influence, third-world corruption and mistrust.
Bayh echoed that selfsame poll when he suggested the only way to "fix" Congress might be to vote all the jackals, special interest shills and fringe nutballs out of both parties, and then vote in an entirely new cadre of untainted humans, real reformers, people who know how to work together and make things happen, sans the bickering and acid and hookers and handouts.
You can see the problem right there. Who the hell might that be, exactly? Where do we find people like that? Do they even exist? Have we not already established the fact that American politics, as it is now designed, largely draws freaks and gladhanders, shysters and fools?
One of the ways to make politics appeal to fair-thinking, good-souled, college-educated intellects would be to start with something even mildly radical — like, say, campaign finance reform, perhaps disallowing vicious corporations to buy and sell a given candidate like a brainless toy. Yes, that might help. Hello, Supreme Court? Here is your giant middle finger. Love, America.
Let me be clear: Well do I know there are a handful of very smart and very well-intentioned politicians — mostly local, some state — who get into it for a genuine love of people and community, and because they truly want to make their town, their schools, the world a better place.
Of course, it seems they don't last long. They get sucked into the guts of the machine, and their ideas get filleted, and their families and personal lives are destroyed by a billion slings and arrows from outrageous bloggers and Fox News imbeciles, and in order to survive at any length and be reasonably effective, they and their souls get slowly eaten alive by angry gnats.
Which brings us, naturally, to President Obama, quite possibly the least freakish, slippery, pre-devoured politician to ever grace the Oval Office — which, in truth, sort of baffled everyone, in the beginning. "What the hell is a smart, attuned, deeply intelligent, meta-calm community organizer dude doing wanting to run the country, in that ocean of snakes?" millions of us who voted for him asked in wondrous, mystical disbelief. "How long can such a person possibly last in that rare, impossible state of utopian goodness before being sucked into the hate-filled congressional vortex?" we added, fearfully.
Answer: not long, apparently. To be sure, Obama went in with a rather astonishing set of credentials as a masterful uniter, a capable compromiser, someone who could find the intelligent middle ground in a hurricane. This, to many of us, was the real change he would bring to Congress — not wild organic liberalism and peacenik silliness, but more of a simple, calm, effective reversal of the utterly vile, hyper-polarized, we-hate-everything extremism that Bush so disgustingly embodied.
(Oh btw, the Bush family? Total freaks. So cloistered, inbred and twitchy, they were perhaps freaks of the worst kind: freaks of the mundane and the mediocre, the violent and the low. But you already knew that.)
But now it feels that even Obama, quite simply the best president we on the left can possibly hope for in terms of intelligence, subtle thinking, nuanced understanding of the more progressive issues of the day, a man who dazzled the hell out of both parties when he walked in, appears to be stunned by just how deeply he's been dipped in the toxic acid bath that is the United States Congress.
All of which can lead you to an utterly depressing, defeatist view of America, wherein you might say the worst affliction we suffer isn't the horrible economy, job losses, botched health care reform, war, housing collapse or Hannah Montana. Rather, it's a snarling, hydra-headed government led by fundamentalist tea-party fringe nutballs from the right and weak-kneed whiners from the left, full of sound and fury, inspiring absolutely nothing. Or is that overstating things just a little?______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 24, 2010 21:15:48 GMT 12
From SFGate.comTiger Woods' terrifying lack of humorBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, February 24, 2010Tiger Woods, again setting a fine example for humorless, joyless, personality-free, irony-deprived humans everywhere. Great for kids! — Photo: Eric Gay/Associated Press.It is entirely possible that Tiger Woods, AKA the world's most famous athlete who also appears to be the most boring and bland and Jesus dude show a hint of spark and humor and life, would you please? it's entirely possible Tiger is far more messed up and clinically depressed than his juvenile, low-grade adoration of hookers, porn stars and skeevy Vegas waitresses would let anyone believe. Let us acknowledge that possibility for a moment, as a means to justify the guy's absolutely deadly blandness, his unbearable contriteness, his refusal to show even a wisp of lightness or spark or shrugging get-over-it-edness. Maybe he's really dead inside. Maybe it's deeper and sadder than anyone knows. Fine.
But, oh my God, is this really how it's supposed to be? Is this the example we want? A dour American billionaire "hero" steps up and apologizes profusely, via careful script, to a huge array of people who have no real need for his apology, because no one really cares anyway? A speech that basically comes down to some rich guy no one really knows saying he's sorry for failing to live up to some impossible, ridiculous Mr. Nice Guy standard set by, well, himself, a hundred endorsement deals and an entirely bogus Christian moral code that doesn't really exist? Great.
But oh, how relentlessly depressing. And how utterly silly. Watching Tiger bury himself under an avalanche of sad-faced apologies and surprisingly awful clothing, I'm reminded of a similar reaction I had when I watched Andre Agassi break into tears on camera in front of a delighted Katie Couric not long ago.
Andre was talking depressedly about the rough time he had well over a decade ago when he was going bald and resenting the hell out of his ruthless father and snorting a tiny bit of meth just for the hell of it, all whilst nailing Brooke Shields every night in his $10 million Vegas mansion while still being adored by millions and having nothing at all, really, to worry about.
My thought was: Why isn't he laughing? Why isn't he at least shrugging and sighing and saying, "Hey you know what? Life is ridiculous. Life is hard. Life is a mixed blessing crapfest thrillride joyburden, Katie. Even for me. Especially for me. Isn't it all hilarious and amazing? I'm still here! Did some dumb things, dated some very dumb people, wasn't the most honest with my wife. Then I fixed it. Everybody happy? Good. Let's get in the hot tub."
Oh, I know, Tiger Woods committed adultery like 5,000 times. Shameful! Horrible! Should be strapped down and beaten with a ultrafeminist 9-iron! Bow before a scowling judgmental God for his copious unforgivable sins! Or perhaps, not so much.
Shall we be honest? About how we live in a country with a 50 percent divorce rate, and probably 27.9 percent of the remainder wish they could split and go their own way, but are trapped by kids or homes or taxes or because it's just too damned annoying/expensive to separate, so let's just stick it out and gently seethe in warm pools of quiet resentment and long, woeful sighs, and maybe we should try an open relationship, honey, please, please, please?
Translation: Only a fraction of long-term couples are happily married and faithful, and more power to them. But the vast majority of relationships are difficult, fraught, insanely challenging. Indeed, Tiger was a massive lying slut. But I have a feeling his grinning zillionaire wife wasn't exactly ignorant of the blinged-out world she was blissfully inhabiting. Fascinating how many transgressions, affairs, flings that multiple mansions, a private jet and an unlimited checking account can help you "overlook."
ABC's George Stephanopoulos called Tiger's little speech "one of the most remarkable public apologies ever by a public figure." Clearly, Stephanopolous might be more of a mental fluffball than anyone originally thought.
Dick Cheney slithering forth and apologizing for being a cancerous, warmongering monster whose brutal profiteering and shriveled soul cost thousands of young American lives? The GOP stepping out and admitting they killed health care reform because they really wanted to ding the scary black president, and don't really give a flying crap about your sick and uninsured children? Now those would be remarkable public apologies. A comatose golfer saying he's sorry for nailing some hookers whilst his family rolls around in $500 million worth of Escalades, diamond-crusted teaspoons and Swiss ski chalets? Not a remarkable apology. Clear?
But here's the bigger truth: Tiger wasn't apologizing to actual people, to his wife or kids or even his confused fans. Tiger was apologizing, straight up and to the bone, to capitalism itself. To his own brand. It was a scary attempt to shore up the multimillions in endorsement deals, his future as a billion-dollar icon. Tiger the man was apologizing to Tiger, Inc., mostly for tainting its earnings potential.
It's the golden rule of capitalism: Don't f**k with a hot brand. It's blasphemy of the highest order, made doubly potent by the fact that we're the ones who helped create the brand in the first place, who bought into the saccharine lie and absurd marketing BS of Tiger's impossible squeaky faultlessness.
It's a bit like Coca-Cola stepping forth and admitting, "Gosh, so sorry for making everyone obese and contributing to global diabetes rates, but you know what? You buy our garbage, don't you? You actully believe the silly commercials with the polar bears and the singing children. You really think sticky goopy chemical-laden high-fructose water is refreshing and healthy? Really?"
It also points up a terrifying trend, a broad and rather pathetic theme in our culture: Precious few are the celebrities, politicians, sports icons or rock stars who would dare step in front of a camera after some sort of "scandalous" misbehavior and smile, or even laugh, shrug it all off and tell everyone to lighten the hell up and go worry about something important. Well, maybe a few rock stars. This is why we love them. This is why they became rock stars, so they don't have to apologize. God bless them.
Perhaps there's still hope. Perhaps someday, a politician/celeb/icon embroiled in a crazy drug/gay/sex scandal will step up and say, "Hey, my apologies to my loved ones. I was a hypocrite. I lied about some stuff. I was sort of stupid about it. It happens. We all do it. I'm working on it. But you know what? No one died. Everyone will be OK. Life goes on. What's more: No one really cares. Or if you do, you really need to get out more.
"Did you know there are multiple, appalling wars going on right now? Disease and suffering of the highest order? The planet is dying in coughs and spasms? Do you know your kids can't get decent health care? Fish stocks are collapsing? A billion humans live in slums?
"So I slept with a gay hooker and enjoy a line of blow now and then. This really matters? You really care? We are flawed and silly species, each and every one of us. If we don't laugh and dance and face our demons like the grinning, preposterous monkeys we so very much are, we're all dead anyway. Who wants wine?"______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Feb 26, 2010 21:01:20 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOh we are cynical, oh we are hopefulBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, February 26, 2010What sort of species is this? What are we made of, really?
Here is what you already know: We are preternaturally jaded and fearful, burned-out to the core. We are ever at the mercy of our myriad dreams of destruction and death, ravaging us like salivating demonhounds in the night. And not in the good way.
Poll after poll, study after study says the human animal is a fragile, troubled creature. Our bodies are a million ways amazing, but they are no match for the ruthless machinations of time and industry, freeway crashes and health care collapse. We are held together by rubber bands and duct tape, shot through with 10,000 prescription meds, therapies and surgeries, as we offer a thousand nervous prayers for that unsettling chronic pain to please, please, please subside, just a little.
Poisons abound, in our food, furniture, the very air we breathe. We are crammed like a Texas Wal-Mart with so many chemicals and toxins, afflicted by so many ailments and mental illnesses that it would take a book the size of Freud's fetish dungeon to list them all.
What's more, we keep creating new ones, inventing and defining amazing ailments to suffer from. You ever seen a copy of the DSM-IV? A medical encyclopedia? The ingredient list on a bag of Chee-tos? Sweet diabetic Jesus. Is anyone truly healthy, even keeled, just right? Don't ask your doctor.
It's not just us. Oh how we despise and mistrust our leaders, our own government, as well. Here's a poll: fully 86 percent of us think our government is broken at a very deep level, and fully 86 percent of us are exactly right. "What sort of insane system is this?" we like to wail into the Void. "Who the hell came up with such a nefarious scheme? Oh right."
But wait. What have we here? Aww, goddammit. That's right — it's the flipside, the other half, the perky everlasting upswing to your ever-depressing downward spiral. Who the hell let all this eternal sunshine in here? Guess we'll just have to make the best of it.
And that's exactly what we do. For here is another set of polls and surveys, studies and insights that reveal, happy birthday and wouldn't you know it, that we are one hopeful, perpetually optimistic creature of joy and positivism, always looking on the bright side, always hoping for a better outcome, the yappy little dog wagging its tale at the approaching hurricane.
Here is the selfsame aforementioned poll, revealing that, despite how 86 percent think government is totally busted, 81 percent also think it can be nicely fixed. Yes, really.
Which is curious indeed, if only because, by most measures, our government was broken a priori, from the moment of inception, when it first rolled out of the factory. "Fixing" it, then, would seem to require nothing short of exploding the whole goddamn thing, starting from scratch and not letting a single corporate executive, politician, military general, teabagger or banking honcho within a million miles of the drawing board.
No matter. Optimism is, apparently, in our wiring, our genetic code. Hope springs eternal. Eternity springs more hope. Obama nailed this tone perfectly in his campaign, tapping the innate positivism vibe better than any candidate in a generation, mostly because he (arguably) actually believes it. What a sucker. Or not.
That's the cool part, really: It didn't feel like the typical charade, it wasn't a lie. It's genuine, that hope, a verifiable scientific fact. It's also, if you strip away the fluff and Oprah and Jesus, quite the gorgeous reminder of our inherently divine nature. Truth is, we've done the I-predict-a-better-future thing since Adam checked out Eve in her newly sinful state and went, oh hell yes.
So of course we do silly things like try to measure hope and happiness, to quantify it and define it or develop iPhone apps for it, and we say inane statements like "I just want to be happy," even though most of us have little clue as to what that vague place might look like, how to attain it, or even if it's something to be attained at all, as opposed to what the mystics have been telling us for, oh, about 5,000 years.
Which is: You don't strive for happiness, silly one. One does not attain bliss, or enlightenment, or godhood. You simply step into it, as a river. You simply become aware of it, like suddenly becoming aware of the tongue in your mouth. Hi. I've been here all along. Let's go lick something.
It's about consciousness. One billion of our fellow bipeds live in filthy, high-density slums on pennies per day. No running water, no Wi-Fi, no $5 lattes. Yet, shockingly, numerous studies reveal slum-dwellers to be, well, if not happy, or at least not nearly as miserable as you might assume. They're not nearly as miserable as, say, your wealthy McMansion neighbor, with his Porsche Cheyenne Turbo and two pissy over-entitled kids and three expensive therapists and daily thoughts of apocalypse and flamethrower and suicide. Amazing.
Hope is everywhere, when you dial into it. Endless are the articles, books, websites detailing the stuttering progress of our species, the genius thinkers, the hopeful invention, the thing that could rescue us all from oil dependency or cancer or environmental destruction for about 89 cents per unit, if only we could (blank blank massive trillion-dollar investment).
"Look on the bright side, wary pilgrim," these stories all seem to wink. "We live in miraculous times. The circus rolls on. Who the hell knows what the future holds? Also, you could be dead right now. Shut up and get on with it."
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I all you have is cynicism and bitterness, the world grins its most ominous grin and serves you a whole lot more. Conversely, if all you have is perky lightness and fluffy love, well, you are perhaps living a lie as well, your Jungian dark side hidden and ignored and potentially — or rather, certainly — explosive.
So then, do you dance between the extremes? Do you blend and commingle like the trickster bartender of your own sacred life? Do you try to stay hovering in that sweet, sticky interstitial zone of yes and yum and dammit, ever aware and questioning, yet also ever certain, at a very deep level, that the world, that humanity, can and will get better?
Which way do you lean? Have you already tipped all the way over? It's OK. There's always hope.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 5, 2010 15:08:06 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe truth about your immense weirdnessBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, March 03, 2010"What are you doing?" she asked, watching closely as I moved about the kitchen all Zen-like and confident, sort of.
"Just warming some sake."
"In that?"
"Well, yes."
"What is that? It's so cute! A little pan! Wait, isn't that a ... sauce warmer?"
"Well, technically, it's actually a butter warmer. Don't tell anyone."
"Hold on ... it says KitchenAid on the handle. You're warming sake in a heavy black metal KitchenAid butter warmer?"
"Yes, yes I am."
"I see. That seems a little ... weird. Is that weird? And isn't that a wine glass? I thought sake was supposed to be served in cute little cups."
"Nope. Trust me. Just wait 42 more seconds. [...] OK, here, take a sip."
"Oh my God. That's delicious. Incredible. Goes right to my toes. Deeper."
"See?"
"I stand enlightened."
"It's far better if you sit."
Two things you should know right off: One, despite the previous little scene and the following five paragraphs, this is not really a column about sake.
Two, I'm well aware that hot sake is all sorts of beverage blasphemy. I learned ages ago from my man Beau at True Sake that almost all hot sake you will ever drink is a lie, an abomination, an aberration against humanity, including Japan. Simply put, sake is never supposed to be served hot. Americans have been misled. This happens a lot to Americans. Never mind that now.
(The reason sushi joints serve sake hot is to mask the fact that it's usually cheap swill served from a giant box, and heating it masks its tacky awfulness, much like right-wing talk radio, good porn and most of Florida. Good sake is almost always served cold, or maybe room temperature, and is as complex, varied and wonderful a liquid universe as wine. Now you know).
However, I've also learned that, with certain high quality brews, a gentle warming is permissible, even encouraged. And endlessly tasty. And a simple fantastic means by which to deflect the snappish SF chill.
So here's what I do: I fill a Riedel stemless white wine glass (myth #2: Sake should be served in tiny little cups fit for miniature elves. Lie! Wrong!) about three-fourths full of fine sake. Thusly measured, I pour the contents into my aforementioned hard anodized aluminum $20 KitchenAid butter warmer I purchased exactly for this particular reason, because I have yet to develop sufficiently advanced culinary skills such that I would ever need to own a pan just for the careful melting of 2.5 cups of animal fat.
I light the Wolf. I dial it to medium. I count to 47, slightly longer if the sake was in the fridge. Turn stove off. The perfectly warmed (not hot) brew is poured back into the Riedel, which is leaded, and hence it does not crack. It pours perfectly because the butter warmer has a little drip-free spout. Entire process: About a minute. Taste: astonishing. Cleanup: almost none. Toe-warming quotient: 10.
It's just a thing, something I do. I would say it makes me sort of unique, that it's a harmless little idiosyncrasy, a convenient process I've created in my personal library of such processes, all designed to attain a tiny shred of cockles-warming nirvana in my day.
But I'd be lying. It is, of course, not very unique at all, or rare, or any sort of big deal whatsoever. Because I'm here to guess you do something almost exactly the same as me. You know it's true.
It might not be sake. It might not be any sort of cocktail whatsoever. But I'm betting you have your thing, that little method you've developed that works perfectly, that's sort of all your own. Maybe it's the thing you do to scrub your back in the shower. The path you take home, syncing up supermarket and coffee shop and favorite vista. Maybe it's how you build a playlist, organize your T-shirts, make pancakes, laugh in bed after an orgasm.
Have you ever watched? Ever dialed into yourself or those close to you, and taken note? If you so desired, I'm guessing you could probably identify 100 small paths and proclivities you would call your own, tricks and modes, recipes and formulas that make up the savage and delightful pile of American weirdness that is you, all of which make you, well, totally and completely insane. Just like the rest of us.
This is the obvious but delightful truism that struck me as my friend questioned my beguiling sake process, my repurposed butter warmer, my choice of fine stemlessware for the serving of beautifully warmed Okuden. Was I really being all that weird? Is this all that eccentric?
Of course it's not. But it's always sort of entrancing to ponder how we are all made up of quirks and patterns and ingenious little methodologies, seven billion dirty little snowflakes in the giant slushball of humanity. It's all so individuated and wondrous and personal, it's downright universal.
This is the great truth we deny at our peril: We are far more united in our bizarre little survival schemes and eccentricities than by nationality, race, gender, religion or ideology. I am in many ways a wildly different kind of male than many others of my age that I meet. In many ways I could not be further from the "standard" American dude of my general demographic. However, each and every one of them has an idiosyncrasy, a cool little approach to surviving this madhouse that's surprisingly similar to mine. We are brothers not necessarily in gender or grunt or love of some inane sports team, but in our haphazard accumulation of meticulous human paroxysms.
In our fantastic uniqueness, we are unified. In those things we fear make us total freaks, we are the same. Religions and political parties work like demondogs to normalize and codify certain weirdnesses into collections, tribes, cults and voting blocs, in order to get our money and give them power. This is, quite naturally, utter bullshit.
It doesn't take much blasphemy to note how all religions are, across the board, brazen, synthetic freakshows, far stranger and more surreal in their oddball accumulation of fetishes and rituals than anything your average agnostic, atheist or Burning Man devotee could come up with in her happiest LSD-soaked dreamgasm. You ever been to a Catholic mass? A Mormon temple? A mosque? Disneyland on acid, people. And not in the good way.
Perhaps this is exactly what scares the rigid, the fearful, the conservative mindset most of all. If you really acknowledge our collective weirdness, if you look closely at what makes up the haphazard human spectacle, you are left with one overwhelming and totally awesome conclusion: If God really does exist, She is one deviously kinky, delightfully insane barrel of monkeys indeed. Hell, I'll drink to that.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 5, 2010 22:22:51 GMT 12
From SFGate.comRadical homosexuals ate my baby!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, March 05, 2010And now, ladies and gentlemen, right here on our stage, a fine and terrifyingly hilarious — or is that hilariously terrifying? — spectacle, for your disquieting reading pleasure. Please, remove the children. Ready?
Behold, an item known henceforth as the National Impact Survey of the Radical Homosexual Agenda in California Public Schools, as recently and furtively received/discovered by yours truly, your humble and sexually perverted and imperfectly liberal, very-straight-but-very-gay-rights-supporting satire columnist, in a roundabout manner I cannot divulge right now lest I might get shot waiting in line at Starbucks.
What is the NISRHACPS, you ask? Why, it's a document. It's a mailer. It's a survey of sorts, a short, wretched little questionnaire made entirely of sadness and bile and fear.
It's a piece of paper sent out en masse to particular members of the Republican party who are so openly terrified of all homosexual personages, they fully believe said gays are actively bewitching and recruiting your innocent children behind the locked doors of hugely perverted schoolhouses near you.
This document is, apparently, highly confidential. Everything about it — the shouty ALL CAPS HEADLINES, the copious red ink, the simpleton second-grade language -- screams that I'm not supposed to be reading it, given how I have, you know, a functioning intellect, can walk upright, enjoy copious amounts of sex, and speak in complete sentences. Often all at the same time. I know!
In fact, most liberals, moderates, chimps, garden gnomes and humans with intact brainstems have likely never seen this document, given how it is carefully targeted only at persons of dangerously limited consciousness, people who clearly think book learnin' is for elitists, the vagina was created by the devil and Sarah Palin is like, super-duper smart, and stuff.
You perhaps think I am exaggerating? I am not exaggerating. Behold:
<snip> RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IMPACT RESEARCH SURVEY BACKGROUND: American standards of sexual morality have eroded to the point that almost nothing is off-limits in our schools. [...] Graphic details of perverted sex practices are being taught to high school children, and parents are being locked out of assemblies lead by radical homosexual activists. How long will it be before sex between adults and children is just the next barrier to be torn down? How long will it take before radical homosexual activists achieve their next evil objective? </snip>
That's the first paragraph, more or less. It was difficult to transcribe verbatim, given how it's such a bizarre arrangement of verbiage, such a sickening cluster of sentences, I couldn't really write it without my heart clenching and my brain actively recoiling. Also, it's tough to type when you're laughing, shaking your head, and slamming Maker's Mark to numb the savage karmic pain, all at once.
There are 10 questions in the NISRHACPS. They are all, as you imagine, completely silly, front-loaded, leading questions along the lines of "Pimply spidermutants from planet Fukulon-7 like to devour the severed heads of newborn baby deer like popcorn. Do you support this practice? Yes [ ] No [ ] Don't Know [ ]"
In other words, they aren't really questions at all, and are far more like validations of an outlandish kind of ignorance, a repressed sexual fantasia, the honest belief that godless heathens have penetrated the public school system using giant strap-on dildos and are secretly teaching your little ones about, presumably, leather chaps, Adam Lambert, love and other such abominations.
I shall not attempt any sort of itemized correction of this amazing document. I am not here to shine a light on all the obvious lies and misstatements contained in this "survey." The fact that it's total nonsense, or that the framing device is hilariously lopsided, is not for this column to remedy.
Besides, it's nothing really new. This kind of shrill fearmongering and right-wing propaganda has been going on since Rush Limbaugh was knee high to Pat Roberston's gay bathhouse towel boy's coke spoon. What's more, if you're reading this column, odds are extremely good you're already many, many times smarter than the target demographic of this survey.
But oh, what a target. Allow me to point up one aspect of the NISRHACPS I find particularly distressing. It is this: the document comes from — and is aimed straight at — women.
True. The survey is apparently the dark creation of a little D.C. splinter clan called Concerned Women for America (CWA), who in my imagination aren't really women at all, but are far more like bulky bundles of bad skin and beige polyester with only faintly female characteristics, such as thigh stubble, cankles and a creamy fondness for Jay Leno and lumpy pancake batter and cats.
In other words, I imagine the Concerned Women for America much like I imagine neo-Nazi skinheads in rural Idaho, wacky black metal dudes from Norway, or "Real Housewives" cast members; a weird and ragtag huddle of unstable, nervous humans smelling faintly of stale Doritos and light beer, who have endured a complete lack of agreeable sexual contact since, well, ever.
Unfortunately, the NISRHACPS is not easily dismissed. Many of you will note it was exactly this kind of trickery and lie-mongering used to scare thousands of already overanxious Mormons into giving millions of their kids' underwear money to help pass Prop 8.
This new campaign plays on the same sort of heartless fears, only this time it's targeting one of the weakest and most gullible of all American demographics: mal-educated conservative moms who don't know any better. Sad doesn't begin to cover it.
The NISRHACPS ends with a petition to Gov. Schwarzenegger to please put an end evil homosexual propaganda in our public schools, and instead help "promote views toward sexuality that support our nation's traditional moral values."
Do you remember those values? The moral codes that have helped shaped America lo these many years of joyful Christian goodness and open-hearted love? I bet you do.
From the top, they include: Unchecked sexual guilt, shame, hysteria, pedophilic priests, failed abstinence programs, banning birth control education in schools, dangerous illegal abortions, widespread teen pregnancy, the 50-percent divorce rate, and freaking the hell out over a single exposed nipple on primetime TV.
Also, by extension, unhappy marriages, sexual unfulfillment and a deep misunderstanding of God, love and simple human connection. You know, values just like mom used to enjoy. Thanks for reminding us, CWA!______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 14, 2010 21:28:37 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYou call that having sex?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, March 10, 2010Did you wail? Did you scream it out to the heavens? Did you faint? Did you die, just a little, la petite mort, at least once, before the sighing and the shower and the waves of guilt or God or "Aww screw it, let's do that again please please please, oh sweet Jesus, please?"
Did you think about your mother? Your ex? Maybe a hot celebrity, a favorite wild animal or an entire army of glistening Roman gladiators followed by what you're going to make for dinner, or perhaps all of the above in some bizarre, delirious freakshow orgy you couldn't get out of your head, even as your body was melting and tingling and going, "Um, hi, can we somehow please keep doing this forever and never ever stop? Thank you."
Just a few more questions, if you don't mind: Was there writhing? Copious stickiness? Fear of spontaneous combustion? A pleasurable ringing in the ears? Was more than one bodily fluid involved? Did someone's eyes roll back in someone's head? Head roll back in someone's eyes?
It is very possible you experienced what many would call "having sex." Either that, or you ate some really good sushi. Who can tell?
It is, apparently, a small problem, this defining of what, exactly, constitutes the "having" of "sex," the hot 'n' breathy coupling of human bodies into some sort of definitive surefire statement of, "Oh my God, yum."
Did you know? About the little survey from the good folks over at the venerable Kinsey Institute, the one saying that everyone in America — or at least Indiana, where the responders reside — seems to enjoy defining the finest and most desirous act of all known creation except maybe skydiving, wine-tasting or afternoon naps just a little bit differently? That to say "we had sex" can mean everything from a quick reach around on the bus to scoring a really great deal on a sofa at the Pottery Barn sidewalk sale? It's true. Sort of.
The simple survey resulted in one grand conclusion: "There was no universal consensus on which behaviors constituted having 'had sex.'" Not only that, the definition seems so broad as to encapsulate just about everything imaginable, from a nice morning spent with a pulsating showerhead to a quick blowjob in the park to a 10-minute headstand at the end of a sweaty yoga class. Or, you know, all of the above.
So then, the question naturally arises, slithers forth, opens wide: How do you know if you really had sex? What, exactly, are the criteria? Is it like good art or classic obscenity, you can't define it exactly, but you know it when you see it — or rather, feel it shoot up your spinal cord and down your leg as it induces a wicked thrumming at the tip of your brainstem, like a flock of feral doves slam dancing in a cloud? Could be, could be.
Or is it like some sort of weird foreign film? You really didn't understand a word of it, and it made you feel sort of squeamish and itchy and uncomfortable, and you feel sort of guilty for not "getting" it because you sensed, somewhere deep down, it might've been really good?
Of course, to most, the question is more than a bit ridiculous, the criteria more than a little obvious. Was there penetration? Orgasm by at least one party? Was there some comment along the lines of, "I'd like to have sex with you," followed by nodding and the removal of clothing and then direct cash payment from the Republican senator/Vatican official to the gay prostitute? Was Tiger Woods involved? You had sex. I mean, obvs.
But you can also fairly easily go one layer deeper, slip right past the simplistic technical specifications and say that "having sex" has very little to do with the simple bodily act itself.
As any male worth his cliched excuses and any female worth her lost Vegas weekend will tell you, it's far less about which portion of whose genitalia came in contact with what breed of stranger in the pool at the MGM Grand, and far more about that most beautiful, profound and dastardly of human energies, known as "intention."
We had sex, but it was just physical. We had sex, but it was more like scratching an itch. We had sex, but it didn't mean anything because I don't care about him/her/them. We had sex, but I was totally drunk/stoned/asleep, so it doesn't really count. We had sex, but I felt so guilty I confessed to the priest, which would have been helpful were it not for the fact that he's the one I had sex with. We had sex, but it was with Ann Coulter/Glenn Beck/Charlie Sheen, so it was more like, you know, bestiality. And not the good kind.
Perhaps it's more about the qualitative distinction. There's having sex, and then there's, you know, having sex. The former is more like trying to light a wet match in a blizzard, and the latter is like pouring napalm on the sun. How deeply did it resonate? How many layers down did it penetrate? For how long did you quiver afterwards? Seconds? Days? Lifetimes? Are you quivering right now? Maybe this is how you know.
Some girls say they no longer consider themselves virgins if they use a tampon. Some people consider oral sex having sex, whereas others say it isn't sex unless it results in some form of mewling offspring. Then there's the in-betweeners, like 23 percent of the over-65 men in the survey, who seemed to think that not even penis-vagina penetration was to be considered the real thing. Translation: Do not have sex with weird old men in Indiana.
Or maybe it has something to do what my pal Dan Savage and his fine readers termed "Saddlebacking" — so named for slimy homophobe megapreacher Rick Warren's church — a term for all the anal and oral sex being had by those sweet Christian youth so they can still call themselves virgins. Aww, you wacky kids these days, what with your silly duplicitous heartbreaking sexual ignorance and lack of decent lubricant. So cute!
"There was no universal consensus on which behaviors constituted having ‘had sex’." That's what they said. Of course, they were only asking the brain. Totally the wrong organ to ask, really. You gotta look more central, core, heartish. When it comes to something as messy, weird, impossible, gorgeous, mandatory, wonderful, enlightening and otherworldly as sex, the brain doesn't know its meaningful penetration from a hole in your ... head. I mean, obviously.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 14, 2010 21:29:23 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHey, sickos! Real men marry women!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, March 12, 2010Some days it's just so very difficult to choose. The toxic tales come so fast, slippery and weird, you don't know which way to flip your personal drunkmonkey of wary perspective, just how hard you're supposed to laugh and sigh before you strip naked and run screaming into the woods.
Which will it be, fine citizen? The twee tale of the whiny outcry endured by the unwitting Washington Post after it ran an innocuous photo on its front page, a shot of two sweet, skinny guys lightly smooching on the courthouse steps, the very day that gay marriages were finally legal in D.C.?
You can guess what happened next. The tiny-brained homophobes of D.C. came out in force, threatening everything from canceled subscriptions (oh no!) to the death of every human soul for all eternity. Confused macho lugnuts and little old ladies alike began accusing the paper of promoting "the faggot lifestyle" and destroying all morality by, you know, showing two people in love. The horror.
"That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women," the seemingly rather startled, bespectacled WaPo ombudsman quoted a particularly loathsome reader as spewing.
Oh WaPo, how adorable is the popping of your virgin cherry of virulent reader homophobia! How sweet is the tang!
See, we here in sinful, hellhole Sodom-iffic San Francisco see such piffling outcry, and laugh. We've been shrugging off Bible Belt ignorance and fundamentalist accusations of our being the perverted nail sticking out of God's virtuous park bench since Harvey Milk opened a camera shop, Berkeley decided to light some U.S. flags on fire and the Haight burned Vietnam draft notices — all right before we became one of the world's foremost centers of intellectualism, culture, art, food, education, experimentation, leather, enlightenment, love and joy and fine lubricants for all. Welcome to hell, WaPo! Come on in, the water's blasphemous.
Sufficiently damned, we turn our attention to the old country, to scowling Italy, where the Catholic Church is once again rubbing its cataracts, sighing heavily and, with a rather sickening groan, adjusting something withered beneath its heavy crimson robes.
Would you like to guess the nature of the scandal this time? More pedophilia? Ongoing beatings and sexual abuse of children? Molestation, spiritual oppression and banning condoms, a wanton fear of women, orgasms and vaginas?
Nah. Nothing quite so grand. Just your everyday uproar over a pair of minor Vatican officials, a chorister and his pal, the papal usher, and the latter's longtime love of gay prostitutes, regularly delivered to him by his friend like shiny meat on a platter, like kinky Domino's pizza from Violent Hypocrisyland.
Mmm, it's good to be the most rich and powerful and entitled and cloistered and homophobic religion in the world, isn't it, boys? Fun kicker: the gay prostitution bust was merely an unexpected bonus, part of a larger criminal investigation of Vatican corruption. Shocking! Or not.
It's sort of perversely reassuring, actually. In a world of chaos, technology madness and evil socialist black presidents, it's good to have a few reliable, timeless touchstones, good to know the Catholic Church is still up to the same pathetic tricks — sex scandals, beatings, abuses, misogyny and sodomy, ad nauseam — it's been enjoying since Jesus and Mary Magdalene's lost weekend in Gomorrah. Truly, the Church makes the GOP's cavalcade of pitiable sex and drug scandals look like Wal-Mart selling black Barbie at half price.
Speaking of the GOP, is anyone having any fun whatsoever reading about slimeball Bakersfield Repub state Senator Roy Ashburn slithering out of the closet after driving home drunk from a Sacto gay bar? Of course, despite his virulently anti-gay voting record, they say Ashburn's homosexuality has been an "open secret" for years. It took a DUI and the evil liberal media to bust his mealy butt for being a hypocrite and a liar.
But wait, is he really those things? His poor Kern County constituents aren't quite sure. They are deeply confused. They are hesitant about which dark flavor of their innate homophobia they should unleash upon Ashburn and the world.
After all, despite the nature of his own miserable heart, Ashburn has promised to keep right on voting against sicko pervert gays just like himself, because that's what the people who thought he was a straight, milquetoasty homophobe, want. Ah, the public trampling to death of what's left of a man's wretched soul. Such a cheerless spectacle. Thanks for the sad lesson, Roy! Here, have another drink. You're gonna need it.
As we near the end of our tale, we take a passing glance at Eric Massa, the pasty first-term Democratic New York ex-congressman accused of sexually harassing/tickling/text messaging male underlings, who has been playing whiny uber-victim to anyone who'll listen.
Not much to see here, really. Oh wait, there is one thing. Maybe the real story is how deftly Massa proved himself to be a perfect mushy, creepy foil to none other than... Glenn Beck. Did you see? Turns out the train wreck politician and the tearful nutball Fox News showman were made for each other. Who knew?
I have to say, all told and taken together, despite their collective grossness, all these stories still feel like they really don't add up to much. There's no real dark center, no meat and thrust and threat; all of it feels like it's happening way out on the fringe of who the hell cares.
Nevertheless, splashing through the media mud puddle like this, you can't help but feel the need for a shower just after, maybe an emetic, an aperitif, an intellectual palate cleanser.
Here it is. It comes in the form of a nice follow-up story to our first WaPo item above, wherein it is revealed by the aforementioned ombudsman himself that his original post about the nasty outcry against the paper resulted in a wonderful sort of "counterattack," multiple emails and phone calls from around the world in wide and unexpected support of the touching photo, and its overall message.
At last count, he says messages were running 10-1 in favor of the photograph, of progress, of (you might say) love itself. All in all, a sweet, giant, global middle finger to the intolerant and the lost. Maybe there's something worth cheering about, after all.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 17, 2010 21:09:52 GMT 12
From SFGate.comDear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, HistoryBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, March 17, 2010Hey, kids! Here's something I bet you didn't know: Black people? Back in 1800 or whenever? They liked being slaves. True! Many savvy, industrious Negroes actually volunteered for that fine, desirable position. It was a completely balanced, fair, hugely successful system, until those damn liberals came along and ruined everything. I know, right? What a shame.
Do you know what else? America was wholly victorious in Vietnam. It's a fact! Kicked some serious enemy butt! Mission accomplished! Sure it was a little bumpy for awhile, but President Nixon, that great and wronged American hero, put us on the righteous path in the end, wrapped that sucker up beautifully and made America the noble Superman to the world. Hey, it's the truth! You can look it up in your history textbook!
Even more good, newly historic news: Despite what you may have heard from the liberal media, America has very much won its recent, God-sanctioned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Angry Allah loses again! Just look at this handy diagram on page 281, Figure 4-9. See those little dark-skinned bodies stacked up neatly beside that minaret? Right next to that completely unstaged photo of the toppled Saddam statue? Look how many there are! Graphs never lie.
Did you know, back in the frontier days, that Native Americans welcomed the white man with open arms? Absolutely true. Those poor, sunburned people were so beaten down and exploited by their oppressive dictator "chiefs," they were forced to believe in all sorts of disgusting pagan sun gods and had to eat, like, rocks and snakes and stuff.
It's no wonder they greeted proud, fair-minded American colonials as great liberators — yes! Just like in Baghdad! — and happily gave us free access to their fields and their women and their wonderful bead-making technology, in exchange for, you know, gin and fireworks. And casinos.
Never doubt America's irrefutable greatness, kids. Our prison system, for example, is the finest in the world. Also, dirty Mexican people had no role whatsoever in the Civil War or U.S. history (except as troublesome immigrants, yuck), hip-hop music is in no way, shape or form to be considered a significant cultural movement — unlike totally awesome Country & Western, and the War on Drugs is going spectacularly well, thanks to our fine military, numerous Afterschool Specials and the deep love of Jesus — who, if you look really closely at those old photographs from the Bible, is clearly wearing a U.S. flag pin on his robes to go along with his friendly, competely legal sidearm. God bless America.
These irrefutable facts — and many more just like them — are brought to you by the Texas State Board of Education, packed like a jug of rancid tartar sauce with intellectually numb simpletons who smell like ignorance and taste like fear. The TSBE: We make revisionist brainwashing fun!™
Maybe you didn't hear? The little item about how a small pod of pale ultra-conservatives in Texas has just demanded a whole slew of specific changes be made to history textbooks down in the Lone Star State? About how, in fact, nearly every change is a rather ridiculous rewriting of history and the language surrounding it, all tending to favor — can you guess? — white privileged capitalist males, a bitter Christian God, and a whitewashed version of history that never actually existed?
Not much shocking about it all, really. "Texas education" has never exactly equated with "intellectual range and nuance." But there's a big, ugly snag: Due to the state's huge purchasing power, the decisions of these tiny-brained ultra-conservatives could well influence what goes into various school history textbooks nationwide.
So it is that that some inbred neocon beliefs about homophobic God and gun-loving country will ooze their way into the minds of unsuspecting youth in a completely different state say, 10 years' hence, like a poison slowly leeching into the cultural water supply. Ah, Texas conservatism. It's the new DDT!
What, too harsh? I'm not so sure. Yes, everyone knows that history is slippery and spurious to begin with, all about context and spin and who's telling the tale. History is, after all, written by the victors.
What they don't usually add is how history is then revised by the politicians, gutted by the church leaders, molested by the power mongers, skinned alive by paranoid militants, poorly codified by the speechwriters and then spun, torqued and diluted by countless mealy "experts" before being shoved down the gullet of unsuspecting youth, where it is partially digested like so much liquefied school lunch meat, only to be wrongly half-remembered later in life by the most insane among them, who then quickly gets his own talk show on Fox News. And lo, the circle of life continues.
Say what you will about standardized testing, draconian teachers' unions, lazy tenured teachers, crumbling campuses, slashed budgets, et al. I can think of no better argument for mortgaging everything you own so as to afford a private/charter school for your kid than the disturbing fact that these Texas State Board mongrels might have any power whatsoever to shape young minds by way of further tainting the already wobbly, spurious historical record.
Maybe it doesn't really matter. After all, it's widely understood that, given the state of public education, children don't really learn much in school anyway. The system is so problematic and the teachers union so dangerously obstinate, there's a good chance your kid will never crack open one of these flawed, historically inaccurate textbooks in the first place. Small consolation indeed.
It's not all dire and brimstone. Prior to this ridiculous move — and by the way, the board's revisions still have to be ratified, so there's a slim chance public outcry and a deep sense of shame at their own repellant personal politics will get them to back off — there's apparently been a small amount of improvement in school textbooks over the years.
From what I understand, in the wake of wildly influential bestsellers like "Lies my Teacher Told Me" and the late, great Howard Zinn's "People History" series, among many others, school textbooks underwent some significant improvements in the past couple of decades, slightly more multicultural and inclusive, balanced, realistic. Not nearly as thin, lopsided, sexist, jingoistic, myopic as they used to be. Is that damning with faint praise? Maybe.
Alas, if California weren't so utterly broke, slashing education budgets and shutting down schools, maybe our fair state could launch a counter-attack, demand some reasonably accurate historic revisions in those selfsame texts. Time was when we had some killer purchasing power of our own. Remember? Yeah, me neither.
Sadly, from what I hear, California schools don't even use textbooks anymore. Or classrooms. Or desks. They all disintegrated sometime back in 1987. History is now taught by means of sock puppets, toothpick dioramas and firecrackers. And gin.
Of course, I'm completely exaggerating. The changes the Texas Board is shoving through are probably relatively innocuous, just another toxic chemical added to the already lethal school lunch menu, one of a thousand, really. I'm sure everything will be fine. Kids won't mind a whit that they're being fed heavily processed, dangerous, non-nutritive mental crap. Hell, they'll probably enjoy it. You know, just like all those happy, contented slaves.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 19, 2010 22:34:47 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOpen wide and never stop gaspingBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, March 19, 2010"We have no idea what's going on down there." — Biologist Stacy Kim, on exploring deep, subzero waters in Antarctica.______________________________________ I am completely in love with endless jaw-dropping forehead-slapping heart-stopping bursts of insatiable, inexhaustible, completely unknowable mystery.
I am completely in love with the notion that, were you to place everything we know about life, existence, this planet, each other, the heart and mind and breath, skin and spit and blood, all of the science and accumulated data, facts and figures into one enormous bathtub, and everything we do not know, have yet to know and very likely might never ever know over here in this other enormous bathtub, the latter would dwarf the former like a blue whale to a goldfish, the Milky Way to a speck of lint, boundless ever-expanding deep space to your next quick fast flabbergasted gasp.
Every single day, we find new evidence of our completely wonderful ignorance, the sheer impossibility of ever knowing anything for absolute, irrefutable certain.
The quote you just read up top of this column? It's from a biologist who was part of a NASA-led research team working in the still-frozen north, a comment made shortly after dropping an unassuming little probe through a tiny hole in a massive Antarctic ice sheet, a little camera on a cord sliding 600 feet down into freezing, sub-zero, sunless waters where no measurable life of any note or substance will ever be found, because that's just the way it is.
What do you think they found?
Here's what they thought they'd find: maybe a few microbes. Some sturdy little specks, a few tough, single-celled things that can somehow handle those brutal, impossible conditions, because nothing else really can.
Instead, they found Atlantis, an entire gleaming, glittering megacity stretching for 1,000 miles in all directions, teeming with life, lights and enormous, golden undersea temples with lasers, talking dolphins and hyperintelligent, bioluminescent, mind-reading jellyfish with 10,000 heads and 14 hearts.
OK, maybe not. But they might as well have, for the depth and scope of the insane possibility, for the sheer sense of who-the-hell-knows-anymore.
What they actually found was simply a large, happy shrimp and the yanked-off tentacle of a squid (apologies, good sir) apparently living and frolicking even further down in the icy depths. These two rather astonishing creatures, to existing knowledge anyway, had no business whatsoever being anywhere near that spot, given the hopeless conditions, the sunless cold. The likelihood of such life surviving there, science thought, was absolute zero.
Big deal? Well, yes. For thus changeth, once again and for the billionth time, our fundamental understanding of the Way Things Are Supposed to Work. Such simple-but-shattering findings amplify exactly what the biologist mentions: when in comes to the bigger mysteries — and even a few million of the smaller ones — we still haven't a goddamn clue. It's a big deal because it proves once again that life is far more messy and unpredictable than we tend to assume.
But most of all, it's a big deal because it provides yet another key to further unlock the imagination. What the hell is down there, really? How infinite and fluid are the notions of life and dimension? We truly have no idea. Or maybe it's more accurate to say: We have just enough of an idea to know we really have no idea.
In fact, so frequently does this happen in history and science, you might say it would require some sort of preposterous gall, some flavor of egomaniacal, solipsistic chutzpah, to assume we can set concrete rules and proclaim childish religious doctrines that presume to understand such fluxive notions as love, gender, sex, faith, God, organism, orgasm and life itself.
I've a lovely friend who's also a supergenius Stanford neuroscientist; she spends much of her time scanning brains and theorizing about how the thing works and then coming up with wildly fascinating experiments to test those theories.
Like what we know of the deep ocean floor (i.e.; almost nothing), she guesstimates that, in her field, they've successfully mapped only a small fraction of the brain so far, a few regions more than others, none anywhere near completely.
Of course, that's just structures and the neurons, the careful identification of wayward parts. How all the layers interplay, communicate, dance, imagine, dream and then remember where you parked, what your great grandmother smelled like, and the taste of fresh oranges on that warm summer day in 1983 when you first fell in love? Still a giant, mesmerizing shrug. What's more, she says as soon as they figure out one mystery, 10 more open up as a result. Indeed, the more we know, the less we understand.
But then she mentioned something even more phenomenal. She said that right now, new evidence is emerging that, despite all existing research and data, the brain might not actually be the center of all creation and human function and cogito ergo sum after all.
It's just a hint and a whisper of an idea so far. But it turns out, when measured electromagnetically, the brain isn't the organ that gives off the strongest, most complex or dynamic signal. It's the heart. By a factor of, oh, about 5,000.
In other words, so strong is the heart's signal, so overwhelmingly dominant in the body is its pulsing electro vibe (its rhythmic field "not only envelops every cell of the body, but also extends out in all directions into the space around us," says one summation), it's possible that we all have a completely different powerhouse processor/informational hub, potentially even more illuminating and influential than the mind, the function of which we have yet to begin to conceptualize. How gorgeous is that?
We still don't know why whales hum and whistle. We don't know how Monarch butterflies survive their insane 2,500-mile annual migration, much less how the hell they land on the same tree every year to procreate. String theory to quantum physics to dark energy, the G-spot to the magic of the Fibonacci sequence to why human beings kiss one another? Still not sure. Still trying to figure it all out. Hey, it's just what we do.
And of course, nature looks upon our attempts to measure and quantify her, and just smiles, beckoning us in further and further with one hand, while gently, lovingly flipping us off with the other. Hey, it's just what She does.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 26, 2010 23:00:40 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe black commie Nazi did it!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, March 24, 2010Did anyone punch anyone? Was there any actual blood? I think I might've missed it.
Did Pelosi kick John Boehner in the testicles and then run away laughing before a screeching Virginia Foxx grabbed her by the hair, pulled her to the floor and punched her in the kidneys?
Did just about everyone on the House floor bitch-slap Bart Stupak — who should right now vanish of the face of the earth forevermore, you simpering mealworm — while Rahm Emmanuel head-butted Harry Reid, even as both burned a sneering Newt Gingrich doll in effigy? I might've been dreaming.
Did Obama finally strut in like a prize-fighter, like a Muay Thai boxer, bruised and exhausted after a solid year of this insane, polarizing BS, the viciousness of which even he never imagined? Did he deliver a dazzling barrage of calm, swift kicks to the heads of bitchy Repubs and nervous Dems alike, as everything devolved into a violent, smoke-filled melee of broken glass and shattered dentures, with little Joe Lieberman whimpering in the corner, rocking back and forth, wondering whatever happened to his integrity?
I don't think any of that happened. It sure felt like it happened. Maybe it should have happened. But I guess it didn't.
Behold, with the astonishing passage of flawed-but-incredible health care reform, we have the concomitant, frightening realization that this remains one of the most acidic, bitter, hopelessly divisive times to live in America and care a whit for national politics while maintaining a shred of morality, hope, a progressive soul.
Like millions, I was fairly convinced it simply could not get much worse or more acrimonious than when Dubya ran the nation into the ground, embarrassing and humiliating us planetwide a thousand times over as the rogue idiot pseudo-cowboy laughingstock war-hungry prick of the civilized world. I was wrong. But not in the way I imagined.
As Paul Krugman rightly points out, most Dems in the HCR fight reluctantly took their cues from Obama himself; they were inspired and urged to move from a place of genuinely trying to do what's right, a rather simple moral good for the nation, even at the expense of their own careers, all led by Obama's genuine ideal that basic health care is a national right, not a privilege.
In short, despite all their whining and infighting, the left wasn't pushing HCR because they wanted to stick it to the GOP. They weren't pushing it because they wanted to personally profit from various corporate cronies, though I'm sure some certainly will. They weren't pushing it due to multiple personal agendas. It was an authentic, at least somewhat egalitarian push to advance a basic ideal of the nation. Well, mostly. Which, in politics, is about as good as it gets.
The Republicans, on the other hand, were pure venom. Theirs was a systematic fearmongering, a nonstop bombardment of misguidings and untruths, an acid bath of panic overlaid with a fine sheen of racism and rage. This is turning out to be easily the nastiest, meanest GOP organization in ages, the house that Karl Rove built, a group shaming their own party's once-noble legacy. Even Reagan, who claimed Medicare would destroy the country, would be stunned at this gang's level of savagery.
Common wisdom now holds that while Obama finally succeeded in a truly historic, once-impossible vote, he has failed in his promise to be the uniter president, the community organizer of our liberal dreams, the guy who could somehow mend or at least bridge the hemorrhaging rift, not merely between the two parties, but also the two sides of American culture. This rift is defined hereby as the gulf between people with extant intelligence and subtle understanding of ideas, and the Sarah Palin-grade paranoids who don't quite understand what the hell they're raging about, but nevertheless do so with much clenched passion, fake tears, guns and a whole garage full of stockpiled bullets.
This is, to me, perhaps the saddest outcome of the insane health care fight. Not even Obama, the most intelligent, calm and experienced bringer-together president we could possibly hope for, was able to make a dent in the great wall. In fact, all evidence indicates he's even more polarizing, the absolute reverse of dumb-guy Bush who so violently repelled the intelligent and the informed. Obama is doing the opposite: the paranoids are so scared by the guy's untouchable force field of smarts and self-assurance, they're coagulating into little clusters, foamy little pools of resistance and anti-gummint hate.
Verily, health care reform will go down in history for many things — Catholic nuns kicking ass, Ted Kennedy not having to roll in his grave, Democrats actually vaguely unifying — but few are as amusing as the creation of the silliest political movement in recent American history, the Tea Party, a group barely cognizant of what it even stands for, with zero grasp of the history it's named after, who nevertheless will doubtlessly grab every tax benefit, housing subsidy, COBRA extension, Restoration Act moneys and (now) health care benefit that evil socialist Obama hands to them and their sniveling home states, even as they spit tobacco juice in his face. Adorable.
Perhaps the saddest idea of all, however, is the general lament I've heard repeated countless times on the left, this sense that if Obama can't do it, if this astonishingly calm and assured, rock solid, deeply reasonable president can't bridge the divide or at least hack through some of that barbed wire, we are, if not completely doomed, then certainly stuck deep in a sociocultural abyss no one has a clue how to navigate.
Eventually, something will have to give. Much like Wal-Mart pretending to care about going "green" because it realizes it can make/save lots of money, or Exxon pretending it gives a damn about the environment because it's a good PR move, perhaps the only way to force a change upon modern politicians it is to somehow incentivize it, to make it in both parties' best interests to shut the hell up and work together, lest we corral all of them into the street with pitchforks and fire, and run them off a cliff.
I have no idea how this can be done, what magic levers might be pulled or what miraculous tactical maneuver from Obama could possibly make both sides come to terms with the hateful chasm separating them — and by extension, us. The environment? Education? High-fructose corn syrup? Wall Street? Colonizing deep space? No one knows.
One thing do we know for sure: As stunned, bedazzled and burned by the HCR fight as Americans feel right now, that's nothing compared to how we would respond when presented with some dramatic, exciting step forward that both parties were able to agree upon via passionate, articulate, thoughtful discussion and debate. True compassion, honesty, and heart? In this congress? Now that's impossible.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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