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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 24, 2010 23:50:07 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe rise of hugely insufferable womenBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 23, 2010Not all grown men are suave, sexy, progressive George Clooney/Viggo Mortensen/Colin Farrell lookalikes with sharp blue eyes, stubbly outgrowths and abs like World Cup forwards, all hearts of gold, full heads of hair and perfectly sculpted genitalia custom designed to satisfy a small harem, make birds sing and goddesses purr.
Not all adult men are strong and dependable, loyal and true, able to make you laugh, sigh, moan, buy you a drink, jump start your Mini in the rain, smell good all over, build a deck, parallel park a tractor-trailer, and feel sufficiently secure in their masculinity and humanity to champion gay rights and women's rights and pelican rights.
Conversely, not all men are of the other ilk either, the sweaty, overweight, woman-hating Republican homophobes in titanic SUVs, bad marriages and sad comb-overs, twitchy fearmongers who hate all foreigners and wear their baseball hats and grubby hoodies in fancy restaurants, men who spit on the sidewalk and blow their noses like open trumpets into the street, immature adulterers as eager for a war and a beatdown as they are for 20 minutes with a meth dealing gay hooker.
Did you already know all this about men? Does it seem forehead-slappingly obvious to suggest, despite all the clichés, lousy track records and Tiger Woods, that men come in such a huge array of shapes, styles and configurations?
Well of course it is. After all, the male creature has been dissected and bisected and demonized since time immemorial, from hero to Great Oppressor, father to magnate, hunk to egomaniac and back again in the time it took you to read this sentence.
But oh, is it ever worth remembering in light of what is right now being dubbed, with various degrees of pleasure and concern, confusion and delight, "the rise of the woman", "the new conservative feminism", "the end of men", and on and on, all sorts of amazing, disorienting pro-female bellwethers and signs, indicators and shifts.
It is something to behold. Right now I'm vainly attempting to cross-reference Hanna Rosin's fascinating mixed-bag article from the Atlantic that ran under the delightfully obnoxious headline "The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control of Everything", and mixing it with all the feverish stories about California's landmark political races, Carly and Meg and Pelosi, too, influenced by everyone's favorite winkin' ditzball from hell, Sarah Palin.
And I'm tossing in a dash of pop culture, all the MIAs and Lady Gagas and Miley Cyruses, the Kathryn Bigelows and the ditzbombs of "Sex and the City," trying to parse and understand and see some sort of through-line.
I am not having much success. Most women — and many of us men — are cheering madly at all the newfound roles, powers, titles, successes and attentions, from Hillary's stunning presidential run to Bigelow's Oscar to (even) Meg Whitman's pile of billions that could very well buy her the election.
But holy hell with the lost gospels of Mary Magdalene, many are also booing, hissing, screaming their frustration, entirely furious that many of third-wave feminism's cornerstone values — abortion rights, humanitarianism, anti-racism, don't kill stuff — are being violently, stupidly co-opted, inverted, perverted, repackaged, skinned like a moose and shot from a helicopter like a wolf skittering across the Alaskan tundra.
In short, most progressive women are right now discovering a brutally painful truth, one that men have known for millennia: With power, glory and long overdue cultural advancement, comes a whole delightful sh*tbag of downsides, drawbacks, jackals and bitches to poison the party. Fun!
See, long was it believed, via some utopian/naive vision held by "enlightened" men and women alike, that if and when the feminist movement — all three waves of it, really, from Virginia Woolf to Betty Freidan, bell hooks to riot grrls — finally started to get everything it desired, there would surely be some wonderful sea change in the culture, a new paradigm to replace all the ugly, outdated structures of power and ego erected by old white men, something far more fluid and interesting, liberal and heartfelt and, well, nonmasculine.
A funny thing happened on the way to the cultural revolution.
Turns out that original vision is only about half right. Maybe a third. For as much as we now have cause to celebrate the new female empowerment, there appears to be more than enough reason to cringe and sigh and scream into the Void: "No no no, oh hell no, this is not what we meant at all."
Examples are, sadly, legion. Witness, won't you, the zeitgeist's nightmare trifecta of largely insufferable women, the Sarah Palin/Carly Fiorina/Michele Bachmann hydra-headed hellbeast of pseudo-women, one part huge cash reserves, one part evil grammar-abusing ditzball psychopath, one part sassy misinformed moxie, overlaid with wonky ideas of motherhood, love of guns and ignorance of sex and reproductive rights.
These, along with Meg "I'm a Billionaire!" Whitman and Nikki "Sarah Palin hugged me!" Haley, et al, are the apparent "champions" of a perverted kind of new womanhood, some sort of mutant breed who claim it's entirely possible, even desirable to be "pro-life and pro-feminist," which is a bit like saying you're "pro-oil spill and pro-environment."
In other words: Sorry, no. No f*cking way. This is the rule: You do not ever get to say you're any kind of feminist or champion of women and mothers everywhere, and in the same breath add that you also believe no woman should have control over her reproductive powers and, by the way, poor immigrant women should be sent back to Mexico and guns should be legal for all.
Of course, such rhetoric matters not at all. This is the bad news: "Feminism" is right now dying a death of a thousand tiny wounds at the greasy hands (and tiny minds) of the Tea Party and the sneeringly misogynist Republican party, a new strain of semi-educated right-wing nutcase claiming all the revolutionary power of feminism, but none of that icky stuff known as "actual meaning."
What do you make of it? As I say, men have endured similar lopsidedness, unfairness, egomania for ages. I personally wince a thousand times a day at all the lugnuts, NASCAR thugs, frat boys, wife-beaters, spitters, abusers, beer-bongers, sack tappers, popes, pastors, Glenn Becks, Adam Sandlers and Dick Cheneys I see slither across the newswires, men who work like demonslugs to make my entire gender look bad. And I'm sad to report, they're often hugely successful.
Now it's women's turn. Most women I know — powerful, independent, wondrously self-defined creatures of talent and intellect, sex and love, insight and intuition — are fully helping co-create the new female empowerment. But then they read about Sarah Palin endorsing Carly Fiorina with a wink and a rifle shot and a claim of "new" feminism, and they cringe straight down to their ovaries.
Welcome to the great ideological power struggle, ladies. Welcome to being fully empowered, misunderstood, demonized, celebrated, vilified, adored, loathed, loved, championed, deified, and ruined to the core. You're gonna love it. You're gonna hate it.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/23/notes062310.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 25, 2010 21:10:24 GMT 12
From SFGate.comBP welcomes you to the apocalypseBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, June 25, 2010Please do not worry. Please do not fret about that one thing you always fret about, or that other thing, or even that third thing that might have something to do with erupting oil, dead pelicans and that sickening feeling in your gut that Something is Very Wrong Indeed.
I come bearing fabulous news. There is no longer any need to concern yourself with pesky trifles like love, a mortgage, child rearing, planting a garden, dreams, money, shoes, wristwatches, parking spaces, mysterious rashes, foreign policy, baseball, bridge tolls or generally caring about much of anything in particular.
I am delighted to report it will all be over soon. If not sooner. It's true.
And it's a good thing, too, because I was just reading up on six of the worst-case scenarios resulting from the BP spill, all sorts of horrors and tragedies, abuses and unspeakables, from dire seafood shortages to horrifying ecosystem destruction, wildlife mutilation to all the years and decades before the gulf region will be anywhere near recovered. These scenarios all were, in a word, bleak. They were, in three more, thoroughly f*cking depressing.
They were also, whoops, from about two months ago. So I clicked around and quickly found another, far more recent worst-case scenario article, and boy, were its scenarios worse indeed. So awful that they effectively made the earlier batch seem meek and laughable and even sort of quaint.
So it's come to this. Every day in the media, a sort of deranged, comical footrace to figure out which worst-case scenario is really the worst, because every day comes a new stat, prediction, photo, possibility for abject horror we hadn't even conceptualized yet because, well, we've never exactly been here before, not at this scale. How bad can it all get, really? No one has a clue. Joy!
But I'm not at all worried. Because the fact is, almost none of those worst-case scenarios will actually come to pass. Do you know why? Because there are two or three even worse worst-case scenarios that easily trump any you might be reading about anywhere. Ultra, mega, super worst-case scenarios that make all the rest seem like a little splotch on your pretty new iPhone 4.
So, just what are these supermegaworst-case scenarios? They all have one thing in common: Each one of them, all by itself, spells the end of modern life as we know it. Utter annihilation. The End. I am so not kidding. OK, maybe a little. But only until we all die. After that, not kidding at all.
BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #1: Everyone knows that, early on in the spill, BP was thoughtful enough to pump millions of gallons of a horrible chemical dispersant called Corexit 9500 into the gusher, a violently toxic compound so notoriously lethal it's been banned for years by the European union. Obama & Co finally caught on to BP's tactic and told them to knock it off.
Too late. Obscure Russian scientists tell us Corexit's deadly compounds are now breaking up and evaporating into North American rainclouds, which will shortly begin raining down complete toxic hell on us all, poisoning all crops, babies, cats, Christians, Starbucks baristas and none-too-bright redneck videographers (see YouTube video clip below) — though it will somehow magically spare the really good jazz clubs in Louisiana and that one guy who scored the goal for the USA in the World Cup, because he's a freakin' hero.These scientists say the toxic rain could be so poisonous, it will destroy the entire food chain and plunge North America into chaos, rendering the entire region unlivable, with any straggling survivors crawling desperately up to Canada, where they will be promptly made into slave labor to build hockey arenas and drink lager and fade into the woods.
Does that sound dubious? Totally implausible? Fine. No problem. For there is another, even better backup apocalypse scenario, even more melodramatic and wickedly cinematic, and therefore much more likely to come to pass.
BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #2: Apparently, deep in the ocean floor, just beneath the gushing oil, lives a massive bubble of methane gas the size of... oh, let's just say Texas. Maybe Oklahoma. South Carolina. Someplace gassy and slightly rancid and always ready to explode at the poke of a big phallic stick.
This is the drama: All our mucking around on the ocean floor could trigger a methane explosion so gargantuan, it will cause a tsunami. Not just any tsunami, mind you, but a "supersonic tsunami" so ultra-awesomely massive it will effortlessly wipe out the much of the gulf coast states, killing millions and completely destabilizing the nation and inducing zombie riots in the streets as everyone wails over the loss of Florida. Or, you know, not.
So there you have it. Toxic rain and supersonic tsunamis, the end of North America as we know it. Done. Finished. Certainly, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to come to pass, right? Maybe, if we're really lucky, even both?
All right, fine. In the off-off chance that invisible Russian scientists and nutball doomsayers are wrong (impossible!), well, there is one more glorious mega scenario to consider. There is a backup to the backup to the backup. Hey, we're Americans. When it comes to dorky apocalyptic visions, we got you covered.
Here is your grand finale: A new survey says that a disturbingly large percentage of Americans — 40 percent, to be exact — actually believe Jesus will return by 2050, likely riding on the back of a flaming asteroid (30 percent think one will hit us by then), waving a cowboy hat and yodeling as he careens toward our hapless blue dot of inequity, pain and lousy AT&T reception.
Jesus will then crash land in Texas, wink at Dubya and Sarah Palin, and then sweep up all the True Believers in their beige Dodge minivans just as the earth shudders and implodes, just like one of those swirling black holes in "Star Trek."
How cool will that be? Answer: It will be very cool indeed. It is so cool, in fact, it totally wipes out the need to care much about anything at all. See how easy? Now, who wants pie?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/25/notes062510.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 1, 2010 15:11:23 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe glorious myth of “female Viagra”By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 30, 2010This much we know for sure: You do not touch the third rail. You do not betray your closest friends. You do not eat the fuzzy part of the cheese.
You do not rise up from the watery depths too rapidly, lest you go quickly insane. You do not drink five cups of coffee and three shots of absinthe and then attempt delicate brain surgery, blindfolded. You do not drill for oil a mile down in the pristine seas and have no reliable backup systems should something go horribly, horribly wrong. You do not mock Mother Nature.
But above all else, for absolute certain, one thing you really, really do not do: You do not mess around with the female sexual response.
I'm wondering if this will be the one to do it. I'm wondering if the current flurry of activity around the long-rumored, hotly debated, coolly mistrusted, still nonexistent "female Viagra," that hugely elusive wonderdrug currently being chased down by a whole slew of eager, cash-hungry major pharmcos, will be the one to change everything. And not necessarily for the better.
Have you heard? About the magic, billion-dollar pill that's to be aimed at the roughly 40 percent (!) of American women who report a complete lack of interest in sex, who have low or nonexistent libidos, women for whom even moderate arousal is akin to finding a happy gay Mormon in Utah?
Is this the one? Will this be the wild drug chase that finally cracks us wide open, make us see the light, the folly, the futility of trying to unwind the deeper and juicier mysteries of existence? Let us ponder.
We're getting closer. The FDA just rejected the second major attempt at a female libido enhancer, a drug called flibanserin, from German titan Boehringer Ingelheim. Seems the FDA was unimpressed by the drug's overall effectiveness, despite BI's claims that flibanserin's power lies not in its ability to stimulate immediate sexual arousal, but rather in how it serves as a more general improver of overall sensual awareness. Or something.
No matter. This fine attempt means it won't be long until more drugs come down the pike, aiming to capture that elusive gold ring called "female sex drive". I'm actually sort of looking forward to the efforts; something really interesting is bound to emerge, something weird and wonderful, revealing and troubling, all at once.
It's a strange and fascinating game, this hunt. On the one hand, it's widely believed that female libido issues are at least partially clinical, medical, chemical, a genuinely treatable condition, something a synthetic drug can assist in at least partially rekindling. Hell, we have drugs that do everything from tricking your heartbeat to those that help you stop screaming in the night. Why not this?
On the other hand... well, the other hand is where it gets really interesting.
Here's the thing: Everyone knows male Viagra is all about simple mechanics, a brilliant plumbing fix, and nothing more. The miraculous blue pill actually does zilch for male sex drive, nothing to "turn you on," nothing to make sex any hotter or kinkier or orgasmically mindblowing, nothing to help generate a mad lust to be gang-licked by 10,000 nubile callipygian wood nymphs while driving a Bugatti Veyron at 250 mph straight into the sun. For men, that sort of physical lust is automatic, a priori, woven in to our very bones.
The female version is an entirely different divine pink mystery-soaked wildebeest altogether.
The female sexual response is gorgeously, notoriously, infuriatingly hardwired into more than a few unfathomable cosmic wavelengths, along with a whole army of wobbly expectations, cultural proscriptions, maternal drives, menopausal shifts, depressions, ecstasies, bored housewiferies, psychological contradictions — not to mention nearly 2,000 years of male-dominated culture not having a f*cking clue what the clitoris is actually for, combined with a near total medical ignorance (until recently) of intricate female plumbing.
In short, female sexuality is the same as it's ever been: a divine, inscrutable kaleidoscope wrapped in a mystery shaped like a yonic enigma. Parsing it in any reliable way has been one of humanity's greatest challenges, joys, follies, wine-soaked laughter-filled experiments.
My humble male prediction: It will continue to be this way for... well, just about forever. Like poetry, art, the Great Pyramids and avocadoes, it is simply not meant to be unraveled. Put another way, if we ever do fully unravel it, it means the time-space continuum has come undone, consciousness has finally shifted, and we are ready for the next leap. Understand female sexuality, you understand God. Or at least, you understand how She dances.
Do not misunderstand: I'm not de facto against the pharmcos attempting this bizarre feat of effrontery, despite the inherent insult of corporations thinking they can delineate and define the workings of the female sex. Hell, the DSM-IV has been doing it for years. So has the church. Ditto modern medicine. It's just our nature. Complaining that drug makers are inventing ailments to make a profit is like bitching about how crocodiles in Florida keep eating all the little fluffy doggies on the shore. This is just what they do.
In fact, I wish them luck. If nothing else, there will be many fascinating theories, findings, test methods, focus groups. Who knows? One of these corporations may stumble on a bit of truly magnificent, unexpected wisdom about the female wonderdazzle that makes us rethink the entire human sexual experiment altogether.
But know this: There is no way in hell well get anywhere near to figuring it all out. No pill can ever touch the complexity. The best we can do is examine and isolate a few trouble spots, find a few fixes for the most distressed and needful among us, hope for the best.
It's a bit like NASA poking at the dangerous magnificence of black holes, those swirling deep space phenomena that entice and enthrall us almost as much as they scare us silly. Sure, we can get reasonably close, we can take astounding photos, we can make all sorts of educated guesses as to what might be happening in there. We can even send in a few probes, feelers, satellites, take some measurements and gather a few samples to send back to the lab.
But holy hell on a tip of a vibrator, you don't actually go in there. That's where worlds collide, universes expand, meanings come undone, gods laugh, demons play poker with angels, and fire turns into spun glass in the shape of a Sylvia Plath poem. You think you got a pill for that? The hell you do.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 2, 2010 22:10:45 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe last tuna nigiri on EarthBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, July 02, 2010This huge bluefin sold for $104,700 in Tokyo last year, the highest price in nearly ten years. When it's nature vs. capitalism, capitalism usually wins. — Photo: Kyodo News/Associated Press.I call it a "Republican moment," one of those surreal and disturbing thoughts that sneaks into my soul every now and then like an unwelcome but insistent visitor, a nasty little thought made of equal parts greed and unchecked entitlement, all overlaced with a sort of willful ignorance that entirely blocks out that dangerous beast of burden known as "conscience."
The moment came as I was reading the horrifying and deeply sad piece in the NYT Magazine about the plight of the wild bluefin tuna, the world's most overexploited game fish, a top ocean predator and a totem animal like few others, an undeniably magnificent creature that is rapidly nearing extinction due to gluttonous overfishing and unchecked international greed.
It's a harrowing, heartbreaking tale spanning generations, cultures and clashing beliefs of how we treat the earth. There are fascinating subtexts, politics, food history (the article is part of a larger book on the subject, Paul Greenberg's "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food"). But the grand upshot was simple enough: We are quickly destroying the last of humanity's great food stocks, a truly marvelous, powerful and even mystical creature unlike any other. And very soon, there will be no turning back.
The facts are brutal. Simply put, we are gorging our way to the bluefin's oblivion. Stocks in the Gulf of Mexico are now considered to be in full collapse with maybe 9,000 total fish left, all suddenly made far more dire and irreversible by the BP spill, which is destroying millions of fish eggs right at the start of spawning season.
The Atlantic stocks are faring little better, as international fishing boats race to cash in before it's too late. Japan — by far the largest consumer (but certainly not the only one) — is taking 80 percent of the catch, caring almost not a whit, citing dubious claims of "tradition" and a cultural need for its rapaciousness. Most depressing, with the exception of Greenpeace and a handful of other groups, few people seem to care about the fate of the bluefin.You should not be able to buy this in Safeway. Or Costco. Or Wal-Mart. It should not be available in malls, in fast-food courts, in drive-throughs. But it is. No matter. At this rate, it won't be anywhere at all much longer. — Photo: Brant Ward/The San Francisco Chronicle.Perhaps they should. These astonishing, warm-blooded creatures represent, as the story points out, more than just the last wild food stock in the ocean — a staggering enough idea all by itself considering the extent of our dependency on the ocean as an essential food. Bluefin are not like salmon or shrimp. They cannot be easily farmed. They cannot be replaced. They are a huge and hugely wild creature, more powerful than we even fully understand.
Destroy them, and we destroy more than just another everyday, "disposable" species. Their destruction will be a profound marker, a signifier of something far larger and more ominous. Like the honeybees, like the drowning polar bears, like the fresh water crisis, the end of tuna will be of those epic fails we look back upon in a few years and say, "There. Right there. That was one of the signs." We don't get many more.
My Republican moment came as I was nearing the end of the piece, feeling sickened and increasingly depressed, to the point where a sense of abject fatalism finally struck, a sense of just giving up, that wickedly painful moment where the heart has to step away from the scene before it implodes, and the survivalist/capitalist mind takes over and just powers through the nightmare, greedily gabbing on to whatever bits of gristle it can suckle.
This ugly voice said: Fine. If we're about to run out, if this is the last gasp of this splendid creature, if there's really nothing I can do about it anymore, well, to hell with it. I'd better get to my fave sushi joint quick and order a big batch of spice tuna rolls before it's too late.
I mean, might as well, right? Isn't this what humans do best? Isn't this the Republican way, applicable to everything from SUVs to guns, cigarettes to global warming, to mutter something along the lines of: "Really, who f*cking cares if it's the last tuna on earth? Who cares about words like sacred, ethics, reverence? The fish tastes good! It's ours to gobble up as much as we like! Top of the food chain, baby! And if we run out? Oh well. Just the way it goes. On to the next thing."Another day, another rather magnificent species sacrificed to our rapacious appetites. — Photo: STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images.Reminds me of the famous quote, "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." Translation: After awhile, after a few decades of being pummeled by all the horrors and the heartbreaks, the wars and abuses and man's inhumanity to man (and planet too), well, the heart just gives up. Enough. Basta. Idealism fails, hope crumbles, jadedness wins.
And then something far worse happens. The ego takes over completely, analyzes all the grim data it helped create, and says, "You know what? Screw it. All these bleak facts spell out one irrefutable commandment: Go get yours, before it's too late."
Is this not, moreover, what God supposedly wants for us? Has this not been the fundamentalist Christian, Rapture-drunk mindset since Jerry Falwell was knee-high to Satan's towel boy, that the earth was "given" to us by some ridiculously permissive mega-ego deity, along with full authorization to freely burn the joint to the ground as we see fit?
The feeling passed. I'm happy to report that, for the most part, such moments of bitter heartlessness are few and far between, and they tend to come and go like a creepy 24-hour rash, leaving me relatively unscarred. But like most liberals I know, I also work, every single day, to keep those vile demons at bay. After all, that sort of ugly fatalism is hugely addictive, the greediness delicious, the entitlement grossly tempting.
I practice remembering that it is, as ever, a question of how you wish you tread the planet, with what sort of integrity, conscience, lightness of step. It's about where you draw your boundaries, the kind of reverence you inject into your daily comings and goings, what you do when faced with exactly this kind of bleak and tragic scenario. It is, as always, your choice.
After all, if you lose that undercurrent of divine reverence, you lose the point of all life. Even if it's the final bite of bluefin, even if you watch in horror as the polar bears starve to death, even as you hear of nations murdering each other over dusty strips of dirt and pathetic definitions of God, you must, without fail, hold that sense of wonder and awe, nurture it at every turn. Because once that's gone, we're doomed for certain.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 10, 2010 15:23:04 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYour momma sucks iPadBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 07, 2010 LEFT: Another landfill ready hunk of tech uselessness taking us further away from God, or a world-altering mind-boggling hunk of soul candy gifted to us directly *from* God? Yes. — Photo: Manu Fernandez/Associated Press. RIGHT: See? Look how happy is Rita Schena, 78, of Menlo Park, California. Schena said she is very excited to have this device and feels its perfect for seniors on the go. — Photo: Mike Kepka/The Chronicle.S0 there I was, giving my wonderful but happily technologically unconcerned septuagenarian mother her 147th semi-repeated lesson on how to do various relatively simple tasks on her beloved MacBook, because as default Apple tech support for my whole family, that's just how I roll.
It was another lesson on everything from what a "file" is and where attachments go when they die, to what an "operating system" is and what the little swirly button on the toolbar means, along with a quick overview of how it all works, more or less, because there's only so much you can say about these things before all eyes glaze over and it becomes ridiculous and needlessly annoying, and we decide to forget about it and pour more wine.
And of course she dutifully took notes (longhand, on a notepad) also for the 147th time, carefully listing out the steps to each task, how many mouse moves,menu pull-downs and multiple clicks, and which program does what thing, before smiling and sighing and saying, "That's enough, I can't remember any more" and shutting it all off and going back to reading her Kindle.
Which she only sort of likes, by the way (her Kindle that is), because while the thing is fairly easy to read in daylight and makes it relatively effortless to flip through "pages," Amazon's little lump of technological mediocrity is also a hideous mess of lousy interfaces and clunky aesthetics, a beige slab hocked up by 1987's worst design ethos, all of it about as enjoyable to use as a food processor designed by encephalitic monkeys, especially considering all the beauty and deep pleasure it imparts — which is to say, absolutely zilch.
Every time I give such a refresher lesson, I'm hit by the stark realization that, despite how far we've come, despite Apple's legendary user interfaces and elegant operating systems, computers remain simply awful hellbeasts of needlessly confusing geekdom, ridiculous, jargon-filled chunks of chipsets and wires that, for the general population, remain endlessly loathsome and confusing, akin to forcing everyone to understand compression ratios, fuel grades and rubber degradation rates in their cars just so they can drive to the Thai restaurant.
This is, of course, all about to change. Or rather, revolutionize. Like millions of others, I have now purchased, for my mother, for her birthday, an iPad, AKA the computer that's finally not actually a computer, the gizmo that removes all the annoying gizmology from the experience, the singular thing that will make it all better, smoother, easier, even more intuitive, the way it should've been when PCs were first designed 40 years ago, and the way it will be, into the future, from now on.
And I'm here to tell you, it's about damn time.
Sweet Jesus in minimalist design heaven, the iPad. No mouse, no extra cables, no mandatory hookups, no startup times, installation DVDs, RAM guides, accelerators, system folders, font drivers, extensions, launch daemons, Kerberos plug-ins, jpg helpers or compression schemes, no diphthong upslingers pongo hurling goober kerfuffling flipblasters.
Just a devastatingly simple, utterly gorgeous sheet of glass and aluminum that does almost everything your average computer user needs it to do, with a couple finger taps and a happy sigh, sans roughly 500 of the usual steps, clicks, guides, installations, file extensions and so on. It's understandable at a glance, intuitive as candy, enjoyable as a porn star in summertime. You know, just like the Mac has always been, except not really.
Using the iPad is obvious in that "well now this makes perfect sense" sort of way. Use it for five minutes and you'll have what's known as the Apple Epiphany, that thought that says, "Holy hell, why can't every user experience/consumer product be like this?"
I think they soon will be. Just look at the iPhone. Do you have one? Doesn't matter. Love it or not, it changed the cellphone game forever. Every manufacturer in the world is now putting the exact same iPhone-inspired touch screen/flip-fingered interface on their smart phones. Why look at you with your shiny new HTC Nexus One, with its giant glass touch screen with a nifty row of four icons across the bottom! Look at your Android, with its App Store, landscape mode and proximity sensors! How innovative and original! Or, um, not.Shiny! Pretty! Your mom will love it. — Photo: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press.I fondly remember when Steve Jobs took to the Macworld stage way back in 1998, after re-taking the helm of the long-suffering, nearly dead company and setting it back on track. During that world-altering speech, Jobs announced, with much fanfare, Apple's return to profitability, saying the company made a cute little $47 million in profits for the first time in years. How very quaint. Apple now has $40 billion in cash just lying around the campus in nice, perfectly designed piles. What a ride.
On that fateful day, Jobs also announced (pre-turtleneck, pre-Levis, wearing an actual suit) employing what would become his trademark "one more thing" grand unveiling technique, the very first iMac.
Do you remember? It was the first Apple product to have a little ‘i’ in front of it, the one that set the course for everything revolutionary that's come from Apple since. It was a stunning piece of gizmongery, as brilliant as the iPod for its time, a translucent blue, all-in-one computer with a hockey puck mouse and a built-in handle on top. It was genius. It was also Apple's first smash megahit since the original Mac, a wild success in what was to become a whole slew of smash successes.
But here's the amazing thing: It was such a landmark development that almost instantly every industrial product, from printers to staplers, tape dispensers to vibrators, soon came in translucent plastic colors. Suddenly, the consumer world was looking to Apple for design cues, for the direction of the tech culture. And they have ever since. Praise Jesus.
And here we are. With every major innovation Apple introduces, so goes the rest of the tech. This is a wonderful and good thing, primarily because Apple's industrial designers are goddamn genius demigods of perfect, gorgeous minimalist functionality.
And now, with the iPad, my mother will be a trendsetter. She will be on the forefront of the revolution. There have already been articles about how older folks love the iPad. Tap, you get email. Tap, you browse the Web. Works everywhere. Amazing screen. Read books at night. And so on. Great.
But what I look forward to most of all isn't even the iPad itself, but how the damnable thing will influence design everywhere, how its innovations and style will trickle down (or up, or sideways) into my car, into stereo equipment, into coffeemakers and cameras and buildings.
Sure, my mother will probably still have plenty of questions. There's still a bit of a learning curve. At least it's a pleasurable one. Try saying that about most things in this happily lumpy, clunky, tech-drunk life.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/07/07/notes070710.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 10, 2010 15:25:34 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThank you very much, British PetrolBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, July 09, 2010Please sit down. Take a deep breath. I am going to ask you to recall something very traumatic and painful, to take a moment and remember exactly how things were not all that long ago, how pathetic and lost it all seemed, for nearly a decade, one of the worst intervals in our nation's history, a period most of us have worked extremely hard via wine, drugs, scream therapy, sex and lots of deep and prayerful book-learnin' to block out, forget, heal.
Let us now, just for a paragraph or three, recall the sad and soiled era of one George W. Bush, AKA the Dark Times, the Era of Lost Souls, when all felt calamitous and miserable and not a single day went by without some nefarious scandal, abuse, global humiliation, blunder, illegal war or Creationist kiddiebabble to molest your heart, scar your soul and humiliate your finer sensibilities.
Do you remember? I know, I'm very sorry to make you do it. But it just might save us all.
See, there are those who tentatively argue — I've done so myself, more or less, in this very space — that we actually owe Dubya a huge dose of (reluctant, teeth-gritted, soul-clenched) gratitude.
There are those who say that, had it not been for The Worst President of the Modern Era, his epic blunderstorm of war, environmental abuse and a deep suckling love for/from the deeply disturbed fundamentalist right, well, the potent groundswell for change and upheaval would not have occurred, the GOP might not have collapsed so violently under the weight of its own repellant misprision, and Obama might never have succeeded as well as he did.
Do you agree with this estimation? I'm a bit mixed on it overall — I think Obama was fairly spectacular in his own right, and I'm generally optimistic enough to say that we as a species don't always require violent trauma or severe loss to finally see the light. But still, there's no doubt that the stunning amount of global disgust Bush fomented caused a hell of a slingshot effect.
For better or worse, sometimes it's the only way change can arrive. It's easy to argue that most humans — particularly American humans — do not really evolve in any substantive way unless forced, unless the consequences of inaction become so dire, pathetic or abusive that we are left with no choice. So lazy and overpampered have we become, so comfortable and fat and widely drugged, that unless something is truly at stake — usually money, perhaps health, occasionally self-respect — we simply shall not budge until the walls are, quite literally, on fire.
So we come to the great BP spill of 2010, the most gruesomely epic man-made disaster of our age. How do we parse? Through what lens do we observe? Using the Dark Days as a model, I'm here to suggest the possibility that we look at BP, its horrible disaster, its slimy executives, its Republican apologists, its roots in pure evil — and actually, by short extension, its direct ties to the Bush Administration itself — and set our sour fatalism aside for a moment, and instead offer up a perverse sort of gratitude.
Shall we try it? Thank you, BP, for being so grossly negligent and incompetent that your historic, vile train wreck might finally snap us to attention, see the greasy flaw in the modern human experiment, smell just how repugnant is our oil dependency, just what sort of poison we depend on so aggressively for our daily churn, so we may finally lay the groundwork for something far better and more helpful to emerge.
Thank you, BP, for the unbreathable fumes, the millions of gallons of toxic Corexit 9500, the countless thousands of dead animals and ruined species, the cover-ups and malfeasance, for reminding us of just how vile is the stench of our universal need for cheap and plentiful energy, at whatever cost.
What do you think? How did that feel? Is such distorted gratitude appropriate? Are we on the cusp of a major awakening, a redirection of our national policy, identity, environmental ethos?
So far, the signs are not good. Even Obama hasn't stepped up to the moment with anything resembling true audacity. He has yet to leverage this catastrophe in any meaningful way, to launch a dramatic overhaul not merely of U.S. energy policy, but also how we behave in the world. There's $20 billion in reparations, a new federal agency or three, and a few heads have rolled. But that's about it.
It's too bad. Much in the way Bush whored 9/11 to ramrod through an illegal war, authorize torture, maul the Geneva Convention and lay waste to the Constitution, the Treasury and the once-noble American identity, one hopes Obama will do something equally dramatic and nation-altering with the BP spill — only, you know, in reverse. Maybe it's yet to come. Obama, as is his way, isn't one for melodrama.
Or maybe it's just too much to ask. Maybe oil is just too precious, too much a cornerstone of the world's empires, too essential to every nation's economic and military infrastructures. There is simply no way to be a world power without it. To suggest we move away from oil is to suggest humans move away from food, or water, or porn, or guns. Laughable. Impossible. Never happen. Can't.
Which means, of course, that no catastrophe will ever be large enough, and the only thing that will finally force us away from oil is, of course, when we run out. And as Alberta's disgusting oilsands prove, we're developing simple horrific, planet-raping techniques to ensure that doesn't happen for a long, long while. Hell, Texas's "best and brightest" in the biz are already proposing, not ways to wean us off oil, but merely ways to develop better technologies for more efficient drilling. Sort of like saying of course we should never stop declaring wars; we should only develop better ways to kill people. Good thinking. Thanks, Texas. P.S.; Go to hell.
Maybe it's the wrong way to look at it. Of course, the BP spill is nowhere near as traumatic, nation-scarring and historically destructive as a decade of Bush. His reach was wide and deep, the damage decades in the unraveling and recovery, the innocent lives lost counted in the hundreds of thousands; Dubya was a whole-body cancer.
But it's still worth recalling. Because sometimes the gifts come in hideous packages. Sometimes the enlightenment, the higher consciousness only comes after you've been beaten over the head with the oily baseball bat of what the f*ck is wrong with you. Thanks for the brutal, nightmarish beating, BP. We'll see if we regain consciousness.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 15, 2010 23:16:25 GMT 12
From SFGate.comMel Gibson's 10 tips for sexist monstersBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 14, 2010What vileness lurks in the hearts of manic depressive Australian sexist washed-up actor-men who are not aging gracefully and who reportedly/allegedly beat their girlfriends and toss out racist slurs like wretched popcorn? Is it even worth pondering? Oh wait, I just wrote a whole column about it. OK, it totally is. — Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.Mel and Oksana in (seemingly) happier times, as the invisible vultures of pop culture doom circle ominously over both their heads — but mostly aiming at Mel's brainless, moronic skull. — Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images.A second audiotape has emerged in which Mel Gibson allegedly heaps disgusting verbal abuse and threats on the ex-girlfriend who is the mother of his baby daughter. — CNN______________________________________ Many have asked, how does Mel do it? What does it take to become such a gargantuan, sexist, possibly racist, potentially violent monster, or at least give a very convincing appearance of same? Can I do it, too?
Herein, some tips for those looking to hone their own personal ranty hatemongering sexist jerkface skillset:
1. First, last and always: Make lots and lots of money. I mean, truckloads. Mountains. Even more than you are imagining right now. No, no, I mean even more than that. Look, take that amount, multiply it by 100, then smack yourself in the skull with a petrified copy of "Lethal Weapon 4" until swarms of that amount are swirling around your head like bees. We're talking giant, obscene piles of it, strewn about Mel's personal Holy Family Catholic cult compound like piles of James Caviezel's trashed career.
In the parlance of the rich and repellent, Mel's millions — a large portion of which he made on the sick success of "Passion of the Christ" — is called "f*ck you" money. It completely inures you from the slings and arrows of outrageous bloggers, creditors, film investors and divorce attorneys. It's the kind of money that allows you to do whateverthehell you want, because no one can touch you. Even if the lawyers take half, you'll still have plenty left over to buy lots of Russian hookers, vodka and the femur bone of Michael Jackson.
Note: Does having a ton of money automatically make you a raging racist/sexist jerk? Of course not. Does it help? Absolutely.
2. A second significant benefit of the money involved in #1 is how you can, you know, own people. I mean literally own them. See, when you control every waking moment of someone else's life — the house, the car, the food, the kids — when they can't really do a single thing without your permission or approval, well, you get to treat them almost any way you like. Because you own them.
And if they happen to be cheap Russian whores who barely deserve to live, well, you also get the right to come over there and "put them in the rose garden." See how that works?
3. Do not ever settle for merely a single smear against your character. Anti-Semite, sexist, drunk? Big deal. Any of those on its own is easily defensible, even forgivable by your fan base, by way of some sort of excuse: terrible childhood, alcoholism, bad hair day, she deserved it, that sort of thing.
True sexist prickmonsters know that to attain true monsterhood, you gotta combine various evils. Stack them high and proud. This is the only real path to lasting disrepute. Try this: Sexist racist anti-Semitic drunk wife-beating verbal abuser sadomasochistic misogynist extremist religious bonk job with a torture fetish. See? Much better. All that's missing is raging homophobe. Wait, it was there before. Hmm.
4. Remember all the countless thousands of fundamentalist Christians and confused old people who numbly trucked in by the busload to watch "Passion of the Bloodbath" over and over again, often hauling their bewildered, horrified children along with them to witness what is easily one of the most grisly, disgusting, masochistic slasher-porn flicks masquerading as a "true" religious tale in the history of film?
They're the ones who basically made #1 possible. Which in turn, enabled #2. So on the path to monsterhood, be sure to toss a big, juicy bone to the fundamentalists, for believing so blindly in your nightmare vision of what amounts to about two lines in the Bible. Remember: Fundamentalism is always an excellent foundation for monstrous madness.
5. Many ask: What the hell? This is news? Why should anyone care about this horrible story, or the tapes, or Mel's personal life? Monster or no, this story doesn't warrant serious attention, much less all the headlines. What sort of culture have we become that anyone really cares about this sort of pop culture chyme?
You know what? You are absolutely right. But therein lies the brilliance: See, the mark of any true monster is how he sneaks into your subconscious and eats away at your better reasoning, even while you're trying to live more consciously and weep more openly about the dead pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico. Damn you, hateful manic-depressive actor! Get out of my brain! I'm trying to mourn the death of the planet! Good luck with that.
6. One sign of true vileness of character is when you can confuse and humiliate all your extant fans, the ones who once thought you were cool, who once thought you were sexy, who once thought you were all kind of funny and godlike and nifty, and who now regret at a very deep and sour level ever paying a dime to see anything you directed, starred in, breathed near. When someone you once sort of liked turns out to have a soul you would not feed your dog? Depressing. Well done, Mel.
7. Do you know who else treats women like trash and blames them for being desirable, and claims that if they get raped, maimed, even killed, they probably deserved it for being so evil and enticing? The Taliban. Al Queda. Iraq. Parts of Saudi Arabia. Radical Islam. Women have been stoned to death, beaten and raped, and it's often their own fault, for being female, for being so tempting that weak, pathetic men can't control themselves.
8. Do a few nice things. Give some money to charity. Help save the Mayan culture. Donate to children's hospitals. This will make your later transgressions all the more appalling, depressing, repellant by contrast. People will be all, like, "But didn't he once give money to save starving children or something? Protect some forests? Maybe he's not all bad?"
9. Then the hoi polloi, if they care at all, will then have to weigh both sides, see if your overt evil outweighs your quieter goodliness. Guess what? Turns out when you (allegedly) punch a women repeatedly, knock out her teeth, threaten to kill her, and rage like a maniac in a hateful spew that can't be retracted or blamed on the booze, well, all bets are off. Even the dying kids in that hospital will be, like, WTF?
10. To hell with all of them. Keep making movies anyway. Keep doing your "thing," whatever that is. You have the "f*ck you" money. You have the talent as a director. Make any sort of movies you want and toss them to the wolves of the general public and to hell with the outcry.
This way, your legacy carries on, anyone who hears your name feels instantly creeped out and sad; you are, in the end, a damn fine reminder of how not to live on this planet.
See? You're really just trying to help.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 17, 2010 2:46:33 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe great Dick Cheney empathy testBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, July 16, 2010The Great Dick Cheney Empathy Test (GDCET) is not for the faint of spirit. It requires tremendous fortitude, a deeply benevolent worldview, much unchecked screaming, and copious amounts of whisky. Also, reading. Do you have what it takes? — Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.Former Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed on Wednesday that he has undergone surgery to install a small pump to help his heart work, as the 69-year-old enters a new phase of what he called “increasing congestive heart failure”. — Associated Press______________________________________ Here's how it works. You read the story above. You note how Dick Cheney, former vice president, Bush babydaddy, sneermaster supreme, befouler of nations, lover of war, hater of, well, almost everything else — has undergone yet another major heart operation, this time to place a little valve-assisting pump (called an LVAD) in his withered and long dysfunctional ticker.
You then read how Dick is recuperating in intensive care following said installation — which, by the way, is usually only a stopgap measure, just a delay tactic until the device in question gives out and the patient requires a full heart transplant. Is Dick a candidate for that? Doubtful. Also, they say LVADs are usually reserved for patients with end-stage heart disease, a last resort, the final straw. It is, they say, only a matter of time.
So it begins. LEFT: Dubya and wheelchair-bound Dick, prior to the inauguration of Barack Obama. Oh, banality of evil, how tepid thy visage, how mealy thy soul. — Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images. | RIGHT: This dandy image popped up as an option when I searched for “Dick Cheney” using SFGate's photo selection tool. It's an artists' rendering from the journal ‘Nature’ showing a raptorial sperm whale Leviathan melvillei attacking a medium-size baleen whale. Scientists have discovered an ancient whale whose bite ripped huge chunks of flesh out of other whales about 12 million years ago, and they've named it after the author of “Moby Dick”. I left the image in. It seemed entirely appropriate. — Photo: C. Letenneur/Associated Press.The first knee-jerk response to the Great Dick Cheney Empathy Test (GDCET) is, of course, the easiest, and the most obvious, the most available to your giddy puppydog consciousness, and my guess is it shot through you like a fast and wonderful lightning bolt of OH MY SWEET JESUS YES the instant you read the story above.
That response was, shall we say, not very subtle. It was, I'm guessing, a not-so-secret howl to the universe that the sooner Dick exits this earthly plane, the healthier, lighter and happier we will all be, planetwide. Dark shadows will lift, flowers will bloom more brightly, 10 million female uteri can finally unclench, and so on.
But then, perhaps you sigh, ponder, probe a bit more deeply. Is that how you really wish to be? What of those noble traits we all strive for: compassion, benevolence, forgiveness, a wan but merciful smile in the face of thine enemy's condemnatory sneer? Is wishing a scaldingly painful death on one of the worst and most shameful characters in American history really the right way to treat your fellow man? Any fellow man? Of course not. Well, maybe. No, no, definitely not.
After all, if you wish such a thing, what does that say? About you? About us? About this paragraph? Would we not all be wallowing on the same filthy level? Is it not similar to the death penalty argument so beloved by liberals, that no matter how vile the criminal, to wish death upon any human makes us just as base and ugly as those we deem to be evil? This is no way for an enlightened consciousness to evolve.
I know what you're thinking. And yes, passing the GDCET would require all your courage, all your gumption, willpower, whisky and every ounce of benevolent energy you can muster. You would have to invoke all your Jesus-flecked Buddha nature to turn the other cheek, love thy enemies, forgive the sinners — basically dredge up every maxim, axiom, aphorism, proverb and Hallmark card you can think of, toss them into a karmic blender and shoot them straight into your wary soul like a desperate and godly emetic.
It ain't easy. You must first resist the very reasonable, insistent screaming of your calmly vengeful side, the one that would be very pleased indeed if Dick suffered a million scalding rashes and burned in hell with Jerry Falwell, Saddam and Strom Thurmond for all eternity. That would be wrong. Stop thinking that.
Perhaps a reversal is in order. Perhaps it's better to wish someone like Dick a longer life, so that he may bear witness to the well-deserved implosion of all his nefarious plans, his cronyist empire. The man is, by most accounts, responsible for countless thousands of innocent deaths, the acerbic tainting of our national identity, a flagrant mutilation of everything we once held dear. You sort of want the guy to feel it. Repeatedly.
Are you a seriously impassioned ultraliberal with a thing for vengeful whimsy? You might even take this notion a step further and hold out a flicker of hope that Dick will live long enough to one day be put on trial for his war crimes, hung in a public square, slowly eaten by swarms of feral pigeons. Or crows. Pugs. Whatever.
This is, of course, a total fantasy, akin to imagining Rush Limbaugh getting busted for snorting meth from a gay teenage hooker's thighs just after fellating Mel Gibson in Newt Gingrich's fetish dungeon. Doesn't matter. As long as Dick is alive, it's a fantasy that keeps many a liberal heart aflutter.
Maybe you sense there is no rush. Maybe you know there's need to wish Dick an immediate demise, given how everyone knows that before long he'll be taking the Great Escalator down to the basement. Surely a great reckoning is coming. In the grand arc of spacetime, what's a few more years?
Besides, will it not be lovely for Dick to witness Obama sail into his second term, replace a third of the Supreme Court with people who actually have souls, and overturn/reverse nearly every law, stance and spiteful stratagem with which Dick ever fouled the earth? You bet it will.
Or perhaps, finally, you can appreciate the value of a living Dick. Every culture needs its demons, yes? The villain is just as important as the hero. Dick has been, and continues to be, an ideal foil, the complete monster, the perfect perversion of humanity by which we can all measure subsequent people and deeds. You may look upon any modern atrocity, any upstart political ogre, any personal abuse and say, well, at least it's not Dick Cheney. That's something.
So, how did you do? Did you pass the GDCET? Fail instantly, way back up top, when you read the headline to this column? Not quite sure?
You might be like me. See, I try to wish no violence or death, illness or pain on my fellow man. I do not always succeed, but still I strive, every single day, with every breath, even if I can't always forgive or be as uniformly compassionate as I'd like, then at least to proffer kindness, to see the larger picture and above all, to refuse to let the poison enter my heart.
However, I'm quite sure I would not be the slightest bit displeased to learn that the laws of brutal karmic repayment have come into full, painstaking, searing effect on our boy Dick. No, I wouldn't mind that in the least. After all, it's the empathetic thing to do.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 22, 2010 1:28:45 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWhat to do when it all goes rightBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 21, 2010Tragedies come in swarms. Evil comes in mobs. Piles of bilious bad news and nefarious negativity hit the fan, spray all over the walls of your exhausted perspective, befoul your entire week. You know how it is.
Far rarer: those instances when genuinely good news lights up the sky, pops up like a flower in cracked concrete, screams hello. So soured are we by the relentless onslaught of bleakness and downspiral that authentic progress often feels jarring, surreal, fake. We distrust it. We do not believe it actually exists. After all, how can anything remotely good survive in this poisonous stew that we call American culture?
Worse, good news usually travels alone. A single headline, a tentative news item, one seemingly upbeat or hopeful tale dances its way across your brainstem and shows off its plumage before being instantly drowned out, swallowed whole by our insatiable, sadomasochistic craving for more blood and fear.
These blips of good and right, they do not last long. Blink once and you can miss it. Blink twice and whoops, another shooting in the street, another train wreck in India, another massive oil spill in another part of the world.
But what about those rare, impossible times that good news comes in an actual gaggle, a cluster, an astonishing little clusterbomb heapdazzle lickflurry of oh my God you have to be kidding me? What of those precious times when it all seems to line up, and the world seems to right itself, just for a moment, just for a dazzling pause of Yes in the middle of all the buzz saw screaming of No's? What do you do then? What the hell is going on?
It sort of happened a few days ago, just for a flash, like a solar eclipse, a fistful of curious confetti, the pause at the end of the exhale. They marched across the wires in a steady stream, all in a single afternoon, waving tattered but still gleaming flags of possibly, maybe, OK, sure. It was a little strange, disorienting. And of course, it didn't last long. Did you notice? Did you pause, smile, scream your Yes and raise a glass, just for a moment?
It went something like this:
After 85 days, 16 hours, 24 minutes, BP announced it had finally stopped its raging oil gusher, after untold millions of gallons of black death had befouled the Gulf. The worst environmental catastrophe in a generation, the demon that seemed inescapable, finally capped, more or less, at least temporarily. At first, no one could quite believe it. When it was verified, you could hear the tentative optimism for a thousand miles around. Really? Could it be?
Argentina defied its timorous Catholic breeding and the panicky wails of evangelical groups, and became the first Latin American nation to allow gays to marry, all helped through by a progressive female president, Cristina Fernandez. It was historic in a dozen ways; gay rights groups are hoping the positive news catches on to countries all around. The first weddings are set for August 13th.
The otherwise acidic, intolerable U.S. Senate actually passed the most sweeping financial reform bill since the Great Depression, a slew of dramatic new regulations designed to hopefully prevent the demons of Wall Street from raping the populace and nearly devastating the economy again. Most Republicans voted against it because they prefer to kneel down and lick the giant diamond rings of Wall Street. No matter. It's still a relatively stunning achievement for Obama & Co.
And on a lesser but no less fun note, the world's largest and most delicious rock-star tech company actually admitted it was slightly imperfect and decided to offer up a fix for the most popular consumer gadget ever invented since the beer hat and the Hello Kitty vibrator. Free bumpers for your iPhone 4! Free returns! Free neck massages from Steve Jobs himself, while supplies last! Awesome. Sort of.
It was, all told, a very surreal moment. You take all those stories in, you let them swim around for a bit, you get a quick jolt of the idea that maybe, just maybe, All Is Not Lost. The world seems to right itself, just for a few seconds, just enough that perhaps you do that most rare of things when reading the news: You grin, exhale, stop feeling doom in every crevasse and corner of your body. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Are you rolling your eyes? Are you scoffing quietly as you read that list? Did your cynical side rush in with a hatchet and some matches? After all, it's insanely easy to pick them all apart, to kill the good and positive in an instant, to go through each story and find the pessimistic aspects, the downside, the BS, the part that can instantly make it all ugly and sad again.
Is BP lying? Could the plug actually make everything far, far worse? How nice for inconsequential little Argentina — good luck getting it to stick anywhere else, and just wait for the conservative backlash; Fernandez won't last long. Financial reform? As if. It's a crock, a handful of tiny changes that mean almost nothing and will have little effect on the power and greed of the Wall Street titans. Goldman Sachs paid a piffling $550 mil for its vile transgressions. It made $16 billion on the AIG scam alone. Their stock price has already re-skyrocketed.
As for Apple, well, who cares? Gizmos suck, cell phones are evil and Jobs only admitted the mistake as a sly PR move. And so on.
I shall leave the teardown option up to you. It is, as always, your choice how you proceed, if you wish to let the cynicism and sourness back in without even so much as a pause. Really, I'm less interested in these particular stories per se, and more what you do when you see them, how you parse and dance. We are, after all, trained like monkeys to see the worst, expect the least, hope for very little good to come of anything.
But let's just ponder the impossible: What are the other options? Is it possible to see those tales and recognize the good energies they represent, perhaps even figure out a way to, I don't know, further them along? Keep the vibe humming? Offer them forth like some sort of wicked divine blessing? When good things happen, is there a way to jump on the back of that flash of lightning and ride that glorious beast to the end of time? We're all experts in bleakness. How do you become experts in the upside?
Or how about this: Maybe, just maybe, that gaggle of weirdly sparkling stories was actually not a rare and nearly extinct cluster that almost never happens. Maybe such clusters are always there, always on the march, always moving though. The good news, the upside is always there; we've just forgotten how to see it. Could it really be that simple? Could it really be that challenging?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 26, 2010 23:35:27 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHow to properly mount your deityBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, July 23, 2010Everyone should receive a divine package like this at some point in their life. It's all flavors of awesome. Also slightly intimidating. But in the best possible way. — Photo: Mark Morford.The 5,000-year-old god arrived in an enormous, heavy-duty cardboard box — as gods are wont to do — nearly four feet high and two feet deep, weighing nearly 100 pounds, packed like an incandescent rock in dense industrial Styrofoam, because that's just the way he rolls.
This particular deity had made the journey to my door from a divine sculpture shop deep in Connecticut, which itself was merely a brief domestic stopover, given how he first traveled upwards of 9,000 miles from a remote part of southern India where he was born in clay and metal, fire and sweat, across multiple eons of mystical history and tradition, give or take a millennia or two.
Unwrapping him properly took me nearly an hour. I took my time. You do not want to rush such things. You do not need to hurry. This is, after all, a sacred presence, a wild and powerful force, a big-assed, mega-divine yelp of supremely humbling wow.
He's also sort of ... eternal. This particular god, this immense helping of sacred meaning, has been around awhile. Basically, when you decide to fully invite something like this into your home, into your life, you do not want to f*ck around.
Plus, this wasn't your typical art piece, lawn ornament, decorative doohickey, a hunk of fancy but inconsequential furniture to be set off in the corner and upon which you can toss your jacket or hang your dirty socks and forget about until the dust bunnies gather and the spider webs form and you're like, "Oh right, that thing."
I fully intend to revere this piece — if that's the right word, which it really isn't — to indulge it, admire it, honor it, smile before it, swim in the hum of it, celebrate it, drink it in, bow before it, practice yoga in front of it, wink at him and let him wink back, every day, forever and ever, even though I don't fully know just what the hell most of that even means. Yet.
This, I fully believe, is the fun part. With a god like this, you gotta earn it. It takes time. Lifetimes. Who's counting?
It's an enormous Nataraja statue, by the way, just over three feet high and about 95 pounds of solid metal, as weighty as time, heavy as your meanings, light as your consciousness, and vice versa. He is, in short, something to behold.
Nataraja, if you'd like to know, is a form, a version, an embodiment, an incarnation of the great Lord Shiva of Hindu myth. In this form he's the dancer, the fiery gorgeous four-armed deity you've likely seen in various versions and sizes all over, from day spa to yoga studio, sacred space to meditation zone, funky Haight Street head shop to Burning Man camp, as well as innumerable temples, shrines, altars from here to Bangalore.
Recognize him yet? He's got one leg in the air and all four arms in motion, standing atop a demon of ignorance. He has snakes and drums, fires and rivers, immeasurable power and humble grace. He also has serious history. Hell, he predates Jesus by nearly 3,000 years, if not a million. You know, give or take.
Shiva/Nataraj is, by the way, one of Hinduism's most complex and revered of deities, god of creation, destruction, embodiment, release — pretty much the whole shebang. He is the destroyer of illusion, but also the great source of all the energy of creation. In this particular dancer incarnation, he's in constant motion, the embodiment of a conscious, aflame universe. Also, as a piece of mystical art, he's just all kinds of insanely gorgeous.
I shall not attempt to explain all the history, the Hindu philosophy, the multiple stories and meanings. I haven't nearly the skills, the knowledge, the training. Not many people do. As a yoga teacher for a decade, I'm still learning, every single day, how to embody Nataraja's crazy multifarious aspects. Truly, I may never get it all. In fact, I'm quite sure I won't. This is a wonderful thing. LEFT: Emerging from the heavy duty Styrofoam. Just like Christmas, only completely different in every way you can name. — Photo: Mark Morford. | RIGHT: The Nataraja as I first saw him. Of course, no mere photo can do the thing proper justice. Then again, I'm not sure I can either. This is what makes it so fantastic. — Photo: Mark Morford.]I carefully hoisted the 5,000-year-old god out of the thick foam, cleaned off the scattered bits, polished him with a cloth dipped in coconut oil — not that he really needed it, but more as an excuse to touch every nook and cranny, get to know his features, the artistry involved, to get to know the god that's in the details.
Curiously, my lack of serious Hindu training and scholarship almost prevented me from investing in this piece of divine art. For a moment I felt ... unworthy. I felt I could not possibly do this creation proper justice. After all, to bring in a piece like this, you are normally to perform puja — elaborate ritual, mantra, chanting and food, milk and flowers, fire and smoke — many times over. Often with a Hindu priest. For hours.
Then I entirely flipped that over. What a thing to work toward? Who says we are bound to such limitations? Invest in the best and most beautiful instrument that inspires you, and learn to play it properly.
I will say one thing: Unlike other forms of worship, with icons like this (and in Hinduism in general), you do not bow down in shriveled meekness. You are meant to meet the deity at eye level. It is not about submissive subservience, not in the way the West thinks of it, anyway. It is not about you being a flawed, guilty sinner and the god is above you looking down, saying "Tsk, tsk, tsk." There is no separation. No duality. As with any of the Hindu gods, it's all aspects of the self. You are looking at you.
I'm still figuring that out. I always will be.
One small problem. I have yet to find a proper altar for this tremendous piece of art, one that supports this kind of weight, significance, power, one that does the statue justice. It needs to be a bit more than a table. I am searching for the base. It's a lot to hold up, as it were. At the same time, it doesn't weigh a thing.
How do you mount your deities? How do you give proper reverence? With what sort of wild astonishment do you bow and breathe? I don't really believe in churches, in guilt and shame and forsaking your identity to some scowling judge, in staring up at a horrific image of a bloody body nailed to a stick, full of sin and shame, taught that I can never actually attain sacredness. Why such horror and fear? Why not just dance?
But to attempt a wild, drunken, conscious, devout seeking-out of the sacred in all things in all moments? To destroy illusion and defeat ignorance? Full of consciousness in every breath, smile, song, handshake, lick, suck, touch, word, column, eyeblink, cocktail, dreamstate, marriage, divorce, wound, ecstasy, trauma, death? That I can do. Or rather, that I can strive for, breathe toward, wink at. After all, the gods, they just love to wink back.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 29, 2010 0:42:16 GMT 12
From SFGate.com10 amazing truths you already suspectedVolume V! San Francisco brains, gay disco priests, Wikileak sighs!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 28, 2010(Previously: Volume I | Volume II | Volume III | Volume IV)______________________________________ Did you already know? I bet you already knew. Or at the very least, had a sneaking suspicion. Here we go...
1. I know what you're thinking: In these times of acrimony and divisiveness, is it still possible to find peaceful consensus? Can any group of educated individuals ever agree on anything worthwhile, besides Blue Bottle Coffee, the Fiat 500 and grilled sausages in summertime?
Good news: They totally can! Watch in awe as every one of the country's 238 respected presidential scholars recently agreed, without the slightest doubt or hesitation and despite all their varying backgrounds, ages, political affiliations, heights and weights and hairstyles, that George W. Bush really is the worst president in modern history, and the 5th worst of all time. Wonders!
2. It's entirely true that San Francisco can be a whiny, opinionated place, obnoxiously politically correct, sometimes a bit too passionate about issues and ideas for its own good. But really, it's all just a happy side effect of the fact we have such a huge and generous surplus of educated, active brains lying around.
It's true. Turns out San Francisco has the highest number of college degrees per square inch, followed by New York, Boston, Chicago ... well, all the major cities, really. The locations with the fewest sophisticated brainstems? Why, that would be places like Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Birmingham ... all those burgs where books are scary, God is always scowling, and deep fried is the only way to cook your squirrel. It might even be easy to suggest that the smarter and more educated you get, the more liberal, healthier and generally less terrified you become. I mean, obvs.
3. Then again, maybe not. As I write these words, it's fairly clear that the BP oil spill, much to the disappointment of many on the extreme liberal left and the apocalyptic right, has not caused the end of the world via methane explosions, giant tsunamis, acidic toxic rain, or by way of a million horrific screams emanating from all those politicians who've had to swallow their "drill baby drill" chant like a greasy backwash poison.
Make no mistake: The BP spill ruined lives, coastlines, portfolios. It is an environmental nightmare unmatched in our lifetime. But somehow the world still spins; it's just a bit darker and greasier than before. What will the next apocalypse porn be? What will finally spell our doom? Let us ponder.
4. How clever you are, using your kid's birthday as your secret online banking password. Or is it your wedding anniversary? Is it 1-2-3-4? Oh, you silly thing. Don't bother fixing it now; research shows that frequently changing your password is pretty much useless. Here's the thing: If nefarious hackers haven't swiped your password by now, they're not really going to. Or if they do hack it, they'll use it immediately, and hence, changing it every month or two is, well, pointless. Did you already know?
5. Do you love yourself some Vitaminwater? Do you like to think it's at least remotely healthy, better than, say, liquefying a Twinkie and injecting it directly into your eyeballs? Nope. Vitaminwater is just sugar water. It is junk food.
Proof: A federal judge has now ruled that a class-action lawsuit against Coca-Cola — which owns Glaceau, which owns Vitaminwater — can go forth and lay waste to Coke's insidious claims of Vitaminwater being a healthy happy gulp of drinking goodness. Now, go turn on your tap. Fill up a Sigg. Drink it down. There. About 20 times healthier. And it's free.
6. Your intuition was right all along: Mel Gibson really is a raging lunatic. You already knew his bloodfest slaughter porn movie about that sweet Jewish mystic was even more cartoonishly disturbing than an episode of Happy Tree Friends. But Mel Gibson might be one of the first modern megastars to go completely insane before our very eyes. Would that be something to behold? You can say: Sure my life's rough, sure I have some darker issues, but holy hell on a hand grenade, at least I'm not Mel Gibson. Far more frightening than Tom Cruise and his silly sci-fi cult. So reassuring.
7. "People who are untrusting, fear rejection, or are otherwise insecure about their relationships might be at a greater risk for health problems than their more secure counterparts." Thus spake a new study directly to your overwhelming sense of duh.
No matter. Upon hearing such terrible news, the fearful and insecure among us will of course only become more fearful and insecure, thus further elevating the risk of heart attack and illness, thus reinforcing the study's findings, thus perpetuating a lovely downward spiral of imminent self-fulfilling doom. Science is neat!
8. Another day, another hidden camera catching three young Catholic priests gyrating, groping and partying hard at a gay disco in Italy, then having hot gay sex in a church building. Dovetails beautifully with the recent tale of the Rev. Kevin Gray of Connecticut, busted for swiping $1.3 million from church coffers to pay for gay escorts, fine restaurants, Armani duds. Awesome.
Not to be at all confused with the ongoing churchly scandals about all the creepy old Catholic pedophiles who prey on young children, gay clergy are far more common, harmless, adorable in their wildly hypocritical, sinful debauchery, all underscoring what has to be the church's worst-kept secret: The Catholic seminary is like a big ol' gay bathhouse. Also: God loves mesh.
9. More than 91,000 classified military documents, one big scandalous info dump over at some site called Wikileaks.org that few have ever heard of, countless Defense Department officials and White House staffers scurrying about trying to do damage control, the NYT, Der Spiegel and the Guardian all happy as clams to be part of the headlines, and yet all of the secret documents about the "truth" of the Afghan war so far only seem to underscore the grand reality you surely already suspected.
It's this: Unwinnable wars are exactly as grueling, difficult, miserable, sad, brutal, dishonest, unforgiving, trivial, insane, damaging, surreal, bureaucratic, technically dizzying, numbingly tragic, and often downright criminal as they've always been. We just never had the Internet to back it all up.
10. Exercise for 10 minutes, and your body feels the positive effects for at least an hour. Exercise for an hour, your body feels good for a day or more. Exercise for six hours a day, consume copious gallons of powdered protein shakes, do a thousand crunches in five minutes and get that manic workout-freak look in your eye, and your body recoils and starts to shut down, spasms, gives you weird dreams, screams, "Knock it off already," urges your to seek therapy, have a pulled pork sandwich and get some sun.
Really now, exercise isn't meant to be all that extreme. Despite what you might've heard, life is not one giant, grueling, joyless endurance test. Well, not always. You're going to be just fine. But you knew that already.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 30, 2010 21:19:56 GMT 12
From SFGate.com92,000 pages of awesome miseryBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, July 30, 2010Great news! I have now read and analyzed every single one*¹ of the 92,000 highly classified, top-secret documents recently uncovered in the WikiLeaks.org mega-saga military scandal, the very ones being fretted over by President Obama, the Defense Department and top members of the nervous Pakistani government, along with all those swarthy terrorist cells who are right now poring over them for helpful details like Lady Gaga tour dates, Mel Gibson's fave catchphrases and Lindsay Lohan's home address.
*¹(Not exactly true)
I have scoured all the data, factored in the countless bombings and roadside detonations (and there are, seemingly, millions); I have made pie charts and bar graphs, plotted points of interest on special war paper, geo-located all the various deadly flashpoints using Google Earth, all while making 10,000 little explosion sounds with my mouth, just like George Bush used to do in the bathtub when Uncle Dick talked about "liberating" the Middle East.
I have come to some important conclusions. First off, as mentioned just about everywhere — including by the president himself — talk of these documents "putting lives at risk," is complete and utter BS, and is merely meant to discourage and intimidate anyone from doing anything like this ever again, because it's all been just hugely embarrassing and humiliating to U.S. intelligence, sort of like Tiger Woods' pervy text messages appearing on the front page of USA Today. They hate that.
What's more, the Defense Department itself has admitted it will be weeks if not months before it can sort through all the data and figure out what it might mean, if anything. You think the Taliban has this kind of time? The brainpower? We have cool iPads, MIT geniuses and supercomputers the size of France. They have a single, filthy 2001 Compaq Presario and some string. I mean, please.
But never mind that now. Because there is a far larger truth I have uncovered in the roughly 3,000 hours I recently did not spend poring over the WikiLeaks documents, and it bears being writ large, screamed aloud, and then moaned softly in the night, in pain, over and over again, for all eternity.
It is this: Despite all our dazzling ultramodern technology, despite all those infrared goggles and laser-guided everything, despite 1,000 advancements in weaponry and body armor, stratagems and 3D mapping, war remains the most despicable, thoroughly miserable human endeavor mankind has yet invented, or will ever invent in this or any lifetime, and that includes "Jersey Shore," Microsoft Windows and Mel Gibson.
Let these 92,000 documents eliminate all doubt: war is our basest, most vile creation. Has been for 10,000 years. Always will be. It's sort of reassuring, actually. Reliable. Hey, no matter how ugly it all gets, no matter if you kill your spouse, get hit by a bus, or win the lottery, at least we'll always have the horrors of war, unchanged throughout time and galaxy. Nice.
You don't have to believe me. You can read it for yourself, right there on the WikiLeaks site. Go ahead, click on through, as I did,*² page after page, tale after tale, massacre after casualty after bloodshed after car bomb after random explosion. It's like the world's most brutally mundane neighborhood police blotter. It goes on for days, the same tone, in the same way, snippet after snippet, scene after scene, horror after horror. It's like reaching into a giant basket of razor wire and shards of glass, trying to find the bottom that doesn't exist.
*²(Completely true)
Did you see "The Hurt Locker", the stunning war movie that won the Oscar for being so gritty and realistic and tension filled? That movie is like f*cking "Gone with the Wind" compared to what you read in these documents, compared to the real thing. Do you know why? Because that movie was compact, tense, economical, filmed with terse dialogue and specific scenes designed to impart hard emotions. It was also over in about two hours.
Whereas, the real thing is, well, nothing but endlessly ugly, sad, tedious, nauseating, deadening, exhausting, like peeling off a scab that never ends, like rubbing a grain of sand into your eye that only gets deeper and more painful, like driving down the world's longest desert highway stretching off far into the distance, potholed with bombs and dead bodies, war crimes and shrapnel, oil slicks and weapons contracts, all oversprinkled with a trillion American dollars raining down like fine green confetti.
War is hell. Have you heard that before? Of course you have. Do you know what it means? From what I can tell from the WikiLeaks scandal, here is what it does not mean: It does not mean war is some sort of rugged Herculean manly uberpatriotic exercise in glorious freedom, justice, truth, that just might also, whoops, get a little bloody. It does not quite mean a noble force for good and democracy. It might have meant that once, long ago, for a shining moment, maybe, on the back of a coin somewhere. It hasn't meant anything near that for 1,000 years. Capitalism saw to that.
It's sort of like evil. We love to imagine evil to be this towering, fanged menace, this spectacular fiend, a creepy and gruesome beast borne of a thousand horror movies. The truth is at once far less interesting, and yet far more terrifying. Because evil is more like Dick Cheney's tiny sneer, the religious nutball's weakest synapse, the wheezing death of the soul.
War is similar. It is no grand, melodramatic spectacle, no sepia-toned Spielberg movie narrated by Tom Hanks, no epic "Lord of the Rings" battle royale between ogres and kings. It's just page after page, bomb after bomb, report after report, endlessly and forever, numbing to the core, until history chokes it all down with a dry heave and an exhausted sigh.
I am certainly no expert. I do not know what darker secrets these Wikileak pages might contain. But it takes no genius whatsoever to scan this data and understand that modern battles like we've waged in Afghanistan and Iraq often take lifetimes to unravel. The truth is, we will all be dead before we know the full costs of these wars. A generation or two will have to pass before we can get them in scale and perspective, and even then, like so many before them, they still won't make any goddamn sense.
Then again, they never do. How very comforting.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 6, 2010 20:16:29 GMT 12
From SFGate.comGay marriage makes the world shrugBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, August 06, 2010Argentina, at last check, is not yet writhing in flames. Canada, as far as I can see from my window, is still right up there, stoic and mild, smelling of pine trees and bitumen, watching lots of hockey, shooting guns, being Canadian. The Netherlands? Why, still crisp and clean, efficiently blonde as ever. It's shocking, really.
After all, you'd think they'd be downright miserable. You'd think they'd be in country-wide group therapy, hating and hurling and spitting, maybe a few riots, some stabbings, panic in the streets, the very fabric of their various shell-shocked societies unraveling like Mel Gibson at a bat mitzvah.
In fact, it would appear that millions of people across a surprisingly large number of dashing, industrious countries all over the world — including Belgium, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and even adorable little Iceland — are still not yet imploding, not yet suffering the furious wrath of God, not yet dying in unchecked anguish before our very eyes.
What to make of it? After all, in each and every one of these sinful nations, gay people have been happily and legally getting married (and, presumably, divorced, remarried and tossed about on the same socio-emotional rollercoaster as their straight brethren) every single day, for months and years and — in the case of the Netherlands — nearly a decade now.
What the hell is wrong with them? Didn't they get the newsletter? Don't they know how very wrong, sinful, sick and perverted they all so obviously are? Haven't they heard the hoarse wails of the terrified Mormon elders, the raspy screams of the obsolete Vatican, the tightened bowels of confused fundamentalists of nearly every major religion worldwide, all of them absolutely positive that allowing certain kinds of consenting adults who love each other to get married will spell the end of civilization, families, innocence, the military, God's bitter and judgmental love as we know it? Someone should send them a pamphlet.
Meanwhile, back here in the land of fear and rainbow flags and rivers of fundamentalist misinformation flowing like Coors Light at a NASCAR rally, we still can't seem to figure anything out. The stillborn bastard troll known as Prop 8 has finally been overturned by a fine federal judge, deemed unconstitutional by a mile, not to mention unconscionable, unrealistic, not a little bit hateful, and just plain dumb.
No matter. It has, of course, already been appealed by tiny groups of angry people who really hate other groups of people, and will be contested and argued over, debated and slapfighted for months on its way to the wonky Ninth Court of Appeals, all possibly culminating in a grand and furious finale as the case finally stumbles into the conservative, uptight U.S. Supreme Court by 2012 or so, just in time to induce/commemorate the apocalypse. Perfect.
And then what? Where will we be by then? Or, more importantly, will any of it matter? I'm not so sure anymore.
Let's ask it this way: If the high court doth indeed snicker, snarl and follow the Scalia/Alito roadmap to conservative backassedness and overturns Judge Walker's powerful, intensely worded ruling, or even if some miracle of fairness and progress occurs and Prop 8 is ruled to be exactly as ugly as ignorant as anyone with an open heart knows it to be, well, will the world even blink? Shrug? Will we all die and be reborn in a laughing, sweating heap of what the hell were we thinking?
Or will America be like the very last virgin Catholic schoolgirl, the drunken snail to crawl across the finish line, long forgotten and nicely obsolete, 10 years late and an ideology short, with the rest of the world sighing and smiling and saying "Geez, what the hell took you so long?"
This is what we are learning: The U.S. matters less and less in the grand public debate, the global shift, the Great Understanding. In the past few decades we've seen nation after nation fly right by us in many a happy category, from humanitarianism to education, health care to drugs, sexuality to the arts, prison systems to pollution, transportation to spiritual awareness. What a sad, strange trip it's been.
Perhaps you recall that impossible, rose-colored time when all eyes were on America, when we largely set the (wobbly, inconsistent, but still somehow noble) standard for the world's cultures, governments, arts? How we once represented, at least on paper, at least in our own adorably egomaniacal minds, a kind of delirious, experimental, rough-hewn freedom?
No longer. Our educational system, once the best in the world not 25 years ago, now ranks near the bottom. Our health care system, despite Obama's brutally fought-for reforms, has a long way to go to be anywhere near efficient and beneficial. Our military is insanely bloated, absurdly out of scale for our actual needs, and the single biggest drain on the U.S. economy, by far.
What's more, our own U.S. Congress is more fractured and acidic than at any time in recent history; it can barely move, breath, speak, make a decision without members' clawing each others' eyes out. The divisions are deep and wide, the scar of Bush disgustingly permanent. In short, we ain't what we once were.
That's the bad news. The good news is, the world doesn't really need us anymore. Our melodramas and majestic decisions, our nasty wars and our religious pulings do not make the world start, shake the universe, terrify all comers, reshape global consciousness on a dime. Ain't it grand?
Do not misunderstand. Should gay marriage finally be released from its cage of ignorance and fear here in America, the rush of positive energy and emotion that will explode all over the land of milk and money will be like few other love bombs in recent memory. It will indicate no less than a grand upheaval, the last, great civil right finally realized. It will not merely be the end of an ignorant and outdated law, nor merely a proper slapdown to a silly, cult-like religion that can't deduce its way out of a coffee mug. It will be no less than a new way of understanding ourselves, our genders, our culture.
But at the same time, much of the civilized world will already have passed us by, long ago. Gay rights is and will be a foregone conclusion in a dozen nations, a widely accepted, almost yawningly obvious non-issue. America's really big deal really won't be such a big deal after all. Which means that maybe, just maybe, we can finally get over ourselves, and move the hell on.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 18, 2010 23:18:46 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThank God global warming is a hoaxBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 18, 2010I mean, right? You know? Because gosh Jesus in angry apocalyptic heaven, wouldn't it be just terrible if it were all true?
Wouldn't it be horrible if all this stunning, insanely mounting, irrefutable evidence — death, floods, fires, heat waves, the worst this and the most violent that in 1,000 years — were some sort of surefire, cumulative sign that we have, if not directly caused, then wildly accelerated and amplified the imminent implosion of this planet?
But we didn't! And we haven't! And we aren't! I mean, whew.
I am delighted to remember that hardcore science has lied, misguided, misnomered and whatever else weird science does to confuse the world about the real impact humanity has had on global ecosystems. All those thousands of highly trained scientists educated at the finest universities, learning the most difficult and fraught information of our age, all in universal agreement that humankind's actions directly affect climate change, and they are all totally full of it because they are clearly in cahoots with Nazi Liberal Jesus, the solar panel manufacturers and the hippies who want me to compost my KFC Double Down wrapper.
I am delighted to be reassured by the fringe right wing that the piles of dead bodies, millions of lost homes, and even the very sun itself are part of a vast conspiracy, a plot to form an evil one-world government, a lefty liberal charade even in places that don't understand or care what the hell a liberal is. See? Do you understand how powerful the lie? Amazing.
Because otherwise, wow, what sort of hell is this? Pakistan, Russia, China, Greenland, Niger and on and on it goes. Unprecedented heat waves, scorched crops, giant icebergs, savage droughts, dire emergencies, thousands dead here and 10,000 more over there and nothing like these events in the history of the world, ever.
Even the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, is in on it, coming back from Pakistan stunned and shaken by the epic flooding he witnessed there. "The magnitude of the problem; the world has never seen such a disaster. It's much beyond anybody's imagination," he said, putting out the urgent call for more international aid. I mean, sure global warming is happening — even some of the more ignorant climate change deniers have had to reverse course on that — but humanity had nothing to do with it, OK? We don't need to change our behavior one iota. If God wants another Ice Age or whatever, who are we to argue?
Heathen book-learners and their ridiculous studies, that's who! Scientists are saying that all these severe weather patterns fit in exactly with what they've been predicting all along. Not only that, but they say it's increasingly likely that we've waited too long to change our behaviors, cut emissions, reduce consumption and other such liberal gibberish, and now it might be too late to do anything about it. Increasingly extreme, violent weather will now be the norm, and the devastation, disease and death will only increase.
Good news! If I blink a few times while clicking the mouse, it all goes away. Hey look, Lindsay Lohan's mom is all up in it! Snooki is so wasted! All is as it should be. Thank you, Interweb.
But dammit, their godless eco-agenda just won't stop. 2010, they say, is not being very nice, is setting all sorts of unpleasant records. Already, the most national extreme heat records in a single year (17). Already, the hottest half-year on record in planetary history. Already, the five warmest months in tropical Atlantic history, possibly resulting in more hurricanes. Already, millions of people sensing, deep down, that Something Is Very Wrong Indeed. Good thing their calmly intuitive souls are full of crap.
I mean, please. Isn't it like this every year? Always with the floods and fires. Always with the hurricanes, earthquakes and numbing body counts. Is this year, this decade really that different? I'm sorry, I can't hear you, I just turned up this Glenn Beck podcast. Here is your big lesson: Do not listen to people who actually know things. Only listen to people who react, negatively and whiningly, to people who actually know things. It's the American way.
Have you seen the photos from the Gulf of Mexico, all shiny and clear thanks to toxic chemical dispersants, the miracle of ocean currents and armies of PR people who smell like hate? What happened to all the oil? It's all gone, even though it's really not! Absorbed into the planetary bloodstream like magic! Even the president is there, splashing around in waters that, not a month ago, had hundreds of million of gallons of crude oil and chemicals floating in it.
Just more proof that God's favorite creatures can cause no lasting harm. We're innocent as pie. And guns. And Corexit 9500. I'm dumping some used motor oil into this city sewer right now, in celebration.
I just read the flooding in Pakistan has already caused more devastation than the 2004 tsunami in Asia, worse than the Haiti earthquake. One quarter of the country is underwater. They say Pakistan also just broke a record for the single highest temperature ever recorded on the Asian continent, at 128 degrees (16 other nations also met or broke heat records this year, too). That record was set in a city. Where people live. But not for very much longer, because they do not have giant air conditioners and pallets of Fiji water from Costco like we do, so they probably won't survive.
Yes, it's tragic. It's unprecedented. It's never happened like this before. Heck, even here in the eco-terrorist homeland of San Francisco, they say the change in ocean temperatures will soon mean Fog City will be entirely fog bound, edge to edge, nearly year round. But I repeat: It's not our fault. Seven billion rapacious, industrialized bipeds have the impact of a feather. All this destruction and death? It's just God's will — except for those places that don't believe in a Christian God. Serves them right, doesn't it?
By the way, there's an obvious solution to many of these horrors — to the Russian heat waves, the violent droughts in Niger, the dead bodies floating in Pakistan, the floods in China: Do not go there. Do not go to these terrible, hot, messy places. It's so easy!
I mean, so what if giant icebergs four times the size of Manhattan are suddenly breaking off in Greenland? That's happening way, way up there. I'm overconsuming energy and blocking out inconvenient truths way, way down here. There is no cause/effect, no connection whatsoever, never mind that dark, nagging sense of self-wrought doom, deep in my bones. I know that's just a liberal lie, an implant, completely futile — just like those failed climate talks in Copenhagen, and the soon-to-be-failed ones coming up shortly in Mexico. I mean, whew.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 26, 2010 17:58:37 GMT 12
From SFGate.comAmerica out of Iraq now! Oh wait!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 25, 2010Calmly, quietly, with little fanfare or outsized media attention, after more than seven years and thousands of soldiers dead, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted in one of the ugliest and most unnecessary military operations in all of American history, the U.S. has officially ended its combat presence in Iraq.
Did you hear? Did you see the blazing headlines, the parades, the TV crews lining up in a rabid media frenzy on the White House lawn? Did you attend a rally, a march, a flag-wavin' gun-tootin' victory party, or perhaps gather round the TV at the local saloon, waving a tiny American flag and cheering wildly?
Maybe you saw the president himself hop into a Navy helicopter and land on the deck of that aircraft carrier, dressed up like a little GI Joe action figure, crowing on about the God-sanctioned super-awesomeness of mighty America and its super-awesome, kill-em-all military greatness, a huge Mission Accomplished banner fluttering behind him?
Wait, of course you didn't. Because none of that happened this time. I mean, thank God.
Do you know how I found out about the current status of the long-promised U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq — which, during the last election, was one of the largest and most implausible assurances made by then-candidate Obama, and one that few military experts or even the Pentagon thought possible, given how deeply and violently BushCo had entrenched us in that intractable and impossible war of ultraviolent nothingness?
I got an email. From President Obama. It was a calmly worded, non-blaring, non-jingoistic, adults-only note to American citizens, declaring how the U.S. has now withdrawn more than 90,000 American troops from Iraq, nearly two-thirds of the entire force, all right on schedule, a truly massive and staggering operation, and that our combat mission there is officially over.
And this time, it's actually true.
It's sort of stunning, in both scope and meaning. It's sort of historic, in sheer accomplishment for a president in office less than two years, considering the scale of the epic war machine he faced down when he took the job. It's also sort of humbling and tragic, considering the needless loss of life, the bleak history now permanently tattooed, the deep scars on our national soul.
The president's note was careful to add that there's still a long way to go, that 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for at least another year or so in an advise and assist role, to continue to train Iraqi security forces and keep things stable because, well, you don't invade a country for nearly eight years, destroy its government, wipe out its feeble infrastructure, spend hundreds of millions setting up massive personnel operations all over the country, and then pull everything out in a month.
Wait, I was wrong; I did, in fact, see some media attention, in the form of one plain, declarative headline, buried among the pop culture effluvia and the shrill inanity surrounding a Muslim community center in New York: US Withdraws Military From Iraq, said the headline. It was from the Guardian. Thanks, England.
I've since seen a handful of stories trickle in from the New York Times and assorted outlets, all similarly low-key and beneath the fold, mostly about the mixed nature of the withdrawal, the eternal volatility of the region, the fact that there's simply no way to declare victory in a war that wasn't really a war to begin with. Then again, try telling that to the tens of thousands of soldiers on their way home. Their joy and relief are, I imagine, incalculable.
But it all reveals a strange problem for Obama & Co: How do you dare celebrate the end of such a horrific operation, while not claiming any sort of glorious, patriotic triumph? How do you find closure to a bloody occupation that leveraged 9/11 as its bogus pretext, that was built on a lie to begin with, and that, after all that suffering and loss, means almost nothing? It's finally over, mostly, thank God, and we didn't win a thing, has a lousy ring to it.
What's more, these days, it's almost always more bombastically newsworthy to start a war than end one. Spectacular airstrikes, nighttime gunfire, burning bodies by the side of the road? Bring it on. Blood and death and Christian-sanctioned Armageddon always make for better copy than the news that tens of thousands of exhausted soldiers are finally coming home to get treatment for their PTSD.
It's is also a problem because, well, Americans don't do subtlety. We don't do vague endings, nor can we abide the slightest confusion as to who's the good guy and who's the bad. As evidenced by the millions of lugnut imbeciles who actually believe the president is a Muslim, even skull-crushingly obvious truths don't make it through very easily.
Iraq's new leadership is unruly? The region will be unstable for decades? We didn't actually get all their oil? Screw that. We only want to hear that good prevailed, evil lost, everybody gets a free Dodge Charger and some ice cream. Yay America!
This is, by the way, Obama's short-term curse, as well as his greatest long-term legacy. That is, the president suffers from the curse of reasonable, tempered reactions, the need to reign in ridiculous expectations, to make sure everyone knows nothing is as clear or easy as we'd like. It's largely an intellectual response, composed and thoughtful, full of deeper understanding of time and context. How very weird.
Have you noticed? Unlike Bush's puerile, monochromatic worldview, Obama regularly fails to indulge the nation's fetish for polarizing extremes, for jingoistic hyperbole. Oh, he touts many of his administration's achievements to be sure, but you get the feeling he'd rather not. As a reluctant war president, his is a somber patriotism. But I fully believe the payoff will be far richer. We just have to wait, you know, about 10 or 20 years to fully reap the benefits.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan still rages. Meanwhile, the economy sputters and stalls, rescued from its death spiral but a long way from healthy. Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico reeks of oil. Meanwhile, Tea Party clowns and Glenn Beck charlatans flick their spittle and weep over how they now have easier access to health care. Meanwhile, the churn continues.
But oh, it's a sad day in America when the news that 90,000 troops have returned home from an ungodly war takes a backseat to... whatnow? Racist radio hosts and poorly situated mosques? It's a sad day when so few seem to recognize how the liberal Nazi commie Muslim president is actually far, far more supportive of our troops than the right-wing dipstick monkey who callously sent them off to a futile war in the first place. Obama brought them home. What finer headline could you ask for?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 2, 2010 23:07:37 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHow to regret ever having childrenBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 01, 2010It was a time, wasn't it? Back when you could only walk about 10 feet with a telephone, cars the size of Buicks got five miles to the gallon and the sun itself wasn't yet planning the certain doom of the entire planet?
Those days, when you were a kid, troublemaking meant sneaking out of the house to chug a beer, listen to Elvis, smooch at Makeout Point, knock up the babysitter, heckle some farm animals, maybe grope some thigh in the moonlight and then marry at 19, pop out a brood, settle the hell down and wait, eversopatiently, to die. Ah, simpler times.
Nowadays, with acid dripping from every headline and dread in every chestbone, it's like you can't swing a dead AT&T drop spot without reading about how troublemaking kids these days are using modern technology to sneak out and score crack, inject heroin into their eyeballs, tattoo their genitalia, vomit all over every episode of their own reality TV show, gang-rape farm animals and hack off each others' limbs with chainsaws like in that movie.
You think I'm lying? I am totally not lying. It's all happening. I saw a pie chart in USA Today. I read a brow-furrowed curmudgeon in the Wall Street Journal. I saw a Special Report on Fox News, anchored by scary blonde fembots with no discernable intellectual activity who fantasize about moving to Abu Dubai with Carrie Bradshaw all while never fully knowing the business end of a Hitachi. So sad.
And I also, with a groan and a shot of whisky to numb the savage karmic pain, just read this ridiculous report on CNN, all about the terrifying text-messaging gibberish America's young heathens have developed so they may communicate in pervert code about, like, where to score industrial quantities of Ketamine, how to murder the neighbors with fire axes and where to get a good deal on Justin Beiber tickets — all without their darn-blasted parents trying to stifle the blood-drenched, teenybopper fun.
Indeed, if the latest shocking reports are to be believed — and they almost never are — there's a not-so-new subculture afoot and flourishing, all about "l33t sp33k" and dirty text speak, those lesser-known but far more deadly varieties of innocent ol' text messaging popular among the meth n' puberty set. Parents are, in a word, petrified. They are, in three more, ridiculously, dangerously misled.
Much of the parental fear of what kids are up to online and on their cell phones appears to be spinning off a rash of books with titles like "More Shrill Alarmist BS Data Specifically Designed to Drive Paranoid and Increasingly Alcoholic Parents Totally F*cking Insane Because Then They Will Buy This Book While Their Kids Go To Therapy or Perhaps Prison By Age 15."
Wait, no, that's not quite right. One of the books is actually called "What in the World Are Your Kids Doing Online?" and also "How to Protect Your Children on the Internet" and so on, and they're all about, well, just that: the huge array of messages, links, porn sites and Catholic priest come-ons your innocent spawn are encountering RIGHT THIS SECOND while you are reading this column and sipping your absinthe and not paying attention to their every move, click, breath, twitch, secret plan to mutilate the cat with a lawnmower. Did you hear that sound? Little Bethany just snuck out again to have sex with her meth dealer. Dammit!
To be fair, most of the books appear fairly mild overall, downplaying the predation and porn while up-playing the open communication, the honesty, the notion that it's probably not as bad nor as dire out there in Netland as the panicky media makes it out to be.
Media like, well, CNN.com, whose article was titled "Parents, do you know what these texts mean?" and went on to list all sorts of not-very-clever messages that, when translated by bemused Gen-Xers and the Idaho state government, means the teens who wrote them were drunk, hung over, missing a tooth, or about to do something very weird to their BFF with a garden hose and some Crisco that they saw on chatroulette.com whilst snorting giant lines of dried beetle dung. I am not exaggerating. Well, maybe a little.
Can you blame me? The overall implication is, of course, completely absurd, the idea that millions of kids are so dangerously out of control with this new, subversive text gizmongery that it's all a paranoid parent can do to scour their kids' Facebook page, monitor their cell usage, buy a GPS kid-tracking app and shakily regret ever giving birth in the first place.
Let us not dismiss out of hand. Certainly, idiocy abounds. Many lower-caste kids from Jersey to Philly to Idaho — always, always poor, white-trashed Idaho — are indeed doing horrible things to what's left of their brains with blue cleaning fluids and mysterious powdered substances derived from materials stolen from the auto-parts store.
What's more, certainly places like the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Partnership for a Drug-Free America, et al do heartbreaking, difficult work, and they are occasionally right to ring the alarm about what a large handful of wildly undereducated youth are doing in this fine and brain-scrambled nation.
Then again, asking these joints their opinion of youth behavior is like asking Tiger Woods his opinion on dating. Your answers might have a certain, you know, tang, a slight bias, intermixed with a rather large BS factor. After all, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a Snooki, everything looks like imminent rehab.
Which leads to another fine conundrum for wary parents. The tighter you reign kids in, the more you mistrust and monitor, the more they pull away, find ways to subvert and hide and break the rules. It's the constant struggle, the eternal push-pull, the awkward dialogue of the generations. There is no single way through. There is no one solution. I mean, thank God. How boring would that be?
Perhaps there is something of reassurance to be found herein. Perhaps we can pull back a bit wider, see the larger picture, sit comfortably uncomfortable in our eternal knowing that the gulf between generations, between parent and child is as wide and weird, as confusing and infuriating as it perhaps ever was, that kids have been inventing juvenile modes of communication to confound and perplex their elders since the dawn of time and hormones.
This is, after all, how they find identity, delineate personality — by messing with the lexicon and pushing against what came before. You know, just like you did to your parents. Remember those days? Remember that one night? That thing with the donkey and the gin and howling at the moon in ubbi dubbi? It was a time, wasn't it?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 9, 2010 0:50:39 GMT 12
From SFGate.comBurn a Bible, save a kittenBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 08, 2010Way out there on the wicked, broken fringes of society, those ugly and savage edges that always seem to be moving ever closer to the mainstream and appear more dangerous to the collective soul than ever, there live some masterful miscreants of the human drama, bizarre creatures so moldy and low they can't but help you see the world anew.
You can, for example, happily read about the latest wanderings of Fred Phelps' adorable "God Hates Fags" cluster of manure clumps from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, right now picketing everything from military funerals to high school musicals, Laramie Project lectures to various modest Christian churches that dare to promote tolerance and love. Phelps and his little bucket 'o bile are widely considered the finest freakshow in all of Nutball Godsville.
Then again, competition abounds. Perhaps you've read about that other amoral chunk of anti-spiritual razor wire named Terry Jones, a leathery little Florida pastor with his tiny flock of 50 whack-nut imbeciles who've decided to go forth with their T-shirt-ready "Burn a Quran" day on September 11th? Talk about your genius marketing. I predict a new reality show.
Jones' charmingly repulsive event has not only outraged the easily outraged fundamentalist fringes of Afghanistan (really, it doesn't take much) but also a very unhappy American general who thinks Jones' flagrant idiocy could endanger the lives of American soldiers. Not bad for a shriveled, pea-sized soul from Florida, eh Terry? Jesus would be so proud.
Don't stop just yet. What about that (now-ex) Tea Party slug named Tim Ravndal, suddenly infamous for posting a sweet little joke on Facebook about lynching gay people to death — a thoughtful reference to Matthew Shepherd — because apparently Ravndal's God-given right to be a tiny-brained macho cockroach from Montana are threatened by the fact that some people are far more secure in their sexuality than he will ever be? Oh, Tea Party, will your nefarious gifts never cease?
On it devolves. How low do you want to go? Nazi skinheads? Black Tea Party inverto-racists? The 57 percent of Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim? Feverish Glenn Beck sycophants loading up the pickup truck with shotguns and Coors Light, on their way to take out an abortion clinic or maybe a Gay Pride parade, but who take the wrong exit and/or drive into a wall because they can't read the GPS?
Comedic horrors thrive, moronism seems to inbreed and fester, and most of it manifests under the banner of a mutant Christian God, or extreme conservatism, or some form of fundamentalist moral outrage that can't exactly be explained but which often makes its most devout adherents appear to be nothing more than frenetic fleas sucking blood from the Great Hound of life. The beast merely scratches and sighs, and keeps right on gnawing the bone of eternity.
Perhaps you stop to ponder, as I occasionally do, the curious fact that you never read about, say, a die-hard Richard Dawkins fanatic going off hinge and orchestrating a marvelous "Burn A Bible, Save A Kitten" protest event. Or perhaps a Unitarian Church minister commanding her flock to load up their Priuses with Ecstasy and rum to go spike the punch at the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing-along. Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't that make a powerful counter-statement? Damn right it would.
Where is the liberal outrage? Where are the extreme acts of radical love? Where is the crazed "Daily Show" fan secretly planning to dump 10,000 gallons of Astroglide on Fox News HQ because Jon Stewart appeared in a pot-induced fever dream and ordered them to?
I still await the hippie liberal apocalypse. I still await my fellow progressives gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in calmly organized outrage, armed with Sigg bottles full of Cabernet and copies of the New Yorker, demanding free iPads for the poor and more compound sentences on CNN. Hell, I just came back from that infamous neo-pagan antichrist orgy known as Burning Man, and all I got was this lousy glow stick.
Oh, the hardcore lefty fringe has its violent cretins, to be sure, natty Earth Firsters to slavering PETA blood hurlers, eco-terrorists and freako off-grid cults, but those groups never claim to be a vital part of the Democratic Party. Liberalism does not depend on terrible education rates to survive.
The GOP, on the other hand, sucks hard from the teat of ignorant extremism, splashes gleefully in the shallow mud puddles of Sarah Palin's battered grammar, draws much of its power from the worst the human spectacle has to offer. Simply put, the modern Republican Party would not exist without its army of high school dropouts drunk on Rush Limbaugh and sexual dread. It's not difficult to imagine "Burn a Quran Day" becoming a new Texas state holiday.
What to make of it? After all, the world has always been speckled with rabid clowns, an endless parade of spittle-flecked sociopaths that make us shudder and sigh, many with "Reverend" before their names or "Show" just after it. American culture is rife with worldviews so narrow and poorly educated, you can be quickly convinced we are but an inch from permanent insanity.
Or maybe not. I prefer to think of these fine denizens of dumb as the darker, skankier parts of our individual consciousness, the red flags of the soul. Should we not be grateful they exist? That they are here to remind us to be ever vigilant and wary? Hell yes we should.
After all, the Fred Phelps, the Glenn Becks, the Terry Jones of the world are but our basest natures made manifest, the bleakest, most paranoid, lazily ignorant parts of each and every one of us. Deny it at your peril. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion." He should know.
These wretched little demons, they are eternal. They have always been here. And they exist to deliver but one message: If you're not conscious, if you don't pay attention, if you don't fill your cup to brimming every single day with laughter and paradox, love and possibility, if you don't deeply appreciate the madhouse irony of this completely gorgeous, impossibly ruthless human experiment, well, they will but fester like a sore on your big toe, and you'll no longer be able to dance.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 15, 2010 21:49:55 GMT 12
From SFGate.comDamn you Muslims, get off my lawnBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 15, 2010This much we know: America needs its demons. We need our enemies, our menacing and dark-eyed nemesis, that foreign and terrifying thing we do not understand and against which we must rally and wail, push and pule, fight and destroy.
This is, as the legend goes, how we define ourselves, how we give our tribe and its happily flawed capitalist/Christian system meaning, purpose and a reason to kill anyone who dares to disagree. Too young as a country to know ourselves at any depth, too mal-educated to have any real and lasting confidence, we just lash and burn, too afraid to shut up and hear the quiet roar of our own grand irrelevance. Same as it ever was? Like you even have to ask.
Communists. Arabs. The Japanese. Blacks. Native Americans. Hippies. Gays. "Gooks". Immigrants. Chinamen. The poor. Women. Teenagers. Vegans. Science. What's the problem with this nation? What's really eating at our soul and threatening our honest love of an angry God, apple pie and giant homoerotic firearms? It ain't us. It's them. They're trying to mess with our heads, steal our freedom, impregnate our virgins, poison the water supply. Damn them to hell, and where's my shotgun?
It's in this fine American tradition that we devolve yet another notch, as we can't help but notice, on this recently passed anniversary of 9/11, yet another wretched legacy of the Dark Days of Bush, another scar, another sickness, another sociocultural STD left to us during our nation's bleakest period in modern history, a hateful little nodule of moral cancer known as rampant anti-Muslim sentiment.
Have you heard? It's the latest thing, the easiest target. Islam is now the most convenient demon available given the notable absence of all those tangible demons of yore. As evidenced by the New York furor over a proposed Islamic center to be built near Ground Zero, the tiny, rabid sects of radical fundamentalists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks are just not good enough anymore. There simply aren't enough of them, and they live way over there, in caves, in mystery, in places we cannot spell. Plus, most of them are probably dead.
We need to expand. Why not believe the panicky media, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party dinkbuttons? Why not ignore all common sense and nuanced understanding, and instead broaden our hate to include an entire ancient religion, over a billion believers strong? That way, we'll never run out of evil. Hey, we're nothing if not resourceful. Most Republicans believe our own president is one of Them, despite how he's been a Christian his entire life. Neat!
See, in the new American mindset, all Muslims are secret Al Queda sympathizers. All lovers of Allah want America to burn, Christians to suffer and innocent white children to be stoned to death for dancing in public while eating a Happy Meal. All swarthy foreign types, even if they've lived here since birth, even if they are your nicest possible neighbor, even if they smile at you every day, actually believe violence is the truest way to heaven, where hordes of nubile virgins await and everyone can finally eat a ham sandwich. Hey, Muhammad said so, right there in the Koran! Someone should burn that damnable thing.
No matter what Obama says in his impassioned plea for empathy and tolerance, the very last thing America needs is subtle thinking, a deep understanding that we are, by definition and Constitution, a great melting pot of multiple religions and faiths, that in any given urban apartment multiplex you'll find not only multiple Muslims but also Jews, Catholics, atheists, Jainists, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, Wiccans, recovering Mormons, even silly Scientologists and their funny little hats. To hell with that. Far too confusing.
By the way, if you would like to pause and offer deep thanks to the source of this anti-Muslim rage, you may now bow in the direction not only of Bush, but of one Dick "Black Soul" Cheney and his flying monkeys led by Karl Rove, who planted the seed during the time of the Axis of Evil, all about fake WMD and the bogus demonization of Iraq, effortlessly manipulating the panicky media and turning America's deepest tragedy into a seething outpouring of mistrust not merely for a handful of extremist dirtballs, but for all members of one of the great religions of the world.
The sentiment has since grown in fits and farts and boozy burps, fanned by Rush Limbaugh's moron Dittoheads, Glenn Beck's gullible simpletons, and of course, the Tea Party, perhaps the first significant political movement entirely dependent on our failing educational system to survive. Truly, the Tea Party might just be the dumbest gaggle of humans ever to rally around a nonsensical, as-yet-unstated worldview no one can quite spell out. Because they have no clue what the hell it is.
But they do know one thing. They are against a general Islamic takeover of America, Wal-Mart and NASCAR. They do not want their wives forced to wear a burka. They do not want to have to walk all the way to Mecca. Where is that, like, in Peru or something?
And of course, they are dead-set against the construction of that Islamic community center three blocks away from Ground Zero, on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory, right next to skanky strip clubs and Subways and camera shops owned by, uh, Muslims and Jews and the Chinese. Because all Muslims are the same, is why. Sort of like you and I protesting, say, the construction of a Catholic church within a mile of an elementary school.
Did you know there was a Muslim prayer room inside Tower #2? Did you know many practicing Muslim-Americans died when the towers came down? It's OK. Neither did the Tea Party. Far too confusing.
Do not misunderstand: the Muslim faith, being enormous and multifaceted and therefore home to millions of beautiful, mild-mannered, humble practitioners as well as some of the most ridiculous, violent, hateful extremists in the known galaxy, is plenty deserving of scorn and derision. It is, in this way, no different than any dogmatic organized religion throughout time and history. Why let Mormons, Christians and the Catholic Church have all the fun?
Wait, did I say this enemy-invention thing was an American tradition? Far from it. Demonization of the Other as a means to boorish, violent nationalism is universal to nearly all cultures, all nations worldwide. We are, you can say, a planet of self-righteous, petulant tribes, claiming this or that strip of dirt, crying that God chose us as his most favorite, flinging feces at each other like deranged monkeys, signifying nothing. Ain't it grand?
Maybe in this greater truth, we can find a hint of reassurance. This too shall pass. The Islamic center will or won't be built, the media frenzy will die down, the Tea Party will self-flagellate itself through the mid-term elections, and suddenly no one will care about Muslims anymore because, well, we are an ADHD culture. We grow bored so easily. We gotta keep it fresh. We gotta feed the voracious 24-hour news cycle. No one can hold the title of Enemy No. 1 for very long. Praise Allah for that.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 24, 2010 20:47:29 GMT 12
From SFGate.comDesperate brides of the apocalypseBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 22, 2010Desperate brides! Tea Partiers! Christine O' Donnell! Don't let this happen to you. Too late?Way over here on the distant end of the human continuum, where the devil and the apocalypse copulate in a bed of blood, pathos and perky TV ratings, where everyone needs a hug and a shot of whisky to numb the savage karmic pain of merely being alive, we have a new reality show called, apparently, "Bridalplasty."
Can you guess? It's where brides-to-be compete in "wedding-themed" challenges, and the winner gets — you guessed it — extensive plastic surgery to, presumably, make her look tolerable on her Very Special Day™ and less like a walking slab of abject sadness willing to humiliate herself, her family and her fiancé on national television at the expense of her lost and bewildered soul. Coming soon to E! And no, I am not making this up.
I rarely turn on my TV anymore, and when I do I'm always equally stunned and impressed by the new and flagrantly repellant slew of reality shows on the air. They seem to emerge like bipolar trolls, like bewildered phantasms, little whack-a-mole cancers that pop up only to be beaten down again by their own insidious self-flagellating idiocy. Delightful!
But if there's one overarching theme, one denominator common to all shows across the slushpile of televised reality, from "Real Housewives" to "Jersey Shore", "Hell's Kitchen" to, uh, "Teen Mom", it's this: Extremism rules. The further out an idea goes, the weirder and more disturbing, death-defying, humiliating, repulsive, angry, trashy, loud, confrontational, shameful, shrill or depressing, the better the odds you'll see a show about it. "Bridalplasty" is par for a very, very bizarre cultural course that started somewhere back on MTV's first drunken "Real World" and will end somewhere humid and pustulous, where no light escapes.
But this is the fascinating thing: It ain't just TV. It ain't just pop culture. It never really is.
Have you noticed? The amazing parallels? The sameness of extremism and pain across the national sweep? The need to push the very edges of life and experience, belief and idiocy, just to make an impact, to be heard, just to feel that you're still alive? Verily, it's everywhere.
Look here. The GOP, once a relatively sane and stable political platform, with solid — if wildly uptight — principles, now wallowing in the shallow end of the moral and intellectual pool for its basic survival.
The Republican Party is now, by its own design, wholly dependent upon extremist nutcases like Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et al, for meaning and purpose. The Democrats may be many things — mushy, whiny, infuriatingly unable to articulate a cohesive message — but at least they aren't beholden to the mental detritus of the culture, people with more barely hidden psychoemotional disorders than shoes.
People like, well, cutesy little Republican Christine O'Donnell, who just won an election in Delaware. The amazing thing about O'Donnell? She's markedly more ridiculous than Sarah "Queen of Duh" Palin, by at least a factor of three, a nutball wrapped in an anti-masturbation kookpocket with the brainpower of a rusty pink electric razor.
O'Donnell lives at the extreme end of silly cultural belief set populated by giggles, quick blinking and oddly shaped monsters — right along with fellow wackos like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Michele Bachmann — lots of incoherent blather about orgy rooms, dirty dancing and God as a scary little doll standing in the corner, barking evil judgments as you stroke your naughty bits in the night.
But O'Donnell herself is just a symbol, just another hood ornament on the goofy monster truck known as the Tea Party, easily the silliest gaggle of white, undereducated, terrified middle-aged males to call themselves a political movement. Even moderate Republicans are taken aback by how low their own party has stooped, how much the Tea Party is molesting their once-moderate core. It's the new political imperative: Go radical, or go home.
Enough about politics. What are you eating? What's in your body? Recall, won't you, the KFC Double Down sandwich, perhaps the most repellant hunk of inedible chyme ever invented by a major food corporation. It's extreme garbage, an astonishing example of a major corporation shamelessly tapping into the zeitgeist and making millions off of the thisiswhyyourefat.com obsession with gross-out food porn. What a thing.
Don't be snickering, vegans. Flipside is the nonsensical raw food movement, where hyperskinny obsessives spend all day furiously disproving the evolution of the human stomach by chopping nuts and making paste out of beets and claiming their extreme diet gives them tons of energy, all of which goes toward making their 24th giant dinner salad of the day so they don't shrivel and die in the next five minutes for lack of protein. Fun!
What else you got? Religion? Facial tattoos? Facebook oversharing? Extreme sports? Extreme weather? Extreme body modification? Porn? Oh, woe is porn. To my highly trained, porn-adoring eye, this fine, lowbrow art form has devolved badly, from once genuinely sexy raunch into all-out extreme, gross-out torment, spitting and gaping and brutally gynecological horror shows. So very sad. Well, most of it.
From the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the ridiculous, it's the same pattern. I just saw an ad for Pringles Extreme, featuring a slouchy little Generation Tweet denizen holding a nuclear orange food-like item as fire and smoke swirled all around him, as if by taking a bite he ignited a holocaust. Wow. Extreme molded potato-like crisps. Dear Pringles: Shut up.
Shall we blame the Internet? Shall we talk about the modern requirement for more wild melodrama and screaming headlines to stay awake, our ADHD culture, iPhones and hyperlinks and the death of anything that requires more than four minutes of sustained attention? Sure, we can blame all that. But it almost doesn't matter.
What matters is how you parse it all. How do you want to measure? William Blake said, "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough," implying that all our extreme, ridiculous behavior might be a good thing, so long as we know how to pull back when we find those hurtful, inane, Tea Party- and "Bridalplasty"-esque outer limits — which of course, we almost never do.
The ancient Tantric masters, however, tell a different kind of story. They say it's all a bit of a sham, this extremism, a grand and ongoing tragedy, that such behavior is what happens when you get so far away from Self, from calm and self-reflective center, to the extent that only the most extreme experience and loudest screaming will keep you awake and interested in going on living.
That is to say, it's a sign of severe spiritual lack, of the most tormented, enraged and furiously demanding ego that only the most painful, excessive human experience — bizarre sex, excessive drugs, physical brutality, body torment, violent religious belief, rage, gross-out food, you name it — will make you feel, well, anything at all. The relationship is inverse, downward spiraling: The further away you are from true Self, the more extreme experience is required just to feel a pulse.
Of course, after awhile, nothing works at all, because nothing actually reaches the center, nothing serves the core. Everything is external, nothing internal. No matter how far out you try to go, you never actually get anywhere. Sound familiar? Someone had better tell those brides.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/22/notes092210.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Oct 16, 2010 22:15:18 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYou want the good news, or the bad news?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, October 06, 2010Which will it be? How do you want to spin it? Can you even tell the difference? Let us ponder...
Good news! No more hole in the sky. Thanks to the removal of numerous harmful chemicals from your planetary airspace by way of dramatic changes in international law — namely 1987's shockingly successful Montreal Protocol — the ozone layer is no longer being destroyed, and much of it is actually on track to repair itself and return to mid-1980 levels by mid-century.
Read: One of the largest and most daunting environmental issues of the age has been (largely) solved by international cooperation, public awareness, scientific and government pressure, and the undeniable fact that angry bearded Christian God still loves our species best of all despite, you know, everything. Upshot: It worked. We did it. We are perhaps not so evil after all.
Bad news: Nice try, biped. Sure, the Montreal Protocol eliminated ozone-eating CFCs and other related nasties, but we just replaced them with even more harmful HFCs and other greenhouse gasses, which contribute not to ozone depletion but straight-up to climate change itself. Upshot: Fixing the ozone actually made global warming worse. Lovely.
What's more, the Montreal Protocol might've been the last successful global initiative of its kind. Even the weak, molested Kyoto Protocol couldn't make it out of the goddamn garage, despite how the problems it attempted to address are potentially far more lethal. Truly, climate change makes fixing the ozone seem like patching a tire while the engine is on fire.
Good news! At least there's no longer any doubt that climate change exists, is happening, is deadly serious. Most nations are waking up fast to the harsh realities that Something Must Be Done, and Soon. China (!) is taking the lead — in a handful of ways, anyway — on making radical changes in environmental policy, tying green energy to job creation, surprising everyone with their speed and commitment and no-BS attitude. There is, finally, movement. And it's growing.
Bad news: But not here. Every single one of the tiny-brained Republicans on the mid-term election sheet this very year are full-blown, moron-grade climate change deniers, rejecting any notion that humble little man and his seven billion voracious frogspawn has had any real, lasting effect on planetary ecosystems.
Should these GOP lugnuts get into power, expect obscene amounts of push-back against any significant environmental legislation, much fellating of Big Energy and the intellectually constipated Tea Party, lots of new muttering about nuclear power, oil exploration and how the severity of the BP spill was way overblown by the "liberal media elite".
Good news! A semifamous, Rolex wearing, Gucci loving, Bentley driving, egomaniacal millionaire televangelist preacher from Atlanta who oversees an enormous flock of homophobic true believers at his New Life megachurch has now been sued by no fewer than four young men for luring them into kooky homosexual sex via bad jewelry, lavish gifts, promises of salvation and "long, sweaty, naked bear hugs that last four hours."
Hi, Pastor Eddie Long! Another day, another wildly hypocritical Baptist megapreacher who gets the human condition and his own megalomania so wrong, it makes God cringe. P.S.: You look so macho gay hunky in that tight, stretchy muscle shirt, pastor! No wonder the boys love you.
Bad news: It won't make any difference. Even if Long did the deeds, it will do absolutely zilch to make homosexuality more acceptable in the black community. The fact remains: Delightful scandals of this ilk — from George Rekers to Ted Haggard, Roy Ashburn to the entire Catholic Church — make zero difference WRT the general awakening of a more open-minded consciousness among the panicky and intolerant.
More specifically: Long's flock, far from softening or shifting their views, will likely do what all God-fearing homophobes have done in the same situation: weep, forgive Long his "sin," make apologies for his "mistake," and keep right on believing gays are an abomination (view YouTube clip below) — even if the gay person in question happens to be, you know, themselves.Good news! Support for Prop 19, which would legalize the cultivation, possession, taxation and general daily wanton sucking down of marijuana, has flipped right on over like a fine hash pancake, and now hovers around 52 percent positive, potentially set to become the first major shift of its kind in the nation, igniting debate, freaking out the squares, and potentially sending a great many teens into fits of murderous megafreakout madness.
Bad news: Everyone knows legal pot is a gateway drug to, say, more sluggish sperm, pastier skin and very poor hairstyle choices as millions of Californians will never go outside and will choose instead to sit on the couch all day eating Fruit Rollups and watching Oprah and The Cartoon Network and FunnyOrDie.com and not getting a goddamn job.
Also, Prop 19 might just be hugely flawed, and not at all what we need. Also. Gov. Schwarzenegger's recent pot-decriminalization move making possession on par with a traffic ticket might've essentially nullified the whole point anyway. So, we might be doomed. But, you know, feeling sorta mellow about it.
Good news! For the first time since Bush rode into town on his deformed little pony, the federal government is funding sex education programs that aren't based solely on abstinence. Translation: all those completely failed, fear-based, sad little curriculum designed to mollify the right's panicky fundamentalist base to the tune of $1.5 billion in wasted tax dollars are finally dead. Praise Jesus. Now take off your pants and read about this tasty new sex survey.
Bad news: It ain't over yet. We are far from a national, smart, joyful, sex-positive, free-condoms-for-everyone education program that champions awareness and pleasure and hot consensual respectful orgasmic guilt-free goodness. But hey, at least we're no longer regressing. Except for the Tea Party. And Christine O'Donnell. And Eddie Long. And the Catholic church. Oh.
Good news! Who's surprised to learn that most Americans are largely ignorant about God, faith, religious history, the Bible? Who's shocked to hear that atheists know more about God and religion than any other gaggle of humans, largely because they tend to be more educated, and as everyone knows, the higher one's education level, the more likely you are to reject organized religion as making any sense whatsoever as you perhaps embrace the idea that God is merely a convenient collective construct, often far more dangerous to a self-determined soul than liberating?
Eternal factoid of human existence: The less you know, the more likely you are to be fearful, cling to God and gun and fantasy. Hey, it says so in the Bible.
Bad news: Nevertheless, God still loves your new organs. Behold yet another study revealing how fervent, deep faith improves survival rates of liver transplant patients — or, more broadly, how intense faith in, well, anything at all, can help heal whatever may ail you.
Nothing new, really. Dovetails with the famed placebo effect, proven a million ways from Sunday: If you really, truly believe something will work, that something will heal and nurture and help fix you, it will. Well, sometimes. A little. Power of positive thinking, baby. You gotta have faith. You gotta believe. You gotta want to get better. I mean, of course.
It works with vitamins. It works with all antidepressant drugs. It works with sugar pills. It works with magic dolphins and spirit guides, chakra cleansings and bowing to Mecca 3,000 times a day. Of course it works with giant Christian God. Hell, that's why we invented her in the first place, right?
Wait, is that good news? That might be good news. Sometimes it's so hard to tell the difference.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/10/06/notes100610.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Oct 16, 2010 22:53:30 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSympathy for the wretched politicianBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, October 13, 2010Oh, Senator DeMint. You are such the South Carolina charmer, what with your rabid homophobia and tepid sexism, your twitchiness and fear. What's it like to wake up in your little box of crazy every day? — Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press.Fear not, Ms. Angle. It will all be over soon, when the Muslims finally take command. Or is it the Hindus? The Buddhists? Rosicrucians? Hippies? Who can tell? — Photo: Cathleen Allison/Associated Press.In my calmer moments of euphoric benevolence, when the wine has opened nicely and the light is streaming in just so, I sometimes find myself awash in unexpected feelings of kindness and generosity aimed in a very unexpected direction.
Do you know this feeling? Does it ever slide into you like a warm breeze in summertime, like a hot knife into your chilled and jaded heart?
Do you ever feel, that is, a wave of empathy for the various egomaniacal, powermongering doorstops of America, the wonks and politicos, crusaders and congressional chyme, thinking, "Oh you poor, poor thing, there there now, it will all be over soon, you'll be dead in a relatively short time and no one will care anymore about that Very Ridiculous Thing you think is so mandatory to the lifeblood of American ignorance and pain?"
I do. Well, sometimes.
Behold, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck, Jim DeMint. Behold the endless parade of Tea Party dinkbuttons, Nazis and homophobes and God-fearing yoga haters, oh my.
I sip my wine and sigh. What deeply unhappy lives these people must lead, no? So small and cloistered, panicky and scripted, entirely cut off from anything resembling the hot thrum of raw, sticky, swear-worded life as you and I know it, as they shuffle like chilled meatpacks from air conditioned SUV to stuffy Holiday Inn conference room, threadbare high school auditorium to sparsely attended right-wing nutball Midwestern church, retirement home, cotton-candy fairground.
There they are, lurching around the podium, stroking that baby, trying to rally the troops, working like 10 flavors of desperate hell to mean something to someone, somewhere, knowing full well what they're selling is a show, a sham, as they dance and swagger like a doll on a string.
Compassion. That's what we're talking about here. Empathy. A modicum of understanding. Let us, at the very least, try.
For example. It can't be easy to wake up every day and have to be Sharron Angle, can it? To step in front of live cameras and actually claim that Islamic religious law is taking over some American cities? And to say it with a straight face?
What must it be like to live inside such a tiny, misfiring brain and call yourself the queen of infinite space? It cannot be comfortable in there. It can't feel anything like joy, or fun, or freedom. It's just a million screaming little gnats, fighting over a breadcrumb of significance.
There goes poor little Glenn Beck, launching his Sucking Off America road trip tour (or whatever it's called) for a scattershot crowd of barely 700 very white, very scared, very bewildered people in a Midwestern fairground space that holds 8,000, sweating like a farm animal, bombing like a bad comic, working like a big top huckster to lure in the easily duped.
Do you feel for Glenn Beck? It cannot, after all, be easy, maintaining that bizarre shtick at every twitch and turn. What mark will Glenn leave upon this world? What sort of misshapen legacy? Will it not smell of clumsy punch lines and stillborn fear and liquid cheese left out in the sun?
Every day, a new opportunity for empathy. Look, there's New York Republican gubernatorial candidate and weirdo sad-sack Carl Paladino, no stranger to inflammatory, racist, insane comments, coming out on the same week of brutal attacks on gays in New York — not to mention a rash of horrible gay teen suicides — saying how he's "not a homophobic," while in the very same breath saying he doesn't want his kids anywhere near gay people and that gay pride parades are "disgusting," and so on. Oh Carl, you sad old man. Your path is cruel and weird. Here, have a shaved ice.
Paladino might be a clown, but Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., makes Paladino look like an amateur. Here is DeMint, saying how gay people should be barred from teaching in public schools. Not wretched enough? DeMint added that the ban should also include single women who have sex. That's right. Dear Sen. DeMint: Your mom called. She's having some regrets.
What to make of Ohio's very own Republican (of course) congressional candidate and Tea Party nutbunny Rich Iott, who's been dressing up for years in Nazi Waffen SS outfits to participate in wacky little historical re-enactments? Iott says it's all just innocent fun, all for the love of WWII. Sort of like dressing up as a serial rapist just because you like women, eh, Rich?
Oh you wacky Tea Party screammonkeys, such a gargantuan truckload of empathy you require. There you go, hating on all the tortured puppies of Missouri. Did you hear? The Humane Society is sponsoring some powerful anti-puppy mill legislation in that fair state, one of the worst in the country for abused animals.
Missouri Tea Partiers are, of course, whining and wailing against the legislation. Can you guess why? If you said, "Because filthy, abusive puppy mills provide much-needed jobs for ethically deficient Americans," congratulations! You're absolutely, sickeningly right.
Don't forget to take a moment, before it's too late, to celebrate the charming lunacy of Christine O'Donnell, anti-masturbation goofnickel and all-around Tea Party hood ornament, before she slides back into total irrelevance. Do you feel empathy for poor Christine? She is trailing by double digits in the polls. She is scrambling for footing up a mountain of dumb.
What's it like to wake up in her shoebox of panicky fairies every morning? What's it like to be a bar of soap in her lukewarm bath? Shudder and sigh and wish her well on her demon-haunted path, that's what I try to do.
And finally, we have one adorable little Albert Mohler, a delightfully confused Southern Baptist leader down in Atlanta, blurting out sort of deliciously naive maxim that real Christians do not, should not, must not engage in that most pagan, godless, creepy, divinely embodied, mystically lovely, sweaty, sticky, ass-up practice known as yoga.
According to Mohler, real Christians know there is no way in flabby, flesh-hating hell that "the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine." Too mystical. Too much "creepy" chanting, as Pat Roberston might gurgle. Too many weird gods and ancient ideas that predate Jesus by about, oh, 3,000 years.
Dear Albert: As a yoga teacher for more than a decade, I'm here to tell you: You are absolutely right. Yoga is every inch, stretch and twist completely incongruous with your mutant strain of Christianity. Thank Shiva yours is not the only way to move, breathe, or believe, no?
Besides, yogis are nothing if not aware that consciousness is merely energy, God is in the space between the inhale and the exhale, Jesus loved Mary Magdalene's downward dog, and that you are nothing more or less than a radiant grain of cosmic sand, tiny and wondrous, a perfect manifestation of the divine, despite your glorious slew of shortcomings. Just like Sharron and Glenn, Jim and Richard, et al and ad nauseam.
See? Empathy. It does a yoga body good.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/10/13/notes101310.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Nov 3, 2010 20:58:20 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYour mind, well and nicely blownBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, October 27, 2010It is entirely adorable and charming of you, oh glorious biped, to assume you know something of the planet, of time and dimension, scale and wonder, and that you hold dominion over all. Behold, a million individual species living in the sea that, if they think of you at all, merely laugh and sigh in your general direction. Ain't it grand? — Photo: Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images.We are never going to run out.
This is the good news. Wait, check that: This is the astonishing, God-exploding, soul-altering, holier-than-wow news you must sip like a fine absinthe and jack straight into your bloodskin like a heroin bomb and then suck into your very anima like Lindsay Lohan on a coke bender.
It might sound obvious, the idea that wonders will never cease, that we will continue to be blown away by new discoveries for as long as we shall exist, that the world will keep astonishing us with stunning ideas, organisms, diseases and cures, synapses and connections, modes of being and ways of understanding for all eternity, despite our efforts to thwart it, deny it, reject it, or dumb ourselves down so much that we no longer have a goddamn clue what's going on.
But it's not obvious at all. We are, after all, nothing if not preternaturally jaded and wary. Many assume we're at a point in history when we've made most of the major breakthroughs and discoveries, have established all the laws of time and physics we are ever going to need. No more man on the moon, no more discovery of antibiotics, no more E=MC2, no more sorry-Pope-the-world-ain't-flat kind of epiphanies left.
Even worse, with the mad race of technology and the escalating problem of information overload, we've fallen into the habit of merely grabbing hold of what we think we know and running as fast as we can with it, as if with sharp scissors, endlessly refining and recalibrating same ol' ideas, pounding them into a fine powder so as to better snort them into our desperate ideologies, hoping for a new kind of high that never really comes.
I'm here to say, ha! I'm here to cheerily scream out another reminder, or multiple reminders, an infinite supply, really, courtesy the great wide ocean, and the mad science thereof. Yes, again. Again and again and again.
Behold, another surge of discoveries to boggle the mind and startle the eyes, confound the reasoning faculties and open your id to the wider possibilities. It just keeps happening. Ain't it grand?
They just found another very strange little fish, living nearly five miles down in an area of the ocean where no such life was thought to exist, deep in a trench in the southeastern Pacific. Five miles down is the pressure equivalent of something like 20 10-ton semi trucks stacked on your chest, which is of course impossible to imagine and is not quite the point, but what the hell.
Despite the insane pressure, there it swims, this bizarre little snailfish, cool as an albino cucumber. Eels are down there, too. Other things. It's sort of astonishing. It's sort of impossible. Scientists aren't quite sure how they survive, exactly. Scientists are basically all agog, which, if they're honest, is a scientists' most-beloved state of all.
It might not sound like much. But it's actually more than enough to serve as yet another exquisite reminder of a massive, humbling truth: What we do not know still far outweighs what we do. Better yet, it always will.
It's true, not only because the earth is an infinite orgy of wanton discovery, but because things are always changing and evolving, shifting and dying to be reborn anew in ways we've never seen before. It's just the way of the world. And, you know, God. Atoms. Our very cells. Deny it at your peril.
But don't just take my word for it. That little snailfish was merely a sampler, a single sushi bite on a far grander platter. Because the world's scientists also just completed the first major census of the world's oceans, a roll call of the various species we know about so far, a baseline inventory of the insane diversity of life existing in the sea.
The survey, called the Census of Marine Life, took 10 years to complete. It included "almost 30 million observations by 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations [who] spent 9,000 days at sea, producing 2,600 academic papers and documenting 120,000 species for a freely available online database." You can see the entire thing right here.
Two major takeaways: 1) The oceans are more diverse and interconnected than the researchers ever imagined, even a mere 10 years ago, and 2) considering the rate of new species being discovered, they guesstimate there are hundreds of thousands, if not upwards of a million, as-yet-undiscovered species living in the sea, alongside a billion varieties of marine microbe.
What, the sea not good enough for you? Bored by a million slimy little things you can't even eat with sticky rice and sake? You want to talk about the insane array of creatures they're finding in the Amazon, even now, at the rate of one entirely new species every three days or so, if we don't trample them to death first?
What about deep space, dark energy and galaxies remote and vast? What of the mind itself, neuroscience and nanoscience and concepts too infinite to grasp? How about mystical experience itself, transcendent states, finding God in the magic mushrooms, MDMA, places funky and slippery and impossible to classify? We think we know, but we have no idea.
Do you ever pause and gasp? Do you ever take a breath and realize it's just a vast and staggering continuum of energy pouring through, that we're just here for a tiny eyeblink glimpse of it, barely tasting a drop of an orgiastic sundae? You do? I'm happy to hear it. Because many, if not most, people don't.
See, COML is the kind of study that runs smack up against much of our need for containers and boundaries, restrictions and limits. It runs contrary to the cold, rationalist view that it's all a matter of time until we rein it all in, that everything has a staid scientific explanation, that it's just a big pile of data waiting to be assimilated and processed and filed away. There is so much more to know, we cannot possibly know.
This also makes it violently contrary, at its very core, to the conservative view that wild, feral diversity is a problem to be controlled, that change is dangerous, that evolution is a myth, that everything should remain as fixed and stable as possible because everything was somehow better or clearer in the past, even though it absolutely goddamn wasn't.
To put it simply, to fear evolution and change is to fear the very nature of God. It's just sort of silly.
We are never going to run out. We are never going to survey it all, measure and classify and lock it down. By the time we do, it will be time to start all over again, because everything will have changed again. It just never stops. I mean, thank God.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Nov 3, 2010 21:26:44 GMT 12
From SFGate.comLetter to a whiny young DemocratBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, November 03, 2010Hey, at least this guy voted. Obama won in '08 with 66% of the 18-29 vote. Most of that demo stayed home this time and played Cut the Rope and drank vodka/Red Bulls and tweeted about not caring anymore. Ah, silly youth. — Photo: David Goldman/Associated Press.Oh, now you've done it.
See? You see what happens when you young liberal voters get so disgruntled and disillusioned that you drop all your party's newborn, hard-won ideas about Hope™ and Change™, without any patience, without really giving them sufficient time to mature, without understanding that hugely foreign, anti-American concept known as "the long view"?
See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?
Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.
What happens is: Many kinds of fragmented, muddled, but still constructive Democratic progress might get stopped quite nearly dead, and even a few pieces of legislation we actually did gain get slapped around, threatened, stomped on the head like a scientist at a Rand Paul rally. Happy now?
Check it out, kiddo: This is not just any Republican party you allowed back into power; these mealy folks are not anything like the war-hungry, Bush-tainted army of flying monkeys and Dick Cheney moose knuckles (see YouTube video clip below) you so wonderfully helped bury in the history books last election.No, the GOP of 2010-2011 is even weirder, dumber, less interested in anything you even remotely care about; this GOP is infused like a sour cocktail with a bitter splash of the most cartoonish, climate change-denying Tea Party dingbats imaginable — most of whom think you're an elitist, terrorist-loving, gay-supporting threat to "real" American values, btw — all led by a guy named Boehner who wears a bizarre, shellacked tan so fake and creepy it makes Nancy Pelosi looks like a supermodel.
And you made it all happen. Or rather, you failed to prevent it from happening, by not voting, by turning your collective back on Obama's tough love, by getting all whiny and dejected like some sort of sullen teen vampire who can't get laid.
Do you deny it? Did you see the polls and studies that said that most fresh-faced, Obama-swooning Dems like you are now refusing to support our beloved Nazi Muslim president because he didn't wish-fulfill your every whim in a week? That he was, in fact, not quite the instant-gratification SuperJesus of your (or rather, our) dreams?
Of course you didn't see any of that. Hell, I bet you're not even reading this column right now. You're probably back on Twitter, raging into the Void about, hell, who knows what? The Wolf Parade concert. Angry Birds. The People of Wal-Mart. Anything but politics, really.
But hey, whatevs, right? Screw it. Screw him. After all, the prez let you down. Conveniently "forgot" to include you in the dialogue, after a major election that you helped him win. Where were the outreach programs? The campus speaking tours? Weekly appearances on "The Daily Show"? Legal pot and gay marriage and discounts tickets to SXSW and Burning Man and Coachella? I want my goddamn political perks, and I want them now.
Hey, I understand. We're an instant gratification culture, and you're an ADHD generation. Who wants to hear that serious enviro legislation might take a decade or two to fully come to fruition? Who wants to hear about Obama passing rather amazing student loan reform? Or even financial reform? Or health care, the Iraq drawdown, saving a million jobs at GM, or all the rest of his rather astonishing achievements to date? Dude, so boring.
Of course, you've now learned the hard way that the hot flush of a major election is far more electrifying than the gray n' meaty grind of actual governing. Obama flew into office on gossamer liberal wings, but the real halls of D.C. are a goddamn pigsblood slaughterhouse, brutal and depressing, full of gnarled legislative compromise. Screw that noise, you know?
And you know what? You're right. Well, sort of. The Obama administration sure as hell could've done more to keep young activists inspired and involved. It's an opportunity squandered, no question. Then again, dude was sorta busy unburying the entire nation, you know? And the twitchy Democratic party has never been known for its savvy cohesion. Maybe you can give him/them a break? Whoops, too late.
Look, I'm sorry. I know I'm being far too hard on you. Of course it's not just you. It's not completely your fault these dimwit Repubs were allowed to ooze back into a bit of power so soon. As many analysts have pointed out, this wasn't a vote for the Republicans, but against the limp-wristed Dems who didn't step up and lead with more authority and clarity of purpose. Truly, libs and independents of every age are frustrated Obama isn't governing with the same kind of magical, balls-out visionary zeal that fueled his campaign.
And let's not forget a shockingly unintelligent Tea Party movement that stands for exactly nothing and fears exactly everything, all ghost-funded by a couple of creepy libertarian oil billionaires — the leathery old Koch brothers — who eat their young for a snack. Who could've predicted that gnarled political contraption would hold water? But hey, when Americans are angry and nervous, they do stupid things. Like vote Republican. It happens. Just did.
But here's your big takeaway, young Dem: It ain't over yet. The 2012 election is just around the corner. If we've learned anything, it's that two years whip by insanely quickly. Anything can happen, and usually does. You'll have another chance. And probably another after that. Maybe more.
So here's what you need to know, right now: Barack Obama is, and will continue to be, a bit of goddamn miracle. He's simply as good as we're going get for an articulate, thoughtful, integrity-rich Democratic prez in your lifetime. Period. To hamstring his administration out of spite and laziness is childish and sad. Check the accomplishments. Understand the process. Deal with the messiness.
It will never be perfect. It will never be giddy liberal nirvana, because it doesn't work that way. Politics is corrosive and infuriating, de facto and by definition, even with someone as thoughtful as Obama in the Big Chair. Understand it. Deal with it. Get back in the game. If you don't, we all lose.
Your choice, kiddo.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/03/notes110310.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Nov 11, 2010 22:43:00 GMT 12
From SFGate.comDear Tea Party: You will now get yoursBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, November 10, 2010And now, hot on the heels of our recent letter to whiny young Democrats, a loving shout-out to all those moderates and independents, confused conservatives and hard-line Repubs who went just a little more than slightly insane this past election.
To all of you who either flip-flopped your wishy-washy ideals and switched your vote from bluish to reddish this past election because Obama and the lukewarm Dems failed to solve all world problems in 700 days, or because you got yourself so emotionally riled up/mentally watered down by the sexy caveman grunts of the Tea Party that you actually bought the bullshit line about being "mad as hell" about nothing even remotely coherent.
Here is your grand message: You are hereby wonderfully, thoroughly screwed.
Oh darling, it's so very true. The fun-filled news is, despite all the bluster and rhetoric, thinly veiled racism and rampant Islamophobia on display, the new army of jittery, anti-everything GOP bobbleheads that you just voted into office doesn't care a single iota about you, or your haphazard values, or what you sometimes occasionally stand for. And what's more, deep down, you secretly know it.
Are you slightly offended? Are you scowling and mistrustful of the notion? I'm delighted to hear it. Also: It doesn't really matter.
You don't have to believe me. Just wait until nothing at all is done to service the Tea Party non-agenda, because it's ridiculous and impossible to service. Just wait until you note how there is no actual shrinking of government, no restoring some bogus sepia-toned idealism that never existed, no saving of your job. There is, of course, but one GOP agenda: furthering their personal stranglehold on all things powermad and avaricious.
That's not to say they won't try to tackle some issues. Boehner & Co care very much about nailing down enormous tax cuts for wealthy people, preventing education reform, gridlocking Congress at every turn, denying the fact that seven billion rapacious humans have an effect on climate change, and blocking as much newly available health care for 30 million Americans as possible. And so on.
But truly, the issues themselves don't matter. For what Boehner & Co value most is not so much making any sort of significant change in American culture, but rather, in keeping the anger, the dread, the paranoia alive.
In other words, they care most about keeping you in the lower, plebian castes all riled and blind as long as possible. This way, power lies. This way we find war and military expenditure and all manner of misprision, torture, environmental rape, WMD and homophobia, you name it. Just ask Karl Rove. Hey, it's a platform. It worked for Dubya. Well, sort of.
Perhaps you secretly agree with this assessment, understanding that the Repubs are indeed mostly shmucks, but at least they're shmucks fighting in your corner. Maybe you think the Dems are no better, and it's all a matter of lesser-of-two-evils, a needful balancing of power, that the nation's new rightward tilt serves Obama right for — what was it again? "Overreaching"? For daring to accomplish in two short years more than any president in six decades? Right.
One thing's certain: the populace remains angry and scared about, well, what we've always been angry and scared about: jobs, a massive deficit, war and terrorism, taxes and drugs, gangs and goons, evil bumps in the night.
But these days, one source of anger trumps all others. We are perhaps most furious about our dysfunctional political system, one that cherishes acrimony over cohesion, backstabbing over unity, bickering over a calm and respectful, unified vision. (Which is a little strange, considering how much Pelosi and the Dems accomplished in two years. It might have been acerbic, but the output was actually sort of stunning. But never mind that now).
Are both parties to blame for this hateful, acerbic tone? Are they equally responsible for the ongoing divisiveness? Sure. To some degree. Then again, no. Not really. Not by a long shot.
Let's be perfectly clear: The modern Republican party has one masterful, godlike skill unmatched by any other org in this century: Its leaders are geniuses at deceit, at leading throngs of blind believers into rabbit holes of war and fear and factual inaccuracy, often using an aggressively dumbed-down form of Christianity as a trump card. Sexual dread, mistrust of youth, of women, of gays, foreigners, of the ever-changing cultural landscape? It's in the DNA. And the Tea Party chugged it like Coors-flavored heroin.
And the Dems? The Dems wish they could be that masterful. Progressives are just terribly weak in fearmongering. There is something about the liberal spirit that values independent thought and self-determination, that defies screaming eye-glazed megachurch groupthink dread. This makes it tough to hold power for very long. It's so much easier to rally around sameness, conformity, institution, fear of the Other. Right, Karl?
Proof? Look no further than the GOP's leaders and mouthpieces: Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, O'Reilly and Fox News and even newly minted Senate demigod Mitch McConnell, et al. There are almost no liberal equivalents to these professional liars, warmongers, kingmakers and overlords. In the category of media and message manipulation, the libs have proven disastrous.
I take it back. Not all red-leaning voters this election are hereby screwed. If you're tremendously wealthy and/or run a very large corporation, you're feeling damn good right about now. Wall Street is giddy like Charlie Sheen in a Bangkok brothel, eager for more deregulation, bigger bonuses, less oversight. The CEOs of every oil company in the world are positively orgasmic knowing that their GOP breathren will now asphyxiate all attempts at new environmental legislation and regulation. And so on.
But if you are a lower to middle-class Republican, Tea Partier or flip-flopping indie voter, you are now in the most delightfully ironic position of all — you think you just voted yourself more voice, when in fact you voted for far less. You think yourself a lion; you're actually the meat. You actually just voted yourself an even lower position on the food chain. Congratulations.
But don't worry. There is a bright spot ahead. 2012 is nigh, and a dramatic new vote simmers and looms, as it always does. Soon enough, it will shift and mutate all over again, and we can kickstart the eternal debate once more. Something to look forward to, no?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/10/notes111010.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Nov 17, 2010 22:22:36 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYour angry God will not save you nowBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, November 17, 2010This much we know: Increasingly it is being proven that sexual orientation in general and homosexuality in particular are largely biological adventures, hardwired and pre-set in your genetic code by sly and well-groomed angels way, way in advance, back when you were but a twinkle in the eye of the moan.
Perhaps you've heard? That being gay — or, for that matter, straight — has very little to do with choice, or hairstyle, or surroundings, or even how uptight or close-minded your Mormon parents might or might not be due to all the hooch and the guilt and the secret stash of fetish porn out behind the barn?
Right. And then along comes that cunning lovewench Mother Nature to back it all up, as increasingly it is also being proven that homosexual behavior is rampant all over the kinky, feral, God-mocking animal kingdom. Bring it on.
Perhaps you've seen? How across thousands of species on every continent known to man, from lions to tigers, dolphins to monkeys, fish to fowl, insect to iguana, nearly every species has at least a few members getting it on with their same-sex brethren for all sorts of who-the-hell-knows reasons? We can be sure of one thing, however: God couldn't care less that a cluster of clenched bipeds would be all confused by the phenom sometime in the late Cenozoic.? "Girlfriend," said the Serpent to the Man, "get over your bi-curious self."
All well and blasphemous. But wait, what to make of the even more amazing, flipside news that, despite all the angelic wiring and sexual predetermination, science is also saying the exact opposite, that we are, in large part, far more a product of our surroundings than once thought?
It's true. When it comes to other kinds of not-so-tingly human torments — mental illnesses, depression, fondness for reality TV — these malicious phenom are largely not genetic, not due to predetermined biological factors or nefarious DNA sequences, but rather very, very much fueled and influenced by what swirls and churns, eats and burns all around us.
Perhaps you've sensed this? That we are, in large part, what we eat, breathe, hate, suck, toil, perpetrate, endure?
Here's big proof: Let us now recall, with a nod to this fine piece in the Guardian U.K., the Human Genome Project, that massive endeavor from years back that was set to revolutionize our understanding of the human animal.
Remember how scientists and the major pharmcos alike were positively salivating at the potential insights and treasures? "Surely," they thought, "this glorious master decoding will give us a million miraculous insights into all manner of human behavior, a veritable goldmine of biological pinpoints as to why certain groups, genders, ages, types are more prone to what kind of ailment, and when, and why, and then we can create all sorts of expensive, targeted drugs to fix it. Right?"
Wrong. Something funny happened on the way to the grand epiphany. Turns out after all that decoding, no reliable patterns emerged. There was no magic revelation, no radical new pathways into the tortured human mind. Turns out that genetics play only a very tiny role in some of the more debilitating, troubling ailments of modern man. Who knew?
The upshot: Environmental and social factors are much more influential in terms of disturbing and damaging the human spirit than previously thought. Which means the liberals had it right all along — the only real way to address mental illness, depression and the like isn't with drugs; it's about improving the toxic social climate in which they fester and breed like Tea Partiers in a bathtub of Coors. Imagine that.
And now, the grand finale. For not only does environment play a devious and even deadly role in our socio-mental downfall, but we are often the agents of our own pain. We cause our own deaths, conflicts, illnesses, every single day.
Here's a tragic and yet sort of obvious idea: We made cancer. Also, we invented war. Turns out we are disastrously good at destroying ourselves.
Scientists have found almost no trace of cancer in the mummified remains of bodies from ancient civilizations. It simply did not exist. Is it because they all died too young to suffer from the disease? Maybe. But unlikely. Cancer is, it's increasingly believed, a lovely byproduct of heavily industrialized, high tech, toxic modern society. We're soaking in it.
Same goes, in a way, for war and combat, our need to dominate and defeat. Despite a million glorified military movies, a billion dead bodies and Dick Cheney's fatal sneer, we are not necessarily, by nature, a combative, warlike species, prone to battle and rage. Did you already suspect?
It's a baffler, all right. But as one fine theory posits — with big thanks to Margaret Mead — that war simply isn't natural. After all, plentiful are the cultures and peoples throughout time and geography that, even despite scarce natural resources, despite having all the supposed reasons to go to war, never once found a need to take up arms, or even understand the concept. it's just sort of ridiculous.
So then, to sum up: War is learned behavior, spreading like a mold. Cancer is a modern invention, the dark underbelly of our madhouse race to progress. We create — and even knowingly promote — many of the sociocultural factors that spawn depression and internal demonization.
But when it comes to love, sexuality, the infinite powers of the heart? It's just the opposite. We are but giddy, terrified players on a vibrant cosmic stage. The love, the sex, the chemistry of desire, while certainly influenced by the modern churn, has its roots deep in our very being, timeless and eternal, woven into our very DNA like a bright red thread into the great throw rug of time.
It's a lot to unpack. But it turns out we've had it all exactly backwards all along. You actually can't choose your particular wiring for love, but you can choose to be a warlike, antagonistic force of cancerous doom. We cannot design our innate sexual chemistry, but we sure as hell can choose whether to celebrate it with wine and song and fearless abandon, or poison it at its heart with ignorance, panic, a violent misreading of God.
Which leaves only the question: Which shall it be? Have we already made our choice?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/17/notes111710.DTL&ao=all
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