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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 25, 2011 22:51:42 GMT 12
From SFGate.comGay NASCAR driver, please stand upBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, May 25, 2011Turn on the TV. Switch on ESPN, Fox Sports, NFL Sunday Ticket or any of those 24-hour satellite channels or sports webcasts that broadcast live games from across the country in one nonstop testosterone-happy grunt.
Look, right there. Did you see him? The one who just slam dunked? The one who tackled that receiver? The one who smashed that double to left center? That guy with the huge smile, hint of flair and the crazy thing with the hair? Guess what? Yep. Totally gay.
Bet on it, darling. There are gay men, right now, playing basketball in the NBA. There are gay men playing football, right now, in the NFL. Ditto Major League Baseball. Hockey, even. There are gay men (and women) scattered all over most every college team everywhere. I mean, obviously.
And I'm going to lay it all on the line and bet you a dollar — all right, make it $10, hell, make it $100 and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and a mani-pedi in the Castro — that there is, right this minute, a gay NASCAR driver. Oh my God! Heathen! Blaspheme! Shut up!
Whatever. He might not know it yet, he might be utterly horrified by every little twitch and gurgle in his heart and loins as he whips around the track, fervently wishing he'd been born anywhere but Kentucky or Kansas or Tennessee, but gay he is. Ain't it grand?
Here is the amazing thing: Word is getting out — slowly, strangely, awkwardly, but it's getting out nonetheless — that gaydom abounds in pro sports.
All right, maybe not "abounds," maybe more like struggles and trembles and panics just a little, every single day, in fear of losing a major endorsement deal and/or getting eaten by scary fundamentalist Jesus, but still. It's certainly common enough that most players already know, and few of them really give a damn except the Bible thumpers and a handful of homophobic youngbloods, and even they shut the hell up when the team makes the playoffs and everyone gets a $10 million bonus and suddenly God can pipe down 'cuz daddy needs a new Mercedes SL550 and a dozen celebratory hookers.
"Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin' idiot. I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person."
That would be the NBA's own happily blasphemin' commentator and former superstar Sir Charles Barkley, who just doesn't give a sh*t what people think, who has never been one to shy away from saying awesome things at the most unexpected times, who is fond of rolling his eyes and nailing the point home.
Of course, no players have actually admitted to their same-sex predilections yet. None have dared muster the nerve. But it all seems to point to one inevitable grand event: A gay pro player, somewhere, someone at the top of his game, perhaps even a superstar, will prove a true hero and break every childishly macho stereotype we have left (excepting maybe hip-hop and country music), and come on out. Hopefully soon.
And then, maybe another. And another. Maybe they'll start a movement. Maybe they'll become instant cultural flashpoints, icons for a new generation of gay athletes (and fans), the collective Jackie Robinsons of the time, stirring up all sorts of controversial melodrama and white-hot discussion to the point where no one knows how to parse it all and everyone just throws up their hands and gets on with life because, well, the games keep being played as usual, nothing undue happens, and Jesus doesn't actually give a damn, so who the hell cares, anyway?
Not your beloved SF Giants, at least. Here's the World Series champs, the first pro team of any sport to come out, as it were, and agree to record some inspirational video for Dan Savage's stunningly successful It's Gets Better Project, all at the behest of a very dedicated gay fan. Hey, it's a step. A rather huge one.
It makes perfect sense, of course, that SF's team is the first to openly trash talk homophobia, given the hometown vibe, given all the local gay and lesbian fans, given that not supporting gay rights would be akin to the Raiders not confessing their big gay crush on Skeletor.
You might say, as go pro sports and (just recently) the U.S. military, so goes the culture. You might say, the sooner homosexuality becomes even slightly more acknowledged and normalized among our millionaire athletes and manly young soldiers alike, the sooner the panicky midwest and the Mormons and hardcore homophobes across our fair nation will realize that gaydom might not be such an apocalyptic abomination after all.
You might say that, but you'd be wrong. The sad news is, America's dedicated clumps of anti-gay crusaders aren't budging out of their fearholes anytime soon. What will change is this: They just won't matter so much anymore. The wail of the homophobes will be drowned out by the new generation of cheering young fans who openly support gay players, gay soldiers and gay marriage (witness the latest and greatest Gallup poll) because, well, it's just not a big deal anymore.
Sure, it might take awhile. I myself wrote a column nearly six years ago, just after the WNBA's then-MVP Sheryl Swoopes surprised no one by coming out as a lesbian, which asked this same question ("Where are the gay pro athletes?"). I assumed it wouldn't be much longer. I assumed it was inevitable, probably within a couple few years.
I assumed wrong. So far, it's been merely a trickle. A long retired player here, an obscure B-list player there, one euro soccer player way over there, the president and CEO of the Phoenix Suns (Rick Welts) just over here, but of course he gets a pass because he's older, white and rich, and everyone knows most of them are secretly gay.
But I'm betting it will happen relatively soon. And then will come the day — can you imagine? — when a pro athlete declares his love for a gay U.S. soldier and marries him on the steps of a Kentucky city hall, and everyone just smiles and says, "right on," and then gets on with their lives.
That will be the day, the day Jesus will be smiling. The day the last of the crusty old homophobes is defeated by love. The day the world will tilt just a little more toward progress and enlightenment and a big, divine shrug.
Do you seriously doubt it? Do you still desperately cling to old anti-gay ideas of strict gender and "perfect" nuclear families and malformed biblical nonsense, at the expense of your fluid and desperate heart? I'm sorry to hear it. Allow me to paraphrase the wise and noble guru: You might be a stone freakin' idiot.______________________________________ 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/2011/05/25/notes052511.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 1, 2011 22:18:41 GMT 12
From SFGate.comMay you now live in sin forevermoreBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 01, 2011Here now, a hot factoid of curious news that will stupefy your parents and confound any extant grandparents and make many fundamentalists and most Mormons clutch their dogmas to their quivering breasts in mild but surefire panic.
The item goes like this: For the first time in US history, married couples are no longer the majority of domestic couplehoods in the United States, and have instead been replaced/outnumbered by ... what shall we call them? The unsure? The pleasantly stoned? Freedom fighters? Those Who Still Have Somewhat Hot and Mostly Regular Sex?
No matter. For lo, the earth doth tremble and the heavens weep as we learn from the 2010 census that married households in America, once the dominant, inviolable, ironclad foundation of all that is good and righteous and often sort've vaguely unhappy and resentful after about seven years, a couple kids and not nearly enough couples therapy — now make up a mere 48 percent of domestic partnerships, with 52 percent going to the sinful and the wimpy and the possibly more frequently naked.
What does it all mean? What to make of such strange, historic markers? Do we worry and fear in light of some of the uglier factors at play — income inequality, education levels, economic instability, wildly conflicting beliefs about the value of home and family? Or do we allow and embrace, understanding it's all of a piece, that no social institution like marriage (or religion, or industrial empire, or gender) can possibly remain fixed for long and simply must evolve with the times, lest it collapse completely?
Or maybe you're under 22 and therefore can't relate to this news in the slightest, because, as part of Generation Facebook, you likely see marriage as a someday/maybe possibility scattered among a wide and biodynamic array of malleable options, and anyway you can't be bothered right now because you're late for your giant chest tattoo appointment at the pagan yoga emporium/organic hemp oil juice bar in the back of Whole Foods? Right. God bless you. Run along now.
For the rest of us, it's easy to get snagged on one of the polarizing views. On one hand is the typical conservative recoil, claiming the very cornerstones of what once made this country great — early marriage, traditional family structure, factory jobs, free guns at church, xenophobia, mommy's vodka and daddy's stash of gay porn — are crumbling to dust, America is in a liberal-induced deathspin and the "Greatest Generation" now only refers to higher Medicare payments and sepia-toned WWII Spielberg movies on HBO.
On the other is the wonky liberal/progressive view, claiming that the fabric of society is merely in flux, is being constantly re-woven, was too stuck in an impossible nuclear family pattern anyway and is now ready to be ripped up and made into a nice summer scarf good for tying your lover to the bedpost and spanking her firmly with the Polyamorist's Guide to Anal Sex and Also Quiltmaking.
No matter how you parse it, this news is now officially One of Those Things, one of those profound tilt/shift moments in the culture that joins an ever-lengthening list of terrifying/wonderful "what does it mean?" statistical firsts swarming all over this past decade alone.
Such as: Women have now officially surpassed men in getting advanced college degrees. The average teen sends more than 3,300 text messages per month. Despite your fluffycute Prius, global emissions set a new world record for 2011. And in the latest Gallup poll, the majority of Americans (finally) think gay marriage is no big deal and panicky fundies should pipe the hell down and embrace the inevitable.
Maybe it's time to start looking at marriage more like home ownership? Often hugely overrated, not nearly as much an essential part of the American dream as we've been led to believe, something that's beautifully right for some but not at all right for others, that renting can be far more liberating than buying unless you care about things like equity or painting the ceiling blue or having a place to put the inflatable pool. You know, so to speak.
Or maybe marriage is like eating sushi or meat? Something that should be a bit of an extravagance, a occasional luxury not meant for everyone every single day, something to be relished and consumed in small amounts, focusing only on trusted, healthy sources? As opposed to how it is now, inhaling massive amounts in toxic bulk due to voracious capitalism and industrialization, something so commodified and cheapened it's lost most of its power to nourish and sustain?
Me, I prefer the wider view. After all, there is plenty else to keep us on our toes. You want something to be concerned about? Be concerned about increasingly violent global weather patterns. Be concerned about massive ice loss in northern Canada. Be concerned about that mention up above, the thing about worldwide emissions.
But that our culturally constructed ideas of love and marriage are proving to be ever in flux and alight, that how we structure our relationships is changing in fits and hiccups, some painful, some amazing, much of it eternal and timeless because that's the nature of the beast? This is not cause for alarm. This is cause for ongoing, never-ending celebration, humble and awed and thrown for a dizzying loop each and every time.
Be married. Or don't. Wait longer. Or don't. Have beautiful children, buy a home, get a certain kind of job, settle down, follow some sort of path you think you're supposed to follow. Or don't. There are alternatives, variations on a theme, inversions and permutations and reinventions on a dime, and this is generally a very good thing indeed.
To think it's supposed to be some other way? To keep believing that if everyone would just follow a similar and harshly regulated path to the same narrowcast ideas of love and marriage, that we'd somehow have peace in our time and Jesus would finally return carrying a million pink roses and a billion $99 heart pendants from Zales? That we think we have the slightest clue how it's all supposed to unfold? This is, by a huge margin, the most dangerous idea of all.______________________________________ 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/2011/06/01/notes060111.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 29, 2011 17:02:02 GMT 12
From SFGate.comAsk me about my agony and despair!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 08, 2011Often is the question posed to me, maybe over on my Facebook page or via email after someone has made it through the messier parts of my book, but also in sundry sweaty nightclubs or boutique SF coffeeholes and therefore almost always fully clothed but almost never in a state of calm emotional stability: Mark, how the hell do you do it?
How do you avoid becoming horribly soiled and tainted, downtrodden and depressed every single day by the relentless onslaught, the endless horrors and bleakness hurled forth by the blood-soaked and desperately panicky mainstream media, inside of which you apparently still writhe and (mostly, sporadically, drunkenly) thrive?
It's a common refrain, of course, a question posed to anyone not merely aswim in the MSM, but also to upbeat politicos and yoga teachers, spiritual gurus and organic farmers, smiling scientists and perky baristas — pretty much anyone at all who seems to move through life reasonably free of the bone-crushing angst so delightfully common to our misery addicted species.
Take, for example, how the UN and the International Energy Agency just revealed, like a gun to the head of humanity, that 2010 was the year in which worldwide carbon emissions broke yet another record, easily surging past any known threshold of planetary pain for the first time in our species' short, sputtering history.
You want disheartening? One million sold Prii aside, all those heartfelt green movements and carbon offsets notwithstanding, it appears nearly every significant environmental effort to date has done exactly zilch, cumulatively speaking, to curtail the extremely hard work of China and India (but mostly the U.S. and France and everyone else) to ensure we still pollute the world with as much carbon dioxide as quickly and as irrevocably as humanly possible, and accelerate climate change to the point of no return.
Perhaps you were mildly encouraged by what happened down in Cancún last year, where member nations gathered and debated and then pinky swore, in the pool, over a pitcher of 'ritas, to do their absolute best to cut way down on CO2 emissions as soon as possible? Or perhaps you thought Obama and his gutted environmental agenda might have made a dent by now, by way of a few lackluster environmental strategies?
You are so cute. Obama has apparently decided to let his once potent environmental agenda burn to soot. Mexico turned out to be a sunny little joke during which everyone furrowed their brows and made concerned tsk-tsk noises, then raced home and fired up the coal plants and approved more oil drilling and decided to leave the really hard decisions for the next generation, if there is one.
It's more than depressing; it's downright fatal. Extreme weather and a low-level worldwide panic are increasingly becoming the norm. No nation of any scale — particularly the U.S., still by far the worst overall polluter in the world — is making any serious moves toward dramatic change.
How to remain, if not upbeat, then at the very least not fatalistic, burned out and misanthropic in the face of what appears to be such abject malevolence, such stupidity at our chosen fate?
But wait, you haven't noted the bizarre mutations yet. Take what's happening in China. Thanks to its white-knuckle, largely coal-powered, breakneck growth, China now enjoys the highest rate of cancer in the world, with hundreds of "cancer villages" springing up wherever filthy factories are built. Cancer rates are soaring countrywide faster than anywhere else in the world.
Do you think this is horrible? Do you think this is ghastly? You're clearly not an investment banker. For this repulsive statistic merely means the emergence of — can you guess? — that's right, a new $1.5 billion cancer treatment market in China. Time to invest in biotech! After all, capitalism begets death begets still more capitalism. It's enough to make you want to go for a bottle of sake and a fine sushi dinner and forget your worldly woes.
Not so fast, seafood maven. For now we glance at this astonishing visual representation of world seafood stocks over the last 100 years, at what was once the seemingly limitless fecundity of the oceans, which we have now somehow, in a mere handful of generations, utterly decimated the way the Tea Party decimates historical fact.
You already know many fish stocks are depleted worldwide. You've already heard global populations of large predatory game fish, the bluefin tuna and the swordfish, et al, have been almost completely wiped out. But this visual does something more. It hits at the heart, the soul of who we are as a species at a level words can't quite access. Simply put, the oceans are being systematically emptied out, and refilled with... plastic. Edible fish are nearly gone. And without major action very soon, most of them will never return.
What is to be done? How to not sit in front on your screen and rage and shake and weep at the unchecked horror show? It is, you might say, the most pressing question of the age. I'm still struggling to answer it, every single day.
This is the practice. This is the study and the meditation and the perspective, the insight and the consciousness and the awareness all rolled into one mandatory spiritual cocktail and sipped gently as you inhale and exhale and try not to freak the hell out every minute because, well, what good would that do?
We say, the karma of the world is not yours to solve. We say, the collective burden of seven billion cannot be taken on en masse by any individual — save a few incredible beings of light — lest you become instantly crushed and suicidal, prone to lots of sneering and road rage and screaming at the TV, your loved ones, yourself.
We say, it is not a matter of turning your feelings off, or shutting everything down, or ignoring all media, or somehow transcending all suffering and pain and floating off into some airy detached bullsh*tland of wimpy bunnylight.
It is simply a matter of understanding your role, your part in the schema. We say, don't you realize you are the universe in microcosm? Oh, stop whining; you totally are. You are asked, what would you do if you could be God for a day? Then why not shut up and do it, in proper scale of your life and your energy and your abilities, right now, because you very much are? I mean, obvs.
How to endure/digest the horrors of the world? You don't. I mean, please. You cannot possibly grasp and resolve the whole of the pulsing organism. It's not your job. You simply resolve and illuminate your own world; you become that messy imperfect gorgeous thing, that drop of lucid dish soap in the sinkful of water away from which the grease scampers and leaps.
And then, you engage. You get out from behind the headlines. As recently put by Jonathan Franzen in a fine commencement speech to overly Facebooked youth of today, "When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there's a very real danger that you might love some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?"
Not clear enough? Still deeply confused by the mass misery of the world? Try ee cummings: "Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense."______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/08/notes060811.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 29, 2011 17:58:41 GMT 12
From SFGate.comCongressman X is throbbing for youBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 15, 2011Here's the thing: When it comes to the wanton exploits of the gloriously single-minded penis and its commanding tendency, since the dawn of time, to propel otherwise savvy males toward behaviors generally considered to be the province of unhinged zoo animals, everyone seems to more or less agree.
It isn't so much the kinky adventures that are the problem. It's not the scandals, the adultery, the sloppy photos, the tepid perversion, the frat-boy sexting or even the prostitute's yawning grunts heard through the hotel walls at the Republican National Convention.
These are all, if not completely acceptable in the public sphere, then pretty much par for the sexually deviant human course.
It's not even the multiple partners, the secret gay trysts, or even the random love child with the scullery maid that so annoy and ruffle the populace, save for the usual cadre of fundamentalist "family values" nutbunnies and occasional unfortunate, horrified girlwomen who claim to be entirely grossed out by images of enthusiastic penises (in which case, I'm terribly sorry for your boyfriend and please avoid my iPhoto library).
No, what everyone seems to agree on is — how to put it gently? — the repellant douchiness of how it's all handled when the scandal, the tryst, the penis photos leak all over the Interweb. Is it not true?
The condescending tone, the dishonesty, the hypocrisy, the patronizing attitude, the sheer gall of trying to pretend that you would never do such a thing and someone must have hacked my account and how dare you suggest it in first place and then whoops, oh yes, well, sorry, yeah it was me after all. About this, universal disdain.
Behold N.Y.'s own Anthony Weiner, if you must, just another in a long line of textbook examples of How to Do It Wrong. Of no doubt is the fact the man's a world-class shmuck for sexting with a half-dozen women, both before and after he married his whip smart (and newly pregnant) wife. Of no doubt is the fact that, from the generic penis shots to the semi-naked gym photos, it's all a bit embarrassing, a skeezy but all-too-common cautionary tale no one really wanted to hear all over again for the thousandth time.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming refrain I hear most can be summed up in a single pair of words: Who cares? Who isn't a bit of a (hopefully healthy, consensual, tactful) pervert in this day and age? Who hasn't employed his or her cellphone's awesome multimedia powers for sundry filthy exploits?
Put it this way: If you're a reasonably youthful adult and a sexual deviant in the slightest and you haven't used new media to Tweet, Histaprint, SMS, CameraBag, FaceTime, Dropbox, or otherwise Web 2.0 a live pic or pile of snapshots or (better yet) shaky handheld video of some quivering, slippery body part to someone else you deemed equally deviant and aquiver, well, you're just not doing it right.
What's more, who doesn't know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of politicians across the nation, of every party affiliation, gender and extant chest hair quotient currently engaging in exactly the same behaviors as Weiner, hooking up with prostitutes, hitting on pages, sexting their interns, using their ghastly powers of seduction and manipulation in the way they were intended since back when Roman emperors had marble sculptures of their genitalia foot-messengered over to the Orgy Palace? Really, to be shocked by a politician's vulgar behavior in 2011 is to be living under a very naïve sort of rock.
No, what tends to annoy people most of all is the ridiculous, customary response, the obnoxious dance of the newly busted and increasingly shamed. Oh, how tiresome it is.
There's the outraged denial. The attempt at quick dismissal. The hint of lingering suspicion. The fresh allegations. Then boom, the big reveal, the sudden implosion, followed by a reluctant public acknowledgement and much contrite scowling and teams of flustered handlers enacting spin control. And failing.
And then, the ugly consequences: Rehab? Therapy? Electroshock? Divorce? Leave of absence? Forced resignation? Finding Jesus? Loss of major endorsement deals and ruthless comedic takedowns by Jon Stewart and Letterman, Leno and Bill Maher? Oh honey.
(It is, btw, all kids of amusing to hear Bill Maher, reportedly one of the raunchiest, most shamelessly kinky bachelors in all of Vegas' finest strip clubs, perform a dramatic/comedic reading — see YouTube clip below — of Weiners's text messages on his show. You can pretty much see his eyes twinkle and twitch with familiar delight).Tiger. Spitzer. Favre. Haggard. Rep. Chris "Craigslist" Lee. Across the board and down the line it's a the same obnoxious pattern, the same timeless dance. Will it ever change? Is there another way? Will there be a time in the near future when a public figure, be it a star athlete or unruly senator, can be, well, pretty much like everyone else when it comes to kink, fetish and general relationship ineptitude, and still keep his or her job?
Or are we doomed to lifetimes of dimestore scandals and tedious carnal distractions, all fueled by America's most insufferable trait of all: its bogus Christian/Puritanical sexual mores? Is it merely the nature of the public/private beast, the same ugly pattern repeating itself throughout history, all made bright and new again by the wonders of our shiny technology?
Yes, I know the answer. So do you. It's probably far too much to ask for it all to shift and evolve toward the naughty red light. This is particularly true for politicians, who are largely hardwired never to speak a straight truth, much less admit they love a good three-way and some pegging before a fine senate vote.
Fascinating will be the day when one steps forth and happily acknowledges, without hesitation, that they have healthy and even dirty libidos and might have done a few stupid things and really, everyone should back the hell off, and by the way Andrew Breitbart is a bottom-feeding meatbucket who only gets away with sending SMS photos of his member to horrified females because of the giant, mangy squirrel costume he's always wearing.
Still, I can't help but long for a time when we can all enjoy a giant collective shrug in the face of what appears to be an endless supply of fabulously uninspired erotic exploits of the nation's leaders. Sure, more tact would be nice. More honesty would be delightful. But class and quality, energy and fire, real sexual progressiveness in a candid, talented public figure who dares to actually walk the smart n' dirty talk? A dream.
It's going to be a long wait.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/15/notes061511.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 29, 2011 17:59:55 GMT 12
From SFGate.comA mysterious throb deep in your bedBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 22, 2011Me, I'm all about the furtive mysteries, the bizarre phenomena no one can quite explain, all flavors of tantalizing magic that make science and the rational mind twitch and hiccup, then shrug and think surely someone, somewhere must have a simple explanation, even though no one really does.
Whale songs? Dark energy? Pyramids? Quantum physics? Oddly curved Polish trees? Newt Gingrich? Mystical million-year-old cave paintings by the lost tribes of French-Indian Trepanning Podiatrists? Obvs.
But I also adore the lesser-known and the seemingly meaningless mysteries, the countless smallish, transitory tales of OMG WTF scattered about the human psychodrama that seem to point to something larger and weirder, something more deeply tattooed into the collective subconscious, but which we're simply unable to understand at this glitchy phase of human evolution. That sort of stuff makes my eyelashes curl. In a good way.
One of these items flitted over the newswires recently, a story about a mysterious phenomenon plaguing a small town somewhere you've never traveled, gladly beyond any experience. It's a tiny English village called Woodland, in Durham County, where not 300 English humblefolk live, many of them reporting the same issue, the same confounding woe, and nearly each and every one going just a little bit insane because of it.
The townspeople are complaining about headaches, fatigue, lack of sleep. They are reporting unhappy pets, unsettled dreams, a slight but palpable freaking of the hell out. (More than a few are also immensely annoyed by all the media attention aimed their humble way right now, but never mind that now).
It's all due to a strange, deep vibration, a town-wide hum akin to the throb of a car engine; it occurs every night, all night, waking the locals, rattling their bedframes, vibrating their mattresses and throbbing their bones. And not in the good way.
This odd mystery is known as the Hum (capital H for creepy effect, thank you) and it's been going on for months. The locals do not know what it is. They do not know why it is. Also, not everyone can hear it. But most of them can. Which is neither here nor there, unless it is.
There are no factories or government facilities nearby. There is no rumbly train station 10 miles just over there, no giant Wal-Mart distribution center, quietly churning up the bones of five million Chinese sweatshop laborers deep in the dank basements of its massive and ruthless heart. It's just the humble little town, same as it ever was. Except for the throb.
"In certain areas of the house you can hear it more loudly. It is definitely from outside, it's in the air, all around, very faint," said one Marylin Grech, 57, a retired store detective. "It vibrates through the house. Sometimes we'll be in bed and it vibrates right through our bed, like a throbbing."
"And not in a good way," she unfortunately did not add.
Thing is, the Hum is far from an isolated incident. It has happened before, in other towns in various parts of the world including Australia, New Zealand and the US, over the last 40 years. It happened most famously in the '70s in Bristol, where a thousand people went mildly nuts because of it. So famous is the Hum that it was even mentioned in a storyline on "The X-Files" way back in the 1920s or whatever, so you know it must be cool.
Everyone thinks they know what the Hum must be. Surely it's a water system. Surely it's some sort of mining operation nearby. Surely it's the government's sinister HAARP experiment, or some other blandly evil plot to disrupt the ionic sonosphere and disable the vibrational codification matrix of the sublingual preconscious plane. I mean, duh.
Following its initial report on this most pressing matter, The Telegraph newspaper went so far as to send a cheeky reporter and cheeky video dude to investigate further and perhaps catch the Hum in action. Of course, nothing could be heard by either mate, because that's just the nature of cheeky British media. "Ho hum," they reported, mildly amusingly.
Still, the Hum persists. For now. It could very well have something to do with the abandoned mineshafts nearby. It could very well be 10 billion red army ants marching to fight the black army ants across town every night, beating tiny little war drums. But nothing really explains all the weirdly similar incidents around the globe. You'd think someone would have found a good answer by now. Scully, maybe. No luck.
Here's a fun aspect: If you read the comments to the Telegraph story — hell, if you scan a few of the comments people posted on my Facebook page, for that matter — you will discover numerous people complaining of the exact same infuriating Hum, in their own towns, their own midnight dreamgasms, their own throbbing heads. Turns out the Hum is sort of oddly universal. Hmmm. Or rather, hum.
It is possible it's a form of mass hysteria, the power of suggestion, a "hear it once and you can convince yourself you're hearing it always" sort of thing, like a mosquito's midnight whine, or perhaps Justin Beiber. Or it could be the mind tricking you, amplifying the silence to a deafening roar. It's also possible you should not care in the slightest about any of this because you've got better things to care about, like work and porn and sunshine. Off you go, humming a merry tune.
Me, I'm leaning into the weird little fire, and laughing. I'm going toward the slippery and the strange, because that's where the juice is. It's always possible such phenomena are easily answerable, something simple and clean and a tiny bit stupid. Often that's true. Sometimes it's not.
We think we know so much. For every answer and breakthrough, a hundred more questions unpeel and spin off into the ether, beckoning us to follow. Maybe the Hum is just the Earth itself, doing what it's always done, vibrating low and deep, singing its timeless tune, occasionally reaching a pitch baffled bipeds can barely hear. Maybe it's the shift of the planet itself, the poles calmly realigning for the giant 2012 metaconscious whoopjamboree. Maybe the great goddess left her vibrator running. Again.
Do you think you know what the Hum is? Do you have a tantalizing theory? You are probably wrong. Just like everyone else. Isn't that fantastic?______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 13, 2011 22:23:43 GMT 12
From SFGate.comPlease protect the innocent conjugal sex fruitBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 13, 2011Don't have sex. Gays are evil. Repress your urges. Close your legs. Quit asking questions.
Jesus loves Coors Light and large-caliber handguns. Iraq is packed like a Bieber concert with squealing nuclear warheads aimed straight at the Utah public school system. The homosexual agenda is alive and very, very real, and it wants to indoctrinate your children, steal your semen and organize your underwear drawer far, far too perfectly. Also, God is judging you. Right. This. Second.
Ahh, simpler times. Yes? You know? Back when? Not so many years ago, when we were laughing about a whole kookball buffet of socio-pathetic phenomena like abstinence education, fundamentalist zealots waving Bibles like wiffle bats, Hummers as mutant status symbols, failed trillion-dollar wars, promise rings and purity balls, Prop 8 Mormons and gay meth-snorting megachurch pastors and maybe, just maybe, getting a nice batch of anthrax in the mail?
It all seems so innocent now, so clear and silly and simple and perky and polarizing and infuriating and loud, and it all made a weird sort of sense, in the bloodthirsty, shameful context of the times: the world's worst president, the U.S. as petulant child, the political moral compass gone haywire.
You could map reactions in the media. You could predict outcomes. You could count on a fresh right-wing atrocity, a new embarrassment every single day.
Behold! How much has changed. Here in the midpoint of the year of our collective psychosis that is 2011, we find ourselves at a truly bizarro stage of American evolution, a belching hiccup of timespace where fewer things seem to make sense, absolutely anything goes in the political arena, and no one — especially those on the right — make even the slightest effort to conceal their outright abhorrence of you, me, their own constituents, the middle class, love and sex and time, science and reason and health.
And why? That's easy. Because they don't have to care, mostly because they've found they can say anything they want and the core will still believe it, still bizarrely vote against their own best interests, in large part because the major media has lost massive traction, Wall Street owns Congress and the GOP leadership sucks the ring of Goldman Sachs at the expense of everyone and everything else, so, well, who the hell needs to pretend to care anymore?
And it's all strangely underscored by the Tea Party, which has accomplished something nearly unimaginable a mere 10 years ago; it's dumbed the conversation down even further, made it weirder and more surreal and juvenile, to a degree that the Republican cause — once a fairly lucid, straightforward platform based on fiscal conservatism tied to a simplistic reverence for social institutions (church, military, industry, marriage) — has been forced to backflip, sideswipe and eat itself alive to appease the sociopathic rabid fringe it helped create.
Upshot: While the Dems remain horribly wimpy but stable, the GOP is now certifiably insane, has no boundaries of protocol or tact, lacks all reasonable center. From manic squirrelmonkeys like Michele Bachmann to Sarah Palin to Newt, it's getting downright impossible to even track the astonishing decay in the quality and content of the public debate. Even brilliant satirists like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher almost can't keep up, the material writes itself, the WTF? moments coming hot and fast and completely disorienting.
Really, how do you mock someone who not only mangles something as historically simplistic as Paul Revere, but whose own panicky followers will then go on Wikipedia to try and literally re-write history to reflect her mindlessness? How do you justify a "viable" creationist candidate for president suggesting that there's a secret movement afoot to create a "one world" currency, that Obama wants to put people into camps, that Sharia law is coming to burka your wife, or whose demented little husband Marcus runs a clinic that works to "cure" gays via guilt and prayer?
How do we justify that the current president of the United States, easily one of the most articulate and highly educated, brilliant minds in the nation, is forced by frenzied airheads to post his full birth certificate online, just to shut them up? How do you argue with a blind GOP constituency that refuses point blank to increase taxes on owners of private jets (see video clip below), on the billionaire corporations who pay, as a percentage, far less than those selfsame constituents — which is to say, on guys who make $35,000 a year and can't afford health care for their kids?Answer: You can't. You just cringe and sigh and keep on dancing. But lo, the dance is getting weird.
Did you hear how the world's top climate scientists are now making a collective, concerted effort to provide official materials that counter the shrill global warming deniers? They actually have to spend time on this. They must form groups, hold colloquia, publish papers. It's a bit like all lagomorphologist PhDs getting together to convince spasmodic five-year-olds that the Easter bunny doesn't actually exist. An excellent use of time, really.
At least one constant remains: the frightened Christians. There's this wonderful new document, a peculiar pledge of sorts, put out by a tremulous, Iowa-based cluster of paranoids you've never heard of, called The Family Leader. "The Marriage Vow" is notable because it was just signed by Bachmann herself, and therefore you know it must contain some of the finest language of abject senselessness in the public sphere, to a degree you think it must be a viral joke, a gag, The Onion going off on another GHB bender. It is not.
The Marriage Vow is real. And it says, in part, that we as a people must vow to protect the "innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy" (note: not orgasms). We must stop Sharia law from coming to our shopping malls. We should know that black families were better off during slavery, because gosh, at least both parents were around. Every effort must be made to increase Americans' procreative powers, halt "quickie divorces," protect women from porn (sorry Violet), and stop the gays from ruining, well, everything.
Of course, it makes a special effort to lump in homosexuality and the enjoyment of porn with sex trafficking, infidelity, bestiality, fisting, cannibalism, foot fetishism and injecting lawn fertilizer straight into your penis for kicks. I might be exaggerating. But only barely.
I confess I am not much of a historian. Was there ever another time like this? A more bizarrely unstable, hallucinogenic period in American political and social life? Perhaps back when U.S. senators wore powdered wigs and sat on long, hard benches, hurled stiff profanities at one another, spit into buckets, wrote with quills, beat children in public, stared at the moon and thought it was made of candle wax and cheese curdles and then went into the back room to sexually abuse each other with feather dusters and branding irons?
Perhaps some divine matrix is at play. Perhaps there's a powerful inverse relationship between the utter chaos and frightening insanity of modern sociopolitical life right now, and the imminent, grand shifts occurring in deeper human consciousness. I like to think so. Sort of a canary in the coalmine situation, writ large and funky and hyperspiritual. The crazier and more desperate they get, the more it's a sign something's about to give.
After all, as the saying goes, it's always weirdest before the dawn. Right? Isn't it? Please?______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jul 23, 2011 16:19:13 GMT 12
From SFGate.comGet over here and touch me nowBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 20, 2011Here's what I think. I think human touch is surely the most sublime sensation/activity ever invented by ecstatically drunken gods as they gently and ever so briefly encased us in these slippery filthy gorgeous mortal fleshforms.
I think human touch, done with calm intention and conscious ease, is a total life-affirming blessing of the most spiritually orgasmic kind, healing and restorative and achingly transcendent in quiet but thoroughly kaleidoscopic ways.
Furthermore, I think said touch is fundamental to basic survival in this tragicomic, dirt-bound realm and if we go too long without it we will die as without water or whisky or trees. Which is also why I fully believe its general paucity in modern life is perhaps the single most unfortunate side effect of the Facebook age.
I realize I might be unusual. I realize I might be odd to offer it up in this way. I deeply acknowledge, furthermore, that there are a thousand notable exceptions. But barring the relative handful of those who don't understand personal space, who perhaps "overtouch," whose intentions are a bit slimy or hostile, I would hereby like to be lightly and lovingly touched at some point by everyone I ever know, meet, connect with, always and forever, quite nearly without exception, and that very much means you.
I feel like I'm on the right path with this. But you never know.
Here's the fascinating thing: The science on the subject has barely been, you know, touched upon. Research is only now coming to soft light that reveals, say, a gentle touch on the arm is not only sorta nice — it can, in fact, change your entire body chemistry. Your viewpoint. Your world.
Such a touch can release tension. Relax muscles. Stop weeping. Start weeping. Evoke worlds. Invite transcendence. Calm rage. Soften the heart. Open the breath. Touch can alter temperaments and attitudes in an instant. Babies love it. So do romantics, dogs, deities and saints, gurus and wizened masters. An attentive touch carefully placed can pretty much calm everyone the f*ck down.
Thus spake a recent, fascinating little study: "Library users who are touched while registering, rate the library and its personnel more favorably than the non-touched; diners are more satisfied and give larger tips when waiting staff touch them casually; people touched by a stranger are more willing to perform a mundane favor; and women touched by a man on the arm are more willing to share their phone number or agree to a dance."
So sayeth, elsewhere, one Dacher Keltner, psychologist from UC Berkeley and specialist in the study of touch: "The science is showing that when I receive a very friendly form of touch, it releases oxytocin, a neuropeptide that promotes trust. It shuts down stress-related parts of the brain like the amygdala, and the locus coeruleus, it activates a branch of the nervous system we study called the vagus nerve, which is involved in connection. And by the way, the vagus nerve controls your immune system in part as well."
That's the budding science. In yoga philosophy, we might say it's all connected to sliding into proper alignment with your true essence, your core, the deeper self not made up of the ego's stories and cultural constructs and insidious mind games.
We might also say: This deeper, essential you is most certainly not touch averse, because that's impossible. After all, like craves like. Energy craves energy. Prana (life force) flows to prana and if you have no idea what I'm talking about just imagine your being is made of water and so is everyone else's and what happens when one water droplet contacts another? Right: An effortless, nearly instantaneous collapsing into a wondrous megadroplet of wow because holy hell, what else is there? Why else are we made of energy and electricity and sly consciousness if not to jack in to the collective interpersonal mainframe all the damn time? But maybe that's just me.
Perhaps you do not wish to hear it. Perhaps it makes you wince and roll your eyes. Perhaps you know far too many people for whom just about any kind of touch feels not just wrong, but slightly terrifying. Perhaps you are one of these people yourself. They are not difficult to find. We are a victim culture, we are a low-touch society; also, abuse is tragically prevalent.
It might be one of the saddest and most distressing signs of our time that so many are frightened of or even openly repulsed by simple touch, so many who think soft, everyday human contact should be reserved only for close family or the most intimate of connections, and even then it's a little invasive and creepy if you don't ask permission or have a few drinks first to numb it all out and make sure no one's trying to steal your kidney.
I think: how dour life must be for those who would not hesitate to report their boss or barista if said person touched them on the arm without formal authorization, legal disclaimer or safe word. How difficult the days for those who associate even the lightest friendly (or even slightly awkward, weird or undesirable) touch with abuse or sexual harassment, who shudder when brushing against a stranger, who shrink down and small themselves to avoid all forms of sweat and oil and germs, damage and pain and oh my God get that thing away from me who do you think you are I'm taking a shower and calling my therapist.
Religion is zero help. Conservatism, fear of Other, endless media lies about predation, abduction, contagion, molestation all feed the anti-touch beast. So ugly has it become that even Catholic priests are no longer allowed to touch children without another adult in the room. So horrible is our indoctrination that when we hear of anyone touching a child many of us instantly flash to "child molester". How sad that, as a culture, touch has come to mean violated boundaries, inappropriateness, provocation, crossing some sort of line no one remembers drawing.
Which is partly why, at least here in the Bay Area, there are entire workshops dedicated exclusively to touch, on re-learning how to gently stroke your friend or lover into fits of sighs and ease and whoa, to the point you can actually transform your entire relationship, all without saying a word. I can't quite decide if the existence of such classes is absolutely wonderful or sort of tragic. You're right: It's both.
It is perhaps the greatest myth, the most brutal lie ever foisted upon mankind: that of separation. You are there and I am here and "god" is way, way over there and no matter how hard we try and strive, we'll never fully meet. We can never fully connect. Just the way it is.
What horse-sh*t. In fact, it's exactly the other way around. We are already deeply connected, de facto and a priori. We are of the same divine source material. Disconnection, fracturing and disassociation is a learned affliction. A disease. Chronic, epidemic, global.
But maybe with the right touch, at the right time, in the right moment, the pandemic can dissolve in an instant. Touch me just that way, and suddenly everything makes sense. All is right with the world. We are one.
Really, what else is there? (What is less or more than a touch?)______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 1, 2011 17:41:17 GMT 12
From SFGate.comCome taste my scimitar-horned oryxBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, July 27, 2011There are many things I don't understand. Star Wars Lego fetishism. Justin Bieber perfume. Dancing squid lunches in Japan (see YouTube clip below). Quantum entanglement. Utah.By extension, there exist innumerable subcultures and little eccentric freakshow cultworlds scattered about the American landscape around which my mind simply cannot gain traction, about which my emotional wiring and better reasoning slam into a wall of OMG WTF as my heart slips into a dark pit of you've got to be effing kidding me.
For example. Behold this fine piece of spam email I just received, sent by something called Safari Club International. Instantly did my expert journalistic eye deduce, from its alarmist wording, macho "weathered" fonts and multiple exclamation points that the group deals in those charming, "exclusive" Texas hunting clubs for rich white hunters and the high-powered rifles who love them.
How I got on their mailing list, I may never know. Isn't life grand?
Have you heard of these places? Giant ranches where giant men pay giant fees to be driven in luxury SUVs out onto huge swaths of privately owned property in order to shoot carefully bred and relatively tame exotic and/or endangered creatures who never had a chance in the first place? And then they kneel down next to them and grin like caveman as they pose for revolting photos atop a very, very dead bison, or leopard, or gazelle — a creature who was, minutes prior, pretty much just standing there waiting to be shot because, well, it's a goddamn game preserve, after all. What are they going to do, run?
Am I revealing a certain bias here? A general attitude toward what I freely deem is a heartless and gut-wrenching pseudo sport? I might be OK with that. Also, I might be completely wrong. But more on that in a moment.
"Alert to Everyone Interested in Protecting the Outdoors Who Own Herds of Scimitar-Horned Oryx, Dama Gazelle, Addax!"
...yelled the strange and grammatically strained email, in perhaps one of the most narrowly framed openings I've ever read, as I thought, "Really? How many of these people are there? How many Americans can claim herds of scimitar-horned oryx as their very own? Five? Fifty? Enough to justify an entire email alert aimed solely at them (and, for some reason, me), which is both bizarre and disorienting and a little bit creepy?" Apparently.
The email goes on to say something about how the Fish & Wildlife Department is changing the rules about the "take" of these animals, which I later learned meant the feds will soon require permits to kill said exotics (there is currently no limit), and thus will likely lower the overall number of creatures hunters are allowed to gun down for trophies and furniture and the aforementioned gut-wrenching Facebook photos that make your heart spit out its coffee in disgust.
It's all of a very familiar tone, angle, attitude. Much like the Tea Party, like religious fundamentalists, like various militias — but also, of course, like hardcore lefty enviro groups, too — the only reason any of these clubs ever sends out such "alerts" is when the government (or the gays, or women, or science) is trying to restrict some sort of "liberty" or take away some right they have to kill whatever they want with whatever firearm they like because, well, mankind rules and nature drools. Or rather, bleeds. Sighs. Sits patiently nearby for the imminent end of the world. Something like that.
But wait. Not so fast, self-righteous liberal columnist. Here is where I admit my own wild hypocrisy, my own complicit nature.
Here is where I humbly remind myself that not only do I eat meat, I do so quite adoringly. Grass-fed and organic and sustainable as possible, reverentially and deeply gratefully and in small and reasonable amounts? Yes. But whatever. Still: meat.
Also, love leather. Also, big fan of places like Skulls Unlimited, the Bone Room in Berkeley, Paxton Gate in the Mission, those tastefully macabre places that deal in dried and preserved, cool and hipsteriffic animal bits and parts, penis bones and teeth. Where do I think they get their specimens, from vegan angels who put the animals to sleep with kisses and lullabies? Hell, I almost bought a gorgeous, sacred gemsbok skull at Skulls Unlimited just last year. Some of their stock comes from those selfsame "sporting" game preserves. It's all connected, no?
As for the hunting clubs themselves, well, they like to argue they are primarily conservationists, doing more to restore and sustain the stocks of these endangered/extinct animals than anyone else and without these ranchers we'd have almost no oryx anyway so why shouldn't they be allowed to kill as many as they like for sport?
Yes, it's more than a bit ridiculous. And total bullsh*t. Sort of like arguing hey, they're my kids. Why shouldn't I be allowed to sell a few into slavery?
It's a tricky and slippery little world, my loves. To me, it is, of course, all about what sort of integrity and honor you bring to your life, your heart, your body, your dinner table.
Something about the way these hunting clubs design their ethos, their worldview, all about proving some sort of dominion, validating superiority, inflating the macho ego at the expense and mockery of nature, it all makes the spirit recoil and the blood turn cold. Deep reverence doesn't seem to be a part of it. Love for the animals themselves beyond potential rich man's trophy, nowhere to be found.
Or to put it more into direct yogic terms, the energy is all wrong. The intention feels twisted and unconnected to anything larger, more conscious. More to the point: To express abject joy while kneeling atop a bloody corpse of a stunning two-ton animal shot by a precision $1,000 rifle as if some noble, impressive accomplishment has been achieved, this way pathos and ignorance lies. After all, reverence and bliss rarely know how to dance with violence and blood. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I am.
Maybe it's all just another example of the ongoing conundrum wrapped in a parable disguised as a quandary. How to hold ethical balance in a world of pleasures and pain, meat and murder, egomania and love, capitalism and desire? Can it be done? Where are your lines?
Put another way: If mankind's progress is measured in how we treat the planet and its divine inhabitants, in how we hold space and revere our food, our bodies and each other, well, do we not seem to be moving, at very best, in fits and lurches and long, low groans? Can we even be sure, sometimes, that we're moving forward at all?______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 3, 2011 22:32:28 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe gay agenda will see you nowBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 03, 2011Patrick Plain, left, and Seong Man Hong, both of New York, celebrate after getting married at the City Clerk's office in New York Sunday, July 24, 2011. Hundreds of gay couples were expected to marry in New York and across the Empire State on the first day of same-sex marriage ceremonies. — Photo: Jason DeCrow/Associated Press.Phyllis Siegel, 77, right, kisses her wife Connie Kopelov, 85, after exchanging vows at the Manhattan City Clerk's office with New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn in attendance, back left, on the first day New York State's Marriage Equality Act goes into effect, on Sunday, July 24, 2011. — Photo: Michael Appleton/Associated Press.So, how about it? Has it all come clear? Has the true horror been made absolutely and irrefutably real? Because know this for certain: There is no going back.
Behold, beautiful and confused children of Earth: The smoke has cleared, the glitter bomb has settled and finally, after years of deliciously imaginary back-room strategizing and decades — if not centuries — of secretly brainwashing millions of innocent children, punk-rock girls and repressed '50s dads ...
After panicking the religious right, inducing nightmares in the Pope and shamelessly luring countless congresspersons and church pastors, mayors and deeply shamed NFL players into the shimmery rainbow fold, the world-famous "homosexual agenda" has, once and for all, screamed itself alive.
Have you noticed? Have you read and felt and pored through, stifled a sniff and perhaps even let a few tears flow? Have you yet had your heart cracked open, just a little? Or maybe a lot?
I dare you. I dare you right now.
Especially you, over there on the convulsive and ever so baffled religious right. Especially you, bleak and loveless Mormon Church elders. Especially you from the aged, encrusted generations who are right now looking around in buzzing terror and not sure what to make of it all. Especially you up there on the pulpit, waving your arms and wielding your Bible like it was a dull switchblade, wailing that the fabric is coming undone and nothing will ever be the same again.
You know what, pastor? You are absolutely goddamn right. You know what else? Thank sweet Jesus for that. I mean, really.
To make it even easier to understand, to produce irrefutable evidence of the agenda's ultimate goals, to further confound (or perhaps finally enlighten?) those who still think homosexuality is a choice, who think it the devil's work and believe it morally repugnant, well, we have pictures. Lots and lots of pictures, all from New York, all from the first days of legal gay marriage in that fine state.
And lo, they are enough to shake you to the core, reignite the soul, reaffirm your simplest faith in this rough beast known as humanity. They are enough, if you look just right and open a bit wider, to make you forget the woes of the world and be reassured that the simplest truths remain, as ever, the most profound.
Or let's put it this way: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a photo of two people aswim in true and respected love is worth just about every book, poem and bible ever written in this messy and godsmacked little realm we call home.
Don't believe me? Click the gallery I've included in this column, or any other floating around the Web right now, and be amazed, refreshed, ignited, heartspun and soulwarmed, over and over again, as many times as you like, as many times as it takes. I've looked through all these pictures a dozen times, and take my word for it, it never fails.Under a rainbow chuppah, Michele Trester, center left, and Ann Macklin, holding the couple's 9 month old daughter, share a moment as they are married by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum wth Congregation Beit Simchat Torah Synagogue, in New York, partially seen at left, Sunday July 24, 2011 in a park across the street from the Office of the City Clerk in New York. The couple, who live in the Queens borough of New York, have been together for 10 years. Macklin's mother, Ellen Macklin, is seen at right. — Photo: Tina Fineberg/Associated Press.David Hind, left, and Craig Francisco dance their first dance after getting married on a cruise hosted by Marriage Equality New York in New York, Sunday, July 24, 2011. New York became the sixth and largest state to recognize same-sex weddings in a closestate Senate vote on June 24 after strong lobbying by Cuomo and advocates. The first gay marriages in New York were performed just after midnight and continued through the day at municipal offices that opened for special weekend hours. — Photo: Seth Wenig/Associated Press.Here it is, over and over, one stunning photo after another, an endless parade of people simply bursting at the seams with love and human potential, radiating and terrified and madly aglow with the possibility of it all.
Here they are, in an incredible array of shapes and sizes, ages and hair colors, backgrounds and melodramas, each and every one finally able, with the state's full blessing, to consecrate their vows. Hey, just like you! Imagine.
The good news is, there is almost no way your Republican dad, your deeply homophobic brother, your Puritanical grandma, or pretty much anyone with a functioning and extant heart can see these pictures and not suddenly be drained of all protest, all resistance, all ridiculous fear of what "the homosexual agenda" is really all about. It is, after all, about just one thing, and one thing only. And it always has been.
Perhaps it's too much to ask. Perhaps you believe there are many who will simply never be convinced. The fear is too deep, the religious indoctrination too harshly stamped, the heart too cold and locked down.
It's very possible. When I first posted a link to some of these photos in Twitter and on my Facebook page, amidst all the positive comments, the cheers and tears from all normal and vibrant souls, even then did a few scowls sneak through, some who were still disgusted at the thought, sickened by the images, grossed out by the very existence of gay people in the way only violently uptight, over-sheltered straight people can be.
Some reacted to the funny way some of the couples were dressed. Some hated how silly and identical some couples were to one another. Some were childishly indignant that gays should still not be allowed to be seen kissing in public.
To which you can too easily reply, Have you seen straight people lately? Bridezillas? Bridalplasty? The abject nightmare of deeply freaky straight people getting married in strip clubs, in full furry costume, at Star Wars conventions, as Klingons and Smurfs and Star Trek characters, at drunken monster truck rallies, Krispy Kreme donut shops, Guns 'R Us? I've been to many beautiful weddings in my life. But know this now: No one can top straight people when it comes to gross and ridiculous couplings.
But I won't say that. Because that would be tacky, and also beside the point. Besides, the protests have been relatively minor, tame. Note how there hasn't been a single GOP candidate who has dared to slam the New York weddings. The Prop 8-loving Mormons are nowhere to be found. Redneck dudes in baseball hats have retreated to the man cave en masse to sulk and watch gay porn in silent resentment.
Do you think they sense the writing on the wall? Do you think they intuit which way history is leaning? Which state will be next (note: all of them, eventually)? Or do you think they finally understood the true nature of the terrifying "homosexual agenda?"
Maybe, just maybe, they finally saw it, in blazing full color, in a devastatingly simple photo gallery somewhere, and finally had their fears laid to rest, their ideologies reconfigured, their hearts blasted open. Hey, it's possible.
Love can do that, you know. It always has.• To view a photograph gallery at SFGate containing 27 images of happy homo couples, click here!______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/03/notes080311.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 11, 2011 16:39:49 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHello, I find you perfectly toxicBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 10, 2011You spend some time with a person. You go out for a drink, you go to a ballgame, you get matching tattoos, you buy a timeshare in Vegas, you suck at the same giant blue margarita from the same giant pink straw, you howl at the moon and dance 'til dawn and have three unruly kids and regret only one of them.
You take that person to dinner, loan him or her a copy of "Jitterbug Perfume," you hang out after work, you talk about the thrum and pulse of time, sex, dim sum, the universe. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is what comes next. You exit said person's company and you go home, sit down, take a breath, gaze inward and check the gauges. You ask yourself: How do I feel?
Are you energized or depleted? Drained and bleary or a little bit amped and pulsing in the core, ready for more? If you are more tired, you have been poisoned. If you are energized, you have been nourished. Simple, no?
This is the test. This is how you know. This is how you can tell if someone is toxic or replenishing to you and your life and it's failsafe and bulletproof and you should hereby use it the rest of your life.
This is also the test I just discovered — and paraphrased more or less verbatim — via one Milton Glaser, who is a famous graphic designer, by way of a talk he gave in London about 10 years ago, in which he cites Fritz Perls, who is a famous gestalt therapist, who was probably citing something/someone else. Glaser mentions this fine test in his talk called "Ten Things I Have Learned", which is a great read all the way through, and when you are done here I highly suggest you go there read the rest because, well, what the hell else are you gonna do, work?
Is it not some form of perfect magic, this test? Is it not some lucid insight so simple and profound that it cannot possibly be true because, well, because we have a hard time believing things can be true if they're so simple and profound?
Doesn't matter. It's easily one of the most invaluable tests on earth, and yet one we overlook or ignore freely, thoughtlessly, to our detriment, every single day. Is someone toxic or nourishing? Is someone good for you or sort of not? How do you know? And what the hell do you do about it when you find out? Do you marry them? Eat them alive? Scream and run like they were a new Adam Sandler movie and you had a shred of taste and nuanced intelligence? Well, yes.
Maybe it's not so simple in practice. For one thing, most people, it appears, are not at all attuned to the tone or quality of their inner energy states. They have no idea which way the needle is pointing — or if they do, they have no idea why.
This is because the world is loud, chaotic and distracting as a porn star bumble bee car crash on Neptune, and we love nothing more than to let ourselves get caught up in all manner of shiny mental bullsh*t so we don't have to try and figure out anything way down deep, where the meanings are.
This is also because tuning in to such energies requires that most difficult and challenging thing of all: practice. And time. And patience. Followed by the hardest part of all: If you find someone is actually sort've toxic or nourishing, well, you might have to do something about it. Make a change. Lose friends. Gain wisdom. Invite a new way. Flip it all around. Get ugly. Get beautiful. Risk. Dare. Try. Try again. Dive in. Dive out. Usurp. Bring forth. I know, right? Goddamn terrifying.
So we avoid. We complicate, make things messier, hang out in comfy numbness, let the mind get in the way and start asking all manner of unnecessary and stupid questions. What sort of energy are you speaking of? What do you mean depleted? Do you mean use this test with everyone? All the time?
After all, how can you tell? A great night out dancing, talking, eye contacting, dropping ecstasy and going bowling, having sweat-drenched sex, or any number of fine and blissful shared activities can leave you breathless and wiped out and going oh my God oh my God oh my God before crashing hard and sleeping for three days in a fine state of yum and yes and wow.
Which is, you know, wonderful. Supercharged. Indelible, in fact.
But that's not the energy we are speaking of. The test is something deeper, more subtle, more about spiritual energy, the flicker in the core, some sort of click of alignment with what the hell you're really all about.
Of course, this test, it's nothing really new. In yoga philosophy we have a nearly identical modality, a way of observing the world around you and measuring its effect, something we might call energy leaking, and it's not just about people but about anything at all — places, ideas, work, shoes, food, attitudes, situations in your life that either nourish at the core or tend to suck the life force right outta you and cause you to feel endlessly shaky and disoriented and sighing heavily all the damn time, reaching for the bottle or the pill, the reality show or the foodstuff, the doubt or the fear or the endless incessant whining that makes everyone shun you like sunlight shuns Michele Bachmann.
Perhaps this is why the simplest test of all can be the most insanely difficult. Maybe this is why we do not apply it more freely and regularly.
Because if you really employ the test every single day and actually dare to follow through with what you find, well, you can lose family. You can lose (what you thought were) close friends. You can shed dull ideologies, religions, gods. You can leave unhealthy marriages, your job, the way you thought it was all supposed to be. You can gain new and terrifying insights and worldviews that run completely counter to what you thought, felt, loved before.
Some people will think you have gone partially insane. They are partially correct. But, you know, in a good way. Simple, no?______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/10/notes081011.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 17, 2011 21:54:53 GMT 12
From SFGate.comI wanna be your exorcistBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 17, 2011Attention college grads! Economy driving you to despair? Prospects feeling hopeless? Job market endlessly bleak? Ready to move back in with your exhausted parents and play WoW 18 hours a day and lose yourself in Facebook and not have sex for five years?
Fear not, young seeker. Fresh job opportunities abound, if you know where to look.
Which is to say, down. Look way, way down.
Behold, a recent announcement from none other than that ancient employer of scowl and misery, nervous altar boy and indefatigable oppression better known as... the Vatican.
That's right, the Vatican is hiring! Don't laugh. Business is solid (2000 years and counting! In Roman numerals! Spitefully!), the pay is barely reasonable and the benefits… well, there are no benefits. Except for the misery and oppression. Hey, it beats Facebook! Well, not really. It beats the GOP! Then again, so does a root canal in 1882. It beats a beating! There you go.
But never mind that now. Because here is the Vatican, exclaiming that, thanks to the damnable Internet making all manner of dark n' sticky information far too easily available to you, the susceptible and perverted masses who don't know your Jesus from your Pauly D from your hydra-headed hellbeast who wants to suck your soul through your fingernails, it is now easier than ever for young people to discover that classic go-to monster of lazy dark lords everywhere: Satanism.
Satanism! No, not the kind espoused by Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann, who will cut you for looking at her funny. Not what Rick "Rainfall for Jesus" Perry surely believes, as he holds giant prayer vigils amidst thousands of fellow zealots in dusty Texas stadiums, hoping for rainfall to nourish the crops, wash away the gays and drown out damnable health care reform designed to help the greedy middle class, and immigrants, and the poor, and women and children and minorities and people who care about, you know, stuff.
This is the Vatican. Which means this is old school Satanism: blood rituals, badass pentagrams, spitting nails, speaking in tongues, hissing in gibberish and they don't mean Sarah Palin-style gibberish that makes four-year-olds wince, but more like Charlie Sheen-style gibberish, which is more like malformed Latin mixed with, say, bad sexting.
Apparently, according to the Vatican's Internet experts (I know. But really, don't laugh) Satanism abounds online, giggles like a dirty schoolgirl, is flourishing like Dan Savage at a fisting how-to convention. Translation – and here's where you might want to open a whole new section in your LinkedIn profile – the Vatican needs exorcists.
You read that right. Satanism is, apparently, hot like Bieber and exorcists are, apparently, in short supply and the Pope is getting increasingly nervous, not only because fewer humans are falling for the church's archaic wiles anymore, but also surely due to the dramatic upswing in all manner of Beelzebub-ish behavior, like gay sex, straight sex, paganism, yoga, salted chocolates, open-throated love, vagina cupcakes (see YouTube video clip below) and of course, regrettable Harry Potter tattoos.In fact, so dangerous has the threat of Satanism and the concomitant need for new exorcists become, the Vatican recently held a major international conference, gathering together serious-minded priests and confused psychologists alike to discuss what to do when Billy starts torturing the family hamster with goat-skull incantations and little Tiffany starts slipping the blood of Moloch into mom's vente latte.
"[Chief Vatican exorcist] Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron, scream, dribble and slobber, utter blasphemies and have to be physically restrained." And if you've been to a Tea Party rally, PETA fundraiser or NASCAR afterparty, you know exactly what he means.
Let us not be too flip. Let us not dismiss out of hand. For one thing, the church is being relatively reasonable about the whole thing, in part by finally updating its basic exorcism rulebook for the first time in about 500 years (still waiting on the women priests thing, alas), to include thoughtful bits about how new exorcists need to be very careful to discern between "real" demon possession and your everyday Prozac-ready madness.
What's more, in some ways, the Vatican's concern is based in a completely legitimate issue, insofar as fragile, impressionable young people who come from lousy families and even worse schools are often indeed in danger of succumbing to all manner of maniac cultist, Mormon polygamist, or inane conspiracy theory about, say, how President Obama wants to round up all the old Republicans and send them to camps (Hi, Mrs. Bachmann!)
What's more, demon possession isn't exactly the sole purview of the Catholic church. Shamanism and even ancient Hindu sects, among others, fully believe dark beings can latch on to the human animal like a blurry rainbow dolphin on a sorority girl's sacrum, to such a degree that some massive purgative ritual is called for to suck that imp right out and send it back to South Carolina from whence it came.
All well and good and fascinating in the way only old-fashioned demon possession can be. But for the church's wonderful gall in this matter, we must reserve a special sort of acclaim, a special room in the trophy hall all its own.
Really, is it not the height of wicked and delicious irony? Is it not sort of easy to point out that, while some people are very much susceptible to various vile and/or oppressive demons, cults and sects, the church, with its deeply embedded homophobia, sexual dread, misogyny, fondness for pedophilia and cover-up, falls squarely into that exact category? More directly: Doesn't the church often represent just the sort of savagely manipulative demon it seeks to expunge? Why, of course it does.
But maybe that's taking things too far. Meanwhile, the search for new exorcists continues. Still interested? Ready to apply? To join the ranks of officially sanctioned demon-hurlers, one must endure many trials. You must, of course, become a Catholic priest (sorry ladies). You must get permission from your bishop. You must join the church's very exclusive exorcist's club, which reportedly has the creepiest secret handshake in the history of mankind.
You must be of sound mind, humble and strong and free of all demonic thoughts and motivations, temptations and perversions (sorry most all of humanity). You must be trained in psychotherapy. You must not be freaked out by glass-laden vomit. You must possess supernatural tendencies and cognitions. These are the fundamentals. Pad your resume now.
But above all, as with any organized religion, political dogma or overly hardwired superstition, to work for the Catholic church in any way whatsoever, you must completely rid yourself of one key characteristic. You must purge yourself of all sense of irony. Even the demons know: that sly stuff is fatal.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/17/notes081711.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 24, 2011 21:48:44 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHow to eat a dead terroristBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 24, 2011So deeply mesmerized was I by Nicholas Schmidle's chillingly detailed, wildly intense New Yorker piece describing nearly every gut-wrenching decision, stratagem and gunshot during the Navy SEAL's momentous takedown of Osama bin Laden on that fateful night in Abbottabad back in May, that I almost missed it.
It was a thick and spectacularly complicated operation, as you might expect, packed with uncountable meetings, precarious intelligence gatherings, endless planning and huge sums of invisible money no one really knows how to measure.
Schmidle's piece is page after page of fascinating behind-the-scenes melodrama, from the construction of an exact replica of Osama's compound in the Nevada desert to rehearsing the mission dozens of times, from what kind of guys populate the world of the SEALs to what it means to crash a Black Hawk chopper in the middle of the night in a small, volatile Pakistani city due to unexpected heat backlash, and not wake the neighbors.
But amidst all the hardcore politics, grisly details and hugely cinematic spectacle, one vital detail swung by almost without notice like a thief in night-vision goggles; it was a potent flash of insight so devastating and telling I re-read the passage a few extra times to really let it soak in, to induce a deeply felt shudder and sigh.
It was this: We do this sort of thing all the time.
That is to say, the clandestine ops, the specially outfitted helicopters, the brutally efficient night raids, the elite teams of heavily armed military pros fast-roping into barbed-wire compounds and blasting open barricaded doors with C-4, the shooting of women and various suspects on the stairs as bearded Muslim men peek out from behind corners and then rush forth with AK-47s to shoot at soldiers before being gunned down in bloody heaps — on and on it goes, year after year and age after age, and endless horror movie with no grand finale. Schmidle writes:
“In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that ‘this was not one of three missions. This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.’ He likened the routine of evening raids to ‘mowing the lawn’.”
We learn of a harsh and strained world full of precise, practiced brutality, huge numbers of unreported, sanctioned murders and merciless emotional coldness, the taking out of "targets" that seem to replicate and replace themselves like a demonic video game army. And it's happening all the time, right now, as you read this very sentence.
Of course, to anyone who pays any sort of attention, such activity is not even remotely unusual. Most of us have contemplated both extremes of America's military operations, from stunning Osama-like takedowns to horrendous torture practices in Iraq, from American soldiers given a hero's welcome in troubled lands to acts of ignoble savagery, pain and even rape (hi, Blackwater).
The information is certainly out there. Nasty blogs abound that attempt to get the word out that America is enacting this or that horror on this or that innocent civilian, prisoner, population. The Iraq operation alone killed untold thousands of innocent civilians, women and children. General outrage quotient of the majority of Americans? Zero.
The truth remains: To the mainstream, America is all flag waving patriotism and God-sanctioned moral righteousness, and any blood or misery or harrowing "Hurt Locker"-like suffering is reserved for some faraway place most can't locate on a map. Americans remain, along with a few almost equally well-pampered allies, perhaps the most coddled, blindfolded, happily ignorant populace on earth.
And then comes the kicker: This is how we like it.
For the most part, it's an ignorance most of us gleefully accept, encourage, even happily pay for, both in taxpayer cash and in wary, informed understanding. "Here," we seem to say, "take all this money, use our billions to pay for the most advanced, bloated military in the world; just promise to never, ever tell me the full details or (especially) the moral ambiguity of what we're doing. Deal?"
Deal.
We know, but we do not want to know. I recently read of yet another grass-roots movement to legalize the publication of "real" war photos from America's various global engagements — all the flag-draped coffins, body bags, grisly disfigurements, bloody severed heads, charred children, and so on — the idea being that, if Americans really saw what was happening, we'd never stand for it and the entire complexion of our global military stance would change.
Ah, such delightful naiveté. Politicians and the military alike know: We the people simply don't want it. Few really want to see how the sausage is made. Even with a mission as just and powerful as the takedown of Osama, unless you're really into military porn, the accompanying details of casual brutality and endless violence, political misprision and relentless destruction are almost too much to take.
So it goes and same as it ever was. But what happens when people start denying facts en masse? What happens when larger and larger numbers of Americans band together in their willful ignorance, going beyond mere foreign policy and the military to start championing a lack of education, demonizing books and learning and science? What happens, in other words, when collective ignorance gets institutionalized and becomes a dangerous cultural force?
Why, you get fundamentalist Christianity. You get the Bush administration. You get the Tea Party. You get Palin and Bachmann and Rick Perry. And lo, the nation shudders and fractures even more painfully.
This much we know for sure: Like attracts like, dark attracts dark, and as goes the upper echelons of our national leadership, so the nation responds, softens and calms or curdles and blackens.
In this way, the good news is, we are no longer a childish, war-mad, rogue cowboy nation. From the careful Iraq withdrawal to the takedown of Osama to the imminent end to our major involvement in Afghanistan, Obama has set a far more thoughtful, even-handed tone. There is zero "shock and awe," no "Mission accomplished," zero pseudo-cowboy BS that so scarred the nation's soul.
Still, even under the finest and most honorable of peace-seeking presidents, brutality remains, violence is a de facto and necessary evil across the globe, torture continues, ethics remain questionable. As justifiable and deeply satisfying as the takedown of Osama was, the associated horrors of war remain disturbing at the core.
Put it this way: For anyone who values peace and moral progress, who resists using our military as pre-emptive attack force, who cares about fostering humane sensibility in the national dialogue, with Obama, this is about as good as it gets.
The sad news is, it's still not very good at all.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/24/notes082411.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Aug 31, 2011 23:26:09 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYou smell like the devil's gumdropsBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, August 31, 2011Her name was Robyn and she was delectably 21 and I was all of 15 and she was my first real girlfriend, more or less, gaspingly beautiful with her perfectly feathered hair and tight Britannia jeans and her simply awesome, '80-something silver Trans Am — not to mention she was of legal drinking age, had her own studio apartment downtown and made my parents very, very nervous indeed.
Needless to say, I loved her madly.
But that's not what I remember most. What I remember most, of course, is her smell.
Oh my God, her smell. She smelled like the devil's gumdrops, like orchids melting on the moon, like a million fluffy bunnies pureéd in a blender and poured over your creamiest teenage daydream. It was a thick, powdery ultra-floral kind of scent, with a little bit of... I have no idea what the hell it was. Mist? Ocean? Hummingbird spit?
Doesn't matter. Of course what Robyn really smelled like was a completely toxic, chemically blasted all-over body spray, a violently synthetic hellmix of cancer-causing agents made by Johnson & Johnson or Proctor & Gamble or perhaps Dow Chemical. She wore the stuff nearly every day and it had a ridiculous shopping mall name like White Sail or Wind Song or some such cheeseball glop invented deep in the bowels of Product Marketing.
Doesn't matter. Wave a hot blowtorch of the stuff in front of me right now, decades later, and I guarantee I fall into a hot reverential swoon, a quivering mass of burgeoning manhood, teen love incarnate. The scent was all over her, all the time. In her car. Her clothes. Her apartment. I swam in it like a happy fish in warm little tank. I drank whatever she secreted like the desert drinks rain. It was the finest 1.5 months of my entire pre-adult life.
Isn't it the way? Who doesn't know that scent is the most powerful of memory triggers, a white-hot grenade of psychoemotional wonder, the one sense above all others that can send us into tailspins of joy or reverie, misery and despair, ecstasy or confusion? Who hasn't walked in to their grandparent's apartment, sat in a new car, strolled Burning Man at dusk and had their mind, heart, soul hammer out a dizzying tattoo of time and space?
And then there's sex. Who hasn't heard of the concomitant notion of pheromones, those mythical, omnipowerful sex-monkey secretions emitted by delightful female glands that attach to scent and penetrate the soul like slippery daggers of lust, making us want to have sex right there in the movie theater, the dressing room, the first Cosmo-ready How to Drive Your Man Crazy lunch date?
Ask me years ago and I probably would've sworn a huge part of my teen lovelust for Robyn was indeed powerfully pheromonal, the purest form of raw human chemistry, something deeply feral and totally unstoppable. Or so I thought.
But now we know better. Now we know that, well, pheromones don't actually exist. At least, not for humans.
It's true. As this fine Slate article points out, the whole pheromone thing was sort of invented back in the '60s, a giant marketing land rush spinning off one hugely specious little study about female rhesus monkeys and their "copulins" — "a blend of vaginal aliphatic acids, based on the monkey secretions" — i.e.; specialized chemicals that were supposedly irresistible to males, the sexual holy grail.
You know what happens next. Perfumers and product marketers latched on and went insane, and to this very day you can buy pheromone soaps, pheromone lotions and pheromone toothpaste and each one promises you so much hot, quivering action you won't be able to stand up the next day. You know, just like church.
Of course, like SPF 100, like 1000 thread-count bed sheets, like church, it's all kinds of advertising bullsh*t. Turns out the pheromone myth has been debunked a few times over, and — as you might expect from something so deliciously powerful — scent and attraction are indeed just a little more complicated than that.
Maybe "complicated" is the wrong word. Maybe mysterious. Primitive. Prelapsarian. Something we will never quite understand, and never really should. Isn't that great?
Nevertheless, we are hungry and desperate to know. We are aching to believe there are powerful chthonic forces at play just beneath the surface of things, flirting with memory and licking at the tailbone of desire, hot little scents pouring forth from our skin that make someone across the room suddenly look up from their iPad and feel overwhelmingly compelled to stand up and walk over and ask you to please remove your pants.
And it's at least partially true. Well, sort of. The science of scent as it attaches to memory is nascent at best. Hell, my brilliant neuroscientist friend Dr. Melina down at Stanford tells me there's a large part of the brain, called the parietal lobe, that lights up like crazy when memory is most active and sparking. She says this region appears to be essential, dazzling, is performing some very, very important function indeed.
Problem is, whoops, you can pretty much remove the parietal entirely and memory still seems to work just fine. What the hell is the lobe doing? Making pie? Dancing on the head of a pin? They really have no idea.
What's more, as Dr. M tells me, there are only two parts of the brain that grow new cells: the hippocampus (the memory bits) and the olfactory cortex (the scent parts). Why is this the case? Who the hell knows?
But give someone a verbal cue to retrieve some sort of memory — as in, please remember that fine meal you had on that first date in France with your wife, versus wafting the scent of duck foie gras in a Petit Syrah reduction under their nose — and you can guess which part of the brain will win that memory fight. Every time.
Which leads us to... well, who knows what. Magic. God. Aromatherapy. Mysticism. Tapping into the id and letting the creative bits roam unfettered. Aromatherapy alone — that luscious form of alternative medicine that uses essential oils and herbal aromatics to treat various ailments of body and spirit — has evolved into a fascinating and beautiful little art form (and yes, also cheesy New Age marketing gimmick). Does science back it up? Of course not. Does anyone really care? Not really, no.
And why? Well, simply put, because scent drives us wild, taps into poetic realms we simply cannot, will not ever fully understand. And that's the way we like it.
As the Slate piece mentions, maybe the fact that pheromones are bogus means we can actually manipulate smell and our reaction to it more or less at will, that we can play with scent like music, that memory and identity — especially as they relate to sex and desire — are less hardwired and more weird and fluxive and impossible to pin down with anything resembling absolute certainty. You know, just like love.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/31/notes083111.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 9, 2011 2:13:30 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHappy fun cloud will kill you nowBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 07, 2011Have you seen the future? Have you felt its hot, Wi-Fi enabled breath on your nervous and sweaty neck? Don't worry: You will.
The future, in case you didn't already know, is all about the cloud. The cloud is, of course, that nebulous, supernatural high-tech storage space purportedly floating just above your head but which is really housed in an enormous server farm somewhere in Ohio, which will soon contain every possible bit of personal data about you — your lifestyle, eating habits, music collection, photos, blood type, banking and drug preferences, hairstyle and sneeze fetishes, demographics about your kids, your dog, your therapist and your imaginary friend ... everything.
Have you heard about the cloud? I bet you have. The cloud is the new oxygen. The cloud is the new Bieber. The cloud is the Next Supreme Step toward a gloriously sanitized uber-paradise where all worries vanish, all wires come unplugged and the cackling world government manipulates the whole thing very, very carefully.
Apple, for one, is all over the cloud. And if Apple is in on it, you know it must be magnificent.
But Apple is far from alone. Let us watch in mystified awe as the Ford Motor Company unveils a rather stunning new concept car called the Evos, perhaps one of the most gorgeous designs ever spit forth by an American car company that's not directly aping the Germans, and then proceed to stab the lovely little thing to death with one of the most terrifying visions of how this car interacts with the cloud (view YouTube video clip) — and you, and the future — that you will ever see prior to the 2012 apocalypse.Watch and learn, awesome Blade Runner citizen of the future. We are told, in a swell Austrian dominatrix voiceover, that the Evos will communicate intimately via the cloud with ... your house. Together they will calibrate your entire world: set room temperatures, arrange wake-up calls, coordinate work schedules, choose playlists, turn on the coffeemaker, fluff pillows, run you a shower, smack the kids around for forgetting to brush their teeth for two full minutes. You name it, the car and the house do it together. But that's just the beginning.
The all-electric Evos will charge itself via a giant pad on the garage floor. The car will (of course) map out a perfect route to work (wait, the future isn't all telecommuting? Never mind), tell you your colleague is running late, massage your prostate, read you your emails (emails? Still?), check your heart rate and plan your vacation even as it satisfies your wife's tingling needs by running her favorite vibration pattern on her Hitachi because in the future, real human contact is, of course, totally gross.
And it all happens by way of the cloud. Which is, naturally, jacked straight into your brain by way of some sort of RFID chip implanted in your sub-cortex when you were a fetus, and now the world is one giant, pre-programmed wonderland of perfect first-world intercommunication (in the future, poor people don't exist, which is... thoughtful) that isn't the slightest bit disturbing or insulting to all that is feral and dirty and good.
Which brings us around to the main point at last. For does not all this cloud talk sound vaguely familiar? Does it not all point to ideas surrounding, say, impossibly perfect sci-fi utopias, Popular Mechanics magazine covers, geek psychobabble, all the way up to the grand dystopian idea known as the Singularity, that twinkling, apocalyptic moment when our top futurists say artificial intelligence will finally surpass human brainpower, humanity will eat itself alive and the world becomes one giant iPad 1,000? Of course it does.
Does it not, furthermore, remind us that we are nothing if not the balls-out most ridiculous and megalomaniacal species this side of the GOP inbreeding with the cast of "Jersey Shore"? You bet it does.
Let us now check in on a few untamed little facts. Did you know a recent study says we've only successfully recorded about 14 percent of all species on earth? That 86 percent remain completely unknown and, given the current, accelerated rates of extinction (thanks, humanity!) many never will be known, not ever?
Read that again: Entire species are being birthed and will die before we have a chance to catch a glimpse, before we're allowed a tiny taste of their secrets.
Did you know we've only seen, much less mapped, about three percent of the ocean floor, perhaps the most mysterious and uncanny landscape we can comprehend? How about the fact that we've glanced at about one millionth of one percent of the galaxy? That we still can't parse whale song? That we don't even know which dimension we actually inhabit?
This much we know for sure: We know but a fraction of what the hell we think we know, and to presume we have the slightest grasp on how it all works and how we can sync it all together in some sort of nifty jetpack zip-zip fingerswipe touchscreen wonderland is to proffer enough chutzpah to make God laugh.
Is it not a fantastic thing? Nearly every high-tech vision of the future is, by definition, rather embarrassingly lopsided, deformed, stripped of messy, feral nature. Futurists always manage to skip the eternal wildcard known as living organisms, those things that cannot, will not ever be controllable, understandable, reasonable. I think Don DeLillo nailed it, way back in "White Noise," when he wrote: "This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."
Ah, but perhaps we're being a little hard on the poor pseudo-visionaries at Ford. Perhaps it's far too much to ask of any futurist anywhere to try and conjure a remotely accurate vision of tomorrow that contains all the appropriate free radicals: nature, sex, love, emotion, god, pain, fallibility, dancing, self destruction, stillness, the smell of your lover in the morning, the taste of a margarita on the beach at sunset.
Let's just say it outright: There will never be a Singularity, there will never be seamless tech integration and, mark my not-so-humble words, the nifty Ford Evos will never play your favorite song at the perfect volume at the exact moment you want to hear it, not only because that's just entirely stupid, but because we are awesomely fickle, slippery creatures, because organic systems are fluid and fluxive and can never be fully controlled or contained in a single vision, because to attempt same is to beg nature to explode all over us in a grand and glorious middle finger of, who the hell do you think you are?
Which is, when you think about it, actually very good news indeed.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 14, 2011 21:46:03 GMT 12
From SFGate.comObama, get your Dick (Cheney) onBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 14, 2011Let me just say it outright: I still love Obama. Still believe him to be the most articulate, thoughtful, integrity rich president in my lifetime, still prouder'n'a bucket of kerosene at Burning Man whenever he stands at the podium at just about any international affair and, you know, represents. Shhh, it's OK. You know you feel the same way, too.
Despite all the beat-downs of late, the man still has mojo galore. The jobs speech alone reminded anyone within earshot that Obama knows his impassioned rhetoric, can still rally and inspire and hey gosh really might not be messing around after all. Bin Laden? Gaddafi? Women's rights? DODT? Iraq drawdown? New START? Haiti quake relief? The Cairo speech? Nobody better, baby.
But oh smack me with the stick of gnarled reality, the disgusting debt deal. The nasty thing with the EPA air quality regulations and (probably, sadly) the hideous Keystone XL pipeline. The appalling compromises at every turn; bloated cronies in Wall Street, failed bank reform, feeble environmental and education policy, innumerable humiliations and roadblocks when facing down a hateful and spittle-flecked GOP.
It's downright embarrassing; the guy can't even get a meeting when he likes, much less stop the GOP from falling into tantrum in the cereal aisle or the Tea Party from repeatedly stabbing the country in the face with a fork.
Bottom line: Despite all his power and formidable intelligence, Obama seems to have no real capacity to deal with, you know, morons.
And it's largely his own fault. The president, I believe, still wants history to tag him as the peacemaker, the grand unifier, the great Middle Way. Despite all gruesome evidence to the contrary — not to mention his own toxic poll numbers — he still seems to think he can bridge the violent disparities in Congress, reach consensus, simultaneously serve as the lighthouse to the Dem's lost ship and the truckload of Zoloft to the GOP's unchecked madness.
No surprise, then, that Obama often looks to be in a state of stunned disbelief that no matter how hard he tries, no matter how many compromises and concessions he makes to the malignant right, the wingnut contingent still blocks him at every turn. And then spits in his face. And bashes him in the kneecaps. And then hits itself in the head with a brick. And then cackles.
To say this is the most shamelessly weird, unscrupulous right wing in modern history doesn't seem to adequately capture how far Boehner & Co are willing to go to undermine and sabotage Obama's presidency. They will insult and demean their own constituents, yank insurance from children, hold the world economy hostage, cost the nation hundreds of billions, hobble the FAA, endanger lives, eat their young. And it's not even an election year yet.
Which is why I believe Obama needs to make a change. He needs to bring in someone who will get the dirty work done, who is utterly fearless and without shame, qualms, reasonable moral compass when it comes to dealing with dingbat creationists and dinkbucket "mama grizzlies," juvenile science deniers and tiny-brained freshman congressmen with IQs that match their shoe sizes.
To put it bluntly: Obama needs a Dick.
Cheney, that is. One to call his very own.
No, not the Dick Cheney, mind you, not the face-ripping, war-loving, torture-worshipping, Halliburton-sneering monster of ignominy who led us to at least one illegal war and, if he could have, would have launched a dozen more. Not the guy who singlehandedly lowered the bar for America's moral and humanitarian positions more than just about any bloodthirsty backdoor crony in recent history.
No, not that Dick Cheney, but rather, a Dick Cheney, a truly badass, hardcore strongman of a very unique liberal bent: super-intelligent, deadly effective, vicious as a pit viper, someone with zero qualms about smacking the GOP around like dime store bullies with one hand while yanking the puerile Tea Party up by its Underoos and hanging them from the flagpole with the other.
Of course, a progressive Dick Cheney would have a slightly different tang than the original. The liberal Dick would actually care about, you know, people. He would truly believe in things, like single payer health care, gay rights, science, women, books, education, the planet, air.
Of course, what he (or she) wouldn't have is a twitch of remorse when it came time to, say, casually mention to Anderson Cooper that Michelle Bachmann once drunk-dialed him in the middle if the night searching for her suitcase full of oxytocin, or that he once saw Rick Perry stroke a goat at the county fair just a little. Too. Intimately.
What, too juvenile? Too lowbrow? Have you heard Bachmann's position on gays? Perry speak about global warming or Jesus? Mitt Romney on anything? I might be OK with a little nasty gamesmanship in the name of, you know, basic sanity.
And then, when the president is in his default mode of conciliatory magnanimity, there's a major progressive policy item on the table requiring some ruthless backroom arm twisting, and the GOP is still full of terrified, homeschooled toddlers who think the planet was invented by angry grandpa and Jesus rode the back of dinosaurs? That's when it happens. That's when the Punisher comes in.
The deal gets done. The progressives lurch the country forward, awkwardly, but permanently. The Tea Party, squirming and squealing up there on the flagpole, won't even know what happened, much less who posted the blurry photo of them sucking Jaeger shots off Rand Paul's third nipple in Cabo.
Alas, I'm not quite versed enough in the players in the DC beltway to suggest who this awesome backroom savior should be. Rahm Emanuel gave a flash of hope, but as Chief of Staff didn't carry a big enough stick and was gone at the first offer of real power. Sweet ol' Joe Biden, a savvy player indeed, just doesn't have that killer Cheney instinct, a taste for idiot blood. Who else you got?
Let me be clear. I am no fan of flagrant misprision. I normally do not appreciate such uncultured mudslinging, in lowering the overall vibration at such a scale. As the saying goes, there is no benefit in wrestling with pigs. You get dirty, and the pigs enjoy it.
But this wouldn't really be wrestling. This would be "Big Game Hunter 4," in reverse. Because this is 2011. The game is not what it once was. We are burdened by the most humiliating, gridlocked congress, induced by the least sane Republican party, in generations. There is no more time for calm reasoning. There is no more hope for rational conciliation.
Yes, we all hope and pray that when Obama wins a second term, he'll finally step up and go all scorched Earth against the GOP and make us proud. The signs still exist that he's got it in him. Let us pray.
But barring that, well, at this point in our mangled history, we really shouldn't be afraid to invite in a truly progressive Dick. Go ahead, say it like you mean it.______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/09/14/notes091411.DTL&ao=all
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 28, 2011 21:40:48 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHow to make a creationist weepBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 21, 2011Do you want to know the real reason Barack Obama is going to win the 2012 election? The big, grinning hunk of overwhelming evidence that has little to do with the not-very-terrific job he's doing and not nearly enough to do with the fact that the man has actually accomplished quite a lot, despite being savaged and hobbled and compromised at nearly every turn?
The reason, as most comparable explanations are, is sort of awesome in its pureform power. The most interesting part is that it has almost nothing to do with Obama at all and everything to do with the fact that his opponents are, largely and comfortably, insane.
What, too harsh? Too mean? Not even close, honeybomb.
Let me back up for a second. Because here I am, reading over this swell little science item that whipped through the newswires recently, all about how some paleoecologists just discovered some stunning prehistoric feathers locked in a tiny hunk of amber they calculate to be about, oh, 70 million years old.
It's a fascinating little finding, really, one of thousands like it happening all the time in the science world; it tells of life long past, how protofeathers later evolved into actual feathers, how flight first came to be. Wonderful.
Then it strikes me. There was that magic word, "evolved." Oh my sweet goddess, to many Americans, these scientists are totally lying. They are part of some mass liberal conspiracy begun hundreds if not thousands of years ago, specifically designed to ruin homeschooled kids' minds and taint the blood of virgins and demean angry Almighty God.
Is it not true? Is this not the belief of many of the nation's current crop of top GOP presidential candidates? You bet it is.
See Rick Perry over there? He doesn't really believe in evolution. Says "It's a theory that's out there" which "has some gaps in it," which is not even remotely true, but he's been far too busy killing inmates in his home state and rallying evangelical homophobes to, you know, care much for book learnin'.
Perry "knows" only one thing. We came from God. That's it. He's just not really sure what happened next. Probably some combination of confused monkeys and flying iguanas and, like, oil or something. Poor Rick. The world must be so weird.
Over there, it's Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann, who, aside from being a grade-A nutball conspiracy theorist of terrifically paranoid dimensions, is an avowed creationist, believing all existence began less than 10,000 years ago, during which man and dinosaurs co-existed, prehistoric cave paintings never happened and the planets are nothing but God's little sack of marbles.
Bachmann believes in teaching creationism in schools. She says we should "put all the science on the table and let kids decide," as if creationism has the slightest whiff of fact behind it, as if there was some sort of valid debate happening anywhere but in her own madly short-circuited brain, as if kids were somehow savvier than, say, Richard Dawkins. Isn't she adorable? Keep her away from your pets.
Mitt Romney! He's not so bad, right? Romney actually believes evolution is fact, more or less. He believes God created everything and then, well, then Joseph Smith found it all etched on some shiny plates under a rock one day while out evading his seventeen petulant wives. Yes! Who needs creationism when you've got a whole religion to "translate" on a whim?
Awesome. Let's sum up! To the majority of the "serious" GOP presidential hopefuls — and let's toss Sarah "I Really Love the NBA" Palin in there for kicks and adulterous, coke-snortin' giggles — our little 70-million-year-old golden nugget, well, it does not actually exist in current spacetime.
It's a fake. A sham. It cannot be real. Carbon dating is a gimmick. The Ph.D scientists in question are frauds and swindlers as are the major university programs and departments to which they belong. And the media? Oh, honey. The media is clearly the devil himself for reporting such bogus findings as "fact."
Do you see? It all provides a deliriously high level of raging ignorance against which, I firmly believe, the nation will calmly recoil when it comes time to weigh the presidential options at the polling place.
Put the other way: No matter what you think of Obama's performance to date, the man's intelligence is undeniable, his education formidable, his values regarding science and truth unshakable. Among this gaggle of science-denying misfits, he's the only real adult in the room.
And me, I believe in intuition. I believe in a certain collective wisdom, a deep instinct among the hoi polloi when it comes time to pull the lever. I still believe most Americans, if they actually vote, will sense at some deep level just how destructive it would be to basic human intelligence to have a single one of these mental infants at the helm.
Of course, I said the same thing about Bush versus Gore. And Kerry. Whoops. But now the chasm is, unbelievably, even wider.
We must be careful. We must not deride these creationist nutballs too nonchalantly. We must remember that a mere 20 years ago the vast majority of the nation, upwards of 93 percent of us, knew evolution to be a fact, and only seven percent walked around smacking themselves in the face with coloring books and wondering when Jesus was going to return with lollipops and hugs.
And now? Bad news, America. According to a new survey, in a scant two decades, the number of Americans "uncertain" about evolution has tripled. What's worse, roughly third of the nation believe evolution to be "absolutely false." Only Turkey ranks lower in such basic smarts. Thanks, megachurches!
But is this sad report really irrefutable evidence that we're on a collision course with a great wall of dumb and the gas pedal is nailed to the floor and the passengers are all snorting oxycontin and chortling at Rush Limbaugh as we hurl toward the great Walmart in the sky? I'm not so sure.
For here is our not-so-big secret. (And here, for that matter, is how to make a creationist weep. I know! Finally!)
Tell them advanced civilizations do not ever really intellectually degenerate. Tell them that, developmentally speaking, the human brain is not really designed to unfurl and regress, to suddenly erase complex, deeply learned wisdom. It is not our nature to understand, say, electromagnetic waveform and photosynthesis and suddenly revert to thinking it's all magic fairies and gnome spit.
You can say we will never return to slavery. Our hospitals will never again lop off gangrenous limbs with rusty hacksaws and no anesthesia. Never again will we believe the earth is flat, that we are the center of the universe, that trepanning will release evil spirits from your skull. And sorry, but we will never again believe that everything was created when angry bearded grandpa suddenly snapped his fingers and belched.
You can thusly summarize: If the arc of history bends toward justice, it also lurches, hiccups and stumbles toward basic progressive intelligence. Barring some sort of environmental cataclysm and starting all over, there really is no going back.
As the tears begin to flow, you can offer solace: "It's OK," you can smile, "we just evolved that way."______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Sept 28, 2011 21:42:24 GMT 12
From SFGate.com10,000 secrets for a perfect marriageBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, September 28, 2011Keep a few secrets. Try separate beds. Have kids. Don't have kids. Have kids later. Get the hell away from each other for awhile, regularly, to make the heart grow fonder and the reunion sex hotter and the smell, taste, feel of each other that much fresher.
Oh, sex? Yes, definitely have lots of sex. Make it interesting, variegated, experimental even. Mix it up. Shake it out. Slap it new. Emotionally, too. Spiritually.
Don't do the same old thing. Don't assume. Don't predict. This is a big one. Huge. Do you want to guarantee the imminent soul death of just about any relationship, marriage, long-term love connection? Do this: Assume you know the person, through and through. Assume you have them all figured out, all likes and dislikes, quirks and habits, positions and reactions, all tied up neat in a little box. Allow no room to change, evolve, surprise. Build lots of rules and walls and limitations. Watch your hearts wither and die.
All just a handful of suggestions, they say, on how to make marriage, love, relationship work, last, survive more than a blip and a hiccup. But is it true? Is there possibly any sort of formula? Can there ever really be? Of course they're can't. But that won't stop us from trying. Over and over again. Forever.
Here's a new book, Iris Krasnow's "The Secret Lives of Wives" (attention cover designers: enough with the damn woman-holding-a-shiny-red-apple thing already). The book is one longtime wife interviewing 200 other longtime wives to get their "secrets" to wifely success, which, not having read the book, I'm just going to guess runs a rough gamut of possible variations numbering, oh, let's say about 200.
How can it be any other way? How can it not be unique to every individual wife or couple? Sure, there are some patterns, a few tips, some basic trends and advice (see first paragraph). But beyond that, well, you'll have better luck at the craps table in Reno. Blindfolded.
I certainly have very few answers. Hell, I've been in my share of serious, long-term relationships, but I have yet to enter the grand institution of marriage myself. This makes me, at my age and orientation, a bit of an anomaly. A freak, even. I can only look askance, ponder, write sweetly intrusive columns, stare curiously as if through large plate glass window.
Nevertheless, advice abounds. My wonderful father, married 53 years and still madly in love with my mother, only ever really gave me one heartfelt piece of advice when selecting a mate. He told me that if she makes you laugh, if you have fun together, if you'd rather be with her than, say, up in Alaska fishing with the boys, hell, all the rest is gravy. She's the one. Go forth and procreate.
Procreate! Reminds me of my young (late 20s) friend in Texas who has an equally young boyfriend with whom she is, much to her surprise given her wild 'n wanton, sex-crazed, never-settle-down ways, madly in love. The catch? Her boy has already had a vasectomy. Before hitting 30. Seems he apparently knew early on he never wanted kids, got snipped, all done. Just like that.
My friend, being an awesomely open-minded pervert, finds this enormously sexy. "Vasectomies are hot," she told me, before pointing out what a major relief it was to not have to carry the burden of birth control all the time (she's fairly positive she doesn't want kids either), not to mention all the various new sexual freedoms his decision allowed. Ah. Good point.
But wait, there's more. For my friend also has two young lovers (did I mention she was open-minded?), both even younger, around 25. Guess what? That's right: two more vasectomies. Yes, all three guys, all under 30, all snipped. Just a crazy coincidence, she says. Just sort of startling and amazing and weird, I say.
I was all, WTF? Did their decision not savagely reduce their dating pool by a factor of, say, a billion? Is male virility, according to just about every study on the subject, not an essential draw to the female of the species? Isn't a young guy who's been snipped pretty much an immediate deal breaker to the vast majority of the female population? Well, yes. But that's not who these guys want anyway.
But never mind that now. Because here's another thing: Living in San Francisco, it's required by law that I know couples who are way into polyamory, who swear that the key to making their central love relationship work is, well, to have a whole tasty variety of others hovering around to keep things interesting. After all, to assume one person/relationship can satisfy all needs and desires is as silly as assuming you'll only ever like one flavor of lubricant.
My poly friends join an even wider tribe I know who are deeply smitten with another book from last year called "Sex at Dawn", a "renegade" anthropological/zoological bestseller all about how silly little homo sapiens (that's you) are not actually designed for monogamy, that marriage is a massively flawed social construct, a byproduct of the agrarian age, the church, your confused grandmother. We're cavemen, really. Monkeys. We like to commune, share, screw anything that moves. (I might be oversimplifying a little. But not much).
And marriage for love? An even newer invention, really, and one that can't possibly be sustained. After all, love is fickle and volatile and blind and awesome and gorgeous and flames across the psychoemotional sky like a drunken comet. Depending on it for stability and security is like depending on the ocean for calm, clear sailing. Right? Isn't it?
I could go on. And so could you. Infinite examples. What about romance? Soul mates? Alcoholism? Adultery? Divorce? Communication skills? Counseling? God? Vibrators? Technology? Time?
Time! Jesus. Here's a wonderful and mystifying article from New York magazine, about older parents having very young kids, about women having babies late into their 40s, even 50. It's unsettling. It's beautiful. It brings into question just how malleable life and love really are. Here are the 60-something parents of two pre-teen girls. Here is a new mother, breastfeeding at 48. You have a problem with that? Why?
Who's to say how it's supposed to go? Western medicine? Culture? The Bible? Ha. The Bible doesn't know true love from hole in the confessional wall. That disastrous little book would have you marry your 14-year-old sister and then stone her to death for menstruating without permission in front of your brother's shoe. Or something.
Lord! What a rambling, unfocused column. Matches the topic at hand, no? So much for zeroing in on the making marriage work thing. How cute of me to try. How cute of anyone to try. After all, look at all the factors. Variations. Cultures. Generations. Desires. Personalities. Dysfunctions. Technologies.
Technologies! Yes, Facebook. Yes, Timelines. Yes, social networking and Grindr and sexting, hookups and porn and online dating. What about them? Are Facebook et al not changing the nature of love and, by extension, marriage? Well, no. Not even a little bit. Are they changing how love gets its game on? Absolutely. A little. For now.
But the truth remains: We know about as much about successful long-term love as we do what the hell makes up deep space, the ocean floor, the perfect Martini.
Which is immediately followed by the divine kicker: a million books, articles, hookups, orgasms, love songs, breakups songs, romantic comedies, sumptuous weddings, tortured divorces, delayed babies and premature vasectomies later, this is the exact same amount as we will ever know. Really, what's not to love?______________________________________ Mark Morford's latest book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is available at Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.
Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is MarkMorford.com.
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, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/09/28/notes092811.DTL&ao=all
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