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Bush lifts drilling ban, oil
execs leer, nation cringes, Obama
sighs
Everybody get bloody: Why
do we so love images of brutal misery and
pain?
Going Obama-less: How I
managed to miss the most celebrated event in recent
U.S. history
I Twitter for
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Are you a Net neophyte? Very, very late bloomer?
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Do you still prefer to get your news and
information from disposable printed matter made
from poor ol' trees because you believe all
high-tech gizmos are a total soul-sucking waste of
time except maybe for your George Foreman grill and
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all those Web 2.0 companies with geeky-sounding
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'friends' flock together like flies to cow eyelids
and everyone's young and cute and funny and
jacked-in to the cultural zeitgeist, but you have
no idea what it all means or why you're supposed to
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charts and bar graphs and color-coded thingamabobs.
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Here's just a few of the recent Facebook/Twitter
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"Jen got up at 7am to do laundry only to find
the machine is busted and then she broke a nail
hitting it with her hand. God my life sukks!!"
"Tina is STILL looking for love but finding it
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"Jay is eating Thai food with Morgan and
watching a 'Mad Men' marathon. So gud!"
"LouAnn is sad."
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Still not convinced? Still claim you really
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you're lying.
Of course you care. Look, all the kids are doing
it. Hell, even old folks and parents are on
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it in my Facebook news feed. Whoa.
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Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/18/notes021809.DTL&nl=fix
Going Obama-less: How I
managed to miss the most celebrated event in recent
U.S. history
I was hoping for a piercingly unique
perspective.
I was hoping the fact that my first sticky and
sweltering and reasonably exotic vacation in years
just so happened to coincide with the most
thrilling American presidential inauguration in my
lifetime would mean I'd almost surely return with
some sort of singular, coolly global take on the
glorious Obama transition, some quirky or slightly
unorthodox or at least decidedly non-American view
on the whole magnificent, heartrending switchflip.
I mean, how could I not?
It would be, I assumed, a perspective that would
help underscore just how giddy and thrilled and
intensely relieved the entire planet was that The
World's Worst was finally back to shoveling manure
and monosyllabism at his dishwater ranch, while
someone who spoke in complete sentences and
actually enjoyed dancing with intellectual
complexity was finally back in charge, and hence
the U.S. could finally breathe again and the toxin
had finally receded and is it not still the most
remarkable thing ever?
In fact, I figured there'd simple be no escaping
it, this tremendous event I cared so much about,
the buzz and the headlines and the deluge. The
inauguration was so historic, so electric, that the
Obamafied jolt would be felt from the Mission to
Macedonia, from Budapest to Bolivia, from Slovenia
to Scandinavia to right where I was getting my
bones blasted clean somewhere on the sticky and
sweltering edge of southern India.
Didn't happen. Not even a little. Oh, there's no
doubt the news, the headlines were out there all
right, buzzing like swarms of happy malarial
mosquitoes hovering over the slums of Mumbai, with
hundreds of millions of locals paying close
attention indeed. But for some incredible and
curious reason, I missed it all completely. And, as
it turn out, intentionally. What a thing.
Or maybe it's not all that curious. Maybe it has
far more to do, at least in part, with that
splendid reminder I'd long forgotten, the same fine
memento that every regular globe-trotter already
knows, and which, to my mind, remains perhaps the
most astonishing facet of long-distance travel.
It is, of course, just how terribly easy it can
be, how powerful and jarring, to entirely detach,
to unplug, to get so far around the world and spend
enough time in a place full of unfamiliar smells
and fantastically spiced foods and inexplicable
toilet design that you very easily upend your
entire normal worldview. I repeat: What a
thing.
Admittedly, I spent most of my stint in India in
the lush funk of Goa, an odd, hybrid coastal state
that's one big dose of Indian culture intersliced
with all sorts of wanton flavors, most
significantly Portuguese (the original colonizers
of the region until India yanked it back by force
in the '60s), but also hits of Mexico, Vietnam,
Bali, Costa Rica, Hawaii, you name the sweltering
muggy funky gorgeous sprawling overgrown
ever-decaying hippie-injected tropical locale, Goa
has a big hookah hit of it.
But remote or no, I still had options. I still
could've found a way to jack in. After all, the
news media is my lifeblood. It is how I'm wired,
has drenched my life for well over a decade, is the
thing that oft makes my id go. And of course, this
inauguration was the culminating event, the climax,
the merciful end to more than eight years of
unbearable suffering and socio-spiritual decay for
millions of us bipeds who cared a whit for the
health of the planet, the soul, the mind, various
flora and fauna.
Put another way, no one was more ready, more
excited, more grateful to be rid of Bush and to
celebrate the grand Obama changeover than yours
truly. The inauguration was the perfect-pitch
moment I'd been waiting for, quite literally, for
years. How could I possibly miss it?
And then, it happened. Or rather, didn't. On the
big day, with the entire world riveted to our
country's most stupendous ceremony in a millennia,
there I was, seeking out no Net café, no
international newspaper, no local bar with a fuzzy
TV tuned to CNN where I would sit, transfixed and
elated, ice-cold Kingfisher in hand, cheering and
sighing and smiling from 9,000 miles away, as the
world changed for the better.
In fact, I was nowhere near it. With the
exception of a few expats talking it up and a few
happy foreigners congratulating me on how my nation
was finally regaining a large dose of international
respect, I just simply... let it all go.
I do recall feeling some vague tug, some notion
that I should really be doing something, writing
and processing and whispering profound somethings
into my MacBook Pro, eager to spend 50 rupees to
jack in to the local Net and file a gleeful,
celebratory column on the whole shebang from the
far-flung mists of the land of Shiva. But that was
about as far as it went.
What to make of it? What the hell happened?
Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe it's not merely
about cheerfully unplugging from the grid when you
can. Maybe it's not just about having your
worldview flipped around by the glories of distant
travel. It is, I think, far more about the
unconscious. All about how you go about your day
and your life thinking you know what you're all
about, thinking you know how it all is gonna go
down, that you know exactly what you do and what
you need in any given situation.
But of course, the good news is, you know
nothing of the sort.
Turns out, what I really needed most this trip,
was to pay no attention at all. What my mind, my
heart, even my body craved -- without my express
written consent, no less -- was to not wrap my mind
around any of it, to relax that mental grip I'd
been holding for so long, even at this most
stupendous juncture.
Hell, I was in India, after all. If there's one
thing I learned about that sandalwood-scented land
of pollution and poverty and teeming chaos and
stunning, thick beauty and two million gods, it's
that your normal expectations -- of self, of work,
of mental processes, of how it's all supposed to be
-- haven't the slightest chance in hell of
surviving intact. Simply put, the place openly
defies every concept of normalcy and strategy you
can possibly hold. A plan? Krishna laughs at your
cute little plan.
Which means you only really have two choices:
fight that fact and get angry and flustered and
miserable, or roll with it, let go, and smile as
you place more flowers around Ganesha's happy head.
With my sincere apologies to Obama, I'll take the
latter, any ol' divine day.
Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/01/28/notes012809.DTL&nl=fix
The XXX of life: When even
smut becomes quaint, you know times have
changed
Please note: This is a column about porn. All
sites and products mentioned herein, while quite
safe and healthy for your heart and soul, are just
incredibly, obviously NSFW. If you are foolish
enough to view them at the office, I cannot be held
responsible for any spontaneous screaming,
fainting, or firing that might occur. This means
you, Senator. Carry on.
So there I was, innocently burning precious life
hours hunting down classic, grainy screen shots
from various cheesy retro porn movies of the '70s
and '80s for possible use as charming graphical
augmentation for my upcoming book (The Daring
Spectacle, a mouthwatering column compendium and
then some, coming very soon and please join
my
mailing list
to stay abreast), when I was struck by three
curious revelations, only one of which was how
blessed and delighted I am that I get to search the
Web for retro porn from home on a crisp Sunday
morning and call it creative work.
The second was that I am now old enough and
"wise" enough and slightly alterna-curmudgeonly
enough to see these photos, to watch some of these
classic raunchy clips wonder aloud to myself, wow
and gosh and sweet Jesus with a leather riding
crop, whatever happened to that kind of fun, sexy,
enchanting porn? Where have all those good times
gone?
Whatever happened, in other words, to the
authentic tease and the thump and the titillation,
the wink and the wicked grin, wherein you knew even
the performers themselves were slightly shocked and
awed by the fact that they were getting naked and
very, very nasty in front of a video camera and by
the way oh my God would you look at all that body
hair and the natural breasts and belly flab, and
can you believe Ron Jeremy used to be young and
reasonably thin? What is he now, 80?
It's sort of startling, the change in tone and
attitude from then to now. Then again, it's also
nothing new. Being a bit of an aficionado of things
prurient and filmic, turns out what's happened to
the culture at large, to media and TV and magazines
and even politics and the economy, has struck the
porn biz equally, if not even more intensely. Or
rather, it's more accurate to say, it's the other
way around.
It's a surprisingly dependable rule: As it goes
in porn, so it goes in the culture. Porn has always
been a fascinating, illuminating arbiter and canary
of various trends and attitudes, economic and moral
and sticky.
Sometimes the smut biz leads the revolution
(CD-ROMs in every computer, online payment systems,
streaming video technology, etc.), sometimes it
follows instantly behind, providing crude but
efficient, mock-a-licious commentary ("Who's
Nailin' Palin" being the hottest porn title of
2008, right behind last year's "The Eliot Spitz-Her
Story", and so on).
You already know, thanks largely to the Net and
those damn whippersnapper kids with their crazy
iGizmos, that print newspapers are gasping for
survival and the record business is on life
support, and even the movie industry is in all
manner of terrified convulsion, as all traditional
media suffers its most spectacular upheaval since
Gutenberg dropped acid and realized a new way to
shove ink onto paper.
Did you know that the colossal porn industry is
suffering just as hard? That free smut sites like
YouPorn and Xtube and PornHub and Red Tube and (my
favorite name of all) Freud Box and roughly 8,000
others just like them are slaughtering the porn
biz's once-indestructible cash cow, the porn DVD,
leaving all SmutCos scrambling to create what my
friends over at the wondrous kink.com have already
mastered: the art of the targeted, high-quality
online fetish experience?
Like any major cultural overhaul, some of the
shift is glorious and creative and healthy
indeed -- like kink, where the performers do seem
to be genuinely enjoying themselves, at least a
little, doing it for the pleasure and the joy and
authentic dirtiness, or the new wave of amateur,
"real," home-grown delights like shotathome.com and
ishotmyself.com, et al. And some has been, shall we
say and at least as far as I'm concerned, a little
nauseating.
Professional porn, to be sure, has taken the
road less subtle. Product has become so slick,
manufactured, soulless and mechanized and
micro-niche it seems impossible to find a truly
sexy piece of professional raunch anymore. Most of
the more modern fare is all about gynecological
extremes and gross-out overkill, so much choking
and gaping and spitting it's like a boring pool
party at Caligula's condo. Not for the squeamish.
Or the sexually joyful.
Of course, I admit this is also exactly what any
grumpy old-timer would say about the flapper girls
in the '20s, or the showing a bit of wrist in the
1790s. Whatever happened to subtlety? Whatever
happened to a bit of tease and mystery? What's
wrong with a nice bit of hand-holding and a furtive
glance at the occasional exposed ankle meat? Mmm,
ankles. Taste like chicken.
Which brings up my third feebly interconnected
revelation. Turns out, no matter where you reside
on the spectrum of sly hipster perversion, no
matter how far off the mainstream grid you like to
think you frolic, there is no escaping the
curmudgeon factor of getting older. Ain't it a
bitch?
It's what strikes me whenever I see one of those
hardcore hipster dudes, the scowling Mission
District waifs and biker chicks with the four-inch
earlobe disks and the punk neck tats and the skater
tees and the raw selvage and the cute hunkered
slouch and the bagger job at Whole Foods.
I think: Just a few more years, sweetheart. I
think: Not long at all before you glance back and
see all a whole gaggle of wicked weird kids coming
up behind you and go, dammit, whatever happened to
innocent face tattoos and fanatical Wolf Parade
concerts and ironic graphic T-shirts depicting
Winnie the Pooh butchering a unicorn with a chain
saw?
Or more on point: damn kids these days, with
their crazy online homemade fetish porn and their
incessant media upheavals, their hardcore heartless
fetishes and gagging and butt plugs the size of
small Volkswagens.
Where is the nuance? Where is the subtlety?
Where are the cheesy, thumping background music and
the leg warmers and the awful editing? Where are
the even remotely authentic heat and joy and glint?
And most importantly, does it not seem mandatory
that we all watch a lot more porn, to try and learn
something important about life?
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/12/12/notes121208.DTL
Everybody get bloody: Why
do we so love images of brutal misery and pain?
I do not know you. I do not know your temperament
or your cosmic calibration or what angle of
disposition governs your very being. Not yet,
anyway.
I do not know, therefore, whether or not your
heart allows or enjoys or for some ungodly reason
really, really loves to wallow in relentless images
of human beings either bloody, exploded, weeping,
dead, limbless, drowned, terrified, on fire,
butchered or malnourished or maimed or otherwise
suffering in searing, tragic pain in every corner
of the world at all times everywhere.
Is that you? Are you salivating at the prospect
of such a cruel pageant? Do you wish at all times
to be surrounded by images of woe and distress and
heartwarming defenestration? Because if so -- and
there must be quite a lot of you, really -- have I
got a photo montage for you. A few, actually.
I stumbled on such a pageant recently. It was,
if I recall, about 800 photographs taken by
assorted shooters from the Reuters new agency, all
gathered into a little online flipbook of
incredible, relentless agony and posted somewhere
on Yahoo for your viewing and cringing pleasure. Do
you want to see it? No? Good.
It was, they say, a photographic overview of
2008, one of a myriad of year-in-review galleries
posted all over the Net this time of year from
every news agency and blog and newspaper you can
name, ostensibly the best and most striking
pictures taken of this thing we call the human
experiment.
I find that, while sometimes these media
scrapbooks can indeed be touching and profound,
more often than not they seem most interested in
exploring what it means to have large portions of
your flesh ripped from your body. Charming.
Here, apparently, is the endless reminder
offered by such media yearbooks: Bleakness rules
the world, with occasional relief provided by cute
polar bears or dew-dripped flowers or people making
out during some sort of holiday or festival or
enormous party to which you weren't invited.
But mostly, it is disaster. Pain. Death.
Corruption and landmines and torture, bloody stumps
waving in the air like high-fives from the devil.
It is mangled face after war-torn body after
wailing widow and did I mention the blood and the
blood and the blood? I used to think browsing those
noxious "What do they look like now?" scrapbooks of
aging celebs and former teen idols on lowbrow
tabloid sites like TMZ or Gawker was depressing.
Ha.
I know what you're thinking: This sounds exactly
like the kind of material, the kind of inexorable
negativity, that justifies our deep loathing -- or
at least a well-deserved mistrust -- of major
media, that lets you blame them (or rather, us) for
making the world seem so relentlessly dark and
horrible because there you are innocently surfing
the Net and sipping your coffee and feeling pretty
good about your day, and hey that phantom pain in
my abdomen finally faded away and maybe I'll get
laid tonight and, wait a second, oh my God, what
the hell is this and oh sweet Jesus is his entire
face missing? What's wrong with her leg? Is that a
giant tumor? Why is that child on fire? Do I really
need to see this?
I think it was somewhere around the 200th photo
of a (usually foreign, usually third world) face
torqued in unbridled agony that I was hit by the
same question I always run up against while working
in major media: Is this all there is? Was this
really our 2008? Tear gas and tragedy and so much
splattered blood it makes "Saw IV" look like "Blues
Clues?" Are we really made of nothing but suffering
and gore and the occasional cute penguin in a Santa
suit to make it all better?
Answer: Of course not. But this is what we see.
These are the stories we seem to care about, that
seem to define us the most, the ones that draw us
in -- or rather, the ones that draw us down, into
that low-vibration zone where it's ridiculously
easy to wallow and simmer and sit like so many
decaying couch potatoes in the dreary living room
of human suffering.
It is not always easy to parse. I am in full
agreement with the like-attracts-like principal,
how low vibration begets low vibration and we are
very much a culture that fetishizes death and pain,
and hence we sort of get what we deserve. Blame
"the media" all you like, but it is often as much a
mirror as a perpetrator. Which came first, the
gruesome image of the gunshot victim, or your
weird, dark desire to stare at it until something
shifts in your stomach and you feel like taking
more drugs and kicking the dog?
But of course, it's not that simple. I'm also in
full agreement with my friend Rob Brezsny, who
argues that imagination and choice always supersede
our worst cultural secretions. In other words, if
you choose to believe the prophecies of doom and
suffering spun by the soothsayers of the world --
including the news media but also popular culture,
film, blogs, fiction, and so on -- then sure
enough, that will increasingly become our story,
and the sadness and pain will continue to manifest
like a bloody volcano that never stops
erupting.
It is perhaps the most significant question we
face: Where do we find balance? How can we evolve
past such reliance on horror and wallowing to tell
us who we are? How can we shift the story, even a
little, and focus our attention elsewhere?
Or to put it in more practical, capitalistic
terms: How can we devise a world where uplifting or
spiritually rich or open-hearted tales and images
of life and love and energy get the same attention,
the same number of profitable clicks, as relentless
stories of, say, the wife who was shot in the head
by an enraged husband who then killed himself and
his three kids in the Wal-Mart parking lot?
Because I think I just saw that picture. I think
I just read that story. Again. And again. And
again.
Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/01/07/notes010709.DTL
The Remote Control
Penis
They say the male birth-control pill is ready to
go. But is something missing?
Vividly indeed do I remember the lovely and
sordid tale my friend once told me, many years ago,
of the terrific guy she once dated, a strapping
young thing who - through a series of unfortunate
childhood events - had to have a remote-controlled,
robotic penis installed in his body.
Let me be more specific. Apparently, this fine
lad's delicate man tissues had been damaged in a
very unpleasant bicycle accident in his youth, and
he could therefore no longer enjoy normal
erections. Everything else functioned just fine,
but when it came to sex, despite having full
sensation, all systems were mangled, all blood
vessels shot. Sad indeed.
But then, a savior. Through the miracle of
modern medicine and not-so-modern pneumatics,
ingenious doctors were able to install some sort of
marvelous contraption, a valve and a rod and
bladder and a little pump - a complete mechanical
system by which our boy could, well, inflate and
deflate his manhood at will, last as long as he
liked, repeat as frequently as energy and soreness
and lubricant allowed, and thereby enjoy a
(relatively) normal sex life.
It worked like a charm. It also worked like an
aphrodisiac, a mesmerizing technological miracle,
and a pair of old Reebok Pump basketball shoes.
What you did was: Squeeze a little bulb at the base
of the perineum a few dozen times to inflate, to
raise the flag and see who salutes. Enjoy
indefinitely (!) When finished, simply reach up
underneath into God's country and press a different
little bulb to deflate the air bladder and, well,
lower the mainsail (my friend said this particular
procedure sounded like a sad squeaky toy, sighing
slowly. She found it adorable).
(Here is where I'd like to tell you my friend's
nickname for this lad, but they tell me this is
still a family website and baffled
children/grandmothers could be reading this and are
already panicky that they saw the word "penis" on
screen. So I'll just say it rhymed very closely
with "The Wonder Sock.")
This heartwarming tale comes to mind as I read
of how scientists have now developed a tiny valve
they can surgically implant into the manhood of
mankind to, well, control the flow of sperm at
will. Your own built-in, reversible,
radio-controlled vasectomy! they exclaim, with a
winking Australian grin.
Apparently, said contraption involves a little
remote-controlled switch that can, at the press of
a button, activate or deactivate the flow from
wherever it is that sperm flows (a musty little
furniture shop somewhere on the outskirts of
London, I think) by opening and closing a valve
installed into the all-important duct known as the
vas deferens. Nifty!
I know what you're thinking. A remote-controlled
sperm valve? Are you crazy? Who the hell would want
something like that?
I'll tell you who: Every modern male under 30,
that's who. Hell, add in a digital camera and an
MP3 player and maybe built-in GPS, and you've got
the next iPod.
See, like my friend's wonder sock, I think such
technology would play directly upon the dual modern
male fantasies of unlimited penile dexterity and
übergeek tech coolness. In the age of gizmo
wonders and technologically advanced everything,
why not a mechanically enhanced penis? Why not a
little Iron Man in your iron man? Make it easy,
make it relatively affordable, market it like you
would the Bang & Olufsen stereo option on an
Audi R8 (i.e., an invaluable enhancement, not a
threat), and I say: Viva la revolucion!
It is, of course, all part of the eternal quest
for an easy, idiot-proof male birth-control device
for consensual adults that doesn't involve
sheathing everything in miserable amounts of latex
and therefore dulling the finest sensation known to
all malehood next to perhaps a superlative foot
massage and maybe sipping dark rum in a hot tub
with nubile pagan fire priestesses from the
moon.
But maybe such a valve won't be necessary. After
all, they say there's already been a big
breakthrough in male birth control, that scientists
have finally developed a surefire "male pill" that
knocks any man's sperm count down to zero, and all
that's left is a bit of clinical testing.
So effective is the new pill that it's
apparently safer than condoms, safer than the
female pill, safer than staring at a photo of Ann
Coulter for three full, agonizing minutes while
your sperm commit mass suicide from sheer horror.
Amazing.
But apparently there's a problem. Big Pharma
doesn't seem to care about this new breakthrough.
And why? Money, of course. They say there's just
not enough interest. Men don't seem to be clamoring
for it, the market doesn't seem to be there,
millions don't stand to be made, and hence no one
wants to fund more research on the thing, which
could result in a wait of three to five more years
before such a pill hits the market, if it ever
does.
What's more, some argue that dumb-as-nails men
are too unreliable for such a thing anyway, that no
woman worth her weight in diaphragms and Nonoxyl-9
would dare trust a man to remember to take a pill
every day, because of course men are generally
irresponsible schlubs who can't even remember their
own phone numbers and etc. and so on and
cliché cliché cliché.
To which I say, utter and total B.S. There's not
a smart modern male I know who wouldn't love to
know he wouldn't - couldn't - get a date pregnant,
that there could be no "accidents," that he will
never get that life-altering phone call. Hell,
there's already a trend whereby some baby-terrified
men are getting old-school surgical vasectomies in
their early 20s, rife with the fear that some
nefarious huntress might try to snare them in the
baby trap. Shift the power dynamics of fertility
and birth control to men? Talk about your massive
cultural psycho-sexual upheavals. Watch for it.
But maybe that's neither here nor there. Maybe
the pill's researchers need to hook up with the
valve engineers and the genius docs who installed
my friend's lover's old penis pump way back when,
and all work together to solve this most pressing
issue and move humanity, uh, forward.
Which is to say, you want to guarantee men
engage fully in matters fertile and impregnable?
You want to make sure they care deeply about
familial responsibility and planning? Don't just
give them a pill. Give them a slick badass
high-tech gizmo to deliver it, maybe a hot little
button on their iPhones that not only shuts a
microvalve and releases the pill's chemicals, but
also boosts stamina, responds to voice commands,
calculates the tip on the dinner bill, organizes
their playlist according to a given date's
particular mood, and of course, reminds them
exactly where the clitoris is. Really, what more do
you need?
Source: By Mrk Morford,
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/07/16/notes071608.DTL&nl=fix
Totally
Gay Happy Meals
It is the end of the nutball Christian right. Here
is your proof. To go
Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering
clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush
into office and seized the national narrative for a
few terrifying moments about five years back, ran
deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over
their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and
confusion and lust for all things homophobic and
saccharine and spiritually denigrating?
Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very
soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch
line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried
housefly limbs after a sneeze. You should know this
now.
Yes, you are right; they already were a
caricature, a cultural pothole, a nasty rash in the
armpit of society. But it wasn't all that long ago
that they were, through a bizarre series of
sociopolitical machinations still being parsed by
baffled historians, a powerful rash, hugely
newsworthy, as dangerous and unstoppable as they
were wrongheaded and sad. Remember?
You were not much younger than you are right
now. As the Bush era crested, as the neocons' power
reached nuclear levels, when female nipples and
f-words and evil gay agendas ruled the news, the
evangelical Right -- led by the most virulent,
spittle-flecked gaggle of mental throwbacks to ever
stain the American newswires, Focus on the Family
(Dr. James Dobson's clan) and the American Family
Association and its nefarious leader, the Rev.
Donald Wildmon -- these groups controlled, for a
brief, awful moment, the national dialogue. They
were the temporary arbiters of taste, the warped
conscience of a freaked-out culture. And lo, it was
ugly.
Rejoice, won't you? For their time is over.
Did you know the AFA recently boycotted
McDonald's? That's right, this once semi-powerful
tub of right-wing brain-caulk recently declared a
comestible fatwa against America's foremost
purveyor of toxic foodstuffs because, apparently,
some high-ranking McD's VP just joined the board of
directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber
of Commerce, which, to the AFA, somehow translates
directly into free pink condoms and
mind-controlling rainbow flags in every toxic
God-fearing Happy Meal.
Did you read about that? No? Of course you
didn't. Here is why: No one cared. Well, that's not
quite true. McDonald's sort of cared, just enough
to write up a nice letter of response to Wildmon
stating, in essence, that the AFA is a bunch of
troglodytic knuckle-draggers with the sociosexual
awareness of a fungal spore, and they should crawl
away right now before God spanks them even harder
with the 2x4 of total irrelevance.
I might be exaggerating. What they actually said
was: Thank you, AFA, for your hateful
consideration, but we support our employees' right
to join whichever socially responsible and positive
groups they like. And thusly did McD's flick the
AFA away like a tick from a dog. Isn't that
amazing?
Now, you may argue that McDonald's and the other
megacorps that the AFA has tried to boycott in the
past, including Wal-Mart (for selling "Brokeback
Mountain" DVDs to unsuspecting toddlers), the
Disney Corporation (for its overall corporate
support of the evil gay agenda) and the Ford Motor
Company (for advertising in gay magazines), aren't
shrugging off Wildmon's wide-eyed cult out of the
goodness of their gay-loving hearts. It's not like
the majority of McD's honchos actually give a damn
about gay rights, or gay marriage, or social
justice, or the deeper aspects of love.
Nossir, they do so purely for economic reasons,
because it's just good PR, because they are safe in
the knowledge that the AFA's rantings have exactly
zero effect on their bottom line and lots of their
own employees are gay -- and by the way
discrimination based on sexual orientation is
thoroughly illegal -- and therefore it simply makes
more business sense to support tolerance than it
does to endorse homophobia and general spiritual
stupidity. Isn't that right, Boy Scouts of America?
You bet it is.
But wait just a second: Is it still not
fascinating in this day and age that our most
powerful capitalist companies, those most
associated with mainstream, dumbed-down, unhealthy,
rather uninformed Republican Americana, even these
megacorps are now openly and rather shamelessly
supporting gay rights and tolerance?
Is it not, concomitantly, interesting that no
one at all cares a whit for what the hell the AFA
has to say anymore? Is this not a sign of something
interesting and sea-changing and good? I think it
is. McD's, Wal-Mart, Ford and Disney utterly ignore
the Christian Right? What's next, an articulate
black intellectual president? Oh wait.
It is made all the more amusing, more comical
and cute, by another recent tidbit, the final
evidence you will need that the evangelical Right
has returned to its original state of inbred
silliness, and therefore it is very likely indeed
that you will never have to read anything more
about them ever again until Wildmon and Dobson join
Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms in the Great Gay Bath
House in the sky.
It is this: The AFA's Web site apparently has
(or rather, had, until just recently) an
auto-filter installed. So utterly terrified of
anything remotely gay are these kindly folk that
whenever the word "gay" appeared in any news story
on their site, their autobot automatically changed
it to "homosexual." True.
Thus did it come to pass that many fine stories
about American Olympic track and fieldster Tyson
Gay become a whole lotta wacky stories about the
epic struggles of some unlucky runner named "Tyson
Homosexual" to post some good numbers in the
100-meter dash. Poor guy.
And that about does it. Your final proof that
God laughs and snorts and doesn't give a flying
McRib sandwich about any particular gaggle of
humans, particularly those who profess that they
know and love and worship him more violently and
blindly than anyone else.
Somewhere in all this, a moral, a lesson.
Perhaps a curious anecdote about how, in this
country, it seems like every agenda, every stupid
idea, every rancid fireball of ignorant religious
fanaticism nevertheless gets its moment, its 15
minutes, its desperate shot at guiding the culture,
just to see if it can, if there's something of
value, if there's something to be learned.
And when it comes to the sad Christian nutballs,
well, the lesson appears to be wildly obvious
indeed: Avoid the sad Christian nutballs, now and
forevermore. Hell, even God could've told you
that.
You are not reading
enough
Has the Internet killed the joys of sitting down
with a good book?
The pile is waiting. The pile is getting higher.
The pile looks impressive, probably isn't, still
feels slightly overwhelming, vaguely threatening,
even as it sighs, waits, drums its fingers on the
inside of my skull, promising all manner of wonder
and insight and syntactical bliss if I'd just,
please, maybe, right now, even for just an hour or
three, pay it some serious, focused attention.
Please?
It's a bit of a problem. More than that, it's a
moral, ethical, personal issue, a deep indignity of
the soul, a painful twist to the nipple of my
id.
See, I love books. Admire and appreciate and
adore. Was a lit major at Berkeley, read
voraciously, still love to read, still like to
consider myself a big consumer of books and deep
thinker about bookish issues and ideas and
authoralia.
And yet, if I'm painfully honest, I have to
admit it: I barely read books anymore. Not nearly
like I used to, anyway. Not for a long, long time.
And chances are, if you're at all addicted to the
new media vortex, neither do you.
It's become a social conundrum, a cultural sore
spot, a morose sign of the times. The question has
been posed by agents and writers and a confused,
hyperconsolidating publishing industry: What
happened to all the readers? What happened to the
culture of books? And the hint of fatalism, just
underneath: If few truly read anymore, what of the
state of the American mind? How much more dumbing
down can we possibly stand?
Oh sure, books still sell, product is moving
like crazy, but by and large it's truckloads of
self-help and how-to flooding over a precious
handful of sure-hit novelists, topped off with the
grand cherry that is Oprah, single handedly keeping
the tepid melodramatic coming-of-age family saga
alive. In between, 18 zillion copies of "Eat, Pray,
Love."
But overall, the message is bleak: Fewer writers
of real talent are being discovered, fewer
publishers are willing to take any sort of risk,
and serious, literary-minded reading, that glorious
pastime, that fine personal art, the immersive and
transportive and beautiful intellectual fertilizer,
appears to be giving way to the more addictive but
far less nourishing hellbeast of new media and the
Net.
It's an easy beast to blame. I skimmed through
Nicholas Carr's fascinating and depressing piece in
the recent Atlantic Monthly ("Is Google Making Us
Stupid?"), which talks up, among other things, the
downfall of deep reading, of spending uninterrupted
hours immersed in a literary tome or even a long
essay, a victim to modern media's vicious ADD,
short-attention-span approach to engaging the world
of ideas.
Carr's upshot: The Net might actually be
rewiring our brains, changing the way we read
because it's changing the way we think, forcibly
adapting us to tolerate only bite-sized summations
and simplified blips at the expense of deeper
thought, of the ability to parse ideas, to sink in
for a long, committed intellectual journey.
Proof? That's easy: Just try to sit down with
that dense copy of W.G. Sebald or Haruki Murakami
after spending any portion of your week online, and
watch as your Net-addled brain becomes almost
instantly anxious and frustrated, eager after just
a couple thousand words to jump away, ogle
pictures, watch dumb teens humiliate themselves on
YouTube, buy some shoes.
Christ, if TV numbs you out, encourages a
passive, flaccid state of intellectual
disengagement, the Net does the opposite, slamming
so many tiny shots of pseudo-meaning and media and
nothingness into your brain over the course of a
few hours, it's like getting stung by a swarm of
horny bees.
It seems all dour and dreary and unfortunate
because not a week goes by that you don't hear
about some gloomy book fair or publishing industry
merger or the death of a legendary independent
bookstore that just couldn't compete not only with
Amazon, but with a generation trained to read
nothing more challenging or lengthy than
grammatically mangled e-mails or snarky text
messages or snide 300-word pop culture takedowns on
Gawker.
Ah, but I do believe all is not lost. There is
lingering hope. I am moderately sure a brain thusly
amped on the wicked energy drink of the Web can,
through honest time spent, through forcibly yanking
the Ethernet cable out of one's cerebral cortex, be
re-rewired, untrained, re-addicted to the deeper
juice. In fact, it isn't that difficult, really. We
just like to think it is.
I can personally attest. About a year ago the
most astounding thing happened: The hard drive on
my MacBook suffered a rare and painful meltdown
when I was away on vacation. I was, much to my
initial horror, to be e-mail/Net-free for over a
week. What was I missing? Who was e-mailing? What
about all the blogs and the news and the
Significant Global Happenings? What of all the
salacious offerings of nubile flesh and social
wonderment stroking my in-box as I sat there,
entirely cut off and adrift?
Mercifully, the yoga kicked in and I quickly
shrugged, sighed, noted the incredible opportunity,
the gods trying to tell me to unplug. I hit the
bookstore and bought three thick, sticky literary
novels like a misguided vegan buys some grass-fed
steaks for the first time, and devoured them
whole.
As I did so, an amazing thing happened. Time
slowed down. The brain quickly returned to its
normal breathing. The mental seizures and the
near-constant desire to click away and leap to
something different, faded and soon vanished. And
the books I so loved suddenly moved from the bottom
of the intellectual priority list straight back to
their original, top-tiered state of grace.
I vowed to never let them drop so low again.
Even though, right now, they have. Even though,
right now, even as I add to the glorious pile of
must-reads on my desk, I realize I've been sucked
back into Net-time again, back to the world of
instant feedback and clickable everything, as the
pile grows heavy and scornful and lonely. Ah but
here again, an opportunity. For it is here that I
remember the most wonderfully humbling lesson of
all ...
When I finally got my precious MacBook back,
when all e-mail was restored and all Net access was
re-granted and I was able to dive back into the
perky digital maelstrom, when I spent a few hours
and got all caught up, it finally hit me: I'd
missed exactly nothing. The world was exactly the
same. The beautiful churn continued, same as it
ever was, with or without me. Isn't that fantastic?
Someone should write a book about it.
My handgun, my
parasite
Never forget: The brutal effects of the Bush regime
will be felt for generations.
Ah, so this is how it's gonna be.
Like recurring cancer. No, more like a rogue
rash, an STD, flaring up at unexpected times and in
unexpected places and when it fades, you gently let
yourself forget all about it until it suddenly
erupts and hits hard and ruins your day, and then
you can only sit back and moan softly, slather on
ointment, shudder.
Wait, one more: Maybe it's most like a nasty
intestinal worm, a wicked parasite like those you
suck down in India or deep Mexico or the jungles of
Indonesia, the kind that burrow deep and attach to
all manner of essential organs and induce a wicked
bout of dysentery or all-over body convulsion,
until you finally crawl out of the hospital and
drown in antibiotics and slowly work your way back
to semi-health — but only semi, because of
course you are never quite the same.
This is where we are. This is the state of the
nation after having swallowed the malicious worm of
Bush. We have, by all accounts, suffered — and
somehow survived — the very worst of the
illness, the cancer, the oozing spirit. But now, as
America's worst president prepares to amble off the
stage he never deserved to be on in the first
place, it is time to prepare for any number of
convulsions, aftershock, excruciating
reminders.
Here is your Bush-loaded Supreme Court, for one
regrettable example, addressing the
much-misinterpreted Second Amendment for the first
time in eons. Here is the majority of the court
basically arguing that, in case you forgot, much of
America still blindly loves its guns, and of course
handguns are a nice addition to any God-fearing
family's arsenal of ridiculous self-defense
weaponry and therefore banning a device designed to
do nothing but kill other humans is just plain
wrong.
It is, by all accounts, a severe, dark cloud of
a decision, loaded with sadness and a feeling of
despair, the cruel notion that America is still
defined by its love of violence, or even the
utterly phony idea, put forth by Justice Antonin
Scalia himself, that only violence prevents
violence, or that the answer to the gun problem is,
quite simply, more guns, because surely that's what
the founding fathers intended, more paranoid NASCAR
dads stocking Glocks in the rec room to protect the
rug rats from those icky drug-dealing rapists who
never come.
Is it worth mentioning how handguns kept in the
home are much more likely to be used for suicides
and homicides, not to mention fondled by those same
curious rug rats who find daddy's little Elvis in
the sock drawer and decide to aim it at their
sisters? Worth pointing out that the self-defense
argument is not only pathetically illogical, part
of a silly pseudo-cowboy mythology, it's also
statistically untrue, a perpetual, insidious lie
that's undermined the American identity for
generations?
Nah. Let us not stare down that particular
barrel of gloom just now. Instead, let us prepare.
Let us steel ourselves. As we head into the Obama
era and as the GOP juggernaut mercifully sputters
and lurches back to the cave of 1950, let us be
reminded that escaping the Bush aftermath isn't
going to be all wine and roses and new energy
policies.
See, we've been enjoying a small reprieve. These
past six months or so, it's been sort of delightful
to finally turn our attention toward the imminent
Democratic sea change and away from the ravages of
the Bush disease, to finally look toward the new,
as we get to focus on all those things we might be
able to do once we get out of this damn hospital
and get the weak-kneed Democratic Party out of
second gear.
But oh, not so fast.
Let us be reminded, the Bush virus will be with
us for years, generations. Aside from the shambles
of Iraq and the Middle East, aside from handguns
and the decided mixed blessing of the Supreme
Court's recent spate of decisions, there are
maneuvers and decisions we don't even know about,
nefarious arrangements, a corruption so deep that
normally staid historians are behaving more like
alarmed climate-change scientists: We know it's
going to be bad, but we just don't know how
bad.
There are destroyed nations, mauled
infrastructures, horribly compromised federal
agencies from FEMA to the EPA, the CIA to the FCC.
There is a rogue outsourced military, citizens who
can no longer sue gun manufacturers, six straight
years of increased poverty, untold numbers of
homophobic, misogynistic judicial appointees,
devastating environmental policies the consequences
of which could take generations to comprehend, much
less repair.
Where do you dare to look? Women's rights?
Science? Foreign policy? Currency devaluation? Big
Oil? Halliburton's billions in war profit?
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the Dick Cheney
agenda of torture and pre-emptive aggression? What
about unchecked corporate cronyism, the shunning of
the United Nations and of international law,
Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, wiretapping and
surveillance and "evildoers" galore?
And finally, what of all those families, the
thousands of dead U.S. soldiers, the tens of
thousands of brain-damaged, disabled, permanently
wounded? Bush's legacy isn't just one of staggering
social ineptitude combined with shocking success at
serving his corporate masters. It's foremost a
legacy soaked to the bone in blood.
Truly, I firmly believe the record will reveal
that no president in modern history has done more
to unravel the American identity, to dumb down the
populace and cater to the basest instincts of man
than the one about to mispronounce his way into the
history books. Even Nixon didn't leave office with
Bush's incredible range of ignominy.
Ironically, this is why many in the GOP are
chuckling in secret, rubbing their hands together,
plotting their revenge. They know the colossal pile
of issues and problems Barack Obama will inherit is
so overwhelming, so unsolvable, it doesn't matter
how smart and aggressive he might be. It doesn't
matter that he'll have a Democratic Congress. He's
just plain doomed. Combine this with America's
infamous short attention span, and within a few
years, just watch as the GOP emerges from the murky
depths, the champion of a "new" solution.
I know, it can seem bleak. Insurmountable, even.
But here's the lesson of any major injury, of
surviving a serious illness and getting on with
your life. Often, it's not merely about letting
time heal all wounds. It's not always about
ignoring the scar, or looking away from our
permanent deformity and pretend we don't now walk
with a savage limp.
It's far more about learning to live with the
violence that's been wreaked upon the national
body, letting the scale of the wound fuel us, shock
us back to life. Question is, do we have enough
optimistic ointment to cover it all?
©2008, Mark
Morford
Bush lifts drilling ban, oil
execs leer, nation cringes, Obama sighs
I admit to bafflement. I admit to a bit of total
confusion mixed with a certain level of stupefied
awe and teeth-rattling frustration as to why anyone
with the mental acuity of more than a housefly
would think that stabbing more holes into Alaska
and the eastern seaboard in the search for a few
remaining precious drops of oil is a good idea,
would solve anything at all, is anything more than
the equivalent of hurling matches at the devil.
Perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps there's
some dark, secret genius behind President Bush's
otherwise absolutely imbecilic and dangerous
corporate-whore move to lift the federal ban on
offshore drilling, a ban placed there by his own
father, as Dubya actually stood there with a
straight face and tried to imply that this
insidious move was meant to impart something good
and helpful for a gas-stunned nation, that he was
"doing all he could" to help with prices at the
pump, when you could actually see the oil dripping
from his shivery bones and the giant hand of Exxon
shoved up his weak little spine, making his mouth
move.
Oh, I fully understand the corporate arguments,
even the political ones. Asking why the oil
companies are eager as rabbits on meth to gouge
further into the planet is a bit like asking a
surgeon why she wants to operate, or a lawyer why
he wants to sue, or a snake why he wants to sink
his fangs into a nice juicy rat and swallow it
whole and smile for a week. It is, quite simply,
what they do.
And politicos, well, they're of course generally
terrified of their own shadows, merely following
what the people scream, and enough misinformed
people scream about high gas prices and demand some
sort of relief and, well, politicos from both sides
of the aisle will say just about anything to
mollify and deflect and pretend to care, even if it
means lying, even if it means feigning total
ignorance and blaming the oil speculators, even (or
rather, especially) if it means an utter and
complete shunning of the facts at hand. ...
Read the rest: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/07/18/notes071808.DTL&nl=fix
©2010, Mark
Morford
* * *
Mark
Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every
Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook
section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on
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