My fellow Americans: I come before you tonight to tear this whole immigration charade a new one. First of all, can we drop the whole "immigrant" thing? We don't have an immigration problem. The system of legal immigration is as backed up, as bloated, and as constipated as it is supposed to be. As with all things bureaucratic, it is designed to be just broken enough to justify more money in the next budget. What we do have a problem with, is illegal immigration. And the problem is, you don't get it.
I know you don't, because 75% of you are unhappy with the millions of illegals pouring over an unsecured border, which means that 25% of you think that's just fine, and since 75 plus 25 equals one hundred, clearly, one hundred percent of you have your heads so far up your derrieres that you can't tell a fish taco from a hole in the wall.
Let me explain. You see, as President, I have a unique perspective that 100% of you do not have. I occupy a singular postition, riding a fence that most of you don't have to ride. For instance, you either don't know, or you have forgotten that as president I am beholden to the worldwide communist movement, and I am therefore dedicated to making sure that our nation is flooded with uneducated, unskilled, underprivileged scofflaws. It's the only way to strangle the life out of those who control the means of production, cripple our government services, and bring our system of representative government and free enterprise to its knees.
But I am also in the breast pocket of Big Business, and am therefore dedicated to the task of importing an ever growing army of laborers who are willing to work for insanely low wages, and without the benefit of union membership, workman's comp and disability protection, or a health plan.
Beyond my obligations to seemingly oppositional and ultimately mysterious forces, I care. I care about the mexican people. I believe we must not punish people for wanting to participate in building up, not to mention the destruction, of our great republic. In my humble opinion we must reward the raw tenacity of anyone willing to cross the dark night of uncertainty and drop a baby on the hot sand of the Arizona desert. I believe that we must reward the ingenuity of anyone willing to subvert the system in a way that gives millionaires one more thing they don't have to pay for, and activists one more thing they can scream about.
For those of you who believe that Mexico is passively taking back land that we took by force, I congratulate you on your historical insight. I have it on good authority that the nation of Mexico has been surreptitiously acting all along to return the land to the Native Americans they took it from, at which point they will pack up and go home . . . to Spain, which they will then abandon to the barbarian tribes who took the land from the Romans who took it from them.
So I hereby propose to do what every president and every politician on both sides of the aisle have done since the days of Julius Cesar: I will appear in every way to care, and appear in certain ways to act, and will in the mean time trust America to understand that doing anything substantive is absolutely out of the question.
lundi, mai 22, 2006
samedi, mai 20, 2006
Please see below
A post entitled: "Dear Mr. Baldwin" has appeared below "Sense and Sensitivity." I don't know why it is out of order.
vendredi, avril 28, 2006
Sense and Sensitivity
I remember scoffing--scoffing with extreme prejudice--at the concept of Sensitivity Training.
But I might need it.
Never mind even that I believe with absolute, unshakable faith in a glorious resurrection. And forget about my nasty habit of enjoying life enough to feel like kissing it goodbye wouldn't be a soul shattering tragedy. I've just always been OK with Death. Really OK.
Which is really not OK in the eyes of people who want to make a big deal about it for whatever reason. (The reason is usually melodrama, hystrionics, or ignorance--but pointing that out will get you slapped with the old "Judgemental Ass" label. For whatever reason.) So I keep my opinion mostly to myself. People don't want to hear it. Never mind that I believe in meeting people where they are.
Recently, when a co-worker's distant relation passed on, even as I refused to sink to the maudlin level of the proletariat and spout the usual meaningless condolences, I did refrain from spouting anything beyond an earnest: "He was lucky to have you in his life." (I highly recomend this approach. It obviates acrimony and contention by changing the subject away from Death. As an added bonus, I really meant it.) And as I turned to walk away and savor the sweetness of dodging a bullet, she murmured, "It was just so sudden."
Obviously, she was looking to tangle. She needed the drama, I guess. And when someone throws down the gauntlet like that, you cannot with impunity ignore it. Your honor is at stake.
"Hold on a minute," I said. "What do you mean, 'it was just so sudden?'"
"I mean, it was unexpected."
"I'm sorry, but I couldn't have heard you correctly. Did you just say that the only absolute eventuality since the dawn of time was unexpected?"
"I didn't--"
"Did you miss the fact that 100% of the people who have been born on this earth have died, most of them at random junctures or in coincidental circumstances?"
"It wasn't that--"
"How DARE YOU? How dare you claim the responsibilities and trappings of adulthood and slather them all over with the sickly sweet frosting of infantile expectations! How dare you come in here asking to exchange the basest emotional childishness for sympathy! I mean COME ON!"
Naturally, she was speechless. "Probably can't find the words to thank me," I was thinking. I had just offered her exactly the hystrionics she had been seeking. Or if not, at least I had given her some simple facts that should have, in my mind, taken the edge off her so-called loss.
My lawyers have instructed me not to describe in any way what happened next. But suffice it to say, I was wrong.
But I might need it.
Never mind even that I believe with absolute, unshakable faith in a glorious resurrection. And forget about my nasty habit of enjoying life enough to feel like kissing it goodbye wouldn't be a soul shattering tragedy. I've just always been OK with Death. Really OK.
Which is really not OK in the eyes of people who want to make a big deal about it for whatever reason. (The reason is usually melodrama, hystrionics, or ignorance--but pointing that out will get you slapped with the old "Judgemental Ass" label. For whatever reason.) So I keep my opinion mostly to myself. People don't want to hear it. Never mind that I believe in meeting people where they are.
Recently, when a co-worker's distant relation passed on, even as I refused to sink to the maudlin level of the proletariat and spout the usual meaningless condolences, I did refrain from spouting anything beyond an earnest: "He was lucky to have you in his life." (I highly recomend this approach. It obviates acrimony and contention by changing the subject away from Death. As an added bonus, I really meant it.) And as I turned to walk away and savor the sweetness of dodging a bullet, she murmured, "It was just so sudden."
Obviously, she was looking to tangle. She needed the drama, I guess. And when someone throws down the gauntlet like that, you cannot with impunity ignore it. Your honor is at stake.
"Hold on a minute," I said. "What do you mean, 'it was just so sudden?'"
"I mean, it was unexpected."
"I'm sorry, but I couldn't have heard you correctly. Did you just say that the only absolute eventuality since the dawn of time was unexpected?"
"I didn't--"
"Did you miss the fact that 100% of the people who have been born on this earth have died, most of them at random junctures or in coincidental circumstances?"
"It wasn't that--"
"How DARE YOU? How dare you claim the responsibilities and trappings of adulthood and slather them all over with the sickly sweet frosting of infantile expectations! How dare you come in here asking to exchange the basest emotional childishness for sympathy! I mean COME ON!"
Naturally, she was speechless. "Probably can't find the words to thank me," I was thinking. I had just offered her exactly the hystrionics she had been seeking. Or if not, at least I had given her some simple facts that should have, in my mind, taken the edge off her so-called loss.
My lawyers have instructed me not to describe in any way what happened next. But suffice it to say, I was wrong.
mardi, avril 25, 2006
Dear Mr. Baldwin
A reporter walks into a crowd of people chanting anti Bush slogans. He chooses a woman at random and interrupts her indecipherable rhythmic bile with a question: "What brings you out here to the protest today?"
She stares blankly. He thinks for a moment she is preparing a lucid statement of opposition to the current administration. She promptly proves him wrong.
"My husband."
"You came with your husband?"
"Yeah, I just came with him. I don't know that much about it."
How enlightened. Well, I guess blind, subservient vitriol is just as loud. Keep yelling, sister.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #1: The week willed, obedient women are at the protests. Old fashioned men who think a woman should simply defer to her man's opinion need look no further.
QUERY: If a right winger had knocked her up first, would she be off on the other side of the steps yelling "Support our troops?"
UNTENABLE CONCLUSION: Opposition is so important to our system that you don't need to base it on anything. Just be indignant. You are a credit to a time honored tradition of . . . I can't remember the term. I'm really just here with my wife.
A politician waves an article from USA Today as he blasts the powers that be for their oppression and suppression and I don't know what all. A day later, entities implicated in the "journalism" begin stating facts that happen to run contrary to the Gospel According to USA Today. The politician quiets down. Maybe he knows what's coming next. Sure enough, someone looks up his voting record and finds proof of him voting in favor of legislation eerily similar to that which he has been railing against--back when people he agreed with were in power.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #2: Americans' position on the issues and level of satisfaction with the power structure depends solely on whether or not they happen to ideologically agree with the party in power. Your opinion is not an opinion: If you hate the president, nothing he does will please you. If you happen to like the president, he can bomb all the innocent children and vitamin factories he wants. Your mind was made up when he called the fetus either a "baby," or an "unviable tissue mass."
QUERY: When the Economy is reported to be doing rather well, do you say "Damn, Bush's numbers are gonna go up," or "Wait a minute, if everything is fine, but consumer debt is at a record high, we might be headed for trouble that has nothing to do with who is in power." Wait, you didn't hear the economy was doing really well?
FLAWED BUT SEEMINGLY INEVITABLE LOGICAL CONCEPTUAL CHAIN: Politicians have, without exception, sold their souls to essentially identical party structures in much the same way that doctors have been swallowed up into the HMO's--with all the same nefarious results. The American people have been taken along for the ride. We are tools of a systemically corrupt machinery of extremes that reinforce each other. Given that said machinery is self sustaining, and designed to withstand the influence of individuals by a) pitting them against each other in ideological mortal combat, wherein anyone who appears to disagree with you is the enemy, and b) fooling them into thinking that by aligning themselves with a group of like-minded people, they can make a difference by defeating the bad guys on the other side, you have only two choices: 1) Give in--cuddle up in the cozy flannel of polarization, filter everything through the filter of who you are supposed to like and hate according to your chosen blanket--relax, knowing that party affiliation is all you really have to know about anyone, or 2) Give up--The system is broken--everything sucks--so you can with good conscience sign off and consider yourself above it all.
Whatever you chose, I don't want to hear about it. But do us a favor. Call poor Alec Baldwin's radio show and reassure him that even if the recent public MRI didn't reveal any brain mass, he is still a very good looking man with a talent for narration. When it's scripted.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #3: These Hollywood pretty boys are empty shells, who should not be allowed off the red carpet--for their own good, and the good of the nation.
QUERY: If a nation falls in the forest and there are no reality show TV cameras to record it, did it really happen?
COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED AND ABSOLUTELY UNDENIABLE CONCLUSION: Alec Baldwin (and everyone not making fun of him) is an idiot. He should run for president. He shouldn't BE president, but he should run. By himself he could scare up a viable third party movement.
She stares blankly. He thinks for a moment she is preparing a lucid statement of opposition to the current administration. She promptly proves him wrong.
"My husband."
"You came with your husband?"
"Yeah, I just came with him. I don't know that much about it."
How enlightened. Well, I guess blind, subservient vitriol is just as loud. Keep yelling, sister.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #1: The week willed, obedient women are at the protests. Old fashioned men who think a woman should simply defer to her man's opinion need look no further.
QUERY: If a right winger had knocked her up first, would she be off on the other side of the steps yelling "Support our troops?"
UNTENABLE CONCLUSION: Opposition is so important to our system that you don't need to base it on anything. Just be indignant. You are a credit to a time honored tradition of . . . I can't remember the term. I'm really just here with my wife.
A politician waves an article from USA Today as he blasts the powers that be for their oppression and suppression and I don't know what all. A day later, entities implicated in the "journalism" begin stating facts that happen to run contrary to the Gospel According to USA Today. The politician quiets down. Maybe he knows what's coming next. Sure enough, someone looks up his voting record and finds proof of him voting in favor of legislation eerily similar to that which he has been railing against--back when people he agreed with were in power.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #2: Americans' position on the issues and level of satisfaction with the power structure depends solely on whether or not they happen to ideologically agree with the party in power. Your opinion is not an opinion: If you hate the president, nothing he does will please you. If you happen to like the president, he can bomb all the innocent children and vitamin factories he wants. Your mind was made up when he called the fetus either a "baby," or an "unviable tissue mass."
QUERY: When the Economy is reported to be doing rather well, do you say "Damn, Bush's numbers are gonna go up," or "Wait a minute, if everything is fine, but consumer debt is at a record high, we might be headed for trouble that has nothing to do with who is in power." Wait, you didn't hear the economy was doing really well?
FLAWED BUT SEEMINGLY INEVITABLE LOGICAL CONCEPTUAL CHAIN: Politicians have, without exception, sold their souls to essentially identical party structures in much the same way that doctors have been swallowed up into the HMO's--with all the same nefarious results. The American people have been taken along for the ride. We are tools of a systemically corrupt machinery of extremes that reinforce each other. Given that said machinery is self sustaining, and designed to withstand the influence of individuals by a) pitting them against each other in ideological mortal combat, wherein anyone who appears to disagree with you is the enemy, and b) fooling them into thinking that by aligning themselves with a group of like-minded people, they can make a difference by defeating the bad guys on the other side, you have only two choices: 1) Give in--cuddle up in the cozy flannel of polarization, filter everything through the filter of who you are supposed to like and hate according to your chosen blanket--relax, knowing that party affiliation is all you really have to know about anyone, or 2) Give up--The system is broken--everything sucks--so you can with good conscience sign off and consider yourself above it all.
Whatever you chose, I don't want to hear about it. But do us a favor. Call poor Alec Baldwin's radio show and reassure him that even if the recent public MRI didn't reveal any brain mass, he is still a very good looking man with a talent for narration. When it's scripted.
UNJUSTIFIED STEREOTYPE #3: These Hollywood pretty boys are empty shells, who should not be allowed off the red carpet--for their own good, and the good of the nation.
QUERY: If a nation falls in the forest and there are no reality show TV cameras to record it, did it really happen?
COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED AND ABSOLUTELY UNDENIABLE CONCLUSION: Alec Baldwin (and everyone not making fun of him) is an idiot. He should run for president. He shouldn't BE president, but he should run. By himself he could scare up a viable third party movement.
samedi, avril 15, 2006
Peace Talks . . .
. . . in the Middle East were derailed late Saturday evening when it was announced that stricken former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was bathed the blood of Palestinian children. Palestinian militants were outraged when Israeli doctors claimed it was a medical procedure with a high degree of historically documented success. Members of Sharon' s own Likud party claimed the procedure was justified, given the recent election of the "suicide bomber party" in Palestine. Palestinian leaders reacted with a sneer, saying: "You're only saying that because of our Holy Vow before God to erase your people utterly from the face of the Earth."
Then Israel said: "Oh, yeah? Well, which one of us is flying a deadly armada of American-made fighter jets?"
So Palestine said: "Go ahead and fly all the jets you want, jerks! As soon as Iran goes nuclear, you can kiss your sorry asses goodbye in a New York minute!"
And then Israel was all: "New York Minute? Is that some kind of veiled 9-11 joke? You think you're clever, bitch? Well, we're telling the Americans you said that!"
So Palestine was all: "Go ahead! They're too pussy to use their nukes for real--besides, they're funding us too--at least until we blow them up--and half of them want us to win, so there!"
Members of the U.N. Security Council praised the dialogue and were encouraged by what they called "progress towards yet another delicious black eye for the Americans who pay for everything."
Speaking at the funeral of a close friend, former president Bill Clinton said: "Remember, I started the peace process in the Middle East. That was me. I did that. If I could have run for a third term, those people would be huggin' and kissin' and lovin' all over each other. The current Administration has no flower power."
Spokesmen for the White House simply pushed play on the tape recorded message that says: "We are winning the War on Terror."
Then Israel said: "Oh, yeah? Well, which one of us is flying a deadly armada of American-made fighter jets?"
So Palestine said: "Go ahead and fly all the jets you want, jerks! As soon as Iran goes nuclear, you can kiss your sorry asses goodbye in a New York minute!"
And then Israel was all: "New York Minute? Is that some kind of veiled 9-11 joke? You think you're clever, bitch? Well, we're telling the Americans you said that!"
So Palestine was all: "Go ahead! They're too pussy to use their nukes for real--besides, they're funding us too--at least until we blow them up--and half of them want us to win, so there!"
Members of the U.N. Security Council praised the dialogue and were encouraged by what they called "progress towards yet another delicious black eye for the Americans who pay for everything."
Speaking at the funeral of a close friend, former president Bill Clinton said: "Remember, I started the peace process in the Middle East. That was me. I did that. If I could have run for a third term, those people would be huggin' and kissin' and lovin' all over each other. The current Administration has no flower power."
Spokesmen for the White House simply pushed play on the tape recorded message that says: "We are winning the War on Terror."
mercredi, avril 12, 2006
oops
Turns out my Dad has an admirable collection of Jerry Garcia ties.
Maybe I was wrong about everything.
skn
Maybe I was wrong about everything.
skn
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