Little Armageddon on the Prairie.

Officially, freedom in representative government ended when the Federal Reserve was formed by unconstitutional executive fiat early in the last century. But let us put aside that depressing little fact (and the attendant story, which is too long to tell here) and break down the death of democracy the only way a modern mind can conceive: Let us make a list.

Having watched for the signs, I believe I can with confidence elucidate the
4 horsemen of Democracy's Apocalypse.

1) THE CHILD. When educated, stable, caring, responsible people are having 1.5 kids per household, and abusive, classless, ignorant, drug addled, publicly dependent households are DOUBLING that (by the most conservative estimates), there is simply no hope. When those who depend on the government are simply outbreeding those who contribute to it, Doom is automatic. There is no politically correct polish you can put on this. And no label you slap on the prophet pointing it out will alter the outcome. Every individual has an inherent nobility and an infinite potential blah blah blah. When this imbalance occurs, it's over.

2) THE PRESS. When the fourth estate is beholden to the government it was set aside by the framers to monitor, all is lost. When those ostensibly charged with dispensing information to an informed electorate are motivated by ideology, by partisanship and profit, only a fool hopes that the system can survive. Where you just caught thinking of Keith Olberman? of Sean Hannity? They are simply the extremes that reinforce each other, and they are only a symptom, hemorrhoids, if you will, resulting from a deeper imbalance of pressures from a constipated core.
3) THE FAT ONE. With sincere apologies to the beautiful overweight people all over America who get up everyday and contribute to society in dynamic ways, it must be observed that no government has ever existed that can govern a sedentary citizenry. Greece, Rome, and everyone before, between and since has crumbled when Prosperity became Opulence. In that sense, fat and sassy spells the end. Blame television. Blame the fast food industry. Blame the video games. The why doesn't matter.

4) THE CONTROL FREAK. Not me. The other control freak. A.K.A. THE LAWYER, THE NANNY STATE, or the Suer. (Hey, rhymes with sewer!). It appears in many forms: the government that wants to take care of you and the people who think that's OK; the litigious bastavich who thinks an arm broken on a neighbor's trampoline, or a lung full of cancer, or a blistered belly from coffee that was hot is a ticket to easy street; the ambulance chaser and the system that supports the fleecing of good people for honest mistakes, setting up money as the arbiter of justice. Beware of this one. It is the most subtle of all the horsemen. It admits to being evil, but rightfully calls itself necessary in a nation of laws. Once it has enough avatars and acolytes in society, the people might (for a time) be very well protected and provided for, but NO ONE IS TRULY FREE.

Luckily, these harbingers of impending doom remain far off, in a nightmare future.

Don't Mess

I teach guitar.

It's a humble job. But it pays fairly well; and there is certainly no shortage of young people in Northern California who think they want to learn to play. All in all, I'd rather be playing than teaching. That said, I have had the privilege of associating with some truly wonderful, and wonderfully talented kids.

Even so, motivation constitutes a problem for the majority. Most kids have very little desire to put in the work it takes to become a real musician. Sadly, the blessing/curse of the guitar is that if you are willing to goof around long enough you can get pretty dang good at it, and yet somehow utterly avoid being able to read music or really know anything about it. There are quite a few students willing to enter this category. We all have a most excellent time. But some days I wonder if I'm doing enough to cajole my students. The least I could do is shame and scare away the slackers before they waste more of their parents' money, right?

Many years ago now, in an attempt to help them understand the consequences of their choices, and to distinguish mere players from real musicians, we invented a word:

GUITARD.

Anyone who exhibits great skill, who can shred like a bastard and yet knows very little about music, who can play, perhaps, every AC/DC song in the catalogue but can't read Yankee Doodle from the beginner's manual, is a guitard. By extension, anyone who wants to shred, but who lacks the desire to study music, becomes, at least nominally, a guitard.

The term was effective from the get go. Even as it set the studious future musicians apart, it seemed to pay a certain respect to the shredders (in fact, the exact kind of counter cultural respect they desire); and kids with no desire to read music embraced their categorization. More importantly, it always got a respectful snicker or two from both sides of the musical fence, as most kids have a healthy sense of safety around any adult willing to use any word that remotely resembles "retard." By now, the term is practically part of the lesson plan.

As is another educational necessity: CHOCOLATE. I make a big deal of rewarding students who magnify their efforts towards musicianship. I've found that rich, classy, dark, dark chocolate is one of the better tools. Mostly because any good teacher must take it upon himself to sample the reward before dishing it to a student. A guitard will be rewarded more immediately with attention from the opposite sex, applause in the battle of the bands, etc. A musician's slower progress merits fine chocolate from teacher.

One day I stopped in a local supermarket for the express purpose of purchasing chocolate to reward my future musicians. I needed something new, something classy. Something a talented guitard might covet just enough to learn a little musical terminology or theory.

A new display caught my eye, and to my astonishment a fine chocolate from San Francisco rose like a glorious chocolate sun before me.

I don't know what invisible forces knew of my neologism and brought about this serene harmonic convergence, and I don't care. Suffice it to say, my teaching rose to a different level when we all learned together the all important lesson:

Don't mess with me. The very universe itself is on my side.

Sorry, but Socialism sucks. And 'Utopia' means 'no such place.' But I hope we can still be friends.

I may have a problem with you. And I need you to understand where I'm coming from, because I don't want it to come between us. See, a small part of your belief system might just be a joke to me. Worse, I might even consider it ridiculous, even evil, and dismiss it out of hand, because it makes so little sense to me. I admit it. However . . .

Perhaps my problem with communism/socialism/liberalism is that it can be, in fact, has been, thoroughly debunked in masterful, scholarly works of brilliant historical analysis like The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin. [editor's note: read the book, read the book, read the book. Even if you don't have a passion for lengthy footnotes and pages upon pages of analysis so deep that you have to google one out of every three names he drops, you might still come to understand how an entire book could be conceived and composed based on a single quote from Immanuel Kant--"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."]

Or maybe my problem with communism/socialism/liberalism is that after an admittedly personal, but nonetheless exhaustive search of the founding documents and related statements of the founders of the United States of America, I can find NOTHING, not ONE THING that supports the idea that one segment of the population can or should be forced to pay for another segment. In fact I find the exact opposite. They feared the idea that the government might ever have the power to do immoral things like tax income, or redistribute wealth. Intellectual slouches like Thomas Jefferson dismissed such ideas with books, with legislation, with essays, with public statements, and with little quips like "The government that has the power to give you everything you want also has the power to take away everything you have." [ed. note: it is particularly painful to contrast such words with the words of a citizen, who recently got some money from the government, looked a reporter in the eye and literally said: "Hey, it's free money! Thank God for Obama."]

Possibly my disdain finds its source in my experience in Canada, where, for two years, I saw the soul of a generation sucked out and drained of anything resembling vivacity, wherewithal, or even sass by the simple fact that when they turned eighteen they were grandfathered into the welfare system, from which they would derive their material existence as long as they lived, essentially getting paid to smoke, watch TV, and go to hockey games. [ed. note: the author considers Canada a great and beautiful country.]

Could it be I find it difficult to accept a belief system that even an old hack like G. Gordon Liddy could dismiss with an epithet: "A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man. A debt which he proposes to pay with someone else's money." How am I to accept a philosophy that even my beloved (and, in fact wonderful) communist/atheist brother admits to accepting on blind faith, being without evidence of success anywhere in history?

Or does it all add up to a thought I had the other day, (as I strove to find a way to appreciate the nobility of people with compassion in their heart, who want to help others, who reach out to humans being with a helping hand): No matter how angelic it is to want to help others, wanting to FORCE others to help is satanic.

I believe that. My completely rational study, personal experience, and analysis have led me to believe it.

Which is why, if you happen to believe otherwise, my responses to your arguments might feel a little like I'm telling you to go to hell. Which I can only hope, perhaps irrationally, that you'll understand.

On the Other Hand . . .

How could I forget the magic of shows like Arrested Development, and The Office? How could I neglect to praise the miracle of sports in HD? How could I overlook the incisive wit of the Daily Show, or, even funnier, the Colbert Report? How unfair of me to conveniently ignore the way the first season of Hero's grabbed me! What a cad I am. I can only hope it will forgive me. I still don't have one in my home, but a fairer assessment may be in order.

Modern Television might be just like Morrissey in his ripe old age, as years of greatness and geometric expansion of influence drive toward more extreme poles of contradiction: When he is good, he is better than ever--when he is not so good, he's a bit of an embarrassment.

I can't watch TV.

Recent exchanges on Facebook with idiotic partisans over the confirmation hearings of Inevitable Justice Sonya, who, mark my words, will go down in history among the least intelligent of all confirmed members of our highest court (she misuses easy words with the frequency of W, if that tells you anything) has left me itching to spit acid on the commentators and pundits of both sides. But I vowed that July would be free of politicality, and I'm tired of breaking promises to myself. Hence, this will not be an elucidation of the leftist pundits who, having written about how horrible and unqualified she was in the past, have had to become apologists for her now. Neither will I be listing the words she misused and asking: If I hated that about a certain Caucasian Cowboy, why do I have to accept it in a "wise [read: racist] Latina?" [editor's note: one of the words was "province." Well, she actually said "providence" as in, "it is the providence of congress to deliberate etc. . ." She obviously meant to say province.] And when if comes down to it, it was the exchange that offended, much more than the Justice or the hearings. And in the end, it just isn't worth the effort to even discuss people who are too stupid to understand the importance of an opposition party to question presidential nominees.


So, instead I will be asking the age old question: What has happened to TV?


As a child, I remember spending hours watching it. Hours. I didn't even need cable. M*A*S*H was on twice a day where I grew up. The mornings were replete with the golden age Game Shows. And what with the delicious re-runs on the UHF station, from the blessed perfection of Andy Griffith, to I Dream of Jeannie, from Gidget to One Day at a Time and right up through Diff'rent Strokes, you could literally spend an entire day watching (I did, every single time I was sick enough to stay home from school), and be entertained every moment. Saturday morning was Loony Toones and Smurfs and Trolkins and the entire stable of Hanna Barbara legends who took you into ABC's Wide World of Sports. It was TV that didn't seem to care if you were the only one watching. And I swear I learned at least as much from I Love Lucy marathons and Gilligan's Island as the kids who weren't lucky enough to be sick.

The intervening years have seen me get away from Television. Just a little. I don't have one. I watch the shows I love on DVD or on line. And they are few and far between. Perhaps my absence made the Television angry. I don't know. But last week I had the opportunity to volunteer at a facility that cares for the Elderly. Spent the day there. One of the things they do is watch lots of TV. (I guess in the TV sense, getting old is like being young. At least the part when you were too sick to go to school). The odd thing is, beyond certain obsessions, (Oprah for some; 6 O'clock news for others; Animal Planet for a few) they don't really care what they watch. Actually, what they really crave is sleep, and the TV serves as a distraction for the people who might otherwise try to keep them awake with annoying sing-alongs or childish crafts.

So there I was, remote in hand, ready to re-live the halcyon days of yore, to reclaim the ability to waste time, so alien to people who have the weight of the world on their shoulders. First order of business was The View. I've said before that this show is one of the proofs that hell exists. We need not speak of it further. The channel just happened to fall on whatever satanic station happens to run it. We quickly ran up the dial--two hundred channels up--to Animal Planet. I was anxious to love it, because I have always been an animal documentary junkie. My parents mandated that Sunday viewing be educational, and I took the occasion to fall deeply in love with Jaques Cousteau, and the entire crew of the Calypso. I even love films like March of the Penguins and Winged Migration. Ask my son, who only consents to watch our Planet Earth DVD (AGAIN!) because it is his best hope of an hour's nap on a Sunday afternoon.

Suffice it to say that Animal Planet left me bitterly disappointed. Between the abject depression inspired by "Animal Cops," a show about people who abuse animals in large cities and the people who cite them, and the sensationalistic shock shows about animals gone awry, I was left pining for Nova, or the old National Geographic, or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I learned nothing from watching a deer jump through a plate glass window and tear up an apartment. Not the first time they showed it. Not the 50th time. Not even from the 25 times they showed it in grainy slow motion. I had to change the channel. [ed. note: Animal Planet later redeemed itself, ever so slightly, with an actual documentary about Wild Russia.]

I then had to navigate through a barrage of Judge shows. All of which seemed to be trying to one up the others in the all important "yelling at the participants and telling them how stupid they are" category. It seemed that to watch 3 minutes of one was to get the point of 3 hours of any of them. My soul sank deeper into the gulf of dark ennui that TV was digging in my brain.

All the news channels, ALL OF THEM, were instantly soul killing. Toggling between MSNBC and Fox is like flipping a rigged coin. Heads: you lose--RNC spit takes that aren't funny because that's actual spit and it lands on your face. Tails: Keith Olberman pulls his head out of the anus of DNC marching order headquarters and smears you with the intellectual offal that passes for commentary in the minds of people who think he's any different from Sean Hannity. And I know they don't always have 'round the clock posthumous lionization of Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite, but even if I caught them on a bad week, let's not pretend that another viewing will find me nodding and saying: "wow, their shameless advertisements for Obama's socialization of the health care system have left me feeling informed." The situation was not improving. [Speaking of Cronkite, it was fascinating, which is to say, sickening, to watch how CBS stretched out their reportage, whilst the other networks truncated theirs. It was as if the former was desperately trying to say, "See how Katie lives up to his legacy?" and the latter were proclaiming "legacy? What legacy?" But perhaps it is fitting that "the most trusted man in America" is worth hours to the network that owned him, and 30 seconds to the networks who can only wish they did. Can't you just hear the board meetings? "Let's not be overly sentimental here people. How can we use this?" vs. "Let's not be overly sentimental here people, he was CBS. Let's just hope Brokaw kicks the bucket during sweeps."]

But I think I'll stop complaining there. Not just because prime time has a good deal more to offer. (LOST and a hot minority of highly entertaining, cutting edge shows save the day.) (Also, I am a closet sports junky.) (Did I mention Lost?) And not just to avoid the shame of revealing how certain shows like "extreme makeover, home edition" (which I caught on line once) make me cry as if the TV just gave birth to my firstborn child. I just don't want to pretend that TV has nothing to offer. As Homer Simpson said: TV gives so much, and asks so little.



Still, how can it be that when there were five channels, I had a more satisfying viewing experience than now, when there are 500?



It doesn't take a fuddy-duddy, or even a curmudgeon to point out that the modern age of television is not an embarrassment of riches. It's just an embarrassment.

Counter Culturalissimo

Permit me to reveal how deeply committed I am to bucking the establishment. Give me this moment to open a window, to give you a view of the interior of my house of rebellion. In short, let me tell you how hardcore I am.

Long before the tattoo was de rigeur for every single college kid and mid-life crisis in America, essentially the province of teenagers and cougars, I got one. Long before the very idea of the tattoo became the absolute mainstream, essentially making ALL of them, with the exception of Mike Tyson's, images of the Fonze jumping the shark, I had one. (Don't worry, in a few years, it will be a mess of blurred, indecipherable ink, you can tell people it used to say "Wino Forever.") It is still there, my tattoo, and it is so edgy that no amount wardrobe alteration (i.e. wearing my shirt unbuttoned and scratching a phantom pectoral itch) will shine the light of day upon it. Yes, I have a tattoo on the tender flank of my one remaining kidney.

Take that, ye grizzled Harley men! Ye kitschy odd-ball man-child hipsters! Ye self-finding socially conscious casual drinking college age post feminist granola girls!

(Face it, a tattoo so cutting edge that only a crooked doctor in a third world country even has the slightest chance of being awed by my bodacious audacity is the cutting edge. All others are swimming in my inky wake.)

And did I stop there? Absolutely not. Mere ink is not disfigurement enough for me. My anarchistic supremacy needed something that couldn't be faked with a sharpie. Yes, I needed a piercing. I needed a hole in a place where nature didn't put one, and I needed metal in that hole. Hence, long before your pants-sagging recreationally dependent bong banger was incrementally making his ear lobe holes big enough for nickels, I took it up a notch, and had the pierceologist at the local parlor put a 4 penny nail through my brain stem. (This is also why I forgot your birthday, whoever you are. As any counter cultural acolyte will testify: sometimes the price one pays for bad-assitude is slightly diminished cognitive function. So be it!) You can't see it, and I don't care if you can. I didn't do it for your approval. But you can bet your sorority sister silver tongue post that when I set off the metal detector at the courthouse I get right up in The Man's face and say, "What's the matter, you got a problem with my nail? No it isn't surgical. It's art. I did that ON PURPOSE, WHITEY."

Yeah. Take that, ye pierced eleven-year-old noses! Ye perforated eyebrows! Ye lint trapping belly button rings, now languishing in folds of fat!

Perhaps, now that my secrets are out, I can at last re-claim the title long held by usurpers.

I AM THE LIZARD KING!