OMG! Nazis! Nazis Everywhere!

 

Last week the Obama campaign released their new campaign slogan:

Forward

That’s the new slogan, Forward.

The Obama campaign likes simple one-word slogans and given today’s sound bite mentality that’s very likely a good idea.

Forward.

I probably wouldn’t have gone with Forward myself. In my mind it’s not really as inspiring as the campaign’s previous one word slogan, Hope.  Plus, the word hope only has one syllable, forward has two and the campaign risks losing the undecided vote with such a lengthy message.  If they were going to use a direction as a campaign slogan, for the majority of Americans it probably would have been better if they just grunted and pointed (of course pointing is fraught with risk too, you don’t want to get caught gesturing towards Canada, or worse Mexico. You know, on second thought, never mind).

So, anyway, Forward.

Moving toward the front, forward.

As in the direction that one is facing or traveling. Forward.

Into the future. Forward.

Seems harmless enough, right?

Forward.

For those of you who didn’t watch the video (because, Dread Cthulhu, Man, it’s like seven minutes long!), it begins by summarizing the grim situation President Obama inherited from the previous administration when he took office three years ago. The video then lists the president’s numerous accomplishments, both foreign and domestic, and goes on to mention that Obama managed to accomplish all of that in spite of the deliberate and sustained obstructionism of media pundits, truthers, birthers, flat-earthers, bug-eaters, loons, goons, poltroons, and congressional Republicans (my personal favorite is that little smirk on Mitch McConnell’s sallow pasty face. If Obama does get reelected, I’m going to enjoy watching him eat those words). 

The video concludes with the president’s ringing endorsement of the middle class and the American dream and of the United States itself.

“Hard work, determination, real results,” says the voiceover.

Hard work plus determination equals results, isn’t that what so many conservatives have been saying for the last three years?

OK, sure it comes out sounding like “Get a job, Hippies!” and “Screw you, I got mine,” but isn’t that exactly what republicans have been saying?  Work hard and you’ll be rewarded, forward to the American dream, right? There are plenty of jobs, you just need to get off your dead lazy socialist ass and go get one. Work hard and maybe someday you too can make millions liquidating companies and sending jobs overseas.

The clear and obvious message behind the above video is that while the president feels we’ve come a long way during these last three years, there is still much more – economically, domestically, and in the foreign policy arena – to be done in the coming years.  We'll need to work hard, stay the course, and eventually we’ll be back on top.

The video ends with one word: Forward.

Forward, isn’t that exactly the direction conservatives have been giving Obama for the last three years? Forward. Quit looking backward. Quit blaming Bush.  Quit complaining about the mess left by previous administrations and Wall Street and the banks and business. We need to stop talking about the past and start moving forward to the future.

Forward, it doesn’t get anymore American than that, right?

 

Yeah, American all right, American communist.

Forward, my easily amused electronic friends, is actually a totally secret hidden code word for socialism, communism, Nazis, godless baby eating atheism, Illuminati, shiny shaven vajazzled harlots running rampant in the streets, Canadians, mass abortions, Muslims, poison arrows falling from the sky, Justin Beiber, sissy electric cars, Marxists, the Anti-Christ, militant vegetarianism, death panels, FEMA labor camps, the Metric System, lite beer, the Lifetime Channel, and the sparkly nacho-cheese flavored fabulously stylish rainbow-colored gay agenda.

It’s totally true.

No, really it is. 

Forward = Commies.

 

Hello?

 

Whoa, Jim, I hear you say at last in that cautiously placating voice you use when you think I’ve been mixing drain-cleaner and recreational narcotics again and you’re frantically trying to find the number for emergency mental health services while keeping me calm long enough for the guys with the stun guns and pepper spray to arrive. What’s that you say, Jim? Forward is a communist slogan? Sure. Whatever you say, Chief, just stay right there and don’t worry about those sirens.

OK, you’re skeptical.

Fine. Be that way. Go on then, don’t take my word for it.

Instead listen to Glenn Beck ferret out Obama’s secret totally hidden plan to use his Magic Negro-Ray and the secret armies of Communist Cannibal Death Nazis of Death to achieve absolute world domination (WARNING: you may actually feel yourself devolving into a more primitive life-form during the following video.  Those who are already running a brain cell deficit are strongly cautioned to skip the video, otherwise you may end up as a bowl of pudding):

Did you make it through the video? (If you’re suffering brain spasms, watch this. The nausea and vomiting will pass eventually)

Sure, to the untrained eye, Beck sounds like gibberish, the kind of booger-eating Palinesque random word salad stream of consciousness generated by an unhinged under-medicated paranoid, of course it does.  But remember, Glenn Beck is also the guy who discovered Nazis in Grandpa’s Medicare, Marxism in ancient Babylon, and secret communists at FEMA. Say what you like, Beck knows his way around a conspiracy theory (it’s also likely that he knows his way around a drain cleaner and narcotic highball, but I digress).

Besides, it’s not just Glenn Beck, folks.  Fox Nation, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, why all sorts of totally reliable sources agree.

Want more proof?

Over on ZIMBIO, there’s a compelling piece titled:  Obama Campaign Slogan "Forward" or "Vorwärts". Think Karl Marx.  The author, a intellectual giant and obvious expert on all matters historical, explains how Obama’s slogan “Forward” is the same as “Vorwärts” which a is German for “Forward.” 

Ah ha!

What? 

What do you mean you don’t see it? Dude, look: Forward = Vorwärts.

No? Try harder.

Forward = Vorwärts = Forward = Vorwärts = Forward, shake, lather (emphasis on lather), repeat. 

Still nothing, eh? Here, drink some of this drain cleaner.

Look, English has a word for Forward. German has a word for Forward. Coincidence? Not likely.  English = German and German = Nazis and if English equals German and German equals Nazis then America equals Nazis, Q.E.D. That’s math, folks. Math don’t lie, that’s in the Bible and you can look it up.

Get it now?

The only good logic is the circular kind, folks. Take another slug of that drain cleaner and pass the bottle around, tastes like tea doesn’t it? Mmmm, good.

Vorwärts.

Now if those filthy socialist umlauts weren’t condemnation enough, Vorwärts is also the name of a song sung by the Hitler Youth back in old communist Nazi Germany. 

That’s right, Hitler Youth.

Oh, now the light comes on, does it? Hitler’s Nazi fascists and Karl Marx’s communists were Best Friends ForEVAH.  That’s right. Everybody knows that, everybody whose history textbooks were printed in Texas anyway.

It’s pretty hard to argue with that kind of logic, isn’t it?

You bet it is.

You drink enough drain cleaner and you start to see things in a whole new light.

Forward? Why it’s like Obama is just rubbing your face in it, isn’t it? Who did he praise in that video? Teachers? Firemen? Police? Autoworkers? College students, women, construction workers? The middle class. Communists one and all!  Who did he condemn? That’s right, banks, Wall Street, Oil Companies! Real Americans. Obama hates capitalism!

Ended the war?

Killed Osama?

You know who else ended a war in Afghanistan and tried to kill Osama bin Ladin? I’ll tell you, the Soviets! 

Except those Russian commies failed, Obama actually did it.  Sweet Nacho-Flavored Jesus, Obama is a better communist than the Soviet Union!

Wait, hold on, what’s this?

Holy Hell! Forward is the motto of Wisconsin! Wisconsin is communist!  We’ve been eating Marxist cheese! Is that a Russian Bear under the Nazi Forward banner? I think it is (What? It’s a badger not a bear you say? Yeah and what animal did the USSR name their atomic bombers after?)  God’s hairy belly button, look at that damned picture, hammer, arm, plow, two gay guys, it’s like you can feel yourself being indoctrinated into the Nazi Communist Party of Socialist Fascism!

I know what you’re thinking: Boy oh boy, I wish I’d taken the blue pill.

Me too.

Forward. Dread Cthulhu, I had no idea how far the rabbit hole went.

No idea at all.

Who’s this guy?

Lebron James? Famous American basketball player, one of the best in the world. What position does he play? Oh, yes, that’s right, Forward.  Good Grief, look at that guy, no wonder Conservatives are scared. Put a bag of Skittles in his hand and Lebron would be the spitting image of Lenin!

Hey, how about this socialist?

Winston Churchill a dirty Marxist? Say it ain’t so!

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”  – Walt Disney

Walt Disney, folks. Secret communist.

“The choice before the American people this year is of overwhelming importance: whether to hand the government back to the liberals or move forward with the conservative agenda.” — Ronald Reagan, 1986.

Et tu, Ronnie? Et tu?

Forewarned is forearmed.

Oh but it’s so much worse than that. So much worse. Want to know the name of the preeminent Jewish daily news site? Forward.  Yes, that’s right, the Jews own Forward.com. Can you believe it? The Jews are Nazis!

Wait, wouldn’t that make supporting Israel the same as supporting communism?

For the answer to that question and many more you didn’t know you wanted to ask, tune into Glenn Beck.

Remember to keep looking backward, folks.

For America.

 

 

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Afterword:

Couple of things:

- First, Afterword, I hope you see what I did there.

- You know, if anybody else other than the usual conservative pundits went on national media and in complete candor said this kind of bizarre stupid silly conspiracy nut nonsense, they would get locked up in the boobyhatch and pumped full of happy juice.   Glenn Beck’s mental illness is almost funny – in a sad, kicking the spaz sort of way – until you suddenly realize that it’s contagious.  Especially for people with compromised immune systems.  Education seems to be an antibody, but too many of these twits are the educational equivalent of anti-vaxxers.  Glenn Beck is the Typhoid Mary of politics.

- The part I don’t get is how Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest of these drooling booger-eating yoyos figure that Obama is so nefarious, so clever, so tenacious, so single minded and dedicated to his cause, that he plotted from before he was born to take over the world, kill Jesus, and turn America into tasty nacho-flavored Communism, and he did it so well that he actually managed to get himself elected. But then he what? Couldn’t resist putting a Nazi slogan on his bumper stickers, because, why again?

- For a political party and an ideology composed in significant fraction by people who like to refer to themselves as “The Greatest Generation” (and really, no arrogance there. No no, you’re awesome. We totally suck. Not your fault though) and who like to go on ad nauseum about how they single handedly won World War II and the Cold War, how they personally cornholed Hitler and kicked the Soviet Union’s ass and made the world free for democracy – they sure don’t seem to understand that the terms “Nazi” and “Communist” are not interchangeable (Of course, that would require that the Greatest Generation admit that they allied with the communists to fight the fascists, funny how they leave that out of the history books nowadays, but I digress).  Honestly, I simply cannot fathom how anybody, let alone this particular group, can’t seem to get it through their pointy heads that fascism is one end of the political spectrum and communism is the other.  They may both suck, but they suck in totally different ways.  To me, nothing says your argument is invalid quicker than using “Marxist,” “Fascist,” “Communist,” and “Nazi” interchangeably.  It ought to be legal to slap the Ben Franklin Powdered Wig right off their silly heads.

- Don’t get me wrong, and don’t get too smug. Liberals have their fair share of gibbering loons too.  The extremists on both sides keep talking about taking their country back or words to that affect, I think it’s about time for Americans, reasonable intelligent moderate Americans on both sides of the aisle to step up, speak up, and start marginalizing these goofs.  The people who nominated Romney have a lot more in common with the people who nominated Obama than they do with the vocal nutjobs in their own party, extremists like Glenn Beck and his horde of drain-cleaner swilling followers.  The reverse is also true.

Wanted: Sidekick, Must Be Able To Take A Punch

So, it's come down to Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney?

After three years of listening to the screechy monkeys wailing about Obama and crying about taking "their" country back, conservatives have apparently chosen Mitt Romney as the de facto GOP candidate.

Mitt Romney.

It's just me, right?

Yeah. It’s just me. Pardon me while I guffaw in hearty, yet ironic, amusement.

Mitt Romney.

Really?

Let's review, shall we?

The first to fall was the warm up comedy act, Dominar Rygel the Sixteenth Donald Trump.

The first real actual candidate to bow out was Jon Huntsman. As I said when he declared his campaign beneath the baleful copper gaze of Lady Liberty, Huntsman never had a chance. And that is a damned shame, because Huntsman probably came closest to what most Tea Party, Libertarians, and large number of conservatives say they want. Ironically, these are the same things moderates of both parties, many Liberals, and a significant number of the Occupy movement say they want as well. But I digress. Savvy, smart, experienced, down to earth, hardworking, about as non-partisan as you can get and still be a politician, a guy who understand business, a guy who was one of the most popular governors in US history, and a solid leader who likely understands China and Asia better than anybody else in the world (certainly orders of magnitude beyond any other current politician). Huntsman is a guy who doesn't much care for either of the mainstream American political parties and he is somebody who advocates for congressional term limits, profound campaign finance reform, and a major overhaul and strict limits on Congressional redistricting. A rather large number of Americans who have been going around calling themselves We The People claim they want to take their country back from the politicians, the things Huntsman advocates would go a long, long way towards giving them exactly that.

Naturally, Huntsman was eaten by the flying monkeys first.

The Three Stooges were next. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry each appealed to their own small paranoid fringe demographic of underpants gnomes. It should give all of us pause that they made it as far as they did, obviously there is a much larger population of the untreated mentally ill running about than any of us would have guessed. None of these goofs ever had a real chance, despite the personal endorsement of the Almighty, there just aren't enough Unibombers or members of the Texas Independence Movement to make a significant voting bloc, and let's face it, Godfather's pizza sucks giant dirty donkey balls. I do admit, however, that as somebody who writes about politics and as somebody who is as easily amused as I am, I was really rooting for Cain. I would have paid actual real genuine American cash bucks to see Herman The Pizza Man debate President Obama one on one, man to man and mano a mano, constipation to Constitution, live on national TV. I might even have subscribed to HBO for that that, because, honestly, there hasn’t been a really worthwhile comedy special since Palin's interview with Katie Couric. In my mind's eye I picture Cain’s head flopping backward and a crazy little Herman face looking out of his neck like Sam Rockwell's character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy madly shouting, "Magrathea! Magrathea!" (or maybe "Cheese Pizza! Cheese Pizza!").

Cain, Dread Cthulhu, talk about a guy whose brain runs on lemons, but I digress yet again.

Seriously, Zaphod Beeblebrox had a better chance at the nomination than any of these three twits.

Much less amusing was the other glassy-eyed religious zealot in the mix, Rick Santorum. Santorum is about as funny as cervical cancer and his brand of theocracy is just about as accepting and tolerant as an Ayatollah at a Castro District Pride parade. He was supposed to appeal to the conservative base, but he couldn't even muster up enough votes to win his own home state primary.

Next out was Newt Gingrich. Of course, he's not actually out yet, but will apparently announce next week that he's officially quitting the race. Then he'll take all his toys and retreat to Moon Base Reagan and write a book about how he won a moral victory and how he’s not really sulking. We're all just supposed to ignore the fact that Gingrich has repeatedly sworn he would stay in until Tampa, no matter what, cross my heart and hope to die. Of course there's nothing surprising about Gingrich's failure to keep a promise, it's pretty much his trademark. If he can screw over a couple of wives in the process, he gets a royalty payment.

Frankly, Gingrich only lasted as long as he has because the universe doesn't prevent crazy people from being Las Vegas billionaires or starting superPACs.

Then there's Ron Paul. I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I really dislike this guy. I think he's a galloping goof and if his kid is any indication, it's probably a hereditary condition. His followers are starting to verge on the walleyed gibbering version of lost cause fanaticism (Magrathea! Magrathea!).  If they all decide to move to a jungle compound in Guyana and start eating each other I won't be even mildly surprised. But even I have to admit that Paul does seem to live up to what he preaches - that's fairly unique in a professional politician, especially this crowd, and especially one from Texas (Yes, yes, I know. Look I hate to keep busting on Texas, but seriously, you stop and I'll stop).

Ron Paul doesn't have to drop out, he was never actually in the race to begin with.

And so, after all the moaning and wailing and teeth gnashing, after three frantic piss-filled years of Hitler-tossing and horror struck dire warnings of sodomy and socialism, liberalism and death panels, communism and the end of the world and the Anti-Christ, totalitarianism, Marxism, the shambling undead corpse of Ronald Reagan, and OMFG Nazis! we're finally down to it.

And who did the Republicans pick?

Romney.

Mitt Romney.

Ha ha h… wait, what?

After three years of bitching about presidential arrogance and the red tide from China, Republicans didn’t pick the down to earth guy with the foreign policy experience.  After three years of pointing out how the current occupant of the White House never served in the military and hates veterans and the working man and America, they didn’t pick the pray for rain cowboy cargo pilot.  After loudly lamenting the death of “traditional family values” and the insidious sparkly gay agenda, they didn’t pick Ford-Tough-Super-Duty-Uterus  Lady who also happens to be an expert in degayification.  Despite complaining bitterly about a lack of business acumen in the White House, they didn’t pick the guy who more or less claims to have invented the pizza industry single handedly, while walking up hill, both ways, to work barefoot in the snow. After a decade of pissing themselves blind over Muslims and bemoaning the lack of Jesus in the classroom they didn’t pick the Uber Christian. And after three years of complaining about the president’s comparative lack of experience in Washington and the cancellation of the space program, they didn’t pick the Beltway insider Moon Man either.

No, they picked the one guy who is politically closest and ideologically most like, wait for it, waaaaaaaaiiiiiit for it, most like Barack Obama.

Buwah?

You're shitting me, right?

So, in the end, after all the rhetoric and all the anguished rending of garments and self flagellation, after repeated threats of government shutdowns, after all the talk of taking our guns to Washington, after tea parties and talk of treason and secession and civil war, after the patriots and powdered wigs, after the tear gas and the Tasers, after the ridiculous idiotic birther nonsense and the endless silly comparisons of who the better Christian was, after all that bullshit about elitism and who had lost touch with the common man, they picked the handsome moderate elitist millionaire with a private elevator in the garage of his vacation mansion and the weird religion made from magic underpants and the funny marriage customs who championed universal healthcare, gun control, big government and made his fortune by liquidating jobs and closing businesses and who said that he would do pretty much exactly what the current President has been doing to end the war and fix the economy (only he'd do it faster and without any OMFG Nazis!).

Refresh my memory, what was all the rabid frothy objection to Obama again?

What could it be? What could it be?

Hmmmm. It’s a puzzle.

What’s that you say?

Oh, yeah, that. Riiiiight. I'm sure that's not it. Never mind. Move along, nothing to see here.

So anyway now that the GOP Sausage Machine has spit out this cycle’s wiener, the only question remaining is: who's Romney going to select as a running mate?

Marco Rubio? Chris Christie? Paul Ryan?  Rubio is supposed to appeal to Latinos because apparently Mexicans can’t tell themselves from Cubans either. Paul is supposed to appeal to people who like spread sheets and poverty. Christie is supposed to appeal to people who are still in mourning over the end of The Sopranos.  All likely choices. All boring and predictable. Just like Mitt himself. 

Romney needs to shake things up, show some spontaneity for crying out loud.  Appeal to those fringe elements who bailed out of the process and hightailed it for their mountain shacks and bible bunkers when Romney’s fellow candidates fell by the wayside.

Sarah Palin?  As amusing as a rerun of Word Salad Sally would be, there’s spontaneity and there’s going rogue.  Rogue is what they call it when an enraged elephant goes completely nuts, begins trumpeting wildly and biting at its own tail, tramples everything around into pulp, and is then eventually shot dead by the surviving bloodied villagers after rampaging through a church bus filled with crippled orphans.  Nobody wants that (well, OK, almost nobody wants that).

How about Ted Nugent? He’s already on a first name basis with the Secret Service and he’d be a hoot at fundraisers.

No?

So who then?

Republicans picked the candidate most like Obama for president, doesn’t it make sense to find a guy similar to Joe Biden for Veep?

Let's see, Biden is old, white, outspoken, profane, gaff prone, a lawyer, Catholic, immodest, nonintellectual. He got out of going to Vietnam with a draft deferment … holy hell! Joe Biden is practically a Republican already! If we could get him to snort cocaine out a gay prostitute’s belly button, or maybe torture a prisoner or two, his journey to the dark side would be complete! He’d forget all about that equal rights and sissy global warming stuff.

Sure, that’s it!

Joe Biden. He could be both Obama and Romney’s running mate.

Hey, smaller government, right? It’ll foster closer ties between Left and Right. C’mon, it’ll be like one of those arranged marriages in Game of Thrones.  Sorry Joe, it’s your duty, for the good of the realm.  You marry Prince Joffrey tomorrow at noon. Buck up, Man, you’ll grow to love him. 

Think of the money we’ll save.

States will save money by having one less name to print on the ballots, it’s not much but it adds up – especially if we could reuse Biden for two or three more election cycles. No matter how it shakes out, we don’t have to change the name on the VP’s office, don’t have to hire new staff or clean out the fridge or redecorate the VP Residence.  Hey! I’ve got an idea.  Dig this, the Constitution doesn’t assign any actual duties to the VP, in fact nobody is really sure which branch of government he even belongs to. He just sort of lurks around Washington watching TV and surfing the internet and making smart Alec comments.  But, and this is my point, he gets a government paycheck.  That’s right, the Vice President of the United States gets paid to do nothing, hell, even Prince Charles has to attend shopping mall openings and polo matches and stuff.  The American VP? Nada.  I say that’s a luxury we can no longer afford to keep on the payroll.  We save money by recycling the VP, we can save even more by putting him to work. So, what can the Vice President do?  Oh the list is endless, somebody needs to wash Air Force One, walk the First Pooch, weed the Rose Garden, clean up after GSA parties.  That kind of thing. There’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents it (that’s totally true, I looked it up on the internet). 

Sure, that’s it, Joe Biden, he’d be the perfect guy for Romney’s running mate.

Ok, just think about it. That’s all I asking.

The People We Were, The People We Are

We used to know each other.

I always wondered what happened to you, where you ended up, what you became, how your life turned out.

My memory isn’t what it once was, but I still remember you, I do.

Despite the years, decades even, I’d still recognize your face in a crowd – at least I think I would.  Probably.

It’s been a long time though, hasn’t it?

We were friends, you and I.  Once, long ago.

Maybe we were inseparable or maybe we just sort of knew each other like people do, either way there was a time I would have counted you among my friends. Yes I would have and I don’t say that lightly.  I have a lot of acquaintances but by design I don’t have a lot of friends; I treasure the ones I do have.  I treasure the people who made a difference in my life, even if they exist only as memories now.

I remember you and the times we shared fondly.

I remember that I looked up to you and valued your viewpoint and opinion. I had a hard time finding myself when I was young, I wasn’t the most pleasant person or the most easygoing back then. I tend to live a bit louder than the average and I truly valued your patience with me. I respected you and you should know that you helped to shape my worldview though maybe not in a way you expected.

We were schoolmates maybe, growing up together during a childhood that is much further away now than either of us like to acknowledge.  We grew up in the same neighborhood.  Or maybe we were boy scouts together.  We met at summer camp, or on the baseball diamond, or at the lake.  Maybe we were co-workers decades ago, back before I left Michigan to see the world. Sure, we slung hash and bussed tables together, we lusted after the same hot waitresses in their cheap polyester skirts who wouldn’t give us the time of day and we hated the same jerk managers and made fun of their silly comb-overs and crappy two dollar clip-on ties.  We worked side by side on the paint line at the car factory, sharing a Marlboro Red during break to get the stink of burning metal and wet enamel out of our noses (Dumb? Sure, but back then we were positive that we were immortal. And why shouldn’t we have believed that? Nothing had killed us up to that point).   We bailed hay and drove tractors and shoveled cow manure together.  We drank cheap lousy beer from a keg around a bonfire at a party in somebody’s backyard surrounded by faceless people that I have long ago forgotten. Or maybe we met in the service. Two and a half decades in uniform, a dozen deployments, one quick month-long war and two endless decade-long ones, a half dozen ships, a dozen duty stations, six continents and seven seas, I met a lot of people. We might have been shipmates, you and I.  Maybe we stood the watch together on some Cold War cruiser off the coast of Africa or Russia or Greenland, or maybe we crossed the Pacific together and sailed through the Straits of Malacca or Indonesia or Hormuz. Maybe we went on liberty together, drinking and swearing and raising hell as only Sailors can through the streets of Mallorca and Tel Aviv and Athens and Rome and Cairo and Sidney and Hong Kong and Singapore and Nairobi and Freemantle and two dozen other places and countries that I no longer recall.  Maybe we hunted pirates off the Horn of Africa, sweating our butts off in that goddamned inhuman heat or maybe we chased drug smugglers in the Caribbean or down off the mysterious Galapagos Islands under the light of the Southern Cross.  Maybe we served together at some long gone duty station in some forgotten part of the world, trying to figure out what the hell we were doing in such a miserable godforsaken place, stuck in the festering armpit of the universe surrounded by people who hated our stinking guts or maybe just the opposite, hell and gone from the rest of civilization and so close to the edge of the world that you could see it.  Maybe we slogged through the same warzone together, wondering if we would ever make it home again, miserable and sweating and afraid and wondering what we ever did to deserve such a fate or witness such devastation.

Maybe we shed tears over the same fallen comrades, the same lost friends.

I’ve got a box of old faded photos around here somewhere, because back when I knew you cameras still used film. I’ve still got those albums, and I’ve still got those pictures. You know the ones I’m talking about. I’ve seen you piss drunk and I seen you cold sober. I’ve seen you scared and tired and hungry. I’ve seen you laugh and I’ve seen you cry.  You once told me about your dreams and what you hoped to get out of your life. I remember that you wanted to open your own restaurant, or maybe it was a bar and grill (even going so far as to draw up floor plans and menus and pick out locations), you wanted to be a singer (I heard your demo tape, the one you cut when you were 19, the one you scraped together $500 bucks to make at some fly-by-night studio with a drunk session keyboardist and a second-rate soundboard and a broken microphone. It was terrible, goddamn was it terrible, but hey, it was you and you know what? Even though you can’t sing for shit and I haven’t seen you in decades, I still have that tape and some day, if I can find a working cassette player, I’m going to upload it to your kid’s Facebook page),  you wanted to be an orthodontist (honest to God, what kind of kid dreams about being a dentist? But that was you), you wanted to be a poet, you wanted to drive a taxi, you wanted to go back home and be a small town cop.  You wanted to be a doctor, you were going to do good, save people, serve in the Peace Corps.  You were going to be a priest, you were going to walk in the footsteps of Jesus or Gandhi or Indiana Jones. You showed me pictures of your kids and your spouse and your butt-ugly three-legged dog (or maybe that was your new baby, it’s been a long time, I forget). 

We were going to change the world, you and me. Make it better. Wasn’t that what we were taught? Service above self. Respect. Duty. Honor. Be trustworthy and loyal. Integrity. Help others. Heal the sick. Clothe the poor. Feed the hungry.  Help little old ladies across the street. Leave only footsteps, take only memories.

You worked with others, of all faiths and none, maybe you believed and maybe you didn’t and maybe you just didn’t care one way or the other but you didn’t make an issue out of it.  If you talked about your faith, or lack thereof, you weren’t an ass about it, you didn’t proselytize, you didn’t try to witness me,  and you didn’t try to force your beliefs on me – because if you had, well, we wouldn’t have been friends, would we?  You didn’t hate others for believing differently, or if you did you never said so out loud and that was good enough.

You used to believe in taking care of the planet.  Remember when we were Scouts? Leave no trace, isn’t that what we practiced? You taught me that. Remember when we were kids and that commercial about keeping America beautiful, that one with Iron Eyes Cody and narrated by Robert Conrad? Remember the Exxon Valdez and Love Canal? There was a time when we, you and I, believed that we were stewards of this world and we wanted to leave it better than we found it, we wanted the next generations to know the forests and the lakes and the beauty that we knew.

In all the time I knew you, I never heard you call people who were different traitors or un-American or enemies or lazy parasites who were destroying America, I never heard you call people socialists or fascists or Nazis (Nazis for God’s sake. Nazis) just because they didn’t belong to your political party.  And the only people you called commies were communists, not the 208 members of Congress who happen to have different political beliefs than you.

We used to talk about science. Of course we grew up in the same decade when men walked upon the moon.  We believed, you and I, believed in science, in technology.  In education and learning.  We read the works of Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and we wanted to go, and hell, we even believed that we would.  Someday.

I never knew you to buy into crazy conspiracy theories and obvious nonsense and hysterical talk radio bullshit.

I don’t remember you being afraid all of the time, afraid of everybody and everything.

I don’t remember you thinking that guns and violent revolution and theocracy were good ideas.

I don’t remember you ever using a racial slur, or demeaning women or minorities. You were the guy who would have spoken up, who would have put a stop to it and, man, back then I wished that I had  half of your courage.

I don’t remember you hating people.

Hell, you used to enjoy meeting people who were different, people like me for example.  You accepted people the way they were, people like me for example, and that was so unusual in my personal experience that it profoundly changed how I viewed the world – and how I treated others.

I didn’t know there were people like you and you have no idea how much I admired you for being you.

You helped me grow up.

That’s one of the things I really, really respected about you.

Even after all these years that’s the thing I remember most about you. Your face grows hazy in my memory and maybe I really wouldn’t recognize you in a crowd after all, but I will always remember the way you treated others, people like me for example.  I’ve always carried that lesson with me and I’ve always tried to live up to your example – even if I haven’t always been as successful at it as I’d like.

 

Maybe I’m remembering it wrong. 

 

It was a long time ago and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since we last saw each other. 

But, you know, I remember plenty of folks from the same time who hated others, who were bullies and jerks and hysterical fools. I remember those who were small minded religious bigots. I remember those who thought they could solve every problem with their fists, believe me I remember those people very clearly – despite the various head trauma I’ve suffered over the years that part of my brain, the part that stores those memories, remains solidly intact. I remember those who were racists and xenophobes and haters.  I remember those who treated people who were different, me for example, with contempt and scorn and mockery.

I don’t remember you being one of them.

Maybe that’s why I was so glad to hear from you again after all these years.

You found me on Facebook or saw my Twitter feed or you came across my name listed at TogetherWeServed.  A friend of a friend of an acquaintance forwarded you something I wrote and you realized you used to know me.  You saw a link to something I wrote in the national media or on a blog or via StumbleUpon or Reddit or on Google Plus. 

You did a web search and somehow you ended up here at Stonekettle Station.

One way or the other, we reconnected after ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years.

And that’s when you found out I wasn’t the person you imagined I was.

Don’t feel bad, the discovery was mutual.

You, whoever you are, always start your message the same way. You tell me how smart you thought I was, how much you used to respect me or how funny you thought I was. What a card, what good times we had. But (and there’s always that but isn’t there? I can always see it coming. But.  I used to really respect you, but…  I used to admire you, but… I remember what a smart guy you were, but…). You read something I wrote and you were appalled.  Now to be fair, you gave me the benefit of the doubt, or benefit of your denial, whatever, and decided that I was just misguided.  You could straighten me out if you just quoted Rush or Glenn or the Savage Wiener at me.  When that didn’t work, well, then you couldn’t wait to tell me just how utterly disappointed you were in the way I turned out.

I’m not the guy you think I should be.

Sorry about that.

But hey, it turns out you’re not the person I thought you were either.

I guess that makes us even.

Nowadays you call yourself a Patriot or a True American or a Constitutionalist, implying of course that I am not, despite the fact that I’ve spent my entire adult life sworn to uphold and defend that same Constitution, that same America and despite the fact that I’ve put my life on the line to uphold that oath.

Somewhere in the intervening decades, you stopped believing in science and started believing that science is some vast conspiracy theory, a dodge, a con game to make scientists rich – the fact that you’re surrounded by rising seas and melting glaciers and dying species and the fossil record and can’t point to very many rich scientists doesn’t seem to deter you at all.  If the filthy rich guy in the the multi-million dollar temple of glass and steel and gold says it’s true, well it must be so. 

Somehow, somewhere, you gave up your dream of being a teacher and started sneering at education. Like scientists, teachers seem to deserve only your contempt and scorn. Our parents dreamed of their children having a better education than they did, you demand that your kids, and mine, have less. 

Somehow you went from accepting those that were different, like me for example, and started surrounding yourself with people just like yourself.  You’re the guy that turned the Boy Scouts from an organization that once included all, into a small withering outfit that is largely defined today by those that they hate and exclude.  Don’t. Don’t bother to try and tell me different, I’ve seen exactly what it became with my own eyes when I tried to introduce my own son to an organization I once dearly loved.  I remember a guy we once called a friend, one of the best scout leaders we ever knew, a guy that lived up to the Scout Oath and the Scout Law every single day – a guy people like you kicked out of Scouting because it turned out he was gay.  He died of cancer a while back, with his lifelong companion by his side, and all those Scouts he helped and guided and mentored over the years, well, they pretended that they didn’t even know him. So much for loyalty and courage and doing the right thing.

Somehow environmentalism became a dirty word for you.  Leave No Trace somehow became Drill, Baby, Drill.  Conservation became Consumption and anything else is just plain unpatriotic.  Our children can live without the forests and the lakes and the beauty we knew, so long as they can still buy an SUV.

Somewhere along the  line you stopped believing in bearded happy robe-wearing Jesus, that guy who welcomed all and admonished you to do onto others and love your neighbor as yourself.  Instead you took up with the Mirror Universe Messiah, the angry goatee wearing soldier Jesus who carries a high-capacity 9mm H&K concealed in his cammies and hates pretty much every goddamned body.  Feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, love your neighbor, that hippy garbage is for suckers and socialists and people who want to enslave us all.   You’re all about America being a Christian nation run by militant Christians in accordance with Christian values, just as long as that means government can use Jesus as an excuse to dictate a woman’s reproductive and healthcare choices, but not when it comes to having a government that does what Jesus specifically commanded you to do – because charity, of course, is about individual choice. I guess it’s a whole lot easier to shoot an abortion doctor than it is to feed and care for the tens of thousands who go to bed hungry and cold and sick every night.

You used to be fearless, but somehow you ended up afraid all of the time.  Afraid of everything and everybody, afraid of change, afraid to hope, and afraid of anybody different, people like me for example.  You live in the freest nation in the world and in a time of nearly unlimited opportunity, you have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep and unfettered access to endless information, you’ve got fresh water and healthcare and a sanitary place to take a shit without it ending up in your food supply and you’ve got all the goddamned guns you can afford. Your worst damned day is better than what ninety percent of the world’s population will ever experience, ever, in their entire miserable short brutal lives.  But you’re still afraid. Maybe it’s because you only listen to people who tell you to be afraid, dimwitted small minded fearful haters who make a profit on your fear, folks like Ted Nugent and Allen West and Sarah Palin. Maybe it’s because you only listen to people like Rush and Glenn and Sean instead of actual scientists, engineers, economists, or people who have actually gone more than fifty miles from where they were born, people like me for example.

Maybe it’s because you want to be afraid. 

For all the things I once admired about you, for all the things you taught me, for all the glad memories we share, it saddens me that it should be so. 

We used to know each other.

I always wondered what happened to you.

I always wondered where you ended up, what you became, how your life turned out.

Now I know.

And I wish that I didn’t.

The War Is Over, But The Battle Rages On…

And then there were, er, uh, two?

Two actual GOP candidates I mean. 

And one of the two is Ron Paul, so technically it’s really just Mitt Romney.

Or is it?

 

Santorum’s out. For sure. Sort of. Maybe.

“We made a decision over the weekend that, while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting."

We’re not done fighting.

But, we will suspend our campaign.

Santorum is out like Newt Gingrich is out.  Like Michelle Bachmann is out.  Like Rick Perry is out.  Like Herman Cain is out. 

They’re out. But they’re not out out. They quit, but they didn’t quit quit.

They lost, but they’re still fighting. 

Kind of like their queen,

It may be tempting and more comfortable to keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand [that you] sit down and shut up, but that’s the worthless easy path. That’s a quitter’s way out

That was Sarah Palin, during her resignation speech when she quit her job as Alaska State Governor on July 3, 2009

It’s over, but we’re not done fighting?

We’re done, but we’re not done.

We quit, but we didn’t actually quit.

What the hell does that even mean?

Honestly, suspend? We suspended our campaign. It’s so totally not like quitting.  We’re not running for office any more, but we didn’t quit. No no, quitting is for quitters.  We not quitters, we suspended our campaign. We’re suspenders. 

Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and now Santorum all “suspended” their campaign.

Then they all vowed to keep fighting (just like they all vowed to go all the way to Tampa, but I digress, as is my wont).

Refresh my memory, aren’t these the same people who so utterly despise “political correctness” and who pride themselves on “saying it like it is” without sugar coating? Really aren’t these those people?

Why the hell can’t they just admit that they lost and they are now quitting?

Honestly, I think there needs to be some kind of federal law or Constitutional amendment or a Fatwa from His Humungous, the Pope, or something that compels politicians to stand in front of a camera and say this exact line, “I quit.  I am defeated. My campaign is over. I concede. I have lost.  I am a loser. I was beaten. I am no longer a candidate. I am a worm.  I am lower than whale turds on the bottom of the sea.  I have lost, lost, lost.  I will now slink home where I will sit in my darkened living room wearing nothing but a pair of dirty boxer shorts and watch reruns of SpongeBob Squarepants while moaning like a small child with a belly ache. I will drink cheap red wine straight from the box and go unwashed and cry until my wife brings me a grilled cheese sandwich with the crust trimmed off and some Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O’s with the little cut up weenies in ‘em.”

Then they should be publically marked with a large “L” drawn on their foreheads in indelible black Sharpie Marker and be forced to wear their underpants on the outside of their clothes for a year whenever they are out in public.

I guarantee that a law like that would dramatically cut down on this “suspend” bullshit. 

Yes, yes. I’m an idea man, everybody says so. Make sure they spell my name correctly on the Nobel, my middle name is “Goddamned.”

The battle is over.

But we’re going to keep fighting.

What? Like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find in a cave on some long forgotten South Pacific island fifty years after World War II ended? All wild-eyed and bearded and raggedy-assed, living on rats and drinking his own piss. Still fighting for a long defunct Emperor and a nation that had been burned to the ground and rebuilt as a country that makes fuel-efficient cars, creepy Anime porn, and music that sounds like a cat and a fire alarm in a blender? Like that? Is that how they’ll “keep fighting?”  Because I would totally pay to see Rick Santorum drink his own piss, I’m just saying.

Santorum didn’t give a reason for his non-quitting campaign suspension. 

The press seems to think it was because of his daughter, Bella, who has a rare genetic disorder and was hospitalized over the weekend. As a parent myself, I’m sure Santorum loves his daughter with all of his small calloused heart and her welfare is of the utmost importance to him and I think he’s perfectly sincere when he says so. And if he did quit because he puts the welfare of his family over his own ambition, well, you know, good on him.  But I think that ship sailed about six months ago,  his daughter didn’t just get sick, she’s been sick since the moment she was conceived and she’s always going to be sick despite all the prayers to the Great Bird of the Universe to make it otherwise – well, unless secular science and the Satan-spawned stem-cell medical research Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in finds a cure, but I digress yet again.  His daughter’s tragic illness is nothing new, and I seriously doubt that it was the reason for Santorum’s decision to suspend his campaign even if his campaign does decide to officially use her as an excuse.  I have no proof of this, of course, but I strongly suspect that like the other ego-driven jackasses who have also recently fallen off the GOP bug-wagon on the way to Crazytown, Santorum bailed out so that he could claim that he went out a winner.  I think he quit, ur sorry, suspended his campaign because the polls in Pennsylvania were looking pretty damned grim for Rick Santorum.  These are the folks who know Santorum the best, and they’re the ones who handed him a big pink slip after his second term in the Senate. It’s not his daughter, it’s his ego, he just can’t stand the thought of having to admit he lost. To Romney. In his own home state. Even Gingrich didn’t have to suffer that indignity. If Santorum can’t even win over his own neighbors, hell, his own family, on his own home turf, it’s going to be damned hard to avoid having to drink his own piss on national TV.  But if he bails out now, before Pennsylvania, he can claim that he left on his own terms, i.e. as a winner – which is a lot like running the Boston Marathon for five miles, then stopping, doing a few stretches, and claiming victory by saying, “hey, at least I didn’t end up puking on myself in the middle of the street in front of my own children. I’ve still got my dignity, man, and that makes me a winner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go give the actual winner some advice on winning…”

We will suspend our campaign.

But, we’re not done fighting!

Honestly, what the hell?

What if we actually did business that way? No really, what if we all behaved like this? As a society? What if civilization operated like some institutionalized version of Road Rage? What? You beat me to the exit?  You passed me? You cut me off? Oh no you didn’t girlfriend!  Why you dirty rotten son of a bitch! Now it is so totally on!

I know by definition we’re all supposed to be adults here, but we’re just going to go on acting like petulant children. Why not.

What if we approached civil rights like this? Sure the marches and protests and court cases are long over. We know what the right thing is.  Everybody is equal, sort of, and yeah, sure we voted for segregation and Separate But Equal and George Wallace, and sure we ended up on the wrong side of history.  But you know what? We’re just going go right on hating people based on their skin color and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation and we’ll just keep right on trying to deny them an equal share of society. Yep. The war’s over, but we’ll just keep right on fighting for something we know is wrong.

Damned straight.

Or say the environment?  Oh yes, sure, okay, turns out that you can’t just keep dumping sewage and heavy metals and industrial waste into the water supply without consequence.  Turns out that natural resources aren’t, in fact, infinite. Turns out that if you destroy enough of an environment or kill enough of something, it goes away forever and God doesn’t just wave his big juju magic God stick and make more.  Sure, ok, we’ve seen enough dead lakes and Exxon Valdezes and Love Canals and Cancer Alleys and superfund sites and Dustbowls and mid-ocean garbage patches and Great Irish Potato Famines and deep water oil well blowouts and Salton Seas and droughts and plagues and famines to know that we can’t just keep shitting in our own nest without consequences. Sure we get that, but we’re just going to keep acting like we can because despite all evidence to the contrary and a thousand years of recorded human history and thousands, hell millions, of examples to the contrary we’re going to believe that industry will regulate itself.  In our best interest.  Just because.

Drill, Baby, drill.

And not only industry, Wall Street too.  Sure, despite the catastrophic implosions of unregulated markets during the 1720 Mississippi Bubble, or the Great Panic of 1819 (and 1837, 1847, 1857, 1884, 1893, 1896, 1901, and 1907), followed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which plunged the world into the Great Depression, the recession of 1937, Silver Thursday and Black Wednesday, the Dot Com Bubble, and don’t forget the Housing Market Crash, and the recent Not-So-Great Recession, what we need here is less regulation. Sure.  Because banks and business can regulate themselves and what’s good for them is good for us. We need to get out of the way of the job creators, like Lehman Brothers and Enron and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and, well, we’ll keep fighting for those corporate citizens, because they’re people too you know.

And you know what else those citizens need?  More tax breaks. Sure thirty years it’s been now and so far trickle-down economics has mostly trickled from the billionaires to the millionaires, but sooner or later, yeah baby, it’ll trickle right on down to us peons. You just wait. Any minute now Reagonomics is going to pay off big time. Any minute now. And sure, those rich bastards have been basking in the Bush era tax cuts for a decade now, and so far instead of creating jobs they sent about six million of them overseas or liquidated them all together, but man, you know what they need? More tax breaks. Then they’ll create some jobs. You’ll see.  Hey, only in a great country like America would unemployed folks whose jobs were sent to India be out in the street wearing Tri-Corner hats and demanding tax breaks for Millionaires.

Seriously, is this a great club or what?

Hey, here’s some good news, we got the Israelis and the Palestinians to sign another peace treaty! Because, this time, this time, man, Hamas won’t suddenly start lobbing rockets into Jewish towns and Hezbollah won’t decide to detonate a car bomb in downtown Tel Aviv or a bunch of Orthodox Jewish extremists won’t suddenly decide they just have to build a new settlement right smack in the middle of some Arab’s olive orchard.  This peace treaty is signed but we’re just going to go right on doing the same stupid shit and killing the same people and hating each other. Because that worked out so well up to now.

And speaking of bombing the Third World into democracy, sure we damned near bankrupted ourselves by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know what would pay that right off, invade Iran! Peace through more war.  Of course, sadly, the war is over.  We didn’t win, but, heck, we’re not gonna lose either.  Now, we could have peace and get on with the business of rebuilding the country.  Sure, we could do that … or, we could just keep blowing shit up anyway. Maybe strap on some C4 and go light that sucker up in the middle of the market place. Keep shootin’ people randomly.  You know, like that.  We quit, but we didn’t quit quit if you know what I’m sayin’. And a hundred years from now the Iraqi equivalent of Rednecks will still be driving around Bagdad with Saddam Hussein’s flag plastered across the back window of their pickup trucks and explaining to everybody that will listen how denying Shi’ites equal rights isn’t really, actually, bigotry, it’s just a symbol of our history, man. 

Oh, yes, let us have some more of that.

 

You know, on second thought, it’s probably a good thing we don’t run civilization like these silly self involved bastards run campaigns, eh?

What?

Oh.

Right.

Damnit.

And then, this afternoon Newt Gingrich said despite suspending his campaign and bouncing checks to the state of Utah and having basically conceded, he was going to continue the fight. He said,

I want to keep campaigning!

Man, I really hope this doesn’t mean we’re all going to have to start drinking our own piss.

I’m just saying is all.

Trayvon Martin: License to Kill

 

A FoxNews article today begins with this provocative title:

Taking Liberties: Arrested for reading the Bible?

The title and the article give the intentional impression that Christian Fundamentalist Mark Mackey was arrested for simply reading the Christian bible.

As if he was dragged from his home and thrown into prison for reading a religious book.

As you might guess, there’s a bit more to it than that, for example Mackey wasn’t quietly reading the bible to himself at home, he was engaged in the obnoxious asshatery of “witnessing” to folks waiting in line outside of a California State DMV office. He was asked by both security and police to cease and desist, he refused and continued to annoy the hell out of people who had the choice of either listening to his unsolicited proselytizing or giving up their position in line (I suppose they also had the choice of punching him in the mouth repeatedly, which would have been my first impulse, but I digress). 

Despite Fox’s deliberately misleading and alarmist headline, Mackey was not arrested for “reading the bible,” he was arrested for being an irritating asshole.

The editors at FoxNews know this, of course, that’s why they used the yellow journalism technique of casting the title of the article as a question.  Arrested for being a Christian? Are they arresting Christians now?  You can’t even read the bible? Well, what do you think, poor persecuted Christians? Wink, wink. One has to wonder how the folks at Fox would have written this story if it had been a brown skinned man in a turban shouting Suras from the Quran.

However, be that as it may, a rather large number of the faithful regard this arrest as just one more example of the ongoing bigotry against Christians in America, on par with being burned at the stake or thrown to the lions in the Coliseum. Commenters on Fox Nation lament this supposed “war on Christians” and rage against the abuse and bigotry that poor persecuted followers of Jesus have to endure every day as a repressed and harassed minority in America. You can read the story in much more detail for yourself, it’s been widely repeated on numerous Christian conservative websites and a video of the incident is, of course, on YouTube. With a little GoogleFu, You should have no trouble finding numerous examples.

Now, here’s what I find interesting, if you read the various articles on those same sites, articles about this incident and the recent killing of a young black man in Sanford, Florida, and if you read the articles and comments under various faith blogs and the mainstream media reports of the aforementioned shooting you’ll notice a few things:

1. There is no racism in America anymore, because a black man is president, Q.E.D. However, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of American presidents have been openly Christian, including the current one, there is an ongoing American bias against Christians.

2. A white man cannot harbor racist prejudice against people of color if his mother is Hispanic.  However, a president whose mother was white and father was black clearly hates white people.

3. A man who pursues another man lawfully minding his own business on a public street and then provokes a confrontation resulting in death, is not guilty of either murder nor manslaughter, but is, in fact, a patriot defending the constitutional freedoms of all Americans. However, an American citizen lawfully minding his own business on a public street who is confronted by an armed man has no right to either stand his ground, defend himself, or meet force with like force.  He is, by the simple nature of his appearance, a thug who deserves what he gets.

4. Conservatives, gun owners, police, neighborhood watchers, and Christians should not be judged by a few extremists in their ranks.  However, all black teenage males wearing hoodies may, in point of fact, be labeled thugs and criminals until proven otherwise.

I suppose this form of doublethink isn’t particularly surprising, coming as it does from a group of people who seem to think that a country steeped in Christian tradition up to and including national icons, official mottos, symbols, phrases, traditions, oaths, federal holidays and composed of an overwhelming majority of Christians who have unashamedly declared this a Christian nation at the exclusion of other beliefs, and whose government, military, and law enforcement agencies are in fact composed almost entirely of Christians, is engaged in a war on Christians.

Heh.

 

A number of you wrote to ask my opinion of the Trayvon Martin shooting, or to ask why I had not already posted something – do I not care?

Of course I care.

But one thing we should all know by now is that the nature of 24-hour news media and social networking will inevitably lead to an evolving story in high profile situations like this one. Passion, rage, outrage, and hysteria are high on both sides and plenty of folks have their stock kneejerk responses all ready to go. The gun nuts and the anti-gun nuts are out in force, so are the racists and anti-racists, so are the law enforcement defenders and the cop-haters, so are the liberals and the conservatives, and so are the usual talking heads, agitators, deniers, haters, sympathizers, conspiracy theorists, flacks, hacks, loons, goons, and poltroons - on both sides. 

What does that have to do with the first few paragraphs of this article? Well, for one thing the cognitive dissonance of those particular observations is indicative of a far, far larger issue – one that led almost inevitably to Trayvon Martin’s death.

A young man not much older than my own son is dead. 

He’s dead because another young man shot him down. 

He’s dead, and there’s no good reason why he should be.

He’s dead, and his family is devastated.

This incident and the circus surrounding it should serve as a clarion call to all Americans, every single goddamned one of us, because the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is a stark and abject example of everything that is wrong with this country.

This incident is a harbinger of what will one day bring down the United States of America if we stay on the path we are on.

Is Zimmerman a racist?

Is Zimmerman a racist, did he target Marin because Martin was black? Would this incident have ended differently if Martin had been white, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Native American?

I don’t know.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I don’t know George Zimmerman. And so, I don’t know if Zimmerman is a racist. 

But here’s what I see, America immediately and predictably divided itself into camps over this incident, kneejerk opinions based not on evidence but on race, on stereotypes, on preconceived ideas of what really happened - and there’s no better indicator that racism is alive and well in America than that, right there. 

Should people of color automatically assume that Zimmerman is a racist?

In different world, no, of course not.

But in America, this America, this one right here, the one we actually live in, the real question is this: Is there any reason whatsoever why people, of any color, should not automatically assume that Zimmerman is indeed a racist?

black people are the most disgusting race on earth , the parents making hoodies . what are they gonna do when the truth comes out and the punks guilty? they better take the money and go hide . they are very sick people . selling their sons soul, and probably for crack.[sic]

Yo, idiots. Its OBVIOUS, that the kid thought Zimmerman was unarmed. Typical black youth behavior of CONFRONTATION, led to Zimmerman pulling out his gun. [sic]

It certainly adds to the problems poised by this case, that the response of millions of black males to the fact that they are stereotyped as criminals, is that they dress and act like criminals!! Of course, no one deserves to be shot for dressing or acting like a criminal, but on the other hand, no one should be suprised that those who dress and act like criminals, get treated like criminals. If a group of people is being stereotyped as criminals, the last thing in the world they should do, is ACT LIKE CRIMINALS!. Meaning, in this case, wear "gangsta" attire, go about in public with their faces concealed like criminals who are trying to hide their identity, behave in an insolent and hostile way. If you behave exactly in accordance with people's stereotypes about you, you are simply giving them reason to believe the stereotypes are true. Stop confirming the stereotypes and things will go better. [sic]

Trayvon Martin was no longer the cute little 12 year old from all of the photos the Media has been showing... He was a 6'3" football player who apparently had a taste for doing burglaries. I would bet that is what he was doing in that gated community parking lot, looking for something to steal. He attacked Zimmerman from a concealed position and severely injured him. This justifies self defense. Case Closed! [sic]

If some 17 year gorilla in a hoodie stalks me to my car, jumps me, breaks my nose and then punds my head on the cement sidewalk... I'm going to shoot the rotten S.O.B. So would anyone else who wants to stay alive. You want to know who's at fault here? The parents of the dead boy. It's their fault for raising him to be a thug. [sic]

Those comments, and thousands more like them come from those aforementioned Christian and conservative news websites.  Go look for yourself, you’ll have no trouble finding a whole bunch more just exactly like them, or worse. Note that I’m not saying racist garbage like that quoted above is the exclusive purview of either Christians or conservatives, there’s plenty of this horseshit to go around, across all strata of America, in all directions.  I simply used the examples from the sites I did, because they are easy to find and readily available.

Was the Trayvon Martin shooting racism?

Is the fact that the shooter has not been arrested racism? 

Well? Is it racism? Look around. Be honest. Give me one, just one, good reason why people of color, or any person for that matter, should assume that it isn’t.

Was the shooter racist? I have no idea.

Is Trayvon Martin dead because of racism? 

Yes. Absolutely.

A black youth. Hooded sweatshirt. Saggy pants. Gold tooth. He comes into your store, your bank, approaches your car, gets in an elevator with you. What do you think? Black, white, brown, yellow, red, what do you think? Be honest, what do you think?  Thug. You think he’s a thug, don’t you? A gansta from the hood. You can’t help it. He looks like a thug. He wants you to think he’s a thug. Is that his fault? For dressing like a thug?  Yes. Just like it’s your own fault when people assume you’re an ignorant gun-toting sister-humping Klan-lovin’ redneck because you drive a big truck with a Confederate flag plastered across the back window. Is it your fault when people assume you’re a terrorist if you’re sitting on an airplane wearing a headscarf and speaking to your seatmate in Arabic? No, but they do, don’t they? My son is about the same age as Trayvon Martin. My son is white. My son listens to music that makes my teeth ache. My son wears hoodies.  But you wouldn’t automatically assume he was a thug if you met him on the street, would you?  Welcome to racism. It comes in all forms and it’s all around us, isn’t it?

A black youth in a hooded sweatshirt, is it his fault you think he’s a thug? Perhaps. But it’s your fault too. It’s all our faults. 

And yes, some black men in hoodies are real thugs and you have every reason to be afraid of them.

But here’s the thing, many folks, black and white, glorify that thug life. It’s in the music, it’s on popular TV shows, it’s in the movies, it’s in advertising, and on the web and at the mall.

Why the hell shouldn’t our children, black, white, brown, yellow, red, want to look like that?

Terrible, right?

Terrible, this glorification by popular media and culture of criminals, of thugs and gangsters. Almost as terrible as when previous generations glorified outlaw biker gangs and made popular movies about them and adopted their style of dress and transportation, or idolized the mobsters of the Roaring Twenties and dressed up in fedoras and double-breasted Zootsuits, or turned the bandit gangs and gunslingers who once terrorized the Old West into popular heroes of song and silver screen. Then there is our ongoing love affair with pirates, who in reality were, and are, some pretty terrible sons of bitches.  Oh, yes, how terrible that the youth of today should glorify outlaws and violence and gangsters, because Americans don’t have a long, long history of doing exactly that.

This culture of thuggery didn’t happen in a vacuum you know, no more so than it did in the biker bars of Southern California or on the streets of Chicago during the 1920’s or streets of Laredo during the 1880’s. What changed it back then was law enforcement, education, government, and citizens who cared enough to do something about it.  If you’re tired of being afraid of a thug in a hoodie, then the root causes that gave rise to that image have to be addressed.  The solution isn’t a law that lets you shoot down people in the fucking street, the solution is education, healthcare, development, access, opportunity, rule of law, and citizens who give a good goddamn about each other.

The solution is inclusion instead of exclusion. 

The solution is long and difficult and it requires sustained effort and organization and resources.

If it could be solved by killing people, well we wouldn’t be having this problem, would we?

Here’s the thing, so pay attention: You can not leave the root causes of this situation behind, sooner or later they will catch up to you – even if you move into a gated community.

Liberal, Conservative, Black, White, Left, Right, do you really, really, want to live in a community where the law allows a man to shoot another down in the street with impunity? Really? Do you really want to live in an armed camp? Hemmed in by armed patrols? Do you really want your kids to have to answer to armed civilian militia? Really? 

If you do, if you think armed patrols and gunning people down in the street is the answer, then you’re insane.

And where do you go when that isn’t enough? A castle? A fortress? Where?

And after that, what?

I’ll tell you what comes after that, because I’ve been in countries where it all finally hit the wall.

What comes next?

Genocide

Trayvon Martin was just a kid in a hooded sweatshirt who went to the store to buy a drink and a bag of candy. He wasn’t a saint, he got in his share of trouble. But he wasn’t a thug either. He was just an average kid, a football player, a guy with a girlfriend, an American just exactly like my own son, no more, no less. 

Trayvon Martin was just a kid who should have been able walk down any street in America without fearing for his life – no matter how he looked or what he was wearing.

Trayvon Martin died because he committed the fatal sin of being a black youth in America.

His death and all those things that led directly to it are a blot upon all our souls.

Like the folks at the beginning of this article, there are far too many Americans who falsely proclaim themselves the targets of bigotry and prejudice and unjust persecution, who would gleefully pretend to martyrdom, and turn a blind eye to real injustice. 

If they want to know what real bigotry is, they should put on blackface and a hoodie and walk the streets of America.

Stay Classy, Catwoman

And then there were two.

Ok, technically three, but really just two. And really, just one.

Newt Gingrich is “scaling back” his campaign for president.

Scaling back. Heh heh. Scaling back, is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?

Like he actually has a chance at the nomination, right?

Newt Gingrich will never be President and the only one who doesn’t seem to know this is Newt Gingrich.

His bid for the GOP nomination, let alone the White House, was DOA right from the beginning.

Sure, there were a few flickers of life, he appeared to rally a few times, a twitch here, a spasm there, but Gingrich never really had a chance. His campaign has been brain dead for a while now and the only thing keeping it breathing at the moment is the SuperPAC oxygen tube jammed down his windpipe.  His next of kin, the ones he hasn’t alienated over the years, are gathered around his bedside like Cleveland Indians fans dumb enough to buy season tickets and stuck now staring down at the field, sheepishly sitting in a half empty stadium and cheering weakly more out of a sense of duty than for any actual hope of winning. About half of them gave up the deathwatch a month ago. The Rest? He’s a fighter they say, he’ll pull through. God will grant us a miracle, you watch and see.  Any minute now. Any minute now…

But even diehard Indians fans don’t really believe their team will go all the way, not even with God in their dugout.

The doctors just shake their head and nod knowingly to each other, they’ve seen this all too often.   They smile sadly and make noncommittal noises – and inside they resent the resources this corpse is taking away from other more viable patients.  It’s time for some battlefield triage they think, time to salvage what organs they can, pull the plug, and call the meat wagon – or the glue factory.

Unfortunately for everybody, the argument over pulling the plug is verging on the ridiculous.

And so, there he is, Gingrich, a bloated meatbag gone cold and clammy, heart still beating sluggishly, but he’s brain dead and his organs are failing one by one and there’s nothing left but a bad smell.  The only question now is what time the coroner will stamp on the death certificate.

Newt, true to course, continues to display his usual sullenness:

“None of you guys would call a football team or a basketball team and say, 'Why don't you drop out?' You'd say, 'There's a season. Let's play the season…”

Note that when Bachmann, Huntsman, Perry, and Cain all dropped out of the race, Newt didn’t encourage them to play out the season.  He smirked his smug jock-douchebag smirk and waved bye bye at the losers.  Adios, suckers. But now? Now Team Newt has played thirty-two games.  He won on his home court and he managed a small victory during one away game. That’s it.

He’s 2 and 30 (of course, that’s two better than Ron Paul, but still).

Newt’s right, you don’t have to tell a sports team to drop out – they get eliminated in the playoffs.

At this point what we have with Gingrich is less an assisted suicide-sports mashup analogy and more like that time Sean Young got piss drunk, put on a homemade Catwoman outfit, and assaulted Tim Burton and Michael Keaton on the set of Batman Returns. 

That’s right, Newt Gingrich has become the crazy Catwoman wannabe of presidential campaign politics (and when I say Catwoman, I mean it in both the drunkenly obnoxious Sean Young and the horrifyingly bad Halle Berry sense.  And, of course, in the Batman Returns sense too. Catwoman, no matter how you slice it, always ends up costing somebody a lot of money and turns out to be a stinker, just like Newt).

Conservatives may not care much for either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, but they’ve made it abundantly clear that they like Gingrich even less. A lot less, actually.

Just like Catwoman, Newt’s death spiral is more than a little cringe-inducing.

And so here we are, Gingrich is out of money and running in the red, he’s fired his campaign manager and half his staff, his schedule has been cut to the bone, but he’s adamant that he’ll stay in the race.  He can’t win the nomination, hell, he can’t even win second place, but he’s staying in.  He’s out, but he’s not out out – instead he’s apparently going to concentrate on winning Twitter and Facebook because hey, social media, that’s where the real battle is. Sure.  And seriously here, what the hell is it with these people? Bachmann, Cain, Perry, they didn’t “quit,” they just “suspended” or “reassessed” their respective campaigns, only Huntsman had the good grace and self-confidence to say, “I did the best I could, but I’m done now.”  Are these people really so insecure that they can’t admit when they’ve lost? Really? (that’s a rhetorical question, don’t bother to answer).

Gingrich can’t win. I know it. You know it. Democrats know it.  Independents know it.  Republicans know it.  Stone age tribesmen who speak the click-click language and live deep in the jungles of Mindanao Island eschewing all contact with the outside world know it.  Gingrich knows it. It looked like he might have had shot back a couple of months ago, before people remembered who they were dealing with, oh yeah, that’s right, Newt Gingrich, blech.  But now? Newt has about as much chance of being president as Sean Young has of a speaking role in The Dark Knight Rises.

So, what the hell is he doing?

Well, he made his intentions pretty clear in a radio interview this morning,

“Romney has to earn this, it’s not going to be given to him.”

One thing about Newt, he’s consistent.  He’s always been a selfish hypocritical son of a bitch.  He tries to have a president impeached for adultery, while he himself is committing adultery. He talks about morals and ethics, while engaged in unethical behavior.  He says something obnoxious, and blames the press for repeating it.  He complains that other politicians haven’t been “vetted” but is outraged when his own words and behavior are placed under a microscope.  He’s a career politician and the consummate Washington Insider who  denounces “Washington insiders” and “politics as usual” – the very politics as usual that he himself is largely responsible for creating. He talks endlessly about personal responsibility, for everybody else, but he never takes responsibility for his own actions – with Newt it’s always somebody else’s fault when he screws the pooch, or screws somebody else’s wife.  Hell the last time he stepped out, he blamed America, not just one or two of us, America.

Newt resents the fact that try as he might, the vast majority of the country remains steadfastly unconvinced that he is half as awesome as he thinks he is.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, Newt talks about uniting the nation and pulling together as Americans, but he can’t even put aside his monstrously bloated ego long enough to unite his own party – how’s he going to do it on a national scale?  Answer, he’s not. And he has no intention of doing so.  When Newt talks about unity, he’s just talking about the people that he likes, the rest of us can go to hell, or move to Canada, whatever.  He’ll do what he has always done, throw everybody who’s not on Team Newt over the fantail and into the ocean. He’s a selfish, self-centered, self-involved son of a bitch who’s only in it for himself.  And most people can sense that, even if they don’t know exactly why they don’t like him.

He has lost and he knows it. 

He’s going to have to back Romney, he knows that too and it just galls him. 

Newt is going to back Romney because Romney is going to be the GOP candidate.

But, Newt being Newt just can’t admit it.  He’s got this idea that he’s somehow going to make Romney “earn” the nomination.  As if Romney isn’t at least as an experienced politician as Gingrich is – without the three wife and ethics violations baggage – as if Romney hasn’t put in just as much time in the political trenches. Newt knows exactly what the outcome is going to be here, and he knows he’s going to back whoever the GOP nominates even if it’s Cannibal Hitler’s Head in a Pickle Jar. But he is still going to make everybody else pay just out of selfish spite.

And that right there, more than anything else, tells you what kind of President he would be – exactly the same as the kind of Speaker he was, just exactly as the kind of man he is every single day. 

Newt hasn’t changed, not one bit, he’s still same old hypocrite.

He keeps talking about how the current occupant of the White House ignores the so-called will of the people, but he himself fully intends to force a contested GOP convention and somehow snatch the nomination for himself out of the resulting chaos against the clearly stated will of Republican voters. 

He wants Romney to earn the nomination, but he wants the GOP to just hand it to him. 

Don’t be surprised if he shows up in Tampa wearing a Catwoman costume.

Ten Things That Would Have Made ‘John Carter’ A Blockbuster

Well, it’s official. 

The Disney movie, John Carter, is a bomb.

Maybe the biggest bomb in Hollywood history. The pundits are cheerfully proclaiming it a bigger flop than the infamous Waterworld (which is a bit ironic, given that Waterworld was not, in fact, an actual flop).  At the moment the movie is $200 million in the hole and unlikely to ever make back a significant fraction of that colossal loss from theater sales – though I suspect that like the aforementioned Waterworld it may eventually recoup quite a bit with the video and overseas releases and maybe even turn a profit.

And that, my fuzzy electronic friends, is a damned shame because John Carter is a terrific movie. 

It’s a shame because John Carter is the kind of movie Disney should be making more of.

It’s the kind of movie old Walt himself would have loved.

Carter is a blast, it’s got everything: action, adventure, handsome heroes, evil bad guys, beautiful girls who are neither helpless nor stupid and who don’t spend the entire movie shrieking hysterically, fantastical creatures, a rollicking story, fast pacing, death ray battles and  sword fights. It doesn’t lecture, it doesn’t proselytize, and it never takes itself too seriously. There’s no bad language, there’s no blood, there’s plenty of skin but no nudity, there’s the tiniest bid of smooching but there’s more sexuality in a GAP commercial.  It’s a decent family movie, in the old fashioned escapism sense, a Saturday afternoon popcorn flick that you can take either your date or your kids to with equal ease – and that’s a damned rare thing nowadays.

Carter is exactly the kind of movie I go to the theater for.  Hell, if it wasn’t for movies like this one, I wouldn’t go to the theater – I ‘d stay home and wait for it to come out on cable.

The movie is based on a series of stories publish in 1912 by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who is probably more famous among the mundanes for his better known creation, Tarzan.  Carter is visually stunning, like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life (no coincidence, since Frazetta was involved in the movie at one time).  It’s utterly beautiful to watch, gorgeous even, especially on an IMAX screen in 3D – movies like this are why IMAX and 3D exist in the first place and why I cheerfully pay extra to see them.  The director, Andrew Stanton, did a wonderful job bringing Burroughs’s Barsoom to life, it was exactly as I imagined it when reading The Princess of Mars all those years ago.  I could have sat and watched it over and over again just for the visuals –  and somewhere inside me a teenage boy was wishing for glossy full color movie posters, like the kind they used to publish in Starlog Magazine when I was a kid, to hang on my bedroom wall and dream of a Mars that never was but should have been – if only the universe had a bit of poetry and a twist of whimsy in its construction.

It’s easy to see why the movie cost so much to make, because so much of it is CGI.  Now, it can certainly be argued that too much CGI can detract or even ruin a movie. CGI can become jarringly annoying and cartoonishly distracting the way it was in the widely hated Star Wars prequels. But done well, CGI can create new worlds and fantastical creatures and movies that are simply impossible to make any other way.  The CGI of John Carter is incredibly well done, seamless and nearly perfect. 

The story itself is simple, reluctant hero meets girl, loses girl (sort of), fights battles, defeats the baddies, saves the world, and ends up with the girl (maybe).  The acting is decent and the actors themselves are likable and interesting – even the ones made from computer pixels instead of flesh.

More than anything, John Carter is fun.

I suppose that it was inevitable that the critics would hate it.

And it certainly didn’t help that Disney obviously really didn’t understand what they had. Promotion was lackluster at best. And in what has to be about the biggest faceplam moment of entire affair, Disney had Stanton change the title from John Carter of Mars to just John Carter in some kind of misguided attempt to appeal to a wider audience than just science fiction geeks.  Wider audience? What wider audience? Geeks totally rule the movie theater. Look around, nerds run the world.  The highest grossing, longest playing, most successful movies in the last four decades, from Star Wars to Avatar, have been science fiction movies.  What? OK, there was one movie about a boat and an iceberg, you got me there, but that is one damned movie. One. Science Fiction and Fantasy movies are what people go to see and have since King Kong in the 1930’s. You have to wonder if anybody at Disney has ever even been to Comicon.  Pull in the nerds and everybody else will follow. 

And really, how could they miss?

After all, the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs has captivated earthmen for more than a hundred years.

See, in 1877 Earth and Mars were about as close as their respective orbits ever allow.

As luck would have it, some of the very first large scale telescopes were just seeing first light then.  Those instruments were small and primitive by today’s standards, but they would forever change the way we looked at the heavens, and in particular Mars.

During this time, called the Great Opposition, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli made some of the first detailed observations of the red planet.  Now modern astronomers rarely, if ever, look directly through their scopes.  In fact most modern telescopes don’t even have anything resembling an eyepiece.  Nowadays astronomers observe their targets through a variety of instruments and detectors far, far more sensitive than the primitive human eye. Before the advent of computers, charge coupled devices, and the internet, the telescopes fed their light to wetfilm photographic plates.  But before that, way back in the dawn age of modern astronomy, astronomers spent their nights high up in their observatories, bleary bloodshot eyes squinting into a tiny viewfinder on the bottom of some huge optical instrument pointed up at the night’s sky – observing the stars and planets with the original Mark I, Mod 0 scientific instrument, the human eyeball.  Back in 1877, Schiaparelli wasn’t looking at those crisply clear high resolution digitally-enhanced false-color scans you see nowadays in Scientific American and National Geographic or on the NASA space telescope webpage.  He was observing Mars though a small telescope at the hundred year old Brera Observatory, built in Milan, Italy in 1764 by Jesuits, and sketching his observations with paper and pencil.  Night after night during the Great Opposition he stared at the blurry red image in his eyepiece and attempted to map the surface features of Earth’s nearest neighbor.  His scope was small and primitive, and his observations were often obscured by clouds and haze and earth’s turbulent atmosphere. And yet Schiaparelli persisted and he eventually published some of the very first maps of Mars.  Those drawing were crude by today’s standards and not particularly accurate. Schiaparelli had only Earth to compare his observations with, so he labeled the dark areas on Mars “seas” and the lighter areas “continents” and the darker lines that he perceived here and there he called “canali.” 

In Italian, canali means groove or channel – a naturally occurring geologic feature. But when translated into English, canali became canal with the obvious implication that those faint lines on Mars were made by alien intelligence.

Needless to say, the idea of intelligent Martians caused a bit of a sensation here on Earth.

Another astronomer, this time an American named Percival Lowell, was so taken by the idea that in the 1890’s he built an observatory on a mountain outside of Flagstaff, Arizona specifically to study Mars.  Over time, Lowell began to believe that he was observing the last days of a dying world.  He dreamed of a vast red desert crisscrossed by a great network of canals built by a once mighty civilization in order to carry Mars’ last drops of water from the polar icecaps to the desiccated equator.  Lowell spent the next fifteen years peering at the red planet through his eyepiece and sketching elaborate maps of those supposed canals and oases. 

There was just one problem, try as they might, other astronomers couldn’t see what Lowell saw. 

They saw the seasonal variations as Mars moved along its orbit from summer to winter and back to summer, they saw the dark ‘seas’ and light ‘continents’, and they saw a few random lines here and there – but they never saw the elaborate network of waterways that Lowell had mapped (in 2003, a theory was put forward that what Lowell was actually seeing were the blood vessels in the back of his eye, reflected off the lens of his eye piece). Most of his colleagues thought Lowell was nuts but the public didn’t care, they loved the idea of Martians. Lowell’s speculations of a fading civilization struggling heroically against their slowly dying world had a tragic and poetic ring, and the idea of Mars and its supposed canals became deeply entrenched in the public mind and would persist right up until first probe from Earth flew past in 1965. 

The Mars of Perceval Lowell influenced millions of people over decades of time and fired the imaginations of generations.

A lot of ordinary people believed in Lowell’s Martians.  On Halloween night in 1938, Orson Welles and a Mercury Theater radio broadcast convinced a bunch of Americans that they were being invaded by those very same Martians, the incident remains famous almost a century later – how many other radio plays can say the same thing? Science fiction from the first half of the 20th Century, from Burroughs to Del Rey to Bradbury to Heinlein, gave Lowell’s Mars life and flesh and this is the world of John Carter. Not 2012, 1912. The movie is tale from the dawn of modern speculative fiction, from a time when technology had literally just taken flight and men were beginning to believe that they could do anything – even voyage to other worlds. The earth itself hadn’t even been fully mapped yet and writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs took inspiration not only from new scientific discoveries, but from the real life adventures of real men who voyaged to Antarctica and explored deepest Africa and pushed into the heart of the Amazon.  Those were the things that inspired Burroughs to write John Carter and Tarzan.

One review I read (and I can’t find the link now to save my inky black soul) said that the movie’s main gimmick, i.e. Carter’s Superman-like strength while on Mars, ruined the movie.  It was fairly obvious that the reviewer didn’t understand the story and didn’t care to.  John Carter is told in a format unfamiliar to most people nowadays, but one that was common in 1912, i.e. the story is framed and told through the eyes and imagination of the protagonist’s hero-worshiping nephew, Edgar Rice Burroughs himself (which is not only implicit in the format, but clearly spelled out at the end of the movie in a conversation between the characters of John Carter and Ned Burroughs). In other words, it’s a tall tale. One that might have grown a bit in the telling, particularly the storyteller’s self-described feats of strength and daring-do and his way with the ladies. This format was once common in fiction, from H.G. Well’s The Time Machine to Barry Sadler’s Casca: The Immortal Warrior.  It’s a mechanism designed to let stodgy and serious minded Victorians suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy the damned story – something modern movie critics seem largely incapable of doing.

The movie was called variously “hammy” and “out-dated” and “campy.”  Apparently not one of these reviewers were fans of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or Conan the Barbarian – or have actually ever read Edgar Rice Burroughs for that matter.

My favorite negative review was Andrew O’Herir at Salon, who said, “if you’re willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it’s also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second...” No shit, Sherlock, you just described Star Wars and all four Indiana Jones Movies.  Is John Carter for everybody?  No, of course not.   Is it deep? Does it make a profound statement? Will it change your life forever?  No. 

Is it entertaining? Is it fun? Hell yes.

Seriously, you’re sitting in a theater wearing a pair of 3D glasses with a box of Jujubes in your hand watching a movie based on a pulp scifi novel written in 1912 about a guy in a loincloth sword fighting four-armed green-skinned Martians in order to save a half-naked red-skinned princess who’s also the chief scientist of the Ninth-Ray, and you’re all pissy that there isn’t some fancy dialog about the nihilistic pessimism of fate and circumstance described in narrative ellipses and playful points of view that explores the similarities and differences between Gods and Men, East and West, sin and virtue, good and evil?

Seriously?

I think you might have wandered into the wrong theater by accident.

But you know what? Fine.

Perhaps Andrew Stanton and Disney could have done things differently.  Here are ten changes to John Carter that would have netted high praise from moviegoers and critics alike and guaranteed at least two sequels and a short-lived TV series on Fox:

1) I’m going to be honest here, even if it gets me in trouble with the long suffering Mrs. Stonekettle, the stunning Lynn Collins in that Princess of Mars outfit was worth the entire price of admission, plus ridiculously overpriced refreshments.  I think she’s awesome and a terrific actress and I wish her nothing but a long and happy career.  But let’s face it, other than playing Wolverine’s double-crossing girlfriend in that last X-Men flop, nobody knows who she is.  Swap her out for Kim Kardashian.   Sure, Kardashian can’t act and a widescreen 3D IMAX shot of her backside would probably cause theaters to spontaneously implode all across America, but paint her red and put her in a Princess Leia bikini and have her jiggle around Helium Shore and you wouldn’t be able to sell tickets fast enough.  Paris Hilton as the voice of Sola.  Ice-T as the Eight-legged Martian Disney Dog.  And, in a casting move sure to spark the free publicity of controversy and thereby fill theater seats with asses, former Confederate cavalry officer John Carter would be played by Wil Smith.

2)  The most expensive and difficult scene in the movie was when Carter fights the white apes in the Thark arena.  Move the scene to Hogwarts and replace the arena with a Quidditch match.  Throw in a couple of wizards and a high school tween with round glasses played by an actor in his thirties.

3) Two words: Emo Vampires.

4)  Disney renamed the movie from John Carter of Mars to just plain old John Carter.  Big mistake.  They should have called it The Hungry John Carter Games, then secretly started a rumor that the movie was an allegory for the final battle between liberalism and conservativism in the red communist wasteland of post 911-America. Carter’s magical transportation to Mars and back to Earth and then back to Mars is an obvious parallel to the Christian Resurrection.  Then Disney should deny it all (honestly, these people really need to hire me to work the phones. What? No no no. It’s just a wholesome kid’s movie.  Besides, it’s really about atheism, wait, I meant evolution…  Seriously, I’d have the theaters packed for weeks. Packed with angry people, but hey their money is as green as any Thark).

(5) and (6) Tits.

7)  Make the movie more “edgy” and “realistic.”  E.g. John Carter and Dejah Thoris are renamed Fredo and Samantha. They have to take a magic ring to Olympus Mons and fight orcs. Along the way they meet wizards, trolls, talking trees, Magneto, and a giant spider who is also a Transformer.  Also, Samantha is a gay guy who has a major crush on Fredo.  Also, they’re midgets. 

8) Mowr Matrix-style Bullet Time! Mowr!

9) The final climatic scene on earth should involve Edgar Rice Burroughs (played by Tom Cruise) and the Therns in a battle on top of the Burj Al Arab using machinegun rocket pistols, kung-fu, bungie cords, and steam punk motorcycles. In fact, the whole movie should just be this scene, repeated over and over from various angles.  With huge explosions.  In Bullet Time.

And finally

10) Hire the Coen Brothers to turn the movie into a ultra-violent gore-fest with John Carter as a psychotic soulless hitman who slaughters the Tharks with an air powered captive-bolt gun and a portable leaf-chipper while roaming a post apocalyptic wasteland with his son who is also a one-eyed lawman for hire named The Dude.   Tack on an incomprehensible non-ending and then claim the movie is based on an unpublished Cormac McCarthy manuscript called People Suck and Then They Kill You And it Sucks Even More And There Are Cannibals about the unending crapfest of human despair.   Not only would the critics likely soil themselves in orgasmic joy, A History of Violent John Carter and the Cannibals would win the Oscar for Most Awesome Disney Family Film Ever Made.

 

Or you could just ignore the critics and go see the movie.

 

---

 

If you’ve seen the movie, you get mucho bonus points if you immediately recognized where Stanton got the design for John Carter’s mausoleum without having to look it up.  I’ve stood in front of the original, I loved that little hat tip.