Sometimes I stumble upon a bright, shiny, happy piece of the internet that makes me laugh like a hyena and forget all of my problems for a minute. Lately, a minute is more of a respite than ever.
From Something AwfulIf you don't know Something Awful, you should.
If there's anyone left who is still desperately smoking the Crack-We-Can-Believe-In, I would hope THIS will finally get that "Hope and Change" monkey off your back.
On Wednesday, the transition team and Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced that Rick Warren, pastor of the powerful Saddleback Church, would give the invocation on January 20th. [HuffPo]President-Elect Obama doesn't see anything wrong with that.
“I think that it is no secret that I am a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on, and I intend to continue to be consistent on during my presidency,” Obama answered but then defended his choice by making a broader argument for unity, “What I've also said is that it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.”[ABC]This is not about a "disagreement". This is about a fundamental, ideological difference between Americans' rights and bigoted religions. How can Barack Obama be an advocate for gays while validating the bullshit opinions of Rick Warren? Oh yeah, yeah, I know Warren says almost nothing about homosexuals that isn't swathed in milquetoast doublethink.
Explaining his views about homosexuality and gay rights, he notes, "I don't think that homosexuality is the worst sin," and, "By the way, my wife and I had dinner at a gay couple's home two weeks ago. So I'm not a homophobic guy, okay?" [The Nation]Of course he isn't. He just rejects their equality under the law and subscribes to the same ridiculous position as the rest of the bigots.
And Warren says "there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease two percent of our population." As Warren puts it: "This is not a political issue -- it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about."[OneNewsNow]So see, he isn't really homophobic, he just thinks that it's okay to discriminate against homosexuals. Just like having black friends allows me to say "nigger".
“...it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues."Rick Warren does not want anyone to "come together" unless it's under Jesus. These are not "social issues" to him or his ilk, but moral obligations. There's no discussion to be had. It's an insult to both sides to pretend otherwise.
The braggadocio me says, “Yep, I called it!” The old fart me blames texting for the idiocratic inability to have a memory or attention span that could possibly reach back to April. April! The frustrated civic writer in me wants to learn three foreign languages just to have a large enough vocabulary to throttle these pricks in print and destroy them. Secondly, where have I heard the anti-camera argument before? Oh yeah, in my piece My New NYC Revenue Proposal: The Civilian Ticket Patrol. I may have employed a little reverse psychology there, but can anyone truly ignore the resulting cry of disgruntled NYC citizens who yearn for privacy?
Again, we just went through this in April. April! In my piece, Congestion Pricing: Be A Snot-Nosed Rich Prick, I spelled out a near epic list of arguments that should have come up in the battle to keep New York City’s East River and Harlem River crossings free from the disgustingly greedy power-monger lies and their dollar sign, cartoon eyeballs. Moreover though, debunked point after debunked moronic point was expressed as one common warning. I warned that congestion pricing initiatives would keep popping up again and again, with new names, new ways to mitigate objections, and new efforts to grab our hard-earned, recession pinched cash from the thin air left in our pockets. Never, though, in my wildest dreams did I think we’d be facing the same deplorable classists and their crusade to wrench money, if even through our collective anuses, less than seven months after the exact same proposed methodology was laughed out of Albany. Seven months! They’re baaaa-aaaack, at least a veritable cultist subset of them.
This time around, it’s the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that’s out to do it. Yes, it’s the same Metropolitan Transit Authority mentioned in my historical Triborough Bridge argument. This is the same MTA, the company, that already controls that bridge and others, all the NYC subways, and all the NYC buses. Despite their near constant subway and bus fare hikes in my dozen years here, their recent takeover of all the private bus companies and routes within the city limits, their never ending push for folks to use mass transit, their massive job eliminations and rolling token booth closures, their near triennial bridge toll hikes, and their mass marketing of subway themed products that did not exist just a decade ago, they are somehow broke again. Functionally on the heels of their last birthed subway and bus fare hike that was supposed to quash their then alleged deficit, instead rumored to actually have been a multi-million dollar surplus amidst their public refusal to allow NYC to examine their books, the MTA'holes are now claiming a new 1.9 billion dollar budget gap that is estimated to reach 3 billion by next year. I guess your last fare hike didn’t work!
To close this gap, they will use the bailout driven economic environment to request rescue funds from city and/or state sources. When they don’t get that, because the city and state are trying to close gaps of their own and because government would be more than happy to take over the subway and buses in the event of an MTA failure, they are going to shoot for the moon with a plan to grab the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge (a.k.a 59th Street Bridge), as well as all the remaining smaller bridges that cross the Harlem River, and covert them from free thoroughfares to tolled ones. In other words, their plan to bail themselves out of another reputed economic failure of the NYC subway system, is to charge drivers of cars. Pardon me, dickwods, but isn’t that like raising Amtrak fares to pay for jet fuel?
Now, dumbass ideas knowing no bounds, the MTA plan fails to stop there. It does not stop at glomming seven bridges currently owned and run by the city, for free, to transform them into giant, unlimited ATMs. No. Another part of the plan is to simultaneously raise the subway and bus fares a full dollar or, in other words, to do exactly what charging drivers is hypothetically supposed to prevent.
But wait there’s more! This simultaneum will additionally be congruent with MTA layoffs, closures, and downsizing including the elimination of certain trains and bus routes. So, straphangers already paying the highest per ride fare in the country will now pay a full dollar more per ride (raised from $2.00 to $3.00) for less service and be forced to cope with larger crowds within that remaining service. Plus, for that headache, will they even get the feeling of security that might be knowing their dependable subway system is at all solvent? No! This ridiculous act of pay more, much more, get less, gleans absolutely nothing. It is an arbitrary fare increase that, according to the very people threatening the increase, will not help. Instead, they have to snatch a bunch of bridges they never had before and use them to charge ALL drivers, yes ALL drivers, who have absolutely nothing to do with a subway system deficit.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but he only visits MTA Board Chairman H. Dale Hemmerdinger and then blows him!
Okay, so here’s the obligatory “to be fair” paragraph. To be fair, the MTA plan has not released how exactly it would rend these bridges from city ownership, making the plan seem to New Yorkers like a longshot. To be fair, they have included one idea that I hadn’t seen in the defunct NYC Congestion Pricing proposal which is to not toll via booths, but via EZ-Pass scanners and traffic cameras that photograph license plates, both thereafter sending drivers a bill in the mail. That’s all I can give them. The rest of the idea shits on us profusely.
Hey Hemmerdinger, let’s not pat ourselves on the back for the traffic camera and scanners idea just yet! Firstly, it’s not the MTA’s idea. If you were creative thinkers, you wouldn’t be proposing the very same idea that was just trounced in April.
“I’m gonna buy that failed ice cream parlor on the corner of Nowhere and Nonesuch and make it into my own ice cream parlor! I’m a genius!”
Look, just like I’d written, the idea has expectedly resurged again with a few minor changes in hopes of masquerading as a new idea. At the very outset, that’s its own reprehensible problem. It states that tolling the free bridges of central New York and charging your own residents to get to work is the only idea anybody has to close budget gaps. Freakin’ automatons!
Duh, let’s toll the bridges and make millions a week. No? Um, okay let’s toll the bridges and make millions a week. No good? Okay, let’s toll the bridges and make millions per week and also raise existing fares!
Still though, outside of an extreme lack of thought and creativity on the part of every person strapped with closing a budget gap, most of my original arguments still work to fight this new incarnation. The checklist balances like this.
Booth troubles – No longer an argument
Exporting traffic angle – No longer an argument
Still – Punishes people who are doing the right thing
Still – Not a green initiative
Still - Charges people to get to and/or from their own neighborhoods
Still – Ignores tell-tale Triborough Bridge History
Still – Ignores the tell-tale “one city” history of bridges
Still – Unfairly segregates Queens and Brooklyn from Manhattan
Still – Ignores logical and historical toll function
Still – Unfairly charges 150,000 – 275,000 pregnant commuters yearly
Still – Reads a poor choice for toll placement
Still – Mimics the poor effects of the New Jersey Port Authority toll hikes
Newly – Charges drivers to close a subway budget gap
Newly – Fails to ask why the last plan and hike didn’t work
Newly – Creates less service for more money
Newly – Presumes that what was not a good idea seven months ago is a good idea now
Newly – Puts all remaining transit choices in the hands of a nearly untouchable, independent company with a captive client base
With all these counter-arguments, why do I think the plan has legs enough to get through if we don’t fight it? Well, it was the Mayor of the city that just tried and failed to toll most of the same bridges. It’s not such a far fetched argument that this way the MTA could simply ask for the bridges and the city could say, “Here, please take them off of our hands for free.” At least the old plan was going to get us millions from the federal government to improve mass transit. The new plan gets nada. Oh, did I mention the Mayor appoints four of the MTA Board members? Did I mention he also wants stuff from them?
Plus, I think it is no error that such a plan is being proposed right at the post-election change-over of local powers from the old guard who stomped down congestion pricing to a new guard that, in some cases, wasn’t even involved in the battle.
Also, the city and state, trying to close their own budget gaps, might jump at the chance to cross off bridge maintenance and reconstruction from their line items.
My friends, I understand belt tightening and fiscal responsibility better than most. I understand the drastic measures that must be taken by our government (not our companies) to fix stupid spending decisions passed. I believe that, having chosen to live here, part of that burden will actually be my own. This does not change the fact that an illogical, poor, mean-spirited, hurtful, non-creative, never-ending and counter-intuitive plan will ever be acceptable. We will go to war and take lives as a last resort in the name of saving lives. We don’t, however, get to take money in the name of saving money, even as a last resort. It doesn’t work. Why, is this, then, everybody’s very first resort?
You know, with world events being what they are, New Orleans an orphaned city, Wall Street in shambles, the U.S. auto industry castigated, successful terrorist attacks seemingly non-stop and everywhere, global climate change, foreclosure after foreclosure; I must just come off as some little runt who doesn’t want to pay six to twenty bucks a day for a round trip to work. Okay, granted. I never want to pay money for what was once free. But every single one of these disastrous world events is at least partially a result of poor and uninsightful decision making on massive scales. I am talking about one such massive decision on a massive scale impacting more than just mass transit, but all transit. Can we not learn enough from our previous approaches to poor decisions to examine the problem differently in the moment? Can we not identify what is wrong with a proposed “solution,” all the things that are wrong with a proposed “solution,” and then move on to something else? How can a government that just seven months ago debated both sides of an issue and deemed one side bad for New York at all entertain that same side of that same issue in a plan by a private organization? It shouldn’t be allowed. They should tell the MTA, “We just spent and lost millions of our own dollars to prove your plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Now don’t come back until you think of something else!”
Now that we see that no voice here, except perhaps my own, has any new or creative ideas, we can further see the nauseatingly repeated plan to toll the free bridges in its truer category. Tolling free bridges is not a plan. It’s giving up. It’s throwing in the towel. It’s getting the supposedly greatest financial and political minds together in a room for months on end just for them to conclude, “Fuck it! This is too hard. Just toll those bridges! We don’t even care who makes the money at this point.” There are more creative solutions. Just listen to your people. You are not going to get an all-in-one gift solution. It’ll be a package. It’ll be the creative efforts of bunches of smaller, positive programs that help you reach your goals. It’s like paying for college. You contribute some, your parents contribute some, you get a school scholarship, a private scholarship, a grant, a student loan, and work study. You’ll have to do the leg work to put together a positive and reasonable package of many ideas that work. I know that people who are used to having the money around hate the new leg work to dig up dollar sources. I know they want a fairy to hit them on the head with a wand and say, “Make a wish.” Get real. Get to work. If you’ve got a budget gap, the answerS ARE somewhere in your budget.
JPMorganChase has made much press this year. In addition to being one of the sole global financial institutions that almost completely sidestepped the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it also, at the government’s behest, merged with Bear Stearns as they were going under, many months before Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG tanked and before Wachovia and Merrill Lynch began publicly waffling. In fact, JPMC did so with such vitesse and expertise, they had plenty of spanking room left over to proceed with the long rumored take-over of Washington Mutual just months after buying Bear. Unlike other organizations, JPMC offers those who’ve lost their jobs pursuant to mergers an astounding barrage of high-end, professional services to help them get resituated in new jobs elsewhere. How sweet. Also unlike other organizations, their no-holds-barred CEO, J. Dimon, has been plastered all over Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune for months on end if for no other reason than speculation as to what move he’ll make next.
In this light, JPMorganChase certainly seems like a cowboy in a white hat, a good guy amidst disappointing failures all around. And, for the most part, the press reflects that. But let’s call a spayed duck a spayed duck. JPMorganChase is no stranger to the very greed, questionable behavior, and ruthless decisions exhibited by all the other corporate banking giants. They were just strategically lucky this time. It was not so many years ago that in a public address to his employees upon newly accepting the head honcho position, J. Dimon referred to all of HR, for example, as a “bunch of maggots and cockroaches.” His attitude seems to have changed little since and as a mouthpiece for his organization, it should be noted that this style of communication is an underpinning of bank practices at large.
Kudos to JPMorganChase for giving so much to charity over so many years. Cheers to them for sponsoring so many of our well-known and widely enjoyed sporting events and competitions. Yep, give them points for having more ATMs than Canada has snowflakes. Do these things really offset twisted business ethic?
Offset might be the wrong word. Actually the good they do rather seems to bury or adequately hide many of the nastier goings-on. For instance, as of November 2008, JPMorganChase has implemented a new, mandatory invoicing procedure for all external service providers. No hitch there. Service providers are now to invoice through an online system only. No hitch there. All such providers will be required to do this regardless of the service type provided. So, the company that restocks the water coolers is thrown into the same boat with the shoe shine guy and the $1000 an hour commodities consultant. Perhaps no real hitch there other than the regular corporate tendency to make sweeping decisions without so much as a humane wink toward the macro or the micro. Yet, in true corporate fashion, JPMC has tagged on a new and creative slap to the face that has certain service providers wondering if it is just a big, fat joke. If you wish to be paid on your invoice on time, JPMorganChase will now charge you 4% of the money you earned. You heard it! Buy your money! If you get paid in any way from JPMC and are not a direct employee of the bank, you now must pay a fee to get your money in fewer than 60 days. Some might say, “Well, 60 days, 8 weeks, that’s not really a concern to most service providers.” Some might be lucky to get paid that “quickly.” Well, I think I need not mention what that does to Mom and Pop shops, especially straddled over the fiscal year’s end. But this hardship isn’t relegated to only the small businesses around town.
Consider, for the moment, that at any given time, JPMC has a strong percentage of people working in their offices, every day, who are not direct employees of the bank. The supposed global authority in fiscal prudence didn’t want to take them on at a decent wage or pay their benefits. So, though full-time workers for the bank, they aren’t actually employees. They are temps and contractors and consultants and associates and interns of every type and level. We are not talking about the schmuck who delivers the bagels in the morning or the window washer with the peg leg. We are also not talking about an elitist jet-set or a self-proclaimed mogul salon. We are talking about a set of workers, doing the bank’s work, who show up every day, for a full day, sometimes more, with no overtime in certain cases, no job security from one day to the next, no corporate earned recognition for their deeds, but whose only difference between themselves and an employee is the lacked label, “employee.” They live from week to week, sometimes hand-to-mouth, and depending upon their situation, may already be waiting a four week lag time between hours worked and the specific check used as recompense for those hours.
By JPMC switching to the 60 day standard, pseudo-employees in this title-less cage have but two choices. Pay good money to get their due pay in a normal amount of time or wait double the time they might already be waiting. Why is either significant? Well, to pay money to get your money is a matter of poor principal, poor business ethic; so much so it would be illegal to inflict this very practice upon regular employees. It reads kickback. If you think paying ATM fees is a killjoy, at least ATM fees provide you with a choice. Imagine, instead, if your employer forced you to give her/him 4% of every paycheck before receiving your check every week. Freakin’ Ebenezer Scrooge wouldn’t even do that.
As for the doubled wait time, a wait period that’s already been doubled from the standard 90’s Chase practice of a two week wait, the negative impact is a little trickier. When one considers the fact that these folks already waited an entire payless month at the outset of their being brought on to JPMC, the existing four week lag time, it makes another month wait seem devilishly inappropriate. Yes, they will get paid eventually, but for at least a few, that’s going to constitute two full months without physical pay in a given calendar year. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty hard to withstand for a lot of folks. Honestly, what would your opinion be about people asked to work full-time for a year and get paid, at the outset, for ten months of that work?
Secondly, given that the notification went out to certain folks in this group during their unpaid vacations, notification warning with less than two weeks prep-time, well that’s then a ten week wait without pay for some. Again, this “some” is people who show up and work every single day.
Thirdly, lump onto the above the sometimes two week processing span it takes to register a person in the new online system, and you can be talking about an up to twelve week wait without pay. Work done on October 1st for instance, wouldn’t be paid until the following year. Yes, once the lag time has abated, such workers will get a check every week thereafter, steadily. Yet note how few people in the world actually get paid every OTHER month or every THIRD month. It usually doesn’t happen because that is not how bills and rents and mortgages are set up. Monthly is usually the least palatable tier of payment possibilities. Even at that rarity, such a paycheck would be for a whole month of work, a larger check. This potential eight to twelve week wait only starts payments again with a check for a single week’s work. Ugh! JPMC should not be allowed to get away with this based on the idea that it is only a single lengthy wait and not a regularity. Face it folks, it is no mistake that a brand new 4 to 8 to 12 week lag time goes live in November, just in time to be penniless for the holidays! Nice move JPMC. I guess if you wish to feed your children on Christmas, you have to give 4% to the Grinch who stole WaMu.
Al-Qaida-linked Web site backs McCain as president
WASHINGTON (AP) — Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.I'm sure there are Americans who would welcome that. Maybe not the assholes rooting for Gustav, but some.
The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.This is terrible! How lucky are we to have such brave and selfless agents at the CIA, the FBI and the NSA to alert us to this upcoming danger!
The message is credited to a frequent and apparently respected contributor named Muhammad Haafid. However, Haafid is not believed to have a direct affiliation with al-Qaida plans or knowledge of its operations, according to SITE.OMG! You guys! You almost had me, you betcha!
Yes siree, if you live in the U.S. of A. it’s coming for you, and the only thing you can do to stop it is to keep an ear to the ground and recognize the greenback beast in all its many incarnations. The idea of congestion pricing, adding new tolls to some or all inbound roads into a city or central business district in the name of traffic control, is a sneaky shape-shifter of an idea recently, but barely, shot down for New York City. I’ve no doubt that it will be revisited, mayor after mayor, snot-nosed rich advisor after snot-nosed rich advisor, and suggested as a solution to every deficit until kingdom come. Learn to fight it here.
Background snippet de jour: New York City is a city made up of five boroughs on four differing land masses. When most people think about NYC, they think of Manhattan, an island. Staten Island, a separate island, is also part of The Big Apple. Brooklyn (Kings County) and Queens are actually city counties on the westernmost geographic body of Long Island (yet a third isle), while the Bronx finishes the city to the north looking to cartographers like a mutant uvula dangling rudely from the mainland. Smaller islands like Rikers Island, Wards/Randalls Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, Coney Island, and the like are also part of NYC. The Hudson River (tidal estuary), Harlem River, East River, Arthur Kill, Atlantic Ocean, and Long Island Sound are a web of water bodies that carve up the city into its component parts, making it no surprise that the metropolis is vivaciously riddled with beautiful bridges of every length and style. Long story short, all the bridges and tunnels controlled by New Jersey’s Port Authority, are tolled. Most bridges controlled by the city itself are currently free. While this has made for some controversy over the years, certain New Yorkers able to get from home to work and back sans toll, others being forced to pay a toll to get into their own neighborhood, it’s not all that difficult to track. Bridges and tunnels closer to the outside of the city or entering the city are tolled, bridges closer to the center of the city are usually free.
Well, borrowing from current practices in places like London and Stockholm, this year saw “congestion pricing” suggested and narrowly defeated in NYC. The idea was to add new tolls to all the currently free Manhattan inbound bridges between certain streets. Functionally, this would have eradicated all remaining free rides on any major bridge. It was meant, in part, as a deterrent from driving for non-city residents. Problem was, the bridges proposed for said tolls are right in the middle of the place, effectively cutting off more than half of the city’s resident drivers from their destinations. I mean, wherever you live, imagine, for the moment, that there is only a single boulevard you can take to get to your job. Then imagine that somebody slapped a big toll booth right on that road. Starting to get the picture? Mayor Bloomberg backed it, pushed for it, and financed an obtuse battalion of elitists to hammer it through. No dice, even as the lie evolved. It was originally brought up as an idea to curtail traffic in Manhattan, but soon became touted as a green initiative. Lie!
What kills me about it is not the suggestion. Ideas come and go. I don’t even horribly much mind that the idea became lumped in with green initiatives. The Bloomberg administration has done quite a lot, in fact, to push through and to support multiple green initiatives, despite a small budget burp early in his 9-11 proximal mayoralty that temporarily quashed the city’s massive recycling program. The congestion pricing idea needed a recognizable home and gravitated toward the easiest one to lie about. What actually feels like the ice pick in my brain, instead, was the argument used by congestion pricing opponents, the freakin’ people on my side! The main argument they chose to combat congestion pricing was such a poor and almost unrelated argument that I am actually amazed this tolls nonsense didn’t pass with flying colors.
Congestion pricing opponents, again and again, chose to harp upon the idea that to toll the many remaining free bridges between Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan was a thinly veiled stratagem seeking to disenfranchise Queens and Brooklyn residents, an unfair tax. Often, without actually saying it, the insinuation was that Queens and Brooklyn, being among the most culturally diverse counties in the entire nation, were being discriminated against by Bloomberg and an army of Manhattanites. Pah-leeeeese! Really? Ten-thousand perfectly logical counter-arguments that could have shown congestion pricing for the poor idea that it was; countless obvious, common-sense reasons, any one of which could have defeated congestion pricing initiatives for a long time to come if not forever, and these concave skulls thought that a watered down version of a race card was the way to go?! They chose a “taxation without representation” argument for a fee that was not a tax and a group of people who they themselves represented? You know, despite the fact that I seem to live in an urban honeycomb of modern liberalism, I do see racism and bigotry every day. It’s here, it’s there, it exists, it’s real, it deserves to be challenged and fought. But to buy the argument that congestion pricing would unfairly “tax” a cross-section of the community even partially based on class or race means I would also have to believe that Bloomberg and his money making robots actually had some sort of investment in discriminating, a Berlin Wall agenda that starts with tolls and ends with a force field. I’d have to believe that Manahattanites, a mosaic of races and classes in and of their own demographic, didn’t simply and selfishly want less traffic around their homes, but also wanted Queens to evaporate and Brooklyn to just go away. It makes no sense. I am insulted by the very people sent to debate for my best interests.
Look, there are forces at work out there that are going to piggy-back a highly unfounded congestion pricing scenario onto every cause, every bill, every earmark they can. They’ll call it something different each time. They’ll renegotiate the price. They’ll petition the feds for backing. They’ll “mitigate” the impact. They’ll take surveys until people are bored with the subject. They’ll cite new impact studies from every angle. It’s not about any of that. It’s about money and only money. It’s about a few too many powerful people who are too self-righteous to sit in traffic like the rest of us, or dare I say, deign to take mass transit. It’s about an endless history of government waste and questionable spending practices that listless entrepreneurs will try to balance by charging the very people who their inane spending habits affected the most. It’s an untapped source of revenue over which businesspeople like Bloomberg salivate as they stare longingly at those poor, untolled, engineering marvels. A makeshift race card defense isn’t going to fly every single time this power brokerage rears its ugly haunches to piss on us.
That said, ringing true to even the soundest of Queens and Brooklyn minds, it’s all phrased as opinion. Opinions don’t win dink! This blog entry is not about my opinion. Imagine that! It is about equipping you, the reader, with all the actual arguments that should have been brought to bear in New York. It is about sharing the layer upon layer of common sense that was ignored from both sides in our case, so that you can adjust to your own city’s attempt at congestion pricing with a full and proper arsenal. I’ve no doubt that some cities are going to sneak it through, but before they do, they are going to have to contend with you and each and every single GOOD point you bring up at the hearings before getting it done. I’ll give you what I can. Please give me yours. Let’s work this out.
THE NYC ANTI-CONGESTION PRICING MASTER LIST:
First, let us just plainly and logically discount the notion that congestion pricing is a green initiative as proposed in NYC. Perhaps the simplest illustration I can borrow is the fact that all cars would be charged the same toll. Hybrid cars were not going through at half price. Alternative energy cars (like yet to be legalized hydrogen vehicles which only produce water as waste) are not getting through the tolls for free. There would be no pro-rate for cars that use less gas over cars that use more. There would be no 1955 singing Exxon team popping out of each toll booth to check under your hood and validate your energy prudence. If the heart of the matter is an ecological one, certainly no truly green mitigating provision was made in the congestion pricing proposal. Not green $8.00. Completely green, $8.00. Horse and buggy, $8.00. How stupid do they think we are?
Even if future editions of this farce crop up including discount provisions and passes, one still cannot justify the ADDED 40 minute to 2 hour wait that all drivers, hybrid, biodiesel, corn ethanol, and otherwise, would have to wait in the snaky line behind the toll booth. That’s not green. That’s not reasonable. If the current rush hour wait times on the highly tolled west side at the New Jersey bridges and tunnels are any indication, waits that take place on wide open highways, well then the waits through the easterly Chiclet-like neighborhood blocks, fully actuated traffic lights, industrial parks, double-parking, and bus stops are going to be all that much worse. When I am talking about 40 minute to 2 hour waits, I AM ROUNDING DOWN! People we are talking about a different kind of green here, dollar green.
Besides, that’s just the autocentric version of the “green” debacle. Though I am in full awareness that the people of our nation are exorbitantly far from green goals, what about those crafty, future Queens homeowners who will have participated in projects enough to completely neutralize or negate their entire carbon footprint? For every bit of gasoline they will have bought and for every molecule of pollution they will have shunted through their tailpipe, they will have also done something else on the homefront to reverse the curse. They will have planted trees and tended to flowers. They will have stuck a windmill on the roof, gone paperless with their bills. They will have taken to buying only green products, reduced, reused, recycled, minimized consumerism, ridden bikes locally, hosted Earth Day, become vegetarians, forgone AC, and donated to the DEP to clean up the East River. You mean to tell me that Inspector 12 is going to come monthly to their homes and fill out a certificate that allows them to cross that very same East River at a discount? No! “You are on four wheels and rollin’ lady, 8 bucks.” Congestion pricing has nothing to do with ecology. Were that the proposition’s only fault, it might have had a chance.
I’m going to start with the absolute broadest reason why congestion pricing is titanically unjust, the reason lawmakers need to have smacked in their faces. It punishes the people who are already doing things correctly! Congestion pricing punishes the people who are presently doing exactly what the city insists that they do to battle congestion! The city wants people to take mass transit. Well, millions of them do just that. They are on a train in a hole in the ground every morning at rush hour and again at rush hour on the way home. They stand, packed, dangerously shoulder to shoulder, not a seat in sight, clutching belongings and unable to reach the nearest pole or strap to hang onto in the speeding subway snarl. They are crowd-pressed to teeter on platform edges as the trains roll into stations, already sardine-full of people from the previous stop, each clipped for two bucks a head to experience the luxury of this risk to life and limb and time and comfort and privacy. Commuters are herded up wide staircases with nary an inch to spare between their own faces and the stranger’s ass in front of them. The sheer mass of the populous sharing their commute, the mass that is mass transit, has so engorged the subway and buses systems that, in typical New York fashion, morning rush hour is actually two and a half hours long. Nighttime rush hour lasts from 4pm to 7:30pm without blinking an eye. Six full hours per business day of people-stuffing, strained backs, picked pockets, squeezed breath, spilled drinks, no seats, danger, dehumanization, and cumulative, inadvertent dry humping; and to this equation Bloomberg wishes to ADD all the people in up to 40% of all the vehicles in Manhattan?! I guess one of us must have bent his grandmother over at Thanksgiving.
Too personal? Perhaps. I mean, the idea of congestion pricing seemed pretty damned personal to me. How about my once pregnant wife, high-risk pregnancy, weekly appointments with her OB, the occasional extra appointment for a test or two here or there? Well, we live in Queens. Her choice of doctor (and we have to add the insurance company’s choice of doctor) was in Manhattan. You mean to tell me that you think it is perfectly fine to implement a congestion pricing scheme that would leave my pregnant wife only two real transit choices for every single appointment as well as for the “big day?” Choice number one, walk eight blocks, go up the subway steps, enter the subway system, up another set of steps, onto the train, 20 minute ride with rush hour bodies knit together like a big B.O. doily, change trains underground, 10 minute ride with rush hour bodies crushed to critical and sometimes urinating mass, up another set of steps, followed by a five block walk to the hospital. Choice number two, get in the car and wait 40 minutes to 2 hours to get through an $8.00 toll, per trip, and over a bridge that without the toll can take 5 minutes? Hey, I realize it is expensive to have a baby in New York, but you just took $416 out of that baby’s mouth. If you consider the time I spend waiting each day to make it through that toll, time I could have been at work after each doctor’s appointment, well even at minimum wage that’s an additional $371.80 you’ve taken from that child’s well-being. This doesn’t even count gas spent while waiting. Might not sound like much, and therefore it might not sound too personal, but let’s keep in mind there are 125,00 babies born in New York City every year. That’s 150,000 to 275,000 pregnant commuters at any given time. There's a hearing I want to hear!
Let us, for the moment, turn to discounting some of the lesser riddles embedded with the pro-congestion pricing pulpit. How about the idea that the intention of congestion pricing was to encourage people outside of the city to take mass transit? Well, we are getting closer here, but still untrue. Placing the toll booths on the bridges smack in the middle of the city means you are not looking to curtail outside cars from entering NYC, but that you are trying to curtail any cars, including the cars belonging to your own hard-working residents, from going to one particular area (the area where most of your citizens work). Bridges, sadly, form the perfect traffic bottleneck for toll booths. It makes sense that a money-monger would WANT to put the tolls on bridges, but if one is truly to encourage “outsiders” to opt for mass transit, than the toll booths logically need to be placed on the far more voluminous inbound roads on the outskirts of one’s jurisdiction. There would have to be sudden, expensive booth eyesores placed on each Nassau County road leading into Queens, the city’s largest county. Impossible!
Instead, bridges were the target, and perhaps luckily for naysayers. See, the proposed placement of the booths couldn’t have any better illustrated all the flaws with the idea. One key argument I never heard brought up to combat congestion pricing was its effect. In effect, as a proposed method to “curtail” traffic in Manhattan by 13% to 40%, such was not a curtailing at all. It was a manner in which to EXPORT the traffic to other boroughs within the same city. Up to a Manhattan-sized 40% increase in traffic would be diverted to the local roads and neighborhoods housing the very citizens who predominantly support NYC’s central business nexus. That flat traffic increase is then additionally lumped on top of the then 40% more monstrous bottle-neck caused by the toll itself. Mosquito infestation? Blah! We’ll fix it. Send 40% of those mosquitoes to your brother’s house. It’s poor business ethic, plain and simple.
I truly thought that Bloomberg, who ran as a Republican and later changed to a more Independent approach, was a person learning lessons. If so, it might then follow that at least some of those lessons would be the lessons of history. The congestion pricing proposal for NYC flagrantly ignored so many of the lessons of history that it became quite difficult to see anything inspired in the idea.
It ignored the countless news broadcasts, two toll hikes ago in 2001, that showed New Jersey drivers furious over NYC inbound tolls going up as they commuted to work, but surprisingly showed Manhattanites who were happy as pie and grossly over-thankful for the increase, figuring the hike would keep more cars out of “their” city. It didn’t, at least not until 9 months had passed and even then to a tune of a trivial 2%. Such broadcasts overtly laid those Manhattanite desires right out for everyone to hear. Do we really think those desires faded in just five or six years? Do Manhattanites deserve special treatment over others in their own city, OUR city?
It also ignored the history of the bridges bringing the city together as a single entity, a story founded on more than just matters of transit, money, trade and traffic, but one deeply rooted in culture, immersion, freedom, and empowerment. The History Channel even ran an ironically recent special on these giant NYC bridges and how they made the city whole. Cast in the light of bridge-building past, the congestion pricing proposal cannot hope to achieve any greater reputation than that of purposeful division.
I guess it also doesn’t help that the proposal ignored years of widely publicized complaints from Triborough Bridge users. In a nutshell, users of this bridge are chiefly New York City residents who are forced to pay a toll to get both to and from work within their own home town, the folks whom I’d mentioned earlier as being charged to get into their own neighborhoods. The Triborough Bridge, a bridge with three legs (plus) that actually reaches three city destinations, while placed perfectly to service three boroughs, is also at a cross-purposed niche in the city geography. It is both near the center of the city and used as an entry point. It is controlled by The Metropolitan Transit Authority and tolled much as the New Jersey crossings are despite the fact that no end of it touches New Jersey, no end leaves NYC, and it stretches across the same river as all the free bridges. The weirdness of the Triborough’s status aside, years of complaints from commuters have yielded years of responses from city officials. For decades now the typical response had been that if Queens residents wish not to pay Triborough tolls to enter Manhattan, they already have another free alternative, the 59th Street Bridge (Queensboro Bridge). Well, that response seems to imply that if Queens residents had no alternative, the Triborough Bridge toll would be eliminated. Did I say implied? The wording of this repeatedly visited response, when stated officially, is practically a promise. Under congestion pricing, there would be no alternative. Yet, was there any provision to address this historical fact, any provision that would have city officials and the MTA make good on their promise? Nope. In fact, it is more likely the Triborough Bridge toll would need be nearly doubled to match congestion pricing on the other bridges. Voilà ! Another turbulent verbal history of citizen voice verses government rationalization ignored as Bloomberg’s skirmishers beseeched Albany to pass the bill.
Perhaps the easiest reel of history for our representatives to have shelved was the common sense episode. Tolls, for the most part, are meant to help pay for new thoroughfares. They offset new bridge costs and new highway costs, ensuring that public projects eventually pay for themselves. Specifically, they are a plan to guarantee that those who foot the bill are those who use the road, and not an additional tax hike on six million people who stayed at home summer Fridays picking their toes. Sometimes, tolls are instead worked into a broader shard of the revenue system, not only paying for the road over which one travels, but additionally helping to pay for related initiatives, like transit in general, or unrelated initiatives like public schools, police protection, and the Mayor’s penis pump. In either case, there is an unavoidable chronology in the purposing of tolls. In the first case mentioned, tolls have a built-in end date. They are placed for a number of years and then removed when the road construction and maintenance costs have been superseded. New York City need only look to its near neighbor, the Southern State Parkway for this example. In the second case mentioned, tolls are placed when the road is built and are planned to remain in that location indefinitely. NYC’s other near neighbor, The New Jersey Turnpike, is a shining and despicably expensive example of this usage. However, does anyone care that in neither case is a road allowed to remain free for a century and then get tolled later on? That’s a step backwards! A twelve year old kid can tell that's a decision that moves in completely the wrong direction. This concept is consumately un-American. To find its like, one has to stretch for examples all the way across the Atlantic Ocean or into nations with whom we would never share economic policy. We are not Stockholm on the Hudson. You know, the plain common sense of it is that Manhattan traffic will not be viabley curtailed. For every vehicle you get out of the area, another one will take its place eventually, usually from within Manhattan by people living there. Where do we get off suggesting a rigid policy that even distantly approaches the ideal of, “If you want to drive here, you have to be rich...and we're willing to move backwards to enforce that?”
In the end, maybe the folks on my side in Albany had it right. Maybe all these many solid arguments were just too common, too easy to overlook as non-points and non-politics. Maybe the “race card” or the “unfair tax” approach had more on the ball than I’d realized. I mean, after all, it is one more well known lesson of history that Robert Moses, power broker who saw to the construction of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, each stretching east over Long Island from NYC, sought to prejudicially exclude. All the cross-street bridges over both parkways were purposely built too low to allow buses to pass thereunder. It was an artifice specifically employed to disallow poorer people (urban minorities) from making their way to Long Island. That’s a bit of a Berlin Wall, a kind of lowbrow force field. Well, what is Bloomberg, but a rich power broker? I personally don’t hear a speck of bigotry in his speeches. That shows he’s careful, careful enough to tailor every quip, careful enough not to use language that divides. It begs the question then, why he as such a careful, rich, power broker would elect to back a policy that so clearly lumps him into historical association with another who deliberately sought to divide, maybe even conquer. Aren’t appearances everything?
According to Barbara Forrest at the Louisiana Coalition for Science, those lovely people at the Discovery Institute have produced a new textbook, Explore Evolution.
Scientist and writer John Timmer has reviewed the Discovery Institute’s stealth creationist textbook, Explore Evolution, in Ars Technica. Three of EE’s authors are well-known intelligent design (ID) creationists. Stephen C. Meyer is the director of the Discovery Institute’s ID creationist wing, the Center for Science and Culture (CSC). Two of his co-authors are his CSC associates Paul Nelson (a young-earth creationist) and Scott Minnich (a witness for the defense in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District). The other two, Jonathan Moneymaker and Ralph Seelke, are lesser-known ID supporters.That would be a good idea for anyone who ever sees this book in the hands of a kid, regardless of the state or location.
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Contrary to its misleading title, Explore Evolution is a sustained, error-ridden attack on evolutionary theory. It also contains a section on Michael Behe’s concept of “irreducible complexity.” Both aspects of EE make it very much an intelligent design creationist textbook.
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Timmer closes his review with a parting reference to Louisiana. Recalling the statement by Kevin Padian, a scientist and expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller trial, that intelligent design “makes people stupid . . . essentially makes them ignorant,” Timmer concludes on a note that should resonate strongly with all Louisiana citizens who value our public schools and want our children to be decently educated:Sadly, thanks to the actions of the Louisiana state government, that state’s students are much more likely to be exposed to this sort of stupidity.-----
But the book doesn’t only promote stupidity, it demands it. In every way except its use of the actual term, this is a creationist book, but its authors are expecting that legislators and the courts will be too stupid to notice that, or to remember that the Supreme Court has declared teaching creationism an unconstitutional imposition of religion. As laws similar to Louisiana’s resurface in other states next year, we can only hope that legislators choose not to live down to the low expectations of EE’s authors.
Anyone with knowledge that Explore Evolution or any other creationist material is being used in Louisiana public school science classes should contact the National Center for Science Education or the LA Coalition for Science.
More to come later, but I saw this on MSNBC today and just couldn't believe it.
Officials from Texas pressed for equal treatment from federal aid agencies. "I have asked the president and the administration to just treat us as fairly as they treated Louisiana back during Katrina," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry. "Texans will take care of the rest."Mr Perry, you really might want to rethink that statement. I hope you haven't put it in writing. If you did, you just fucked the citizens of Galveston and Houston.
Don't mess with Texas. You don't know where it's been.
That would absolutely ruin the Democratic Convention, wouldn't it? I mean, I'm not wishing that anybody get hurt, but wouldn't the timing be incredible?
What
a
Bunch
of
ASSHOLES!
From Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News (second link):
I hope for the sake of the beleaguered Gulf Coast that this doesn't come to pass -- but from a realpolitik point of view, there is a potential nightmare for the Republican Party swirling around the warm Caribbean waters right now.You are so right, Will. And I really hope a terrorist attack on Philadelphia doesn't come to pass -- but from a realpolitik point of view, that would absolutely kill the Democrats.
His name is Gustav.
Let me put it this way...Pissed off, yet? Then just wait, there's more from this cocksucker.
...I understand all about the "I hope this doesn't happen to New Orleans."
But, it's got to hit somewhere, and I hope it does hit New Orleans.
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And just like surgeons always cut a little more than they have to when removing a tumor, then yes, God, please, let a hurricane hit New Orleans. Let there be a moment of such absolute, perfect irony that the Republicans simply cannot, ever, live it down.
If it hits New Orleans -- and it doesn't have to be a Cat 5, I'm not sitting here working the worry beads hoping for total destruction [gee, thanks shithead - b] -- it puts the Republicans in the position of having to have a fucking party in the middle of a grotesque recreation of one of the country's worst natural disasters.Fuck you.
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I'm sorry people are upset about the notion of New Orleans, a city on the Gulf Coast being hit by a hurricane, but the Democratic Party has to stop being so Holier Than Thou. Progressive does not mean that someone can't be tough or ruthless. And the touchy-feely indignations are NOT going to win the election. A water-logged Waco will NOT be of any use in the election. And yes, this is a crucial election.
Wouldn't it be funny if I was interrupted in my recollection of three years ago by another hurricane?
Maybe God is trying to take out the gays again.
He better hurry it up, though. Southern Decadence is over Monday
It would be pretty fucking funny if he missed them again.
Isaac Hayes, 1942 - 2008
Following Isaac Hayes' death this weekend, I've seen the above sentiment all over the 'spheres. It struck me as immediately ridiculous and not just because I don't believe in heaven.
Isaac Hayes was a scientologist. He worshipped either a false god (Xenu) or an idol (money). He can't possibly be going to any Christian, Jewish or Muslim heaven. But what happened to him?
Where (besides the dirt) did he go?
Luckily, we have Explainer at Slate to help us out.
The Afterlife for Scientologists
What will happen to Isaac Hayes' legendary soul?His soul will be "born again into the flesh of another body," as the Scientology Press Office's FAQ puts it.
Add to this the frequently blasphemy of South Park and it's almost certain that, if the Christians are right, Isaac is smokin' in a whole different way.
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The Web site also stresses that Scientologists do not believe in "reincarnation." Unlike religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in which reincarnation functions as a kind of justice system—i.e., an individual's behavior in one life determines the caliber of the next—rebirth in Scientology is a more mechanical process. Hubbard described it as "simply living time after time, getting a new body, eventually losing it and getting a new one."
I haven't seen any claims of a deathbed conversion, but at least one "100% Christian" has claimed him for the "Glory Choir". Yeah, can't wait to see Ma Theresa dancing to Chocolate Salty Balls.
***WARNING:The following paragraph links to Fox News.***
Incidentally, while Scientology may have had a serious hold on him, his friend Roger Friedman has disputed the strength of Hayes' convictions, accusing the "Church" of pressuring him to quit South Park, then quitting for him after Hayes' stroke in January 2006.I can tell you that Hayes is in no position to have quit anything. Contrary to news reports, the great writer, singer and musician suffered a stroke on Jan. 17. At the time it was said that he was hospitalized and suffering from exhaustion.
In his most recent column on the subject, Friedman all but charges Scientology with killing Hayes.
It’s also absolutely ridiculous to think that Hayes, who loved playing Chef on "South Park," would suddenly turn against the show because they were poking fun at Scientology.But the general consensus was that he needed the money. Without “Chef,” Isaac’s finances were severely curtailed. He had mouths to feed to home. Plus, Scientology requires huge amounts of money, as former member, actor Jason Beghe, has explained in this space. For Isaac to continue in the sect, he had to come up with funds. Performing was the only way.
What a bunch of fuckers.
---
But there are a lot of questions still to be raised about Isaac Hayes’ death. Why, for example, was a stroke survivor on a treadmill by himself? What was his condition? What kind of treatment had he had since the stroke? Members of Scientology are required to sign a form promising they will never seek psychiatric or mental assistance. But stroke rehabilitation involves the help of neurologists and often psychiatrists, not to mention psychotropic drugs — exactly the kind Scientology proselytizes against.
All I know about Isaac Hayes comes from South Park and Shaft. I am utterly unqualified to make any statement about the man and his death except that I am positive he isn't in heaven, hell or another body. Anyone who didn't know the man personally should be ashamed to make any claim to the contrary.
I'll just end it with another quote from Friedman:None of this should ever take away from who Isaac Hayes really was: a great friend, a warm congenial man with a big heart and a big laugh.
---
...he was a masterful musician with a great mind and a wicked sense of humor. His loss at 65 is simply way too early and very tragic.
Really, really, shitty thing to do assholes. Aaron Rodgers is the next Rex Grossman. I give him three games, maybe, before the Cheeseheads start calling for #4. I hope Mike McCarthy and Ted Thompson are enjoying the moment. I have a feeling that this time next year, maybe two, they won't be in Green Bay, either. You don't fuck a legend, you dumbasses. You just don't do it.
Personally, I think that's pretty fucking funny.
Look at all the elements:
But Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, was baffled that much of the negative reaction to the cartoon was coming from Obama supporters on liberal blogs.What Art (Do you mind if I call you Art?) fails to realize is that the left-wing elite know that the rest of us are too stupid to get it. We need to have everything spoon-fed to us by the Nanny so we don't think too quickly and get our tummies all upset. Plus, as I've mentioned, people in Kansas don't read the New Yorker.
"They sound so elitist," Spiegelman told The Chronicle. "The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it."
The cover is obviously a moonbat parody of what they think are right-wing ideas about their messiah. But they got so meta with it, they ended up wrapping around and making themselves look stupid.That's a perfect response. Just as much arrogant, snarky condescension as the cover, itself.
It was bound to start eventually.
Here's a good piece on the current hard-working, small-town whites > shiftless, urban blacks crap.
I'm Callin' BullshitInteresting stuff in the comments, too, such as:
There's been a recent spate of right-wing blogs all saying the same thing:
"Now, I'm not racist, but how come all those small-town Iowans are so much more supportive and self-reliant than those big city New Orleans folks were during their disaster?”
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...it takes a special sort of blinded gall to ignore Iowans getting reimbursed almost entirely for their damages and then complain that Katrina victims are sucking on the government teat...
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Of course, Iowans are a lot more likely to receive giant agricultural subsidies, but I understand that accepting such money does not in any way make you less self-reliant or salt-of-the-earth.
I’m not sure why the right-wing pundits are crowing about Iowa. We have a Democrat governor and a Democrat majority in our state congress, plus the majority of our national congressmen are Democrats.This would be funny if it wasn't so fucking infuriating. Check out the actual blogs he links in the post.
Ah, Louisiana...
Well, the ridiculous SB 733 - "The Louisiana Destruction of Science Education Act" passed all the way through both chambers, with a total of THREE votes against it. I am extremely disappointed with those I thought were above this sort of thing. I'm looking directly at you, Messrs Donahue, Lafleur and Lafonta.
It now moves on to Governor PBJ, who is certain to sign it because: a)It's obviously veto proof and he knows it. Why piss off the Christians for no purpose? b)He's a total pandering jackass when it comes to religion. I hope he does the right thing, but I've pretty much given up on this.
I guess I'll just wait until Tangipahoa tries to use it and Americans United, the ACLU and the FFRF jump on them with both feet. I hope it hurts. I'll need a heads up before the protests, OK guys?
Bigger voices than mine are in this fight already, and I don't have the energy for it. We are so ignorant that we deserve what we get.
Case in point:
BR man arrested, accused of having sex with his dog While attempting to serve a warrant to a 46-year-old sex offender Wednesday, U.S. marshals stumbled upon the man having sex with one of his dogs in his backyard, an affidavit says.
---
Chaney, clad in only a white T-shirt and black slippers, was standing in front of a chair where a brown and white dog was standing, the affidavit says. Marshals observed Chaney try to penetrate the dog several different ways.
This was in the PAPER!! Now I know you're all thinking, "But, what, bullet, is one to do as an illit'rate resident of Loosiana (as if there's any other kind) who cain't read dem papers?"
Never fear, it was also on the NEWS!
Just kill me now.
Props to BigEZBear for the dog fucker links. Picture from Looking for Group.
Anybody have plans for some Expelled protesting? I'll be at our local hick movie theater with this shirt
and handing out "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" from Scientific American.
Is there anywhere Expelled is making a big showing? New Orleans has no theaters, Jefferson Parish has one in the boonies of Harahan and only one in the entirety of St. Tammany, Tangipahoa and Washington, which is where we keep most of our fundies and godbots. Within 250 miles of my house, only 33 screens are showing it. Look at this:
That's a LOT of Gulf Coast Protestants being ignored. Maybe the producers are hoping for long lines, sell-outs and high per-screen numbers to boost their credibility.
Anyway, if you don't hear from me for a while, it's probably because I'll be somewhere recuperating from some of God's love to my face.
Wish me luck!
Yep, while our backs were turned, feverishly reading my ever thought-provoking piece, Bar None, on the proposal to ban cussing in bars in St. Louis...South Pasadena, California snuck in like a cat burgling rapist and officially declared an annual "No Cussing Week."
AP Article via MSNBC
My conclusion, as before, Pasadena, California is now off of my tourism list. In fact, since the town went the step further to actually implement the idea, I may have to take a step further and march a million people to the Rose Bowl parade to scream out FUCK in unison every ten seconds, just for families and cameras.
Unlike the St. Louis idea, I don't read any criminality in Mayor Michael Cacciotti's move. The official week reads more like a Breast Cancer Awareness Day or a Great American Smoke Out. In a way, that might be considered endearing to have promoted civil discourse on an official level. However, it is again the subtractive phrasing of the observance that represents the slippery slope to free speech issues. "No Cussing Week" could have just as easily been called Professional Speech Day or Expansive Language Awareness Month, Pride in Our Civility Celebration or Champions of Maturity Week. With these titles you can build projects at school. Grammar assignments can turn into forensic debates, words-of-the-day contests can be implemented and involve speech games and communications fairs. The point is that recognizing the power of the English, verbal form in a positive light gives one something substantial with which to work. The possibilities, following a positive name, become as boundless as the imaginations of the program's willing participants. All a "No Cussing Week" offers is the restriction, "don't cuss."
I'm not splitting hairs here. To the reader, what the week is called might seem irrelevant. Few may care about the subtractive verses the proactive. Still, the subject at hand is one that deals with LANGUAGE, speech specifically, and therefore should have had consideration toward the language used to promote it. My complaint is a direct outgrowth of that content. The Mayor's people should have considered that the simple function of a negative phraseology on a speech driven initiative is a tool others use to try to undermine free speech. A "No Cussing Week" can easily lead to "no cussing laws," or "no cussing zones," or "no cussing in film." I mean, can we not see a correlation, extreme though it may be, between a "No Cussing Week" and a town-sanctioned book burning? Far fetched? One modern society did it. How are we immune from repeating those mistakes?
Don't take my alarmist word for it. Right in the MSNBC article it already goes beyond the intent of the official week and speaks of "no cussing" as one day becoming a "quality of life issue." That is so short-sighted. The Pasadena week just got approved and already the foul tool is working its dark function. I guarantee there is no family living in a slum with cracked windows, roaches, heat turned off in winter, hungry kids, and zero health coverage that would consider a cuss free environment an improvement on their day.
Not enough? The 14 year-old that started the club, perhaps even a grass roots movement, is quoted as saying, "I don't cuss...If you want to hang out with me, you don't cuss." It's a line in the sand. It's exclusionary. For instance, I don't drink alcohol, but I wouldn't ask others not to drink around me and I would never, ever imply that failure to refrain as I refrain carries with it some sort of punishment, even the simple penalty of depriving others my invited company. This is what happens when you let a 14 year old determine political policy. The kid had a great idea. He showed awesome initiative and objective. He displayed bravery and exemplified the gut American notion that one person, even a kid, can make a difference. I don't expect a 14 year old to grasp the nuances betwixt the subtractive and the proactive. I do, however, expect the full-grown, mature adults in any mayor's office to understand this and to act accordingly. Their mistake came in taking the idea of a 14 year old and implementing it unrevised, untempered with maturity or wisdom.
Inherently, days, weeks, and months made into official declarations of practice or awareness need to do so in the positive. Black History Month doesn't mean that you need to refrain from knowing other ethnically grouped accomplishments, or trickier, refrain from being a skin color. The Great American Smoke Out is called such for a reason. "Don't Smoke Week" might get some poor schmuck with a Marlboro stoned to death in line to see 10,000 B.C. Bring Your Daughter To Work Day would not work if it were called Ignore Children With Penises Day. I jest, but the philosophy persists into every facet of governing, including many far more important than Secretary's Day or Groundhog Day.
For instance, is it any wonder that of all amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the only one that "failed" or required correction was prohibition? Amendments are used to enforce rights, to acknowledge rights newly realized or admitted at the highest levels of leadership. Prohibition instead tried to take away, not to grant. It tried to limit, to control, to have people refrain from. At its heart, it failed because its attempt ran counter-directional to the purpose of a constitutional amendment. It's why I know that a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution preventing same sex marriage would never pass or last long. It too would run counter-directional to the purpose of ENFORCING rights or ACKNOWLEDING rights.
In short, LAWS are meant to prevent, to have folks refrain from well defined practices we as a society view as bad. They operate in the negative as counteragents to those who'd squelch life, liberty, happiness, and free market. That is the function of a law. Hence, nobody can open up an idea in the negative and sanction it officially without also opening the door to that notion one day becoming a law. The two practices are of the same grain. People who do so, even unintentionally, have their hand tipped. What they are saying may sound like a decent and feel-good proposition that everyone can agree upon. Yet, they are bluffing. If what they had at heart was in any way positive or feel-good, they shant have skewed negative in its expression. They shant have opened that dangerous, dangerous door. For what it's worth, with all our millions of laws on the books, chances are (barring new technological innovation) that everything that requires prevention already has a law against it. Logically then, pretty much anything that's existed for 200+ American years which does not have a law against it, most likely should not. It should remain in that grey area between controversy and blind acceptance that teaches us all how to get along and how to see alternate points of view. We are not just agreeing upon these measures as an existent society in 2008, but as a civic society in the broader sense that includes all American citizens from 1787 until now...possibly even into the future.
This was the vision of our founding fathers. They knew that the pursuit of people driven government and equality would rest upon a body of laws enacted by said people, specifically so that no one person with a myopic mindset could seek office to screw it up. They acknowledged that volumes and volumes of laws might be created in this pursuit and made room for that to be okay. Yet, at the same time, they created a structure and a list. No matter how many preventive laws might ever come to be in their future, every single one of them would be held accountable to, held subjective to this pervading structure and to this pervading list of acknowledged rights. The ability to prevent, to exclude from freedom, would forever be measured against this higher purpose, this documented inclusion or admission into American freedom. The negative would be governed by the positive.
“No Cussing Week” sounds pretty good. It’s not unlike a makeshift Lenten practice or a really good diet. I bet nobody ever explained to the youth that, phrased as such, it is also unconstitutional. Implemented officially, it is therefore a cause for concern. It means there is another upwardly mobile politician holding office in the U.S. who would forego the U.S. Constitution for either his own purposes or for lack of the two seconds of concentration it would take to change the name. His most likely accidental blight on our nation’s governing structure and on our rights masquerades under the guise of ceremony, holiday. If that’s to persist unchecked, why not KKK Appreciation Day? Open a present, burn a cross. Why not a Torturegiving holiday? Turkey, stuffing, and water boarding while we watch a parade.
Look, there are plenty of reasons not to cuss. Variant ethics aside, I like to refrain from cussing as often as possible because I think it means that much more when I do choose a cuss word in the craft of writing.
Refraining from cussing on the regular is also an exercise that elevates intelligence. One stretches the mind by always searching for alternative expressions to aptly describe anger or dismay, sort of the way an improvisational artist, while near boundless in presentation style, can keep a performance PG-13. It’s her/his boundaries that create the intellectual challenge until such time s/he would again artistically choose to reintroduce the blue language.
It almost goes without saying, even in a post-industrial, psychology-aware nation, that cussing in marriage is antithetical to what both people wish to achieve via marriage. Cussing interrupts real communication and thus partnership and slows the journey to common goals with innumerable, needless pauses to marital momentum.
Perhaps refraining from cussing can be used as a tool to set examples for young children, new comedians, etc. We all do it. Nobody would cuss in a job interview or a convent. We have no problem choosing alternative wording and tone when running for office, broadcasting news, or critiquing literature. There is a merit to practicing language in the subtractive from time to time, circumstance to circumstance. It’s a type of extra-sensory deprivation that achieves particularly coveted intellectual results.
However, theoretically that merit cannot be achieved if not for the greater prevalence of the explicative in common usage. A metaphor…the viceroy butterfly. The viceroy butterfly looks exactly like the more prevalent monarch butterfly and is named accordingly. The monarch butterfly is poisonous to birds. Birds have evolved to “recognize” monarch butterflies by sight alone and therefore steer far clear of them as food. The viceroy butterfly contains no such poison, but has instead evolved to look like the monarch butterfly as a form of defense against being eaten by birds. It’s an amazing interrelationship that deepens our understanding of the evolutionary process. Yet, as with all evolution, a delicate balance had to be struck and maintained for us to not yet see further changes in the viceroy. Meaning, the viceroy population must always remain in the minority to the monarch for the subterfuge to work. Once the viceroy might gain numbers over the monarch, the odds of a bird grabbing a poisonous insect go down. Without knowing an iota of math, birds would slowly begin partaking of the food again when fewer resources exist and fewer of their own kind die off in turn. In fact, to exist, the viceroy must always be limited in numbers as compared to a completely different species. Guess what, they don’t know math either.
The same holds true when we examine the relationship between the merits of not cussing and the pathology of cussing itself. The countless merits there are to be found, several of them enlightening in nature, cannot be achieved if there is nothing more common to refrain from. Challenging one’s self to use language empty of swearing would fail to be a challenge unless swearing itself not only existed, but existed to a far larger degree than the unique, individual choice to refrain from it. Cussing, like any other word or word group, MUST be far more commonplace in raw numbers than the personal choice to refrain from it in order for us to procure virtue in the attempt to subvert it. We can neither alleviate the need for the one nor the practice of the other without denying ourselves the rewards to be culled in the contrast. Picture it. How much more expansive would your vocabulary and your speech become if you honestly attempted to refrain from using the word “the” for a year. That would be quite the journey. “The” is throughout common usage in numbers too great to count. Your attempt to the contrary would be a grand challenge with who knows how many intellectual and disserting rewards? Now picture trying, instead, to refrain from using the word “otolaryngology” for a year. It would be far less of a challenge specifically because it is nowhere near as common in usage as “the.” Its raw numbers pale in comparison. Less of a challenge means less of a mental journey, less of an intellectual reward. In a Cartesian sense, we require vast platitudes in mere order to doubt them properly or advantageously.
Mr. Mayor, my fangs would retract if only you’d positively alter the name of your newfound, annual observance. Until then, in my mind, I have to question what you understand about this democratic Republic. Your intentions seem honorable, but your fitness to govern, suspect. It’s like when Katie Couric called freedom of speech a “privilege” or when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claimed people should “watch what they say” in response to Bill Maher’s firing from ABC. I’ll give you that cussing can be viewed as bad. However, to whatever degree it might be bad, your official “NO” week is far worse.
It seems rather poetic that Mel "Mr. Ultra Passionate Orthodox Catholic Sugar-tits" Gibson keeps creating movies about how religion makes people superstitious, bloodthirsty savages.
I don't think for an instant that he's ever intended that.
This is, however, the second time he's done it.
I have been away from posting too long. One reason is the amount of time I spend reading and commenting on other blogs. Stop being so compelling, you fucks! The other reason is that I am too tired to have "big thinks" for any longer than it takes to write a few sentences and by the time I get something together it's way overdue. And with my free time, I generally play video games.
That being said, I am posting today because I hate the fucking Patriots. Watching them not only lose but just get dominated by the Giants D was more satisfying than any football game this season. I loved seeing Brady hit the ground. I loved seeing Bill "Crybaby" Belichick leave his team on the field with 1 second left. I loved seeing both of these sore losers mumble and grumble and not say anything positive about the team that just outplayed them. I loved that no one got to be perfect. I loved that the cheaters couldn't win it all. I absolutely love that Bostonians get so pissed that their important, Puritan, heart-of-the-revolution city is regularly ignored in favor of an island the Dutch, the DUTCH, stole off a bunch of Indians. And I love that the football team from that island just beat the piss out of the Patriots.
I fucking hate Boston. Any town known for giving bad directions to tourists is crap. Any town that has more than 3 left turns at a given intersection is bullshit. The Red Sox fans bitched about the Yankees "buying" their World Series, but were ok with their own team buying theirs. Fuck the Celtics. The Celtics are known for Larry Bird and fuck-all else. Bruins? Please. Who gives a fuck about hockey? The NFL is the premier sport in this country and the Patriots, regardless of their season, regardless of all their records, are nothing but cheaters and losers. That's the Belichick legacy, folks. Eat it, you bastids.
Oh, and it was great that a New Orleans boy won the Super Bowl for the second time in a row. I could only be happier if the Saints had won it all. Even then, it wouldn't be by much.
While I’m not up enough on the early release of AP affiliate news around the globe to bring you information you probably haven’t already heard, I did think this article about the proposal to ban swearing in St. Louis bars deserved some further debate.
The article contends that police officers in the area need greater leeway in promoting the public peace, specifically in rowdy, night-crowd bars. The proposal is said to lump in the act of cussing with a short list of other “questionable” practices which, if outlawed, would give police the exceptional berth they’d need for better crowd control.
Um, am I allowed to say “screw debate” or “this is fucking ridiculous?” Perhaps “pish-tosh” would be more appropriate. Our illustrious Bullet of My Pants once put it very succinctly. “You cannot make being an asshole against the law!”
I suppose, however, that my mere swearing in an obscure blog entry does little to show these life-o-phobes for the mental nonparticipants that they are. I am absolutely certain that the St. Louis meeting scheduled to discuss the topic will be all but laughed out of existence. Nonetheless, if I trust only in the skimped human gathering of a far off Metropolis to learn from this proposed, obtuse doctrine, I’d be failing my readers. Okay, reader.
Why? Why bars? Well, let’s first handle the “why not” of the tale. This is NOT to give law enforcement officers more leeway for crowd control. That’s a lie. I am well aware that the tenants of freedom as observed in our nation leave a great many law enforcement officers with the feeling of having their hands tied. It is the observance of that feeling that actually makes a great many heroes, their awareness of their limitations, their need to supplement allowable force with immense doses of simple human appeal. An officer who refuses to overstep bounds or who acknowledges the privileges awarded her/him in enforcement is usually a fine example for the rest of the force. More often it is the staunch, black-and-white philosophy of law enforcement that sees hypocrisies and even law breaking on the part of officers and legislators.
I guarantee this “outlaw swearing” idea is not coming from an officer(s) who feels her/his hands are tied. Those officers already know that there is far and away enough existing legislation to do what they need to do in a bar crowd or any other crowd. “Disorderly conduct” ring any bells? Do “noise ordinances” sound familiar to anyone? A heavier handed “inciting to riot” might even come into play here. “Public intoxication” laws have a million incarnations across the country. “Failure to comply” is another funny derivative of “resisting arrest” that, dare I say, might take place in a St. Louis bar from time to time. “Indecent exposure” continues the list while “disturbing the peace” sees countless applications and “reckless endangerment” pretty much knocks the point home. By almost any of these existing laws, the law enforcement officer is provided the authority to exercise good, common sense between arriving on the scene and determining if an arrest is necessary. With any of these laws, it is up to the officer to determine whether somebody just advised him to go fuck himself or if the patron uttered “fuck” when his quarterback’s pass was intercepted in the third quarter. The simple fact is that sometimes swearing constitutes disorderly conduct, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes swearing is part of inciting to riot, sometimes it is not. Sometimes swearing is a direct failure to comply, and sometime it is not. The determination is now up to the officer on the scene. Legislate anti-swearing law, and the officer will have no choice. Any cuss would represent a failure to comply. Any drinking game would be tantamount to disorder by definition. No reasonable police officer wants this. They do not want what little authority they DO have, even with “tied hands,” to be taken away, therefore further tying their hands. It’s a no-brainer.
So, if it is not officers who feel they have tied hands bringing the topic up for proposal, then who…and more importantly why?
The first possibility is the staunch black-and-white legislators and enforcement officers mentioned above. Look for the hypocrisies people! If good cops would never bring it up, then bad cops have an ulterior motive in doing so. Don’t fall for it, whatever it is!
The next possibility is the Disneyfiers of the world. These are the corporations that think all reasonable people want to live in a Magic Kingdom and wear purple pants with great big buttons. Not too long ago, New York City’s Times Square and its surrounding areas were home to an urban nightlife which included a huge real estate swath of cheap, overtly disgusting, adult-only entertainment services. During the day, Times Square was a tourist attraction like none other, drawing in families and theatre-goers, PG-13 seekers and photophiles. Late night Times Square was a completely different place, a place that would sell double-sided dildos on the street, third hand, and home to a clientele who would buy them. Several conservative mayoralties later, for better or for worse, Times Square now looks like the Lion King threw up on it. Candy shops, Mickey merchandising, authentic Bugs Bunny tie-tack outlets and retro’ themed cafes have all obliterated any trace of a single glow-in-the-dark condom within walking distance of the Marriot Marquis. While I was no fan of 25 cent peep shows or those who’d freelance the same outside at 8th and 42nd, I can’t say that I’m all that enthralled with New York City being a big Betty Boop cartoon either. Sex slave DVD knock-offs disgusted me, but near zero variance in the available, touristy, consumer wares, none of which I would ever buy, doesn’t seem quite like Times Square either.
Growing up in the suburbs, we used to have a chain of franchised stores called Times Square Stores. It was a department store, of sorts, following on the heels of Grant’s and their competitors, with the exception of the fact that in each TSS department, some different franchise was making the profit. The only reason anyone ever went to Times Square Stores in the suburbs was the selection. It was the nincompoop, working class dream that one could get a new set of Good Year tires just paces from tiny, pink, Easter shoes that made it attractive. You could get a full set of earthtone, stoneware dishes in the department right next to the sale on imported newts and newt tank accessories. Before Wal*Mart and Kmart, before Target and Caldor, Times Square Stores made selection diversity synonymous with convenience. I knew about Times Square Stores before I ever knew about Times Square. Once I learned about the place the store was named after, I couldn’t wait to grow old enough to go there. I mean, if the price and selection at the store that BORROWED the name was so colossal, then the real Times Square was going to have products I’d never even imagined on the shelf. Sure, I was dismayed to eventually discover that the “products I’d never even imagined” were nipple clamps and assless chaps, but a guy’s got to learn somehow. Though I never made these impulse buys either, still, they were in fact things I’d never imagined, just as I’d suspected. Besides, lewd toys weren’t the only items available in Times Square, just the majority of them. Today, I can get the same Minnie Mouse pom-pom socks in Times Square that I can get in the Disney Store in Boise, Idaho. Figuratively, that’s about all I can get. Granted, I have to acknowledge the place is much better and that there is more to Times Square than shopping. However, homogenizing Times Square, in the end, gives me absolutely no reason to go there. Their money now comes from some one else and goes someplace else, eventually reaching old Walt in his hyperbolic chamber.
That’s the rub with the theory of Disneyfiers promoting anti-swearing law in St. Louis. If there is any truth to it, one must follow who’d be making the money. The city? The superstores? Special interest groups? Who would profit from a master plan to Disneyfy the area. Step one, make grown men say fiddlesticks. Step two, bring back floor length house frocks and put saltpeter in the food. Step three, build a rat in pants that can be seen from space. St. Louis, I ache for you.
In the end, however, I think it is neither of these groups that would try to suggest such legislation. I think, in our gut, when we look at both the absurdity of the law and the fact that it would only apply to bars and not St. Louis as a whole, we’d have to put our finger-pointing money on FAMILIES WITH SMALL CHILDREN! Ahhhhhhhhh!
This is my generation’s fault, yes FAULT! Oh sure, they lump us all into this Gen X category straining to find any one pan-spawn factor that unites us. That’s because they are looking for something positive. In practice, it’s much easier to find lists of similarities when we look directly at our own faults. We Gen Xers think that since the first step of a process is the hardest, we don’t have to take any of the other steps. We think that if we haven’t heard of something before, it must not be true. We think that part of the determination of whether an act is right or wrong is whether or not we get caught. We think that a two page email is way too long to read as books collect dust on our shelves. We think that everything old is useless and that everything new needs to be user friendly to be worthwhile. Convenience and comfort are actually priorities. And, and, and we think that every place we might ever set foot, even by accident, has to be completely innocuous to our children!
To quote George Carlin, “Fuck the children!” Listen, I write as a brand new father of an absolutely perfect 14 week old daughter. I hold her and feed her and change her diapers every day. I joke about her becoming U.S. President in 2042. I speak both baby talk and educational lingo to her on the regular while always making time for play. She is my light, my heart, and my hope. We waited and tried for a very long time just to have her and I relish what will be our time together. I fear for her safety, plan and wish for her future, pray for her happiness, and even wonder at her simple presence with my own child-like eyes.
Even I, however, realize that there is a difference between a child and an adult, the adult being the first tier. It’s not as vast as say, the difference between another animal and a human, but it is an enormous difference nonetheless. For me to expect that every single threshold I might cross, that each and every doorway I might darken, has somehow keenly brought itself up to the benign specs that would fascinate, but not negatively impact a six year old is the epitome of self-centered drek. Overwrite that MP3! Wear bulkier pants! Picket HBO! Give that guy a ticket for spitting! The color of that blouse is way to close to fleshtone! It’s like we want to raise a nation of Eloi.
As long as there are both adults and children in a free enterprise society, there will be businesses that target every niche. There are going to be some businesses that cater directly to children: Gymboree, Fruit Roll-Ups, rated G films. There will be others that cater to adults with a particularly naughty feel: Hooters, strip clubs, casinos. There will be still others that cater to adults with no such naughty feel: sports bars, cigar bars, red carpet affairs, wine tastings, gaming tournaments. Lastly, there will always be businesses that cater to the whole family: Red Robin, parades, zoos, Friendly’s, amusement parks, museums, etc.
To attempt to make EVERY place “family friendly” only serves to put other family friendly businesses out to pasture. Claiming and asserting that everything or that almost everything is supposed to fit into a single, American, child-proof niche, makes a shitload of competition within that niche and puts people out of work while dumbing down the consumer. Yet, you do not need demographics and economic mumbo jumbo to convince you. What you need is to swallow a much more jagged pill!
Starbucks is not responsible for raising your children! You are! Oh sure, it’s easy to agree with when stated like that, but have you examined where you’ve failed this test? In truth, the very existence of “family friendly” restaurants and their kind is because YOU are too much of a baby to make a sacrifice for your child. In American decades past, families took children to visit other family members and that was about it. The rest of the time, babies and kids were at home and at least one adult was too, parenting. Babies and kids, for the most part, were completely unseen in hotels, in restaurants, on planes, or wandering the exquisitely safe aisles of the local hardware store. Just the outside chance your child might cry was considered embarrassing, even rude. You’d catch a child or two at the movies or in a shopping cart, but they were frequently the exception…and if they so much as spoke too loudly they were immediately removed by the parent. Somewhere along the line, you, you who wanted to be a rock star and have the world on a platter, you decided that you weren’t willing to give up your daily mocha frappuchino. You weren’t willing to miss the limited time only bacon cheeseburger burrito at Taco Bell. You felt that just because you had a kid, that was no reason you had to give up going out on Saturday or had to put the last place bowling league on hold for a while. You didn’t want to learn how to cook for your child so you decided that the grillman at the local T.G.I. Fridays was going to do it for you, along with all the unyielding nutrition that the occasional cockroach and rat tail have to offer. You couldn’t miss the Joe Namath look-alike contest at Stumpy’s so you insisted that Stumpy add curly fries and clean peanuts to the toaster-oven menu. You decided that the seven dollars that was supposed to go into your child’s college fund was better spent on a Happy Meal because you just had to get out of the house. You were not okay putting your child first and your friends second so you dragged your little toe-headed pumpkin to every booze cruise, antique show, monster truck rally, spa day, tech expo, whites sale, treadmill workout, police auction, and quilting bee on three continents. Sure, you claimed to have ultra-modern parenting skills by virtue of the fact that your kids were exposed to so much, but we know you. More importantly, you know you. You filled the child’s days with all your personal, trivial pleasures because you, yourself had so little to expose them to at home. When it came to raising a child, you were a void, a vacuum of anything remotely relevant and you chose instead to distract your offspring from that with breads and circuses for as long as possible. If you truly wanted to infuse diversity of exposure into your child’s life you’d be taking them to poetry readings and religious studies, to live theatre and on camping trips, to political campaign headquarters and national monuments, to volunteer in assisted living facilities and to charity bike rides, to fireworks displays and to county fairs. Instead you took the child to Pizza Hut and came out the cool parent when you sprang for an extra topping.
Of course, anyone would have to acknowledge two more recent points of order to this trend. First, no one wishes to downplay the sheer torture it is to hold down a job or two and raise a child as a single parent. I doff my hat to those who do. You are heroes. Second, it is true that the very decades I speak of when explaining that kids spent much time at home were decades where a family could get by on a single income. Today, almost all similarly classed families require two incomes to make the same headway. It is not your hardship or schedule at which I target my venom.
I speak only of the parents of my generation that think the money they make is 100% their own to spend. I speak of the thick skulls who honestly believe they cannot leave the house without make-up, the lonely masses that have actually developed an addiction to shopping, the fence post geniuses who cannot “make it through the week” without a Krispy Kreme, the intricate thinkers that claim it will cost more to buy school supplies than it will to shut off the cable for a month, the consumer hoarders who claim that a cluttered house is still a clean house because clutter is not dirt. It is you. You with all your flimsy, flighty, whimsical personal wants, not a one sacrificed at the sudden alter of parenthood, you who still think you can have it all if you try and that dying by trying is somehow admirable, you have paved the way for the outcry, “Give us family friendly!” It is you, the enabler. You need someplace to go, go, go. Your condescending, uncompromising, unwillingness to stay at home and read a book aloud or just take a walk in the woods with your kid has sprinkled fast food chains and tabloid magazine racks over the blemished face of a once great country. Now, having expanded your kid-friendly options to McDonald’s and drug stores and Ikea, fashion outlets and racquetball clubs and virtual reality kiosks, travel and concerts and dance clubs, now you want to go further and take the bars too. Sure you could drag the entire family on an Amtrak excursion to the Mall of America, but you miss having a beer with the boys and watching the instant replay of the Chargers’ shoddy defense. You know Dr. Phil will hate you if you do it by yourself, so the only way to accomplish it is to drag Buffy and Jody into happy hour. That means unplugging the juke. That means you’ll demand pork nuggets and crayons at the table. That means the seat at the end of the bar is now the homework seat that makes your bartender no money. These are things you’ll demand to make yourself look like a good parent after having failed miserably at it. Not being a bar-goer myself, I’m almost apt to let you have them. After all, it’s no skin off my nose. You do all the work and that’s all the many more places I’ll be able to take my daughter to pee at the drop of a hat. However, when you are willing to rescind the basic tenants of freedom of speech by FORCING Big Tom and Stinky to say, “Fudge that coach in the patooty,” BY LAW, that’s where I draw the line. Every establishment will not be molded into a haven, bar none, that prevents me from calling Child Protective Services on you. If there is nothing good at home, then you are a crappy parent anyway and I am not going to reward you with cheesy fries and malt liquor.
There are plenty of words that offend me. There are even more words that I just do not want to hear. However, I am not indigent enough to think that people need to be ticketed or to go to jail for their use, even around my daughter. Has no one in the St. Louis legislature seen Demolition Man? Exactly what you are proposing was one of the biggest running gags in the film. Are you trying to be the laughing stock of the U.S.? Is there not one city representative who’d ever watched Footloose? Is Kevin Bacon coming to dance at your meeting? St. Louis, I love your zoo. I marveled at your basilica. The steamboats, the arch, every fiber of visitor in me found plenty to satisfy in your fine city. Again, I don’t even go to bars. Yet, if you see fit, under any cockamamie excuse, to pass a law against parts of speech; slang, cuss, or otherwise; you’ll pretty much be off my destinations list for good. Legislators are not lexicographers and passing the bar does not give literal dominion over them.
To conclude, I am probably wrong on all counts. Perhaps there are no bad cops, Disneyfiers, or marginal parents screaming for this St. Louis meeting to take place, for this law to become a reality. But you are having the meeting and you are then stretching for a way to explain it. Somebody out there has their underwear in a knot or is salivating at the prospect of making money at the expense of others. Somebody out there is hankerin’ for a Beverly Hills Cop style take-down technique or the chance to overtly redeem himself from being a crappy father. Whatever the source of the idea, you are not truly saying. You’ve refrained from stating a viable reason and in the doing are basically calling your own St. Louis citizens too stupid to notice. I don’t believe the people of St. Louis are that dumb for a second! St. Louis, you’ve got your work cut out for you and I hope the meeting is severely baptized in what will prove history’s greatest morphology of creative and everlasting profanity. Good luck pig fuckers!
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