Cantankerous Chicanery

As I’m sure most people are aware of by now, Andrew Martin, known to most as “Test” during his time in the WWE, passed away about a week ago or so. It’s been a bit late to share my thoughts but I just thought I’d kick in my two cents.

I was genuienly shocked. I went to scope out the wrestling news as usual, seeing who would be pushed and who was currently in the doghouse. You know, all the usual sports-entertainment drama. So when I saw the headline “Andrew Martin found dead at 33″, a lump gathered in my throat.

I clicked on the link and read he had been found dead in his apartment. It was truly a paradigm shift for me. Here was a guy I remember watching as a kid, who no less than a few years ago was prominently on TV and competing in ECW and TNA. And now he wa sgone, a corpse holed up in his apartment.

Lest we in the IWC throw stones, let’s wait for the autopsy report to come out. The answer will probably be a bit too obvious, but you never know. So far police have ruled out foul play. That only leaves a few suspect….and to smark fans all-too-familiar….reasons for Martin’s passing away.

This, unfortunately, is making the news rounds. A few mainstream media outlets are picking up on it. I was both saddened and frustrated to hear this being broadcast on my local alternative rock radio morning show. During the show, they heaped scorn upon WWE, Vince McMahon, and the wrestling business in general.

It’s become almost passe to demonize Vince. But is he responsible for a lot of this? I don’t think he’s entirely innocent and that he should be completely let off the hook. He can be a prick and does demand a lot of his employees. I feel like, even with the Wellness Policy being implemented, steroids, painkillers, and general drug abuse is probably an all-too-real problem in wrestling stil. There’s no way a human being can look that cut naturally without supplemental enhancement.

But, he is only one person, and he has funded rehab for former employees. Perhaps, then, we should analyze the general way the wrestling business is rn. It’s come a long way from its origins as a sideshow carnival attraction, but it nonetheless remains a very shady business. Sure, WWE has risen to the level of national prominence and conciousness by virtue of its status as a publicy-traded company, but there’s still tons of indy feds that stiff the performers out of money and could truly care less about their health.

The Wrestler was a shocking shot in the arm to the general public, but to those of us that frequent the message boards and read the dirtsheets, it’s an uncomfortable reality we sit with. When the cameras stop rolling and the bodyslams are done, the wrestlers are ultimately people. Far from their larger-than-life personas, behind closed doors they get fucked up at bars, cheat on their wives, and deal with their own demons.

Professional wrestlin is ultimately a brutal business. It’s part soap opera, part stuntman show. One can’t slam their body on a mat or cut their foreheads every night and be fine with it, no matter how passionate you are about the business. It’s a spectacle that favors the young and tosses out the old, long after their bones are broken and the fans have stopped caring about them.

At the same time, we can’t look at everybody else as a scapegoat. While the masses will be quick to scrutinize wrestling and cast it in a once-again negative light, let’s take into account Andrew Martin himself. You could obviously tell from just looking at the guy that he was on the juice and he was pretty open about his roid use. As well, he had just comleted rehab, so that shows WWE was trying to cover all its bases. But as any addict will tell you, rehab isn’t always the solution. Sometimes it’s just yet another roadblock on the eventual path to self-destruction.

It’s a tragedy that he died but ultimately it was his own fault. I hate to sound callous but the man most likely did this to himself. He had a choice and obviously, if he was going to rehab, he knew he made some bad choices and realized the error of his ways. Then again, who knows? I hate when the amateur wrestling journalists out there jump to conclusions before any official “facts” are released, published, or confirmed. He could have had a pre-existing heart condition. Robbers could have broken into his home and, unbeknowst to us or anybody, killed him. Until we get an official word or statement or investigation, who knows?

It was a bit sickening that WWE didn’t do a tribute to him or at least acknowledge his passing. With the Chris benoit scandal and other wrestlers dying lately, though, who can blame them? Any heartfelt attempt at honoring a fallen comrade would most likely result in bad PR. And WWE is, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money and gladhand as much as they can.

Enough of all that. Everyone’s turning this into a pro-WWE/anti-whatever agenda issue. I think what we’re forgetting is that Andrew Martin has died. He was a human being with a life, who had parents and girlfriends and existed. Let’s hear about him, shall we? I heard he was hoping to go to college, get a career, and put rwestling behind him. To hear he died before getting to do all that is the fickle and ironic hand of tragedy at work.

I rememeber watching him as a tiny youngster, just coming into wrestling in the late-90s popularity boom. despite the fact that he was a heel with the Corporation, even as a mark I considered him one of my favorites. He was tall, atheltic, and had a cool sort of charisma about him. He was no master technician but, God bless him, he tried, and if he stuck around a bit more he might have actually broken through to the main event.

Plus, hey, he got to plow both Stacy Kiebler and Kelly Kelly in his lifetime. How many of us geeks can claim that?

The fact that wrestlers are dying in their 30s and 40s at an alarming trend is a disturbing and disheartnening fact that cannot be ignored, however. I feel this is a lot of fallout from the 80s and 90s when wrestling was unregulated and the guys would party their asses off and get as drugged-up as possible since Vince was still getting the company started out and most likely turned the other way.

So, here’s my little humble (and admittedly pathetic) tribute to Test. It may not be much in this tiny little abode in the Web, but at least it’s something . I consider this one of his shining moments as he got to be a dick heel and face Scott Steiner (man, how did he survive so far out of the two?):

Octomom. A quick Googling tells me her real name is “Nadya Denise Suleman”. Let’s think about this for a minute: why do I know her name? Seriously? Honestly, why the hell should I care about her one iota?

It seems Octomom is the latest in a long batch of people who are celebirties for no good reason. You could say they are famous for simply being famous. This woman has no talents, no special quirks, nothing worthwhile or useful or productive to offer the world. She’s having eiht kids and she has no jobs. Meanwhile, there are doctors working to save people’s lives and firefighters bravely and selflessly rushing into burning buildings to rescue those in need. This, instead, is the person we see plastered all over CNN?

I’m often reminded about Andy Warhol’s infamous qoute about everyone’s 15 seconds of fame. Trust me, in a few years, nobody will know or care about her. She is not spectacular, far from it. Rather medicore, actually, but for some reason everyone goes crazy over her.

Before you see me as yet another commenter fanning the flames, let me make it clear that thruthfully I could care less one way or another. I think it’s kinda negligible how she has a ton of kids with no plan to put food in their mouths, but to each their own. I don’t know the woman and it doesn’t personally affect me so to be honest I’m quite apathetic about the situation. Just thought I’d throw in my two cents.

This dilemna does bring up a few interesting features of our culture, though. I think this latest flash-in-the-pan escapade highlights how we’re all basically a society of rubberneckers. We are a mass traffic jam that slows down to watch the proverbial car crash, all for our sense of schandenfreude. I think, even though her irresponsibility repulses us, we are nontheless drawn to her, not only because she represents the worst in us, but she reminds us that we are a bit better. In a weird way, she’s a psychological comfort valve, giving us a scapegoat to heap scorn at and unleash our anger.

As well, she highlights our demand and bizarre obsession with individuality. Throughout the recent decades, and indeed if you go back to the foundations of this country, we’ve been bombarded with the lesson of personal responsibility. The Great depression and the current economic crisis are monumental examples of this. We now have our own myths such as the lawsuits against McDonald’s and the Darwin Awards as parables raging against what we see as incompetence and lack of self-sustainability. Octomom is yet another chance to shove the message of “have your shit together and take care of your own first” down our throats.

Look, I really don’t know this woman personally. She could be a saint, she could be a sinner. Who knows? And who are we to judge? This is an example of a world oversaturated with insatnt media. She seems like a greedy whore who can’t keep her legs shut and is using her kids as a means to get money and attenion. But so what? There’s genocide going on in africa right now. Which do you think is the more pressing issue?

Bob Dylan once sang, “The times, they are a-changin’.” And that guy went from hippie renegade to born-again Christian, so that should tell you something about how things go on.

I can remember, in my formative years, how my precocious young mind was influenced (and some say warped) by the Internet. Back when the World Wide Web was a exciting new frontier, like outer space or credible journalism, I was one of the first youngsters on my block to get a brand-new computer.

When I say “computer”, I don’t mean the sleek laptops or fancy gizmos of today that you probably conjure up in your head at the mention of that image. No, this thing looked like it had been gathering dust in some back closet of an MIT campus. You could actually hit somebody with this thing and do some damage. Keep in mind this was back in 1998. I should donate that thing to a  museum these days.

But I digress. In my childhood, where there was sparsely a friend and I had only my own thoughts to entertain, I found solace in the writigs of these new technological iconoclasts. Whereas everybody else in school was playing basketball or bnding with each other on the wrestling team, I was reading The Misanthropic Bitch and an old semi-(in)famous zine called Fitshaced.

Remember that I was about 10 or 11 at the time. What would be considered shocking material to an adult I welcomed with open arms. My view of the world had already been skewered by Ren & Stimpy and Dennis Miller. Yet here, here was something different. In sparse but intricately designed text were arguments going faaaar against the average grain. At times it jumored me, at times it angered me. Overall, though, it caused me to question what I already perceived to be as a faulty line of mainstream thinking.

As time went on, I seemed to stumble across these avant-garde social critics. Within time I found fugly.net, Rick Bayan, Scoopthis.com, you name it. Whatever absurd and acidic satire my youthful and lonely hands could grasp, I devoured it. Through these websites and humorous articles I developed a sense of postmodern cynicism, a keen understanding of how to poke fun at anything and everything. Overall, this is honestly how I learned how to write and construct good rhetoric.

The landscape changed. Over time I actually began to experience the outside world, I gained *gasp* real-life friends. I learned how to socialize face-to-face. Fast-forward through the boring crap. My computer crashed in the meantime. Now here I find myself once again coming back to my origins. I just got my laptop set up a year ago and after a while of getting back into the technological groove I decided to check out all my old haunts.

What happened? I feel like the protagnist in Pedro Paramo, returning to a town he once knew only to find its walls are inhaibited with the echoes of ghosts long past. Oh, sure, there’s stil one or two hanger-ons. The Scotsman and Rick Bayan have blogs going, however sporadic the updates may be. Scooter still busts out the rants, although Lord knows his fat ass isn’t going anywhere.

I search for these sites. The archives are up, the old articles that amused me and quite honestly (as sad as this is to admit) changed my life are still there, the ever-so-faithful rants of Seanbaby loyal as always as my eyes scroll through every word. But the authors themselves seem gone. I search for answers in their bios. I hear they’ve moved on. One’s an English teacher; another’s got a career in radio. Maddox is branching out to do guest appearances in various Barnes & Nobles. Some are M.I.A., having vanished without a trace.

In their place is a steady sream of incoherent babble and useless information. I see MySpace dominate the landscape; I shudder to consider the rise of Twitter (whatever the hell that is). To hear of iTunes and Wikipedia and /b/ and these things I don’t understand. Gone is the thoughtful and mordant parodies of contemporary life. Now it’s been reduced to a smoldering smorgasborg of lame in-jokes, pointless memes, disgusting pictures, and hipster slang.

Lest I bite the hand that feeds me, blogs now dominate the genral discourse of the Web. You know the wing of the insane asulym for the most truly disturbed, the halls full of schizophrenics, manic-depressivs, and those most truly out of tuch with reality? Give them a router and there you have the blogosphere. Because of the populist movement of the Internet, now anyone can have their own little corner of the Internet as their soapox to vent. Have a burning desire to inform the world of your cat’s poop schedule? Come on in and let us know of the fucking boring fascinating details!

Perhaps my memory clouds my judgement. As I go back and peruse through Hyatte’s Mop-Ups and Wrestlecrap, I find the prose isn’t as strong as I thought it’d be. In fact, it strikes me how incmplete and almst, dare I say…..amateurish it comes off as. Mind you, the jokes are still somewhat funny and the style is at times dazzling. But overall, it left me disappinted. The pieces that I found brilliant as a prepubescent are now “ho-hum” to me as a yound adult.

On YouTube, yet another agent of change, I had a chance to look at Maddox in person. My first reaction was, “Are you serious? That’s him?!” Granted, that’s not a knock against the guy. He seemed rather funny and chill. But, I dunno, I guess I was expecting someone like Stone Cold Steve Austin to walk up to the podium. Reality oftentimes is more disappointing than the illusion. The bad-asses in hypertext are the next door neighbor telemarketer in actuality. I can’t help but feel this sense of disappintment as I view my ribald heroes and see that, yes, they are human as well. All too human, it seems.

I can’t even track down the old site Fade To Black. Apparently Sickopath has sold his domain (who would want to claim that site, anyway?. Oh well, at least he was always honest about his rather selfish intentions.) 411wrestling went from a small cut site for all your IWC needs into a giant, monolithic entertainment site known as 411mania, complete with a slick new layout and design, where none of the writer’s names are familiar and the music and movie news dominates the front page. They remind me of the proverbial small business that turns into the very thing they fought against: a huge, profit-driven corporation.

The sands of time may not lie in them. After all, people don’t live on the Internet. They go out, get jobs, marry wives, have children, ya know, actually exist as human beings. Perhaps, then, I changed. With the late ’90s’early 2000s boom of the Internet, of course it stands to reconcile that, as Guns N Roses once so eloquently waxed poetic, “nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain”. I got older, I became more mature, I understood more of how the world worked and how people operated. I grew to care less about who was getting the latest push in WWE (I remember when it was WWF…oh crap, don’t sue me, you enviornmentalist hippies) and more about what chick was checking me out in class. I forgot how to type quickly and instead learned how to drive a car. Now, as I return to these websites, I find nothing but ruins, broken links, and archaic server domains. All I have left to hold onto are these memories, an internal sanctuary that I retreat to as a solace for what is to come.

So here’s to you, Grudge Match. So long, Mr. T Ate My Balls web pages. In time, the Chuck Norris facts and why, even Uncylopedia will, one day, fall by the wayside. I just demand pics, or it didn’t happen.

In our quest to seperate ourselves from others, in an attempt to establish our own individual identities, in this grand journey we call life, we try and create distinct identities for the self. We signal this through clothing, hairstyles, particular modes of speech or body language, and music. We are the under the impression that we create our own lives and that we are unique and completely original entities.

Well, I am here to tell you that we are all hollow moths, buzzing towards the lamp only to be burned.

You see, we’re all conformists, one way or another. We’ve seen many movies and we’ve read many novels championing the will of the singular. Nietzsche prophesizes that the unbermensch will rise up and stake his own claim to immortality. The punk culture, in particular, champions personal freedom and self-autonomy. But, I ask you, are we really all that open-minded? Or do we simply go along with the crowd?

It is my belief that we are all followers, one way or another. The thought occured to me as I attended a local rock concert a few months back. In the midst of the mosh pit I was engaged in, I saw a young kid with a communist logo T-shirt and liberty spikes swaying with the rest of the crowd. As I looked on in bemusemnet at this spectacle, I considered what he meant to me and society at large: a few years ago hat would have been me.

I was always one to rail against the evils and injustices of society. To pint out the hypocritical flaws in the world and to argue against what I percieved to be a stale and bland suburban enviornment. Yet, as I looked on at this kid, I thought perhaps he was in the wrong as well. After all, the youth of today wouldn’t cut their hair into mohawks or epouse socialist ideals if they hadn’t seen it done before, would they?

Take a look at the fashions of yesteryear. The wide-brimmed collars, the insane muttonchops, the formal suits for even the most destitute of commners. If you were truly different and above all trends, wouldn;t you walk around in this? This is a thought that has always puzzled me, for some odd reason. Even the most eccenctric of philosophers and madmen commonly sport the current standard “uniform” of a T-shirt and jeans, of some sort. If you were outside-the-box, you would wear clothes from a comletely differnet time period.

This extends to all realms. The biggest uniting factor in culture is language. No matter how abstract or cerebral our thoughts, our mind still works in our native tongue. From birth, we are conditioned to learn the words and sentence structure of our origins. If one were to truly step outside your usual paradigm, you would speak in a completely different language. I’ve learned this while taking French class. Because I am learning it at such a late age, it is becoming increasingly difficult and frustrating to pick up on. I’ve come to an epiphany about how sheltered and shallow my outlook is when all I know is English, having ignored all other tongues. As children, our brains are molded by what we are taught in our formative years and thus new modes of behavior become foriegn and alien to us and hard to pick up on.

My distinct thesis has always been of a sociological bent: we are ultimately determined by the outside world around us. Our fates as solitary origanisms, try as we might, are futile in the face of the bigger picture. You can see this in herd behavior. Perfect sane, rational people wuld go along with the most inane and bizarre of behaviors if the whole crowd is doing it. The stock market and riots are examples of this. Have you ever shown up to a party or some other social event and you felt somewhat awkward and out-of-place? Have you ever not spoken up in the face of scrutinizng racism or sexism because it was otherwise inappropriate to do so? Exactly.

So, there is no individuality, try as you might. Any sense of rebellion or freethinking is simply different ideas borrowed from a third party. Even as I type this, I write it on a laptop, which I only have because everyone else has. my method of delivering this message is through a blog network, which I have stumbled upon due to its recent popularity. If I were truly an iconoxlast, I would be out in the woods, drawing pictures on the ground in incoherent gibberish to demonstrate my point. As it is, I’m no better than the rest of you. Humans are nothing more than sheep following one another. So it is.

On the heels of the recent remake, reimaging, recrapfest that is Friday the 13th, I have a confession to make: I am a horror movie fan. Love it, love it, love it. As much as I browse through the readings of Flaubert or wear cashmere sweaters, at the end of the day I like to unwind with a good ol’ slasher flick where some psycho in a mask chases around horny teenagers and tries to cut them up. I am a splatter junkie and I’d have to say it’s easily my favorite genre. Hey, better than the bromance comedies we have now starring Paul Rudd, Paul Rudd, and a special guest appearance by none other than Paul Rudd himself…

I’m not sure why. I guess it was my mom that screwed me up. You’d be suprised because she comes off as a nice, conservative, stereotypical suburban mom. But underneath that veneer she loves the old movies starring Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman. It didn’t help that at a young age she exposed me to these movies. I even began watching Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. Pretty traumatizing stuff for a prepubescent, eh?

It really just interests and amuses me to see people get offed in increasingly more bizarre, grotesque, and unlikely ways. Maybe it’s a dark, evil side to me. I’m really not a dangerous person. True murder horrifies me and I consider myself a pacifist who’s opposed to most forms of violence and warfare. Yet I want my mvies as red and as violent as possible.

Similar to UFC andboxing, people need a therapeutic outlet for their daily agression. After some co-worker talks behind your back and gives you a bad name to the boss, who can’t sympathize with Jason as he hunts down those who have wronged him and avenges his lost childhood? Horror movies, in a sense, are a psychological exploration of our deepest fears and our most primal, taboo urges.

Throughout human history there has always been a fascination, in art, with bodily mutilation and unspeakable acts. We claim to be disgusted by these events yet why is there whole shows, like Cold Case Files, devoted to it? If we weren’t truly intrigued by it there wouldn’t be a niche sector of entertainmen devoted to it.

In a sense, I think horror movies are a way to actually make death and violence safe. After Night of the Living Dead ends, we feel safe becuase we know zombies really won’t come up from the ground and devour us. What truly horrifies us is the real ugliness out there: robberies, rape, muder without provacation or cause. These things are real, and furthermore we can’t truly explain them through supernatural explanations. The most revolting monster is that of the human being itself.

Ah, the hackneyed plots themselves. I am also a fan of the “so bad it’s good” list. I’ve seen flicks so atrocious Ed Wood would give them two thumbs down. Aside from being truly gripping and suspensful, these things become travesties of mockery. Despite their morbid intentions, they end up being feasts of comedy. This, too, is a means wih which we comfort ourselves against the sociopathic insanity of the modern world.

Highbrow critics will maintain horror movies are nothing more than cheap works of pulp fiction satisfying the lowest common denominator. Perhaps so, but these are the same people that watch The Enlgish Patient and are actually interested in it I (seriously, what the fuck is that boring-ass movie about?). What the cinema snobs won’t tell you is that horror movies can be suprisingly deep character studies.

Jason Voorhees is often thought of as an overgrown man-child. He kills camp counselors out of grief over his own pained adolescence and at the hands of being bullied due to his unfortunate mental handciap. Michael Myers is elemental evil (not Austin Powers Mike Myers, although acting in that movie might be cause for evil as well), beyond explanation or comprhension. He is a blank slate, driven only by the passion to exterminate. Freddy Krueger is a charismatic anti-hero, although many ignore his true origins as a disgusting pedophile. Not the type of guy whose one-liners you’d really laugh at, now is he? Hostel could even be interpreted as a meditation on the cultural angst and sociological rift between America and europe, all served up with a nice helping of some old-school gore, of course.

Oh, but how the times have changed. Gone from my television screen are the clueless stoners that end up getting axed right after they get stoned, the teenagers who have sex and then suffer the reprecussions of premarital sex through the swift blow of an axe (is it too much to ask for some bobies from these damn teen romps every once in a while?), and the heroic virgin who makes it all the way to the end. In their place are endless hip postmodern self-reference, convoluted back stories that involve the killer being someone’s long-lost brother/cousin twice removed/plumber, and soundtracks from the latest rap-rock/metalcore bands (if it wasn’t for New Line Cinema, music like Slipknot would be out of a job). I place the blame squarely at the feet of Scream. Everybody else loved it and while it’s an okay movie and a cute concept, at times I couldn’t stand it. Gone is The Last House on the Left; in its place is I Know What You Did Last Summer starring heartthrob Freddy Prinze Jr. This signaled the death of the horror genre.

And if it’s not that it’s the goddamn remakes. No matter what they’re called (re-telling or re-imagining), you put trash in a different colored bag and it’s still trash. They take classics like The Hills Have Eyes and give it this nauseatingly glossy, Hollywood, bid-budget spin. Gone is the lo-fi authenticity and brutality of the original ’70s movement

But much like the antagonist rises up and kills the would-be survivor as they go to remove his mask or check if he’s dead, perhaps the horror genre will be reborn one day. In due time, my friend. In due time.

Howdy, all. First of all, sorry I haven’t been blogging as much (to the two of you regular readers out there that care). I’ve been so swamped with school and trying to find a job and important real-life shit (not to say Today.com, an excellent blogging site if I do say so myself, *wink wink*, isn’t important). I’m also rather hung over at the moment, if that helps put this rant in context.

I just saw Nas last night and he was the shit. He really brought the goods to concert. I saw Lil’ Wayne at Vodoofest late last year and god did he suck. It’s telling a now-underground rapper was better than the popular one that everybody’s into. To me, Nas is real hip-hop.

Also, I just got an e-mail in my inbox from the advisor of my mkajor stating I was denied a poetry scholarship award. Even though I really can’t stand poetry and think it’s for wussy kids who wear striped sweaters and drink way too much coffee, I figured what the hell, might as well try to get my writing out there and get paid while I’m at it. This is even though I’m sure my poems were better than half of the arty goofs who probably wrote some imagist stanza about how they saw a leaf fall and this reminded them of the first time their uncle felt them up. She said they “wished me the best in all my future poetic endeavors”. This brought out a chuckle in me, as it sounded like Vince McMahon was running this contest. Christ, I watch too much wrestling. Anyway, enough about my rather uninteresting life. This isn’t Twitter, people.

Anyway, onto today’s topic. Recently I was browsing through the newspaper when I came across a little fella named McKay Hatch and a little idea he has called the No Cussing Club. Never heard of him? Have no idea what the No Cussing Club is about? Don’t care either way? Well, too bad, ‘cuz I’m about to school you on this dude:

“I am 14 years old.  I’m just a regular kid.  I like to play soccer, play video games, hang out with my friends, etc.  I started the No Cussing Club at my junior high school in South Pasadena, California in 2007.  A lot of kids at my school, and some of my friends, would cuss and use dirty language all the time.  They did it so much, they didn’t even realize they were doing it.  It bothered me so much that one day I challenged them to stop!  They were shocked.  They didn’t know that it was bothering me.  They didn’t even realize how much they were doing it until I said something.  I was actually surprised at how they reacted; they accepted my No Cussing Challenge.  But some of the kids said they didn’t know how to stop.  That’s when I started the No Cussing Club.”

Fascinating stuff from the kid’s website. Here’s a link: http://www.nocussing.com/home.html

The whole idea is he wants people to stop using profanity. Well, shit, the guy’s got a fucking point. I get so pissed off when some dumb asshole uses bad language I just wanna be all, “Dude, what the hell?”

I know crass behavior is leading to the downfall of Western society. The other day when I was driving and some guy cut me off in traffic and I shot him the middle finger, I guess at the moment it failed to dawn on me how that action quite specifically caused this economic recession we’re in right now. My bad, guys.

This is the viewpoint of every lame Mormon kid that got beat up in high school. Of course, Mr. McKay never really gives us a reason behind his disgust at what hye views as the more lewd aspects our culture. Who needs context when you can get all your life lessons from Howdie Doodie?

Beating your chest in a fit of self-righteousness isn’t going to do anyone any favors. This marketing promotion comes off as so cheesy. It really aggervates me when stick-in-the-mud moralists try to be all young and cool. For instance, ol’ Mitch tells us to chill out on cursing (or cussing or however backwoods people in boring suburban states pronounce it). Whoa, bro, you’re like so down. If I wasn’t busy shooting people in the ‘hood I’d ask you to come hang, dawg!

There’s even a helpful picture of a few thugged-out badassesapples looking all tough because THEY DON’T CURSE. I’m sure 50 Cent will bow down to these all-mighty masters of hip verbal cleanliness.

To counter here’s a picture of someone’s grandpa I have doctored to show everyone how liberating it is to use dirty language:

“I love me some bitches and hos!”

I think what Mitch McKay and other well-meaning word police are ignoring is the fact that there is a time and a place for profanity. I see profanity like a vacation: good, meaningful, and refreshing if used sparingly, bur when it’s over done it loses its charm. Profanity is a good way to help us release anger and express tension. Sometimes when you stub your toe, yelling, “Holy cow!” won’t do. I feel it loses it luster the more and more it’s overused When it’s brought out for special ocassions, it can serve a special purpose and social function, kinda like when they thaw out Dick Clark every year to have him host the New Year’s show on TV.

Sometimes I agree that vulgarities become all-too common in the natural form of human discourse. There’s only so many times I can see hear some wigger in a tanktop and backwards fitted hat say, “Man, that fuckin’ bitch was fuckin’ yellin’ in my face so I fuckin’ told her to shut the fuck up” before I decide, yeah, you’re not bad at all. It does get tiresome and this poverty of language becomes excessive to where you yearn for new, more poetic ways of expressing oneself.

But what a lot of controlling, conservative groupthink police are after is stamping out the negative aspects of human nature. And, well, sorry to say Theodore Cleaver, but anger and agression have been around since the beginning of history. You don’t think after Alexander the Great conquered all of the known world and began the spread of civilization to the rest of the known world, he stopped to announe, “I gotta take a shit, I’ll be right back!”

Words are only as bad as you make them. They’re simply that. Not bad, not good, just a collection of letters you string together. Let’s really look at this: fuck. What is inherently bad about that word? Is it the f? Maybe it’s the strange placement of the “u” in the middle. The vowel lodged right there in the median of the word does give it a nasty sort of sound as you pronounce it. Would I be fcked if I left out the u in posing this entry and risk getting censored?

Language is only as destructive as we make it. What if we were to replace “pussy” with “bat”? I’d be all like, “Man, I gotta get some bat tonight!” or “Quit being a bat and fight me already!” or “Did you see that girl stick that phone in her bat on that Redtube video?” Pretty soon we’d be talking about how Alex Rodriguez was stepping up to pussy at plate.

I’m just showing how it’s all subjective. Profanity is what you make it.

So fuck you, Mitch McKay. I won’t join you and your no cussing clause. Not that I cuss every day, far from it, but I just find this a pompous ploy for attention and a misguided solution to a problem that’s really not even that important. In fact, I’m going to start a “No No Cussing Club”. I challenge you, readers, to work in profanity every day. Even if you’re talking to your superiors at work. For instance:

Stuffy boss (probably some douchebag wearing way too much hair gel): Hey, did you get the e-mail I sent you.

Totally bad-ass you: Fuck yeah I did.

Stuffy boss: (pissing his pants now in fear) Excuse me?

Totally bad-ass you: Shit, I said I got it. So the meeting’s next week?

Stuffy boss: Clean out your desk, please.

See? Fail-proof scenario. Do me proud, prodigies.

First off, let me just say it is disgusting that Nickolodeon is still allowing Chris Brown to host the Nickolodeon Kids Choice Awards despite him beating Rihanna. I guess this proves that no matter what you do, as long as you’re famous and good looking and a rich rapper you can get away with whatever. Never mind that there are plenty of hardworking, normal people that are poor and have a strong moral center, but they don’t have an agent with Hollywood connections, so they get nowhere in life.

Way to teach those kiddies, Nick! Maybe soon ol’ Suzie in 2nd grade will start getting the smackdown for passing around the cooties, if ya know what I mean. I’m glad they finally took the iniative and started actually providing educational proramming to teach these kids something. Boys need to learn how to conduct themselves in the real world when they grow up. Eh, guess they can’t all be Are You Afraid of the Dark?

And as sad as this is, Rihanana is pretty stupid too. Most girls will whine and cry about how men aren’t sensitive anymore but they all go after the brawny asshole because it makes them feel better. At this point she honestly kinda deserves it if she’s gonna take that dirtbag back.

I think the media needs to focus less on their swank and rich homes and instead point out that CHRIS BROWN IS A FUCKING WOMAN BEATER. We should hear more about the tragedy of domestic abuse and how to stop it, instead of it being treated by the police as a trivial matter. How sexist and unfeminist has our society become?

With that out of the way, time to move on to my topic. I recently had the chance to watch The Devil and Daniel Johnston. And boy was that about two hours of my life I’ll never get back. Now, I say that thinking it was a good movie and a well-shot documentary. But the real question is, what the hell is the big whoop over this Daniel Johnston fellow?

For those unfamiliar, here’s a sample of his music so atrocious it would make a dying cat puke musical maestro abilities:

The guy has a basic grasp of pop structures, but he is extremely overrated. His music is very rough and crude and there’s no structure or rhyme or reason to it. Bob Dylan was able to achieve a folk sound while seeming under control and with every melody heard in a nuanced fashion. John Lennon used simple chords to get across a universal message of love, peace, and the human condition in a pleasurable manner. But this guy? It’s like a 5-year old’s diary entries turned into a song by going to the local Toys R’ Us and banging on the keyboard that’s out on display.

And here come the torrent of indie rock fans to his defense. “He’s simply a genius!” “You don’t get it! You’ve been raised so much on commercial rock, dude!” I do get it. I just don’t particularly care for it. Has anybody ever actually listened to it? And I don’t mean stare at the album while ina record shop so you can try and bang the vegan girl behind the counter, I mean actually sat down and listened to it? It’s not good music, period. I can record myself taking a dump and it would sound better than him.

It seems a lot of alternative rockers patronize him with a strong hint of irony and mocking approval. His music does come across as raw and almost brutally sincere, yet his fans are the typical saracstic, flannel-wearing 20-year-olds. Despite his Christian rants and religious breakdowns I’m sure his fanbase are all cappucino-sipping atheists.

This is not to say people with handciaps cannot make art, let alone good art. Travis Meeks, the guitarist and lead singer for days of the New, reportedly has autism. And yet he crafts some of the most beautiful acoustic rock ever:

Thd difference is, and take out your notepads boys and girls because this is the important part, he understands not only what sounds good but how to put it together and hone it so that it comes together as a coherent whole. You can argue “deconstructionist art” all day until your eyes bled through your thick-rimmed glasses. But all art is structured. I hate to burst your bubble, Mr. Beckett Wannabe, but even art that expresses a theme of fragmentation or has jarring structure is…..wait for it……planned out months, even years in advance, and is carefully crafted and even *gasp* edited!

It’s also nice to know he worked for McDonald’s even though they’re a corporation that produces unhealthy food that is mass-mrketed and they gobble up precious land and resources to make room for their locations. And it’s also so sweet that he wanted to be the spokesperson for Mountain Dew even though it’s the liquid equivalent of heroin and they’re also a big business that regularl swindles its investors, the customers, and its own employees. Hey, it’s all part of his cutesy, idiot savant image though, right?

During one point in the movie, they talked about how he yelled at the members of Sonic Youth (whom he was hanging out with) and how the lead singer got pissed at him and ditched him. Fuck them. This goes to show you how hypocritical the whole college/art scene is. They claim to be all underground and against the macho aesthetic but when somebody gets up in HIS face there’s about to be a fight.

I get the feeling a lot of snobby, prentious d-bags like him because they vicariously want to relive their inner child through him. Because his music is whimsical and innocent, they feel like they can leave the adult world and its responsibilities and foibles behind. This is a guy who should have gotten treatment for his obvious mental hang-ups. Instead, he got dragged to shows to perform. He reminds me a lot of the character in Dostovesky’s The Idiot: a noble simpleton destroyed by the corruption of the adult world. Record comapnies claimed they were going to take care of him and when he didn’t sell well enough they dropped him like a bad habit.

Many claim to like him because he’s different and nobody else sounds like him. Okay. That doesn’t make it good music. That just makes it odd. If I wear orange boots while everyone else sports regular sneakers, does that make me some sort of lyrical prophet or wise philosopher? No. It just means Wednesdays are half-off at Payless. No Jimi Hendrix to see here, move along.

Peple are just going to claim to like him so they can seem oh-so-bohemian. You see, they’re enlightened because they’re into someone that everyone else isn’t. They get his musical genius. The general public will always flock to anything with a whiff of “artistic” or “autistic” or “non-mainstream”.

The Blair Witch Project is proof of this. Even though it came off as novice and amateurish and it looked like a student film gone bad, people raved about it. They bought into the hype even though it wa sbankrolled by a major studio. Oh well, as long as it didn’t have any of the loud explosions or sex scenes or big name actors that Hollywood has, man.

Who’s to say Daniel Johnston is even crazy? To me, he just came off as a very clever self-promoter. He’s basically a guy with an acoustic guitar and a gimmick. You mean to tell me, “Oh, man, I think everybody’s a Satanist and I’m sooooo crazy I’ll have to go to a mental asulym, bu wait, not before I give out my CD to everybody I meet and sign a big record contract! Okay, strap on the straightjacket before R.E.M. calls me to go on tour with them.”

I’m not enough of a cynical bastard to suggest he’s faking the whole thing. He seems a like a guy who is genuinely mentally troubled (after all, anybody that’s hobknobbed with Atlantic Records and still lives at home with their parents is a few fries short of a Happy Meal….not named MC Hammer, that is), but I also think he somewhat exaggerated and exploited it. Basically, he knows what he’s doing and he’s pervertedly using it to his advantage.

Everybody jumps on the bandwagon and likes him because even though he’s modestly popular, he hasn’t broken through to the mainstream. While some people like Kurt Cobain, a majority diss him because of how overly adored he became. I guratantee the same fanboys that jizz thesmevles over his Beatles-as-sung-by-a-toddler style would claim “Dnaiel Johnston is overrated” tommorrow if he suddenly rose to #1 on the billboards. No matter how individualistic or cultivated people fancy themselves to be, they still follow a bandwagon menatlity, sadly enough. It’s just a different sort of bandwagon.

Gosh, the burden of being white and male and Christian and growing up in middle-class Americana. Thank goodness he used his musical abilities to inform us of his pain and have us respect the trials and tribulations he’s going through. That way we don’t have to hear about how peple in the ghetto are addicted to drugs and shoot each other every day or how Mexicans have to sneak into this country and try and get a job just to feed their families. Y’know, people that actually have it bad off. But poor Daniel Johnston. It breaks my heart to pour myself into his songs and discover what a burden it is to be a fat, lazy slob that becomes a paranoid Christian and a threatening asshole that randomly attacks people.

Look, he’s a violent dickhead and he’s abused drugs. This is the guy we anoint with fame and recognition? You have got to be kidding me. And don’t throw that manic-depressive bullshit at me because I’ve been through those mood swings too and so have others and I’ve never had to go to jail for breaking and entering an old lady’s house. Face it, the guy just doesn’t wanna go out and get a real job and a place of his own. He’s a typical spoiled and priviliged Caucasian male that took advantage of the advantages he was given.

As for his art? That crap goes for a million bucks an auction. Guess it shows to demonstrate what lack of taste people have. The same ones who cultivate a so-called “eccentric” taste in music will also look for the weirdest shit out there to prove how creative and hip and up-to-date they are (or think they are).

In fact, here’s a picture I drew of a dog wearing a tophat that I feel is somewhat marginally better than any of Mr. Jonhston’s body of work:

Go ahead and bitch about how I tore apart your sacred cow (and believe me, with how he looks today, that man is INDEED a cow).

Children. They have to be God’s curse on us for allowing Vanilla Ice to become famous. Everybody else is in love with these things. When we see them we say, “Aww, how cute!” or “When are you going to have one?” Me, I can’t stand them. I truly can’t. I can already see the arguments coming: You’re mean, you’re bitter, you’re not normal, etc. I’ve heard it all before.

Quite frankly, I find children just useless. This doesn’t mean I think we should have a mass genocide of all the nurseries around the country. In fact, around 1 to 2 they’re okay. After about age 14 when they get into their “I wear black because I hate the world” phase they’re tolerable as well. But God, that in-between phase makes me want to kick them all into space.

Whenever we try to idealize how cute or how precious they are, we ignore the obvious signs of detriment. The fact is kids tend to be greedy, whiny, aggervating, and simply way too much to deal with. We talk about how young Johny is soooo smart because he can read a page of a book by now (BTW, your kid is not the next Einstein simply because he’s somewhat above-average at some miniscule talent, get over it….most likely he’ll be like the rest of us: mediocre, another dull and unsassuming human being), we ignore the fact that he throws yet another temper tantrum over not getting a piece of cake at dinner.

Our society places a bizarre amount of importance on children. I understand they’re young and need to be raised in a decent manner so they don’t turn out to be the Charles Manson fan club, but we protect and coddle them too much. Everywhere across the landscape we see “Baby on Board” signs, an inordinate amount of laws geared towards protecting children, and toys, marketing (as innocent as they make themselves out to be, keep in mind these companies try to use consumerism on under-developed minds), and a crazy amount of dough geared towards making them happy and complacent.

Quite frankly, toddlers just annoy me. They really just won’t shut up. There’s only so many times I can answer a simplistic question or try to make out what they’re saying before I want to throw them in a sewer. We think children are so sacred even though they babbly incoherently, defecate themselves, and walk arond half-naked most of the time. When I try to do that people call me a weirdo and try to call the cops on me and all sorts of ludicrous stuff.

Youngsters are, by and large, selfish. They only see the worlds in terms of themselves even though we try and claim otherwise. I’ve nver wanted children and I still don’t. It’s an opinion I’ve maintained since age 11 and it’s one I still hold to this day. I am selfish and I want to live life for myself. Why should I take he time, money, and effort to raise a creature that will just end up being unappreciative and probably hate me one day anyway?

Our culture always tries to pressure others into having children. The notion of finding true love and deciding to becme mature and start one’s life by reproducing is romanticized in fiction and in movies. we ignore the fact that many deliquent children turn into socipahic crimincals, the toll it takes on the parent’s individuality, and how reproducing just takes up more of the earth’s space and resources. we humans are trult fucking up the planet and by having more snot-nosed brats that will likely never contribute nothing to society at large will not help that.

This is the only logical solution to this problem.

Every day we’re told to go to college. To get a good education, to go to school so we won’t sell drugs or shoot each other in the streets. But what I’m writing is to ask, is academia really that conductive to learning?

Think about all of our cultural and intellectual icons: Einstein, Elvis, Kayne West. All of these are (arguably) intelligent and famous. And yet they all struggled in school or dropped out altogether. Is a degree really a true indicator of how smart someone is? Or is just a measurement of how much you can jump through hoops for the world’s approval?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Jerry Falwell v. 2.0 speaking here. I wholeheartedly believe in the pursuit of knowledge(which is what philosophy is defined as, after all), and I believe a critical nation that is willing and enthusiastic to debate about ethical and moral matters f the mind is a strong nation. But why are institutions the barometer for this quality?

I attend college, and let me tell you, if you saw some of the dumbasses that go there, you’d find the original Declaration of Independence and send it right through the shredder. Kids that make the cast of Clueless sound like a night at the Cabaret Voltaire somehow manage to pass with flying colors. Students regularly get high on everything from marijuana to codeine before going to class (and I know this for a fact, so stick that in your “A degree will keep you off of drugs” pipe and smoke it….or don’t smoke it, rather). It’s not a means of finding out how well-developed your critical thinking skills are or how you can grasp abstract concepts and hold a meaningful discussion on it. It’s just seeing how much crap you can remember and regurgitate to fit with whatever the professor’s “teaching”. Why do you think the popular image of a college student is of someone who’s up at 3am downing Red Bulls the night before an exam, nervously pouring over his notes like Wesley Wyndham Pryce on amphetamines?

Get a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. This is the future of your nation. In fact, he’ll be declared “Totally Rad Bro For Life” after the Frat Boy Uprising in 2032. Better start praying to him and learning how to do beer bongs while you can.

The college scene today is so fucked-up it makes a David Lynch film look as simple as a Geico commercial. Even though you’re mst likely a young adult aiming for a humble anthropology degree you have to fork over a mere tutition bill that costs about as much as a small country’s GNP. Now there’s a handy way to counter poverty and end the vicious cycle of ending up poor: MILK THESE KIDS FOR ALL THEY’RE WORTH. Only in America could we put a monetary value on something as universal and basic as the need for education, have everything from an entry fee to books to parking stickers cost (and not just cost but to the point where you may end up feeling a methhead by selling off all your possesions on eBay just to make due), and then bitch about how we’re a stupid, violent, and quickly-tumbling-into-a-recession nation.

I yearn for the days of ancient Greece when wisdom was true, pure, and free. No applying for student loans, no curves on an exam, no essay questions, you just meet up with people in the street and talk. About whatever you want. I feel true genius should be wild, untamed. The days of the urban, philosophical maverick are gone. In its place are student graduate clones and rude, stuffy professors. Why can’t it be similar to Socrates or Plato where you’d walk in on a garden, sit down, absorb what they have to say, and respond? I guarantee you Aristotle never had to go through an insane amount of paper work to get his thesis published in some obscure niche journal called Metaphics Quarterly.

Really, let’s cut past the inspiration b.s. and get down to the heart of the matter: College is nothing more than a business. Okay? Like everything else in the ol’ US of A, it’s become a capitalistic enterprise designed to maximize profit and minimize spending. This is why, even if you’re lucky to somehow get a scholarship, ou end up staying in a dorm that makes a back-alley abortion office seem like the Ramada Inn. The food offered on-campus is so poor I tried to offer it to a homeless guy one time and he smacked me in the face. Meanwhile, the chancellor (or, as I like to refer to him, the Dark Lord) sits high on his ivory tower, laughing, while all the swankly-dressed professors in their tweed outfits (seriously, what is up with you guys? Do you just have a closet full of nothing but stuffy plaid suits? Wear a fuckin’ T-shirt every once in a while, geez) walk around and bitch about how apathetic the students are. Well, no duh, Sherlock (and I mean actual Sherlocks). When you can afford to pay your motage on my salary and I dig around in my couch like I’m an obsessive-compulsive couch poptato for change just to pay the toll fee for the bridge, well, odds around I’m not gonna tap-dancing into my physics lecture.

The whole idea of prerequisites is annoying to me, too. Logic goes if I’m attending college and my main area of focus are words, why should I have to take classes pertaining to chemistry and math? I understand you want a well-rounded person, but why get them caught up in areas they’re not interested in? Because I had to end up taking classes that weren’t related to my field of study that were required for my major, I got a few bad grades and now the school won’t grant me financial aid because of “unsatisfactory academic progress”. Hmm, I wonder if they teach Catch 22 in any of the literature courses?….

Look, I’ll be truthful and say I don’t give a crap about history or French too much. Sorry to sound like an ignorant cultural phillistine, but there it is. I love literature and I’d like to just enroll and go right into that. But no, college wants me to take a gazillion classes that have nothing to do with my aspiratiosn because they want to bleed more money out of me for the sake of learning.

We really need a reform of the educational system. Down here in the South it’s pretty bad, although elsewhere I’ve heard it’s a bit better. The teachers in high school are severly underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated, which in turn causes them to be either hired even though they’re unqualified or simply not give a crap. I can’t tell you one benficial thing I learned from my years of high school, except how to make a paper airplane. This in turn produces a generation of kids who are unprepared for the mindrape that is college and who don’t have the motivation insilled in them to simply care. May the cycle be unbroken…..

A B.A., P.H.D., M.F., or any other fancy title with initials is only useful for one thing and one thing only: If you want a decent-paying job. I can tell you right now with a straight face and a sincere heart that the only reason I’m enrolled in a university is because I don’t want to work at Wal-Mart for the rest of my life. Even then, I’m an English major, so the best I can hope for (besides a dream of being anovelist, which ranks right next to “Tear a hole in the space-time continumum” on the realistic choices poll), is to teach some creative writing class that everyone only takes because they need a few more credits to graduate and it doesn’t interfere with their time schedule of sipping smoothies at the campus cafe while discussing how Britney spears is making a comeback (omg hav u herd her new cd????! its lik 2otally kewl)

I’ve known man peopl, too many in fact, that are incredibly intelligent and passionate and could be a great mind in whatever field they choose to persue. And these people are not in college because of the money. I feel all the bureucratic red tape surrounding this needs to be fixed before we find ourselves severly screwed, and not in a good Jenna Jameson way. Does anyone else find it hypocriticalm that there’s sociology courses talking about the horrible conditions in the ghetto and how some people barely survive on minimum wage when the only people getting in college are rich white kids? Some geniuses simply aren’t cut out for school. In fact, if you go back through history and look at some of the great artists, musicians, and writers, you’ll find they were bored by what they perceived as a dull, stifling sea of conformity.

I dare you to call this man stupid. Okay, there is that whole *foot fungus* deal…..

Anybody wanna challenge them?

 “New Orleans is declared an epic fail, says President Bush.”

For those of you that don’t know (and if you do….WTF? Quit stalking me, freaks), I hail from southern Louisiana. The area I live in is about 20 minutes from New Orleans. Now, I’ll give you time to recover from the shock that I own a computer. Yes, we do have houses and live in suburbs. No, we’re not all stuck in the swamps or crazy Cajun alligator wrestlers who have IVs pumping daiquiris into our veins every second. I have been known to expose body parts for beads, however. Not proud of it. Not too ashamed of it, either.

But I digress. Folks, I gotta say the politics down here makes an underground chicken-fighting league look downright ethical and wholesome. Every day that I peruse through a copy of The Times-Picayune I read about yet another Congressman or council member that is stealng hundreds of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets. I swear, they are just downright brazen about their greed. I honestly thik they don’t care if they get caught anymore; that’s how big of balls they have.

Recently represnative William Jefferson was caught with about a couple of thousand dollars (dollars, mind you, we’re talking COLD, HARD CHEDDA), and he claimed he didn’t know where it came from. I heard even Marion Barry said, “Nigga, that’s a lame-ass excuse.” What happened, did he get a concussion and have amnesia? I can see what happened: Due to this tragic accident, he confused his bank account and his TV dinners and just happened to put a shitload of cash in his freezer. That means somewhere there’s a hunk of Hungry Man dinners stinking up a Chase bank account. That doesn’t mean they’re thawed out, I just find Hungry Man dinners disgusting on general principle.

And if William Jefferson is enough to make you want to run into the arms of a used car salesman for moral comfort, just wait ’till the Ray Nagin circus pulls up in town. Every day it seems people wait n their hands and knees for the latest wacky thing he’s going to say. We think of this as cutesy and demonstrative of the wild nature of New Orleans, except for one tiny tidbit: HE’S THE FUCKING MAYOR. I don’t wait him to be adorably insane. I want him to be compeent. We shouldn’t hold the mayor of our most important city, the man whom we place all our trust and confidence in, to the same standard that you do for your incoherent grandfather. The one thing they still haven’t recovered from Katrina is Nagin’s mind, apparently.

It really speaks volume about how much a region has deteoriated when you treat your politicians like they’re heirlooms in an auction. Line ‘em up and let the highest bidder get the final say-so. Everyone feels sorry for us because of the hurricane but in truth this area is quickly going to hell in a riverboat. We’ve improved but at the same time it really just feels like it’s all falling apart. I’m not sure how other areas are in terms of political honesty (and I’ve heard some states have leaders just as untrustworthy as ours), but in this case, we may not even be able to believe Eddie Price when he says he’s lying. That is, if he’s sober enough to articulate that he’s lying.

How hypocritical is it that some guy can drive while drunk off his ass, crash into a gate, and have the police just whisky him off on his merry and inebriated way just because he’s the mayor, while I ca’t even go 2 miles past the speed limit in Westweg without getting tazered and thrown into a jail cell where I’m Bubba’s new play toy? He gets away with this just because he’s an roided-up jock who happens to have a few press conferences a year? Are you kidding me?

“Proof that party bickering and straw man arguments aren’t just for white people anymore!”

By now I’m sure you’ve heard or seen Jindal’s crash-and-burn-fossil-fuels performance after Obama’s speech. On behalf of all of Lousiana, we apologize for that. We didn’t know he was going to do that. He didn’t mention it at the annual nutria trapping festival.

Some locals will jump down my throat and say, “You should support him! He’s one of us!” First of all, I’ve never seen him at any family get-togethers of mine, so I don’t consider him one of us. Second of all, I didn’t vote for him. So I don’t even have to put his picture on this website if I want.

That being said, this isn’t another condemnation of Jindal as if he wrote the sequel to Mein Kaimpf. While I’m not a Republican I had no problem with him at all becoming governor. During his term so far, he’s done pretty well. He strikes me as an articulate, intelligent man. When he declared evacuation for Gustav, he handled it in a calm and efficient manner. So far, so not-Sarah-Palin, right?

So what went wrong? Jindal tried to appeal to the core of the GOP, that’s what. Instead of outlining the philosophical differencs between liberals and conservatives, in a thoughtful and non-partisan manner, he tried to appeal to our more base human emotions. He beat the old “goverment bad, individual good” horse (which has historically proven to never be true) and came off like a bitter candidate who lost out in a high school election, not the Harvard graduate and legal braniac we’d gotten to know him as.

Quite frankly, as soon as the words soared out of his mouth, I felt this uneasy quivering sensation in my stomach. I was, to put it quite frankly, pissed. Pissed that he sold us out to try and get the early Republican nomination for 2012. Pissed that he traded in his intellectual ideals to play up to the right-wing’s ideal of guts over rationale. Pissed that he used this as platform to promote himself and, in essence, became an attention-hungry, me-monkey, media whore.

Quite frankly, I’m honestly not that bothered about his rather dull and wooden method of delivery. Sure, his charisam could best be described as being slightly more engaging than an argument between Bob Newhart and Richard Belzer. Indeed, one could venture to even describe Jindal as something of a nerd (you have to go to law school and all this other academic hoopla to become a politician……name one entertainer outside of Schwazenegger or Reagan that got involved in legislation…..Motley Crue is exiciting on-stage and on-stage only for a reason) if you were in the mean sort of spirits.

Look, I wasn’t expecting Chris Rock or Dane Cook out there (and heaven knows I don’t even think I’d want to see them out there). I also know it had to be difficult following an Obama speech. BTW, what is up with everyone going ga-ga over Barack Obama these days? Sure, he’s a good and capable politician. He talks kinda cool and he’s a bit of what some would call a “looker”. But you’d think a fucking alien came down and took over the White House with the way some people jizz their pants him. Not since Beatlemania has such an irrational tide of fanatcism swept over this nation. I’ve seen perfectly capable adults and political pundits be reduced to shrieking 12-year-old Backstreet Boys fans at the mere sight or mention of him.

No, my problem is what Jindal said. He decried assistance on the federal goverment even though we stil desperately need money to rebuild. He tried lame attempts to appear folsky (when will the fat cats in Washington ever learn just because they tell a story about how their dad was a poor grocery store owner/tree cuter/plumber/disease-ridden porn star doesn’t mean I’ll jump and yell, “WELL GEEZ HE’S TOTALLY ONE OF US NOW, I’MA VOTE FOR HIM, SHOOT, JETHRO, LET’S CALL HIM UP AND INVITE HIM TO A PARTY IN THE TRAILER PARK HERE!”

He played upon the old worries and phobias of small-town hicks instead of trying to suport the bill or come to some sort of compromise in this dire time of ours. When will politicians ever learn we need at least some sort of assistance from the government? I’m not saying hand out welfare checks like they’re complimentary sprays of colgne at a department store, but there are times and instances when we may need a little help. Just rollin’ up your sleeves and saying poof and there’s a small business out of nowhere won’t help anymore. After all, isn’t that kinda, you know, what the givernment’s supposed to be for?

Look at that pesky liberal volcano and all its wasteful eruption. Man, how stupid are we to spend all this money or monitoring something that could erupt and be potentially deadly. Shame on you, left-leaning volcano. Don’t you know your fire is what’s causing global warming anyway?