"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
That's the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I have read the Constitution many times, for many reasons, and reading it today for the umpteenth time for the umpteenth reason I still don't really understand this amendment. When I encounter something I don't understand, whether due to vagueness of language or abstract ideas that my widdle bwain can't bend itself around, I simply re-word the statement, try to make it simpler, so in this case I might translate this statement as 'In the process of listing all the rights and liberties of the citizens of this country, we might have missed some shit in the first eight amendments, but just because we didn't mention them doesn't mean that folks don't have those rights and liberties.'
But is my translation correct? And, if so, what does it mean? I know what it says, but... When my primary method for understanding something fails me, I have a Plan B. I look on Wikipedia.
Go on, give it a try. Look it up for yourself, and if, at any point, you don't say to yourself 'Holy fuckballs!' then you're doing a lot better than me.
I'm interested in gay marriage right now. Not because I'm gay, I just simply believe that gay people are human beings too, which means they have human rights and civil rights as well, and the right to marry whomever we choose is not something that can legislated or be put up for a popular vote. Arguments against gay marriage are usually rooted in either religious grounds or on sexual bigotry or both, and it's obvious to me that neither of these are legal tools on which to make a legal decision. Apparently, it's not so obvious to everyone because the debate rages on every minute of every day in this country.
Last night while bartending, I overheard some conversation on the subject, which you will no doubt be familiar with by now. "You can fuck a dog or a goat, but you can't marry 'em. If two guys wanna fuck each other, great. But they can't get married. It's...it's...unnatural!" This was from a retired Chicago police officer. It was Mardi Gras weekend, and the place was packed, so I didn't really have time to get in the conversation even if I'd wanted to point out the obvious, that people aren't fucking animals, whether they're straight, gay, white, black or otherwise and therefore deserve human dignity and the right to live whatever life they want to. I wouldn't have convinced him anyway; this is one hard-headed sonofabitch we're talking about with a lifetime of bigotry and stupidity behind him.
Another reason often cited is that gays marrying violates the sanctity of marriage. This point is invalid. We are not, no matter how loud and obnoxious some people want to be over this, a Christian nation. We are a nation founded on laws, not religion, and at the end of the day marriage in America is little more than a legal contract binding two people in a legal union. You can make it religious if you want to, all you like, with the priest or minister or rabbi or bhagwan or whatever, but the fact is as soon as you, your partner and a couple witnesses sign your names at the County Clerk of Courts and pay the fees, you're already married. You don't need to wait for some guy in a dress to tell you to kiss the bride. You can have as much or little sanctity marriage as you want to put into it, but it isn't necessary. Sanctity is a term denoting the sacredness of something, which is an unquantifiable religious expression and therefore has no merit in a legal sense. It has no value outside of it's own cultural context, and just because seven out of ten Americans feel that something is sacred, it doesn't mean jack shit to me. Eight out of ten Americans believe in angels- does that make 'em real? Four out of ten (dumbass) Americans don't believe in evolution, but I guaran-fucking-tee that we share the same ancestors as the great apes and that this will be undeniably proven one day. Hell, there is a considerable segment of our population that feel that BASEBALL DIAMONDS are sacred spaces. Why don't coaches have the authority vested in them to perform marriage rituals, in that case?
Sorry, I start ranting and I start losing the plot. I was talking about gay marriage and the 9th Amendment. There is no mention of gay marriage in the Constitution for a simple fact; namely, back when the Constitution was being framed, they'd string your ass up in the nearest tree if it was discovered that you were gay and engaging in homosexual activity, much less wanting to get married to someone of the same sex. Or they might've skipped the rope and just beat you to death. Either way, you were toast. Not that it didn't happen, ever since there have been people there have been gay and straight people. Back then you just had to be really ultra-top-shelf-triple-red-dog secretive about it. But, these guy were smart, knew that the world is not static and there would be things our country would experience that they had no way of foreseeing then, so they created a living, breathing, malleable document that could change with the times and cover issues undreamed of in their frame of reference. They definitely were out to create something that would insure that everyone would have the freedom and the liberty to live as they wanted to.
Less freedom for some is less liberty for all.
As John Rawls wrote in 'A Theory of Justice' in 1971, "No system can be called efficient if there is an alternative arrangement that improves the situation of some people with no worsening of the situation of any of the other people."
From our vantage point of history, we look back and think, 'How could it be that women weren't allowed to vote or own land back then?', or 'How could they think it's okay to not let black people go to school or vote or own land? Or have jobs that actually pay?' I firmly believe that fifty years from now, people of America will look back at our times and shake their heads, wondering 'Why would anyone give a shit whether someone else is straight or gay?'
(And probably also, 'How could they not see that Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were totally hot for each other?' And 'Who the fuck was paying good money to listen to Justin Bieber?' And 'Who couldn't have seen that Oprah was going to own her own planet someday?' And 'Wasn't it obvious that weed is good for you?' And ......(ran out of time, they're closing the Playstation down for the day.))
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Who Wants To Spend 10,000 Hours With Me?
Ten thousand hours. That is the minimum number of hours required to become a world-class anything, according to Anders Ericsson. He's a psychologist from Sweden, working at Florida State these days. Whether you're into chess, football, violin, mathematics, fashion, basketball, writing, bartending, tennis, basket weaving, pole dancing, painting, cooking, whiskey drinking, doodling, playing pinball, erotic body-painting, mandolin playing, golfing....fuck, random list-making, for all I know. This cat says it takes TEN THOUSAND HOURS to become a world-class anything, whatever you're into.
How long is that really? That's like 416-something days, almost 417. Not so long, when you put it that way, but let's get real. We all have jobs. Or we're looking for one. Shit, when you think about it, I'm a world-class seeker of jobs; I'm POSITIVE I've pounded at least 10,000 hours worth of pavement. The local city governments should tax me extra for all the wear-and-tear I've put the local sidewalks through. Damn! I shouldn't say that, that'll be a talking point in the next Republican debate, and it'll be all my fault. My point is, is doesn't sound like a long time, less than a year and a half. To become WORLD CLASS. Better than 99% of everyone else on the planet. Is that so hard?
OF COURSE IT IS. That's a huge investment in time and effort. Think about it; just having a job that pays the bills takes at least eight hours a day, forty hours a week. And that's exhausting. We bitch and bitch about it, as adults, having to work that much. And as adults, our brains have pretty much shut down to learning new things. What is that like for kids? A year and a half to an eight year old, that's like eternity. My five year old daughter can't sit through an episode of Spongebob without grabbing a toy or wanting to break a window, what does ten thousand hours mean to her? It means, of course, twenty thousand episodes of Spongebob. And a hell of a lot of broken toys and windows.
How much time have you put into your passion, whatever that passion may be? Television doesn't count, the average American spends four hours a day watching shit on television. That's 1460 hours per year. Porn? That's a question that's hard to answer, but the best I can say is that the average American watches 40 minutes of porn per WEEK. So you're probably not world-class at watching porn, either. Before I had internet access, I used to read a book a day, no matter how many pages were in a book. Since then, it's been about a book a year. Stupid Facebook. I suppose we're all world-class at Facebook by now.
How about sex? HAHAHAHAHAHA you must be joking. I would love to say I'm a world-class lover... Shit, now that I think about it, it really does take me a really long time, now that my hips and knees are degenerating and the pleasure I get from sex is totally overridden by the pain I feel, sex with me is like a Meatloaf song on karoake night, too long and too loud....
Finally, I can say I am world-class at something. Something I still suck at. Sex, and the close second place, apologizing for sex.
How long is that really? That's like 416-something days, almost 417. Not so long, when you put it that way, but let's get real. We all have jobs. Or we're looking for one. Shit, when you think about it, I'm a world-class seeker of jobs; I'm POSITIVE I've pounded at least 10,000 hours worth of pavement. The local city governments should tax me extra for all the wear-and-tear I've put the local sidewalks through. Damn! I shouldn't say that, that'll be a talking point in the next Republican debate, and it'll be all my fault. My point is, is doesn't sound like a long time, less than a year and a half. To become WORLD CLASS. Better than 99% of everyone else on the planet. Is that so hard?
OF COURSE IT IS. That's a huge investment in time and effort. Think about it; just having a job that pays the bills takes at least eight hours a day, forty hours a week. And that's exhausting. We bitch and bitch about it, as adults, having to work that much. And as adults, our brains have pretty much shut down to learning new things. What is that like for kids? A year and a half to an eight year old, that's like eternity. My five year old daughter can't sit through an episode of Spongebob without grabbing a toy or wanting to break a window, what does ten thousand hours mean to her? It means, of course, twenty thousand episodes of Spongebob. And a hell of a lot of broken toys and windows.
How much time have you put into your passion, whatever that passion may be? Television doesn't count, the average American spends four hours a day watching shit on television. That's 1460 hours per year. Porn? That's a question that's hard to answer, but the best I can say is that the average American watches 40 minutes of porn per WEEK. So you're probably not world-class at watching porn, either. Before I had internet access, I used to read a book a day, no matter how many pages were in a book. Since then, it's been about a book a year. Stupid Facebook. I suppose we're all world-class at Facebook by now.
How about sex? HAHAHAHAHAHA you must be joking. I would love to say I'm a world-class lover... Shit, now that I think about it, it really does take me a really long time, now that my hips and knees are degenerating and the pleasure I get from sex is totally overridden by the pain I feel, sex with me is like a Meatloaf song on karoake night, too long and too loud....
Finally, I can say I am world-class at something. Something I still suck at. Sex, and the close second place, apologizing for sex.
America Is Sexually Fucked Up: An Overly-Longish Rant
I'm not a scholar or a scientist. I didn't go to college, didn't even graduate from high school. I did get my GED, but anyone who's taken that test knows that you only have to be moderately concscious to pass that one. So forget about my official credentials. But I have been around this craphole of a planet for forty-two years now, and being a pretty astute dude I've made a lot of observations and come to a lot of conclusions. And if this seems sloppily written with a lot of mistakes and grammatical mistakes and errors in syntax, let me say I'm also not a fucking writer. I'm a bartender, have been for a long time. I've resided in a hundred different places here in America and a few places outside of the U.S. o' A. I've read probably a quarter million books in my lifetime so far, and plan to read a million by the time I'm done. None of which, I might add, were books on how to write well. Accept it and continue reading, or go watch tv or water the lawn or something; I know some shit. Plus, if you're reading this, chances are you didn't go to fucking Yale either.
One observation I've made, or one conclusion I've come to (either apply), is that America is fucked-up about sex and sexuality. For the most part. There are plenty of people that are enlightened on the subject, people who have great, healthy sex lives with people they genuinely care about and with whom have normal, healthy relationships. These people aren't hard to find. But equally easy to find are their exact opposites. Turn on C-Span or read a newspaper, ANY newspaper, local or national, or or listen to the average fuckface on the street and you're gonna read and hear and see a bunch of backasswards shit. Sex is for procreation solely, sex outside of marriage is evil. Teenagers should never have sex. God is love, but god hates fags, and they're all evil child molesters. Condoms don't protect you from disease or even prevent pregnancies. Watching porn morphs normal people into rapists and again, child molesters. The fact there are pleny of rapists and child molesters. The anus is the Devil's Playground. Britney's vag looks good. Clay Aikens is a sex symbol. Mel Gibson is what women want? Really? A whole slew of wacky shit. Of course there is plenty of rotten people who rape and abuse childred and oppress gay people and generally think shitty thoughts outside of the US, but we're so fucking convinced we're the fucking apex of civilization and history, the rest of the world has got to be wrong.
So what's the deal?
This is what I remember from school about the founding of America. The Puritans in England were being persecuted for the beliefs, so they hopped in some boats, sailed the Atlantic, made friends with the cats they met when they landed, they had some nice meals together, then all the sudden they owned the whole place from sea to shining fucking sea. Free to create they society they'd always wanted and everyone would be free, equal and happy. Seriously, that's what I remember learning. The key words being 'what I remember', of course.
Since I have learned to not listen to or trust the motherfuckers that tell and teach shit like this in schools and textbooks and Hollywood scripts and People fucking Magazine. And you don't believe them either, don't lie to me and say that you do. George Washington told a lotta fucking lies. Abraham Lincoln didn't think black people were much more than animals and in no way equal to or superior to white people in any regard. Except working really fucking hard for no pay until you die. They were awesome at that. Ben Franklin didn't invent electricity. AND he was an asshole that fucked his best friend's fiance after promising to look after her while he was gone on a job. Turns out Hoover, the guy in charge of rooting out the evil homos in this country and fucking their lives up forever was, in fact, a homo with a penchant for especially effiminate textiles. The Kennedy boys were DP'ing Marilyn Monroe every chance they got because they married the women they were supposed to, not the kinky kind they wanted. And they were on crystal meth. We KNOW this shit. I could go on and on, but if I do I'll forget what I was trying to say in the first place. You can look this shit up the same as me, lazy bastards.
What I'm trying to say is that this country was founded by sexually fucked up assholes. Were they really persecuted in the Old Country? I have to think, maybe they were being holier-than-thou assholes back home, telling people that God and Jesus didn't want them jerking off to French poetry or actually enjoying it when they fucked their wives, and people probably just told them to shut the fuck up and mind their own business and to not worry about who and what and how they were fucking or whacking off to? Just maybe. Same as you or I, right? So these tight-ass motherfuckers said fine, we'll leave and go create a Godly society somewhere else, where they're aren't any other people. A place where no one fucks or jerks off. So they came here and lo and behold, there were other people there. People who were even worse than the heathens they left behind. These people were fucking CONSTANTLY, without being married or worried about if the neighbors caught a glimpse of some bare titty and ass. AND, they didn't even KNOW WHO GOD fucking WAS! Fucking animals! These weren't even human beings! So they started slaughtering them. After accepting a bunch of dinner invitations from them. Assholes!
These guys were such assholes, they'd fucking KILL you if you were a woman that fucked around before marriage. The guys they were fucking didn't get killed, of course, they were the victims of a satanic plot. Chicks who put out were put in public stocks with their pusses and asses and tits hanging out, branded with irons, burned at stakes for fuck's sake! To save themselves and the women they were torturing from, you guessed it, the Devil.
Fast forward, a little or a lot, and things took a long time to change. In the ninteenth and part of the twentieth centuries you could get locked up in a mental institution if you got caught jerking off. Everyone was doing it, of course, everyone's always jerked off ever since there has been the opposable thumb, but if you got caught? The Devil! Makin' folks crazy. Lock 'em up! And if you were gay... I'm really sorry. Until 1861, if you were discovered to be homosexual you were put to death. After 1861 things got a little better, you were simply imprisoned for the rest of your life. Whew! Punitive measures for adultery, that's still a tricky one. A couple of recent cases pop up in my memory. A man in North Carolina (I think) sued another man for 'stealing his wife away' and was rewarded some $35,000 by the courts, and another in Maine (again, I think) where some guy came home, found his wife in bed with another man, and blew them both away with a shotgun. The local judge ruled it 'justifiable homocide'.
Again, I'm not just bashing America. I'm bashing human beings. This kind of thing has gone on all over the world and is still going on today. But since I am an American, this is the place I'm focusing on, and trying to figure out why we're so backwards about sex and sexuality. TO THIS DAY. It's election time here again, and since we have a Democrat in the White House we are constantly barraged by folks vying to be the Republican opponent come next November. Rick Santorum wants to criminalize contraception, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. Why? He's a Puritan. Because of his faith and the fact that he's a self-loathing closet homosexual. Ron Paul agrees about abortion. He's a doctor, he makes a living delivering babies. Just white babies, though. I'm pretty sure he's okay with abortions for black people. Probably sterilization, too. Newt Gingrich? Don't fucking get me started on that fat, lying hypocritical bag of mashed spuds; everything he claims to be against, he's already done himself. Mitt Romney... well, it doesn't matter what he says. Tomorrow he'll say something else. And he wears magic underwear.
NONE OF THEM KNOW A FUCKING THING ABOUT SEX. Not that they will publically admit, anyway. Newt thinks he does, but really he just knows how to con a younger, prettier and less-ill woman than the one he's married to to go down on him. They are all Puritans in an age that has left Puritanism far behind, speaking to and exploiting a desperate audience that has been fed a steady diet of fear and hatred of 'otherness' for so long that they will grasp onto any straw that promises a return to the 'good ol days', no matter how weak and fragile that straws is. And they all want to be the leaders of our country and, by all of their own statements, are willing to legislate our bodies and our sex lives.
The Good Ol' Days weren't really all that great, really. Unless you were a straight, land-owning white guy, things kinda sucked. And even those guys were probably sexually frustrated. Unless they found a way to do what they wanted, without getting caught...
Whew! This is a long one for me. And I haven't even had a beer yet!
I believe in America, though, and I believe in Americans. I believe we, as a nation, will find a way out of the morass of fear, intolerance, bigotry and superstition that we are mired in and find a way to go forward. Recongize that while we have a foot in the past, we have an obligation to take a step forward into something that possibly is unknown to us now, but something that can be far more satisfying and beautiful and fulfilling to all of us. Believers and non-believers, straight and gay, black, white, red, brown, etc., Republican, Democrats, Independants, Xboxers, PS2ers and Wii's. Cats and dogs, too. I'm really tired of listening to them fight.
As always, thanks for your kind blah blah blah.
One observation I've made, or one conclusion I've come to (either apply), is that America is fucked-up about sex and sexuality. For the most part. There are plenty of people that are enlightened on the subject, people who have great, healthy sex lives with people they genuinely care about and with whom have normal, healthy relationships. These people aren't hard to find. But equally easy to find are their exact opposites. Turn on C-Span or read a newspaper, ANY newspaper, local or national, or or listen to the average fuckface on the street and you're gonna read and hear and see a bunch of backasswards shit. Sex is for procreation solely, sex outside of marriage is evil. Teenagers should never have sex. God is love, but god hates fags, and they're all evil child molesters. Condoms don't protect you from disease or even prevent pregnancies. Watching porn morphs normal people into rapists and again, child molesters. The fact there are pleny of rapists and child molesters. The anus is the Devil's Playground. Britney's vag looks good. Clay Aikens is a sex symbol. Mel Gibson is what women want? Really? A whole slew of wacky shit. Of course there is plenty of rotten people who rape and abuse childred and oppress gay people and generally think shitty thoughts outside of the US, but we're so fucking convinced we're the fucking apex of civilization and history, the rest of the world has got to be wrong.
So what's the deal?
This is what I remember from school about the founding of America. The Puritans in England were being persecuted for the beliefs, so they hopped in some boats, sailed the Atlantic, made friends with the cats they met when they landed, they had some nice meals together, then all the sudden they owned the whole place from sea to shining fucking sea. Free to create they society they'd always wanted and everyone would be free, equal and happy. Seriously, that's what I remember learning. The key words being 'what I remember', of course.
Since I have learned to not listen to or trust the motherfuckers that tell and teach shit like this in schools and textbooks and Hollywood scripts and People fucking Magazine. And you don't believe them either, don't lie to me and say that you do. George Washington told a lotta fucking lies. Abraham Lincoln didn't think black people were much more than animals and in no way equal to or superior to white people in any regard. Except working really fucking hard for no pay until you die. They were awesome at that. Ben Franklin didn't invent electricity. AND he was an asshole that fucked his best friend's fiance after promising to look after her while he was gone on a job. Turns out Hoover, the guy in charge of rooting out the evil homos in this country and fucking their lives up forever was, in fact, a homo with a penchant for especially effiminate textiles. The Kennedy boys were DP'ing Marilyn Monroe every chance they got because they married the women they were supposed to, not the kinky kind they wanted. And they were on crystal meth. We KNOW this shit. I could go on and on, but if I do I'll forget what I was trying to say in the first place. You can look this shit up the same as me, lazy bastards.
What I'm trying to say is that this country was founded by sexually fucked up assholes. Were they really persecuted in the Old Country? I have to think, maybe they were being holier-than-thou assholes back home, telling people that God and Jesus didn't want them jerking off to French poetry or actually enjoying it when they fucked their wives, and people probably just told them to shut the fuck up and mind their own business and to not worry about who and what and how they were fucking or whacking off to? Just maybe. Same as you or I, right? So these tight-ass motherfuckers said fine, we'll leave and go create a Godly society somewhere else, where they're aren't any other people. A place where no one fucks or jerks off. So they came here and lo and behold, there were other people there. People who were even worse than the heathens they left behind. These people were fucking CONSTANTLY, without being married or worried about if the neighbors caught a glimpse of some bare titty and ass. AND, they didn't even KNOW WHO GOD fucking WAS! Fucking animals! These weren't even human beings! So they started slaughtering them. After accepting a bunch of dinner invitations from them. Assholes!
These guys were such assholes, they'd fucking KILL you if you were a woman that fucked around before marriage. The guys they were fucking didn't get killed, of course, they were the victims of a satanic plot. Chicks who put out were put in public stocks with their pusses and asses and tits hanging out, branded with irons, burned at stakes for fuck's sake! To save themselves and the women they were torturing from, you guessed it, the Devil.
Fast forward, a little or a lot, and things took a long time to change. In the ninteenth and part of the twentieth centuries you could get locked up in a mental institution if you got caught jerking off. Everyone was doing it, of course, everyone's always jerked off ever since there has been the opposable thumb, but if you got caught? The Devil! Makin' folks crazy. Lock 'em up! And if you were gay... I'm really sorry. Until 1861, if you were discovered to be homosexual you were put to death. After 1861 things got a little better, you were simply imprisoned for the rest of your life. Whew! Punitive measures for adultery, that's still a tricky one. A couple of recent cases pop up in my memory. A man in North Carolina (I think) sued another man for 'stealing his wife away' and was rewarded some $35,000 by the courts, and another in Maine (again, I think) where some guy came home, found his wife in bed with another man, and blew them both away with a shotgun. The local judge ruled it 'justifiable homocide'.
Again, I'm not just bashing America. I'm bashing human beings. This kind of thing has gone on all over the world and is still going on today. But since I am an American, this is the place I'm focusing on, and trying to figure out why we're so backwards about sex and sexuality. TO THIS DAY. It's election time here again, and since we have a Democrat in the White House we are constantly barraged by folks vying to be the Republican opponent come next November. Rick Santorum wants to criminalize contraception, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. Why? He's a Puritan. Because of his faith and the fact that he's a self-loathing closet homosexual. Ron Paul agrees about abortion. He's a doctor, he makes a living delivering babies. Just white babies, though. I'm pretty sure he's okay with abortions for black people. Probably sterilization, too. Newt Gingrich? Don't fucking get me started on that fat, lying hypocritical bag of mashed spuds; everything he claims to be against, he's already done himself. Mitt Romney... well, it doesn't matter what he says. Tomorrow he'll say something else. And he wears magic underwear.
NONE OF THEM KNOW A FUCKING THING ABOUT SEX. Not that they will publically admit, anyway. Newt thinks he does, but really he just knows how to con a younger, prettier and less-ill woman than the one he's married to to go down on him. They are all Puritans in an age that has left Puritanism far behind, speaking to and exploiting a desperate audience that has been fed a steady diet of fear and hatred of 'otherness' for so long that they will grasp onto any straw that promises a return to the 'good ol days', no matter how weak and fragile that straws is. And they all want to be the leaders of our country and, by all of their own statements, are willing to legislate our bodies and our sex lives.
The Good Ol' Days weren't really all that great, really. Unless you were a straight, land-owning white guy, things kinda sucked. And even those guys were probably sexually frustrated. Unless they found a way to do what they wanted, without getting caught...
Whew! This is a long one for me. And I haven't even had a beer yet!
I believe in America, though, and I believe in Americans. I believe we, as a nation, will find a way out of the morass of fear, intolerance, bigotry and superstition that we are mired in and find a way to go forward. Recongize that while we have a foot in the past, we have an obligation to take a step forward into something that possibly is unknown to us now, but something that can be far more satisfying and beautiful and fulfilling to all of us. Believers and non-believers, straight and gay, black, white, red, brown, etc., Republican, Democrats, Independants, Xboxers, PS2ers and Wii's. Cats and dogs, too. I'm really tired of listening to them fight.
As always, thanks for your kind blah blah blah.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Apparently, I'm One of The Most Hated People In The World
Just reading a Pew Research opinion poll and graphic that I found interesting:
(http://www.pewforum.org/Public-Expresses-Mixed-Views-of-Islam-Mormonism.aspx)
I'm pleasantly surprised at the numbers on Islam, considering the hateful climate in America lately. I would think that 43% is pretty high. But 53% unfavorable towards a group of people that, by definition, aren't even in the game? That's like 53% of Nascar fans being unfavorable towards David Beckham. I read about a study that claims that religious people trust atheists about as much as convicted rapists. I'm REALLLLY hoping that this is an instance of statistics and numbers being manipulated to prove an already existing hypothesis, but I'm not holding my breath. That study was done in Canada, anyway. Who ever believes Canadians?
And really, just saying 'Muslims' is kind of vague. There are huge differences between different groups of Muslims, just as there are amongst Christians. You think that Catholics, Methodists, Calvinists, Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, blah blah are all the same? Of course not. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many churches in town, everyone would go to the same place. There are different kinds of Muslims, there are different countries that are fundamentally Muslim, and there are differences between the Muslim people who are from the same countries as well as the same religion. Just don't ask me what the differences are. I don't pay all that much attention.
I am not a person that believes in much. I have many ideas, but not many beliefs, and I don't put much stock into other people's beliefs because usually they're just things they were taught as children by parents and teachers or other adults in general. Sorry, but they are people too, and are often wrong, because the things they 'believe' are the same things that they themselves learned as children. That's how bullshit gets perpetuated, and this ofay ain't playin' that. But just because I don't believe the same as others doesn't mean that I can't respect other people and their beliefs. I can. I respect people. I just don't agree with them on many things.
When the average American or Canadian is asked how they feel about Islam and Muslims, I don't give a shit how they reply because I know for a fact that they are responding solely on presupposition and what they've heard on the television. How many Muslims do you know? How many times have you talked to them? How many mosques are there in your town? Have you ever visited one? Ever flipped through the Koran? Just ask yourself. I'm not requiring a response, and frankly, I figure if I did, you'd lie. That's what people do.
Almost ten years ago I moved to Europe, more specifically Belgium, where there are plenty of Muslims. There's a bunch of Jews there as well; outside of New York and Israel itself, you're not going to find a larger population of Jews as you will in Antwerp. But I didn't get to know any Jews there. The Hasids of Antwerp are a clannish lot. When walking through Jewish neighborhoods, I never got so much as 'hello' or 'goed Middag' in response to my greetings, and none frequented the cafe that I worked at. Muslims, however, were all around me and pretty much never shut up.
It was the end of April, 2002 that I flew over. I was engaged to a girl from the Netherlands whose visa had expired in the summer of 2001, so in order to get married it was going to have to be over there. I didn't mind, I'd always wanted to visit Europe and the idea of actually living there was mind-blowing to a small-town, broke-ass Iowa boy like me. So I jumped at the chance. Even if I had to get married to do it...
The journey by air is fuzzy in my memory; there was the jet-lag that I'd never experienced before (it's a ten or eleven hour flight to Amsterdam), and the fact that I hate flying so much that copious amounts of alcohol are required for me to get on a damn plane in the first place. I vaguely remember a layover in Reykjavik, Iceland, and being disappointed that I didn't have the opportunity to check the place out (I'm a big fan of Bjork), and waiting for hours at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for Jetta to show up (she'd gotten bad information from the airline about when I was arriving), a couple of train and tram rides, and there we were in Antwerp. If I was Paul friggin Theroux, I'm sure I could come up with a better travel tale, but there you have it.
Now, you have to realize this is April 2002, just six months after 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just heating up, people of all nationalities and religions are a little pissed about the way things were. Already I could see signs with messages like "Bush Is A War Criminal' and 'No Blood For Oil' in windows all over the place as we traveled by street car to our apartment that Jetta had procured a month before, so right off the bat I was a little nervous. And when we finally got to our neighborhood in South Antwerp and walked the couple of blocks from the tram-stop to our apartment, EVERYWHERE I looked all I saw were Arabs standing around in groups, smoking cigarettes and talking to each other in a way that made me think violence was imminent; harsh-sounding dialogue with lots of hand gestures. I later learned that's just how they talk. They could be commenting to someone on how nice the weather is and that the fuzzy kitties their kids have at home are so adorable and life couldn't be any better, and to us Westerners it all sounds like 'I'M GONNA FUCKING CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF AND CHKUDDAH DOWN YOUR NECK.' (That's Arabic for 'shit', I think...)
We get to our tiny little chkuddah-hole of an apartment, two rooms and a kitchen for five hundred euros a month, the toilet's not even IN the apartment, we have to go out into the stairwell to get there (which led to a lot of incidences with me drunkenly peeing in the kitchen garbage can, of course), and I'm not real happy about this. I stood there in a semi-jetlagged, mostly paranoid daze looking out the window at all the Arabs in the neighborhood that she'd moved us into, and I see the street sign on the building across from me. Of course I don't speak the language, I never really did get a handle on it, but I tried sounding it out to myself--Gijzelaarsstraat, Guy-zee-lar-strat...
Me: Honey, how do you pronounce the name of the street we live on?
Jetta: Gijzelaarsstraat!
Me: Yeah, ok...and what does that mean?
Jetta: Mmmm, let me think...Oh, it means Hostage Street.
Me (in my head): WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!? YOU GET A TINY, TOO-EXPENSIVE CRACKERBOX APARTMENT, SIX MONTHS AFTER NINE ELEVEN, MY FIRST TRIP ABROAD, IN AN ARAB NEIGHBORHOOD ON FUCKING HOSTAGE STREET?!?!?!? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK WERE YOU THINKING???
Me (out loud): Hm. Interesting.
It turned out totally fine; it was a Turkish neighborhood, and though I didn't know it at that moment, Turkish people are TOTALLY cool. Their country is the guiding light of the Arab world, every Muslim country wants their government to be like Turkey's, they are allied with most Western countries (including the US), they don't hate Americans, and this may be a generalization, they seemed to me to be the CLEANEST people on Earth. Seriously, like three times per week all the women would all run hoses out of the ground floor windows, hose the sidewalk down, use these big deck-scrubbers to clean the sidewalks off, wait for them to dry, bring out all those beautiful, ornate rugs from inside, lay them out and clean them with hoses and deck-scrubbers, wait for them to dry, take them back in and THEN AGAIN clean the sidewalks the same way as before. Seriously. I never went into any of their apartments, but I imagine they were spotless. The Turkish bakeries and restaurants are exquisite and very often inexpensive. The people in working in the bakeries, restaurants and shops were always nice and polite to me, even after they found out where I was from.
I cannot say that about the Muslims from other countries that I encountered.
They have a system for shops in Belgium. There are two kinds; dagwinkels (day shops) and nachtwinkels (night shops). The dagwinkels are open from 6am-6pm, the nachtwinkels open the other twelve hours. In the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to walk from my apartment to the Penny Black, where I worked, there were at least ten of each type of shop. Which was a damned good thing, because all of them were owned-operated by Pakistanis or Afghans or Moroccans and they generally LOATHE Americans. It was a familiar, well-defined patter; I would walk into a store, grab some Jupiler or Stella Beer for me, some Kriek (cherry) beer for Jetta, then have to ask the person working, in my intolerably bad Flemish, for 'een pakje Camels and een pakje Marlboro Lights, alstublieft.' After two or three such transactions, the question-and-answer phase would begin.
Clerk: Where are you from? England?
Me: Nope, America. (I was SO tempted to say Canada, but I never did.)
Clerk: (disgusted look) AMERICA?!? Your President is a verrry, veerrryy bad man!
Me: I know! I voted for Gore! (Which was a lie, I didn't vote in the 2000 election, and the guilt is still eating away at my innards.)
At this point, the conversation would go one of two directions. I would either infer through body language and slamming cash register drawers that my business was not welcome and to leave, or they would say 'Wellll... you don't seem like a bad person, but your President is A VERY VERY BAD MAN! What's wrong with Clinton? Why isn't he still President?'
I got that a lot, from people of all nationalities.
At some point, I had to stop going into the stores that did welcome my patronage, as the word would get out that an American was shopping regularly there and soon there would be groups of men standing around and waiting for me to show up. Ribs would be nudged, necks would be craned, words would be quietly hissed, fingers pointed.... I obviously was never kidnapped or even really accosted, but that was because those would be the last times I ever went into those stores. There was always another winkel on the next block up...
That was the process in the dagwinkels on the way to work, the same process in the nachtwinkels on the way home. It was exhausting, really.
There were other instances that stand out in my memory; while wandering around and trying to learn the layout of the city, I stumbled out of an alley and onto this scene, captured by a local newspaper:
(Note: This is the wrong fucking picture. I can't find the right one, but if you look through the archives of Antwerp's Algemeen Dagblaad, you can find the right one. But this is basically what I saw as I popped out of the cobblestone alley onto the Meir.)
This was a seriously anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Arab march moving down the Meir, one of Antwerp's biggest shopping districts. The picture doesn't really make clear the size of the march; there were thousands of people, carrying signs that called for Bush's crimes to be accounted for, if not his head, and generally for Americans to burn in whatever Muslims call hell. I just lowered my head and did an about-face back into the dark alley I'd just popped out of and speedily walked home, locked the door and smoked hash until Jetta got home. She called me a pussy and said not to worry, get used to it, these kind of things happen all the time. Yaaaay!
Then there were the riots sparked by the killing of a young Moroccan, an Islamic teacher that was beaten to death by some Belgian guy who's father lived next door. The Belgian guy was a member of the Vlaamse Blok, or the Flemish Bloc, a notoriously fascist organization that thrives in the neighborhood bars and cafes of Flanders whose motto is 'Flanders Is For the Flemish'. They didn't dislike only the Moroccans and Turks that had come to their country in the 1940's and 50's to work in the mines, or the Africans who had come in the last few decades to escape civil wars and racial atrocities or the Ukrainians and Estonians and Belarusians that had flooded the local economy with cheap labor (and better-looking prostitutes also- people were apparently bored with the local labor force), they hated ME too. Because I'm not Flemish. Anyway, the Moroccan riots was big news for a bit, with it's own celebrity, a certain Abou Jahjah. Jahjah was the head of the local European Arab League and they had started patrolling Muslim neighborhoods much in the same way that the Guardian Angels patrol New York and Philadelphia, only that they're there to protect fellow Muslims. I didn't leave the house for a few days around that time. Maybe I am a pussy.
But really, what's my point? All I'm saying, how many problems would I have had if the Muslims I encountered in Belgium had they known I was an atheist? Probably a lot more. I have a feeling that if a survey were to be taken among European Muslims, the 'disapproval' numbers would be a lot higher than 53%, and though I hate to use generalizations and stereotypes, those cats like to cut people's heads off and drag bodies through streets. Or at least stone you to death when you don't follow their rules.
And Christians aren't any better, historically speaking! They might not be chopping off heads or dismembering you when encountered with dissension, but they're pretty quick with a match and a stake.
Does anyone ever take a public survey of atheists on their views? Why bother. We can't even come up with a correct number of people who don't believe in a god or some sort of spiritual force that runs the universe. Pew polls come up with a figure of about 15 million, the USA Today numbers are around 50 million. Either way, we're the most despised group of people on the planet in non-racial matters. If you ask me, based on my experiences, I would say that 4 out of 10 Muslims have been total assholes to me, and 5 out of 10 Christians. As I've mentioned, I haven't known that many Jewish people so I can't really give you a number. Brian Erlich and another kid from school, that's about it, and they were always pretty okay to me. So I guess I could say that one hundred percent of Jews, in my experience, are cool. Not exactly scientific, but there you have it. It doesn't really matter what religion someone belongs to, to me there's about a 50/50 chance that you're a dick.
In the final analysis, my only real point to all this typing, is that 53% of people, religious or otherwise, can suck my balls. Thanks for your kind attention!
I'm pleasantly surprised at the numbers on Islam, considering the hateful climate in America lately. I would think that 43% is pretty high. But 53% unfavorable towards a group of people that, by definition, aren't even in the game? That's like 53% of Nascar fans being unfavorable towards David Beckham. I read about a study that claims that religious people trust atheists about as much as convicted rapists. I'm REALLLLY hoping that this is an instance of statistics and numbers being manipulated to prove an already existing hypothesis, but I'm not holding my breath. That study was done in Canada, anyway. Who ever believes Canadians?
And really, just saying 'Muslims' is kind of vague. There are huge differences between different groups of Muslims, just as there are amongst Christians. You think that Catholics, Methodists, Calvinists, Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, blah blah are all the same? Of course not. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many churches in town, everyone would go to the same place. There are different kinds of Muslims, there are different countries that are fundamentally Muslim, and there are differences between the Muslim people who are from the same countries as well as the same religion. Just don't ask me what the differences are. I don't pay all that much attention.
I am not a person that believes in much. I have many ideas, but not many beliefs, and I don't put much stock into other people's beliefs because usually they're just things they were taught as children by parents and teachers or other adults in general. Sorry, but they are people too, and are often wrong, because the things they 'believe' are the same things that they themselves learned as children. That's how bullshit gets perpetuated, and this ofay ain't playin' that. But just because I don't believe the same as others doesn't mean that I can't respect other people and their beliefs. I can. I respect people. I just don't agree with them on many things.
When the average American or Canadian is asked how they feel about Islam and Muslims, I don't give a shit how they reply because I know for a fact that they are responding solely on presupposition and what they've heard on the television. How many Muslims do you know? How many times have you talked to them? How many mosques are there in your town? Have you ever visited one? Ever flipped through the Koran? Just ask yourself. I'm not requiring a response, and frankly, I figure if I did, you'd lie. That's what people do.
Almost ten years ago I moved to Europe, more specifically Belgium, where there are plenty of Muslims. There's a bunch of Jews there as well; outside of New York and Israel itself, you're not going to find a larger population of Jews as you will in Antwerp. But I didn't get to know any Jews there. The Hasids of Antwerp are a clannish lot. When walking through Jewish neighborhoods, I never got so much as 'hello' or 'goed Middag' in response to my greetings, and none frequented the cafe that I worked at. Muslims, however, were all around me and pretty much never shut up.
It was the end of April, 2002 that I flew over. I was engaged to a girl from the Netherlands whose visa had expired in the summer of 2001, so in order to get married it was going to have to be over there. I didn't mind, I'd always wanted to visit Europe and the idea of actually living there was mind-blowing to a small-town, broke-ass Iowa boy like me. So I jumped at the chance. Even if I had to get married to do it...
The journey by air is fuzzy in my memory; there was the jet-lag that I'd never experienced before (it's a ten or eleven hour flight to Amsterdam), and the fact that I hate flying so much that copious amounts of alcohol are required for me to get on a damn plane in the first place. I vaguely remember a layover in Reykjavik, Iceland, and being disappointed that I didn't have the opportunity to check the place out (I'm a big fan of Bjork), and waiting for hours at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for Jetta to show up (she'd gotten bad information from the airline about when I was arriving), a couple of train and tram rides, and there we were in Antwerp. If I was Paul friggin Theroux, I'm sure I could come up with a better travel tale, but there you have it.
Now, you have to realize this is April 2002, just six months after 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just heating up, people of all nationalities and religions are a little pissed about the way things were. Already I could see signs with messages like "Bush Is A War Criminal' and 'No Blood For Oil' in windows all over the place as we traveled by street car to our apartment that Jetta had procured a month before, so right off the bat I was a little nervous. And when we finally got to our neighborhood in South Antwerp and walked the couple of blocks from the tram-stop to our apartment, EVERYWHERE I looked all I saw were Arabs standing around in groups, smoking cigarettes and talking to each other in a way that made me think violence was imminent; harsh-sounding dialogue with lots of hand gestures. I later learned that's just how they talk. They could be commenting to someone on how nice the weather is and that the fuzzy kitties their kids have at home are so adorable and life couldn't be any better, and to us Westerners it all sounds like 'I'M GONNA FUCKING CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF AND CHKUDDAH DOWN YOUR NECK.' (That's Arabic for 'shit', I think...)
We get to our tiny little chkuddah-hole of an apartment, two rooms and a kitchen for five hundred euros a month, the toilet's not even IN the apartment, we have to go out into the stairwell to get there (which led to a lot of incidences with me drunkenly peeing in the kitchen garbage can, of course), and I'm not real happy about this. I stood there in a semi-jetlagged, mostly paranoid daze looking out the window at all the Arabs in the neighborhood that she'd moved us into, and I see the street sign on the building across from me. Of course I don't speak the language, I never really did get a handle on it, but I tried sounding it out to myself--Gijzelaarsstraat, Guy-zee-lar-strat...
Me: Honey, how do you pronounce the name of the street we live on?
Jetta: Gijzelaarsstraat!
Me: Yeah, ok...and what does that mean?
Jetta: Mmmm, let me think...Oh, it means Hostage Street.
Me (in my head): WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!? YOU GET A TINY, TOO-EXPENSIVE CRACKERBOX APARTMENT, SIX MONTHS AFTER NINE ELEVEN, MY FIRST TRIP ABROAD, IN AN ARAB NEIGHBORHOOD ON FUCKING HOSTAGE STREET?!?!?!? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK WERE YOU THINKING???
Me (out loud): Hm. Interesting.
It turned out totally fine; it was a Turkish neighborhood, and though I didn't know it at that moment, Turkish people are TOTALLY cool. Their country is the guiding light of the Arab world, every Muslim country wants their government to be like Turkey's, they are allied with most Western countries (including the US), they don't hate Americans, and this may be a generalization, they seemed to me to be the CLEANEST people on Earth. Seriously, like three times per week all the women would all run hoses out of the ground floor windows, hose the sidewalk down, use these big deck-scrubbers to clean the sidewalks off, wait for them to dry, bring out all those beautiful, ornate rugs from inside, lay them out and clean them with hoses and deck-scrubbers, wait for them to dry, take them back in and THEN AGAIN clean the sidewalks the same way as before. Seriously. I never went into any of their apartments, but I imagine they were spotless. The Turkish bakeries and restaurants are exquisite and very often inexpensive. The people in working in the bakeries, restaurants and shops were always nice and polite to me, even after they found out where I was from.
I cannot say that about the Muslims from other countries that I encountered.
They have a system for shops in Belgium. There are two kinds; dagwinkels (day shops) and nachtwinkels (night shops). The dagwinkels are open from 6am-6pm, the nachtwinkels open the other twelve hours. In the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to walk from my apartment to the Penny Black, where I worked, there were at least ten of each type of shop. Which was a damned good thing, because all of them were owned-operated by Pakistanis or Afghans or Moroccans and they generally LOATHE Americans. It was a familiar, well-defined patter; I would walk into a store, grab some Jupiler or Stella Beer for me, some Kriek (cherry) beer for Jetta, then have to ask the person working, in my intolerably bad Flemish, for 'een pakje Camels and een pakje Marlboro Lights, alstublieft.' After two or three such transactions, the question-and-answer phase would begin.
Clerk: Where are you from? England?
Me: Nope, America. (I was SO tempted to say Canada, but I never did.)
Clerk: (disgusted look) AMERICA?!? Your President is a verrry, veerrryy bad man!
Me: I know! I voted for Gore! (Which was a lie, I didn't vote in the 2000 election, and the guilt is still eating away at my innards.)
At this point, the conversation would go one of two directions. I would either infer through body language and slamming cash register drawers that my business was not welcome and to leave, or they would say 'Wellll... you don't seem like a bad person, but your President is A VERY VERY BAD MAN! What's wrong with Clinton? Why isn't he still President?'
I got that a lot, from people of all nationalities.
At some point, I had to stop going into the stores that did welcome my patronage, as the word would get out that an American was shopping regularly there and soon there would be groups of men standing around and waiting for me to show up. Ribs would be nudged, necks would be craned, words would be quietly hissed, fingers pointed.... I obviously was never kidnapped or even really accosted, but that was because those would be the last times I ever went into those stores. There was always another winkel on the next block up...
That was the process in the dagwinkels on the way to work, the same process in the nachtwinkels on the way home. It was exhausting, really.
There were other instances that stand out in my memory; while wandering around and trying to learn the layout of the city, I stumbled out of an alley and onto this scene, captured by a local newspaper:
(Note: This is the wrong fucking picture. I can't find the right one, but if you look through the archives of Antwerp's Algemeen Dagblaad, you can find the right one. But this is basically what I saw as I popped out of the cobblestone alley onto the Meir.)
This was a seriously anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Arab march moving down the Meir, one of Antwerp's biggest shopping districts. The picture doesn't really make clear the size of the march; there were thousands of people, carrying signs that called for Bush's crimes to be accounted for, if not his head, and generally for Americans to burn in whatever Muslims call hell. I just lowered my head and did an about-face back into the dark alley I'd just popped out of and speedily walked home, locked the door and smoked hash until Jetta got home. She called me a pussy and said not to worry, get used to it, these kind of things happen all the time. Yaaaay!
Then there were the riots sparked by the killing of a young Moroccan, an Islamic teacher that was beaten to death by some Belgian guy who's father lived next door. The Belgian guy was a member of the Vlaamse Blok, or the Flemish Bloc, a notoriously fascist organization that thrives in the neighborhood bars and cafes of Flanders whose motto is 'Flanders Is For the Flemish'. They didn't dislike only the Moroccans and Turks that had come to their country in the 1940's and 50's to work in the mines, or the Africans who had come in the last few decades to escape civil wars and racial atrocities or the Ukrainians and Estonians and Belarusians that had flooded the local economy with cheap labor (and better-looking prostitutes also- people were apparently bored with the local labor force), they hated ME too. Because I'm not Flemish. Anyway, the Moroccan riots was big news for a bit, with it's own celebrity, a certain Abou Jahjah. Jahjah was the head of the local European Arab League and they had started patrolling Muslim neighborhoods much in the same way that the Guardian Angels patrol New York and Philadelphia, only that they're there to protect fellow Muslims. I didn't leave the house for a few days around that time. Maybe I am a pussy.
But really, what's my point? All I'm saying, how many problems would I have had if the Muslims I encountered in Belgium had they known I was an atheist? Probably a lot more. I have a feeling that if a survey were to be taken among European Muslims, the 'disapproval' numbers would be a lot higher than 53%, and though I hate to use generalizations and stereotypes, those cats like to cut people's heads off and drag bodies through streets. Or at least stone you to death when you don't follow their rules.
And Christians aren't any better, historically speaking! They might not be chopping off heads or dismembering you when encountered with dissension, but they're pretty quick with a match and a stake.
Does anyone ever take a public survey of atheists on their views? Why bother. We can't even come up with a correct number of people who don't believe in a god or some sort of spiritual force that runs the universe. Pew polls come up with a figure of about 15 million, the USA Today numbers are around 50 million. Either way, we're the most despised group of people on the planet in non-racial matters. If you ask me, based on my experiences, I would say that 4 out of 10 Muslims have been total assholes to me, and 5 out of 10 Christians. As I've mentioned, I haven't known that many Jewish people so I can't really give you a number. Brian Erlich and another kid from school, that's about it, and they were always pretty okay to me. So I guess I could say that one hundred percent of Jews, in my experience, are cool. Not exactly scientific, but there you have it. It doesn't really matter what religion someone belongs to, to me there's about a 50/50 chance that you're a dick.
In the final analysis, my only real point to all this typing, is that 53% of people, religious or otherwise, can suck my balls. Thanks for your kind attention!
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
The Reason Republicans are Acting Crazy: A Crazy Conspiracy Theory
It's not just my opinion that the candidates on the Republican ticket are acting batshit looney, you can look anywhere on the internet, television or newspapers and see that people on both sides of the aisle are more than a little disturbed by behaviors and statements from almost every one of 'em. Newt wants grade school kids to do the janitorial work at schools, and said he doesn't trust the morality of anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus. Bachmann thinks poor people should starve to death, or at least pray to God for food instead of receiving social assistance. Ron Paul says that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional (if he was around in 1863, I imagine he would have said the same thing about the Emancipation Proclamation). When Herman Cain gave up his run, he quoted a Pokemon movie! Perry claimed that the BP oil spill was an 'act of God' that couldn't have been prevented. Santorum is against abortion, for any reason. Except when it's his wife having one.
Do I really need to go on? Because I could, you know. The list of insanities, inanities, falsehoods, misstatements and outright lies go ON AND ON, like a Meatloaf song on karaoke night. But chances are, if you're reading this, you have internet access and can look this shit up too. Just google 'crazy shit republican candidates have said', grab a beer, sit back and enjoy. Better make it a 12-pack. It's quite a list.
How has this happened? How could it be, that the people running for office that represents a huge portion of our population, can be so fucking nutty? Have they always been this way?
Maybe. But perhaps there's another reason. A reason that no one would ever suspect, unless you're a sort-of crazy person also, who has a good memory for weird facts and connect dots in weird ways... Yes, I'm talking about me. Don't act surprised.
In 1981, a guy in Hull, Iowa named Lawrence Vander Esch started a restaurant with a mission. A couple missions, actually. The first, publicly stated on their website www.pizzaranch.com, is "To glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in." By making pizzas. Fair enough. The website doesn't mention Vander Esch's name though; in the 'History' section it says that the idea came from a 19-year old Adrie Groeneveg (a nice Dutch name!) and his mother Lorraine, and that people tried it and liked it so it spread far and wide and is now the top pizza franchise in Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota. It's true, they're all over the place. It's huge. It's the Borg of pizza joints. My parents have given up on their Friday nights at the Steamboat Gardens in Waterloo, IA, where they'd dined weekly for about 20 years, for the Pizza Ranch right up the road.
So what's the secret behind their success? Why has Vander Esch's name been removed from the official history? Why do Republicans insist on holding their 'town hall' meetings at their franchises? Why are all acting bugnutty? WHAT'S THE DARK, SECRET CONNECTION???
I mentioned that Lawrence had a couple missions in mind when he started the place. To 'glorify God' blah blah blah. To make pizzas. To make some dough. Money, I mean. And....to collect semen.
What did I just say? you're asking. Yes, to collect semen. From his employees. In June of 1998, Vander Esch, a former Sioux City Republican Chairman and county treasurer, went up to one of the kids working for him and...well, I'll just cut-and-paste from the Iowa Court of Appeals article (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ia-court-of-appeals/1162014.html) :
"Vander Esch was a co-owner of Pizza Ranch restaurants. In June 1998 he asked a young male employee, John Doe # 1, if he would be willing to donate a sample of semen for a scientific research project.1 Doe # 1 was promised fifty dollars for a successful donation, and he agreed to the procedure.2 Vander Esch showed Doe # 1 his own penis “to make him feel comfortable.” Vander Esch then put a condom on Doe # 1, and when the procedure was finished he “milked” the penis to “get out all the semen,” then took the condom off.3 He tied the condom, and put it on ice, stating it would be sent to a laboratory for testing.4 He later told Doe # 1 his sperm count was not high enough for him to be paid for the sample.5 Similar circumstances occurred on a second occasion with Doe # 1, and on two occasions with John Doe # 2, who was also a young male employee at the restaurant. Vander Esch was never authorized by any scientific body to collect human semen samples. The victims indicated they would not have consented to these sex acts if they had known no legitimate research project existed."
WILCO TANGO FOX-fucking-TROT?????
What a dick! He not only conned these kids (who were apparently just young, dumb and full of cum) into doing something pretty gross, but didn't even pay 'em the fifty stinking dollars he'd promised them!
So what was he doing with all that spunk?
When I first heard of this story on the local public radio station (KUNI), I wrote it off to closet homosexual weirdness. This kind of stuff happens when guys don't get what they really want, for whatever reason. The guy wants some cream-of-sum-yung-buoy but is a well respected member of a tight-ass right-wing Christian society, and well, he's gotta be creative. In a strange way, I can respect that. Almost. I laughed about it and promptly forgot about it.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday I woke up and got on Facebook, same as every other day, and one of the first things I saw was an article titled "Santorum Salad: Iowa Pizza Ranch Names Signature Dish After Rick Santorum." After a comical spit-coffee-take all over my girlfriend's table, I read HuffPo's article. (For those of you who haven't googled 'santorum' yet, will you hurry up and fucking do so? I'm tired of explaining why it's so fucking funny!) Then I read more articles people had posted, and this being Iowa in the beginning of caucus time, there were a lot dedicated to crazy shit that Republicans were doing and saying.
Slowly, the mists were dispersing, thoughts were coagulating....like white blood cells on strange thoughtstream infections....
Republicans, meeting and eating at Pizza Ranch....Santorum Salad....Founder charged with bilking male employees out of their hard-earned semen....Michelle Bachmann's crazy eyes....chicken in white sauce....condoms on ice.....Rick Perry's haircut....Newt crazy-fucking women like James Bond....man-on-dog love....Cain and his stable of albino mares....Marcus Bachmann's white-knuckle prayers....Santorum and Perry caught slapping dickheads in an airport bathroom stall (ok, I made that one up).....hoardes of overweight Iowans in line at salad bars....John Doe #1, 2, 3, 4, 5.....frothiness....
OH MY GOD, REPUBLICANS ARE ALL SECRETLY GAY, PIZZA RANCH IS SERVING SEMEN, IOWANS ARE GOBBLING IT UP, AND IT'S MAKING EVERYONE LOONEY TUNES!
If there is another explanation, please provide it to me! I realize this all sounds crazy, but then again, so is laissez faire and trickle-down economics. If it turns out that I AM crazy, the next president now has the power to detain me indefinitely. As always, thanks for your kind attention!
Do I really need to go on? Because I could, you know. The list of insanities, inanities, falsehoods, misstatements and outright lies go ON AND ON, like a Meatloaf song on karaoke night. But chances are, if you're reading this, you have internet access and can look this shit up too. Just google 'crazy shit republican candidates have said', grab a beer, sit back and enjoy. Better make it a 12-pack. It's quite a list.
How has this happened? How could it be, that the people running for office that represents a huge portion of our population, can be so fucking nutty? Have they always been this way?
Maybe. But perhaps there's another reason. A reason that no one would ever suspect, unless you're a sort-of crazy person also, who has a good memory for weird facts and connect dots in weird ways... Yes, I'm talking about me. Don't act surprised.
In 1981, a guy in Hull, Iowa named Lawrence Vander Esch started a restaurant with a mission. A couple missions, actually. The first, publicly stated on their website www.pizzaranch.com, is "To glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in." By making pizzas. Fair enough. The website doesn't mention Vander Esch's name though; in the 'History' section it says that the idea came from a 19-year old Adrie Groeneveg (a nice Dutch name!) and his mother Lorraine, and that people tried it and liked it so it spread far and wide and is now the top pizza franchise in Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota. It's true, they're all over the place. It's huge. It's the Borg of pizza joints. My parents have given up on their Friday nights at the Steamboat Gardens in Waterloo, IA, where they'd dined weekly for about 20 years, for the Pizza Ranch right up the road.
So what's the secret behind their success? Why has Vander Esch's name been removed from the official history? Why do Republicans insist on holding their 'town hall' meetings at their franchises? Why are all acting bugnutty? WHAT'S THE DARK, SECRET CONNECTION???
I mentioned that Lawrence had a couple missions in mind when he started the place. To 'glorify God' blah blah blah. To make pizzas. To make some dough. Money, I mean. And....to collect semen.
What did I just say? you're asking. Yes, to collect semen. From his employees. In June of 1998, Vander Esch, a former Sioux City Republican Chairman and county treasurer, went up to one of the kids working for him and...well, I'll just cut-and-paste from the Iowa Court of Appeals article (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ia-court-of-appeals/1162014.html) :
"Vander Esch was a co-owner of Pizza Ranch restaurants. In June 1998 he asked a young male employee, John Doe # 1, if he would be willing to donate a sample of semen for a scientific research project.1 Doe # 1 was promised fifty dollars for a successful donation, and he agreed to the procedure.2 Vander Esch showed Doe # 1 his own penis “to make him feel comfortable.” Vander Esch then put a condom on Doe # 1, and when the procedure was finished he “milked” the penis to “get out all the semen,” then took the condom off.3 He tied the condom, and put it on ice, stating it would be sent to a laboratory for testing.4 He later told Doe # 1 his sperm count was not high enough for him to be paid for the sample.5 Similar circumstances occurred on a second occasion with Doe # 1, and on two occasions with John Doe # 2, who was also a young male employee at the restaurant. Vander Esch was never authorized by any scientific body to collect human semen samples. The victims indicated they would not have consented to these sex acts if they had known no legitimate research project existed."
WILCO TANGO FOX-fucking-TROT?????
What a dick! He not only conned these kids (who were apparently just young, dumb and full of cum) into doing something pretty gross, but didn't even pay 'em the fifty stinking dollars he'd promised them!
So what was he doing with all that spunk?
When I first heard of this story on the local public radio station (KUNI), I wrote it off to closet homosexual weirdness. This kind of stuff happens when guys don't get what they really want, for whatever reason. The guy wants some cream-of-sum-yung-buoy but is a well respected member of a tight-ass right-wing Christian society, and well, he's gotta be creative. In a strange way, I can respect that. Almost. I laughed about it and promptly forgot about it.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday I woke up and got on Facebook, same as every other day, and one of the first things I saw was an article titled "Santorum Salad: Iowa Pizza Ranch Names Signature Dish After Rick Santorum." After a comical spit-coffee-take all over my girlfriend's table, I read HuffPo's article. (For those of you who haven't googled 'santorum' yet, will you hurry up and fucking do so? I'm tired of explaining why it's so fucking funny!) Then I read more articles people had posted, and this being Iowa in the beginning of caucus time, there were a lot dedicated to crazy shit that Republicans were doing and saying.
Slowly, the mists were dispersing, thoughts were coagulating....like white blood cells on strange thoughtstream infections....
Republicans, meeting and eating at Pizza Ranch....Santorum Salad....Founder charged with bilking male employees out of their hard-earned semen....Michelle Bachmann's crazy eyes....chicken in white sauce....condoms on ice.....Rick Perry's haircut....Newt crazy-fucking women like James Bond....man-on-dog love....Cain and his stable of albino mares....Marcus Bachmann's white-knuckle prayers....Santorum and Perry caught slapping dickheads in an airport bathroom stall (ok, I made that one up).....hoardes of overweight Iowans in line at salad bars....John Doe #1, 2, 3, 4, 5.....frothiness....
OH MY GOD, REPUBLICANS ARE ALL SECRETLY GAY, PIZZA RANCH IS SERVING SEMEN, IOWANS ARE GOBBLING IT UP, AND IT'S MAKING EVERYONE LOONEY TUNES!
If there is another explanation, please provide it to me! I realize this all sounds crazy, but then again, so is laissez faire and trickle-down economics. If it turns out that I AM crazy, the next president now has the power to detain me indefinitely. As always, thanks for your kind attention!
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