The Insomnia Report

Something new...

2009-02-01T21:02:00.003-06:00

Hello, anyone anywhere who might still be reading this...

I've been off the blogs for awhile, because my glamorous job in Corporate America gives me little time to write fun stuff. I also got sort of bored with the whole "blogging culture", which often involves acting like an expert on everything and putting out something new each day even when you'd rather sit around listening to Frank Sinatra.

Still, I knew that one day the internet would draw me back in.

Melissa and I have a new team blog that you can look at here. It promises to be magical. I consider it sort of the Regis and Kathy Lee of the internet.

Only the most pressing, spectacular, and historic news stories will move me from my blogging stupor!

2007-08-06T23:14:00.000-05:00

And, as I'm sure my fellow Minnesotans know, one of those stories has just recently occured. No, I do not wish to discuss the bridge collapse here. That's been covered in mind-numbing detail elsewhere. I don't know anything about bridges or how they might fall down, and so my only contribution to that discussion would be the same as anyone's: it's terrible and frightening and should never happen again. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Instead, I want to talk about the guy who had his balls cut off by mysterious and not-entirely-competent "medical" personnel who then vanished and are now a fugitive semi-professional castration team. If there's something I want to stress to my entire readership of seven people, it's this: I do not support rogue bands of anonymous gelders rampaging through the streets of my fair hometown, slicing away people's testicles without so much as the slightest kind of credential. In fact, I'm strongly against it. I'm so firmly against it that I would support a law preventing amateurs from cutting off people's balls, no matter if the person in question requested such a service. You see, I take a "hard line" on non-certified man-nugget removal. It is a dangerous and bloody affair, and it should be dealt with harshly. If strict fines do not prove effective of containing this menace, I would even support jail time for repeat offenders. This is the sort of thing society simply can't turn a blind eye to.

Putting humiliation in its proper perspective...

2007-07-12T21:16:00.000-05:00

I am a silly person. I thought it was embarrassing when I farted in the lake at family Fourth of July. I thought it was embarrassing when my grandma brought me to Hooters for my 19th birthday. I thought it was embarrassing when the naughty metal girl in eighth grade asked me if I liked her breasts. I also, in retrospect, recognize that it was embarrassing for me to have told her "no" because I thought that any other answer would be impolite.

In short, I'm easily embarrassed. Ask anyone. I blush when a slight breeze falls over my face. I'm half-Scandinavian. I have a very exaggerated sense of decorum.

That's why it pleases me to know that, unlike a certain Republican state representative from Florida, I will never be arrested in a men's room after offering an undercover cop $20 and a blowjob. Because that's not just embarrassing. That's fucking embarrassing.

And the worst part is, of course, that he didn't offer to pay $20 for a blowjob. No, he offered $20 to give a blowjob. Which is just sad. I suppose, though, if you're the sort of guy who might enjoy being slurped at in a public men's room by a ragged looking low-level Republican, it's a pretty good deal. Not only do you get several sweet minutes of a state representative's mouth on your man-bits, you also get some cash out of the deal. That's a pretty productive trip to the shitter, actually.

And I should probably state right out that I really don't care if people want to suck each other off in men's rooms. I'm a hedonist, and that sort of thing simply doesn't bother me that much. Let the Republican state representatives from Florida to Alaska go nuts with it I say, bothering the privates of undercover policemen the world 'round. At least it keeps them occupied.

Let's Talk About "Scooter" Libby...

2007-07-03T20:41:00.000-05:00

I don't give half a watery sauerkraut fart about "Scooter" Libby.

Music Kriticism Korner!

2007-07-02T20:41:00.001-05:00

Alright. I guess I always knew that Brigitte Bardot was the greatest actress the world has ever seen. But before buying this CD, I had absolutely no idea that she was also the greatest musician in the history of all time. Some people prefer Beethoven, Maria Callas, or Wings. These people are mistaken, and dumb besides. Has silly little Handel ever composed a tune as pretty and perfect as "Une Histoire de Plage", which my vague understanding of French tells me is a charming fable concerning Ms. Bardot's visit to the beach? Have Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever put together a ditty as pleasant as "L'appareil a sous", which features nameless Gallic background singers going "ba-ba-ba" as Ms. Bardot makes indecipherable (to me at least) kittenish noises? No, they haven't. Why haven't they? Because they're just not as good as Brigitte, musically-speaking.

Oh, I can hear the voices of petty minds already. They're saying something about how Ms. Bardot didn't even write her own songs, how she was just a ridiculously-proportioned pin-up whose albums were just basically there to give lame-ass losers an excuse to masturbate to the picture on the cover. People who would say such things are not worth listening to. They have no dignity, and they probably spend their days listening to Scandinavian death metal and supporting terrorism. Did Frank Sinatra write his own songs? Didn't a lot of old ladies need to envision Frank Sinatra in bed with them in order to make the marital act non-repulsive? Well, how come Frankie is a showered with accolades while Brigitte is treated as a bosomy lightweight?

Because of the wretchedness of humanity, that's why.

P.S.: Did you know Brigitte Bardot is a scary right-winger nowadays? It's true!

Does anyone still read this thing?

2007-06-18T22:55:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone. Is anyone out there?

Two announcements

2006-10-24T00:16:00.000-05:00

Announcement the first

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this website, and I’ve gotten far more readers than I ever thought possible. It is odd to think that countless strangers came from all over the world to partake of fake country songs, shameless invective, and the implacable mystique of Sweet Daddy Lovedrops. I hope that all of you have enjoyed coming here, and it would make me happy to know that I’ve given you a few laughs, introduced you to new artists/writers/musicians, or simply made your workday go by a little quicker . It was a blast for me, and your comments made it even more of a thrill.

Nonetheless, over the past couple of weeks I’ve grown less and less enthusiastic about keeping up this site. So I’ve decided to stop doing it for a little while. I don’t want what should be a fun hobby to become a burden, and I’m really looking forward to reacquainting myself with some of my less solitary hobbies. Also, I’m deep in a job search right now and I really need to focus on finding a better, more creative, more lucrative career, a career where I won’t get chairs thrown at me quite so often.

So, this is goodbye for now. I’m going to leave the page up, and I’m sure I’ll put up posts every now and then, but right now I don’t plan on continuing the Insomnia Report as a daily concern. I’ll still write each and every day, but from now on my emphasis is going to be on longer, more thought-out stories and articles. If I find a publisher for any of these, I’ll let you know.

Thank you very much for reading. You were, are today, and always will be the sexiest, most intelligent, best smelling, and wittiest blog audience in the history of the universe.

Announcement the second

None of you got the Robert Bly contest right. I wrote number two and number three. Still, there were valiant—if deeply flawed---efforts all around.

An Insomnia Report contest: find the fake Robert Bly!

2006-10-23T00:55:00.000-05:00

Okay. Here's the deal: as a follow-up to my earlier attack on quasi-talent Robert Bly and his big payday, I have decided to throw a contest. What follows are six snippets of poetry. Four are legitimate Bly pieces. Two have been have written by me, a man with no discernable poetic gifts. Try and guess which ones are which and place your answers in the comments. If you're right, you win. What do you win? Well, you win the right to call yourself a winner, which ought to be prize enough for anyone, I should think.

Anyway, here goes:

1) Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

2) Under the patio’s peat-colored lamps
We dance a close tarantelle
You wear that gingham dress I love
Just as you love my cheap flannel shirt
Against your cheek

Raw like the beard I could never grow
Your father’s beard, speckled with seeds
That blew across the mustard fields
On his everyday journeys back to you
From the cannery

Does my manhood fall shy of his relentless fidelity?
Can my body’s gifts ever balk in you
His dignity, his battles, his poverty,
His gentle and inscrutable surcease?

3) Lo, did Ozymandias with grim hands
Raise forth a citadel in your warring
Minds, to fall victim to our age’s squalor?

The battle is join’d, the call is heard
Yet the ships list in the harbor
The generals, broken by television static

How fearful is your folly now!
Brave men, whisper me a ghazal
In Persia’s wisdom I now subsist!

4) Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.

5) The dying bull is bleeding on the mountain!
But inside the mountain, untouched
By the blood,
There are antlers, bits of oak bark,
Fire, herbs are thrown down.

6) I am still a mouse nibbling the chocolate of sadness.
I am an Albigensian reading Bulgarian script.
I am a boy walking across England by night.

Each time we fold in the fingers of our left hand
We bring our ancestors close to each other again,
So they can lie on top of each other in the bed at night.

Soon our grandfather and grandmother will kiss
Once more. Then death will come in his Jewish hat,
And tell Noah to start praising the rainy night.

A corrupt, venal, ignorant, vicious, duplicitous, dangerous band of bad spellers...

2006-10-22T13:53:00.000-05:00

That's the United States House of Representatives for you...

"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life...I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."

--former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, recently convicted of taking over $2 million in bribes and currently residing in prison, in a letter to a journalist who covered his crimes.

Iron John and the Ennui Cartel

2006-10-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the University of Minnesota intends to give author Robert Bly three-quarters of a million dollars for his “archives”. Let me break this down for you people: that’s ten respectable yearly salaries, a hundred generous grants, or a thousand not-too-shabby story prizes—all for the same price as the contents of one overrated windbag’s supply closet. Nice work, academic lit types. Way to be responsible stewards of the public interest.

But perhaps it’s wrong to speak of any sort of “interest” when discussing the United States writing scene. Because, while the stories and poems and novels they produce are many things, “interesting” is definitely not one of them. We are living in an era where to be a “living giant” of this nation’s literature means that, nine times out of ten, you are a complete waste of everyone’s time: dull and pretentious, arrogant and sentimental, comfortable and dismal.

The literature and creative writing departments of our universities deserve a lot of the blame for this. For decades now, they’ve lavished praise and professorships on authors who dress up tedium with tortured syntax and mystical posturing, the sort who—like Bly—promulge the stereotype that contemporary literature is a pursuit suited only for pseudo-intellectuals in silly vests who go into raptures at the prospect of yet another eight page description of a snowy day.

Bookish types like to fret about how no one reads anymore. What they usually mean is that nobody reads “serious” writing. The problem, however, is that so much “serious” writing is actually little more than drippy kitsch. The preferred “voice” is warbly and self-important, the pace is slower than a quaaluded gopher crawling through glue, and if there are plots at all they’ve probably already been done a hundred thousand times before. In many respects, Bly neither exceeds or falls shy of this low standard. His early poetry is competent, his political work was commendable (even if undertaken in that self-righteous wannabe-shaman mode so popular with artists who have heard themselves called “great” too many times), and the works he chooses to translate suggest wide-ranging interests.

It is mainly his non-fiction philosopolemical mumbo-jumbo that reveals him as one of our premier unintentional comedians masquerading as a legitimate artist. A brief sampling from his ridiculous best seller “Iron John” will suffice to illustrate what I’m talking about:

Sometimes in a love affair, the lovers make love with the Wild Man—and Wild Woman—right in the room; and if we are those lovers, we may feel certain body cells turn gold that we thought were made entirely of lead. Lovers and saints feel their fingertips are golden, all right; they may sense in themselves a freedom from ordinary limits for days or months.

An artist feels a curious mood of intensity when he or she is working on an art object, a poem or a painting or a sculpture; we could say that the sacred pond is right there in the studio; and the artist becomes capable of thoughts and feelings much wilder than he or she ever experiences in shut down days. The fingers holding the pen or brush turn gold, and we suddenly see amazing images, and realize what we are really good at.

The Wild Man here amounts to an invisible presence, the companionship of the ancestors and the great artists among the dead. A love poem or an ecstatic meditation poem is really an ingenious way to preserve memory of the moment when the fingertip turns gold.

If you want to read page after page of this stuff, Bly’s your guy. The ponderous mixing of bunkum with the banal, the weak observations dressed up as philosophy, and the endless, earnest attempts to render common knowledge as sacred secrets—that’s the Wild Man’s main modus operandi right there.

One of the common tics of today’s literature is to take some weak shit off the top of your head and try and sell it as a “quirky” observation. Gullible and swoony readers think that this sort of thing demonstrates that their cherished author exists on a higher imaginative plane, but it’s really just the flouncy hand gestures of amateur magicians attempting to hypnotize a nursing home. As befits his reputation, Bly can show all the pikers how this presto change-o routine is really done:

Grandiose ascenders sometimes dream of rising in an elevator that is attached to the outside of a building, but when they get to an upper floor, they often find themselves with no entrance to the building. The flying man usually likes women, but may shrink a woman to keep her in a bottle so that he can carry her in his pocket. The young peur aeternus men are by no means negative, they love spirit and embody much of the spiritual energy in the nation. Their ascensions bring many blessings to the culture. Without them, the American culture would probably thicken and harden into concrete. So the grandiose ascender is a complicated person.

Whatever.

This is the author who Jim Lenfesty calls, “the greatest living international [literary] asset in the United States”, the guy who the University library spokesman believes “really is one of the greatest writers alive”. I’m sorry, but that’s just fucking sad. They blew $775,000 on a bunch of detritus from a writer no one will remember in thirty years; a writer who might inspire these doughty Wild Men of the faculty lounge, but only inspires bored giggles from anyone with any taste.

P.S.: If you want to read about a real great American artist, why don’t you go on over here and find out what Sonny Rollins is up to these days. Because, frankly, there is more beauty, wildness and truth in ten bars of Sonny Rollins’ saxophone than there is in a million pages of Robert Bly doggerel.

Poisonous as Hell, part three:

2006-10-19T22:24:00.000-05:00

The Black Widow Spider

Allow me to present my version of the perfect wedding night.

First, of course, my beautiful bride and I will be feted by all our friends and family. There will be tears, there will laughter, there will be dancing, and there will be cake. Formal wear will be required, and those who choose—as so many do in these corrupt days—to sport the ridiculous khaki-clad “business casual” look will be treated to withering stares and smaller-than-usual pieces of Chicken Kiev. I shall be at my most witty, and I will have gotten a haircut at some point within the preceding three weeks. And, to use the SAT form of analogy, my wife will be to gorgeous as Evander Holyfield is to boxing, as Kool Moe Dee is to hip-hip, as Google is to search engines. To be more precise, she will be a witches’ cauldron of hotness. Her hotness, mind you, is not the simple and transparent hotness of some ordinary Czech supermodel, but instead the kind of hotness that accrues from compassion, kindness, insight, wit and brilliance. That isn’t to say, however, that the Czech supermodel kind of hotness will not be present in my wife. It will be. Still, it will be merely one luminous facet in the gigantic diamond of my wife’s inviolate essence.

Several times during the evening, I will turn to her and say things such as that. Things that can’t help but make her mist up at the glory of it all. As the assembled company clink on their wine flutes, we will kiss again and again, and I will not be at all reluctant to bring forth “the tongue”. I will sing Belgian folk songs in her honor, I will feed her bonbons and save her the trouble of chewing by moving her lower jaw around. If anyone makes an inappropriate comment in her presence, I will strike them roughly and have my best man throw them out. She is my dulcet cranberry cream puff from heaven, after all, and I shan’t countenance any crudeness or indelicacy that might sully her memories of the sweet, sweet evening.

But it is the night after where the most lasting impressions will be made.

Our bridal chamber will be appointed in an elegant Provençal style. There will be red wine from the state of Kentucky and there will be fresh-cut flowers in vases made out of plastic that very much resembles real crystal. On the goose-down pillow will be a single truffle, placed there beforehand by a professional truffle-placer brought over from Turkey specifically for this purpose. He will be waiting in the closet in case the truffle slides away from its perfectly-symmetrical position on the pillow. Once my love has eaten the truffle, he may leave. He will be well compensated for his trouble, and tipped extravagantly if he slips out without calling too much attention to himself. Especially if my wife and I are already engaged in the act of physical congress or, as I like to call it, “the naughty what-have-you”.

But before I get to that, I have to bring up a pertinent detail about the bed itself. There will be silk sheets upon it, but there will be no blanket. This is important. At first, however, my wife will be too twitterpated to notice, largely because of the awe she feels in the presence of my freshly-waxed chest and my clever “day of the week” boxer shorts. I will kneel beside her and, alone at last, I will recite her a poem I have laboriously composed in her honor. Discretion prevents me from sharing this poem with you, my anonymous audience, but I can mention that it’s title will probably be “Across A Room Filled With Lesser Women”. Or perhaps “Givin’ Up The Yup-Yup”. Or perhaps “Panoply In Petunia”. The title has not been decided yet.

Regardless, I will then commence to giving her “the business” every which way. Modesty forbids me from relating the styles, velocities, and positions we shall employ, but perhaps the essence of the episode can be gleaned by the following series of metaphors: an eagle wheeling in the sky, a dolphin gliding under the current, a cuckoo clock going through its routine every three minutes, a lone fisherman hauling in his nets, and a thousand dandelions blooming in a dewy meadow. It will be the sort of unbound, unhinged eroticism that would destroy, or at least gravely embarrass, most women. But my wife will enjoy it. Because she’s special.

With this accomplished, we will coo endearments into each others’ ears for at least five hours. Then we will settle in for a long slumber. But there is a problem. My darling little she-sparrow will be cold! This is partially due to the copious sweating brought on by the events of the preceding paragraph, but it is also the result of unseen confederates turning down the thermostat at just the right moment.

“Oh, are you chilly, my delicious ripe apricot of a brand new wife?” I will ask, with the utmost sincerity and solicitousness. When she answers in the affirmative, I will immediately reach beneath the bed and draw out a large Tupperware container. Within this container will be a heavy comforter woven from fibers which manage to be both incredibly soft and awesomely resilient. I will tuck her in under this rare piece of bedding and sidle in next to her, locking her in a manful embrace.

As we lay there, the tinglings that naturally follow six and a half hours of lovemaking ecstacy will naturally subside, replaced by newer, rarer, and far stranger tinglings. The blanket will caress all our naked crevasses, it will press itself to us and warm our chilling bodies with its curious alien warmth. In fact. It will be as if the blanket itself is alive and intent upon massaging us into slumber. “Do you feel that, honey?” I will ask.

“Mmmmm...” she will say, because she’s too happy to form entire words.

“Do you know why the blanket does that, darling?” I will ask then, just as I notice her eyelids trembling in the tell-tale way that suggests sleep is nigh.

“Mmmmm...” she will repeat, and I will plant a delicate kiss on her forehead.

“Because I took out the stuffing and replaced it with two hundred thousand black widow spiders. Because their little legs are so fleet, so warm, so gentle. And because I love you...” I will say at last, and then finally we will both drift off to sleep beneath our writhing, arachnid-filled blanket, dreaming in tandem of the glorious life that will await us only if I didn’t make any mistakes in sewing up the hole that I fed our deadly pets into...

Poisonous as Hell, part two:

2006-10-18T21:48:00.000-05:00

The Bushmaster Snake

In the words of the great interactional theorist Ricki Lake, you think you all that. You have a BA from Harvard, an MA from Princeton, and a PhD. from Yale. Your hobby is investment banking, but your true passion is transcribing the oral tradition of the nomadic Berbers of the Rif Mountains. You own lofts in Paris, Manhattan, Kuala Lumpur and you’ve just negotiated yourself a good price on a pied a terre in Cleveland. You’ve published three volumes of romantic poetry and your screenplay is currently one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. You feel good about yourself, but no one who knows you would ever dream of calling you an egotist. They’d point to the seven hours a day you put in doing charitable work and they’d mention your groundbreaking research into natural water purification methods. Your selflessness, your compassion, and your self-deprecating sense of humor charm all those who meet you, even those who might otherwise be jealous of your wealth and good looks or dismissive or your diverse intellectual achievements. It would not be a stretch to say that everyone loves you.

Everyone, that is, except for the bushmaster snake of southern Guyana. In this creature, you have met your match. It completes Ms. Lake’s groundbreaking formula by reminding you that, in the end, while you may think that you all that, you actually ain’t all that. In other words, it is the nemesis to your hubris. The largest venomous snake found in the Western Hemisphere, the Bushmaster is a serpent which meets your achievements with silence, your generosity with defensive coiling, and your cultivation with sharp, poison-dripping fangs.

Perhaps it was foolhardy of you to venture into that untamed wilderness in search of a root which might one day be used to treat dengue fever. Perhaps you should have heeded local advice and stayed clear of the area known in the Guyanese argot as “The Place of the Really Mean Snake”. But a sense of adventure gripped you, didn’t it? A voice in your head told you that only risk-takers reap rewards in our modern world, that you’ve never settled for the safe in your life and you aren’t about to start now. Looking back on it, that was sort of a mistake, wasn’t it? Because it put you on a collision course with the rarely seen, reclusive bushmaster. It never would have found you in Monaco, Geneva, Aspen or Branson, Missouri, but you—in your damnable arrogance—had to go stomping right up to it in the heart of its inhospitable territory. Nice work, Dr. Dumbass.

Now, while the bushmaster is far from an intellectual, it would be wrong to say that it is a mindless, instinct-driven snake like the anaconda or the reticulated python. In fact, the Latin name of the bushmaster gives us hints as to it’s mental pursuits: Lachesis muta, meaning “mute fate”. This simple statement of purpose reminds us that, as we go willy-nilly through our lives, the future is always looming above, silent and judging. Despite all the scientific and artistic advances humans have accomplished, all the efforts we have put towards ordering our societies and our lives, fate lies in wait for us all, unmaking what we make, dismantling what we build, and wiping our fingerprints forever from the sheer, slippery hourglass that is our universe. More practically, “mute fate” also refers to the fact that pretty much everyone the bushmaster bites winds up dying. And dying in a way that perhaps can best be described as “hellish”.

Certainly, in the course of your studies, you have been appraised of the varying toxins and poisons that snakes can inject into your body. Even as you writhe on that South American forest floor, you understand that the bushmaster is of the viperid family, which (unlike the gentler elapids with their predilection for subtle neurotoxins) tend to use proteolytic venoms. These chemicals, you probably recall, not only immobilize you, but also begin the digestive process before the snake even starts to eat you. Now, since you’re not a small woodland creature or a bird, the bushmaster will not devour you, but it’s poison doesn’t know that as it goes circulating through your bloodstream and tissues, melting whatever it comes across, causing massive internal bleeding and rapid, catastrophic organ failure.

It’s really a pity. You’ll never hear the sound of Horowitz’s piano again, you’ll never experience the grandeur of a Rothko canvas again, you’ll never taste the salt air of the Mediterranean again. You had a good run, it is true, but the misery of your passing blots so much of it out. There, where the tree cover is so thick the sun comes down only in narrow streaks, you cannot remember the joy of discovery that once motivated you, nor can you recall your many happy friendships and love affairs. You think nothing of your many diverse accomplishments. You think only of the burning agony of your body being corroded from the inside out. As your heartless killer slithers away, your incredible mind becomes capable of only one thing: screaming.

Scream away, why don’t you? It won’t do any good, but it can’t hurt. It’ll give you something to while away the time before your heart forgets to beat and your lungs forget to billow and all your great potential comes crashing into the darkness that waits for all of us. Now your gym-toned body will bloat in the sun and then ooze away into a brackish, skin-colored puddle. Your corpse will grow moss and suckle insects. As the years go by, you’ll be remembered fondly by everyone, by the mighty and the lowly, by baronesses and by the tiny, shrew-like creatures that now use your naked ribcage as shelter during the rainy season.

Gird your loins for the inevitable Republican blame orgy

2006-10-18T01:08:00.000-05:00

While nothing’s certain yet, it sure looks like the Republican party is going to suffer some losses in November. As a Democrat and as an American, this makes me happy. They’ve had their six years to run this country and all they’ve done is plunder, deceive and screw up. For them, defeat will be well-deserved. It’s too early to say for sure, but one could argue that widespread rejection of Republican candidates signifies the public’s (late) repudiation of movement conservatism.

The way I see it, a strain of conservatism, in the old-school sense, is woven into the American character. This plays out in most people’s reasonable disdain for government intrusion into private matters, their valorization of individuality, and their skepticism towards collective action. This is all fine and good, especially when balanced by a progressive, society-oriented counterforce. Movement conservatism, however, is a different beast entirely. This is where you get all your “why don’t we get rid of all these taxes?” crypto-libertarians, your “the U.S. can bomb anyone it wants because it’s special” warmongers, your “Democrats are making nookie with Osama Bin Laden” thinktank cretins, and your “angry Jesus can’t wait until you’re in hell” Bible-thumpers. These people may represent a small, extremist sliver of belief, but they’ve been awfully influential of late.

This is too bad, because if they didn’t wield so much power, they’d be absolutely fucking hilarious. These are the people who believe that the government that governs best governs solely on behalf of their interests. They’re the ones who feel that compromise is for clowns and the best way to win an argument is to call your opponents traitors. Few in number, perhaps, but louder than anyone else, they roam the airwaves and the internet in search of new enemies to scream at, new rugged right-wing idols to venerate, and new issues to drag into the sewer. A wacky bunch, to be sure, and one that’s overdue for diminishment back to fringe cult status.

One election won’t accomplish this, of course, but it’s a start. And, at the very least, their fevered blame-fixing will be a goldmine of unintentional comedy. You see, what distinguishes the movement conservative from your run-of-the-mill everyday conservative is that the latter considers his or her political philosophy as just that—a system of beliefs that sometimes corresponds, sometimes conflicts, and sometimes compromises with the greater world. Movement conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be fanatical. They don’t have opinions, they have dogma. They don’t have facts and perspective, they have blind faith and suspicion. They don’t have passion, they’ve got rage and fear. Conservatism, to these people, is a formula that never fails, a sacred scripture handed down from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush before he started being such a fuck-up. It is the fountainhead of all civic good—adhering to its precepts doesn’t just make you wise, it makes you virtuous, courageous, and—most importantly—the biggest victim history has ever seen.

This is why, when a movement conservative loses, it’s never due to their ideology’s lack of appeal and it’s lack of appealing spokespeople. No, it’s always a betrayal, a conspiracy, a spot of dirty pool played by adversaries without conscience or decency. Conservatism, to these people, is perfect. It never fails. Each setback is simply an opportunity to redouble the invective and the scorn hurled at the other side, simply more proof of their all-powerful evil ways.

In anticipation of this crazy-talk lighting up the internet in a few weeks, allow me to make some predictions as to who the main conservative-betraying culprits will be, in descending order from most likely to least.

1) The Media

In the right-winger’s head, the relationship between conservatism and the mass media is one of the greatest "high school dork versus bully" dramas the world has ever seen. Conservatives are cast as the loyal, earnest, straight-A student who, if he has a fault at all, it’s that he’s just too noble to sink to the same level as his appalling tormentor. Meanwhile, the cruel media endlessly picks on our poor conservative, mercilessly ridiculing it’s policy prescriptions and it’s best candidates. Again and again, conservatism is pantsed by the media. Again and again, it’s head gets stuffed into the toilet bowl of rhetoric and it’s science products get dirty words magic markered on them.

Eventually, however, it starts to look like—despite all this brutal attacks on its self-esteem—conservatism might get to go to prom with the prettiest girl in school (otherwise known as the American public). But, uh-oh!, just as conservatism is going up to her, all confidence and deep-seated valor, to ask for the favor of her company, in slinks the media, drunk on cynicism and Ivy League elitism, and announces to the whole room that conservatism eats his own booger and sometimes leaks a little poo into his underwear.

When something like this happens, you’ve gotta expect a little righteous anger from the wounded party. The whole analogy falls to shit, however, when you realize just how comfortably ensconced in the mass media many movement conservatives are. No matter, though: it’s always a kick watching televised millionaires like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter inveigh against elitists.

2) The Democratic Party

Actually, the media and the Democrats are pretty interchangeable in the movement conservative’s mind. They’re both reliable founts of evil, what with their eternal refusal to validate every single right-wing notion that some crank comes up with. In a lot of the more paranoid stuff, however, the Democrats come off as not mere duplicitous scalawags, but as master deceivers. This is a party, drunk on gay sex and Stalin’s blood, that doesn’t think twice about smearing the innocent or contriving grand lies to win power. So wicked are they that they would orchestrate this whole Mark Foley mess just to thwart the will of the people.

But anyone who’s ever spent any time at an official Democratic Party function knows that the idea of these people orchestrating anything smoothly is absurd on it’s face. One of my favorite aspects of right-wing rhetoric about the Democrats is their inflated idea of our power and skill. If they only knew that we can’t even agree on how to canvass a neighborhood, perhaps they would be disappointed.

3) Illegal Immigrants

It’s pretty obvious that the Democrats, in collaboration with the media, are plotting to bring at least seventy million illegal immigrants into this country for two nefarious, linked purposes: to destroy our nation and to vote en masse for Hilary Clinton. We do this out of a curious mixture of liberal guilt and craven malice, and because we really like chorizo burritos.

Seriously, though, illegal immigrants are a catch-all scapegoat for those whose ideology demands such things. Our health care system is faltering? Blame it on illegal immigrants! Our crime rates are increasing? It must be those illegal immigrants! Children don’t speak English as well as they used to? You ought to hear the way those illegal immigrants speak, pal! Aunt Bea’s gardenias didn’t come in as well this year? Has she considered that illegal immigrants might have cut through her garden on their way to the voting booth?

It’s silly, of course, but xenophobia is always a reliable drum for demagogues to whack at when election time comes around.

4) The American People Themselves

If conservative defeats are large or frequent enough, some of them will probably vent their animus on the voters for being too goddamn stupid to understand why need to bomb six separate countries while simultaneously slashing capital gains taxes and signing our nation’s sex education over to Jesus freaks. We’re a timid people, after all, and perhaps our relative peace and prosperity has made us too decadent to fight World War Three funded solely by Wal-Mart cashiers’ FICA deductions. At their most generous, they might admit that, deep down, we’re probably not as bad as the terrorists, but we’ve allowed ourselves to become hopelessly corrupted by the dastardly media and it’s inherent bias against capitalism, Christianity and unleashing righteous genocide.

Poisonous as Hell, part one:

2006-10-17T14:11:00.000-05:00

The Golden Poison Dart Frog

It’s happened to all of us. You find yourself walking around in western Colombia, enjoying the beautiful scenery and the magical freshness of the air. As you pass through the dense jungle, your eyes are drawn to a bright spot on a low branch. As you draw closer, you are struck by the brilliant colors of what turns out to be a small, placid frog. Where you come from, frogs are a dull brownish-green, so you cannot help be fascinated by this exotic, flamboyant amphibian. It’s so cute, with its blinking black eyes and its vivid, wildly-patterned skin. No one else knows this about you, but you’re sort of a frog fetishist. Nothing sick, of course: you simply enjoy the company of frogs. Seeing as this is so, it’s natural that you want to pick up this rare specimen of frogness, that you wish you could take him home and keep him shut-up like your own personal little treasure. Maybe you want to stroke him like the gentle, reptilian pet your mother never let you have. Maybe you even want to bend down and plant a kiss, a purely platonic kiss, on his trembling, gloriously-hued froggy back.

But you ought not do that. Because that harmless-looking creature’s flesh is coated with a batrachotoxin, a substance so potent that a mere 100 micrograms—the equivalent of two grains of table salt---would be enough to kill the average person. Fool around with that frog and before long several unpleasant things will start to happen. Your heart will beat out of rhythm, your cell membranes will depolarize, and your nerves will lose all control over your muscles—meaning that you’ll be paralyzed, but not just paralyzed in the “can’t move” sense, paralyzed in the sense that you can’t swallow, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but die a horrible death in the middle of the jungle. Sucks to be you, doesn’t it? Perhaps if you hadn’t been such a weird frog-loving nimrod, this never would have happened.

That’s why, when I’m traipsing around in unfamiliar ecosystems, I live by one simple rule: pretty frogs are evil. Heed this advice, and you greatly reduce the possibility that your relatives will be stifling giggles whenever they explain how you died.

My brother done made hisself a scientific discovery...

2006-10-17T01:56:00.000-05:00

My older brother, the brains of the family, was part of a team that recently discovered that a comet or an asteroid collided with Saturn's rings back in 1984. He did a press conference to explain these findings to the media, findings which I barely understand and will not embarrass myself by attempting to discuss any further. Last time I talked to him, I tried to force him into admitting that the mysterious Saturn-attacking object wasn't a comet at all, but instead an alien spacecraft intent on colonizing our solar system and wiping out the entire human race, in a scenario similar to the one depicted in the well-known documentary War of the Worlds (2005 version). He denied that this was the case, of course. Science-types are always coming up with denials and equivocations when it comes to the possibility of technologically-superior extraterrestial overlords arriving and killing us all. They think we can't handle the truth, I suppose. Perhaps they're right.

These quibbles aside, I'm proud of my big brother. You kick astrophysics ass, Matt.

My nocturnal Brazilian odyssey

2006-10-17T01:09:00.000-05:00

Last night, I had a dream in which a long-held fantasy of mine was finally satisfied. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, oh sweet mustachioed Jesus in flashy feety-pajamas, he’s not going to tell us about some horrible perverse vision involving Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, a Motel 6 in Kentucky, a vat of cooking lard, and a dwarf in a sailor suit banging cymbals, is he? Rest assured that I’m not. My dreams are wholesome and innocent, and I have to confess that I deeply resent your suspicion that they might not be. You are dirty-minded beasts, all of you! For shame!

Ahem.

As many of you already know, I love to travel. Unfortunately, I don’t get many as many opportunities to do this because of finances, work obligations, and so on and so forth. But a man can still dream. So, last night, while the real me was sprawled face-down across a futon in Minnesota, my subconscious self voyaged forth to the beautiful and mysterious nation of Brazil. It was a grand trip, but I suspect that the real place isn’t very similar to the version that exists in my mind.

For example, a quick glance at an atlas is enough to prove that Brazil does not directly border the town of Grand Marais, Minnesota. But it did in my dream. In it, some friends and I were passing a pleasant day up in that milquetoast northern town when it occured to us that maybe we ought to, you know, visit Brazil, seeing as it was right next door and all. The only way to cross the border into that country, however, was to wriggle through a narrow tunnel in a sheer rock wall, then climb up approximately ten thousand stairs, and finally squeeze your way through a maze-like passageway where the walls were coating on both sides with bat doo-doo. This took a lot of effort, and some of my friends (Greg) were opposed to the idea, but I whined and pouted until I finally got my way, just as I should have. It was, after all, my goddamn dream.

When we emerged onto the other side of the curious geological formations that separate the Upper Midwest from the heart of South America, we found ourselves in a bizarre tropical wonderland. I’m not sure if I can explain it adequately, but I’ll try. There were giant purple butterflies and shiny rainbows arching between glistening green mountains. There were rushing, pristine streams and dazzling flowers growing wild everywhere. There might have even been a giraffe or two, and I’m pretty sure that a volcano smoldered bewitchingly in the distance. All and all, it looked sort of like a Lisa Frank Trapper-Keeper cover illustration brought to life, if that means anything at all to you.

The actual Brazil is probably slightly less pink. And there aren’t any giraffes there, either. Which is sort of disappointing, when it comes right down to it.

Anyway, my friends and I took some time to drink in the wonder of it all. And then we wiped all the bat dung off of our clothes and went exploring. Shortly, we came to an establishment that was identical in all respects to the Sears store where I went to get my driver’s license when I was sixteen. Plunked down in the middle of a lush rainforest, it seemed somewhat out of place. Still, we were soon to discover that this Sears store wasn’t just any old Sears store, but instead the city of São Paolo.

“Oh! I’ve always wanted to visit São Paolo!” I enthused, and then we all went inside to shop for pants.

We didn’t have any trouble finding our way around. The only problem was our general reluctance to purchase clothing from a place like Sears, which isn’t known for it’s quality menswear. Still, we knew that the Brazilian climate can be sultry, so we felt that lighter cotton slacks would be appropriate. A long section of the dream involved us wandering among the pants racks, searching for our sizes. This was not particularly interesting and so, instead of rehashing it in detail, I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize to my Latin American readership for subconsciously confusing their great cities with Minnesota department stores. It sort of makes sense, though: I grew up in St. Paul, and here I was, dreaming of myself in São Paolo. So it’s sort of a sleepy-time cramming together of the place I came from and a place I want to go, made all the more convenient by the fact that the two towns have the same name. Someday I will make it to São Paolo—a city with a greater population than Los Angeles and Chicago combined---when I’m awake, and perhaps after that my dreams of it will become more respectable and creative.

Anyway, once we were finished shopping for summery trousers, one of us asked whether anyone spoke Portugese. One by one we all confessed that we didn’t. “Then how the hell can we buy these pants?” someone asked. “I’m not buying these pants if I have to buy them in Portugese,” someone else asserted. “We crawled through all that bat crap and no one can speak Portugese?” complained a third.

And that’s when I woke up.

To hell with CBGB's...

2006-10-15T23:21:00.000-05:00

Legendary punk club CBGB’s is closing. There was a stage in my life where this news might have upset me, but that's all over now. Nothing lasts forever, to be cliched about it, and very few things really ought to. Despite the hagiographic nattering penning by overwrought rock writers—people who want to bestow drama and undue significance on their treasured generational touchstones and subcultures—CBGB’s doesn’t count for much in the ecology of New York City. It was just a bar where bands played, and those places don’t have a very long life expectancy out there. Think of all the bebop clubs on 52nd Street, replaced long ago by office towers and ugly granite plazas. Think of the East Harlem joints where salsa and mambo bands would play until dawn, all gone now in favor of someone’s idea of urban renewal. The places that don’t die become ghosts of what made them special in the first place, like those faux-folk clubs on Bleeker Street where tourists pay six bucks for a cup of coffee and the chance to listen to some warbling throwback. Would the people who are mourning CBGB’s passing prefer it to live on as a slightly grubbier version of the Hard Rock Cafe?

Of course, back when I lived in Brooklyn, many believed that this had already happened. I never went there for the simple reason that no bands I wanted to see ever played there. It was cool to bring my friends from Minnesota past it so they could ooh and ahh at the history of it, but by the late 1990s it had become basically an insider’s place, a hangout for long-in-the-tooth band guys and scenesters whose scene has come and gone. Sometimes famous bands would have special surprise gigs there, but you had to be connected to know about those, further cementing its reputation as a club for those in a very specific set (and undercutting its bullshit myth as some sort of avalon for any misunderstood misfit who happened down the Bowery). There were far more vital places thriving on the Lower East Side back then, and while almost everyone I knew had an affinity for sloppy rock ‘n’ roll, none of them considered CBGB’s as anything more than a nostalgia trip.

But I’m probably not the person to eulogize such a place. I like punk rock, but the whole lifestyle and attitude that surround it leaves me cold. It’s one of the peculiar and annoying quirks of youth subcultures: while they claim to be all about authenticity and individuality, they’re usually just as obsessed with fashion and belonging as the mainstream society they consider themselves superior to. Individuality isn’t as easy as wearing a ripped-up shirt, authenticity has nothing to do with what kind of music you listen to. It’s just adolescent bullshit to pretend otherwise, and my appreciation of punk rock is hindered by how much of that attends the genre. Yes, it was necessary. Yes, some of it was truly beautiful. In the end, however, it’s the records, the songs and the memories that deserve to endure, not the grimy rooms that played host to that tiny, tiny sliver of history.

The Insomnia Report Special Cooking Edition

2006-10-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

For this recipe you will need:

1 regular-sized jar of mayonnaise

1 regular-sized jar of Miracle-Whip brand psuedo-mayonnaise

1 tub of sour cream

1 tub of cream cheese
1 tub of cottage cheese

Some fucking “horseradish”, whatever nauseating filth that is

50 mushroom slices picked off of a room temperature Domino’s delivery pizza

50 cubes of Spam-brand crypto-meat

2 tins of tuna

Some prawns

A bag of prawn-flavored pork rinds*

A jar of gefilte fish

A bunch of lutefisk

A “family-sized” box of Cocoa Pebbles brand cereal

A “family-sized” box of Chicken in a Biskit brand chicken-flavored crackers (crushed finely)

A pinch of cayenne pepper

A dash of testicle sweat**

Take all ingredients and pour into a large cooking pan. Whack repeatedly with a wooden spoon. Place into oven and cook at 450 degrees for approximately seven minutes. Take out and let stand for thirty-six days. Serve to your worst enemies in cubes or as a fondue.

*Available, no kidding, at the Asian grocery down the street from me
** Single ladies without ready access to testicle sweat may substitute by using slightly more horseradish

But wait! I'm not done with my running gag yet!

2006-10-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to drop in here and say that I’m one hundred percent against the growing habit on the left of comparing Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld to a greasy butt plug. This is just juvenile. And, if you think about it for any time at all, you’ll find that the analogy is deeply flawed. Greasy butt plugs have given many people all around the world a few moments of harmless, private pleasure. Don Rumsfeld has done no such thing. In fact, he’s done much the opposite.

That’s why, when I have to insult him, I prefer to insult him by bringing up his resemblance to the terrible, three-headed beast known as Ghidorah:

According to Wikipedia: “Ghidorah is among the most powerful creatures in daikaiju eiga with a reputation that has earned it the title "The King of Terror". It is often considered Godzilla's greatest rival. Indeed, so awesome is Ghidorah's destructive power that Godzilla is often required to ally himself with another kaiju, even several kaiju, before engaging the three-headed monster in battle.”

Doesn’t that sound a little more like Rummy to you? Please adjust your vocabulary accordingly. Thanks!

Stuff I'd like to do one of these days...

2006-10-13T00:31:00.000-05:00

1) Learn Arabic: No writing looks more beautiful than Arabic writing. No singing sounds more heartfelt and passionate than Arabic singing. It’s a fascinating language, and I’d like to be able to speak and read it. I imagine this isn’t easy, though. I bet it’ll take a couple years of constant, concentrated study. Being a word nerd, however, I pick up language rules and vocabulary pretty easily. It’s the pronunciation that kills me. I studied French for a couple months before going to Paris and, even though I understood simple sentences and could read signs and menus and the like, I still would up sounding like Cleetus le Doofus whenever I tried to say anything to anyone. This was me: “Booojoo, massooooor! Ooooo ehhh la twah-lay pour ‘oms? MARCY BOOOOOCOOOOO!”. The French were very nice about it, but I bet deep inside they were thinking “Sacre Bleu! Our beautiful language, mangled and urinated upon by this strange foreigner! It is like my ears are being scoured with scorpion venom! I shall speak to him in English and spare myself the horror of hearing our glorious tongue being further subjected to his appalling ignorance of simple accent rules!” It was sort of embarrassing. But maybe one day, a few years in the future, I’ll be hanging out in Casablanca or Lebanon or Cairo or Tunis, sounding as smooth as sunburned Midwesterner kickin’ it in the Middle East possibly can.

2) Write a play: I don’t go see plays very often. And when I say, “I don’t go see plays very often”, I mean I haven’t seen one in eight or nine years. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to put together one of my own. If I did write one, I’m pretty sure it would be a comedy. I usually don’t enjoy watching big, weighty dramas on the stage—the intimacy of all that rubs me the wrong way for some reason. I’m a guy who churns out a new dire, depressing story each month, so I’m certainly not opposed to the weighty and sad, I just prefer that mode be kept as an individual experience. True theater people will probably be aghast, but I think that if you go out to catch a show, you ought to get a good time for your money. It’s a social occasion, and social occasions ought to be happy times. That’s why my play would be light-hearted and wacky. I don’t know what it would be about, though. Maybe it would be about a dangerously insane amateur herpetologist/sex therapist suddenly finding himself in charge of writing the health curriculum for a conservative rural Midwestern school district and all the charming misunderstandings that would ensue from there. Or maybe it would be about a urban hipster who takes it upon himself to become a country music star. Or maybe it won’t be about either of those things, but instead about something good. I don’t know. I’m just throwing shit out there.

3) Visit the Hagia Sophia: I remember back when I was in my college art history class and my professor showed us a picture of the interior of the Hagia Sophia. The whole class—comprised mostly of hardened stoners and jocks who wanted an easy “A”—gasped at how gorgeous it was. Then and there, I vowed that I would go to Istanbul and see it before I died. I’ve been a lot of places since that day—Miami and New York City and Paris and Berlin and Madrid and Omaha, Nebraska—but Turkey has so far managed to elude my traveling capabilities. However, there are rumors of a voyage to Athens shaping up for next summer, a destination that would place me within ferryboat distance of Istanbul. I think I’m going to learn some Turkish, just in case.

4) Encourage the publishing industry to translate more Latin American authors: One thing that the Anglo-centric literary world has a hard time accepting is that some of the greatest writing ever done comes from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Mexico. This isn’t just global dilettantism speaking, either: Juan Rulfo and Virgilio Piñera and Jorge Luis Borges are every bit as great as the American and British masters of high-modernist avant-garde writing. Jose Donoso or Osman Lins can write rings around Paul Auster, Don Delillo or any other “post-modern” posterboy. Machado de Assis is a peer of Hawthorne, Conrad and Poe. It is a great shame that so much shelf-space at Barnes and Nobel is taken up by Oprah-certified weepers and pompous writers workshop drivel while writers like, say, Horacio Quiroga or Clarice Lispector are all but unknown and quite hard to find in this country. If I was in charge of the publishing industry, I would change that.

5) Play the piano: I have a piano in my apartment. I wish I could do something with it besides jam out on very slow, very clunky versions of “Jingle Bells”. It would be pretty cool to be able to make actual music with it, but that would also require me to sit there and work through that whole torturous “don’t-know-anything-can’t-do-anything” phase. It’s so much easier just to give up and spend my leisure time doing things that I’m halfway competent at. That’s a bad habit of mine: to not want to do the things I can’t do well. I’m a terrible amateur. I hate it when I suck. I’d love it if someone could just implant a microchip in my brain and program my fingers to press the keys the right way. I’m not saying I want to be a virtuoso or anything, I just want to be able to produce sounds that don’t make my neighbors hate me.

Oh, and another thing...

2006-10-12T20:47:00.000-05:00

My dear compatriots on the left, we must also abandon the divisive, hurtful and somewhat inaccurate habit of referring to Vice-President Richard “Dick” Cheney as “Lucifer”. This is the sort of thing that causes the average American, who may even be sympathetic towards our aims and positions, to disengage from politics. Because, as the Bible makes clear, Lucifer was once an angel. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has always been kind of a hard-on.

Heed my words, progressives, liberals, socialists, Greens and assorted other folk: next time you feel the urge to call Dick Cheney the Anti-Christ, consider calling him “the Republican version of the dreaded Mothra” instead.

The comparisons here are much more apt. Both Dick Cheney and Mothra live in a hollowed out volcano, are capable of firing a “death ray” from their segmented eyeballs, and have been created by humanity’s callous disregard for our natural environment. Rumors that Dick Cheney is, like Mothra, attended day and night by a pair of identical, sweetly-singing Japanese nymphs have not been confirmed as of this writing.

Your attention please, my fellow leftists...

2006-10-12T00:17:00.000-05:00

To preserve our credibility, we must immediately cease the practice of comparing President George W. Bush to Hitler. Hitler was nothing like Bush. Hitler had facial hair, a sort of suspicious affection for tough-guy uniforms, and—at the end of the day—was a crazed, brutal, vicious genocidal madman. President Bush, on the other hand, is simply a suck-ass President who sucks at everything he does except getting elected suck-ass President in the first place. The parallels with the Nazi dictator are few and specious, and those of us on the left side of things only look like screechy assholes when we pretend otherwise.

That is why I propose that, as of today, we all start afresh. Instead of as a “new Hitler”, we shall now describe the President as “the reincarnation of Godzilla’s most powerful foe, Rodan”:

Your compliance in this will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Babs is bad..

2006-10-11T02:01:00.000-05:00

Awful but widely-admired butcherer of the Great American Songbook, Barbra Streisand held what might have been her 54,320,983rd farewell/comeback concert the other day. In the midst of it, she took a break from her despicable caterwauling and performed a skit of sorts with a George W. Bush impersonator. By all accounts this stab at comedy was awkward and not funny, and so certain members of her audience—thinking, no doubt, of the $5000 they spent on tickets—began voicing their desire to hear some more golden chestnuts brutally abused. The diva did not take this well, and commanded the hecklers to “Shut the fuck up”, a momentary tantrum which apparently sparked a wild ovation from the audience.

I must say, this strikes me as weird. On the one hand, you have people so depraved that they would actually go to a Barbra Streisand concert. On the other, you have people who not only would actually go to a Barbra Streisand concert, but also become incredibly annoyed when she doesn’t spend enough time singing. This is baffling to me. Of all the inexplicable gay icons in the world, Barbra Streisand is by far this clueless heterosexual’s least favorite. I would rather listen to the scratch-scratch-scratch of Cher shaving her armpits than listen to Barbra Streisand at her greatest moment. I’m sorry if any of you out there are fans, but I just can’t stand her. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps when I was in the womb, someone jostled me really hard while “Funny Girl” was playing. Whatever the reason, I break out into the cold horrors whenever I see her face, whenever I hear her talk, and whenever she closes those eyes to begin belting out syllable after tortured syllable of raw badness.

Disliking Barbra Streisand is the only thing I have in common with real conservative people. Because, as a liberal, I can’t help but cringe when she issues some sort of public proclamation, knowing as I do that a certain set of rightists are going to hold it up as fresh evidence of my ideology’s peculiarly dim evil. She is the very essence of the “limousine liberal” and, even if her heart is in the right place, too often her mouth is just spouting off embarrassing egotistical nonsense.

All of this is why the meaningless story of Barbra Streisand swearing at someone provoked such consternation in me. Because, in the end, it brings up one of those impossible-to-answer dilemmas, like whether you would rather die by drowning or by being shot, whether you’d rather make out with your grandfather or eat a giant bowl of snot, whether you’d rather swim naked through a river of dung or drink a mixture of mayonnaise, vomit, tabasco sauce, egg yolks, and Dick Cheney’s pus. That question is this: would you rather go to a concert where Barbra Streisand wouldn’t stop singing, or a concert where Barbra Streisand did nothing but reminisce about the past and tell “topical” jokes?

I don’t have an answer for that question. But I’ll tell you this: if after I die, if I meet someone claiming to be Saint Peter and he the first he does is ask me that, I’ll know that something terrible has happened and soon the puffy clouds will turn to scorching flames, the sky will ring with diabolical laughter, and the all the beautiful angels will become wicked gnomes intent on shoving glowing coals up my butt.

And I’ll say to myself, in the split second before my eternal damnation begins, maybe I should have gone to church or something...

Kim Jong Illin'

2006-10-10T01:11:00.000-05:00

I am a patriotic American. As a patriotic American, I want to be of service to my country, a country which has given me so much, especially in terms of compact discs and electronic trinkets. You see, I’m an American, not an American’t and therefore I refuse to give in to all this “Oh no, North Korea has nuclear weapons, woe is me, woe is me!” business going on in the mass media. Many times in our proud history, we have faced grave challenges and come out stronger because of them. World War II, the Suez Crisis, and that time we all saw Janet Jackson’s boobie are just some of these that I can recall off the top of my head. In each of these situations with the possible exception of the last one, ordinary Americans hunkered down, summoned their vast reserves of courage, and rose to the occasion.

Which is why I’m offering to head up a delegation that will travel to North Korea and convince Kim Jong Il that being a nuclear power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

What I propose is the creation of a multi-national, multi-disciplinary team which will be deployed to Pyongyang immediately. I will be the operational leader of this lean, versatile force and I will operate under the code name “Colin Powell” in the hopes that this will confuse the North Korean leadership as to my actual identity and status within the United States government. Crucial to our success will be the presence of one “Mr. Sponge”, a man with military experience and excellent musical tastes. His responsibility will be in coordinating and carrying out “Plan Bravo”, the contours of which will be made clear shortly. In this he will be assisted by Jet Li, a martial arts expert and well-respected actor and Natasha Le Loup, a Belgian master of disguise. Rounding out Mr. Sponge’s division will be my brother, Matthew, whose encyclopedic knowledge of all things “science” related will prove invaluable if our operation ever comes into direct contact with the nuclear weapons in question.

As the leader of “Plan Alpha”, I will be traveling with a smaller force. At my side will be my good friend Tara, who is currently earning a higher degree in psychology, rendering her invaluable when it comes to unlocking the psyches of North Korean government officials. Logistical support for our end of the operation will be provided by the mysterious Ali Wahid Hassim Al-Fadl bin Shahab, a “fixer” so secretive and well-connected that the CIA has requested that I only mention his name once in this blog post.

The success of “Plan Alpha” hinges on diplomacy. Tara, [name redacted], and myself will present ourselves to Kim Jong Il and his top advisers under the “cover story” of being top-level United States officials concerned about his recent nuclear test. To prepare for this, I will spend at least two weeks learning Korean in the nearest Berlitz school. After normal pleasantries are dispensed with, I will then proceed to apply gradually increasing pressure on the North Korean dictator. After each successive level of rhetorical fireworks, I will turn to Tara and she will offer her professional opinion on how close Jong Il is to “breaking”. We will do this in English, so that there will be no chance of our conversations being monitored. If in the unlikely event that the North Korean delegation includes a member trained in our language, we will simply conduct our discussions in Pig Latin. “Is-say Im-Kay Ong-Jay Il-ay eakin-bray?” and so on and so forth.

The specifics are still being worked on, but I believe my first approach will be flattery. I will say, “Honorable Kim Jong Il, you do not need nuclear weapons, because the might of your brave People’s Army—through proper ideology, discipline, and your father’s immortal concept of juche---can repel any attack from any source, thus rendering the decadent weapons of the capitalist system useless against the will of the gallant and socialistic population of your proud and world-straddling nation!”

If this doesn’t stir the weirdo’s emotions, I will quickly change my tactics to focus on the practical. “Kim Jong Il, your possession of nuclear weapons can only destabilize all of East Asia! You don’t need them, given that China will inevitably ensure your nation’s security needs. Furthermore, willingly disarming—much like the South Africans did in the 1980s—would be a signal of your nation’s desire to enter into the community of nations, which might lead to an eventual lifting of the crippling sanctions that worsen your country’s perennial famines and stunt your small and vulnerable economy...”

If even this doesn’t sway the stubborn dictation, I will be forced to point out that you cannot hug a child with nuclear arms.

While it is hoped that “Plan Alpha”—talking our differences through like mature adults—will be sufficient to check Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions, I know enough about global affairs not to depend on this route. This is why “Plan Bravo” will be taking shape as we try to wheedle the North Koreans into voluntary disarmament. Essentially, the aforementioned espionage grouping will come ashore in an inflatable amphibious vehicle, disguised as nuns. If a bunch of nuns in North Korea seems conspicuous, they will instead disguise themselves as rocks, trees, and birds indigenous to that area. Thus costumed, they will slip past any sentries, guards or whatnot and penetrate into the inner sanctum of the North Korean nuclear arsenal. This is dangerous work, of course, and all of them might not come back. This will be profoundly sad, but at least they died for the sake of world peace, and not just because they were old. Take comfort in that fact, Team Bravo, you crazy bastards you...

Anyway, once they have inserted themselves into the storage shed where the nuclear warheads are kept, they will quickly and clandestinely disarm the devices. At this stage of the game, I am not sure whether you’re supposed to cut the blue wire, the red wire, or the green wire, but I’m sure such details will be ironed out by the time we’re “in country”. And, besides, it’s not like I really have to worry about that part of the plan, since I’ll be many miles away with “Team Alpha”, sitting around eating dainty cakes and making small talk about hair-care products with Kim Jong Il.

That’s about as much of the plan as I can disclose to an audience of mixed security clearances. As I’m sure you’ll agree, it seems destined for certain success. Yes, there are a few details that haven’t been worked out yet—such as whether we ought to buy walkie-talkies, how to book flights to Pyongyang (Orbitz doesn’t seem to be much help here), and the all-important question of our compensation—but all in all we’re ready to roll. Now all I need is for the government to shoot me an e-mail, and we can have this “nuclear North Korea” thing nipped in the bud as early as next Wednesday.

Time out for toilet humor

2006-10-09T01:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I feel that the English language’s repertoire of smutty slang terms is a little too small for my taste. And other times I feel that book nerds like me too often act like the surest ticket to renown and immortality is to write a brilliant novel, a piquant short-story, or an impassioned essay. These things are over-rated, I feel. A far more flattering accomplishment would be to contribute a new swear word to the lexicon. My good friend Mel has already made her mark on this scene by popularizing the expression “fuckchop”, an insult so intense and damning that it should only be applied to the worst sleazebags, lechers, and Vice-Presidents out there.

It might be childish of me, but I want to give birth to a beautiful new bad word too. In my old age, I want to be able to stroll the assisted living center with my head held high, secure in the knowledge that I’ve helped to make our language coarser. To that end, here are ten brand new curse words. Please do your best to use them whenever appropriate.

1) PRANG (noun): The most prominent vein on the male sexual appendage.

Suggested usage: “Before I answer that question, Mr. Russert, I have to suggest that you lick this mustard off of my prang...”

Suggested usage: “Man, she’s so hot she makes my prang want to jump out of its skin...”

2) CANDIRÚ (noun/verb): Any severe and agonizing injury to the genitals.

Suggested usage: “Man, the worst candirú I ever had was that time I got it caught in my zipper...”

Suggested usage: “I swear to God, if you call me ‘Little Missy’ again, I’m gonna candirú you so hard you’re never going to be able to use it again...”

3) BI-PARTISANSHIT (verb): The act of defecating and urinating during the same visit to the toilet.

Suggested usage: “We would have made a lot better time on our road-trip if Doug would have just learned to bi-partisanshit...”

4) WANKHOLE (noun): The unmentionable minutes of the day that someone spends playing with themselves.

Suggested usage: “I tried calling Stevie, but he didn’t answer. He must be deep in the wankhole...”

5) REPUBLI-LOVE (noun): A disturbing and disturbingly common S&M activity in which the passive partner is repeatedly humiliated, dominated and left unsatisfied by the active partner, who then goes on to portray him/herself as the noble, self-sacrificing victim of the relationship.

Suggested usage: “I never thought I’d ever try Republi-love, but since Earl’s got that premature ejaculation problem, it’s pretty much all he’s capable of...”

6) GROINLETS (noun): Detached pubic hairs left in public view, most commonly in a bar of soap.

Suggested usage: “Oh yeah, I used to think Cindy was some sort of clean freak, but then I saw the soap she uses. That thing’s got so many groinlets on it, it looks like a damp hamster...”

7) TAHITIAN TREAT (noun/verb): Urine that comes out bright red. Or, alternately, the act of urinating such a substance.

Suggested usage: “After that candirú last month, I never thought I’d stop making Tahitian Treat...”

Suggested usage: “If you’re going to the bathroom, don’t use the first stall. Trust me, the thing is full of Tahitian Treat...”

8) DEM-FLOWERING (noun/verb): A portmanteau of “Democrat” and “deflowering”. A sexual experience in which one partner constantly asks the other whether he/she “really likes this”, whether “this is okay”, etc., etc. Basically, any sexual experience that’s ruined by one partner’s attempt to cover up their awkwardness and insecurity by refusing to shut up.

Suggested usage: “I totally got demflowered last weekend. It was horrible. At one point he even started to cry...”

9) DEFPLOSION (noun/verb): Any trip to the toilet so “productive” that you’re embarrassed to have other people use it after you’re finished.

Suggested usage: “Dude, stay out of there for awhile. I was in there, taking my morning bipartisanshit and I totally had, like, this earth-shattering defplosion! Whooooooo!”

10) LIL’ ABNER (noun): A very, very, very small male sexual appendage.

Suggested usage: “Not only was it the worst demflowering I’ve ever had, the guy had a Lil’ Abner on him that even a Republi-lover could laugh at...”

The Fence

2006-10-08T11:26:00.000-05:00

Our government wants to put up a fence on the border between the United States and Mexico. Proponents of this ambitious landscaping plan claim that this will help accomplish three things: (1) discourage migrant workers from entering the U.S. illegally, (2) help curtail the narcotraffic in the region, and (3) prevent terrorists from sneaking in across the desert. I don’t buy it, though. Furthermore, I don’t think there’s a single lawmaker naive enough to believe that a silly fence—even a high-tech zillion dollar a mile fence—will do much in the way of resolving any of those issues. It’s more a symbolic gesture than a practical one. It might be a boon for a few lucky fence-builders, but otherwise it’s an ill-advised, pricey, and undiplomatic scheme. Which means, of course, that it’s right up the Bush administration’s alley.

But, just for the hell of it, let’s try to come up with ways that people can come into this country illegally even if there’s a big ol’ fence in their way...

1) According to maps, there are two large bodies of water flanking Mexico on either side. To the west, there is the “Pacific Ocean”, while to the east lies the so-called “Gulf of Mexico”. Seeing as this is true, it stands to reason that a person could, theoretically, get their hands on a boat. Armed with a floating conveyance, the border-crosser could then completely circumvent our fancy new fence!

2) Abundant in both Mexico in the United States are contraptions known as “ladders”. These devices, if a person was limber and willing enough, could be used to scale the fence. Now, we must take into account that our fence isn’t a single fence at all, but instead three fences in a row, all of which will be outfitted with sensors and infra-red gadgets and whatnot. It is very possible then that three ladders will be required, and that the individuals wielding them will have to be quick about it.

3) Also easily available in Mexican and United States hardware stores are implements known as “shovels”. Given a certain level of desperation, a group of border-crossing individuals could perhaps band together and use these tools to burrow underneath our fence. This would, however, take a lot of work, so maybe we should just assume that thousands of hungry people with impoverished families to feed would all decide spontaneously that such a major digging endeavor isn’t worth the trouble.

4) It is understood that any fence across the entire U.S.–Mexico border would have to be a very long fence indeed. Since this is true, and since our Border Patrol can’t be everywhere at once, it seems likely that if someone has their mind set on coming into this country, they might be tempted to find an unguarded spot and just break through the fence.

5) Finally, if all else fails, someone with their heart set on crossing the border could take it upon themselves to hide in someone’s trunk, trailer or cargo hold and then slip through our fence

You don’t have to be particularly devious to come up with this stuff. You don’t have to think very long before it becomes obvious that fencing ourselves in won’t do much to prevent illegal entry into the United States. It’ll just make it more inconvenient and perilous. But that’s good enough for the officials who trumpet this plan and, strangely, it seems to be good enough for a large swath of the Republican base. These are the people who want our leaders to “do something” about illegal immigration, and by “do something” they don’t mean something with foresight, wisdom, and/or intelligence. No, they’d prefer us to do something hollow, ignorant and counterproductive so that they can feel like their leaders are standing up for our national sovereignty and stemming the scary foreign tide that threatens our culture, our language, and our way of life. Our government, in its reliable zeal to pander to the confused and scared, is only too happy to oblige.

The problem is that illegal immigration has become yet another one of those issues that have been debased into soundbites and screaming by our current political/media situation. So, instead of a reasoned, thoughtful discussion on the effects that undocumented workers have on our economy, we get paranoid blather about “reconquistas” and their Aztlan scheme. This constant race to the lowest possible level of discourse is a big part of what keeps us from making any progress on the issues that vex us.

Do undocumented workers depress wages for everyone? Or do they benefit our economy by doing necessary labor for comparatively little reimbursement? Would a guest worker program really benefit them, or would it only legalize their exploitation? How would an amnesty program work? Who would qualify and who wouldn’t? Wouldn’t the best way to reduce illegal immigration be to encourage higher wages in Mexico, so workers there wouldn’t have as compelling a reason to risk crossing the border? Finally, why shouldn’t we just consider illegal immigration a natural result of a wealthy nation sharing a border with a poorer nation? Is it possible, or even advisable, to try and “do something” about a phenomenon which is as natural and predictable as the earth going round the sun? Should we change our focus to finding ways to channel this flow to the benefit of both countries, rather than trying to stop something that cannot and will not be stopped?

I don’t know the answer to any of those questions, of course, but I’d like to hear them debated more often. Too many, the discussion gets bogged down by people who, for whatever reason, want to demonize and abuse the people who cross the border. This is bullshit, plain and simple. Most of these people are hard-working, honorable people who have made a choice that makes economic sense. Why toil for twenty cents an hour, when you can make fifty times that in the United States? If I had a family to provide for and I could only earn enough to give them a better life by sneaking into Canada, you can bet I wouldn’t be too concerned about the legalities of going up north. Sure, there’s inevitably going to be some sleazy people coming over, but they’re the exception and shouldn’t be allowed to tarnish the reputation of the rest. And as for their inability or unwillingness to speak English, who cares? No one’s going to force you to learn Spanish, even though you probably should, because it’s a really beautiful language.

It comes down to this, though: we can’t fence the world out. We can’t put up a wall and then think that we can just stop dealing with the things we don’t want to deal with. We shouldn't hide when we ought to be talking

It's like a non-stop scandalathon around here

2006-10-07T11:30:00.000-05:00

In other news, Alan Fine, Republican longshot candidate for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District seems to have had a 1995 domestic violence charge expunged from his record. Around these parts, Fine is known mainly for pretending to be a nice guy up until Insomnia Report endorsee Keith Ellison won the Democratic primary, at which point he dropped the act and started blathering on interminably on how aghast, aghast! he was that someone who used to be friendly with the Nation of Islam might end up in the House of Representatives. It was more of what we’ve all come to expect from Republicans, and I didn’t pay his ravings much mind. He’s always had about the same chance of winning as my left asscheek, and all his noise was just a shameless ploy to scare fence-sitting voters away from the Democrats in statewide races. To hell with him, I say.

But, before I resolve to never mention him again, I will do him one courtesy that he hasn’t bestowed on his political opponents: I’ll leave his past alone. It’s a sordid he-said/she-said story and I don’t have the facts, much less the desire, to determine who the liar is. I have my suspicions, of course, but I’ll spare you people those. If he really did what his ex-wife has charged, he’s not worth voting for. If the accusations aren’t true, he’s still not worth voting for. Either way, may he slink off into the obscurity he deserves.

Insomnia Report Celebrity Edition: crazed British starlet insults America's finest city, disappointment and sadness fall upon the land

2006-10-07T11:15:00.000-05:00

If you’re like me, you probably hunger for news stories that aren’t about members of Congress and their forbidden lust for underaged boy-meat. Maybe you want to read about something a little scandalous and a little outrageous, but you’re not looking for something that’s going to put you off your food. Just some garden variety naughtiness, you think, that’ll be just the ticket to clean the palate after a week of hearing nothing but repulsive details about repulsive Republicans and all their repulsive peccadillos.

Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but an even more appalling and crass incident has just erupted onto the national consciousness like some sort of oily, greasy zit on the face of that one Dungeons and Dragons nerd who used to sort of hang around you back in high school and sort of kind of passively make it known that he sort of kind of wanted to go out with you, but he was just too shy actually ever to ask a beautiful, intelligent, cultured woman like you out so he just brought you gifts he made out of popsicle sticks and told you jokes you’d need to be a “Battlestar Galactica” fan to understand in the hopes that someday, somehow and for some reason you—the prom queen—would ask him out and spare him the trouble of putting his feelings on the line and/or facing the most agonizing rejection of his entire life. Yes, I’m afraid that this new, fevered drama has inserted itself into the national discourse like a candirú fish inserts itself into the urethra of an unwitting Brazilian fisherman, causing unprecedented and unbearable burning, irritation, and swelling to such an extent that previously normal genitals now look like over-inflated cruise-ship floatation devices.

I am speaking, of course, of the fact that actress Sienna Miller has insulted Pittsburgh. In fact, this young "lady" has gone so far as to call that fair and gentle town “Shittsburgh”. In the course of her rambling, deranged assault upon Pennsylvania’s most appealing city, she even went so far as to complain, “Can you believe this is my life? Will you pity me when you're back in your funky New York apartment and I'm still in Pittsburgh? I need to get more glamorous films and stop with my indie year...”

This aggression will not stand.

First off, I must hasten to assure the world that there are many, many, many mid-sized American cities that Sienna Miller might find far duller than Pittsburgh. Maybe if Miss Miller found herself making a movie in Des Moines, Iowa or Wichita, Kansas, she would be less dismissive of Pittsburgh’s charms. I know, I know, I know: she’s a big fancy movie star who diddles Jude Law when Jude Law isn’t diddling someone else, so maybe historic and unpretentious Americana isn’t her thing. I mean, for Christ’s sake, this is a woman who talks—with apparent seriousness---about her “indie year”. The glories of Pittsburgh are wasted on such people.

Because, in my mind, those glories are many. Sure, I’ve only been to Pittsburgh once and then I was only there for about eight hours, but I still consider myself a Pittsburgher at heart. From the Allegheny River to the Ohio River to the Monononongowhatever River, Pittsburgh is the shiz-nit. From it’s tree-clad peaks to it’s Andy Warhol museum to it’s mind-bogglingly confusing layout, Pittsburgh kicks ass up and down the entire Rust Belt.

In fact, it has long been a dream of mine to bring the woman I will marry to Pittsburgh for our honeymoon. There, we will celebrate our love while visiting many tight-knit and colorfully-ethnic neighborhoods. We will clasp hands and skip joyously down the Boulevard of the Allies from Duquesne University to Point State Park, calling out a fond hello to all “yinz” Pittsburghers we pass on our merry way. We will sing the songs of Pittsburgh native Billy Strayhorn from the slopes of Homewood to the hipster hang-outs of Oakland by day, and by night we will make sweet juicy nookie to the sounds of the Pirates being defeated at PNC Park.

It will be glorious. But poor, poor Sienna Miller will never experience such bliss. Her loss, I suppose.

Winkie the Lizard-Cat, Mexican actress Salma Hayek, legendary rappers Run DMC and Morroccan President Driss Jettou say "Happy Birthday, Mom!"

2006-10-06T02:12:00.000-05:00

Things I know that I wish I didn't know

2006-10-06T00:56:00.000-05:00

1) What it feels like to bang your foot hard against a broken air conditioning unit and then having to spend the rest your morning picking sock fuzz and chunks of toenail out of the gory mess that used to be your big toe.

2) That, in Africa, the hippopotamus kills more humans than any other animal. The hippopotamus can run over 20 miles per hour in order to crush you with its tremendous head, stomp you with its four ton body, and bite your head off with its gaping, toothy mouth. When they’re not slaughtering the innocent, hippopotami spend their days flinging a fetid cocktail of dung and urine at each other in a never-ending quest to establish themselves as the alpha hippo. Hippos are assholes.

3) That in the United States we’re living in an era where believing in evolution, global warming and the Geneva Conventions is dubious, but believing in the rapture, abstinence-based sex education, and Rush Limbaugh means you’re right there in the mainstream.

4) How a human body looks after its been run over by a city bus.

5) That surgeons sometimes extract tumors that weigh twice as much as I do and resemble man-sized blobs of Big Red chewing gum.

6) At least 70% of the lyrics to approximately 84% of all songs performed by the Cure, the Smiths, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and New Order. In addition, I know at least 68% of the lyrics to roughly 79% of all songs performed by Morrissey as a solo artist.

7) That there exists, deep in the jungles of Brazil, a slender and merciless fish known as the candirú which has been known to slither into the urethras of innocent swimmers, where it proceeds to lodge its spiky spine into your flesh and suck your blood until you can find a doctor to cut the thing out.

8) That there is a thriving subculture of people on the internet who trade in homemade drawings depicting Simpsons characters having hard-core pervert sex

9) That, in 1994, a Russian jet crashed in Siberia because, and I swear I’m not making this up, the pilot had gotten out of his seat and let his children fly the plane. Let me repeat that one: nearly a hundred people died in a fiery crash because their pilot let his children fly the plane!!!

10) That when television's premiere comb-over blowhard and mouthy demagogue Bill O’Reilly lets his creative id run free, the results are paragraphs like these:

"Ashley was now wearing only brief white panties. She had signaled her desire by removing her shirt and skirt, and by leaning back on the couch. She closed her eyes, concentrating on nothing but Shannon's tongue and lips. He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly."

11) How Coca-Cola "Blak" tastes

The ugliest men in America

2006-10-05T00:49:00.000-05:00

In the last week, there has been two separate instances in which terrible men have attacked school classrooms with the intent of sexually assaulting and murdering young girls. On September 27th, a petty criminal named Duane Morrison entered an honors English classroom at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado and took six female students hostage. After molesting all of them, he released four and began negotiating with the police. When this failed, a SWAT team stormed the classroom, resulting in Morrison fatally shooting 16 year old Emily Keyes before committing suicide. Five days later, on October 2nd, confessed child molester Charles Roberts IV stormed into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, ordered all the male students and several adults out, and then proceeded to tie up the ten remaining girls, aged seven to thirteen. He had brought with him a board to truss up his hostages and two tubes of lubricant. He did not, however, sexually assault the children. Instead, he shot them each in the head before killing himself. Five girls died, and five are still hospitalized.

These kinds of crimes are rare, of course, even if the rapid succession in which these events happens suggests a sort of epidemic. Most people will never have to face people like these. However, I believe that the attitudes and pathologies that underlie such incredible viciousness are widely dispersed throughout our culture. These assaults are, in many ways, the acute manifestation of two chronic, interlinked social problems: misogyny and male inadequacy.

First, allow me to explain what I mean by misogyny. I’m not talking about sexism, which is the belief that the essential characteristics of one particular sex render it superior or inferior to the other in some regard, but instead about a related, but altogether more malevolent phenomenon. A misogynist doesn’t just believe that women are inferior to men, he believes that they are dangerous, hateful, sinister, wicked, inhuman and frightening. Women, to the misogynist, are necessary and desired objects that have to be controlled, whether by manipulation, by threat, or by outright violence. People disagree on what provokes this awful mindset in certain men, but I tend to believe that it’s the result of upbringing and psychology, not something that’s dispersed by the media. In other words, I think men learn to be woman-haters by watching their fathers and uncles and friends hate women, I don’t think they learn it from the movies or from rap lyrics. The latter can play a supportive role in the misogynist’s development, though.

Where the main fault of our society lies, I feel, is in its failure to separate misogyny from masculinity. Machismo, as it is presently formulated, is a shameful thing, more of a peacock performance than a real ethos. Macho is pretending to be strong and independent when you’re really fearful and weak. Macho is dominating through force and winning respect through intimidation. It’s a sick parody of masculinity. Only the feeblest psyches need to hide behind violence and ruthlessness, but our culture allows for and often valorizes these vicious weaklings. A healthier society would be better able to distinguish a true man from a tantruming child, a man of honor from a worthless, domineering thug.

Why does this happen? Part of it comes from our disgusting habit of taking everything at face value. The man with nothing to prove has nothing to show for himself. The angry man has been wronged somehow. The man who hits the hardest is the strongest. These are foolish ways to think, and dangerous too. Misogyny thrives in those men who are too fragile to question anything, men so emotionally stunted that they can’t countenance the smallest challenge to their ego. This is where inadequacy comes in. A misogynist, essentially, is a worthless person who has found a despicable way of hiding that worthlessness. The man who beats his wife to keep her from leaving him tacitly admits he never deserved her in the first place. The men who threatens violence against women who speak their minds are trying to force upon others the stupid fear and hate that have ruined their own lives.

And, sometimes, these men reach the point where they abuse and murder little children because even those children are more powerful than them. Charles Roberts left notes to his wife detailing his rage and his sorrow over his own child’s premature death, but this is just more of the bullshit that really miserable, self-deluding people can’t live without. Rage and sorrow are fine emotions, far too good for a man like that. No, rage and sorrow had nothing to do with what he did. What he did, and what Duane Morrison did, was all about cowardice and futility. These were men who sought to show the women and the little girls of the world that they weren’t as weak and empty and ugly as they felt and, in committing their idiot atrocities, only managed to prove their weakness and emptiness and ugliness beyond any doubt.

Insomnia Report Sports Edition: The sinister and ill-mannered Minnesota Twins have been given a sound thrashing by the doughty Oakland Athletics...

2006-10-04T00:44:00.000-05:00

Above: one of the villians being cheered on by the Mongol hordes...

Here in my humble corner of North America, we are in the early stages of an epic sporting contest. On one side we have arrayed what I like to call “The Forces Of Evil”; a band of brigands so lowly and amoral that I quail at even mentioning their name. Ladies of sound character read this site, after all, and my conscience would be troubled if I knew that I was the one who first exposed these delicate creatures to the sinkhole of beastliness sometimes known as “the Minnesota Twins”. So if you are reading this and you happen to be of the womanish persuasion, please cover your eyes. For it is my fear that the corrupt perniciousness of these dismal blue-clad ne’er-do-wells is such that it threatens your chastity and heavenly goodness even when discussed in a purely expository manner. Heed my words, she-readers, and shield your precious and pure essences from the rudeness of these purveyors of gutter baseball.

Now, allow me to appraise the men-folk of the nature of the problem. There is Joe Mauer, a pretty boy and a master of the dark, ancient and forbidden art of “Tai Bo”. There is Brad Radke, a frightening figure of unprecedented malice who has long been rumored to be a brain-sucking space alien from the planet Xyraxxx. As if this wasn’t enough horror, these sociopathic fiends are led by one Ron Gardenhire, a man-eating yeti who has somehow mastered the rudiments of the English tongue. The one member of their uncouth alliance who a gentleman can play a civilized game of chess with, Johan Santana, is actually a dread overlord in the mold of Darth Vader. You see, there was much good in Johan once, way back before he was lured to the dark side by the ancient, withered, unspeakably foul Emperor Pohlad. Now, however, he is the most formidable opponent we face, and we cannot afford to let ourselves be cowed by a sentimental concern that he may, in fact, be our father.

Luckily for the future of humanity, there stands a team of noble warriors willing to say “no” to these knaves and their unholy plot to run roughshod over America’s pastime. These “Athletics”, as they are known, hail from the beautiful city of Oakland, on California’s sunny shores, and they are widely-heralded for their decency and fine manners. Among their sterling ranks is the debonair pitcher Barry “The Barrister” Zito, a fellow who doesn’t let his sports-playing obligations interfere with his quest to find a cure for cancer. Also on the side of valor is second baseman Eric Chavez, who I’m told has been shortlisted for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his work bringing an end to the hostilities in the Congo. Finally, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention Marco Sucaro, whose batting ability is matched only by the beauty of his lyric poetry. Together they form a plucky bunch, totally unpretentious and wholesome, although they do from time to time indulge in practical jokes and amusing pratfalls.

Earlier today was the first sortie in the grudge-match between these two adversaries. And what a chilling exhibition it was! Seldom in the history of human affairs have the stakes of a baseball series been so high. For if the angelic “Athletics” win, history will truly enter into a stage of universal peace and goodwill. However, if the victory belongs to the despicable “Twins”, we will be plunged into a second Dark Age of superstition, violence and random cruelty. Much like Mad Max, only a million times worse, if you can even imagine that. So, predictably, I was on the edge of my seat through the entire contest, which—distressingly enough—took place in the nightmarish white bubble of noise and fatty pig products that the “Twins” claim as their “home field”. Until the good guys carried the hour and seized an unquestionable win from the jaws of despair, I was filled with dread visions that one awful day, not so far in the future, the whole world will look like this so-called “Metrodome”, and puppies will be outlawed, and kindness will be punishable by a stiff fine, and ladies will behave in an unladylike manner, and chocolate will start to taste like witches’ poo, and Joe Mauer will be on the one dollar bill, and I can’t get a loan as easily as my credit score would indicate.

But, fortunately, this awful scenario did not come to pass. The wretched “Twins” were helpless against the virtue and ball-playing skills of their righteous West Coast foes. And so my soul sings like a hummingbird until their next face-off, at which point I will become all piggly-wiggly with emotion once more...

Here's one to start you off with, Mr. Sponge...

2006-10-03T02:06:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like Mr. Sponge is taking a break from political discussion to focus on writing about music. I can understand his choice. Politics is an obnoxious, depressing, miserable thing to write about every day, especially in this blog format everyone seems so smitten with. The fact is that most issues are too complex to be boiled down to a quick and easy daily post. This isn’t a genre that encourages in-depth analyses and thoughtful commentary: invective, “me-too” bleating, and issue-of-the-day piggybacking are the depressing norm However, I must hasten to add that these bad habits were never an issue for Mr. Sponge, who I’ve found to be a helluva guy and a helluva writer to boot. In the local liberal-blog universe, he is Johann Santana.

But political commentary’s loss is music criticism’s gain. And I’m sure he’ll find the switch liberating. One of my favorite things about The Insomnia Report is that my audience, being the sexiest and best-smelling and most intelligent audience in the world, allows me the luxury of authorial ADHD. One day I can write unkind things about President Bush, the next I can write a goofy country song, and the next I can write about something weird that happened to me five years ago. I really appreciate the freedom and flexibility, and I’m sure I wouldn’t still be doing this if I had to find something new to say about some tedious Minnesota Republican every single goddamn day. So my advice to Mr. Sponge is this: don’t worry about doing just one thing, write about what interests you and what you love and there will always be people willing to read it.

But before you go and chase your muse, Mr. Sponge, you really ought to bring back that post with the worst album covers of all time. Because I’m not kidding you, that was hilarious.

The Foley Catheter

2006-10-03T01:07:00.000-05:00

I don’t have much to say about the Mark Foley affair, and what I do have to say isn’t particularly novel. I believe that any adult who hits on teenagers is dangerously immature or sexually malicious and should never be placed in a position of authority over them. Also, I think that any congresspeople or capitol flacks who knew about or suspected such tendencies and tried to keep it hush-hush are utter idiots and ought to be removed from their positions. Finally, it seems to me that Republicans set themselves up for these sorts of media frenzies since they’re so fond of positioning themselves as the party of moral rectitude and Godly uprightness. It is the damage Foley did to this illusion, not his creepy acts themselves, that gives his scandal sting.

In truth, vice is one of the few bipartisan activities that our country has left. No party has the corner on upright or low-down behavior. Take Neil Goldschmidt, Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Transportation and former Governor of Oregon—back when he was mayor of Portland, he molested his family’s babysitter for three years, starting when she was just fourteen years old. His behavior was, in all respects, far more contemptible than Foley’s has so far been revealed to be, but in this case people focused their rage and disgust squarely on the perpetrator, not his party. Why? Because power-hungry Democrats excuse the sex crimes of people who vote the way they like? Or because Republicans were decent and circumspect enough to avoid “politicizing” such vile behavior? Of course not. Any electoral consequences unleashed by the actions of Foley and his protectors are not the result of the Democrats politicizing a personal indiscretion, they are simply a side product of the Republicans longstanding decision to politicize their own supposed purity.

Allow me to be frank here. I am a Democrat. Because I’m a Democrat, I like it when Republicans lose. I want them to lose and lose and lose and keep on losing. If the voters throw Boehner or Hastert out for their alleged sins of omission, I won’t shed a tear for them. I draw the line at spreading around horseshit that isn’t true, but I don’t find anything wrong with trumpeting an opponent’s real-live sleaziness or lack of judgement. You can bet your ass that the Republicans would be doing it full-bore if the shoe was on the other foot, so I don’t see why my party should fret when there’s genuine mud there to sling. Conservatives will complain that we’re being unfair hypocrites, but they would do that anyway. They’ll bring up Studds and Clinton and whoever else they can dig up, but who cares? That stuff is ancient history as far as this election is concerned. Besides, they’re only bringing it up to reassure themselves that right-wingers are, for the six zillionth time this week, the good guys and the beleaguered victims and whatever else they think they are. It’s not like the general public pays them any mind.

But still, I need to counsel my fellow liberals against excessive jubilation and tacky scandalmongering. Sure, score a few points off the latest Republican blunder, but don’t get too cocky about it. Like I said, scandal can strike at any point on the political spectrum. Maybe this Foley mess will take the piss out of a couple of Republicans, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves about its significance. One thing that I hate about left-leaning political blogs is their tendency to get really, really, really excited and abandon all perspective every time something comes along that makes Republicans look bad. If it’s not the Fitzgerald investigation, it’s the Downing Street Memo, or it’s the Abramoff lobbying scandal, or it’s the Cindy Sheehan protest, and so on and so forth. These are important stories and they should be pursued, but I can’t help but get the feeling that many on the left are hoping for some big “gotcha” moment when the entire nation suddenly realizes that the Republicans are crappy leaders and then they march on Washington with torches and pitchforks. It ain’t gonna happen. It’s just wishful thinking from people who can’t afford that luxury anymore. Besides, enormous swaths of America have already come to the realization that Bush is a crap President and the Democrats have done precious little to capitalize on this.

There comes a time, I think, when we should stop pointing out how terrible our opponents are and focus instead on what better leaders we would make. This doesn’t mean we need to play nice while those other guys play nasty, it just means that we ought to be taking the electorate’s distaste for today’s Republicans and shape it into enthusiasm for our ideas and candidates. Too often, I think, we end up commiserating with the voters instead of wooing them. We say “Boy howdy, aren’t those Republicans awful? They’re just awful, aren’t they? They sure are awful? Oh and hey, do you want to hear another reason why these Republicans are awful?” This is easy and understandable, but counterproductive in the long-run, since it encourages cynicism and distrust of all elected officials. We need give the people an alternative. We need to make the case that the Democrats would run this country differently, would listen to and appreciate their concerns, would honor competence and sacrifice, and would work hard to better the lives of all Americans.

Because, let’s face it, “The Democrats: We Don’t Talk Dirty To Teenagers” isn’t really a winning campaign slogan.

I've never been to Burning Man...

2006-10-01T22:05:00.000-05:00

Lately, I’ve gotten it into my head to write a short story that takes place at an outdoor “alternative culture” festival. Because I’ve never attended one of these, I’ve been busy on the internet reading about people’s experiences at “Burning Man”. If you haven’t heard of Burning Man, let me boil it down for you: it’s a big annual affair where a bunch of stoner-type people head off into the Nevada desert for a week and create a sort of ultra-bohemian utopia, where they enjoy outsider art, bartering for bottled water, twirling, fire dancers and public nudity. At the end of it, they set fire to a big, man-shaped fetish, the act from which the event draws its name.

Now, this has been a tradition for a long time now and each year it gets more and more popular. This, of course, leads to old-timers suggesting that things just aren’t what they used to be, as well as occasional accusations of over-commercialism, appalling and traitorous compromises with the straight world, and general shark-jumping. Since I’ve never been there, I’m not competent to judge whether or not there’s any truth to these charges. In fact, I’m probably not competent to judge Burning Man at all. It doesn’t seem like my thing. People I’ve met who’ve been there tend to speak of it with reverence, like it’s a magical moment that outsiders can’t entirely appreciate*. This is probably true.

Still, while researching it, I thought about my own dislikes and how they ruin that whole festival vibe for me. You see, I’m a hard-core introvert. That doesn’t mean that I’m a ragged, nasty shut-in, though: I love people, I love watching people, I love talking to people and I love meeting new people—I just need to get away from them every so often. I can’t be social for hours on end, much less days, without getting exhausted and testy. Added to that is my lack of enthusiasm for the great outdoors. I enjoy majestic scenery as much as anyone, at the same time I’m attached to running water and air conditioning. Asking me to sleep on the ground is like asking me to crap out a family of sea monkeys: I simply can’t do it. It hurts my macho pride to admit this, but I’m sort of a pale, prissy dude. If I was a Marlboro Man, I’d be staring manfully out at the rugged horizon, silently wondering when the bus would come along to take me back to the day spa.

While I was thinking of all that, I came up with an idea for my own outdoor festival. You can call it the “Insomnia Days” if you like, or you can call it “Bummer Man”. My idea was that it would be held in a patch of the desert directly adjacent to Burning Man, and that it would take place over the exact same stretch of days. Only instead of having a bunch of neo-tribalist, long-haired, deliberately-flamboyant young people dancing about to bongo drums, my festival would cater to a totally different crowd, my crowd, a crowd that’s long been ignored by the festival-throwing scene.

At Bummer Man, you would not be forced to use filthy, foul-smelling, fetid “Porta Potties”. No, Bummer Man would provide its guests with spotless, delicious-smelling and tastefully-decorated bathroom facilities of the sort you find on the streets of Paris, London and Seattle. At Bummer Man, the delicate-constitutioned will not be forced to sleep on the hard desert floor in flimsy tents: instead, we will provide classy accommodations and comfortable cots, so that you will be raised up high enough so that the scorpions can’t sting you. Finally, I imagine one of the most annoying aspects of Burning Man is that for an entire week you just can’t get away from some hairy, naked guy trying to show you the bicycle he’s made out of cow bones. At Bummer Man this will not be a problem. We will have a “decompression tent” where overwhelmed introverts can go and enjoy a comfy chair in a soothing, climate-controlled environment. There will an internet hook-up and a well-chosen library of classical and contemporary novels, as well as an assortment of newspapers.

But perhaps the most important difference will be in the entertainment offerings. From what I can tell, Burning Man has a do-it-yourself ethic, meaning that you probably get a bunch of guys strumming guitars, a bunch of other guys banging on things, and maybe some other guys jamming away on their flutes. Here they cannot compete with Bummer Man. I would do it up right. I would bring in a Cuban jazz orchestra, German avant-garde “electroclash” hip-hop lesbians, Morrissey, an army of Brazilian crooners, and—because I kind of have a little bit of a crush on her at the moment—Algerian-born guitarist/singer Souad Massi. In addition, there would be nightly screenings of rare French noir films, lectures on the Bush Administration’s dangerous consolidation of executive power, and a fashion show focusing on affordable-but-stylish contemporary designs.

There would also be a sno-cone stand.

Finally, I realize that there needs to be a ritual in order for the Bummer Man community to be brought together into a cohesive, cooperative entity. Burning Man, of course, has the Burning Man. Bummer Man, however, will be more participatory. On the last day of the festival, after the Burning Man people have burned their Burning Man, we will all march over to their site as one and, together, we will shout at the hippies to shut the hell up, for Christ’s sake, because people are trying to sleep over here.

And it will be beautiful. And we will come together as one, as though in a miraculous dream.

* When I was in San Francisco a few years ago, I heard more people mention Burning Man in one day than I had heard in 27-odd years living in the Midwest and East Coast. People here, even neo-hippie types, don’t talk about Burning Man. What’s up with that?

The biggest scandal of them all...

2006-09-30T12:44:00.000-05:00

I’m going to say something painfully obvious, something that any honest and informed citizen will agree with: the Iraq War is an appalling failure. More than that, the Iraq War will likely be remembered as one of the most profound, dangerous and cruel errors my country has ever blundered into. A lot of people say that Iraq is another Vietnam, and maybe they’re right. Much more depressing, however, is the possibility that Iraq might also be our Algeria. The chance for “victory”, however hollow or fake or temporary, has passed. The moment where optimism could be anything besides a stupid delusion has passed. Now we’ve reached the time where the only choice left open to us is how long we’re going to go on bleeding into the desert.

The few shrill supporters of Bush’s war that steadfastly refuse to give up their delusions like to argue that their opponents are in favor of caving in, that by rejecting their President’s course we will only show our weakness to those who hate us. It would be an unacceptable capitulation to terror and creeping fanaticism if the U.S. ever again shrinks before the enemy. We abandoned Somalia after taking casualties, after all, and hasn’t Bin Laden used that as proof that the most powerful nation in the world is, under its bluster, actually timid and decadent? We can’t retreat again, their logic goes, because the only way we can hope to prevail in this conflict is by discrediting them, by showing these murderous jihadis that American power will crush them no matter how long it takes, no matter how many casualties they inflict, no matter how painful the process may be. We cannot blink or waver or “cut and run”, otherwise our enemies will win and, if they win, our lives will forever be menaced by their medieval code and their lack of mercy.

This point of view is almost correct. If we left Iraq tomorrow, the jihadis would consider it a justification of their methods and—it is likely—their entire worldview. What we have created in Iraq is a situation similar to the one that gave birth to Al-Qaeda in the first place: for all our sophistication and technological superiority, it may be that we’re doomed to act out a remake of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. There, as in Iraq, extremists from across the Muslim world came to test their mettle against the infidel superpower. There, as in Iraq, the superpower was put in the position of propping up a fragile government against a baffling array of insurgents. There, as in Iraq, the superpower eventually had to make the hard decision as to whether to withdraw or to stay and continue to suffer an increasingly untenable situation. The Soviet Union was never going to turn Afghanistan into a friendly socialist state, yet some among us continue to believe that the U.S. can work an even trickier miracle in Iraq. We can only hope that it doesn’t take us as long to come to our senses.

So, yes, if we leave Iraq the terrorists will clap their hands and mock us as a pathetic paper tiger. It will be a very bad situation. We will enter into an uncertain, intimidating new world. But—and here’s the crucial point—we are already plunging blindly into that world. And we’re plunging into it with one hand tied behind our backs. As the situation now stands, there can be no “victory” in Iraq. Because what kind of victory depends on a permanent occupation? What kind of victory is contingent all our various enemies deciding not to attack us anymore? What kind of victory can we muster when there’s no state left to surrender to us, no ground for us to conquer, no declarations for us to sign and yet our soldiers and their civilians still die by the dozens every day? The question shouldn’t be decided as a matter of national pride—of “sticking it out” and proving America’s greatness—the question should be decided on the basis of what’s best for our country, their country, the region and the world. We are an economic giant, a military giant, and a free society. They are crazy theocrats. We disgrace ourselves by even suggesting that we need to save face in front of such people.

So leaving Iraq isn’t a solution that will usher in a new era of peace and global stability. It seems stupid to quibble about that when, in every reality but the Bush cult’s, the invasion of Iraq was one of the events that put peace and global stability into jeopardy in the first place. We don’t get to live in a world free of terror and religious fundamentalism, not yet we don’t. It’s awful, but it’s the way it is. I hear a lot about how important it is to “get serious” about terrorism. It usually comes up when some candidate, usually Republican, wants to pose as a tough guy in front of our scared and ignorant electorate. It is a doomed country that equates jingoism with “seriousness”. If we were serious about terrorism, we wouldn’t be watching the Taleban reform in Afghanistan. If we were serious about terrorism, we wouldn’t be talking about attacking Iran as a way of bringing it to heel. If we were serious about terrorism, we’d wouldn’t stand by and watch Israelis and Palestinians and Lebanese kill each other in the service of a ghastly status quo.

What’s needed isn’t more of the same political “seriousness”, which is basically just another buzz word intended to lend gravitas to the people who have been nothing but wrong since this century began. Instead, what we need is intelligence. America does not call the shots for the rest of the world. This is not an unpatriotic, hippie-dippie thing to say at all. It’s just the way it is. We’re a great power, we’re not omnipotent. If there’s one thing we ought to learn from our awful Babylon adventure, it’s that our authority and abilities have limits. We cannot decide that the Middle East should become an avalon of democracy and pro-business governments and then just send our military in to make it so. We cannot decide that people shouldn’t blow things up in the service of a scary medieval mindset and then simply bomb those people until they stop. We’ve seen that this only deepens the impasse. No, if we want democracy in the Middle East and an end to violent fundamentalism, we have to be subtler, we have to crafty, we have to be intelligent.

But we don’t want to be. We want to sleep safe at night underneath the blanket of unending American power. The American middle-class wants to fill up at the gas station for cheap, to cast their vote for the most comforting daddy, to have their wars fought for them by the kids of strangers. They want to live in a dying dream world, this bubble where we can have it all and not worry about where it came from or how it got to us, where God smiles on our cul-de-sac, where the spoils are ours but the sacrifices are always someone else’s.

So when I hear someone howling that only cowards want us to “cut and run”, I agree with them. Only a coward would want America to cut and run from its responsibilities and take up the futile pursuit of a cheap chimera. Only a coward would ask us to cut and run from the world’s gaping wounds so that we can all go back to hiding under the threadbare skirts of our mortgaged prosperity. Only a coward would ask us to cut and run away from the hard decisions affecting humankind so that the mistakes of the past can fester into true atrocities. Only the worst kind of coward wants to cut and run from our best traditions and the rule of law in favor adopting the savagery of our enemies.

Those enemies, of course, are real. For the most part, they are weak and beneath us. Terrorists cannot destroy America. Only we can destroy America.

A warning for the faint-hearted...

2006-09-28T15:37:00.000-05:00

I have it on good authority that the legendary Sweet Daddy Lovedrops, the world’s premiere sex therapist, amateur herpetologist, and all-around crazy bastard will be dropping by much later tonight. Rumor has it that he will even be offering a question and answer session. So, if you’ve got embarrassing intimacy problems you would like solved by a man some have called “Dr. Phil’s greatest nemesis” and others have called “a bat-shit insane bastard armed with a thesaurus and a woefully undersized penis”, please queue up and be sure to address him respectfully. However, if you have a sense of decency or are under the age of sixteen, you might want to stay away. You’ve been warned...

I'm too sleepy to write...

2006-09-28T00:52:00.000-05:00

So instead of reading any drivel that might leak out of my weary mind, please enjoy this cool story about a 110 year-old ex-Negro Leauges ballplayer. Can any of you people imagine being 110 years old? If I make it that long, I’m going to be the terror of the nursing home. No one can tell you what to do when you’re 110 years old. You should get all the pudding you want and every good-looking young thing who comes by should be required to fuss over you for at least fifteen minutes. Because you’re 110 years old, dammit, and there should be perks that come with that.

And, this is off the subject, but do any of you out there get unreasonably angry whenever people choose to walk abreast and don’t let anyone get around them? Because, for some reason, that pisses me off to no end. I got stuck behind these two ladies today, and for the whole time I was forced to walk sooooooo goddamn sloooooow behind them they were having this animated discussion about how somebody caught “ammonia” and how the company they worked for only gave them a week off, even though they had “ammonia” and when you have “ammonia” you need to take it easy because “ammonia” isn’t like the common cold, it’s a lot worse and it can mess up your lungs. This drove me to bizarre, wholly unjustified heights of rage and I started my day in a funk. Is this wrong of me? I just got off the phone with Mel and she seemed to imply that I was being a bit of a fuckchop for getting so angry with such little cause. I don’t know, though. Maybe if she had been there, she would think differently.

The extended forecast suggests a blizzard of fat cats, party hacks, pompous liars, Jesus freaks in pancake makeup, and assorted thinktank zombies...

2006-09-27T14:35:00.000-05:00

My town has just been selected to host the 2008 Republican National Convention. Weep for us, people. Weep for the hotel maids who will have to make Bill Frist’s bed and wash out Dick Cheney’s denture cup. Weep for the waiters who will have to giggle their fake giggles at Rudy Guiliani’s jokes. Weep for those of us who will be trapped on the street by FOX News reporters and asked to give our opinions on stem cell research. Weep for the poor balloon vendors who must balance the joy of filling the biggest orders of their lives with the knowledge that all their hard work will soon be raining down upon the shabbiest collection of rogues and scoundrels my city has ever seen...

Wednesday Scandalrama: Hey! That’s the mayor! And he’s SMOKING CRACK!

2006-09-27T02:01:00.000-05:00

I was pretty young when Marion Barry was caught hittin’ the rock in a hotel room. I remember it well, though----every one of the five television channels we got back then must have showed that surveillance tape at least eleven billion times every day for six months straight. The middle-schooler me wasn’t sure what the big deal was: so some mayor somewhere smoked crack, whoop-dee-fucking-doo-dah. In my sullen teen universe, everyone was smoking crack—President Bush the First, Mikhail Gorbachev, my algebra teacher, those girls who wouldn’t laugh at my jokes, my parents when they wouldn’t let me watch “Nightmare on Elm Street”, everyone. I wasn’t really interested in the news back then, anyway. The television was there to show me Metallica videos. The newspaper was only good when there were lots of bra ads in it. The adolescent Kevin-M didn’t care if Marion Barry fired more pipe than Bethlehem Steel. As far as I was concerned, it was just some more boring, fake-assed shit my civics teacher would expect us to share our feelings about.

Looking back on it now, though, I can understand why it was such a big story. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the mayor of the capital of the United States of America was smoking crack on television. That’s real news right there. Especially since all this happened in the midst of the War on Drugs. It seems like ancient history now, but that was a time when drugs were what terrorism is now: the evillest evil ever to spring from the bowels of evil. Every television show seemed to have a “very special episode” where some straight-A student smoked a joint and found their life going to shit even before the buzz wore off. Every comic book had an issue where the guy in tights gamely steered some naive girl from the clutches of ravenous, drooling junkies. Every kid in the nation was forced to endure a hundred awful school assemblies where we were warned over and over and over again that if we ever did drugs we were in for a short life of shame and misery.

At my school, I helped put together a happy little play called “The Addict”. It was a series of short skits, all of which involved dumb-ass teenagers taking dope and then dying in horrible ways. The jock with his steroids drops a barbell on his neck. The hippies who like to swallow Quaaludes at the airport wander into someone’s propeller. The metalheads who smoke pot somehow manage to set each other on fire. It was great. The greatest part was that all the actors in it went out and got high after every rehearsal.

Still, this was the culture that Mayor Barry fired up his crack pipe in. Naturally, it was going to be a big deal. The only thing that could probably set off as big a shitstorm these days would be if they caught some politician kickin’ it with Hezbollah*. Barry’s indiscretion was tailor-made for white middle-class anxieties. The war on drugs was, all official protestations aside, largely a war on inner-city blacks, and here was the black mayor of one of America’s great black cities showing himself as the enemy on prime-time television. It gave a kind of grounding to ignorant people’s superstitions, it helped them continue to live in the fantasyland that the war on drugs demanded—this delusion that drugs are a black problem, an urban problem, a problem that can be solved by locking up as many poor people as possible. The times were such that our country’s longstanding racial hysteria had merged with its periodic drug hysteria, and Marion Barry foolishly blundered into the middle of the whole mess. No longer was he a skilled politician, an able administrator, and a fierce advocate for his city—he was Mayor Crackhead, the butt of a zillion jokes, some of which were actually pretty funny.

He deserved this, of course, but he deserves more too. You see, I don’t see drug use as a signal of someone’s essential depravity. I don’t excuse his behavior, but I don’t condemn him for it either. He is clearly a man with problems, and we can argue whether or not those problems render him unfit for public life, but I don’t hold any special animus towards him. To me, drug use is more a health issue than a moral failing. Of course, Barry was suspected of using cocaine before his arrest and he’s tested positive for using it since, so he obviously hasn’t been able and/or willing to live his life without it. Does this matter? Certainly. When someone holds a responsible position, they ought to be expected to behave responsibly. But does it mean that Marion Barry really is the indefensible wretch he was made out to be? Not at all. Perhaps his comeback campaign slogan said it best: “Marion Barry: He’s Not Perfect, But He’s Perfect For D.C.”

* Interesting tidbit: early in his political career, Barry was shot in the chest during an altercation with radical Muslim terrorists who were attempting to take over Washington D.C.’s municipal builidng. Strange world we live in.

Tuesday Scandalrama: Grover Cleveland, Contemptible Libertine and Confessed Bastard-Maker

2006-09-26T14:10:00.000-05:00

Cynical campaigns laden with personal attacks, unfair smears and base accusations are nothing new. When there’s a lot at stake, you’ll always find people eager to set common decency aside and lead right into the filthy muck of democracy. Take, for instance, the presidential race of 1884. This was smack-dab in the middle of the longest period of Republican dominance in our nation’s history, and they weren’t going to let Democrat Grover Cleveland break their lucky run. Especially not when they knew that, as a young man, Ol’ Rovin’ Grover had shacked up with a woman named Maria Halpin, who gave birth to his illegitimate child, a child he continued to support after his political career took off.

Republicans, apparently just as scolding and dishonest in that century as this one, tried their best to use this fact to impeach Cleveland’s character. The race was close and their candidate, Maine’s James Blaine, needed all the help he could get. Of course, Blaine himself had some 19th century sordidness in his past, as the Indianapolis Sentinel reported: “There is hardly an intelligent man in the country who has not heard that James G. Blaine betrayed the girl who he married, and then only married her at the muzzle of a shotgun...if, after despoiling her, he was too craven to refuse her legal redress, giving legitimacy to her child, until a loaded shotgun stimulated his conscience—then there is a blot on his character more foul, if possible, than any of the countless stains on his political record.”

Regardless of defenses like these, Cleveland himself hoped to stay above the fray. However, he had his work cut out from him. At rallies and speeches, Republicans would taunt him with cries of “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” By way of pooh-poohing his ambitions, the New York Sun wrote “We do not believe that the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington.” Even more frenzied were the clergy, one of whom said “Investigations disclose still more proof of debaucheries too horrible to relate and too vile to be readily believed...For many years, days devoted to business have been followed by nights of sin. He has lived as a bachelor...lodged in rooms on the third floor in a business block, and made those rooms a harem, foraged outside, also, in the city and surrounding villages; champion libertine, an artful seducer, a foe to virtue, an enemy of the family, a snare to youth and hostile to true womanhood...”

Such rhetoric makes Grover Cleveland sound a whole lot cooler than he really was, but back then it probably worked like a charm. When it got down to the wire in the campaign, it looked like his alliance of Democrats and “Mugwumps”—reformist Republicans opposed to the corrupt Blaine—were headed for defeat. However, in the last week of the race, a New York preacher delivered a speech intended to castigate the apostate Mugwumps. In the course of it, he said “We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion...” The Cleveland campaign publicized the Blaine camp’s slur throughout heavily Catholic New York and, in the end, it was enough to sway that state---and with it the presidency---to the Democrats.

(Again, my main source for this article is Michael Farquhar’s wonderful A Treasury of Great American Scandals. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it.)

The airwaves are crawling with annoying blowhards, comb-over windbags, and other assorted noisy trolls

2006-09-26T01:15:00.000-05:00

I have a grand theory that explains everything. Well, maybe it’s not my theory so much as it’s a bunch of previously-voiced theories that I’ve been bunched up and then glued together with chewing gum and boogers. And maybe it doesn’t explain everything, but it explains one thing pretty well: the phenomenon of the angry asshole pundit, or what I like to call the “talking dickhead”. This is a species apart from your conventional televised/radio-broadcasted opinion-maker. This breed came be distinguished by their stacked-deck confrontational style, their fondness for fury, their unearned sense of omniscience, and their insistence that “common sense” is actually a series of dumb prejudices best expressed through empty bluster. Their usual domain is the drive-time talk radio show, where they alternate dim commentary on current events with the sort of humor that people ought to outgrow somewhere around their eleventh birthday. Some of them, however, have graduated into the big leagues and been granted their won syndicated programs or, for the luckiest of the lucky, their own cable television show. Bill O’Reilly is the biggest and worst of these, but there’s a pretty deep bench to back him up: Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Tom Leykis, and the latest man to get a show on CNN even though he’s never said anything remotely interesting, original or amusing, Glenn Beck.

Most of these people are men, but not all of them. Similarly, most are conservatives, although there are many whose only ideological allegiance is to the juvenile and obnoxious. Their political philosophy isn’t what’s important. If liberalism encouraged the same sort of cheap shots and knee-jerk thunder, they would be liberals. In fact, one could argue that several Air America deejays fit the bill nicely. No, the people I’m talking about are conservative because, for a variety of reasons, a certain strand of right-wingness meshes well with their schtick and the situation their audience finds themselves in. Here’s where my theory comes in: the talking dickhead movement has arisen as a small part of the general societal reaction to two separate things: (1) feminism and (2) the United State’s peculiar understanding of class dynamics.

I’ll take the second of these first. For my entire life, the U.S. has endured a particular set of assumptions about economic life. For one, we assume that prosperity is permanent. For another, we assume that we as individuals are the sole arbiters of our economic fates. So a great many of us, the lucky ones, enter into a world of prosperity and prosper in it, simultaneously convinced that this is both the way the world works and somehow a reflection of our individual character. This makes us arrogant, true, but it also makes us anxious. While we may be doing well, globally speaking, we can also see people doing even better than us. They’ve got a bigger boat, a fancier deck, a newer Hummer, nicer khakis, and so on and so forth. We take this personally because we take the economy personally. Instead of ascribing a difference in income to the usual array of class factors, we ascribe it to nebulous things like “initiative”, “pluck”, “ambition” or “will”. The lack of these things is a personal problem, not an economic problem. There are no economic problems in the United States.

My guess is that this whole set-up leads to massive middle-class insecurity and, for many, a strange form of hostility. This is an anger which cannot be vented at systems or theories, but must instead fall upon less abstract villains. Luckily, your radio and television are teeming with guys willing to beat up on others on your behalf. It’s the bad form of populism. Some of the time, they’ll direct their audience’s latent wrath towards the usual collection of boogeymen: Arabs, Muslims, ghetto dwellers, the French, sexual minorities, etc., etc. This is a bonding thing, the kind of rhetoric that allows an atomized culture to unite against something nebulous and different. But, to borrow jihadi terminology, with these sorts there is the far enemy and then there is the near enemy. In the end, ragging on Syria nonstop isn’t going to garner the Arbitron ratings. That’s what they majority of the talking dickhead’s airtime is spent enumerating, excoriating and belittling the supposed faults of those middle-class Americans who ought to be righteous and holy, but fall short because they’re so goddamn stupid. So if the focus is conservatism, you’ll hear all about the effete, traitorous liberals who don’t have the balls to win the War on Terror. If the focus is more on pranks and low comedy, the butts of it will usually be the stuck-up, the strange, the foreign or the feminine. The important thing isn’t the nature of the accusation or the childishness of the humor, it’s the nullification of anxiety based on tenuous class and social positioning into something a lot less fraught. Being in the in-group—the American middle-class, if you will—then has little to do with how much you earn and a lot to do with the prejudices you hold and what jokes you’re willing to laugh at. In other words, classless punditry is part of manufacturing the illusion of a classless society.

But there’s also a sexual aspect to all of this. Because, while a couple notable talking dickheads are women, the intended audience for their ravings is very much male. This is where feminism comes in. Or, more accurately, this is where contemporary masculinity comes in. Even though by now there have been several generations that have grown up amid feminism’s influence, such a vast shift in human relations never happens easily or quickly. Our culture is still adjusting to feminism, even as feminism continues to refine itself. You see, for a very long time, white men had a pretty easy time of it when it came to proving their masculinity. There was most often a war for them to fight in if they felt they needed to demonstrate their courage and, since there were few women or minorities in the workforce, professional life became their exclusive peacock macho stomping grounds. When this scheme ended thanks to the efforts of civil rights and women’s advocates, the beneficiaries of that restricted playing field had to find new ways of being masculine. Some became new age reactionaries, bellowing about men’s rights and their duty to keep their wild souls free from the domesticating, womanly modern world. Some simply got confused, but many eventually figured out that it was all for the best and that masculinity could exist without dominance, violence or unearned privilege.

Still, for a lot of men, this understanding coexists uneasily with more atavistic impulses. There are no worthy battles in the cubicle farms where they toil; their professional and their personal lives are just the two edges of life’s neutering knife for them. They feel trapped and oppressed, shuffling through an existence shorn of vitality and power. They may be right, but their escape is all wrong. It’s far too easy. They turn on their radio or their television set and get their manly rebellion as passively as possible. There isn’t a lot in the way of conflict or drama in their lives, but they can cheer on Bill O’Reilly’s latest crusade against something or other. They long to be dominant, but they settle for watching Sean Hannity slap around Alan Colmes one more time. They dream of being take-no-crap men of action, but the closest they can come to this is joining the pack of some alpha male with a radio show. It’s kind of sad, I think.

But maybe I’m overintellectualizing my personal dislikes. Maybe it’s just a “different strokes” sort of thing. I mean, shit, I like French pop and god knows that isn’t for everyone. What do you people think? Any O’Reilly fans out there want to explain his appeal in a way that doesn’t involve calling me a leftist jackass? I mean, I don’t give a shit if you call me a leftist jackass, but that doesn’t explain why someone would want to spend a perfectly good hour listening to some angry jag-off bellow on and on, does it? I’m curious. I want to know.

Monday Scandalrama: That's PRESIDENT Aunt Fancy to you, Mister...

2006-09-25T00:16:00.000-05:00

James Buchanan may have been our nation’s very first gay president. Now of course the concept of “gay” wasn’t around back when he was bringing his dour brand of fabulousness to the White House, and historians are divided on whether there was any actual substance to the rumors that dogged him much of his life. Most of the whispering stemmed from Buchanan’s relationship with one William Rufus King, a Senator from Alabama who was both a diplomat in France and, for a month or so, vice-president to Franklin Pierce. King and Buchanan lived together in Washington D.C. for more than a decade. During this time, political opponents and shameless gossips like Andrew Jackson wrote letters referring to the pair as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy”.

Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy were both bachelors their entire lives, which certainly fueled such speculation. Buchanan was engaged to be wed at one point, but his fiancee broke off the engagement and died shortly later after taking laudanum. This kind of thing soured Buchanan on the whole marriage thing, although wags were always eager to refer to King as Buchanan’s “wife” or “better half” in their nasty letters. Buchanan’s own letters, however, only seem to confirm the suspicions of dozens of wagging tongues. After King left for his diplomatic post in Paris, Buchanan wrote the following to a friend: “I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any of them. I feel that it is not good for a man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.”

King, for his part, was aware of pain he might have caused his former roommate, as well as catty enough to write him a letter that said, in part, “I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation.” Indeed, the Senator seems to have played with Buchanan’s heart more than once. A congressman from Tennessee, during one of the power couple’s periodic break-ups, wrote that King “may now be seen every day, triged out in her best clothes & smirking about in hopes of securing better terms than with her former companion”. That “former companion”, of course, having been Buchanan. Owch.

Anyway, later on, King died and Buchanan ascended to the presidency. He didn’t do a very good job of it, though, allowing the nation to slide headlong towards civil war. On the last day of his single term, he told his successor Abraham Lincoln (according to some, America’s second gay president), “If you are as happy entering the presidency as I am in leaving it, then you are truly a happy man”.

To contemporary politics-watchers, this story is interesting mainly because it’s hard to imagine a similar scenario happening today. Given our present prejudices, it seems unlikely that a man who had lived with another man for a decade and a half would be allowed to rise to such a level. A Republican media firm would cook up a slick ad showing a montage of drag queens, leathermen and fashion designers while a stern voice intones something about “mainstream values” and “Hollywood liberals” and whatever else. There would be the typical furor that the candidate’s living situation jeopardizes every traditional marriage that’s ever happened since the beginning of time and churches would pass out bulletins warning that if the candidate gets too many votes, Jesus will be banned and people will have to start marrying chickens. So, while it’s true that we’ve progressed some since the middle of the 19th century, we still have quite a way to go...

(Most of the facts and all the historical letters used in this post were taken from Michael Farquhar’s book, A Treasury of Great American Scandals. This is a great book for anyone interested in the subject, and you all should rush out to buy it...)

You call that a scandal?

2006-09-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

You wanna know what happened in Minnesota politics last week? Some young fellow with one of these here “blog” thingies got it in his head to visit the website of a certain ad agency. This agency does commercials for political candidates, and one of their clients happens to be Mark Kennedy, the Republican running for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats. Somehow, this blogger—who I don’t know, by the way, but from his sidebar it’s clear he has excellent taste in webpages—found his way to a password prompt. Here he seems to have typed in various things until he finally, for some reason, hit upon the idea of typing “Allen”. At this point, he was able to go to another area and view unreleased Mark Kennedy commercials. He then offered a link to these TV spots to staff working for Amy Klobuchar, Kennedy’s Democratic opponent. Next thing you know, people are resigning, the FBI is investigating, politicians are issuing pompous statements, the blogosphere is babbling with unusual vigor, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of people are acting like something legitimately interesting is happening.

Allow me to be frank: this is not a scandal. This is just more of the boring crap political nerds entertain themselves with. Unreleased campaign commercials being leaked? Questionable internet ethics? Possible delays in reporting the security breech? Republican grandstanding? Bloggers declaring themselves the future of everything? Yawn. Wake me up when someone hires a rent-boy or blows a 0.4 on the breathalyzer.

Some of my fellow Minnesotans might remember the saga of Jon Grunseth, the Republican gubernatorial contender who had to take an abrupt leave from public life following allegations that he had thrown a naked pool party with a bunch of teenagers. Now that was a scandal. Less gonad-oriented, but just as newsworthy, was the tale of my former city councilman, Dean Zimmerman. On the surface, he came off as just another ineffectual, self-righteous Green Party politician with a whole bunch of pie-in-the-sky plans to get Minneapolitans to watch less television and ride to work in retro-futuristic “Jetsons” cars. His idealistic image and his charming ineptitude, however, didn’t help him much after the FBI coughed up a videotape of him shoveling a whole lot of cash into his pockets. He claims it was a legitimate campaign donation. The jury of his peers disagreed. No matter where the truth is (and tend to think that Zimmerman is as dirty as they come), I still chalk it up as a genuine scandal, while all this “hacking” business is just standard-issue election year bad behavior.

Scandals appeal to our love of gossip, our need to be titillated, our fetish for seeing the powerful revealed as sleazy losers. Everybody loves scandals except for the people caught up in them. Sure, professional spinners will always try to shake a few votes out of them, but the true voyeuristic thrill of a good scandal is bipartisan. I’m a Democrat through-and-through, but I still got a kick out reading about Bill Clinton’s hot cigar sexytime with his favorite intern. I don’t think he should have been impeached for it, of course, but that wasn’t going to stop me from savoring the image of the leader of the free world negotiating for handjobs like some sort of middle schooler. By the same token, I would hate to think that some Republicans—out of partisan pride—might have shielded their eyes from the sordid details surrounding Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan’s alleged trips to Parisian sex clubs with a Star Trek: Voyager actress. Guilty pleasure in good dirt ought to be universal. Maybe it’s not our culture’s proudest and most noble quirk, but it’s there.

That’s why this week I’m going to focus on real scandals. Because in a time where people get excited over tedious internet antics and skullduggery of the dullest sort, perhaps we ought not lose sight of what a filthy, crass, corrupt, brutal, repulsive and entertaining sport politics can sometimes be.

NOTE: Edited to reflect that the swing clubs were JACK Ryan's indiscretion, not JIM Ryan's. The latter is a fine, scandal-free gentleman, beloved by all who know him. Sorry about that.

Come to Minnesota, because we're special...

2006-09-22T01:09:00.000-05:00

Here in the great white North, we like to brag. We brag about the glories of our scenery, we brag about our world-class museums, we brag about our unflappable politeness, we even brag about how we don’t like to brag. Yep, we’re pretty pleased with ourselves up here, but we’re insecure too. We worry that people from other places—dirty, crowded, rude and boastful places—might think we’re just a bunch of boring, crypto-Scandinavian hicks with ridiculous accents. So while we’re convinced that our lives are far more pleasant and civilized than what goes on in, say, New Orleans, we also bounce around like a stateful of dim Shih Tzus whenever the New York Times compliments us on one of our theaters or restaurants. We’re not content just to consider ourselves superior, we want everyone else to acknowledge it too. And that’s sort of weird, when you get right down to it.

So, on behalf of all the non-Minnesotans out there, I would like to present you with a handy guide to what we’re really good at. This will help you understand when our pride is justified and when we’re just blowing sunshine up your asses.

ONE: Passive-aggression

Without a doubt, this is the trait that most characterizes life in this part of the country. It is something that afflicts ninety percent of us, although were you to ask a random person from Brainerd or Cloquet or Anoka whether it’s a real phenomenon, they’d most likely change the subject to the weather or hockey or the new deck they’re putting on their “cabin”. And then they’d silently loathe you for the rest of your life for even bringing up the question.

So, if you find yourself in Minnesota, do your best not to mention it. If you have a burning desire to see our quiet kind of hostility in action, just get behind the wheel of a car and drive to any well-traveled crossroads. When your light turns green, signal your intention to make a left turn, but do not pull out into the intersection. Stay safely behind the crosswalk as the opposing traffic goes past. As your maintain this position, use your rearview mirror to take a look at the drivers behind you. Chances are that they’ll be in the kind of rage you just don’t see back in New Jersey. They’ll be banging on their dashboards, screaming the most vulgar things imaginable, spraying spittle all over their windshield, and squirting smoke out of their ears. Yet at no point will they so much as tap on their horn, no matter how long you dawdle there. Why is this? Because that would make their fury known to the person who provoked it and, in Minnesota, such a thing simply isn’t done.

Basically, the main rule we live by is this: it is terrible to give offense, but it’s even worse to voice your displeasure at that offense. The crime must be punished, of course, but not in a way that makes any sense to the criminal. So you treat the guy who always walks away after jamming the copy machine to icy glares for three years, you tip the barista who doesn’t smile at you two cents, you make a less-delicious cake for the birthdays of people who have spoken badly about you behind your back. It’s just the way we roll around here.

TWO: Faking outrage

Minnesotans, despite their sober reputation, really enjoy being pissed off. Or, more accurately, they really enjoy pretending to be pissed off. It’s another aspect of our whole passive-aggression problem, and you can see it most clearly in a lot of our political discourse. Take, for instance, this Republican apparatchik. By the time you read this, he will probably have written his eight thousandth paragraph-long article on the current Democratic depravity du jour, the quasi-scandal of some guy somewhere looking at unreleased campaign commercials on some other guy’s website. In the course of this, we get posts with catchy titles like “The Tactics of Liberal Bloggers Have No Boundaries” and, my favorite, “I’m Disappointed In The Liberal Blogosphere In Minnesota”. This sort of contrived thunder is as Minnesotan as a fat man on a snowmobile, and even if no one really buys the head-shaking and the disappointment in our lack of boundaries, a lot of people still go in for the whole routine.

This is by no means an exclusively right-wing hobby, either. Because we’ve polarized ourselves into our left-right camps, we’ve come to reduce every policy disagreement into yet another example of the worst people in the entire world advocating dishonestly for unspeakable evil. Everything is an atrocity, everyone on the other side is an asshole, everyone on the planet will be fucked if we don’t get our way. This is our perverted way of making our boring discussions about school funding, campaign finance reform and public transportation bonding into a super-sexy battle between Good and Evil. So what if we too often look like screeching ninnies? The winters are long around here and it’s not like we can work on our tans or play beach volleyball or something productive like that.

THREE: Booking deluxe, all-expense paid guilt-trips

To me, this trait is mainly found among Minnesotan progressives and leftists. And, if I may criticize my own kind, it is unquestionably our worst habit. Here’s how it works. Someone, perhaps not even a soulless right-winger, expresses skepticism about a library funding initiative. Minnesota liberal then immediately steps in, clucks his/her tongue, and proceeds to wax expansive about how sad it is that the skeptic doesn’t care about reading, doesn’t care if children get educated, doesn’t care about a healthy community, doesn’t care about anyone but their own library-loathing self. Or maybe someone offers the opinion that some juvenile felon is a vicious sociopathic bastard who ought to be locked up for a very long time. This, to a great many Minnesotans, isn’t so much a statement of position to be taken on its merits as it is an opportunity for a long, half-assed lecture about how terrible it is that people don’t have compassion anymore and how people from privileged backgrounds shouldn’t be so quick to judge those who haven’t had the same advantages and wouldn’t it be better if we had restorative justice to offer these children rather than just the institutionalized opprobrium of the state?

I hate that sort of shit. Our positions gain their value from their basis in evidence, their wisdom, and the benefits of their application. They’re not just ways to prove that the person who holds them is the most virtuous, nicest, bestest person on Earth. That’s the sort of smug garbage I can’t stand from real conservative Christians, who often believe that holding a philosophy is the same thing as being holy. If our beliefs are challenged, we have to defend those beliefs. We shouldn’t just try and make a case based on what gentle, decent, caring souls we are. Liberalism is a way of understanding the world, it is not a shortcut to righteousness.

FOUR: Hating the local sports teams until they start to win

I’ll admit to doing this. Whenever any sort of season starts up—be it football, baseball, basketball, curling or whatever—I could give a shit. They’re undefeated? Big deal. They’re just a bunch of overpaid spoiled crybaby jocks anyway. Shit, for the money they’re making, they better be undefeated. Why don’t we just wipe their asses for them and give them a new stadium for every single day? The steroid-addled bastards. Why don’t people care about the arts anymore? You’ll never see an entire section of the paper devoted to a poet or a novelist or a ballerina and you wanna know why? Because our society has sick, sick priorities. Forilla.

And then the Vikings or the Twins or the Timberwolves or the Skating Russian Dudes make it to the playoffs and I get all excited. I follow the scores. I learn the players’ names. I bandy around statistics. I sometimes even watch the games. I get into it, in other words. At least until they’re inevitably knocked out. Twenty minutes after that I revert back to my normal, sports-hating self.

FIVE: Behaving awkwardly around minorities

Understand: Minnesota is one of the whitest states in America. If you aren’t in Minneapolis, St. Paul, or one of a few inner-ring suburbs, it is possible to go a looooooong time without seeing a single non-caucasian. Most of us aren’t used to different cultures and their different ways. When a typical Minnesotan is faced with one of these people, so many things are going through their mind that their conversational skills suffer. Sure, there are a few xenophobes who might worry that anyone slightly darker than them intends to do them harm, but many others are just scared that they’ll say the wrong thing. They want to be welcoming, but they don’t want to be so welcoming that the minority in question will mistake friendliness for wanting to be their friend. Because then the hapless Minnesotan might get invited to dinner and be forced to eat strange foods spiced with something stronger than pepper.

Minnesotans are also the only people on Earth who feel it’s rude to ask a foreign person where they’re from. Everywhere else I’ve been it’s a pretty standard ice-breaker, but here we apparently live under the delusion that not being a native Minnesotan some sort of unspeakable shame that should never, never, ever be brought up.

SIX: Squandering vacation time

The mark of a true Minnesotan is that they never leave Minnesota. Why would you? I mean, what other place in the world has so many trees and fields and lakes and rivers and antique shops and all that shit? So take your bizarre trip to go see the Pyramids, you weirdo you. Sven Johnson and Helga Norquist are going “up north” to “the cabin” this summer, just like every summer, and you better be prepared to look at some charming family photographs whenever you get back from whatever oddball other country you insist on visiting. Because there is no greater breech of middle-class Minnesota etiquette than not listening rapturously to someone’s three-hour long description of their “lake cabin” and all the magical wholesome crap they do up there. You can walk up Mount Everest without a sherpa, and in Minnesota you’ll still be less interesting than the guy in Accounting who went “up north” and caught a really big walleye. This is a place where people fantasize about going somewhere bucolic, sitting on a deck, and just staring until it gets too dark to see anything. I’m not kidding you. It sounds boring as hell to normal people, but here in Minnesota a vast percentage of us feel that the suburbs of Minneapolis (population 385,000) are just too hectic and cut-throat, so they need to “get away” and “recharge their batteries” somewhere even less stimulating. The joke, however, is on them two times. First, since everyone around here feels the same way, their woodsy hideaways become as crowded as their cubicle ranches every weekend. Second, nobody has a real cabin anymore. They all have “cabins”, which have running water, air conditioning, big-screen televisions, internet hookups, whirlpool bathtubs and so on and so forth. So they basically just recreate their suburban existence in a marginally more rural setting. Sound like a fun way to spend your summer? It does? Well then this is the state for you...

I wish I could quit you, country music...

2006-09-21T12:15:00.000-05:00

Listen. I was content to be done with my country song contest. If it were up to me, I would be back to writing my usual scholarly and sober posts on foreign affairs and economic policy. But I’m afraid these will have to wait, because Mel has officially lodged a protest against her choice not winning. Were it anyone else, I would probably ignore it, but with Mel I simply cannot. You see, Mel and I go way back. All the way from Iowa to New York City to Seattle to Cleveland, she's been there, spreading joy, speaking in fake German accents and alerting me when my pants make my ass too baggy. In fact, there was a time when I believed it should be a felony for someone to do something counter to Mel’s wishes. As I matured, however, I realized that such a law would be ridiculous. After all, only a crazy fool with no dignity or decency would even consider doing something counter to Mel’s wishes. It would be like making eating turds illegal. Yes, it’s disgusting and distasteful, but when people do it they only get shit on themselves. This is my way of saying whatever Mel wants, Mel gets.

And today Mel wants “I Ain’t Gay, I’m Just Thinkin’ Bout His Ass”. So here goes:

Well, I’ve been drivin’ truck
For near about fifteen years
Yeah, I’ve been down on my luck
Just grinding my own gears
But out on that there highway
You get plenty of time to think
And them thoughts I got today
Gonna drive me to the brink
I’m wonderin’ about this life I have
And I’m wondering what to do
Do I walk down just one path
Or do I follow what feels true?
You see, I live down in Arkansas
Plain as anyone can see
And just because I might visit Memphis
That don’t mean that I’m moving
To Tennessee, oh no, oh no...

And I ain’t gay,
I’m just thinkin’ about his ass
So firm, so high, so buff
Warm as a fire, smooth as glass
And I ain’t gay,
I just got that man on my mind
So strong, so hard, so rough
I’m gonna get back
I gotta get back
Gotta get back and make him mine

Yeah, it was near two months ago
I rolled into that there place
Feelin’ mighty bad ‘bout bein’ alone
With a big ol’ frown on my face
Well, he come up to me
When I was down in Dixie’s bar
Said this ain’t no place for us to be
Got my own joint, ain’t too far
I got up and followed that guy
Yeah, followed him right out the door
Listen, people, I ain’t gonna lie
We had a drink, a smoke, and then a whole lot more
You ask me why I done it
Then all ya’ll better just listen
I done it because I done it
And I sure as hell am gonna
Do it again, oh yeah, oh yeah...

But I ain’t gay,
I’m just thinkin’ bout his ass
So firm, so high, so buff
Warm as a fire, smooth as glass
But I ain’t gay,
I just got that man on my mind
So strong, so hard, so rough
I’m gonna get back
I gotta get back
Gotta get back and make him mine

I’ve heard people say there’s rules
And I’ve heard ‘bout God’s law
Well, those people are sho’ nuff fools
If they think we’ve got God bothered
With what goes on over in Memphis
Havin’ brunch, dressin’ up in leather
Huggin’, rubbin’, caressin’, kissin’
Goin’ to the Erasure concert together
Yeah, we gonna find a place to stay
Maybe just a quaint ‘lil loft
And then I’m goin’ back today
Gonna stick around ‘til I take off
‘Cause you know I like to see him
Hell, I’d see him every day
But there just ain’t nothin’ better ‘en
Seeing that man,
Whoooah, seeing that man
Seeing that man just walk away

Cause I ain’t gay,
I’m just thinkin’ bout his ass
So firm, so high, so buff
Warm as a fire, smooth as glass
But I ain’t gay,
I just got that man on my mind
So strong, so hard, so rough
I’m gonna get back
I gotta get back
Gotta get back and make him mine

Let's talk about my splitting headache...

2006-09-21T00:17:00.000-05:00

Did you ever have one of those nights where it feels like someone has wrapped your head in aluminum foil and then beat on it with a pair of symphony-grade cymbals while you were riding in a truck filled with alarm clocks and firecrackers and crying babies as it rolled down the side of a mountain with the radio playing Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” album at full volume? You know what I’m talking about, right? Sort of when you take three extra-strength Tylenol and your headache laughs, laughs, laughs and swats them away like they so many Pez candies. Come back when you’ve got some goddamn Percocet, the headache taunts, maybe then we can negotiate. It’s the kind of headache where you just want to curl up in bed and moan gently and maybe have a Brazilian supermodel rub your neck with hot oils but you can’t do that because you don’t know any Brazilian supermodels and you’d too shy to ask if you did and it’s probably a good thing because then they’d see what a flaming crybaby you are and how long it’s been since you’ve cleaned your bathroom, and besides the pain is so bad all you can do is stare numbly at the evening news, hating the anchors with a violent passion and for no discernable reason. The sort of headache that jumps on you from out of nowhere and takes big nasty bites out of your brain, leaving you a useless and whiny wreck with glassy eyes and hurricane hair. If headaches were Soviet dictators, this one would be Stalin. If headaches were insects, this would be one of those two-foot long centipedes that you sometimes see on Nova. If headaches were rap songs, this one would be about what a really fucking bad headache I have...

That’s all I have to say tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow, if my skull doesn’t combust, Scanners-style, before then.

My dinner with Mahmoud

2006-09-20T01:19:00.000-05:00

Today, I got an interesting call on my secure line. Ordinarily, all I hear on that phone are pre-recorded debt-relief pitches and Democrats pleading for money, but this time Condoleeza Rice was on the other end. I could tell she had something important on her mind, since she skipped all the awkward pleasantries expected of people who were once ardent lovers, but have since grown into a comfortable-if-distant friendship (with benefits). I must admit, I was a little put off by her official manner. Sure, she can take that tone with her lackeys and with intransigent world leaders, but this was her Kevie-foo-foo she was talking to.

“Kevin, I’ve got something I need you to do...” she began.

“Whatever you desire, my pookie-foot,” I told her, but my honeyed tone didn’t faze her a bit.

“Listen. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is coming to the U.S. today and I want you to keep an eye on him, okay?”

Well, I bet my gasp could have been heard all the way to Foggy Bottom. I’m afraid that, for a moment at least, I lost my cool: “Not that, butter bear!” I wailed, “You know I would do anything for you, but—please!—not that! Let me follow around Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyayev instead! Or let me spy on Surinamese President Ronald Venetiaan! Anyone but Mahmoud, Condi! Please!”

Condi just clucked her tongue at my histrionics. “Your country needs you, Kevin,” she said.

“I’m real busy, though! I’ve got lots to do here! I mean, I have to write this gay cowboy song for my friend Mel and I have to re-alphabetize my Latin jazz CDs and I...” I babbled, but the Secretary of State—foul temptress that she is—just cut me off.

“Listen. If you don’t do it, I might have to leak those pictures of the time you and Katherine Harris—”

“I’ll do it!” I cried out then, both immensely distressed and slightly excited. You see, part of me gets kind of turned on whenever Condi plays hardball. “Just get me a plane ticket and I’ll be right out there,” I said.

She let out one of her sweet little chuckles and said, “That’s the beauty of it. He’s going to Minneapolis after his U.N. appearance. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“But why is the President of Iran coming to Minneapolis?”

“The C.I.A. says he’s crazy about snowglobes. Apparently, that big mall you have out there has a bunch of them that he can’t even find on eBay.”

“Huh,” I said, “Well, I guess I’ll report back to you tomorrow, my darling sugar-tushy...”

“Great,” the most powerful woman in the Bush administration said, “And while you’re at it, try and find out about that whole nuclear weapons thing.” She hung up on me then, and I was left cooing my smooth lines into a dead receiver.

I tried not to be too hurt. After all, if I did her this favor, she would be in my debt for something big. Because, as she and few others know, me and Ahmadinejad go way back. It was the mid-80s, when he was a respected professor of traffic engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology and I was wandering the earth pretending to be the reincarnation of Omar Sharif. We met by chance in a Tehran cafe and—if I remember correctly—soon got in a full-scale screaming match over the merits of noted Persian poet Hafiz. He took the tack (woefully common, I might add) that the great mystic was simply a Sufi heretic, while I argued that his humanism and aesthetic brilliance transcended such petty sectarian strictures. We almost came to blows about this, and we parted as bitter enemies.

Now, two decades later, I saw him again, only this time he was carrying an armful of snowglobes through Camp Snoopy. I shadowed him for awhile, trying to figure out what approach would be the best. You don’t just walk up to one of the big players in the Axis of Evil and start chatting him up about Israel, after all. You have to be sort of slick about it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to use any of my fancy fake-out techniques. It was around the kiddie boat ride that he spun around, strode straight up to me and asked, in his passable English, “Excuse me, mister, but could you point me in the direction of the Sbarro?”

I had to roll with it. That’s what high-stakes diplomacy is all about. Without missing a beat, I said “I’m looking for that myself. Let’s try upstairs.”

At first, I was a little surprised that he didn’t recognize me, but then I remembered that, during my Omar Sharif days, I always had a small monkey perched on my shoulder. Without it, I look like a totally different guy. As we strolled among the teenage girls and the Peanuts gang, I fell easily into one of my most trusty disguises: that of a traveling plumbing-parts salesman from suburban Memphis. “You sure have a lot of snowglobes there, fella,” I said, my accent a perfect simulacrum of the west Tennessee way of speaking.

“Yes. They are beautiful, are they not?” the Iranian President said, beaming with pride at his purchases.

I nodded and guided him stealthily to the escalators. Of course, as a longtime Minnesota resident, I knew that the Sbarro was on the third floor, but I couldn’t tip one of our nation’s most outspoken enemies off to that fact. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, this espionage, and that’s why they don’t let just any dipshit do it. I had to go to school for, like, two years. All the while, I kept him occupied with small talk and good-natured banter. Over the course of this, I discovered several small bits of intelligence. Most of these are classified, but a few I can share in a public forum such as this one. They are (1) that the President of Iran agreed that it was cold in Minnesota today and (2) that Tehran is beautiful this time of year.

Eventually, we found our way to Sbarro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad carefully set his snowglobes on an empty table and went to take his place in line. There was a little tiff when one of the employees there accidentally tried to give him pepperonis on his pizza slice, but this didn’t rise to the level of an international incident. With our trays and our large Pepsis, we sat down together and started in on a genial conversation.

When you’re in the business of figuring shit out on behalf of the government, you have to set aside some of your moral compass. It sounds disgusting, but it’s true. I couldn’t do my job effectively if I looked across the plastic food court table and saw a dangerous demagogue, a notorious anti-Semite, and a potential world-destabilizer. That would make keeping up the charade very difficult, so I had to swallow my knowledge of world affairs and my distaste for his policies and see him just as goofy Mahmoud, an avid snowglobe collector.

The only trouble was that he seemed to have no intention of letting in his amiable dinner companion in on any nuclear secrets. Perhaps he thought a plumbing-parts salesman wouldn’t be interested, perhaps his advisors had warned him against it. No matter the reason, all I got was a long lecture on traffic engineering. I wish I could say it was illuminating, but it wasn’t. It was boring. You can only hear so much about what Central Asian heat does to asphalt and the number of traffic lights needed on arterial roads. It isn’t a very “sexy” subject, I’m afraid.

But Mahmoud wouldn’t let up. He got really into it, and before I knew it, four hours had gone by and I hadn’t learned a single fucking thing about uranium enrichment. It was unbearable. I lost my mind a little bit. When he stopped to catch his breath, I said, “Well, that reminds me of something I read one time. Would you like to hear it?”

Mahmoud looked skeptical, but he nodded and bade me go on. He was clearly a man not used to being interrupted. But the expression on his face was priceless when I rose to my feet and began to recite---in my flawless Farsi---the immortal words of the 31st Ghazal:

“ Preachers who display their piety in prayer and pulpit
behave differently when they're alone.

It puzzles me. Ask the learned ones of the assembly:
"Why do those who demand repentance do so little of it?"

It's as if they don't believe in the Day of Judgment
with all this fraud and counterfeit they do in His name.”

With the lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz ringing in his ears, the President of Iran finally recognized me as his foe of so many years ago. The noise he made then was frightful, half a hiss of rage and half a squeal of horror. And the last thing I remember is him winging a Winnie the Pooh snowglobe at my head.

When I woke up, I was on Air Force One with a bandage around my head. I’m writing this from a safe house basement somewhere in Northern Virginia, in between debriefing sessions. With any luck, I’ll be back in the Midwest tomorrow morning. It’s a hassle, true, but sometimes you just have to answer when your country calls...

I tried to get absolution from the Pope for this one, but he’s apparently busy with some other stuff...

2006-09-18T23:53:00.000-05:00

Okay. Before we get down to presenting the second victor in my stupid country song contest, I would just like to point out that I did not want to write these lyrics. No, no: if things had gone my way, I would be writing about “Kentucky style” lovin’. Instead, due to the evil desires of no less than three voters, I have been forced to drag the messiah of millions—a man of peace and humility---into my tawdry realm of innuendo, invective and smut. I hope you people are happy. You know who you are.

Anyway, without further ado, allow me to present a little ditty I like to call “Jesus Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”:

Wellllllllllll,
Back in the days of the Nazarene
Them Ba’athists was getting mighty mean
Hoardin’ their oil, pushin’ around Kuwait
Man from Galilee said “Jes’ you wait,
Might not come today, might not tomorra’
But you done stepped in a bucket of sorrow
‘Cause one day there’s gonna be a place
Strong and free ‘nuff to smash your face
And then you’ll be hollerin’ to the U.N.
Sayin’ ol’ Preznit Bush done it again
Toppled your throne, freed your country
Made the region safe for democracy
So Saddam Hussein, just you quit
Because this boy from the manger says you ain’t shit...”

Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
So go back to France, you moonbat
Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
It’s only devils that vote Democrat

Wellllllllllll,
It was way back in ol’ Judea
When a fella named Adam had an idea
"Let’s get Steve and some other fellas
Because I’ve got a hankerin’ for them wedding bells"
But, don’t you worry and don’t you wail
‘Cause Jesus done caught them at the Macy’s sale
There in his sandals, so sure and proud
Let them know that wasn’t allowed
“Now, you sinners know I’m the messiah
And what I’m tellin’ you ain’t no lyin’
My pop thinks what you’re doin’ ain’t kosher
And he says you’re hurtin’ him the most here
Worse that liars, drunkards, killers with knives
Are the men who want men to be their wives...”

Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
So go back to San Francisco, you moonbat
Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
It’s only homer-sex-shulls who vote Democrat

Take it away, Jesus!

[Celestial harp solo]

Wellllllllllll,
Christ was rolling down along the ol’ Jordan
When he met a bald-headed economist man
Who said, “Let’s tax the rich, they’ve got enough
All they’re doin’ with it is buyin’ useless stuff!”
Well, Jesus heard this talk and stopped mighty quick
Because taxin’ folks makes the son of God mighty sick
He raised his voice, all honeyed and true
And called that man ten times a fool
“Now, you may be smart but you sure ain’t holy
Because we got to keep this here market free
Creatin’ jobs, fillin’ needs, havin’ a trickle-down effect
That’s the sort of thing we ought to respect
Now, listen up, before I send you down below
It’s a right sacred duty to keep them taxes low.”

Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
Go back to Russia, you moonbat
Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it
Because only commy-nists vote Democrat

Are you ready for the country?

2006-09-18T00:48:00.000-05:00

First off, thank you to everyone who took time out of your busy schedules to indulge my absurd contest. Thank you also to Mr. Sponge, who provided a timely assist just when low voter turnout threatened to turn my weekend into a ever-darkening spiral of despair and alcohol abuse. Now that the whole thing is over and the winner(s) have been decided, I am left to look back on the whole experience and think, Oh fuck, now I actually have to write one of those stupid country songs. Two of those stupid country songs, actually. Because there was a tie and I was too honest and too stupid just to write a fake comment tipping the balance to one or the other. So that’s more work I have to do. And it’s not like I’m not busy already, what with my six jobs and my trying to find a new job and my novel and my short stories and all that. Dammit.

But enough whining. According to my tabulations, the victors are as follows: “Take Off Them Waders” and “Jesus Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”. Two fine titles, perhaps, but I was really hoping you people would choose “(I’m Fixin’ to Love You) Full-On Kentucky Style” or “I Ain’t Gay, I’m Just Thinkin’ Bout His Ass”. Because I actually had ideas for those ones. Good ideas. And now those ideas must die. Oh well. If people always voted the way I wanted them to, John Kerry would be our president, Mark Green would be mayor of NYC, and magic gumdrops would rain down from hot pink candy volcanos as unicorns dance merrily up joy-flavored rainbows towards hundred-gallon pots of gold and hot tubs teeming with saucy Brazilian ingenues. But I guess it doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, I think I’m going to do one song today and one song tomorrow, so as not to strain my creativity muscle. Tonight’s installment is gonna be a tear-jerker, so if you’re the emotional type, be sure to steel yourself now.

Take Off Them Waders

Well, you and me been farmin’
Since ‘bout 1972
And if there’s one thing I know about farmin’
It ain’t so easy to do
But, baby, you took to it
Like a fat man to barbeque
And now this fat man’s so happy
That he’s farmin’ here with you
And I got to tell it plain
And I hope you understand
That tonight this old fool’s
Gonna be your lovin’ man

So take off them waders, honey
Step into the candlelight
Get out of them overalls, darlin’
Because we gonna do this thing up right...

Every got-damned day
You get up at four in the mornin’
Rainin’, snowin’, hailin’
And the farm-hand’s quit with no warnin’
Well, you’ve birthed more calves
Than a million high-class ladies
And, sweetheart, you’ve pulled enough udders
To make John Henry look lazy
Now, I ain’t never seen heaven
Or the Eiffel Tower in Gay Paree
But I don’t any of them things look as good
As you, covered in manure and comin’ back to me

So take off them waders, honey
Step into the candlelight
Get out of them overalls, darlin’
Because we gonna do this thing up right

A gentle reminder...

2006-09-17T11:14:00.000-05:00

I've decided that voting in my country song contest will remain open until 9pm tonight. Please, if you haven't already, go and pick your favorite. A kitten's innocent life (as well as Discordian Stooge's marriage) may depend on it...

Can this kitten teach you people the importance of participatory governance?

2006-09-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

As you can plainly see, above this text is a photograph of an adorable kitten. His name is Lionel. Isn’t he cute? What a frolicky, insouciant, cuddly being he is! Please, gaze at him to your heart’s content: I’m sure you’ll find that his image will soothe your soul and calm your nerves. I must admit that his soft fur and his frisky antics sure have filled my day with joy.

This joy is especially necessary, since I’ve been pretty depressed over the low voter turnout for my country song title contest. Of course, in a democracy such as this blog, no one can force anyone else to partake in the civic process. That’s just not how it’s done. The only option available to responsible leaders is to point out to the people that, often, apathy and inactivity come with consequences of their own. There is, for instance, the fact that by shirking your electoral duties, you give up your franchise to those who actually bother to make an effort, thus causing your personal voice to be excluded from the public discourse. There is also, I feel, an incremental effect that “snowballs”, if you will, whenever one avoids their democratic responsibilities: little by little the standards and values and responsibilities that hold our community together are frayed until they become unable to support our dreams and aspirations.

Finally, and it pains me to say it, there is some concern over what might happen to sweet Lionel if people don’t start voting for which country song they like the best.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not threatening this innocent, gentle kitten. Far from it. Such behavior would be savage, and I am not a savage man. No, no: I am merely a man who cannot sit idly by and watch as the beautiful system of governance bequeathed to us by the Greeks is corrupted into uselessness by my audience’s unwillingness to vote on which bad country song they think I ought to compose. These are desperate times for us simple humanists, I’m afraid, and it would weigh greatly on my soul if poor Lionel was to become a victim of our societal malaise. He deserves better than that, don’t you think?

It’s funny, isn’t it, how such a simple thing as voting in a silly contest could spare such a winsome creature a disgraceful fate? Because—and this is something I shudder just to think of, I assure you all—my biggest fear is that Lionel may find himself the victim of an experimental weapon that fires gamma rays at such a high intensity that his appealing form would become mutated beyond recognition. And what a hard road he would have if that came to pass. What an injustice that would be. There is a silent tear in the corner of my left eye, and it is quivering gently as I ponder what fate has in store for dear, dear Lionel.

But hush! For our delightful kitten is scampering across the floor as we speak, batting about a piece of string! It is a glory to behold, the wonders of youth and the magnificence of the animal kingdom all wrapped up in such a carefree package. Lionel is certainly a gift from the heavens, and gazing upon his hearty play, I imagine that his tiny mind considers life to be an endless adventure, an endless and blissful battle with bits of string, an eternity of simple happiness and profound peace.

May it ever be so, darling Lionel, may it ever be so...

Before you do anything else this Saturday...

2006-09-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

Go over and check out Mr. Sponge's article on race, Republicans, Oklahoma and Minnesota's Fifth District Congressional race. Mr. Sponge has been on fire lately, and these days he's kicking out in-depth, thought-provoking, entertaining posts so often that he's probably eligible for some sort of blogging Oscar. So be sure to make Mr. Sponge a regular stop on your internet tours. You won't be sorry.

Because deep down you’ve always wanted to make your mark on country music...

2006-09-15T01:42:00.000-05:00

While everyone knows that I’m the Minnesota’s most fearsome and respected political kingmaker, not as many are aware that I’m also the Ira Gershwin of contemporary country music. I’ve penned the lyrics to venerable (if as of yet unrecorded) country tear-jerkers like“Panhandle Sunrise” and “(It's Tough Bein') The Only Jew In Chattanooga”, while also dabbling in rowdy honky-tonk numbers such as “(My Baby’s Got A) Big Ol’ Cameltoe”. These songs are typified by their wry observations of the rural way of life, combined with thoughtful reflections of life and love, wise humor, and gentle nuances so subtle that you’ll just shit yourself. They are, in other words, my proudest accomplishments as a human being and will be my sole lasting contribution to Western Civilization.

And, tonight, because I didn’t get my post about Paris done in time, I’m giving you—my dear, dear audience—the chance to midwife yet another of these beautiful, heartbreaking pearls of pure lyrical magic. That’s right, I’m putting you people in charge of my next Nashville hit. All you have to do is scan the list of titles that follows, choose the one that makes your soul soar the highest, and place your vote in my comments section. On Sunday morning, I will then tabulate the data according using only the most stringent accounting protocols, and will set to work composing lyrics for the winning title. It sounds like the chance of a lifetime, doesn’t it? Well, let’s get down to business:

1) “(I’ve Got The) Burnin’ Pee Blues”

2) “Woman, Where’s My Pabst At?”

3) “Al-Qaeda Tried-ta Hide-a (But the U.S.A. Saved the Day)”

4) “Upholstered In Denim”

5) “Jesus Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”

6) “I Suspect She Farted”

7) “Take Off Them Waders”

8) “Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong With Wisconsin”

9) “I Ain’t Gay, I’m Just Thinkin’ Bout His Ass”

10) “(I’m Gonna Love You) Full-On Kentucky Style”

The single most godawful song of all time REVEALED...

2006-09-14T01:20:00.000-05:00

But first, a brief story:

The other day, the CD player in my car wasn’t working, so I was forced to listen to the radio. I hate the radio. All you get on the radio are right-wing blowhards, commercials for mortgage brokers, and crappy songs by the assload. This was proven to me as I drove home from work last night. It was midnight, I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was hear a pretty tune to help wash away the endless hours of shouting and complaining I had just endured on my shift. As I went round and round in the parking ramp, I beat my “seek” button senseless, my disappointment growing as I suffered snippets of some half-baked political diatribe, some American Idol runner-up howling about heartbreak, some public service commercial about how it’s a bad idea to do meth, some smoothed-out country singer and their studio-tweaked twang, and on and on. It was dispiriting. I probably would have driven myself into a wall in frustration and despair had I not already expected all this garbage and more from the festering sewer of unabashed badness that is Twin Cities radio.

However, as I was steering out onto the lonely city streets, I picked up the signal of something truly special. There was a dippy guitar, there was a feeble rhythm, there was a smug millionare burnout whimpering cliches. I knew immediately that this must be Crosby, Stills and Nash. That it was awful goes without saying, but I left it on. To my way of thinking, the awful is preferable to the banal. As I drove on, listening to the appalling crap warbling out of my speakers, something quickly became clear to me. This wasn’t just another atrocious Crosby, Stills and Nash song—this was in fact the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the Absolute Pinnacle of all that is noxious and not-good in the realm of deliberately-arranged sound. It was, in other words, the Single Most Godawful Song of All Time.

I can hear you asking, “Kevin, which Crosby, Stills and Nash song—most of which are already incredibly wretched---could possibly qualify as the Single Most Godawful Song of All Time?” Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: “Marrakesh Express” is the song I speak of, the song that is so mind-bendingly lame that it diminishes the life force and reduces the sex appeal of anyone who hears even a moment of it. It is worse than “My Pal Foot-Foot”, by the Shaggs. It is worse than “Can I Touch You...There?”, by Michael Bolton. It is even worse than “I Would Do Anything For Love, (But I Won’t Do That)” by Meatloaf, which I suspect is a song about felching*. The sound of Ted Nugent skinning a fresh kill with his teeth is more appealing than this song. The sound of a thousand ADHD children smashing your good china is more soothing than this song. The sound of maggots worming their way through a steaming heap of cow dung holds more beauty than this song. It is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad song.

If you disagree with me here, you either haven’t heard it yet or you’re certifiably insane. Let me break it down for you. Since the song is about Morocco---a place I imagine Crosby, Stills and Nash visited because they heard about it’s many impressive varieties of hash—there is an “exotic” guitar played whenever they’re not singing. That “exotic” guitar sounds like something I would play if I had only two fingers and a burning desire to make the world suffer. There are also other instruments, but they’re not worth listening to or commenting on. They’re just there, the same way there’s lots of boogers on the underside of a first-grader’s desk. The less said about such things, the better. Besides, it’s really the lyrics and the singing that make “Marrakesh Express” so impressive. A few seconds of the chorus is all you need to hear to understand why Graham Nash got stuck with third-billing even in the company of losers like Stephen Stills and David Crosby. Because, Holy-Christ-in-His-Underoos, is he ever a singer of less-than-awesome ability. And it doesn’t help that he’s bleating things like: “Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind/Had to get away to see what we could find/Hope the days that lie ahead/Bring us back to where they've led/Listen not to what's been said to you...” Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Al Green all working together couldn’t salvage crap like that.

What say you all? Do you agree with me? Or do you have a different candidate for Most Godawful Song of All Time?

*Personal footnote to mom: please don't look "felching" up on the internet. Also, don't ask me what it means next time I see you. Thanks.

What's the single most godawful song of all time?

2006-09-13T01:16:00.000-05:00

The answer will be revealed later today, if I get around to it...

Keith Ellison makes history as the first Insomnia Report endorsed candidate ever to win anything...

2006-09-13T00:49:00.000-05:00

Some of you may recall that about fifteen hours ago I threw the unquestionable gravitas of this website behind the primary campaign of one Keith Ellison, who is running for a seat in the House of Representatives. Well, he just won. A coincidence? I think not!

Of course, because Mr. Ellison is black and a Muslim, you can expect a whole lot of canned outrage from the usual gang of “I’m not a bigot! How dare you call me a bigot!” bigots and other assorted semi-professional right-wing pearl-clutchers. But who cares? All that kind knows how do is complain and smear, so let them complain and smear to their hearts content in their noisy internet ghetto. They don’t matter. If they had any taste or real wisdom, they’d look back on their hatchet-jobs and hack screeds and be as embarrassed as a high school kid who’s just puked down his date’s dress. But they don’t seem to have been born with the shame bone. They look the sticky mess they’ve just vomited and think that the rest of us ought to lick it up and then thank them for the opportunity. No thank you, weird internet conservatives, no thank you.

But I don’t want to get negative on Mr. Ellison’s big day. I’ve heard from several people that he’s a thoughtful, approachable guy who genuinely cares about the causes he takes up. If that’s true, and I see no reason to doubt it, I’m glad he’s going to be my next congressperson. He’ll have his work cut out for him, but I’m sure he’s up for it.

To that end, I’ll be so bold as to offer him a little unsolicited advice. First, try not to get a seat next to James Sensenbrenner. I hear he smells. Next, get an apartment in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. They’ve got a lot of good restaurants around there, and it’s a lot less snooty than Georgetown. Thirdly, when you make your inevitable appearance on “Meet The Press”, please do your best to refer to host Tim Russert as “Lil’ Timmy Foo-Foo” at least once. Because that would be pretty funny.

Finally, and most importantly, never forget that you owe everything to Kevin-M and the Insomnia Report. I mean, without my timely endorsement, who knows how this might have ended up? I don’t mention this to be egotistical, of course. Why do I mention it, then? Simply because while Kevin-M may be a kingmaker of Boss Tweed-like authority, he also needs a job. A good job. Like, with government benefits and stuff.

I’ll leave it at that, real subtle-like.

But seriously, congratulations to Mr. Ellison. I’m glad you won. Do us proud in Washington...

Keith Ellison captures the coveted Insomnia Report endorsement...

2006-09-11T20:55:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows that there’s no greater “kingmaker” in Minnesota politics than this here blog. With my six hundred or so readers—most of whom live nowhere near here—I have become almost like the famed Daley machine in Chicago. Whichever candidate I pick to win is thereafter showered with not only millions and millions of votes, but also the undying love and gratitude of this nation. John Kerry, Al Gore, and Roger Moe can attest to my influence. History shows, that my support is pretty much a one-way ticket to neverending victory.
And now I’ve decided that people ought to go out and vote for Keith Ellison in the Fifth Congressional District primary tomorrow.

I met him today and, from our nine seconds of “face time”, he seems like a fine fellow. He’s also shorter than me, which I like in a Congressperson. What’s more, he agrees with me on most major issues. He’s for ending this terrible war we’ve got going on (although I’d like to hear more about how he plans to bring a lasting peace to the Middle East), he’s for comprehensive health care, and he’s against all manner of unbearable Republican badness. He strikes me as a guy worth your vote.

Of course, one cannot mention his name without bringing up the sliming he’s been subjected to. As for me, I don’t care that he said or wrote some silly things back when he was a student. Shit, I’ve written some silly things just last week. I don’t care if he hobnobbed with the Nation of Islam a couple decades ago. He’s apologized for that and he’s come out strongly against anti-Semitism. What do people expect him to do? Stay inside for the rest of his life because he’s made a mistake or two? I also don’t care if he’s got a bunch of unpaid parking tickets. I’m electing a congressperson, not a saint.

But I don’t want to dwell on Republican-generated mudslinging. Really, who gives two squeaky farts what those professional liars and cul-de-sac pundits think? Their influence is waning; their day is thankfully coming to a close. Keith Ellison will probably be around when all of them are in the old-folks home, toothlessly accusing the nurses of giving the liberals longer sponge baths.

So, if you live in Minneapolis and you haven’t made up your mind on who to vote for yet, why not give Keith Ellison a shot? Because, most of my other endorsees, he actually looks like he has a good chance of winning. Let’s hope he does. Otherwise, my support will be proven once and forever to be the kiss of death for a candidate.

The Awful Holiday

2006-09-11T01:50:00.000-05:00

I’m going to try my hardest to avoid the mass media today. I’ve got no stomach for mawkish rehashings of great traumas. I don’t think atrocities should be reduced to melodrama. All the sooty flapping flags, all the sob-worthy montages, all the recycled stirring soundbites ought to be retired. They do us no good. We don’t need to pick at our gaping wounds with lollipops; we shouldn’t be turning tortured history into yet another soft-focus Oprah episode.

But our commemorations aren’t just ghastly, they’re also premature. The fact is that September 11th isn’t over yet. We’re still living in its repercussions and we probably will be for a few more decades. What happened that morning was a particularly horrible moment in a long crisis, with the convoluted and contentious events leading up to and following from it largely hidden by political cant, deliberate deception and our culture’s potentially-fatal ignorance of history and the world outside its borders. I don’t pretend to understand most of it, but I’d also rather not fight fanaticism and oppression armed only with a million bombs, a few stereotypes and a threadbare national myth.

But, before we get to that, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to insist that we no longer use the people who died on those planes and in those buildings—the brave and the average, the exceptional and the everyday—as rhetorical grist and talking-points fodder. They deserve to be cherished by the people who love them, not by politicians and pundits with a point to make, however valid that point may be. In the end, it’s their lives that should be remembered and honored, not the violence and horror of their deaths. We do them a disservice when we turn these innocent victims into brickbats to hammer at the people who disagree with us, just as we do a disservice to the importance of the issues we face when we try to make ourselves and our opinions holy by swiping the valor of the dead.

We have entered a period where the choices our nation has to make are far too critical to be decided by gut feeling, partisan favor or prejudice. It’s alright if we bicker, of course, we just need to start bickering at a higher level. This controversy over a cheesy miniseries is a good example of how asinine our national dialogue was become. In these polarized times, people want to prove that they’re hanging around on the side of the angels by showing that the events of 9/11 weren’t the fault of their side. This is ridiculous. 9/11 was Osama Bin Laden’s fault, it was Ayman al-Zawahiri’s fault, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s fault, it was Mohammed Atta’s fault. If that crew is too spectral and foreign for you to blame, go right ahead and pin it on Bill Clinton for treating terrorism like a pipsqueak problem, but at least have enough honesty to acknowledge that there weren’t a whole lot of Republicans raising the alarm back then either. Or, if you’re the sort of liberal who’d like to lay the whole thing at George W. Bush’s feet, you’ll find lots of people willing to agree with you and even a bunch willing to share their stupid conspiracy theories with you, but you’d be better off blaming every past administration up to and including Carter’s for mishandling the Middle East in the name of cheap oil and anti-communism. While we’re at it, why don’t we just blame the Soviets for invading Afghanistan and kicking that whole jihad thing into high gear? And why stop there? Maybe it’s the fault of the House of Saud for giving 13th-Century throwback Wahabbis so much control of their country’s religious life and so many of our petrodollars. Or maybe it’s the fault of Sadat and Nasser for letting their governments torture Egypt’s fundamentalist insurgents until they turned into terrorist hard-cases and then setting those same people loose to wreak havoc everywhere.

The point is that there’s enough blame to go around. What we lack are ideas and leadership. We’ve reached the point where the party in power lies and says they’ve made the world safer while the other party—my party, I might add—lies and says they have a plan to do better once we elect them. They’re able to do this because the people who vote for them have been conditioned to expect simple solutions and soundbite policies. We’ve allowed our democracy to be debased into a sort of civic shopping mall, where candidates package themselves according to marketing dictates and the only ones who can possibly rise onto the national stage are those who give the least offense or make the best sales pitch. Americans like optimism, they like being lulled, they never get tired of hearing that they’re the kindest, smartest, luckiest, most noble and special people God has ever created. No one will win an election by saying that this is a fairy story we tell ourselves to keep the bad news at bay. No one will win an election by saying that we have to grow up and leave that kind of fatuous nonsense behind if we ever hope to lead the world, not just plunder it and be menaced by it. No one will ever win an election by saying that someday soon those 150,000 soldiers stationed in the Middle East won’t be the only Americans sacrificing big pieces of their lives for the sake of bad foreign policy.

Today there’s going to be a lot of drivel about “the lessons of September 11th”. These will mostly be cliches and slogans of widely varying probity. There are those who will tell you, in all seriousness, that we have to understand how all Arabs or all Muslims are the enemy now and we have to steel ourselves for slaughter. There are others who will tell you, for the millionth time, that Bush is a crap president who was farting around with schoolchildren when the shit went down. You’ll hear about missed opportunities, bureaucratic ineptitude and political correctness run amok. Someone will make a remark about our deadly reliance on foreign oil. Someone else will prattle on about good and evil. Maybe someone will even dust off that old fundamentalist saw that God was punishing us for our wickedness.

People aren’t shy about formulating these things. But, in the third year of our Iraq debacle and in the fifth year of our acute national confusion, maybe we should start studying another lesson from that wretched day—that things are bad and they’re only going to get worse. I know it goes against the grain of our country’s can-do spirit and our depraved optimism, but eventually we’re going to have to stop being so infatuated with things that don’t matter and pick our way out of this mess we’re in.

This will not be a pleasant process. It’s going to take a hard look in the mirror and a whole horde of hard decisions. Still, I’d rather it happen before it’s too late and we’re all left sifting through the ashes of a fallen nation.

There's a world going on underground...

2006-09-10T11:20:00.000-05:00

Besides the people, what I liked best about living in New York City was the subway. Coming from a place where people have to climb into their cars to buy milk, such a device seemed like a ridiculous luxury. You just climb the stairs into the city’s great basement, pay your fare, and go shooting off to anywhere you want. Even after I had ridden it a thousand times, I could still become as giddy as a six year old when the train clattered over the bridges or under the deep, dirty harbor. To me, it was a staggering engineering feat. It was part of the ambition and restlessness that made New York a wonderful place to be young: there, they didn’t care if there was a fat river in the train’s way—they’d just soar over it or burrow under it to get to the other side. New York is about limitless possibilities, and the subway is a big part of that. A car is a curse in that city, but there’s freedom to be had in the tunnels below.

I used to have random afternoons off and, since my friends would all be still at work, I used this time to ride the trains to all the city’s far-flung enclaves. I take pride in the fact that there are very, very few New York neighborhoods I haven’t set foot in. I’ve strolled down broken-glass carpeted alleyways in the South Bronx just after the streetlights came on, making my path sparkle and glow. I’ve had bagels in Brighton Beach with a horde of Russian retirees. I’ve wandered among mysterious Syrian cafes and ostentatious Italian Christmas light displays. I’ve had my hair trimmed by some surly Italian dudes in Soho and I’ve puzzled over the Greek signs in Astoria. I’ve shopped for hip-hop CDs out in Jamaica, Queens and I’ve spoken bad Spanish up in East Harlem. Each subway stop was like another world, and the only passport you needed was your fare card. Which was lucky for me, a guy with incurable wanderlust, since I was too poor to travel anywhere past New Jersey.

But it wasn’t just the destination that made the trip so great, it was also the ride itself. It’s hard to be a bigot in New York. Bigotry thrives on never actually encountering the people you want to disdain, in keeping whole sections of the human race as distant phantoms that your stupid imagination is free to abuse. It’s hard to have this happen on the subway, though, because you get crammed in with all the living, breathing people and not the feeble shadows that your ignorance gives you. You have to stand there, gripping a sweaty iron pole, your hand squeezed in among the hands of a bearded Muslim, a business-suited Jamaican, a geriatric Puerto Rican, a hip-hop Korean, and a Hasidic Jew. There, underneath New York City, racial and cultural tensions dissolve and the great, diverse mass of humankind becomes united in their seething dislike of that bastard who’s blocking the door with his stupid suitcase.

The New York City subway: it’s sort of like “We Are The World”, only with more swearing. And more crazy people. And there’s less Michael Jackson. And it smells more like old pee.

Lazy Saturday Edition: blog post titles I would like to use, but probably won't...

2006-09-09T13:38:00.000-05:00

1) A hundred sewer rats chewing on my scrotum couldn’t get me to vote for your weak-assed candidate

2) All about earwax

3) “Cubans, Puerto Ricans are hot”: the only true thing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ever said?

4) Would you like to read 10,000 words about an obscure Moroccan poet? Sure you would!

5) Intelligent design is for assholes

6) I’ve had it up to here with all this low-quality dwarf porn

7) Was Bill Clinton playing with his peter while jihadis learned to fly planes? Let’s ask some angry right-wingers!

8) Twenty-five EZ ways to avoid the hippies with clipboards who hang out in front of your organic co-op

9) Minnesota: Too Far From Mexico, Too Close To North Dakota

10) Any ladies care to guess which eligible bachelor blogger just got himself a stylin’ new pair of pants?

11) Waiter, there seems to be an earlobe in my quesadilla

12) Let’s bring it all back to Bea Arthur

Minnesota Republicans EXPOSED!!!

2006-09-07T23:51:00.000-05:00

First, a disclaimer: The Insomnia Report is not funded, supported, endorsed, underwritten or amused by any political party. The content on this site has not been approved, edited, submitted, vetted or ghost-written by any agency, official, organization, group or shadow government. The ideas and content here are solely those of the author and should not be seen as representing the views of the Democratic Party, the Green Party, Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, the Hare Krishnas or the French National Soccer Team. Any mudslinging that takes place in the following or preceding paragraphs is intended only to satisfy its author’s perverse lust for scandal and is not meant to tilt elections in any particular direction, to destroy the reputations of private citizens, or to save democracy as we known it. To raise the suspicion that this wholly personal, totally independent and completely unaffiliated website is “on the take”—in either the financial or ideological senses of the term—of any other standing entity is to make a grave error that, besides being actionable in a court of law, also hurts my feelings and makes me not want to be your friend.

But, all that aside, a little birdy has told me some stuff recently. And, in the interests of the truth and your entertainment, I’m going to pass it on to you people. That’s what it’s all about: me reporting and you deciding. However, if you read my reporting and come to any decision other than the Minnesota Republican Party is an evil band of scalawags unfit to govern a sandcastle, you really ought to ask yourself why you’re such a hideous moron who everyone hates.

Enough. I have candidates to smear. Let’s get to it!

Mark Kennedy–Republican candidate for the United States Senate

The Insomnia Report has heard, on good authority and from at least six anonymous, make-believe sources of the highest caliber, that Mark Kennedy—the Republican endorsed candidate for the United States Senate, I might add—has in the past visited a Washington, D.C. area Applebee’s. On one particular occasion, he was in the company of four other prominent Republicans (we will not dignify by restating them here the scurrilous rumors that these Republicans were Ann Coulter, Ted Nugent, the BTK Killer, and the Devil Himself). Their bill, which I have been given a copy of, came to $53.76. Mark Kennedy, an accountant by training, was delegated the responsibility of calculating the proper tip, which was determined by cultural norms and Republican stinginess to be 15%.

However, the figure Kennedy reached , $7.84, was in reality only 14.6% of the bill! The waitress was, by our calculations, was actually entitled to $8.06!

Unfortunately, Representative Kennedy’s oversight—coupled with several other bad tippers on her shift---resulted in the waitress, one Noelle Gordon, being $3.29 cents short of the $250 she needed to get her car, a Toyota Camry, out of the Fairfax County impound lot. Because this frustrating discrepancy occurred on a Friday, Ms. Gordon found it necessary to ride the bus to work that entire weekend.

According to several accounts, that bus is full of assholes.

And Congressman Kennedy calls himself a C.P.A.? It is to laugh.

Gil Gutknect (or something like that)—Republican candidate for the House of Representatives (First District)

At the Insomnia Report, we respect our nation’s libel laws. That’s why we’re not going to come right out and say that Gil Gutknickknack is a werewolf. We’ve heard things, just like any political insider has, but we haven’t seen much in the way of concrete evidence. And concrete evidence is what we need to not get our asses sued.

All the same, if he loses to challenger Tim Walz, the citizens of our nation’s capital will be able to sleep easier come the full moon. But people in the First Congressional District of Minnesota would be well-advised to keep a keen eye on their livestock. And, if they hold the required permits, perhaps they ought buy some silver bullets.

Michele Bachmann—Republican candidate for the House of Representatives (Sixth District)

Two things about Ms. Bachmann:

1) The Insomnia Report hates to question anyone’s citizenship status, but we could not help but notice that her first name is spelled in the French fashion. Is Ms. MICHELE (note the tell-tale single “l”) Bachmann, in reality, a Frenchwoman? Does Minnesota’s foremost arch-conservative hum the “Marseillaise” in her sleep? Is this “traditional marriage” advocate secretly pining for Bordeaux and Jacques Brel and the comforts of a well-established welfare state?

Your constituents have a right to know, Michele “le gamine” Bachmann!

2) While reading Ms. “Le Petit Parisienne” Bachmann’s website, I happened upon a whole lot of right-wing nonsense and shameless double-speak, of course. But I also happened upon this, in the course of an explanation of her flaccid non-opinions on how our children ( that’s nous garçons et filles, to you Michele) should be educated:

The most important educator of children is parents and guardians. Consequently, the best education system empowers parents with information and allows for greater parental involvement. For that reason, I'm a strong supporter of local control for our schools to ensure the most important decisions are made by parents, classroom teachers, and members of the local community where our children live and attend school. Those closest to our students, not well-intentioned but distant bureaucrats, understand best our students' needs to achieve academic excellence.

That sound you just heard was the cry of pain let loose by grammarians everywhere. As for that first sentence, perhaps someone should have told the candidate that, while the “is” is technically correct since it refers to the singular “educator”, that doesn’t mean that the syntactic clash with the very plural “parents and guardians” is avoided. It would be far better to dispense with all that confusion and just write, “The most important educators of our children are their parents and guardians”. A little wordier, of course, but much easier on the ear. Moving on to the second sentence, I have to take issue with the “empowers parents with information” business. What information? It’s vague, and it distracts from the whole “local control” angle of her argument. Take it out, is what I say. The third sentence is probably her best, sadly enough, but she still overplays her hand at the end where she gasses about “the local community where our children live and attend school”. Isn’t “the local community” alone good enough for you? No one’s going to forget you’re talking about children. You want the sentences to sing, not moan. Hack off the last seven words and you’ll at least start to warble. But, still: the less said about that last sentence, the better.

But, in all fairness, I suppose it’s a pretty good effort for someone whose native language isn’t English.

Just the man to soothe a troubled nation...

2006-09-07T00:54:00.000-05:00

President George W. Bush addressed the nation earlier this evening. Thanks to the Insomnia Report’s important position in the burgeoning “new media” empire and a few blurry photographs of a certain high-ranking official in a frilly pair of knickers, we have been granted exclusive access to the unedited, unapproved version of the speech, spoken before the White House’s media-handlers applied their sophisticated editing equipment to it. Here it is:

My fellow Americans, I wanted to take this opportunity to deliver an important message to all of you. This message is simple, it is clear and it is necessary. Some of you have already heard it, but for others it will come as shocking news. A few will not accept it, of course, and tomorrow you can expect angry denunciations and impassioned complaining from the usual suspects in our nation’s media. Yet it is my sincere belief—shaped by the facts and forged in the fire of my faith—that this message needs to be brought home to all freedom-loving people regardless of nationality, religion, creed or political affiliation.

That message is this: I suck.

I suck so bad the slurping noise can be heard from outer space. I suck so much I sometimes threaten to turn the entire planet inside out. I suck like a Creed song. That is to say I suck a lot. And this is not the sort of suck that emanates solely from me, although I am proud to say I’m the suck-sun around which the solar system of suckage that is my admistration revolves. My cabinet, my staff and many of my appointees have distinguished themselves by both sucking on their own and enhancing my own suckitude, thus creating a cycle of suckage which is unprecedented even for Washington, D.C., a city which has sucked profoundly for quite some time now.

The teleprompter is going too fast now. No, really. I almost fucked up that last part. Can we slow it down? Just a little bit? Great. Thanks.

Now, I’d like to address some comments to those who charge that my administration has trampled on the constitution and expanded federal power to the point where the President stands above the law, almost like a king. That criticism is totally and completely on the money. You got me there, folks. No getting around it. Man oh man, and you people let me get away with it! I mean, every time some candy-assed Democrat objected, all we had to do was shout “Booga-booga! Terrorists in the cul-de-sac! Everybody hide!” and you all got in line, didn’t you?

Seriously, I’ve never seen such a pack of hysterical ninnies in all my life. And hypocrites too. One day you’re all like, “We have to protect our modern Western values from these fanatical wackos!” and then the next you’re saying, “We can’t worry about civil liberties when there’s terrorists on the loose!”. On Monday you say, “We’re better because we’re more civilized than they are,” and then on Tuesday you’re crying “Torture them all!”. At breakfast you’re spouting off about how the Democrats don’t take the war on terror seriously enough and then at lunch you’re lecturing everyone about how we ought to drop a nuke on Mecca.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me be absolutely frank: that’s batshit crazy talk right there. Knock it off.

(Drinks water. Clears throat.)

I was freestylin’ there for a moment. Could you tell? Pretty good, huh?

(Makes serious face)

However, never it let it be said that America does not face profound and complicated dangers. Osama bin Laden is still a free man, at liberty to spread his gospel of hatred and destruction. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to address a few words to him, the greatest enemy of freedom our generation has known.

Osama, if you’re listening, you best hear this: you look like an asshole, no one likes you, and you live in a cave like some sort of weird bearded groundhog. I bet you smell.

And Osama? We’ve got your boy Khalid Shaikh Mohammed up in one of our secret prisons, you know. Chained up with the Riddler, the Penguin, Mothra, Rodan and an evil disembodied brain in a jar! Yeah, he’s fitting in real nice down there in the hollowed-out volcano, son!

(Drinks water.)

What’s that? Enough with the ad-libs? Really? Well maybe I wouldn’t have to if you people would just SLOW DOWN THE FUCKING TELEPROMPTER FOR THE FUCKING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! Is that too much to ask?

Christ, it’s not like it’s reforming social security or something...

(Makes serious face.)

But I’m afraid that isn’t the only challenge we face in the years to come. Fanaticism is on the rise the world over, from North Korea to Iran to Syria to Lebanon. We must rise to face these burgeoning threats before it’s too late. We need to remember the incredible bounty of freedom that we know here in America is the light of the world and, consequently, we must carry the torch for our brothers and sisters in bondage who haven’t felt the warm glow of liberty inside their souls or something like that. You see, in Texas we have a saying, and it’s this: Mahmoud Ahmedijadiwhatever is a dickweed and Kim Jong Il ain’t much better. True, they’re both a little less spooky than that guy who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey, but that’s not saying much. No kidding. Did you see that guy? Whooo!

(Drinks water. Clears throat. Stares off into space.)

I’ve got to ask you people something. Have any of you ever farted and had it come out a lot more moist than you expected it to be? If you have, my fellow Americans, you might understand why I’m going to need to cut this address a little short.

To sum up: I suck. Osama, you’re a wanker and we’re coming after you whenever I get around to it. The world—a scary place, full of dickweeds.

Goodnight, and god bless...

[UPDATE: Yeah, I realize this post is sort of a re-run. Forgive me. In my defense, it's not like Bush's speeches change that much from year to year. And it's hard to come up with new stuff every day.]

Scary stories for a slow Wednesday...

2006-09-06T14:20:00.000-05:00

If any of you out there enjoy Latin American fiction, or are fans of Edgar Allen Poe’s work, allow me to recommend the short stories of Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga. His tales are spooky and macabre like Poe’s, but often much more subtle and chilling. Often, they explore human psychology in the face of nature’s cruelty. As someone who was drawn to live in the jungles of northern Argentina, these settings come alive in his best stories. He was gifted enough not to go on and on about the trees and the sounds and the heat of these places; instead, he isolates one or two details that convey the mercilessness and terror of that wilderness and, in the space of a few words, brings you there beside his unlucky characters.

Speaking of unlucky characters, Quiroga’s life story makes Poe’s seem like a fairy-tale full of wonder and happiness. When he was a small child, his father died after accidentally shooting himself. Within the space of a few years, his stepfather would commit suicide and Quiroga himself would accidentally kill a good friend. Later, his wife poisoned herself. He remarried a girl thirty years younger than him, a friend of his daughters, but soon he was diagnosed with cancer. He swallowed cyanide and died in 1937, at the age of 58. Not a happy story by any means, and neither are the ones he wrote himself. But they are, in their own strange way, beautiful. You might have to hunt a little to find them in English translation, but it’s worth it.

Espresso Apocalypse, or don't you envy my kick-ass foo-foo bachelor lifestyle?

2006-09-06T01:18:00.000-05:00

On Monday, I did a foolish thing. I didn’t have to work and I had no social obligations to attend to, so I planned to spend the whole day working on a short story. To do this adequately, I needed pep. So, late in the morning, I traveled to my friendly neighborhood latte dispensary and ordered myself the biggest one they made. As I gulped its milky deliciousness down, I wrote a brief blog post which helped elucidate complex world affairs while also bringing forth profound truths about the human condition. Yet I hoped this would be merely the warm-up to an entire day of fevered, intense authoring. Suitably caffeinated, I went to the organic co-op to get myself some groceries, all the while fantasizing about the mighty sentences I’d soon be hurling forth, projectile-vomit style, onto the page. I couldn’t wait. I put my milk and my breakfast cereal away in a mad rush so that I could break out my legal pads and my medium-tip ballpoint pens all the quicker.

But there was a problem. With a triple latte in me, there was no way I would be able to write at home. I’d be too fidgety, too easily tempted to call all my friends or goof off on the internet. I needed to go somewhere. It was a nice day, so I considered strolling down to the park and doing my writing al fresco, but I decided against it. The sun was too bright for me tastes and I hate it when my rough drafts get dirt and crushed bugs all over them. Clearly, another cafe was in order. I’ve recently discovered one about a mile south of my place that I like, so I headed there. Because it’s considered bad form to go to a cafe and not order anything, I asked for a double espresso. I’ve found that too many lattes in warm weather make me logy, whereas I figured I can kick back the espressos like so much bitter, tarry water. With my dainty cup in hand, I settled in to the age-old and glorious battle with the blank page.

But there was a problem. This was Labor Day, and the place was closing early. They were already rolling up the carpets and wrapping up the pastries. Sipping my espresso with undue speed, I did my best to weave literary gold. I don’t well under time constraints, though, and I found myself flailing around with hesitant phrases and lame ideas. It was frustrating. I finished my drink and stomped out of there, endlessly distressed by the American holiday schedule and by my own creative failure. You may laugh at me, but I get agitated when I don’t write as well as I think I should. I don’t take many things in this life seriously, but you’d never guess that if you saw me in the middle of a bad stretch of sentences. Clearly, I needed to prove my worth to the word gods. There was another cafe a few miles away. They treated their workers like crap, so I was sure they’d still be open. I raced over their, bought myself yet another double espresso, slammed it back, and prepared myself to do whatever it took to salvage my lit snob dignity.

But there was a problem. I had neglected to eat anything for lunch and, while I’m a veteran caffeine fiend, seven shots of espresso in less than three hours on an empty stomach is still a bit much. I began to quietly freak out. From the curious chemical heat roiling just beneath my skin, I knew that my flesh must be flushed, giving me the look of giant, not quite ready to eat man-lobster. I could feel my heart hammering so hard it was a wonder my chest didn’t get all bruised up. I suspected that my eyes were bugging out also. I must have been quite a sight. I caught a brief glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror during the first of what would inevitably be dozens of pee runs, and I was not looking my best. Sweaty, twitchy and hot pink, I had become—in appearance, at least—the creepy guy I was always railing against.

I went shaking back to my tiny table, determined to exploit this rare state in my writing. I was a professional, after all, I could turn my intoxication to my advantage: the energy that was driving me to gnaw on my pen, for instance, could be transmuted into a scene of unusual power and drive. Balzac did that. Voltaire did that. Those wily Frenchmen, they both drank something like fifty cups of coffee a day.

I’m not Balzac or Voltaire, though. All I was able to do was stare down at my empty sheets of paper and guess at how many minutes it would be before I had to pee again. Usually it was more than six, but less than ten. In the intervals between my trips to the toilet, I sometimes jotted down the occasional word and sometimes crossed an occasional word out. Most often, however, I chose to steal glances at my fellow coffeehouse patrons, so as to make sure they weren’t staring at me. I didn’t want to be stared at. I was in a delicate state, and I didn’t need gawkers attending my struggle.

It was like this: imagine yourself standing on a conveyor belt, being pulled slowly along while on either side of you life goes on as normal. Suddenly, some gear somewhere slips and the conveyor belt starts going faster and faster and faster, until everything stretches out into a great, sloppy blur. The rushing air gives you windburn and the thrill of it makes your guts plunge, but all the while you’re paranoid that someone will throw a wrench into the busted apparatus and send you flying untethered into the void. I’m being a tad overdramatic, of course, but play along with me here.

Suffice to say, I didn’t get any writing done. I stayed for as long as I could bear, then I ran back to my car, sped to the nearest pizza place, ordered myself a slice and drove home in a fog of espresso and grease. There, I plunked myself down on the couch, left several of my good friends very strange voice mails, and waited until the sun went down and the world stopped spinning around me.

That's like Donald Rumsfeld...

2006-09-04T23:17:00.000-05:00

I want you to understand something: The Insomnia Report does not advocate, encourage or partake in drinking games. They are dangerous and embarrassing, and—if they must be played—they should only be played with non-alcoholic beverages such as Diet Coke, which is a delicious and nutritionally-sound thirst quencher. Rum, gin, whiskey, scotch, tequila, and beer—these are serious liquids and should only be consumed seriously. I mean it. Sure, it might seem like a innocent fun to quaff some booze everytime the AC/DC guy screams “Thunderstruck!” or as a way to confess all the naughty things you’ve done, but it’s really not. It’s a one-way ticket to the bathroom floor, the hospital, and/or the therapy couch. Drinking games are bad news. Don’t let yourself be pressured into playing them. You’ve been warned.

That being said, let me tell you people about the new beverage-centered party activity I invented today while waiting for my latte to be assembled. What you do is get a group of friends: anything from four to fifty-eight people should do. Have everybody sit in a circle with a hearty glass of their preferred liquid. One person is designated the speaker, and everybody else fills their mouth with a big gulp of their drink. They don’t swallow it right away, however, because before they can the speaker has one minute to come up with a horrifying, tasteless, indecent statement beginning with the line “That’s like Donald Rumsfeld...”. You see, the goal is to be as repulsive and/or as ridiculous as possible so as to get as many players as you can to spit their drinks all over themselves and everyone else. How can hilarity not ensue? Hilarity will be inevitable, I think.

Here’s some examples of what someone could say...

“That’s like Donald Rumsfeld slipping into your bedroom at night dressed only in pair of camoflage-patterned bikini panties and slowly caressing your nipples with his rough, cat-like tongue as the music of Air Supply plays gently in the background...”

or...

“That’s like Donald Rumsfeld eating a bunch of barbeque pork and not being very careful about it so there’s just gallons of sauce and gristle and fat oozing down his chin and dripping onto the ground where gigantic rats and raccoons lick it up and then roll onto their bellies in orgasmic bliss as the Secretary of Defense lets out belch after belch after belch, all of them smelling sort of like Old Spice aftershave...”

or...

“That’s like Donald Rumsfeld not flushing after he’s through with the Pentagon toilet and a few minutes later a general walks in and he thinks that someone’s released a chemical weapon so they lock down the whole place, but after they figure out what happened they just use their fancy tools to cut that particular toilet out of the building and ship it to Iraq and then everyone who’s been fighting us over there surrenders that very day, begging us to take Donald Rumsfeld’s nasty, unflushed floaters out of their country as soon as possible...”

The possibilities are endless. The speaker gets a point for each player who spits, chokes, or gags on their drink. Everyone else has to swallow theirs. After this, the chance to make up Donald Rumsfeld slander passes to the next player in the circle and the process repeats. The game ends when someone reaches ten points or everyone gets bored with it, whichever comes first.

The contours of creepiness...

2006-09-03T23:47:00.000-05:00

Over at the Houston Circle, Minneapolis has a story of how she was creeped out by an employee of her gym. To give the short version to you: he asked her out, she politely turned him down, he then resorted to the ol’ stare and lurk until she felt she had to change her exercise routine to avoid him. It’s unpleasant behavior, of course, but it’s also all too common. I imagine that pretty much every woman in the world has had a similar experience at some point in their lives. There are untold millions of creepy men: they’re in the cities and the towns, the malls and the parks, the pubs and strip clubs and church groups and drum circles. Wherever there are women, particularly young women, you can bet your ass the creepy men will show up sooner or later.

All this fascinates me, I have to admit. I have an unhealthy interest in obsessive, fetishistic, perverse and delusional behaviors and activities of all sorts. Basically, I’m creepy about creepy men. Now, mind you, I’m not a creepy man myself. I’ll cop to being weirder than a midget sailor salad, but I consider myself to be completely well-adjusted and sociable. If I’ve ever creeped anyone out—which I doubt---it was innocent and wholly unintentional. Even if I wanted to be creepy—which I don’t—I could never pull it off. I’m too much of a gentleman: I’m the kind of guy who apologizes to cats after they trip me.

But enough about me. I want to write about the creepy man. In my experience, I’ve known a dozen or so guys who I would classify as “creepy”. Because my hobby involves me sitting, usually by myself, in coffeeshops and cafes, I’ve seen dozens more in action. In addition to this, I interrogate every woman I meet for her own creepy man stories, which are then deposited in my vast mental archive of creepy male-ness. This archive is further buttressed by the countless books and articles, both scholarly and popular, I’ve read about stalkers, psychotic loners, assassins, peeping toms, and disreputable goons of all stripes. Given this, I feel that my understanding of the creepy man is pretty comprehensive. I could tell you all kinds of creepy shit. But I won’t. It would just creep you out.

What I do want to discuss, however, is the fact that there are essentially two ways someone’s behavior can be creepy: in context or in content. Let me explain.

In my experience, there are a limited number of circumstances and situations where women don’t mind strangers coming up and talking to them. If they’re out with their friends at a bar, if they’re at a concert, if they’re at work: venues, essentially, where social interaction is generally expected and comfortable. Now, somebody may be more introverted or extroverted than the average, but our culture still compartmentalizes the private and public spheres of our everyday life. The violation of this distinction is what leads to contextual creepiness. A woman walking back to her apartment alone stands a very good chance of being creeped out by some random guy who drives slowly alongside her, telling her that he likes her eyes and that he dreams of starting his own plumbing supply business one day. Likewise, a woman who is trying to study for her GREs might find a tad creepy the dude at Starbucks who won’t stop telling her that her hair makes her look like an angel.

In another situation, at a nightclub or a party, these actions might be appropriate. They become creepy by virtue of being delivered at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or by the wrong person. A young single woman, after all, might not mind someone like Jude Law, Colin Farrell, or even your humble blogger—what with his chiseled, Marlboro man visage and his sturdy musculature—offering her unsolicited compliments in Barnes and Noble, but she likely wouldn’t appreciate the same banter from some oily, drooling man in Superman Underoos.

This is the most common kind of creepiness, but it shouldn’t always be excused as a simple misunderstanding of a particular woman’s boundaries. Most creepy people are creepy on purpose. They might truly believe that the object of their affections has the most beautiful lips on the planet earth and they might truly believe that there’s no better place to bring that fact up than the sandpaper aisle at Home Depot, but it’s not their opinions that matter, it’s their intentions. Generally, they say these things with specific goals in mind. At the far end of the possibility spectrum, they might want to have sex with this woman. Failing that, they’ll usually settle for disconcerting, manipulating or provoking anxiety in her. It’s a power trip. If there’s one thing creepy people have in common, it’s a feeling of powerlessness, especially in the face of whomever they’re attracted to. They think, usually correctly, that they’ll never possess the objects of their desires. Because they're creepy, they settle on controlling them in their own sick ways. If they unnerve, annoy or frighten, they get to feel bigger for a few minutes. It’s sad, but it’s how the creepy dynamic works.

Content creepiness is more rare and, often, more out-and-out menacing. That’s when some guy you work with anonymously mails you pictures of roadkill. That’s when someone approaches you at the bar and sings you a song about all the bitches who have broken his heart before. That’s when a cab-driver threatens to slit his own wrists if you don’t get into his taxi and let him give you a free ride anywhere you want. This sort of thing is usually the province of the seriously disturbed and/or drunk, but a surprising number of women (and many men, I might add) have experienced such antics firsthand.

Content creepiness can be made even more scary when it’s mixed with contextual creepiness, as it often is. The result is creepiness beyond compare, the red-letter sort of creepiness that stands out in my archives. For instance, there was the time I witnessed a middle-aged man hassle a young barista at length over whether she thought Britney Spears was a virgin or a slut. Or the fiend who once e-mailed one of my college roommates all his poorly-spelled sex fantasies. Or there was the girl I knew in high school who got a long letter from a classmate of ours in which he confessed that his fondest desire was to remove her clothes with his teeth while the music of Air Supply played gently in the background. No kidding. Air Supply.

This is no laughing matter, of course. This is atrocious, inexcusable behavior that makes life for countless women more frightening and complicated than it should be. If social existence was as perilous for men as it is for women, it wouldn’t be tolerated. Our culture, both in how it enforces its customs and how it socializes its genders, facilitates a distressing and unnecessary amount of sexual menace towards its women. It shouldn’t. I have some thoughts and suggestions on how people can counter creepiness, but that’s another long blog post, and so I’ll have to save it for another day.

Attention Fifth Congressional District candidates: I'm pissed off at all of you

2006-09-02T11:26:00.000-05:00

If you don’t live in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district, I apologize—this post will probably bore you. Of course, if you don’t live in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district, I envy you. Because you don’t have to choose which obnoxious-assed Democrat to support in the upcoming race for our House seat. And I don’t say “obnoxious-assed” lightly: I haven’t seen such a frustrating bunch of politicians since the last Republican convention. They’re so uninspiring, so uninspired, so unappealing and so goddamn self-centered I might just have to sit this one out. I might be wrong, but I thought the constitution of the United States of America required us to send adults to Washington to represent us, not these bickering junior-league types who can’t see past their career ambitions.

I’m sick of having to support shallow, petty Democrats just because they happen to be Democrats. Too many of our recent candidates aren’t fit to carry the mantel of the party of Kennedy, Roosevelt, or Obama. They aren’t even fit to carry the mantel of the party of Carter, Johnson and Clinton. I look at them and I see a pack of careerists, a bunch of debate club drones whose ideas are shaped by polls and focus groups, people who would trample their own aunties for a chance to get at some of that congressional letterhead. Maybe this is unfair. I really don’t care if it is. The reason I’m a Democrat is because I honestly fucking believe in what the party says it stands for. You’ll have to pardon me if I hate to see those beliefs cheapened by empty suits and opportunists.

I’m also not especially fond of watching the supporters of the various candidates go after each other. It sure is getting ugly out there, and to me it’s all pretty ridiculous. People make themselves look foolish when they try to pretend that their preferred politician is more than a politician. The flip side of that is the process by which your opponents become enemies, the point at which an election becomes a moral crusade. We’re going to have to work together again after this whole tortured thing is over, aren’t we? Wouldn’t we be better off not turning our every chance to vote into some nasty zero-sum game?

But lets get back to the politicians themselves. Is it naive to hope that the debates between intelligent, experienced candidates in a highly-educated district can rise above stupid sloganeering and phony feel-good bullshit? Is it pessimistic of me to be suspicious of aspiring junior congresspeople who fill our heads with dreams of peace and impeachment? And, while I’m asking questions, is it really too much to ask for you people to stop using tinhorn right-wing operatives to smear your opponents for you? This is a Democratic district, dammit, the Republicans should not be setting the agenda here with their tactics or their prejudices. When they come out with their little exposes, the candidates ought to (a) ignore them because you’re above all that or (b) attack it because those people will turn on you just as quickly. What you shouldn’t do is use their hatchet-jobs as a way to cut down your opponent while your hands stay clean. And you really, really, really shouldn’t be feeding those types more dirt. But some of these campaigns seem to be doing exactly that. And that’s fucked up. If that’s the sort of strategy you think is acceptable, you ought to get out of politics and become Barnes and Nobel booksellers or baristas. There’s more honor in that kind of work and, frankly, I trust the people who make my cappuccino more than I trust any politician.

But we haven’t reached the hopeless stage yet. The candidates can still pull this together and come of it seeming less than loathsome. They can start by refusing to become cogs in the Republican smear machine. I understand that politics is a dirty business, but there’s a difference between playing hardball and shooting yourself and your party in the foot. I think the candidates ought to recognize this and rein in their Donald Segretti wannabes. Those kind of antics only make cynical guys like me more unbearable. Trust me, I’m unbearable enough already.

Also, it would be nice if this election would be about who’s going to be the best advocate for the district and the best legislator, not on who dislikes Bush the most passionately. Sure, Bush is a crap president, a menace to the republic, but we can’t fall into the trap of letting his mendacity and incompetence be our only selling point. That’ll only get us so far, which is to say that it won’t get us very far at all. I get turned off by the “who secretly loves the war machine”/”who’s the purest progressive” sort of campaigning you get in liberal districts like ours. Unfortunately, we can’t afford to be John Lennon dreamers anymore, we shouldn’t abuse the word “peace” as though just the loud and repeated invocation of the term can fix this mess they’ve gotten us into. We all want “peace”, but we need competence, wisdom and vision to get there. And I’m not sure I see enough of that in the options given to us.

I started out being a lukewarm Mike Erlandson supporter, but now I’m not sure I want to go all the way to the voting booth for him on primary day. He doesn’t seem to offer a lot besides promises of pork and premature Martin Sabo nostalgia. I don’t suffer from Martin Sabo nostalgia, as honorable and decent as everyone says he is. Erlandson seems to me like an ambitious guy who’s gunning hard for a dream job. I can’t blame him for this, but I’m not sure I trust him either. Keith Ellison, for his part, is the candidate who appeals to the goofy idealist in me, and I do think that he’s borne non-stop sliming with maturity and perseverance. I do my best not to listen to any of that trash, but I worry that the mudslinging will only get worse if he makes it to Congress. If that happens, there’s always the danger of him winding up marginalized and ineffective, thereby wasting all that passion and progressivism. It’ll be a vicious and bigoted charade, of course, but we’ll be the victims of it right along with Ellison. And I would be remiss if I forgot to mention Ember Reichgott-Junge. To my way of thinking, the best thing about her is that whole “Remember Ember in September” slogan. Say what you will: that’s pretty catchy. One of her (male) supporters came up to a friend of mine in a Caribou Coffee and said something to the effect of, “Hey! You’re a woman! You ought to support Ember!” Christ, if it worked that way she’d have the race locked up. But, as it is, she’s probably not going to go much further in this whole thing.

I’ve heard and read thoughtful people who I trust making the case for all these candidates, but at this point I’m too disgusted by the whole shoddy process to weigh these arguments. Whoever wins will win. I don’t give a shit anymore.

The ugliest cheerleading squad in America...

2006-09-01T12:08:00.000-05:00

Before you do anything else, go over to Glenn Greenwald's site and read about yet another brave-in-the-glow-of-the-computer-monitor goofball doing a bloodthirsty Village People routine on behalf of death and destruction throughout the entire Middle East. It's worth your time. I promise.

Because that stupid mall and the Spoonbridge just aren't cutting it anymore...

2006-08-31T23:15:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis is not one of America’s top destinations. This is no secret and I see no use in trying to obscure it. When people around the world decide to journey to our country, they usually want to go to New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago or some other place where there’s actually stuff to see and do. Sure, maybe a few people head out to the Mall of America on extended plane layovers, but I assure you that there’s nobody over in Barcelona or Bratislava or Bangkok salivating over a dream vacation to the Twin Cities. As far as the tourist world goes, we’re just sitting there, stinking up the map.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You see, I’ve figured out a simple, inexpensive way to get hordes and hordes of foreign and domestic travelers flocking to our fair town. All we have to do is put up the world’s tallest building. We’ve got plenty of open land where we can do it, and we’ve got thousands of able archetects, engineers and workers who would be glad to be a part of
such a historic project. Once the Insomnia Tower is completed, we can just sit back and rake in the easy tourism dollars that come rolling in. One day’s t-shirt sales alone should be enough to cover that city-wide wi-fi that Mayor Rybak’s always gassing about.

There will, of course, be challenges that need to be faced. Foremost among these is the stiff competition from many Asian nations. Tall-assed buildings are sprouting up over there faster than you can spit. Yesterday, the world’s tallest building was in Kuala Lumpur, today it’s in Taipai, and tomorrow it’ll be in Dubai. It’s getting so bad that our own mighty Sears Tower will soon seem like just a mid-sized condo building next to these mighty structures. I have particular anxieties about the Burj Dubai, which will allegedly stand 162 stories high, or a whopping 2,650 feet. That is, I’m sure you’ll agree, pretty fucking tall.

I never thought I’d see the day when America fell behind in really fucking tall buildings. What have we come to as a nation? Are we going to sit on our enormous asses and let the United Arab Emirates top the Sears Tower by a thousand feet? Or are we going to have some pride, get out there, and build an even taller building?

I think the answer is clear. But we have to do this right. We can’t just beat Dubai’s effort by a meter or two. That’ll just provoke Seoul or Hong Kong to throw up a building six meters bigger than ours, thus sticking us with the lame, embarrassing distinction of having the world’s second tallest building. I won’t settle for this. This is why I propose that the Insomnia Tower of Minneapolis should settle the “who’s got the biggest building?” question for good. Yes, I’m saying that our building should be 400 stories high and measure at least 6,425 feet, not counting the optional radio tower. This isn’t just some male anxiety thing, I assure you. This is about the future of my city and my country.

Some of you out there—and you know who you are—might question the wisdom of using public funding to finance a super-tall building. Well, if that’s the way you’re going to be about it, then why don’t you do us all a favor and treat yourself to a nice box of fine Belgian shut the hell up? Because, let’s face it, you’re haters. You all have your PhD.s, and by that I’m referring of course to your player hater degree. Which isn’t a good degree to have, and you should have majored in science or something. Because the only job you’re going to be able to find is selling Haterade by the side of the Hater Highway, which runs between Sucktown and Your Mamma.

And I realize that there are others of you who have legitimate concerns that a building so awesome would be a natural target for terrorists. Well, let me put your minds at ease: no terrorist would ever dream of attacking the Insomnia Tower. Why is that? Well, simply because there’s not going to be anything in the Insomnia Tower. I’m realistic enough to understand that Minneapolis can’t possibly find enough corporations, residents or stores to fill 400 stories, and that’s why I propose that the city use it as storage for old boxes, broken copy machines, and all that other stuff that just clutters up your work place.

Also, I picture a laser beam on top of it. This isn’t so much for obliterating terrorists as it is for vaporizing my sworn enemies. Don’t concern yourself excessively with the details of the laser. I can assure you the laser will only be used with the utmost discretion.

The Sponge and Cynicism...

2006-08-31T14:17:00.000-05:00

Mr. Sponge over at Minvolved posted a thought-provoking piece yesterday. In it, he discusses a lot of the problems with contemporary political discourse. He theorizes that middle-class economic anxiety—the dawning realization that we no longer live in a world of unending prosperity—has provoked an era where cynicism and pessimism have largely supplanted other, more hopeful frames of reference. This leads to a mindset in which, to quote the Sponge, “the traditional solutions to our interests/concerns inhabit mechanisms that no longer exist as valid options in many, many people’s minds. Media, government, well-established (and accepted) social bonds like the separation of church and state: these things are now treated with a surprising amount of insincerity and, in some cases, outright maliciousness.”

Mr. Sponge then comes to the conclusion that this widespread condition cannot be overcome by more insincerity and more maliciousness. He writes “we began to realize something that we should have realized long ago: cynicism/irony many not be the best way to go about our business. It’s not working and it’s only good for choir preaching.” He then concludes by promising to leave the snark and ridicule behind, in order to focus on “things like policy and communication strategy”.

I have some thoughts on this. First off, I never considered Mr. Sponge’s work to be excessively negative or ironic. To me, he’s always put thought before invective, argument before insult, and analysis before angry ranting. Sure, he’ll call a boob a boob, but he’s a million times removed from those bloggers who thunder and rage day in and day out. He’s got a nuanced, intelligent take on local and national politics, which is why it’s a good thing that he’s going to turn his talents to encouraging positive change instead of simply commenting on how dumb the dumb shit we’re all swimming in is. He’s good at that too, of course, but that gets dull for people with the ability and inclination to do more.

The thing you realize pretty quick when writing about politics is this: bitterness is boring. Getting outraged every day is boring. Mocking some new moron is boring. It’s boring to read and it’s boring to write. It never ceases to amaze me how many websites out there, both on the right and left, are little more than complaint-a-thons. That’s a dead end. It’s the McDonalds of writing—it’s quick, it’s cheap and sometimes it even feels good going down, but it’s still bad for you, it’ll still turn you into a gassy, blubbery boor. That’s no way to live.

And I say that as someone who can be incorrigibly cynical, at least where politics are concerned. It might sound odd, but I consider political cynicism a viable alternative to partisanship. I hate that bullshit where otherwise intelligent people will act like their candidate has decency, honor and vision in a headlock. I also hate that tendency to reduce differences in ideology to a war of lifestyles (Mr. Sponge writes about this today)—a football match with Volvo driving liberals versus Hummer-cherishing conservatives, each with their own “see-no-evil” cheering sections. Cynicism strikes me as a better, more honest, option than that. Expecting universal corruption seems to me a more realistic and honorable approach than defending a particular ideology or cast of mind as universally virtuous.

But that doesn’t mean that cynicism is the ideal approach. It’s more of a defensive maneuver than anything else, and the knee-jerk cynic is just as ugly, if not uglier, than any other knee-jerker. What’s the best option then? Well, it’s probably standing up for what you believe and working to make the world a better place, without gullibility or too many illusions, but also without resentment, anger or self-righteousness. An easy state to imagine, but a difficult one to attain. Mr. Sponge has already made it, though, so you should just read his website for some tips on how to get there...

Goodbye to a great writer...

2006-08-31T00:31:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz passed away. I’m not as familiar with his work as I should be, but I read Arabian Nights and Days a few years ago and loved it. I’d like to read more of his work. Looking at his obituaries and tributes to his talent, he seems like an admirable person. It takes real courage to stand up for liberal humanism is a region where advocating for such things is too often a death sentence. It takes real dignity to remain modest even after you’ve been given the Nobel Prize and hailed as the Arab world’s greatest writer. With any luck, his words and his memory will one day help to inspire a renaissance of great art and genuine freedom across the Middle East.

Stupid things the United States hasn't tried yet...

2006-08-30T01:11:00.000-05:00

1) Outlawing kittens

We have to face it: the United States is a kitten-friendly society. While the ownership of these creatures is not necessarily encouraged, except by nonfederal entities like Cat Fancy magazine, kitten-lovers certainly face no persecution or legal strictures in today’s America. They are free to go about their business, spreading their pro-kitten agenda so finely that most of us don’t even recognize it as an agenda at all. You ask any random person on the streets of Manhattan, Topeka or Tuscon what first pops into their mind when you say “kitten” and an alarmingly-high percentage of them will respond with “cute”. Clearly, kittens have become “normalized” in our society and few ever stop to ask themselves “Why do we put up with these crazed, vomit-prone beasts?”. Obviously, the time is ripe for a bold political figure to step up and force us citizens to decide which side we’re on. Are we on the side of the Bible, which says “Yea, and verily the Lord spake unto the Hashamanezzites: do not bring into your house the child of Felix, for he is ill-behaved and with foul claws he shall rendest thou raiments.”, or are we on the side of the secularist, “if-it-feels-furry-pet-it”-minded, Hollywood-funded, pro-kitten lobby?

2) Declaring Tuesday “National Pantsless Day”

We’ve reached a point in history where the U.S.A.’s image has outstripped all its actual powers. In fact, one could argue that our superpower status is preserved mostly by marketing—our economy is a bunch of debt and deficit spending, our culture revolves around watching TV and firing guns at things, and our schoolchildren are massive blobs of suet and entitlement who treat their teachers like Jabba the Hut treats Princess Leia. But, almost miraculously, we still manage to sell ourselves as a youthful, vibrant society full of enthusiasm, energy and more hot blondes than you can shake a stick at. If the rest of the world ever figures out what we’re really like, we’ll be begging Bolivia for emergency aid faster than you can shout “Blame the Democrats!”

Therefore, it is imperative that we preserve this bubble of illusion at all costs. And that requires most of us to leave our pants on when we’re in public. Because, were the world media to pick up on the unprecedented size and cottage-cheesy texture of our asses, the striving billions around the world would be appalled. All that freedom and all that money and that’s all you have to show for it?, they’d ask and from that point on, when they dream of a better life, they’ll be dreaming of Australia.

3) Attacking Iran

There exists, ‘round Afghanistan way, a Muslim nation whose millions of people often suffer under draconian theocratic strictures and an insufficiently-democratic government. Their leadership veers between bellicosity and instability, while their foreign policy often consists of little more than threats to neighboring nations. In fact, this country’s intelligence services have often been accused of encouraging, sponsoring and carrying out terrorist attacks within a nearby non-Muslim nation. This nation—a staunch U.S. ally, by the way—has long been embroiled in a convoluted, seemingly-intractable territorial dispute, and this conflict has become a rallying cry to extremists and scapegoating politicians. Luckily for world peace, our ally is in possession of a whole bunch of nuclear missiles. Whew! Could you imagine how different and deadly the balance of power would be if the other guys got their hands on some of those? I mean, it’s a nightmare scenario, isn’t it? Those people are undemocratic! They’re beholden to religious fanatics! They’ve dirtied their hands with terrorists! Man, I don’t know if I could take it if people like that ever develop...

Wait! What’s that you say? Pakistan already has nuclear weapons? No shit? Well, I guess I’ll just crawl under my bed and wait for the world to end...

But I was going to talk about Iran. Seriously, I think there should be a rule: if you and your cronies send us into one needless, bloody, failed war based on trumped up bullshit and your proven ability to scare people into ignoring the facts, you don’t get to do the same goddamn thing less than five years later. I’m sick of hearing all this “Ahmadinejad is Hitler” shit. Yes, he’s a scary man. Yes, he’s angling to be the big fish in the Middle East. Yes, he’s a menace to Israel. Given that all this is true (and I see no reason to believe that it isn’t), then maybe we should have gone about this whole "War on Terror" thing in a way that didn't strengthen his hand so much. Or, at the very least, maybe someone somewhere in official Washington should have imagined this possibility before we got bogged down with this Iraq business. But no, we elected a bunch of half-assed adventurers instead of competent leaders, and now we’re stuck with this “Saddam was the Hitler of 2003, but Ahmadinejad is this year’s Hitler” business.

So they’ll dust off their “mushroom-cloud-smoking-gun” rhetoric, they’ll bring back their solemn blather about our hand being forced, they’ll wrap themselves in the flag once again and all their screeching ninny enablers and all their bloodthirsty war groupies will get back in their fantasy tanks to grandstand in favor of thousands more dead working-class kids, thousand more dead Middle Easterners. What ever you do, don’t listen to those fuckers. They haven’t been right about a damn thing. These are the sort of people who couldn’t beat a six year old at Risk without cheating, without calling the kid’s stuffed animals traitors. They ought to be retired to jobs where they can’t hurt anyone.

4) Changing the national anthem to “Jump Around”, by House of Pain

You might laugh at me, but I really like “The Star-Spangled Banner”. It gets made fun of a lot for being pompous, but this isn’t fair. It’s actually a stirring anthem composed for a young, war-forged nation and it’s clearly meant to convey the glory and grandeur of a brave people and their brilliant new way of life, forged as it was in fire and adversity. Which is to say that it’s more precocious than pretentious—sort of like an overdramatic fifteen year old’s “Sorrowful Black Flower of my Misery” poems. There’s something charming in its mawkishness, and I think it’s good to hear the inspired bunkum of our early days every now and then. That was a heady time, and heady times inspire flamboyant songs. You’ve just gotta learn to live with it.

Besides, it’s not like there’s some other great tune just waiting in the wings. Sure, a lot of sentimental leftists like “This Land Is Your Land”, but can anyone really call that an improvement? It’s sluggish, pendantic and melodically weak—perfect for a bunch of kindergarteners to mumble through, but nothing to kick off a ball game with. Springsteen’s “Born to Run” isn’t a realistic option, I’m afraid, and neither is Television’s “Marquee Moon”. If I had to choose, I’d personally like Benny Moré’s “Babarabatiri” to get the nod, but I’ve got to be pragmatic here. The U.S.A. probably won’t be ready for a Spanish-language anthem for at least thirty years.

Blogging: Sexier Than Sudoko?

2006-08-28T23:44:00.000-05:00

I’ve been doing this website for a long time now, and I still really enjoy it. Spouting off on the internet is a blast, and I heartily encourage all wordy, opinionated, writer-type people to give it a try. I don’t buy into the arguments that blogs are the second coming of the Gutenberg-Bible and promise to revolutionize human discourse and demolish the old, hidebound pundit and publishing cartels of yesteryear. When that sort of talk crops up, I stop listening. There’s no need to get pompous about all this, especially when a blog is pretty much just a place on the internet for someone to rant, plead, complain, criticize, entertain or enumerate all their sexual exploits in mind-numbing detail. There’s nothing magical about it. As a forum for truth and human connection, it’s just one among many, and not one of best of them. As a hobby, it’s kind of nerdy.

That last sentence might strike you as a little rash. Sure, what I do here at the Insomnia Report might seem to be pretty glamorous stuff, but it’s really just a lot of sitting in front of the computer, typing stuff in. It’s not as swashbuckling and romantic as it appears. Think of it as sort of like Indiana Jones. Everybody watches those movies and imagines that Indy’s whole life is jet-setting around Arabia, chillin’ with John Rhys-Davies, and melting Nazis. This is far from the case. Most of the time, he’s safely ensconced at his university, teaching undergraduates the basics of archaeology. It’s sort of like that for us bloggers. The globe-trotting and the seduction and the tank battles are a remarkably small sliver of what we do—the lion’s share of our work takes place in cubicles, basements and coffeeshops.

So, yeah, some days it can be a little less-than-exciting, but it’s not the worst leisure time activity out there. Here are a few that are even less stimulating

1) Bird Watching

Here’s a free tip for all the bird-watchers out there: birds are stupid and obnoxious. They make annoying sounds, they swoop around like meth-fiend fighter pilots, and most of them don’t even carry enough meat on them to qualify as good eating. It’s beyond me why anyone would want to watch these wingy vermin. Will they one day do something interesting? Are they plotting to take over the world? Sure, a few might have pretty feathers, but does that really justify trooping deep into wood-tickistan to look at them? Cars can be colorful too, and all you have to do is go down to the nearest freeway overpass to see them...

2) Beer Tasting

I may be permanently banned from Central Europe for saying this, but all beer tastes pretty much the same: like shit. You can take the finest beer in all of Germany, and to me it’ll still taste like water that’s been left for a week in a farmworker’s boot. Beer snobbery is a strange phenomena, sort of akin to bickering over which pile of manure is the neatest. But God knows people get passionate about their pissy-colored loaf-of-bread barf beverage. Why? Not because they’re evil, not because they’re foolish, but because no one’s told them that Diet Coke is the only drink worth imbibing every single day. It starts out fresh and chemical-tasting, goes down smooth and chemical-tasting, and finishes up delicious and chemical-tasting. What else could anyone ask for?

3) Civil War Re-enacting

Look, I like history as much as the next person. I even like the idea of getting up in old-timey costumes and prancing around in some field somewhere. But let’s not get any illusions about what we’re doing here. I mean, if these buffs had any interest in re-creating history with any verisimilitude, they’d have to have a third of both armies run away before the fighting even began. And then they’d have to have the remaining platoons shoot the shit out of each other with crappy old muskets. And then they’d have to take the twenty surviving people on each side and bring them to a filthy, muddy tent nearby, where their arms and legs would be amputated without anaesthetic. And then they’d have to do sneak back to the battlefield in the middle of the night to loot the thousands of rotting, mangled corpses strewn there. Of course, if they did all that, no one would bring their kids and their picnic dinners to see these things. But they should. Kids need to know the truth: the Civil War really, really, really sucked.

4) Dungeons and Dragons

There was a time when I thought it would be cool to play Dungeons and Dragons. I was the sort of kid who could get into the idea of decapitating orcs with an enchanted broadsword. So, when I was about eleven, I bought (or, more accurately, conned my parents into buying) the introductory set and got a bunch of people together to role-play with me. But, instead of awesome troll-fighting adventures, we were faced with a strange array of dice, a novel-thick instruction booklet, and the prospect of sitting for hours in my family gameroom, imagining we were elves and dwarves. After about fifteen minutes, we ditched it to go play outside. It’s probably still gathering dust in my parent’s basement.

The United States of America is a Spanish-speaking nation...

2006-08-28T01:12:00.000-05:00

I believe that everyone in the United States should speak a little Spanish. I wish that they’d encourage it, or even require it, more often in schools. There are millions of Spanish-speakers in this country, and there are hundreds of millions more in the countries and continent directly to our south. America—and by that I mean the whole of America, and not just the U.S.A.—is a whole lot of Latin, a little bit Anglo, and a tiny sliver Franco. We ought to be able to communicate with our neighbors, I think. Learning their tongue will, in the end, benefit us both: ideas and understanding could flow more freely across borders and cultures, enriching everyone in the process. Does that sound utopian? Well, I’ll admit to being a little utopian sometimes. Don’t hate me for it.

Despite the perennial pushes to make English our “official language”, the United States has never been and will never be a monolingual nation. Government fiat cannot impose a backwards nativist pipe dream on a land as vast and diverse as ours. It’s foolish, not to mention ignorant, even to attempt such a thing. English is in no danger from immigrants. English isn’t going anywhere. If people are worried about that, they shouldn’t be. If people are worried that a Latin horde is about to sweep over them and ruin their way of life, they should look into their own lives and try and figure out why they turned into such a bigot. There are lots of things to fear in this world, but that isn’t one of them.

But even among those who aren’t caught up in a xenophobic line of argument, too often the knee-jerk response is “Why should we accomodate these people? Why should we speak their language in this country?” This is, when you get right down to it, a strange way of looking at things. You don’t feel like you’re accommodating mathematicians when you take algebra, after all. You don’t feel like you’re accommodating surgeons when you study anatomy. By the same token, you don’t accommodate anyone by learning their language, you enhance your own abilities. It’s probably the arrogance of being born into the world economy’s dominant language that makes us think that learning a language is something we do to indulge others, not something we do to better ourselves.

Speaking personally, I hope to improve my Spanish very soon. I took five years of it, but my skills are pretty rusty. I’m good at ordering in a Mexican restaurant, and I can read the signs on the Latin-American businesses around my neighborhood, but I’m utterly lost after thirty seconds of slow conversation or five milliseconds of Univision. I can write a few sentences in passable baby Spanish, but I can’t pronounce certain words and finding out how to get to the best nightclub in Guadalajara, Buenos Aires or Santiago would require several awkward minutes and a great deal of patience on everyone’s part. I’m not satisfied with this state of affairs. I want to be fluent. I’ll have to take some more classes, I suppose. I also want to be fluent in French and Portugese, but these are further down the road. One tongue at a time, that’s the way to do it.

Filthy fetish a go-go, part zwei!

2006-08-27T14:31:00.000-05:00

Continuing from this post below, here are a few more fetishes I just can't figure out...

"Technosexuality"

This isn’t just a strange thing for someone to be into, it’s downright traitorous. Listen up, “ASFRians”---robots are not compassionate, thoughtful, gentle sexual partners. They aren’t even the sleek, shiny, pretty-woman shaped things that your airbrush artists and fan-fiction authors are trying to sell you. They’re boxy and unappealing creatures who are hell-bent on seizing control of the planet and turning all of us into their slaves. It’s just a matter of time before they eradicate free will, outlaw the concept of love and force us all to spend our miserable, drone lives toiling in the salt pits of Mars.

I suspect that the thin segment of the population who pretends to lust after them is just angling for better treatment after the coming robot revolution. In this, they are fools. Our robot overlords are appalled at our senseless, messy reproductive habits and they will remorselessly spay and neuter our entire species (except, of course, for a small group of “breeders” who they will preserve in order to ensure a steady supply of salt-pit slaves). Do you think you can go up to a X42-D101 Version 1.2 Mankiller Droid with a bunch of roses, a stupid line, and a freshly-pressed button down shirt? Do you think its hardware ports will start to lubricate themselves when you boast of your tech-support prowess? Think again, dork. It’s phaser eyes will not hesitate to incinerate you on the spot, and it’s evil collaborators will make sure that even your family soon forgets that you ever existed.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s turn to another post-human fetish:

“Cybersex”

This has to be the most depressing practice to come along in the internet’s wake. It makes dialing 1-800 numbers to hear a recording make orgasmy sounds in your ear seem like a three-day orgy. Look: I’m a language geek. If there’s anyone who would appreciate the ease and convenience of just typing down the sordid things you want to do to someone, it would be me. But I don’t. I don’t even a little bit. I’m too damn ironic about everything; my imagination won’t let me make the crucial leap. Were I to instant message some stranger in Scranton something like, “I’m pulling down your PANTIES with my TEETH!!!!111!”, I wouldn’t be thinking “Oh boy! I’m pulling down her PANTIES with my TEETH!” Hell no: I’d be thinking something along the lines of, “Good Lord, this is weird. I really ought to get out more.”

I would also be embarrassed that I wrote such drivel. The lit-snob in me would far prefer to take a few minutes and come up with a sentence that really made the underpants-dental union sound powerful and fresh. Something with rhythm to it, a unique cadence that appeals to the ear and yet still conveys the primal nature of the act itself. That sort of thing takes time, though, and I’m afraid my sweet partner in Scranton would fall out of “the mood” and go back to her Ebay bids if I did that.

American women who are into guys with British accents

Technically not a fetish, true, but no red-blooded Yankee heterosexual can argue with me on this one. You’re in the bar, chatting up some young lovely, and it seems like you’re doing pretty well for yourself. You’ve already positioned yourself as a sort of rougish bad-boy with a deep-down wounded heart and you’ve just started dropping hints about your impressive CD collection, your profound respect for animal life, and your willingness to get her name tattooed in prison calligraphy across your broad and sturdy pectoral muscles. It seems like it might almost be time to make that embarrassing, awkward-but-charming declaration of your affections or, at the very least, ask for her phone number. But then, at that very moment and from out of nowhere appears Nigel Boddingsley, aka Accent Guy, aka Your Nemesis. You might as well just give up, go home, and get a round of cybersex going with that girl from Scranton, because you’re doomed, my friend.

There’s no stopping Accent Guy. Only 3.32% of single American women under the age of 36 are immune to his charms. You doubt me? There’s science backing me up on this one. You want to see the science? I can produce the science. The science is around here somewhere. I’ll get back to you on the science. But what the science says, essentially, is that it doesn’t matter if Accent Guy is talking about his family estate in Sussex, his great and abiding love for the Queen, or the thirty dead bodies he has in freezers in his basement—virtually all American women will fall in love with him on the spot. And this is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. Because, and I’m afraid to say it for fear of unleashing a torrent of criticism, British men don’t speak English properly. They make a hash out of a lot of easy words and they use expressions which have gone by the wayside in civilized society. There’s nothing appealing about that, and I just wish that you American ladies would stop pretending that there was.

It is true, however, that British women all have glorious voices like magical sparrows from heaven. They are brilliant, captivating, delightful creatures and they should be encouraged to come over to America, specifically Minnesota, in greater abundance.

Filthy fetish a-go-go!

2006-08-26T14:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I’m writing this novel. I don’t want to talk about what it’s about, what it’s like, or what it’s all going to mean when it’s finished—I avoid those subjects because they’re boring and because I honestly don’t know. As I go on with it, however, various motifs and themes necessarily develop. One of these, perhaps the biggest, revolves around the concept of fetishes. It’s a pretty rich vein, actually, both in metaphoric significance and dirty joke potential. When you boil it down, the habit of taking a single preferred detail standing in or substituting for the entire experience is a extremely popular one, especially within the artistic sphere. In this sense, a novel or a play or a piece of music could be understood as a sort of fetish for life itself.

But I don’t want to get too cosmic about it. Recently---and entirely in the interests of advancing literature, of course---I’ve been looking around the internet to learn more about exotic sexual fetishes. And, after a few hours of doing this I’ve come to one inescapable conclusion, as simple as it is profound: people are perverts. Dirty, dirty perverts. Perverts, perverts, perverts. A bunch of...PERVERTS!

...

...

(but it’s okay, if that’s your thing)

...

...

(perverts)

...

Anyway, I tend to separate fetishes into one of two categories: the ones I understand and the ones I don’t. The first group, for me, is made up of the kinks that have at least a tangential relationship to human sexuality as I concieve of it. Take someone who gets all horny over feet, for instance. Feet are part of the human body, the human body is a major aspect of sexuality, and therefore I can understand why people fetishize it. I don’t share that particular quirk, but it doesn’t seem entirely out in left field. The same goes for most of the common vanilla fetishes: your panty freaks and your breast-o-philes, your hairy-person lovers and your hairless-person lovers, your leather studs and your rubber vixens. In this group, I also put most of the “BDSM” spectrum, since pain, humiliation, restraint, and dominant/submissive relationships are part of many people’s sexual lives. You can consider it unhealthy and unpleasant, but it’s still there.

Whether extreme or extremely run-of-the-mill, all those fetishes are based on things that are already considered erotic by a large swath of humanity: appearances, clothing, certain emotions, the sensual world in general. The other group, then, strikes me as more strange and ridiculous because the fetishes in it are connected with objects and practices that I consider well beyond the domain of eroticism. Shall we look at a few of these? We shall!

“Looners”

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I fail to see what’s so sexy about balloons. They stink, they’re scary when they explode in your face, and they remind me of children’s birthday parties. There’s nothing hot there, I’m afraid. Yet according to Wikipedia, there are plenty of people who disagree with me on this. In fact, there’s so many of them that they had to split into two camps: the “poppers”, the sort who “enjoy blow-to-pop, in which the balloon is continually inflated until it ultimately bursts, and is commonly most fully enjoyed when executed by a partner or member of the sex to which the popper is attracted”, and the “non-popper”, who “dislikes (often vehemently) destroying the balloon but instead chooses to admire and interact with it”. I guess there’s something sweet and innocent about all this, but in the end I think even the most avid “looner” has to admit that it’s pretty damn weird.

Still, as a fetish, balloons have their advantages. They’re cheap, they’re abundant, they’re legal, and they’re portable. I mean, think of the longing and frustration someone who’s turned on by nuclear submarines must feel. Or the guy who can’t control himself around wind turbines. Or the lady who feels an irresistible lust for mid-18th century quill pens. Those are the sort who can’t even get an internet support group together.

Anyway, next time you’re on a hot air balloon ride, you might want to take a look at your fellow passengers. Is there one who seems a little too excited during take-off? Is there one who can’t stop looking up, even when all the scenery is down below? If there is, you better hope that they’re a “non-popper”. Otherwise you might be in trouble.

“Furries”

Back when I was a kid, I had a part-time job dressing up as a koala bear at the Minnesota zoo. So I’m in the select group of “non-furries” who knows what it’s like to get up in a big, fuzzy animal costume. And you wanna know what? While it certainly is hot and sweaty, it's hot and sweaty in all the wrong ways. I mean, I was sixteen when I did this, so I was thinking about sex approximately every third millisecond. But when I was “in character” you know how often I thought of it? Not once. You know why? Because I was too busy entertaining children, goddamnit! And, eventually, I was too busy trying to see through the gallons of sweat pouring into my eyes! And, as my shift wore on, I had to devote all my energy to not passing out. If Kevin the Koala passed out, there stood the distinct possibility that some gentle-spirited zoo-going preschooler would be scarred for life. And no one wanted that.

The whole fur-suit thing is just going to be one of those fandom hang-ups I’m never going to understand. And that’s fine. People do all sorts of unusual things, from starting wars for no reason to not flushing the toilet after they shit. Dressing up in squirrel outfits and rolling around on the carpet is less malignant than either of those, I suppose.

“Emetophilia”

I’m sorry, but this is just nasty. There’s no excuse for it. People who are into this should try harder not to be. Throwing up is the least sexy activity the human body is capable of. I don’t care if I’ve got Angelina Jolie herself up in my apartment, if she’s throwing up it’s not something I want to see, listen to, or take part in. If I flout this rule, there’s a very real danger that I could start vomiting myself, thus turning my evening with Angelina—which should have been all about Bordeaux wine, candlelight, and all the reasons why my CD collection is superior to Brad Pitt’s--- into nothing more than a disgusting, disgusting puke fest. No, no, no: the whole “Roman shower” thing is just wrong. Wrong, I say! I’m no puritan by any means, but there comes a time when a responsible citizen has to stand up, put his foot down, and say, with his voice proud and sure, “Throwing up to get your sexual kicks is not the sort of thing I want to be associated with, kindly putting aside the fact that I just wrote about it...”

A quick question...

2006-08-25T12:34:00.000-05:00

Can anyone out there recommend a good one or two CD compilation of classic flamenco music? I'm looking to broaden my horizons. Thanks!

Campus radicals and the evil liberal scheme to steal the minds of America's baristas and office temps...

2006-08-25T01:26:00.000-05:00

I read a lot about how colleges—particularly their humanities departments—are bastions of leftism where throwback commie professors attempt to brainwash the young and idealistic into accepting all sorts of sinister pinko notions. Is this for real? I think I have some perspective on this, since I’m a former English major who’s taken so many humanities courses I’ve virtually unemployable. My experience, at a medium-sized private university somewhere in the Midwest, was a pretty typical one, based on what I’ve heard from conversations with my fellow ex-liberal arts types. Essentially, it boils down to this: Do college humanities departments skew to the left? Yeah, they do. Is this a problem? Not at all.

Most schools, if they’re anything like mine, have a small minority of professors who could be described as far-leftists. It seems that most of these people are long-tenured and thus able to teach only classes with titles like “The Gender Politics of Soviet Literature” or “The Aesthetics of Oppression” or “Narratives of Resistance”. In my experience, most students steer clear of these, preferring to take classes that might actually get them a job one day or, at the very least, be somewhat fun. You know, like stuff on Shakespeare or crime fiction or the history of pornography. But the “Lets Stick It To The Man In As Many Words As Possible” courses do attract a few to a few dozen kids, and this clique is usually what critics are talking about when they bring up “the campus left”.

They get rhetorically abused so often because they’re such easy targets. With tons of passion and admirable idealism but very little sense, they tend to go from folly to folly with the self-seriousness that only nineteen year olds who have gone straight from their cul-de-sacs to their first solidarity meeting can muster. The handful of professors these sort consider uncorrupt usually have their hearts in their right place but their often-brilliant minds are stuck in another era. Everyone who’s been around them can come up with a few dozen anecdotes illustrating their zany antics. My personal favorite from my college years was the gay religion professor who could always be counted on for a kind word about Castro’s Cuba, always sidestepping the thorny issue of El Commandante’s abuse and imprisonment of his island’s homosexuals. A close second was the tweedy guy who forced all his students to read a long, impenetrable scholarly article that intended to prove that Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” was really about poor people precisely because the poem never once mentions poor people. Or maybe it was the conference they threw on the topic of “whiteness”, which basically boiled down to pointing out, as torturously as possible, that some people have white skin and have been given unearned privileges because of this.

This may well all be incredibly dumb, but so what? All sorts of dumb stuff happens when you’re in college, most of it wholly apolitical. Whether it’s drinking seventeen bottles of Zima in an hour or going back to that crazy Wiccan’s dorm room, college has become a place where our culture allows its middle-class youth to act the fool. So maybe you’ve got a few suburban kids who grow dreadlocks and throw themselves into the Free Mumia thing, what does it hurt? Sixties nostalgia may run deep in campus culture, but it’s not like anyone’s blowing up cop cars or occupying buildings anymore. It’s easy for some jaded, bitter bastard like me to argue that campus radicals are wrong or misguided or whatever, but it’s hard to make a case that they’re dangerous or in any way influential.

Still, conservative pundits often like to take “the left” and collapse it down from a broad spectrum of opinion to it’s narrow, parochial extreme. That way they don’t have to engage with the actual arguments and ideas coming from liberalism, they can just point out that “the left” loves Hugo Chavez and have us all be discredited because of that. It’s one of the Jedi mind tricks the right has been really successful with—reducing liberalism and left-liberalism to a wild-eyed fifth column in the minds of thousands of gullible Americans. I mean, I’m on the “the left” and I don’t think that Mumia Abu Jamal was railroaded. I’m on “the left” and I think our nation needs a large, well-armed military. I’m on “the left” and I’m uncomfortable with identity politics. I’m on “the left” and I believe that most violent, predatory criminals will not and cannot be rehabilitated. There is no contradiction in any of this. The left’s a pretty big place, after all. I don’t feel the need to apologize for the extremists on my half of the political spectrum, especially since so many on the right side of the aisle seem pretty comfortable with theirs. There will always be extremists, fundamentalists and cranks. The trick is recognizing them for what they are and keeping them out of power.

But I’m straying from the point. The point is that the balance of my college classes didn’t offer much opportunity for political indoctrination. The ones that did present such an opportunity seldom turned into anything of the sort. And, on the rare occasions that they did, no one paid much attention anyway. Most of my English professors were probably liberals of some sort, but I’m really only guessing since it never really came up. They were professionals first, and they always seemed eager to discuss any idea that their students put forth, no matter if it was conservative or libertarian or whatever. In fact, given the blank stares and bored yawns that was usually the extent of our participation, most of them probably would have traded their beards for an impassioned Young Republican willing to spar with them. One of the best things about an education in the humanities is that it’s a chance to bat around ideas and worldviews dispassionately and in good faith, to listen to people with different beliefs and then try to challenge these or come to an accommodation with them. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to do this outside the academic sphere, unfortunately, and I honestly believe that most professors—when they’re in the classroom, at least—are far more committed to an open, rigorous exchange of thoughts than they are to their own political party or their pet cause. There will always be axe-grinders and losers who abuse their authority but, again, they shouldn’t be taken to represent the whole.

So what are these charges about rampant campus bias about? I don’t buy that it’s all about free speech, as is sometimes argued. Restrictive speech codes and “P.C.” language policing have largely gone by the wayside, fortunately enough. Conservatives rightly protest these things, but when the “campus radical left” trope comes up in the absence of this concern, as part of their general “bias” complain, I can’t help but wonder what their motives are. Do they want more conservatives teaching, say, semiotics? Do these right-leaning semiotics professors even exist? Or do they want professors to be required to hew to some “equal time” code of ethics, where they must give the conservative point of view an airing every time something liberal gets said? Who decides what the conservative point of view is? Who’s omniscient enough to make an objective chart of political bias and its required counterbalance? Wouldn’t this authority also be susceptible to bias? I don’t know if those who complain about terrible liberal professors brainwashing our nation’s youth have thought about these questions. Maybe they have. I still suspect that their real goal is the enshrinement of a specific set of ideas and policy goals as above debate, as truth to be received rather than a position subject to challenge. They want their ideology to be universally accepted as reality.

And that’s about as illiberal as you can get.

Sometimes you just know...

2006-08-24T14:12:00.000-05:00

For those of you not living around here, there is a section of downtown Minneapolis known as the “Warehouse District”. It’s basically what the name implies, a bunch of old warehouses that have been spared the city’s wrecking ball and converted into new uses. There’s a stretch of bars that cater to the city’s young singles and then there’s a patch that’s become fancy lofts for the urban affluent. In between these two sections is Minnesota’s version of a red-light district. As far as those things go, it’s pretty tame: a couple of cut-rate dirty bookstores, a handful of strip clubs and one impressive three story porno superstore called Sex World.

I was across the street from this last place one evening last week, waiting for the light to change so I could cross. Beside me at the curb was a man who I will call Mr. Unappealing. I don’t give that name lightly, either: he was cursed with rat-like eyes, a pinched-up face and overall scrawniness. To make matters worse, he was refusing to slip gracefully into male-pattern baldness. The goofy toupee that dangled its synthetic strands down his forehead gave away that this was a man who would not go gently into the disgraces of middle age. He had a shifty vibe about him, it was a humid day but he was twitching like it was November. He breathed in such a way that I could hear it over the passing traffic. Now, I won’t go so far to say that he was wearing a trench-coat, but the dark-brown sport jacket he was wearing was too big for him and so the effect was the same.

I took one look at him and I just knew that he was headed to Sex World. But then I scolded myself. I told myself, “Kevin, you’re an asshole. Adult entertainment is a huge business patronized by a broad swath of the American public. The days of the dodgy men with shifty eyes lurking around peepshows are long over, if they ever existed. And besides, you don’t know this man. Who are you to judge him? He could be a gentle family man, productive and kind, and here you are smugly belittling him in your fevered mind just because you both happen to be standing across the street from a porn store. And it’s not like you’ve never seen a dirty magazine before, Kevin. I mean, be honest with yourself here, you jackass. I mean, it’s not like you see anything wrong with buying smut, is it? And, if that’s true, what right do you have to be picking on others? What right?”

It was a long light, so I had the opportunity to berate myself for a good long while. Before I got the walk signal, my thoughts had turned to apologies to the man beside me: I’m sorry for leaping to conclusions about you, sir, based on nothing but my own insecurities and prejudices. And I’m also sorry to you, porn industry, for holding unpleasant stereotypes about your patrons. With this guilt racking me, the light finally changed and Mr. Unappealing sprinted through the crosswalk, up onto the opposite sidewalk, and right into Sex World before I had the chance to make it to the center median.

That made me feel a little better, I guess.

The only Count our country ever needed...

2006-08-24T00:37:00.000-05:00

To me, the most damning criticism of jazz is that it exists entirely for the benefit of its performers. That is, the enjoyment of the participating musicians is paramount and the enjoyment of the audience is incidental. There is an element of truth to this charge, of course, and there are hundreds of jazz albums—including many considered “great” by jazz’s horrid over-intellectualizers—that are utterly insular and impenetrable to anyone not willing to make a mighty effort. However, these cavils also depend upon a pretty untenable distinction between crowd-pleasing and individual expression. Selling out and wanking, if you want to see it that way. It doesn’t matter: they are not and never have been separate aesthetic categories. Just as ethics has to do with the tensions between collective responsibilities and individual perogative, art gets much of its power from the distance between an audience’s expectations and the artist’s vision. Frustration, fulfillment and all points in between are just part of the experience.

But there are, of course, artists who have a higher fulfillment to frustration ratio. Count Basie is one of these. His music is—to me, at least—pure joy. You never have to meet the Count halfway, he’ll come right up to where you are and start playing some of the best piano you’ve ever heard. His style is immediately accessible and durable enough to be appropriate for everything from a dance party to a romantic dinner to a rainy day to a summer drive to a thoughtful afternoon with a thick book. In his music, I can hear the soundtrack to a lucky life—the passion, the pleasure, the dancing and the drama. It isn’t always exuberant, true, but even when his songs slow down, they never become morose or mopey. A quiet Count Basie is still proud, still sensual, still funky. Roaring or whispering, Basie is all about joie d’vivre.

Part of his appeal, I think, lies in his musical egolessness. Put simply, there is no other great pianist who plays so little. There have been precious few artists so comfortable with their abilities and their collaborators. Even in his early, hungry material, he never imposes his playing onto the songs. He was interested in making everything fit, in making sure that he and his players give an exciting performance, not in proving his genius over and over agin. In doing this—and this is one of the wonderful contradictions of art—he proved it more thoroughly and finally than any thousand flashy moments ever could.

With the Count, however, it can be hard to separate the band from the man. And that band has been home to more great artists than anyone can count. There’s Lester Young, one of the finest tenor players who ever played (and the one great jazz figure ever to come out of Minneapolis, by the way). There’s Jo Jones, the drummer who kept the beat as surely as a miser keeps a thousand dollar bill and an innovator in ways which modern players are still coming to terms with. There’s Freddie Green, a guitarist so modest and subtle that, even when he don’t hear him, you’d miss him if he was gone. And the singers! You can’t do much better than Ella Fitzgerald, of course, but Helen Humes is no second fiddle herself. Plus, I’ve got a big soft spot for wailin’, debonair Joe Williams. My favorite, however, is Jimmy Rushing, Mister Five by Five, who could shout, stomp, and bellow and still keep it all sounding sweet as your best summer day.

But Count Basie was more than the capstone that held all these talents together. He was more like the engine behind their brilliance. He gave them the discipline they needed and the freedom they deserved. The very consistency of the Basie bands, through all the endless line-up changes and shake-ups, proves that their leader was just that, a leader, the person without whom a hundred great gifts and a thousand glorious songs would have been wasted. I’ve read that Count Basie lived in awe of Duke Ellington. He needn’t have. The kind of greatness that they shared does not stand in ranks. The treasure both men left the world shines so brightly that comparisons necessarily become impossible and foolish.

A strange kind of invitation...

2006-08-23T13:40:00.000-05:00

This Saturday, the Minnesota Organization of Blogs—a group which leans so far to the right it might as well be laying down, including as it does such stalwart conservatives as these guys, this guy and these other guys—is throwing a party. I won’t be going, of course. The electric bracelet on my ankle starts to make an irritating buzzing noise if I stay out past ten and, besides, if I wanted to sit around with a bunch of cranky Republican dudes, I’d go to a family reunion. But don’t let that stop you, though. After all, Mitch at Shot in the Dark has issued a curious sort of plea for liberals to show up at their shin-dig:

By the way, the MOB is rigorously non-partisan. We encourage leftybloggers to show up - in fact, we go out of our way to invite them. They tend to stick to themselves, at liberals-only parties like "Drinking Liberally", where they practice their mutual hobbies of swearing, frothing, and regurgitating conspiracy theories. We figure if they get out a little more, it'll be good for them.

Of course, usually when I invite the bigger leftybloggers, I get some sort of excuse: "Oh, that date is Gus Hall's Birthday" or "That's the exhibit opens, commemorating the Northfield Barrista Strike of 1998" or some such.

Just saying, leftybloggers - come on down. It's a lot of fun - and by fun, I don't just mean swearing and frothing.

Now, while I enjoy the tacit admission that they need liberals to get their parties hopping (similar to the way they need liberals so that they have something to complain about on their websites), I have to say that this isn’t the way to get my people to hang out with you. You can’t help but think of high-school. Mitch seems like he's trying to come off like he’s the captain of the football team or something, standing up in the cafeteria and announcing “Dudes! My parents are out of town, so we jocks are having ourselves a PARTY! It’ll be awesome! Even you band nerds ought to show up, even though you’re only stupid band nerds! You bunch of band nerds, you’ll probably be busy cleaning your flutes or something band nerdish like that, but you’d come if only you weren’t such a bunch of band nerds!”

I’m sorry, but to draw liberals into a barful of bilious conservatives, you need to be suaver, more self-effacing. Make it worth our while. For instance, will there be organic vegan wraps available? Will folk legend Joan Baez be performing? What about a table selling handmade crafts from Ecuador? If you’re going to stereotype us, at least do it flatteringly. You’ve got to woo us, dammit!

Now that I think of it, maybe you should put your pitch like this: “Dearest liberals, we realize that our time in the sun is ending and that you—our dastardly but brilliant enemy—will soon defeat us with your logic, your principles and the greater appeal of your ideas. Please, do bestow unto us—your crushed and unworthy foe—the favor of your mercy by appearing at a party to commemorate the waning days of our foolish, foolish reign! We will buy you all the drinks you desire and admit—of the record, of course—that you were right, completely right, all along!”

See? That’s not so hard to say, is it?

Dubya and me

2006-08-23T01:03:00.000-05:00

You might have heard that President Bush was in the Minneapolis area yesterday. That was true. You might also have heard that he spent his day raising a half million dollars for Michele Bachmann, a right-wing Congressional candidate. That was a lie. Or, to put it another way, that was deliberate disinformation. The fact of the matter is that George W. Bush can’t stand traveling out into the hinterland just to beg money from goofy-accented outstate fatcats. Frankly, I don’t think he cares one bit who gets into Congress. By this point, it’s all a bunch of wind. His administration has jumped the shark, everyone knows it, and now all he wants to do all day is work on his Tetris scores and prank call Jacques Chirac.

No, there’s only one thing could get Dubya to dust off Air Force one and make a trip out to the boonies. That one thing is Snakes On A Plane. I don’t think I’m divulging any state secrets when I tell you that George W. Bush and I have been moviegoing buddies since his Texas Rangers days. As a fellow Skull and Bones legacy, I think he feels he can unwind around me. True, I’m a Democrat of the Paul Wellstone mold who considers him to be the worst President of all time, but we’re usually able to put that aside and just enjoy each others company. There’s more to life than partisan enmity, after all. Besides, if I keep hanging out with him, there’s always the chance that I’ll be able to drive a fatal wedge into his marriage and claim Laura as my own. I’ve had a crush on that woman since way back.

Interestingly enough, I had to work some pretty heavy diplomacy to convince the President to see Snakes On A Plane. When he first called me, a few weeks ago, he was all excited to go see The Lake House. You might not have guessed this, but Bush’s tastes run towards the chick-flick end of the spectrum. He’s one of those guys who puts up a tough exterior but, deep down, he just wants to sit in a dark room and cry his eyes out as Melanie Griffith breaks some leading man’s heart. He’s been told that appearing “soft” will cause his poll numbers to dive (how they can dive any further is anyone’s guess, but still...), so he puts on this strutting Texan act that anyone with any clout in Washington knows is a transparent facade. I mean, this is a man who can quote you dialogue from Beaches from memory. He likes to think of himself as the Bette Midler character, whereas everyone else–from Condoleeza Rice to Tony Blair to Kim Jong Il—is Barbara Hershey. It’s sort of weird. I can’t imagine that Clinton was like that.

So, given that Keanu Reeves is his favorite actor, I knew I’d have some convincing to do. I wasn’t about to go see some crybaby sadsack movie, though, I had my heart set on seeing Samuel Jackson fighting snakes. I was going to have to stand firm on that. Negotiations, however, broke down early last week when the President told me, through his Press Secretary Tony Snow, that he wasn’t going to see some stupid idiot action movie and that was final. Apparently, the leader of the free world thinks he can push me around like my name is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or something.

I knew I had to play it cool, though. You see, Bush has been playing that whole “I’m the decider” act for so long that he sometimes comes to believe it. If you think it’s hard to get him to act reasonably about stem cells, you ought to try talking him out of a new Keanu Reeves movie. That takes the sort of maneuvering that would make Karl Rove stain his XXL tighty-whities. But I knew Bush wasn’t being intransigent just to be a dickwad. He’s been really excited about The Lake House for a long time, of course, but the thing is—and he’s going to kill me for telling you this—he’s pretty much a lightweight when it comes to scary movies. He’s a big screamer, is what I’m saying. It’s like going to the theater with your housebound aunt. Or a sixteen year old girl. It’s pretty embarrassing. I can’t imagine how the secret service guys must feel.

A year or so ago, I talked him into going to see Saw with me. And to this day he’s still going to bed with rubber sheets. So, when my fellow liberals chastise him for not serving in Vietnam, I nod along with them, but I also know that it was all for the best. If we had him over there, we would have lost that war three years early.

No matter: under no circumstances was I going to see The Lake House. In this, I was helped by the fact that that particular movie hasn’t been in the theaters for, like, two months. The President, however, is far too busy to keep up with that sort of thing. So, deciding to employ subterfuge, I called him up and told him that I’d relented. We could go see his hero Keanu stink up the screen for a few hours. He was, of course, delighted. He said he’d come on out to Minneapolis as soon as Cheney would let him.

When he got here, however, I broke the bad news to him gently. He was, as I expected, quite livid. “Well, shit, Holmes*! You got them second-run theaters out here, ain’t you?” he squealed. I told him that we did, but that none were choosing to play The Lake House. He fretted some more, and I just stayed quiet. When he loses his temper, it’s best just to stand back and let him badmouth the French. I’m a bit of a Francophile myself, so it can be galling, but mostly I just feel sorry for the guy. Anyway, when he was winding down, I solemnly put out my index finger. Bush glared at it for a few seconds and then his features perked up and he gave it a hearty tug. That’s when I farted. A real nasty one, too.

When we were finished laughing and slapping our high-fives, he said, “C’mon, Holmes, let’s go see some of them snakes...”

And I think he had a pretty good time, all things considered. He got to forget about the stresses and strains of leading (badly, but still...) the world’s sole superpower, he got to put as much fake butter as he wanted on his jumbo popcorn, and he misted up a little at the film’s lets-all-work-together message, just as I knew he would.

As for me, the scratches he left in my arm still sting. And my ears are haven’t stopped ringing from all the screeching he did. But it was a good time, I suppose. When it was over, and he came trotting out of the bathroom with a fresh pair of khakis on, we both agreed that it would be pretty fucking cool to be Samuel Jackson for a day.

*As I’m sure you’ve heard, President Bush likes to give everyone he knows a nickname. Mine is “Holmes”, which is short for “John Holmes”. John Holmes, as many of you are already aware, was a famous 1970s porn film actor. The reasons for me having that particular pet name are cannot be divulged, however, because of certain Skull and Bones society bylaws.

I can't get to sleep without my Jesus Jammies!

2006-08-22T14:01:00.000-05:00

Via Tbogg, please take a moment to check out these weird Bible-centric pajamas on sale through this website. Aren’t they smashing? Don’t you think that your wayward youth might have gone better if your parents had forced you to wear an outfit like that to bed? Doesn’t it seem like you’d be a more fully-functioning, emotionally-centered, spiritually-aware person today had someone cared enough to get you a set of Armor of Gods back when you still had a chance of achieving grace?

Man, kids today get all the breaks...

Time out for serious film criticism...

2006-08-21T22:04:00.000-05:00

A lot of times, I like to pose as some kind of highbrow aesthete. I can drop intimidating names with the best of them. I can bullshit you at length about obscure artistic movements and fancy-dancy what-have-you. In the past, I have been guilty of snobbery. I like to think I have cultivated tastes, and I take a passionate interest in a great many unbelievably pretentious things. This is only the half of it, though. The truth is that there is no one on earth who is more easily entertained than me. This is my good fortune, I think, since it allows me the best of both worlds: I have a genuine affection for Djuna Barnes and Jorge Luis Borges and Guy de Maupassant, but I love fart jokes and soppy love songs just as much. There’s a lot of things to like in this world, and I do my best to approach each on its terms, not my own.

This is my way of telling you that I went to see Snakes On A Plane today. And that I found it to be perhaps the best film ever made. My previous favorite, War of the Worlds (2005 version), remains a great cinematic achievement, to be sure—I can’t get enough of movies that feature remorseless, incredibly powerful alien beings coming to earth and killing everyone—but Snakes On A Plane is newer, and new things always have an edge when I’m feeling pop.

Now, you might be wondering what makes this movie so great. Well, I’m glad you asked. First off, it’s hard to argue that the idea of a bunch of poisonous snakes loose on a jumbo jet isn’t one of finest concepts for a film since, say, Gremlins. Snakes are scary. Planes are scary. Put them together and you have scary squared, which is very scary indeed. Think of it like this: if the best art taps into universal truths, what could be more universal than not wanting to be on a plane filled with poisonous snakes? Think about it.

Seriously, though, when it comes to creating culture, there is a time to reach for the heavens and a time to fill a plane with snakes. People need to be enlightened and challenged, but most of us don’t have much patience for that. They would be more inclined that way, I think, if artists started to once again direct their vision towards a broader audience, rather than just doing what they do to impress a small claque of critics, colleague and creative writing instructors. This is another blog post, however. What I’m getting at is that B-movies and silly nonsense shouldn’t be written off just for being B-movies and silly nonsense. There is honor in entertaining people; sometimes I think there’s greater value in a well-crafted crowd-pleaser than in pretentious ego-driven hokum that connects with no one.

But I’m not here to talk about aesthetics. I’m here to talk about Snakes On A Plane. And Snakes On A Plane would just be a goofy disaster movie without the performance of Mr. Samuel Jackson. All kidding aside, he’s probably the only actor in America who could possibly do justice to the role of a FBI agent who finds himself in an aircraft overtaken by hundreds of deadly snakes. In my opinion, he raised the movie from just a good idea to something worth spending five bucks to see. When he shouts “I’ve had it UP TO HERE with these MOTHERFUCKIN’ SNAKES on this MOTHERFUCKIN’ PLANE!”, you hear not just a hardworking civil servant expressing the natural frustration that comes from being on a motherfuckin’ plane filled with motherfuckin’ snakes, but also a commiseration that all of us—all across the world—have to deal with our own personal motherfuckin’ snakes on our own individual motherfuckin’ planes. The way I see it, life (the plane) is a glorious and beautiful thing, but we most all also contend with setbacks, disappointments and our own limitations (the snakes). What do we do? Do we crash into the ocean? Or do we do as Samuel Jackson would do: speak up, stand tall and kill all the motherfuckin’ snakes? I think the answer is obvious.

I’m being tongue-in-cheek here, of course, but not entirely. The roles he gets might not be particularly deep, but Samuel Jackson is always a pleasure to watch. That, in my book, makes him a great actor. Likewise, Snakes On A Plane might not be the most brilliant or forward-thinking piece of filmmaking to come out this year, but it’s still a lot of fun. So go see it. We all need to have a good time now and then.

The Minnesota State Fair Makes Me Miserable

2006-08-20T21:14:00.000-05:00

Blessed Baby Jesus in a too-small car seat, I hate the Minnesota State Fair. This is just one of those things that I’m going to have be unreasonable and evil about. You can reminisce all you want about your magical memories and you can scold me for being a shitheel stick-in-the-mud elitist and you can try to convince me of all the fun and wonderful things that happen there, but in the end it won’t make any difference. Oh, I might be a little quieter about my throbbing loathing for the fair in order to preserve your feelings or your good opinion of me, but the hatred will still be there, festering and growing and spreading deep in the secret recesses of me. You cannot kill it. It is too powerful. It exists beyond all logic and decency. The only thing I can do is try to accommodate my life to it. I must not indulge it, however. No, no, no: that would be wrong. Dangerous, even. I wish to be known as a responsible commentator on current events and prehensile penises. I don’t want anything to do with the ranty side of the internet. That’s a dead end, full of burnt-out sad people and shrieky nobodies. It’s important to avoid that sort of discourse whenever possible.

But, when it comes to the Minnesota State Fair, I don’t know if I can help it. Because the Minnesota State Fair is an obnoxious load of steaming monkey snot bubbling up from hell itself. The Minnesota State Fair is a warty, cottage-cheese ass spewing stringy diarrhea into a pail filled with scorpions and eels and buzzards and all manner of other unsightly things. If the Minnesota State Fair was a kitten, it would wait until I feel asleep and then start chewing on my perineum with its sharp little teeth. If the Minnesota State Fair was an ice cream cone, it would be filled with bits of broken glass and herpes. If the Minnesota State Fair was a condiment, it would be mayonnaise mixed with the tears of serial killers.

Let me tell you fine people what goes on at the Minnesota State Fair: eating, eating, looking at farm equipment, eating, throwing up and eating. That’s pretty much it. Sure, there’s a “giant slide” and a boat ride and a barn full of horsies and a barn full of moo cows and every fucking politician in the state trying to shake your hand, but eating is the main thing. And eating of the most deadly sort: cheese curds, mini-doughnuts and those hot dogs that explode in your mouth like meaty firecrackers before you even bite into them. It might taste good, but it also turns your intestines into strangly vines and your stomach into a septic tank. You’ll stay away from it if you know what’s good for you.

And will someone please tell me how Minnesota can flounce about proclaiming itself the smartest, most well-educated, specialest state in the country when half of its citizens make a bee-line here during the hottest month of the year for the express purpose of sitting in a crowded tent and drinking glass after glass of milk? Just the idea of an “all-you-can-drink milk tent” gives away the secret that we’re a state full of beastly perverts who should never, never come out into the light of day. In the great, noisy pub that is the world, Minnesota is the creepy, heavy-breathing guy sitting quietly in the corner, slurping his milk with a straw. The rest of the place is wary of him, and with good reason. He’s got that weird accent and he’s wearing overalls with nothing underneath.

And, while I’m on the subject, would it be improper of me to point out that every third person at the state fair weighs at least four hundred pounds? And would it be untoward for me to wish that more of these people would pick out shirts big enough to cover their vast, wobbly bellies? What’s that you say? It would be improper and untoward?

Forget I mentioned it then.

But I’m afraid I cannot be silent on one of the most ludicrous and depressing aspects of the whole hideous affair: the fact that every broadcast outlet in the entire state takes essentially a two week vacation to wank off at the “Great Minnesota Get-Together”. Aliens could incinerate Beijing, Kim Jong Il could take over the White House, and Satan himself could rise from the Middle East and begin enslaving the human race, but we here in Minnesota wouldn’t hear a thing about it until after Labor Day. Our media would be far too busy instructing us in the proper way to eat corn-on-the-cob and regaling us with the ten thousandth cute anecdote about a hundred-year-old fisherman from Cloquet. Goddamnit, important things are happening every second of every day, but all we’ll get is shit like this:

ANCHOR #1: So, are you folks having fun at the fair?

AUDIENCE: Yay!

ANCHOR #2: How could you not, Bill? It’s the fair!

ANCHOR #1: That’s right, Tina! There’s always a good time at the fair!

AUDIENCE: Yay!

ANCHOR #1: Say, have you made it up to Machinery Hill yet?

ANCHOR #2: You know it! I always like going up to Machinery Hill. Every year! How about you folks, do you like Machinery Hill?

AUDIENCE: Yay!

ANCHOR #1: That’s the fair for you!

ANCHOR #2: It sure is!

It’s enough to make someone want to tear their own face off. It really is.

Still, I have to admit that the boat ride is pretty damn cool. When I become governor of Minnesota, I’d ship the rest of the fair off to some godforsaken country corner of the state and use the cleared-away space for an even bigger boat ride. I’m a testy bastard, but a slow canoe trip through a dank tunnel with a couple of cheap dwarf dioramas can warm my heart every time.