Putting the "Oh, You Gotta Be Fuckin' Kidding Me" Back In Christmas:
Let us imagine, and why not, that over in Iraq, some of the members of the "legislature" and some of their intellectuals declared that Iraq is a Shi'a country, and if the Kurds and Sunnis don't like it, they can go fuck themselves. The Shi'a religious hierarchy can't understand the bizarro lack of intercessionary figures between the Sunni and God. Don't we all get this shit from the same Koran? In fact, all public displays will include big, huge representations of Shi'a emblems of Ramadan and other holy days. Right there: a big fuckin' Ali, the First Caliph. Sure, sure, we can throw in the token Kurdish and Sunni symbolism, maybe some little tiny reps of the other three Caliphs or of Imam Shaf'i, but motherfuckers better understand: it's a Shi'a country. Get used to it or tell it to the Turks.
Would we living in the big mess tent of America be more than a little worried about the implications of such statements? Even if it wasn't the policy of the Allawi "administration," wouldn't we think, "Oh, this is going to go badly," the slippery slope to Shi'a based laws, the inclusion of Shi'a references in governmental declarations, even a demonizing of those who think you should keep your religious beliefs out of the public space. Maybe then, oh, sweet Iraqi Freedom, an ethnic cleansing of those motherfuckin' Kurds, finally, at last, especially the totally screwed-up ones all into the Sufiism. What the fuck's up with that?
This whole bullshit uproar about "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" and oh-my-fucking-God-they're-not-lettin'-the-public-schoolchildren-dress-up-like-baby-Jesus is a worthless subject for discussion. No one's banning Christmas, the fake date of the storybook character Jesus's birth (chances are the little dude was born in spring or summer - depends on who you ask). If African-Americans want to create a holiday called "Kwanzaa," who the fuck cares? No one's walkin' into your house and takin' down your Christmas tree with the crucified Jesus nailed to the top and putting up a multicolored fruit basket. No one's tellin' you to say "Happy Holidays" to your family. It's just that when, say, a business that deals with people who are, well, shit, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, Zoroastrian, or whatever says, "Happy Holidays," it's saying, "I awkwardly shoehorn this phrase into a greeting because I respect diversity."
But a couple of things ought to be noted here. One is the whole thing smacks of a strange guilt complex from the people who can't afford the usual orgy of presents. Sales are down this year, and one can imagine parents at the local Wal-Mart thinking, as they put back the Tickle-My-Balls-Elmo doll on the shelf, "You know, Christmas isn't about the presents. It's about the birth of Jesus. And, hey, didn't the ACLU just take down the nativity scene outside our kid's school?" Get it? When you can't buy your way out of your misery, you gotta take it out on something.
Bill O'Reilly (who ought to be sodomized with a candy cane) is on to something when he belches forth, "This Christmas battle really stunned the secular forces," but it's not for the reasons he's thinking. It's not because we "secular forces" are taken aback at the ferocity of the defense of Christmas. If you tell a chimp not to throw its feces at you, the chimp is still gonna toss that shit. It's what chimps do. No, the "you gotta be fuckin' kidding me" response from the Left has more to do with the fact that, once again, the right has taken something insignificant, blown it up to something huge, and used it as a distraction from the shit that really matters. Social security "privatization"? Too complicated. Muslims and Jews who don't like Christmas? That's a Crusade we can have an Inquisition about. That speaks to the deep seated xenophobia of so many people, so flamed into rage by the right (like O'Reilly, who now has appointed himself the spokesman for the actions of Jesus when he proclaims that, because of the "attacks" on his birthday, "Somewhere Jesus is weeping." The Rude Pundit gets the feeling that if Jesus is weeping, it's probably watching the cars getting loaded with boxes at the valet parking at a Nordstrom's somewhere).
Tell you what: howzabout a deal with the goodly, godly Christians who can't celebrate without a public display of their dogma? A trade: you keep your Jesus out of the schools and the legislatures, and you can erect the biggest goddamn nativity on the lawn in front of City Hall, every city hall. Complete with fuckin' camels, man, big fuckin' camels dumpin' great huge piles of camel shit on the filthy wool of the bedraggled sheep. You can nail a baby to a cross and display it in some gigantic manger, get a token black person to be one of the kings to acknowledge where all this shit actually went down. You can have that motherfucker up for the entire month, with "Mary" and "Joseph" forced to stay out there, live with the fuckin' donkeys, man. Yeah, you keep your Jesus away from the kids and away from the Congress, and you can show everyone how big your fuckin' savior is.
(Information on Islamic sects from Global Security.)
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Man Date - A Poem by George W. Bush:
(All taken from Bush's own words at his press conference yesterday.)
1. Dear Vladimir
I'm optimistic about achieving results, Vladimir.
I will submit and maintain strict discipline, Vladimir.
I intend to keep it that way.
We will provide every tool
We have tools at our disposal, a variety of tools.
We have joint efforts.
Let us keep our commitment a sustained effort.
Because we acted, I will give you a decisive blow in Slovenia.
If we disagree with decisions, we can do so
In a friendly and positive way, Vladimir.
Vladimir, we have got a good personal relationship.
We are two people who've grown to appreciate
Each other and respect each other.
It's a lot less painful to act now
Than if we wait. Otherwise, it will
Make everybody else jealous,
And I don't want that to happen.
2. Negotiating With Myself
Polls go up. Polls go down.
You want to get me to negotiate with myself in public
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I will negotiate at the appropriate time.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
They will want me to start playing my hand.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I'm not going to negotiate with myself.
I'm not going to negotiate with myself.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I will try to explain how without negotiating with myself.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I issued.
3. Regarding Rumsfeld
I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart.
I've seen his eyes when we talk about the dangers, the youngsters.
He's a caring fellow.
Beneath that rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is
A good human being who cares deeply.
When I asked the Secretary,
I was very pleased when he said, "Yes."
He understands the nature of the forces
And where forces are when the heat gets on.
I said to him, "I will continue to push,
You're painfully aware. You had to suffer.
I'm passionate on it. But we have sent messages.
We've sanctioned ourselves.
People are coming. Yet we will continue to
Work the issue hard." His is a vital issue.
He took that on and absorbed it in the spirit
In which it was offered,
The spirit of two people who've grown to
Appreciate each other and respect each other.
But we have to make it easier to enforce our borders.
4. Postscript
I was trying to be really brilliant.
But I'm under no illusions.
I'm not doing a very good job.
(All taken from Bush's own words at his press conference yesterday.)
1. Dear Vladimir
I'm optimistic about achieving results, Vladimir.
I will submit and maintain strict discipline, Vladimir.
I intend to keep it that way.
We will provide every tool
We have tools at our disposal, a variety of tools.
We have joint efforts.
Let us keep our commitment a sustained effort.
Because we acted, I will give you a decisive blow in Slovenia.
If we disagree with decisions, we can do so
In a friendly and positive way, Vladimir.
Vladimir, we have got a good personal relationship.
We are two people who've grown to appreciate
Each other and respect each other.
It's a lot less painful to act now
Than if we wait. Otherwise, it will
Make everybody else jealous,
And I don't want that to happen.
2. Negotiating With Myself
Polls go up. Polls go down.
You want to get me to negotiate with myself in public
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I will negotiate at the appropriate time.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
They will want me to start playing my hand.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I'm not going to negotiate with myself.
I'm not going to negotiate with myself.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I will try to explain how without negotiating with myself.
Polls go up. Polls go down.
I issued.
3. Regarding Rumsfeld
I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart.
I've seen his eyes when we talk about the dangers, the youngsters.
He's a caring fellow.
Beneath that rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is
A good human being who cares deeply.
When I asked the Secretary,
I was very pleased when he said, "Yes."
He understands the nature of the forces
And where forces are when the heat gets on.
I said to him, "I will continue to push,
You're painfully aware. You had to suffer.
I'm passionate on it. But we have sent messages.
We've sanctioned ourselves.
People are coming. Yet we will continue to
Work the issue hard." His is a vital issue.
He took that on and absorbed it in the spirit
In which it was offered,
The spirit of two people who've grown to
Appreciate each other and respect each other.
But we have to make it easier to enforce our borders.
4. Postscript
I was trying to be really brilliant.
But I'm under no illusions.
I'm not doing a very good job.
Monday, December 20, 2004
A Very Nixon Christmas:
(William Safire and Maureen Dowd indulged fantasy scenarios in their most recent columns. Why not join them?)
Safire is in the kitchen, late, late at night, having put to bed his latest editorial, one of his last for the Times. In this one, Safire, using Philip Roth's latest novel as a jumping off point, envisioned the scenario of a fantasy George W. Bush having opinions of his own, able to stand up to the neocons, and refusing to go to war in Iraq. This single act, of course, leads to Saddam Hussein's ascent to unparalleled power in the Middle East, with a complicit UN behind him. Oh, ho, ho, we dodged that bullet, Safire thinks, searching for the last of the Hannukah brisket in the back of the fridge. When he closes the fridge door, he notices that the room is still cold. He turns to the counter and jumps, for a moment, as he sees the ghost of his old boss, Richard Nixon. "How ya doin', ya short-cocked kike?" Nixon asks.
"Hi, Dick," Safire says. He's old. He's seen many, many ghosts in his time. And Nixon's been a regular visitor of late.
"Goddamn, that was a fine, fine fucking editorial you wrote today," Nixon says, proud that his former speechwriter has succeeded where so many from his administration failed.
Safire says, "Actually, it's technically a column. An editorial is generally done by an editor. I'm a columnist."
Nixon rolls his eyes, "Look, Bill, if you correct my fuckin' language one more cocksuckin' time, I'll feed your balls to Satan's bichon frise."
"Satan has a bichon frise? I'd've thought pit bulls or something."
"Everyone in Hell has a bichon frise. Little fuckers shit and shed, it's all they goddamn do."
"Brisket?" Safire offers.
"Got any bacon?" Nixon cracks himself up. Safire shakes his head. He's used to the charm of Nixon's Jew-hating humor. He knows that Nixon's heart is good, despite the judgment of eternity. Nixon continues, "Holy fuckin' crap, what an amazing column today. That kind of disinformation I couldn't buy in my time. Least I couldn't get away with it. Fuckin' Cronkite, fuckin' Murrow, fuckin' Huntley, fuckin' Brinkley, fuckin' Woodward--"
"What are you talking about?" Safire interrupts, slicing the brisket and eating it with his fingers. "I don't contaminate the columns with disinformation."
"Ah, you Hebe bastard, you were always thinkin' you were pure. It's why we tapped your phone. C'mon, the lines about Iraq 'harboring' terrorists? Sure, the fuckin' Kurds were always linked up with al-Qaeda, but, remember, America loved 'em because Saddam gave 'em the gas. So, sure, sure, terrorists were within the borders of Iraq, but nowhere near Saddam. They were cavortin' under our protection. And ending with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as heroes? Fuckin' genius. Oh, and that line about Condoleeza Rice, that sweet brown pussy, nice and thin, like Pat after the cancer operations, sayin' that 'Saddam seeks awful weapons'? Holy shit, that's some fine revisionism. You know Rice said that there were real and actual weapons, not a desire to seek or some such bullshit. It'd be like sayin' that Joe McCarthy was worried about Communism as an ideology, not actual Communists."
Safire winces. "Really, 'Communism' in the form you're referring to is not an 'ideology,' but, rather, an economic and political system that--"
"Oh, that's it, Bill," Nixon growls. "Every goddamn time I visit you, you Jew bastard, you gotta trot out the Strunk and White. That's it. I'm gonna fuck you now." And the ghost of Richard Nixon slams William Safire down on Safire's kitchen counter, Safire wide-eyed, brisket slice dangling out of his mouth, as Nixon goes to town, his cold cock thrusting away as Safire, at first shocked, eases into it, remembering the good old days back in the Oval Office, with an uncomfortable Kissinger looking on whenever Nixon went into one of his sodomizing rages, telling Henry that this is how he wanted to enter Cambodia before tearing down Pat Buchanan's pants. Or Safire's (Safire was usually Laos).
His stomach bouncing on the counter as Nixon grunts behind him, Safire thinks about his recent work in the Times, and this current administration, filled with men who rose to prominence on the coattails of the Nixonian will to power that he, Safire, helped usher in. And as Nixon grabs his ghost balls and screams in orgasm, Safire thinks, The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Gettin' a Lugaring:
Contemplate the statement by Richard Lugar (remember - some consider him one of the rational, "moderate" Republicans) on yesterday's Meet the Press regarding whether or not Donald Rumsfeld should be fired: "He should be held accountable, and he should stay in office." By that fucked-up logic, no one should ever be fired for anything as long as they're "held accountable." Molesting priests should lead the flock. A postal worker who shoots his fellow employees should still deliver the mail. A goddamn Wendy's employee who burns down the restaurant by accident because she thought she knew how to work the fuckin' fryer should be simply reassigned to the drink machine at the next Wendy's. See? As long as there's some bandage of "accountability," there's nothin' to worry about. Didn't we used to call losing one's job "accountability"?
Ahh, but that's just the corporate culture taking over fully in DC. See, as long as no one's caught doing anything illegal (and the key word there is "caught") then you just keep promoting the incompetent. To fire makes the CEO or area supervisor or whoever seem weak. Like, if Dan in accounting fucked up the projected sales figures but you, as VP of sales, signed off on Dan's fuck-up, you can't reveal Dan's error because it implicates you. But to promote? Why, then you're rewarding the incompetent for something good, right? 'Cause, like, why would you promote someone who is an utter boob? And thus Dan gets the corner office and a fun new title. So, really, and, c'mon, unless Rumsfeld is caught balls deep in the face of a limbless Iraqi child in a Baghdad hospital while Marines block the doctors and nurses from pulling Rumsfeld away before he chokes the child to death, we're going to hear over and over from the White House about how "spectacular" a job Rumsfeld is doing.
Of course, the White House rewarding of incompetence that comes to mind most readily is the whole Soviet-style awarding of the Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, Paul Bremer, and Tommy Franks, the See No, Hear No, and Speak No Evil of the Iraq War. Oh, sure, lots of Left Blogsylvania and even some "mainstream" media members were pissed about the obvious bullshit nature of the use of "the nation's highest civilian award" in such a blatant assertion of the goodness and rightness of the Bush policies in Iraq. But, c'mon, Bush has previously "honored" Irving Kristol the same year as Nelson fuckin' Mandela. He's given it to Charlton Heston, Arnold Palmer, and neocon Norman Podhoretz. Sure, sure, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is given to popes and peacemakers and great doctors and artists, but Bush has made sure it's just another circle jerk in the name of shoring up the base.
(William Safire and Maureen Dowd indulged fantasy scenarios in their most recent columns. Why not join them?)
Safire is in the kitchen, late, late at night, having put to bed his latest editorial, one of his last for the Times. In this one, Safire, using Philip Roth's latest novel as a jumping off point, envisioned the scenario of a fantasy George W. Bush having opinions of his own, able to stand up to the neocons, and refusing to go to war in Iraq. This single act, of course, leads to Saddam Hussein's ascent to unparalleled power in the Middle East, with a complicit UN behind him. Oh, ho, ho, we dodged that bullet, Safire thinks, searching for the last of the Hannukah brisket in the back of the fridge. When he closes the fridge door, he notices that the room is still cold. He turns to the counter and jumps, for a moment, as he sees the ghost of his old boss, Richard Nixon. "How ya doin', ya short-cocked kike?" Nixon asks.
"Hi, Dick," Safire says. He's old. He's seen many, many ghosts in his time. And Nixon's been a regular visitor of late.
"Goddamn, that was a fine, fine fucking editorial you wrote today," Nixon says, proud that his former speechwriter has succeeded where so many from his administration failed.
Safire says, "Actually, it's technically a column. An editorial is generally done by an editor. I'm a columnist."
Nixon rolls his eyes, "Look, Bill, if you correct my fuckin' language one more cocksuckin' time, I'll feed your balls to Satan's bichon frise."
"Satan has a bichon frise? I'd've thought pit bulls or something."
"Everyone in Hell has a bichon frise. Little fuckers shit and shed, it's all they goddamn do."
"Brisket?" Safire offers.
"Got any bacon?" Nixon cracks himself up. Safire shakes his head. He's used to the charm of Nixon's Jew-hating humor. He knows that Nixon's heart is good, despite the judgment of eternity. Nixon continues, "Holy fuckin' crap, what an amazing column today. That kind of disinformation I couldn't buy in my time. Least I couldn't get away with it. Fuckin' Cronkite, fuckin' Murrow, fuckin' Huntley, fuckin' Brinkley, fuckin' Woodward--"
"What are you talking about?" Safire interrupts, slicing the brisket and eating it with his fingers. "I don't contaminate the columns with disinformation."
"Ah, you Hebe bastard, you were always thinkin' you were pure. It's why we tapped your phone. C'mon, the lines about Iraq 'harboring' terrorists? Sure, the fuckin' Kurds were always linked up with al-Qaeda, but, remember, America loved 'em because Saddam gave 'em the gas. So, sure, sure, terrorists were within the borders of Iraq, but nowhere near Saddam. They were cavortin' under our protection. And ending with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as heroes? Fuckin' genius. Oh, and that line about Condoleeza Rice, that sweet brown pussy, nice and thin, like Pat after the cancer operations, sayin' that 'Saddam seeks awful weapons'? Holy shit, that's some fine revisionism. You know Rice said that there were real and actual weapons, not a desire to seek or some such bullshit. It'd be like sayin' that Joe McCarthy was worried about Communism as an ideology, not actual Communists."
Safire winces. "Really, 'Communism' in the form you're referring to is not an 'ideology,' but, rather, an economic and political system that--"
"Oh, that's it, Bill," Nixon growls. "Every goddamn time I visit you, you Jew bastard, you gotta trot out the Strunk and White. That's it. I'm gonna fuck you now." And the ghost of Richard Nixon slams William Safire down on Safire's kitchen counter, Safire wide-eyed, brisket slice dangling out of his mouth, as Nixon goes to town, his cold cock thrusting away as Safire, at first shocked, eases into it, remembering the good old days back in the Oval Office, with an uncomfortable Kissinger looking on whenever Nixon went into one of his sodomizing rages, telling Henry that this is how he wanted to enter Cambodia before tearing down Pat Buchanan's pants. Or Safire's (Safire was usually Laos).
His stomach bouncing on the counter as Nixon grunts behind him, Safire thinks about his recent work in the Times, and this current administration, filled with men who rose to prominence on the coattails of the Nixonian will to power that he, Safire, helped usher in. And as Nixon grabs his ghost balls and screams in orgasm, Safire thinks, The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Gettin' a Lugaring:
Contemplate the statement by Richard Lugar (remember - some consider him one of the rational, "moderate" Republicans) on yesterday's Meet the Press regarding whether or not Donald Rumsfeld should be fired: "He should be held accountable, and he should stay in office." By that fucked-up logic, no one should ever be fired for anything as long as they're "held accountable." Molesting priests should lead the flock. A postal worker who shoots his fellow employees should still deliver the mail. A goddamn Wendy's employee who burns down the restaurant by accident because she thought she knew how to work the fuckin' fryer should be simply reassigned to the drink machine at the next Wendy's. See? As long as there's some bandage of "accountability," there's nothin' to worry about. Didn't we used to call losing one's job "accountability"?
Ahh, but that's just the corporate culture taking over fully in DC. See, as long as no one's caught doing anything illegal (and the key word there is "caught") then you just keep promoting the incompetent. To fire makes the CEO or area supervisor or whoever seem weak. Like, if Dan in accounting fucked up the projected sales figures but you, as VP of sales, signed off on Dan's fuck-up, you can't reveal Dan's error because it implicates you. But to promote? Why, then you're rewarding the incompetent for something good, right? 'Cause, like, why would you promote someone who is an utter boob? And thus Dan gets the corner office and a fun new title. So, really, and, c'mon, unless Rumsfeld is caught balls deep in the face of a limbless Iraqi child in a Baghdad hospital while Marines block the doctors and nurses from pulling Rumsfeld away before he chokes the child to death, we're going to hear over and over from the White House about how "spectacular" a job Rumsfeld is doing.
Of course, the White House rewarding of incompetence that comes to mind most readily is the whole Soviet-style awarding of the Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, Paul Bremer, and Tommy Franks, the See No, Hear No, and Speak No Evil of the Iraq War. Oh, sure, lots of Left Blogsylvania and even some "mainstream" media members were pissed about the obvious bullshit nature of the use of "the nation's highest civilian award" in such a blatant assertion of the goodness and rightness of the Bush policies in Iraq. But, c'mon, Bush has previously "honored" Irving Kristol the same year as Nelson fuckin' Mandela. He's given it to Charlton Heston, Arnold Palmer, and neocon Norman Podhoretz. Sure, sure, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is given to popes and peacemakers and great doctors and artists, but Bush has made sure it's just another circle jerk in the name of shoring up the base.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Further Tales of the Christ Weary:
It just seems appropriate that as we edge closer and closer to the false date of the birth of Jesus that we spend more time with the weary among us. And, Lord, sweet, sweet Lord, how the people are sick of having whacked-out interpretations of the Christ myth shoved down their throats and up their asses. A few weeks ago the Rude Pundit asked you to send your own tales of the creedal and the damage done, and you have continued to respond, crying out (or sighing out) in agony to evangelicals, "We get it, we get it - you love you some Jesus - now step the fuck back." Of course, they won't. While next week the Rude Pundit will deal with the whole victimization of Christmas nonsense, it's worth mentioning that in Oklahoma, the citizens of one country voted down a bond issue that would have built a new elementary school because the goodly, godly people were pissed that the Superintendent of schools took a nativity scene out of a grade school Christmas pageant. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord at the ballot box, even if it fucketh things up for the children. Here's more of your stories, sea to shining sea (and, as ever, there's some minor editing and no vouching for the truth of the letters):
From Paul in Washington: I grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. At the age of 10, my parents split and my mother had to get a live-in babysitter named Sandy G. to watch us, a rather nasty bitch who claimed to be a born again Christian. One day after Hebrew school, I mentioned to Sandy that we had learned about Hitler, the Holocaust and the Nazis, and she went ape shit. She started screaming at me that the Nazis were not that bad, that she was German and that the Jews killed hundreds of Christians. It was such an incredible statement that it took me a few moments to realize that she was dead serious. Shook the hell out of me, I was only 12 years old and came across my first real case of anti-Semitism from a fanatic who regularly attend church every Sunday and professed to be a born again Christian.
From Sean: I was hitchhiking across the state of Alaska in March a number of years ago trying to get back to Oregon from the Kenai peninsula. It was about 20 below zero and I was on the side of a dirt highway in the absolute middle of nowhere late one night. I had been dropped off there by a guy in a pickup truck who was turning off the highway at some fork or other. I started to get really cold and started to wonder how long it would take me to die out there. There was some light a mile or so off, so I started to walk towards it. Turned out it was a gas station and it was still open. I made it there and the guy said that I could sleep in the garage of the station till the following morning under an oil smeared ruck sack, but only IF I would accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.
From Loretta: Born and raised Southern Baptist. True story. Dad was a lifer in the Navy, so we moved every year or two while I was growing up. Spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At church with my grandmother one Sunday when I was 8 (I was 8, remember? And completely bought this bullshit at the time), the preacher began to speak about the recent "passing" of one congregant's husband. According to the preacher, and everyone in the congregation, "John" was one of the most stand-up guys to ever live. Salt-of-the-earth. The preacher talked for 15 minutes, extolling the virtues of John, give you the shirt off his back, first to help out someone in trouble, etc. The kicker? He was doomed to spend eternity in hell because he wasn't "saved." His wife, HIS WIFE, and the entire congregation just sat there nodding along, like this was obvious. I was only 8 and I knew there was something fucked about this line of belief.
From an anonymous red stater: I grew up in an Italian, Catholic family. My great-grandparents were immigrants from Sicily. My family is pretty much made up of Louisiana,uneducated, white-trash. Because the Southern Baptist religion is so prevalent there, when many of my relatives grew up, they switched to that church. I must admit that they weren't so obnoxious as Catholics. It's the switch to Southern Baptist that has changed them, made them cruel, even. For example, one of my young cousins was raped, and two other relatives said she deserved it because she dressed like a whore, and that's an affront to God. "Nigger" and "Faggot" are common epithets heard at family gatherings. . .
Because we were Catholic, my parents had more children than they could afford, but still sent us to Catholic school, and struggled to pay the outrageous tuition. We went without many essentials, just so they could pay for that damn school. Of course at Catholic school we had the predatory, molesting priest to deal with. He liked boys, so I was "safe," except when it came to the corporal punishment. I swear to god, some of those nuns got off on paddling. And the verbal abuse was as bad as the physical.
The priest who molested young boys was finally sent away when parents began complaining, but the Church allowed him to return to give the baccalaureate address for the graduating seniors. I don't know why. I was mortified to see him, to learn that he was still able to even BE a priest. I thought of the children I'd known that he'd harmed. I wonder how they're doing now . . .
I attended Catholic school until the 10th grade, and finally convinced my parents to let me go to public school. When the principal learned of this, she called me into the office and told me many horror stories about the drugs, violence, and sexual
harrassment that take place in public schools. I thought of unwed mothers forced to leave St. Vincent's. Of the child-molesting Priests. Of the alcohol poisoning of the Priest at Christ the King. Of the bruising of my backside at Sacred Heart. But I couldn't laugh because of the seething hatred.
From Merl: Upon the death of my 10 year old brother, a Baptist preacher told me I needed to get saved right away so I wouldn't join him in hell. He was not born again. Fuck, he was 10 years old. Barely born for the first time.
From Frank: My brother, sister and I were introduced to born-again Christianity in our youth. My brother embraced more than just faith in Christ, however, and structured his entire life (and later, that of his family) to suit the evangelical Christian worldview. From birth his three sons, my nephews, were indocrinated in many of the more absurd (though purportedly harmless) aspects of that worldview: the boys were largely home-schooled, taught that evolution was baloney, prohibited from watching The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia (witchcraft, see?). Tragicomically, while spending time with my sister on vacation, the boys asked her to remove a box of Count Chocula cereal from the home to protect them from demons.
Where did it all lead? This year, thirty-five years down the road from its roots in Bible studies and prayer meetings and seemingly innocuous Young Life sing-a-longs, their twisted, repressed, demented and hypocritical "faith" has left my brother and his family shattered:
The eldest boy is avoiding his family and living "in sin" with his girlfriend. (My sister in-law, still brain-deep in cult denial, refuses to believe he's sexually active.) His story is a relief, because...
His youngest brother is in jail in Virginia, awaiting trial for armed robbery. It turns out he's been dealing drugs from their home since the age of 10. His circumstance would strain most families; but the real tradgedy is the price paid by the middle child, my favorite nephew, one of the kindest, gentlest souls I have known. He's dead.
A brilliant thinker, but depressed and completely socially withdrawn, torn by the failure of his parent's marriage grown bitter, unable to reconcile the parent-sponsored dogma that without God life is meaningless from his growing certainty that he'd been lied to, that there WAS no such god, and unable to live with the contradiction, obliterated himself this earlier this year.
He ran--literally, on foot, ran--headlong into a freight train. He was weary of the life his parents had given him.
I am not weary of Christ. I am weary of so-called Christianity. It is insanity.
Send your stories: rudepundit@yahoo.com.
It just seems appropriate that as we edge closer and closer to the false date of the birth of Jesus that we spend more time with the weary among us. And, Lord, sweet, sweet Lord, how the people are sick of having whacked-out interpretations of the Christ myth shoved down their throats and up their asses. A few weeks ago the Rude Pundit asked you to send your own tales of the creedal and the damage done, and you have continued to respond, crying out (or sighing out) in agony to evangelicals, "We get it, we get it - you love you some Jesus - now step the fuck back." Of course, they won't. While next week the Rude Pundit will deal with the whole victimization of Christmas nonsense, it's worth mentioning that in Oklahoma, the citizens of one country voted down a bond issue that would have built a new elementary school because the goodly, godly people were pissed that the Superintendent of schools took a nativity scene out of a grade school Christmas pageant. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord at the ballot box, even if it fucketh things up for the children. Here's more of your stories, sea to shining sea (and, as ever, there's some minor editing and no vouching for the truth of the letters):
From Paul in Washington: I grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. At the age of 10, my parents split and my mother had to get a live-in babysitter named Sandy G. to watch us, a rather nasty bitch who claimed to be a born again Christian. One day after Hebrew school, I mentioned to Sandy that we had learned about Hitler, the Holocaust and the Nazis, and she went ape shit. She started screaming at me that the Nazis were not that bad, that she was German and that the Jews killed hundreds of Christians. It was such an incredible statement that it took me a few moments to realize that she was dead serious. Shook the hell out of me, I was only 12 years old and came across my first real case of anti-Semitism from a fanatic who regularly attend church every Sunday and professed to be a born again Christian.
From Sean: I was hitchhiking across the state of Alaska in March a number of years ago trying to get back to Oregon from the Kenai peninsula. It was about 20 below zero and I was on the side of a dirt highway in the absolute middle of nowhere late one night. I had been dropped off there by a guy in a pickup truck who was turning off the highway at some fork or other. I started to get really cold and started to wonder how long it would take me to die out there. There was some light a mile or so off, so I started to walk towards it. Turned out it was a gas station and it was still open. I made it there and the guy said that I could sleep in the garage of the station till the following morning under an oil smeared ruck sack, but only IF I would accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.
From Loretta: Born and raised Southern Baptist. True story. Dad was a lifer in the Navy, so we moved every year or two while I was growing up. Spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At church with my grandmother one Sunday when I was 8 (I was 8, remember? And completely bought this bullshit at the time), the preacher began to speak about the recent "passing" of one congregant's husband. According to the preacher, and everyone in the congregation, "John" was one of the most stand-up guys to ever live. Salt-of-the-earth. The preacher talked for 15 minutes, extolling the virtues of John, give you the shirt off his back, first to help out someone in trouble, etc. The kicker? He was doomed to spend eternity in hell because he wasn't "saved." His wife, HIS WIFE, and the entire congregation just sat there nodding along, like this was obvious. I was only 8 and I knew there was something fucked about this line of belief.
From an anonymous red stater: I grew up in an Italian, Catholic family. My great-grandparents were immigrants from Sicily. My family is pretty much made up of Louisiana,uneducated, white-trash. Because the Southern Baptist religion is so prevalent there, when many of my relatives grew up, they switched to that church. I must admit that they weren't so obnoxious as Catholics. It's the switch to Southern Baptist that has changed them, made them cruel, even. For example, one of my young cousins was raped, and two other relatives said she deserved it because she dressed like a whore, and that's an affront to God. "Nigger" and "Faggot" are common epithets heard at family gatherings. . .
Because we were Catholic, my parents had more children than they could afford, but still sent us to Catholic school, and struggled to pay the outrageous tuition. We went without many essentials, just so they could pay for that damn school. Of course at Catholic school we had the predatory, molesting priest to deal with. He liked boys, so I was "safe," except when it came to the corporal punishment. I swear to god, some of those nuns got off on paddling. And the verbal abuse was as bad as the physical.
The priest who molested young boys was finally sent away when parents began complaining, but the Church allowed him to return to give the baccalaureate address for the graduating seniors. I don't know why. I was mortified to see him, to learn that he was still able to even BE a priest. I thought of the children I'd known that he'd harmed. I wonder how they're doing now . . .
I attended Catholic school until the 10th grade, and finally convinced my parents to let me go to public school. When the principal learned of this, she called me into the office and told me many horror stories about the drugs, violence, and sexual
harrassment that take place in public schools. I thought of unwed mothers forced to leave St. Vincent's. Of the child-molesting Priests. Of the alcohol poisoning of the Priest at Christ the King. Of the bruising of my backside at Sacred Heart. But I couldn't laugh because of the seething hatred.
From Merl: Upon the death of my 10 year old brother, a Baptist preacher told me I needed to get saved right away so I wouldn't join him in hell. He was not born again. Fuck, he was 10 years old. Barely born for the first time.
From Frank: My brother, sister and I were introduced to born-again Christianity in our youth. My brother embraced more than just faith in Christ, however, and structured his entire life (and later, that of his family) to suit the evangelical Christian worldview. From birth his three sons, my nephews, were indocrinated in many of the more absurd (though purportedly harmless) aspects of that worldview: the boys were largely home-schooled, taught that evolution was baloney, prohibited from watching The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia (witchcraft, see?). Tragicomically, while spending time with my sister on vacation, the boys asked her to remove a box of Count Chocula cereal from the home to protect them from demons.
Where did it all lead? This year, thirty-five years down the road from its roots in Bible studies and prayer meetings and seemingly innocuous Young Life sing-a-longs, their twisted, repressed, demented and hypocritical "faith" has left my brother and his family shattered:
The eldest boy is avoiding his family and living "in sin" with his girlfriend. (My sister in-law, still brain-deep in cult denial, refuses to believe he's sexually active.) His story is a relief, because...
His youngest brother is in jail in Virginia, awaiting trial for armed robbery. It turns out he's been dealing drugs from their home since the age of 10. His circumstance would strain most families; but the real tradgedy is the price paid by the middle child, my favorite nephew, one of the kindest, gentlest souls I have known. He's dead.
A brilliant thinker, but depressed and completely socially withdrawn, torn by the failure of his parent's marriage grown bitter, unable to reconcile the parent-sponsored dogma that without God life is meaningless from his growing certainty that he'd been lied to, that there WAS no such god, and unable to live with the contradiction, obliterated himself this earlier this year.
He ran--literally, on foot, ran--headlong into a freight train. He was weary of the life his parents had given him.
I am not weary of Christ. I am weary of so-called Christianity. It is insanity.
Send your stories: rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Bernard Kerik Is a Fuckwad:
Goddamn, that must've been some hot fucking: Bernard Kerik, Police Commissioner of New York City, and Judith Regan, whore of bookdom, balling like crazed weasels in that $6000 a month condo in lower Manahttan, the fin-de-siecle glow of the still burning rubble of the twin towers turning one of the bedrooms a tawdry red. Aw, shit, how goddamn sizzling it must've been, with the odor of burnt corpses and free-floating asbestos in the air, nothing compared to the musk of Kerik's balls tea-bagged in Regan's mouth, Kerik's bare ass pressed against the window that faced the Pit where his officers scoured the ruins for body parts they could send off in a baggie so some family could have something to bury. Maybe Kerik came, ejaculating all over Regan's tits, just as some cop or firefighter picked up a tooth. And the best part? That the married Kerik was also cheating on his mistress, a corrections officer. Man, you can't make that shit up.
Bernard Kerik is a motherfucking thug, a lump of steaming shit who got where he is from tough guy looks, a G. Gordon Liddy moustache, and an oath of fealty to that other wad of fuck, Rudy Giuliani (who hopefully has been forever tarnished). And it's all, all falling out now. All the dirty connections, the acceptance of unreported cash "gifts" (didn't we used to call that a "bribe," "extortion," or at least "graft"?), and more, so much more, going back to his time "cleaning up" Riker's Island. Let's not forget about the ties to Taser, so enriched by selling to the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense. And Kerik claimed a "nanny" problem? Man, that's like a syphilitic hooker with crabs and genital warts telling you she can't fuck you because she has a cracked fingernail.
Back in October 2003, when Kerik was just back from his time in Iraq (time which may have just been an excuse to stay away while his house was being renovated - really), Bush couldn't praise Kerik enough: apparently, in just three months, "Because of his leadership, his knowledge and his experience, he was able to stand up a police force in Baghdad in a very quick period of time. I think he told me opened up 37 different precinct stations -- 35 different precinct stations. They activated and trained 35,000 Iraqi police force." And look at the difference it's made in the last year in Iraq. When Kerik spoke, oh, how pissy he was with the media and the sayers of nay: "Well, try to stand up 35 police stations in New York City. It would take you about 11 years, depending on who is in the city council. It takes a while. You only have 24 hours in a day. But they have made tremendous progress." He shook his finger at those who thought David Kay's report on the lack of WMDs was significant: "There was one weapon of mass destruction -- he's no longer in power." And then, the money quote, bringin' it on home to 9/11: "I understand, probably more than anyone, what a threat Iraq was and the people that threatened Iraq was. I was beneath the towers on September 11th when they fell. And I -- again, I just -- I want to thank the President for the honor in allowing me to go there, because I lost 23 people. I wear this -- this memorial band for the 23 I lost."
It must have been so devastating for Kerik to take off that memorial band when he was stripping off his clothes so he could fuck Regan or Jeanette Pinero in that apartment that was originally donated so that rescuers might have a resting place while digging up bodies. How carefully he must have placed that band on the bedside table before he shoved his penis in his book editor's ass. When Kerik said, as he did when he was nominated to head the DHS, "There isn't a day that has passed since the morning of September 11th that I haven't thought of the sacrifices of those heroes and the losses we all suffered," do you think that thinking was done on the way to the apartment to fuck one of his former employees? The rescue effort was a noisy one. One can imagine that the music in the apartment was turned up loud so Kerik and Pinero wouldn't be interrupted by the sounds of the cranes and bulldozers. Maybe they didn't even change the sheets. Maybe it was even more exciting to fuck on the same sheets that stunk of the sweat of those working in the fallen buildings, some of them Kerik's own men, sifting for bits and pieces of their dead comrades for whom Kerik so grimly wore that band.
Somewhere, Andy Sipowicz is sneering in disgust.
And what of our President, mighty leader that he is. How he just wanted some of that tough guy glow, his own fuckin' J. Edgar Hoover, a man unafraid of using homicide detectives to search for his mistress's missing cell phone. How the White House just wanted to continue to bask in that 9/11 glow, like the pumping asses of Kerik and Regan in that apartment. Oh, my, some pundits say, how could the White House vetting process have missed anything that a solid Lexis-Nexis search would have picked up. But that misses the point.
It's not that Bush's vetting failed or that Alberto Gonzales is an incompetent piece of shit. The point here is that they just didn't care. The Bush administration thought it could do whatever it wanted in the wake of the election and that nobody would fucking care. And the other point is that it doesn't matter. Bush could have a cabinet made up of deaf-mute quadriplegics who shit themselves on a regular basis, and they'd be as effective as whoever Bush appoints. But the Kerik nomination, among so many other things, lays bare the arrogance and contempt the Bush administration feels for the American public. We just happened to catch this one. How many others get by us?
Goddamn, that must've been some hot fucking: Bernard Kerik, Police Commissioner of New York City, and Judith Regan, whore of bookdom, balling like crazed weasels in that $6000 a month condo in lower Manahttan, the fin-de-siecle glow of the still burning rubble of the twin towers turning one of the bedrooms a tawdry red. Aw, shit, how goddamn sizzling it must've been, with the odor of burnt corpses and free-floating asbestos in the air, nothing compared to the musk of Kerik's balls tea-bagged in Regan's mouth, Kerik's bare ass pressed against the window that faced the Pit where his officers scoured the ruins for body parts they could send off in a baggie so some family could have something to bury. Maybe Kerik came, ejaculating all over Regan's tits, just as some cop or firefighter picked up a tooth. And the best part? That the married Kerik was also cheating on his mistress, a corrections officer. Man, you can't make that shit up.
Bernard Kerik is a motherfucking thug, a lump of steaming shit who got where he is from tough guy looks, a G. Gordon Liddy moustache, and an oath of fealty to that other wad of fuck, Rudy Giuliani (who hopefully has been forever tarnished). And it's all, all falling out now. All the dirty connections, the acceptance of unreported cash "gifts" (didn't we used to call that a "bribe," "extortion," or at least "graft"?), and more, so much more, going back to his time "cleaning up" Riker's Island. Let's not forget about the ties to Taser, so enriched by selling to the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense. And Kerik claimed a "nanny" problem? Man, that's like a syphilitic hooker with crabs and genital warts telling you she can't fuck you because she has a cracked fingernail.
Back in October 2003, when Kerik was just back from his time in Iraq (time which may have just been an excuse to stay away while his house was being renovated - really), Bush couldn't praise Kerik enough: apparently, in just three months, "Because of his leadership, his knowledge and his experience, he was able to stand up a police force in Baghdad in a very quick period of time. I think he told me opened up 37 different precinct stations -- 35 different precinct stations. They activated and trained 35,000 Iraqi police force." And look at the difference it's made in the last year in Iraq. When Kerik spoke, oh, how pissy he was with the media and the sayers of nay: "Well, try to stand up 35 police stations in New York City. It would take you about 11 years, depending on who is in the city council. It takes a while. You only have 24 hours in a day. But they have made tremendous progress." He shook his finger at those who thought David Kay's report on the lack of WMDs was significant: "There was one weapon of mass destruction -- he's no longer in power." And then, the money quote, bringin' it on home to 9/11: "I understand, probably more than anyone, what a threat Iraq was and the people that threatened Iraq was. I was beneath the towers on September 11th when they fell. And I -- again, I just -- I want to thank the President for the honor in allowing me to go there, because I lost 23 people. I wear this -- this memorial band for the 23 I lost."
It must have been so devastating for Kerik to take off that memorial band when he was stripping off his clothes so he could fuck Regan or Jeanette Pinero in that apartment that was originally donated so that rescuers might have a resting place while digging up bodies. How carefully he must have placed that band on the bedside table before he shoved his penis in his book editor's ass. When Kerik said, as he did when he was nominated to head the DHS, "There isn't a day that has passed since the morning of September 11th that I haven't thought of the sacrifices of those heroes and the losses we all suffered," do you think that thinking was done on the way to the apartment to fuck one of his former employees? The rescue effort was a noisy one. One can imagine that the music in the apartment was turned up loud so Kerik and Pinero wouldn't be interrupted by the sounds of the cranes and bulldozers. Maybe they didn't even change the sheets. Maybe it was even more exciting to fuck on the same sheets that stunk of the sweat of those working in the fallen buildings, some of them Kerik's own men, sifting for bits and pieces of their dead comrades for whom Kerik so grimly wore that band.
Somewhere, Andy Sipowicz is sneering in disgust.
And what of our President, mighty leader that he is. How he just wanted some of that tough guy glow, his own fuckin' J. Edgar Hoover, a man unafraid of using homicide detectives to search for his mistress's missing cell phone. How the White House just wanted to continue to bask in that 9/11 glow, like the pumping asses of Kerik and Regan in that apartment. Oh, my, some pundits say, how could the White House vetting process have missed anything that a solid Lexis-Nexis search would have picked up. But that misses the point.
It's not that Bush's vetting failed or that Alberto Gonzales is an incompetent piece of shit. The point here is that they just didn't care. The Bush administration thought it could do whatever it wanted in the wake of the election and that nobody would fucking care. And the other point is that it doesn't matter. Bush could have a cabinet made up of deaf-mute quadriplegics who shit themselves on a regular basis, and they'd be as effective as whoever Bush appoints. But the Kerik nomination, among so many other things, lays bare the arrogance and contempt the Bush administration feels for the American public. We just happened to catch this one. How many others get by us?
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Dead Zone:
Let's follow the bouncing ball of logic here: George W. Bush was Governor of Texas from 1995-2000. While he was Governor, 152 people were executed in his prisons. This week, the Death Penalty Information Center put out a press release about the continuing decline in the national rate of executions since 2001. In 1999, when he announced he was running for President, Bush had Texas execute 35 prisoners. In 2000, while in full campaign mode, Bush allowed 40 executions. So, with simple math, we can conclude that nearly half of his executions occurred while he was running for President. In 2001, with Bush safely esconced in the White House, Texas only executed 17 prisoners. It bounced back up to 33 in 2002, when Governor Rick Perry was up for re-election, but it has since dropped into the low 20s.
Conclusions? That Texas prisoners are safer because Bush left Texas? That they're fucked in election years? Either way, since Bush is no longer governor, executions have been on a downward slide. Come up with your own conclusion. (Man, it's a good thing Jesus wants so many people lethally injected, because otherwise we might think that clemency is a form of Christian charity.)
Let's follow the bouncing ball of logic here: George W. Bush was Governor of Texas from 1995-2000. While he was Governor, 152 people were executed in his prisons. This week, the Death Penalty Information Center put out a press release about the continuing decline in the national rate of executions since 2001. In 1999, when he announced he was running for President, Bush had Texas execute 35 prisoners. In 2000, while in full campaign mode, Bush allowed 40 executions. So, with simple math, we can conclude that nearly half of his executions occurred while he was running for President. In 2001, with Bush safely esconced in the White House, Texas only executed 17 prisoners. It bounced back up to 33 in 2002, when Governor Rick Perry was up for re-election, but it has since dropped into the low 20s.
Conclusions? That Texas prisoners are safer because Bush left Texas? That they're fucked in election years? Either way, since Bush is no longer governor, executions have been on a downward slide. Come up with your own conclusion. (Man, it's a good thing Jesus wants so many people lethally injected, because otherwise we might think that clemency is a form of Christian charity.)
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Wise Sages, All (With a Side Note On Why Ann Coulter Remains a Cunt):
Of course, after National Guardsman Thomas Wilson (of Knoxville, TN) queried Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the need for the proper armor for vehicles, the right wing media was stumbling all over itself to spin the story in favor of the Bush administration. Even before Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts was revealed to have "worked with" Wilson on the question, the bumblefuck apologists that masquerade as pundits were making excuses and frothing forth spittily on the subject.
Over on Fox "News," the December 9 "All Star Panel" took a break from the massive Fox effort of trying to convince us that the U.N. Oil-For-Food "scandal" is soooo fuckin' important to weigh in on Wilson's Rumsfelding. Fred Barnes, a man who must have stock in Chapstick for all the blow jobs he gives to conservative politicians, opined that the problem isn't as bad as all that - the real problem is that National Guard members and Reservists are whiny pussies: "It was surprising, at least to me, that these guys would have spoken out, as they did so critically at a public event where the secretary of Defense was. But they were National Guardsmen and Reservists. And a lot of them are unhappy with extended duty there . . .When I was in Iraq, the one thing among other things that I did there was talk to a lot of actual regular Army soldiers in the field in Iraq. And I was amazed. They were not the types -- they knew what the mission was, they were there to complete the mission that's why they joined the Army. And they were not the types complaining about armor or anything else." Barnes then scoffed at the notion that Donald Rumsfeld's misconceptions about the military were not at fault: "To blame this problem on the reorganization or the re-invention of the military that Don Rumsfeld wants, I think is not correct." Then Barnes took out a nearly empty tube of Chapstick to get his lips nice and lubricated to head over to the Pentagon. (Meanwhile, the frighteningly over-made-up visage of Charles Krauthammer claimed that Rumsfeld's remark about being blown up in a tank was "sort of a light-hearted answer." Oh, my, how the delighted titters of soldiers must have floated throughout the hall. And Mort Kondracke blamed Bill Clinton for the "production" problems. Really. He blamed Clinton.)
Over on CNN, Bob "The Toady" Novak also chimed in that this was a problem with bitch-ass hick Reserve members: "Reservists are not happy. The Tennessee reservists, they're not happy being there. I don't think you'd get that kind of a reaction from the regulars." This myth, that the bad-ass regular army motherfuckers wouldn't punk out like this, is belied by the fact that, back in September, a Washington army squad was bitching about the hillbilly armor. Novak is a worm of a man, a craven, desperate-to-be-loved, power mad stenographer who uses information like a caveman uses a club.
A couple of days later, when it came out that Pitts had helped Wilson articulate the question, there wasn't enough blame to go around. But, in that cute "gay people are my neighbors" way of conservatives, even while criticizing the asking of the question, they all admitted that the question was legit as a way to cover their asses. While calling the question legit but "creepy," Ann Coulter, a woman for whom the word "creepy" was invented, used the occasion to hand job Sean Hannity while clawing the haunted face of Alan Colmes, saying, "I would say I find it a little silly disputing whether or not the troops have enough armor from the people who were just supporting the guy who didn't was for more military spending." You see where this is going? Now, because on one vote, John Kerry disagreed with the way that the President was recklessly spending America into oblivion and thus voted against the bill the President wanted, if you voted for John Kerry, you have no business being outraged about the lack of protection for the troops. Sean Hannity jumped on this point, eating out Coulter's sphincter (watching to make sure her ass bones don't poke his eyes out) and bitch slapping Fox "Analyst" Kristen Johnson, saying, "You have no moral authority, anybody on your side, at all, to raise this issue about -- more specifically, because you guys just voted for a guy who voted against every major weapons system that now comprises our current military."
Is there any goddamned self-awareness on the right? Let's get this straight: you vote for John Kerry, who, despite Hannity's lies, voted for every major weapons system that now comprises our current military, and you have no "moral authority" to "lecture" about "what we ought to be giving the military." But if you voted for Bush, who lied about and was blatantly wrong about the reasons for the war, the reasons the soldiers have to even worry about their armor and equipment, and you have all the moral authority in the world? Does voting for the guy who opposed the 9/11 commission mean you lack the moral authority to talk about the commission's recommendations? Does voting for the guy who didn't want a Department of Homeland Security mean you have no moral authority to talk about the failed appointment of a petty thug to head that department? Hannity and Coulter, both horrid jizzbags for the Bush administration, are like people we used to lock in rubber rooms, screaming at phantoms, blaming everything they can fantasize for their ills except themselves.
Around and around the story spins, like a carousel where you can ride the tiger or the pony. Coulter and Novak both talked about how soldiers always complain, in all wars (which, in Novak's case, actually contradicts his own statement that this was merely a malcontent Reservist). The "blame the production" spin was blown out of the water pretty quickly when the company that makes the armor said it could easily speed up production, if it had been fucking asked to by the Pentagon. We all, all, all know who is to blame. And it ain't Clinton and it ain't Kerry or his voters. Sure, it's Rumsfeld - his head should have been on a pike outside the White House a couple of years ago. The problem, of course, is that there's no way to hold anyone accountable anymore. And if your "experts," all, all good sage bitches, are merely quiescent vessels and apologists, then we are, as you know, fucked.
But not as fucked as the soldiers. Not as fucked as the Guard and Reserve members.
Of course, after National Guardsman Thomas Wilson (of Knoxville, TN) queried Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the need for the proper armor for vehicles, the right wing media was stumbling all over itself to spin the story in favor of the Bush administration. Even before Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts was revealed to have "worked with" Wilson on the question, the bumblefuck apologists that masquerade as pundits were making excuses and frothing forth spittily on the subject.
Over on Fox "News," the December 9 "All Star Panel" took a break from the massive Fox effort of trying to convince us that the U.N. Oil-For-Food "scandal" is soooo fuckin' important to weigh in on Wilson's Rumsfelding. Fred Barnes, a man who must have stock in Chapstick for all the blow jobs he gives to conservative politicians, opined that the problem isn't as bad as all that - the real problem is that National Guard members and Reservists are whiny pussies: "It was surprising, at least to me, that these guys would have spoken out, as they did so critically at a public event where the secretary of Defense was. But they were National Guardsmen and Reservists. And a lot of them are unhappy with extended duty there . . .When I was in Iraq, the one thing among other things that I did there was talk to a lot of actual regular Army soldiers in the field in Iraq. And I was amazed. They were not the types -- they knew what the mission was, they were there to complete the mission that's why they joined the Army. And they were not the types complaining about armor or anything else." Barnes then scoffed at the notion that Donald Rumsfeld's misconceptions about the military were not at fault: "To blame this problem on the reorganization or the re-invention of the military that Don Rumsfeld wants, I think is not correct." Then Barnes took out a nearly empty tube of Chapstick to get his lips nice and lubricated to head over to the Pentagon. (Meanwhile, the frighteningly over-made-up visage of Charles Krauthammer claimed that Rumsfeld's remark about being blown up in a tank was "sort of a light-hearted answer." Oh, my, how the delighted titters of soldiers must have floated throughout the hall. And Mort Kondracke blamed Bill Clinton for the "production" problems. Really. He blamed Clinton.)
Over on CNN, Bob "The Toady" Novak also chimed in that this was a problem with bitch-ass hick Reserve members: "Reservists are not happy. The Tennessee reservists, they're not happy being there. I don't think you'd get that kind of a reaction from the regulars." This myth, that the bad-ass regular army motherfuckers wouldn't punk out like this, is belied by the fact that, back in September, a Washington army squad was bitching about the hillbilly armor. Novak is a worm of a man, a craven, desperate-to-be-loved, power mad stenographer who uses information like a caveman uses a club.
A couple of days later, when it came out that Pitts had helped Wilson articulate the question, there wasn't enough blame to go around. But, in that cute "gay people are my neighbors" way of conservatives, even while criticizing the asking of the question, they all admitted that the question was legit as a way to cover their asses. While calling the question legit but "creepy," Ann Coulter, a woman for whom the word "creepy" was invented, used the occasion to hand job Sean Hannity while clawing the haunted face of Alan Colmes, saying, "I would say I find it a little silly disputing whether or not the troops have enough armor from the people who were just supporting the guy who didn't was for more military spending." You see where this is going? Now, because on one vote, John Kerry disagreed with the way that the President was recklessly spending America into oblivion and thus voted against the bill the President wanted, if you voted for John Kerry, you have no business being outraged about the lack of protection for the troops. Sean Hannity jumped on this point, eating out Coulter's sphincter (watching to make sure her ass bones don't poke his eyes out) and bitch slapping Fox "Analyst" Kristen Johnson, saying, "You have no moral authority, anybody on your side, at all, to raise this issue about -- more specifically, because you guys just voted for a guy who voted against every major weapons system that now comprises our current military."
Is there any goddamned self-awareness on the right? Let's get this straight: you vote for John Kerry, who, despite Hannity's lies, voted for every major weapons system that now comprises our current military, and you have no "moral authority" to "lecture" about "what we ought to be giving the military." But if you voted for Bush, who lied about and was blatantly wrong about the reasons for the war, the reasons the soldiers have to even worry about their armor and equipment, and you have all the moral authority in the world? Does voting for the guy who opposed the 9/11 commission mean you lack the moral authority to talk about the commission's recommendations? Does voting for the guy who didn't want a Department of Homeland Security mean you have no moral authority to talk about the failed appointment of a petty thug to head that department? Hannity and Coulter, both horrid jizzbags for the Bush administration, are like people we used to lock in rubber rooms, screaming at phantoms, blaming everything they can fantasize for their ills except themselves.
Around and around the story spins, like a carousel where you can ride the tiger or the pony. Coulter and Novak both talked about how soldiers always complain, in all wars (which, in Novak's case, actually contradicts his own statement that this was merely a malcontent Reservist). The "blame the production" spin was blown out of the water pretty quickly when the company that makes the armor said it could easily speed up production, if it had been fucking asked to by the Pentagon. We all, all, all know who is to blame. And it ain't Clinton and it ain't Kerry or his voters. Sure, it's Rumsfeld - his head should have been on a pike outside the White House a couple of years ago. The problem, of course, is that there's no way to hold anyone accountable anymore. And if your "experts," all, all good sage bitches, are merely quiescent vessels and apologists, then we are, as you know, fucked.
But not as fucked as the soldiers. Not as fucked as the Guard and Reserve members.
Monday, December 13, 2004
A Semi Without a Driver:
Does anyone in the fuckin' press corps have access to Google? 'Cause, within, like, two minutes of searching, here's two stories from a couple of months before National Guardsman Thomas Wilson asked Donald Rumsfeld about the need for armor on the vehicles the soldiers were about to drive into Iraq: From Stephanie Heinatz, an embedded reporter at the Hampton Roads, Virginia Daily Press comes this September 26 story about the Army's 7th Transportation Group from Fort Eustis. They're based in Kuwait, but they do the ultra-dangerous equipment transportation runs into Iraq. Heinatz describes various ways in which the troops try to reinforce their "thin-skinned" vehicles, like putting sandbags on the floors to absorb explosions and welding thicker metal onto the doors. "The Army calls it 'locally made, bolt-on armor.' Soldiers call it 'hillbilly' armor," Heinatz writes. "'The Army's not doing their job to protect their kids if they are finding things to armor themselves,' said Col. Donald Olson, site manager for the Humvee armoring shop."
The other story is from October 21, in the Seattle Times. Hal Bernton writes about a Washington National Guard transportation unit and the soldiers' concern about lack of armor and their reliance on hillbilly armor. The article says that fully armoring all the Humvees will take "until at least March," which, if one uses other predictions about Iraq as a measure, means something like April 2010. The rest of the article is the typical pathetic bullshit, with quotes from "angry" but "flustered" politicians, a mother whose son was killed in an unarmored vehicle, and more.
When Rumsfeld responded with his glib remarks about "physics" and how that soldier could die even if he was in an armored vehicle, the Secretary of Defense may as well have said, "You fucking little hick-ass pussy, lemme tell you something: the only reason you have a tooth in your mouth is because of the Guard, you backwards ass bitch. So don't you yokel-slur out some kind of accusatory question at me. And, hey, diggin' through trash heaps, isn't that what you inbred motherfuckers do out in rural Georgia? Shit, you oughta be proud that Uncle goddamn Sam thinks your cracker dick is worthy of gettin' blown off. Otherwise, you'd be squatting in a ditch back home, picking chiggers out of your armpit hair. You question me? You listen, you insignificant zit, you IED fodder, you piece of shit, you'll only get a proper burial if you fuckin' get to die for your great nation - otherwise, it's the creek for you. Now, General, get up here and tell these soldiers that everything is just fuckin' fine while I ream your ass. Drop them pretty khaki drawers and bend over."
And the national press, who we'll deal with tomorrow, originally acted like it had just discovered the lack-of-armor story, when, in reality, it had been a minor detail in many, many stories about the debacle of Iraq, that semi without a driver, careening towards the precipice. And, as the two Googled stories show, the whole hillbilly armor fuck-up was known before the election. But apparently, it wasn't worthy of discussion when Dan Rather was busy believing forged memos.
But, now, oh, sweet mercies, it seems that a reporter fed the armor question to Wilson. And there, tomorrow, we shall pick up our sad tale with how fuckin' giddy Fox News, among others, was.
Update: Readers John and Matt remind us that 60 Minutes did a report on the hillbilly armor problem as part of a larger piece on a lack of material support for troops in the war zone. Of course, this was broadcast on October 31, two days before the election and post-Rather/memo kerfuffle, so, really, no one paid attention. And why bother unless it comes up at a soldiers' Q&A with the Secretary of Defense?
Does anyone in the fuckin' press corps have access to Google? 'Cause, within, like, two minutes of searching, here's two stories from a couple of months before National Guardsman Thomas Wilson asked Donald Rumsfeld about the need for armor on the vehicles the soldiers were about to drive into Iraq: From Stephanie Heinatz, an embedded reporter at the Hampton Roads, Virginia Daily Press comes this September 26 story about the Army's 7th Transportation Group from Fort Eustis. They're based in Kuwait, but they do the ultra-dangerous equipment transportation runs into Iraq. Heinatz describes various ways in which the troops try to reinforce their "thin-skinned" vehicles, like putting sandbags on the floors to absorb explosions and welding thicker metal onto the doors. "The Army calls it 'locally made, bolt-on armor.' Soldiers call it 'hillbilly' armor," Heinatz writes. "'The Army's not doing their job to protect their kids if they are finding things to armor themselves,' said Col. Donald Olson, site manager for the Humvee armoring shop."
The other story is from October 21, in the Seattle Times. Hal Bernton writes about a Washington National Guard transportation unit and the soldiers' concern about lack of armor and their reliance on hillbilly armor. The article says that fully armoring all the Humvees will take "until at least March," which, if one uses other predictions about Iraq as a measure, means something like April 2010. The rest of the article is the typical pathetic bullshit, with quotes from "angry" but "flustered" politicians, a mother whose son was killed in an unarmored vehicle, and more.
When Rumsfeld responded with his glib remarks about "physics" and how that soldier could die even if he was in an armored vehicle, the Secretary of Defense may as well have said, "You fucking little hick-ass pussy, lemme tell you something: the only reason you have a tooth in your mouth is because of the Guard, you backwards ass bitch. So don't you yokel-slur out some kind of accusatory question at me. And, hey, diggin' through trash heaps, isn't that what you inbred motherfuckers do out in rural Georgia? Shit, you oughta be proud that Uncle goddamn Sam thinks your cracker dick is worthy of gettin' blown off. Otherwise, you'd be squatting in a ditch back home, picking chiggers out of your armpit hair. You question me? You listen, you insignificant zit, you IED fodder, you piece of shit, you'll only get a proper burial if you fuckin' get to die for your great nation - otherwise, it's the creek for you. Now, General, get up here and tell these soldiers that everything is just fuckin' fine while I ream your ass. Drop them pretty khaki drawers and bend over."
And the national press, who we'll deal with tomorrow, originally acted like it had just discovered the lack-of-armor story, when, in reality, it had been a minor detail in many, many stories about the debacle of Iraq, that semi without a driver, careening towards the precipice. And, as the two Googled stories show, the whole hillbilly armor fuck-up was known before the election. But apparently, it wasn't worthy of discussion when Dan Rather was busy believing forged memos.
But, now, oh, sweet mercies, it seems that a reporter fed the armor question to Wilson. And there, tomorrow, we shall pick up our sad tale with how fuckin' giddy Fox News, among others, was.
Update: Readers John and Matt remind us that 60 Minutes did a report on the hillbilly armor problem as part of a larger piece on a lack of material support for troops in the war zone. Of course, this was broadcast on October 31, two days before the election and post-Rather/memo kerfuffle, so, really, no one paid attention. And why bother unless it comes up at a soldiers' Q&A with the Secretary of Defense?
Friday, December 10, 2004
More Tales of the Christ Weary:
The Rude Pundit asked for you to send in your stories of harassment, victimization, and general annoyance at the hands of Christian fundamentalists, and, apparently, far, far too many of you have been fucked with by the righteous. From schools to homes to night clubs, from sea to shining sea, the mad rantings of the evangelicals have pushed us to this: we're tired of it, motherfuckers, oh, so weary. Ah, the evangelical will say, though, his/her eyes spinnin' like roulette wheels, when you're weary, that's when you can let Christ in and be born again. Here's just a sampling of tales of those who remain once-born (again, with minor editing and no vouching for the truth of the stories):
From TJ, one of the most stunning stories: My mom was "born-again" when I was about 5 or 6. From then until I managed to escape, my life was a living hell. I've been dragged to every wacko denomination out there in her quest for the meaning of it all. The worst was by far the Southern Baptist phase, which coincidentally hit at puberty for me. I guess the best memory is of her locking me out of the house and screaming "Jezebel!" at me over and over in hysterical fashion until one of the neighbors took pity and brought me over to sleep on their couch. Reason? I was late getting home from work. Of course, it wouldn't surprise you to know that I got pregnant at 18, and had two kids by the time I was 20. Because contraception and abortion are evil, ya know? When I got pregnant the first time, she locked me in the house for days until I agreed not to give up the kid for adoption or have an abortion. She promised that she would take care of my child and I would never have to worry about it. What a dumbass I was--after he was born, she made it clear that this was God's punishment for having sex, and I would have to drop out of school and work. I went into a tailspin after that, and it wasn't easy to pull myself out of it. The damage she did to my life is immeasurable.
From Beth: I was raised Baptist, and there are three moments that stand out in my mind as marking the religion for the psycho bullshit that it is:
1) Our Sunday school teacher held up a china teacup and asked us all to admire its beauty. After we all agreed with her that it was quite lovely, she turned it to show the inside, which had been covered with dirt or something. "This is what your soul looks like if you haven't accepted Jesus," she intoned. "Although you may be lovely on the outside, inside you are filthy and unclean."
2) At Vacation Bible School we were told a missionary story about a young boy who made some error according to his heathen religion, and the heathen priest punished him by hammering nails into the soles of his shoes and making him walk a long ways to the heathen temple. The story went on in exquisite detail about how the nails dug into his flesh, shredding his feet and causing him agonizing pain. As he trailed blood and tears he was taken in by kindly missionaries who bound his feet gently and explained that THEIR God would NEVER be so mean. It was the most graphic and traumatizing story-- just sick. Who thinks that is an okay story to tell young kids?
3) When my teacher explained that only the saved go to heaven, I asked what would happen to people who had never heard of Jesus, like isolated Amazon Indians or Africans or something like that. "EVERYONE has had a chance to hear of Jesus," she said, and even is that is true now, which I doubt, it certainly doesn't seem likely to have been true years and years ago, so were there generations of people all over the globe, billions and billions, going to hell just because they hadn't heard these cheery Baptist stories? Even when I was just out of kindergarten that sounded pretty unreasonable of any sort of decent God.
From Phil in Kentucky: My incipient crisis of faith was initiated at the age of 5 when my playmates and I were caught red-handed staring upward at 6 year-old bad-girl Vernita (she was a cusser), standing on a tree-limb and pissing for our astonishment. One of us, Clarkie, was run over the next day by his father's Dr. Pepper truck. This was interpreted as God's revenge for his transgression. The surviving six 5 year-olds were forced, as punishment, to serve as his pallbearers. Having no feelings at that age, other than what I was told to feel, it took me many years to resolve my guilt and my sincere efforts to find redemption for my evil nature.
From Rafael in Puerto Rico: Someone wrote this message in one of the walls of my Humanities department: "Jesus says: Evangelize!!"
Kids at my college were not short in imagination so somebody wrote this underneath it: "Jesus says: Vandalize??"
From Melissa: I grew up in a rural town in central Georgia and was taken to a Baptist church most likely the first Sunday after I was born. I was in that church for 19 years of my life. During that time, two ministers of music hit on me. Both were married. The first one happened when I was 16. I was very shy and had very low self-esteem, so I was flattered when he began showing me attention and kissing me. Of course, now I realize I was being molested to a degree. The second time, I was 19. This minister of music was also chairman of the deacons. He never touched me, but the things he said to me had extreme sexual undertones. I even went to the pastor about it, not intending for him to tell this man. I just wanted to talk with somebody. Of course, he tells the deacon, and I'm threatened with a slander suit. Sexual scandal isn't just reserved for the Catholic church. It's everywhere.
From Erin: I grew up in southwest Michigan, in a small town of about 3,500 God-fearing white Christians. My parents were leftover hippies who wanted their kids to have some land to run around and play on, and although they did their best to show us that there was a world outside our sick and sordid little town, I still haven't forgiven them for making me spend my childhood there. It was painful and damaging in a way that will stick with me forever.
In my hometown:
-- the school board yanked our comprehensive sex-ed curriculum and replaced it with "values"-based, Jesus-babble, non-information
-- my first classmate to bear a child did so in 8th grade (and was the hit of the cafeteria when she brought the kid into school during lunch hour)
-- by the time I graduated high school, 20% of the girls in my class had at least one child or were pregnant
-- in 10th grade, I politely and repeatedly asked my Econ teacher to please stop a) preaching about God, and b) telling gay jokes in class, as I thought both were inappropriate. (Needless to say, I was labeled a hell-bound dyke for the rest of my high-school career)
-- and this one is recent: my 18-year-old brother, who took a job at a video store to help earn college money, was making banal small-talk with a frequent customer, who happened to be male. Later, the store manager gave him a hellfire-and-brimstone lecture about the sinfulness of homosexuality, and threatened that his "homo-curious" behavior would not be welcome in the store. My brother -- showing remarkable chutzpah for a kid his age, I think -- told this asshole to take his shitty video shack and shove it, and walked out the door. My brother tells me that the store, "Family Video," has just a spectacular selection of porn, and is, in fact, the only video store in town that offers such selections.
I hated growing up with such hypocritical, hateful, stupid, spiritually bankrupt people. My ideas of spirituality involve a thoughtfulness, a degree of introspection, a value on the greater good, a premium on logic and kindness, and a generosity of spirit that was completely absent in that town. I think about all the potentially good kids who fester in environments like these, who lack the resources to develop critical-thinking skills and to ultimately get the hell out, and I am
at once furious and completely bereft. What do we do?
Continue to send your stories to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
The Rude Pundit asked for you to send in your stories of harassment, victimization, and general annoyance at the hands of Christian fundamentalists, and, apparently, far, far too many of you have been fucked with by the righteous. From schools to homes to night clubs, from sea to shining sea, the mad rantings of the evangelicals have pushed us to this: we're tired of it, motherfuckers, oh, so weary. Ah, the evangelical will say, though, his/her eyes spinnin' like roulette wheels, when you're weary, that's when you can let Christ in and be born again. Here's just a sampling of tales of those who remain once-born (again, with minor editing and no vouching for the truth of the stories):
From TJ, one of the most stunning stories: My mom was "born-again" when I was about 5 or 6. From then until I managed to escape, my life was a living hell. I've been dragged to every wacko denomination out there in her quest for the meaning of it all. The worst was by far the Southern Baptist phase, which coincidentally hit at puberty for me. I guess the best memory is of her locking me out of the house and screaming "Jezebel!" at me over and over in hysterical fashion until one of the neighbors took pity and brought me over to sleep on their couch. Reason? I was late getting home from work. Of course, it wouldn't surprise you to know that I got pregnant at 18, and had two kids by the time I was 20. Because contraception and abortion are evil, ya know? When I got pregnant the first time, she locked me in the house for days until I agreed not to give up the kid for adoption or have an abortion. She promised that she would take care of my child and I would never have to worry about it. What a dumbass I was--after he was born, she made it clear that this was God's punishment for having sex, and I would have to drop out of school and work. I went into a tailspin after that, and it wasn't easy to pull myself out of it. The damage she did to my life is immeasurable.
From Beth: I was raised Baptist, and there are three moments that stand out in my mind as marking the religion for the psycho bullshit that it is:
1) Our Sunday school teacher held up a china teacup and asked us all to admire its beauty. After we all agreed with her that it was quite lovely, she turned it to show the inside, which had been covered with dirt or something. "This is what your soul looks like if you haven't accepted Jesus," she intoned. "Although you may be lovely on the outside, inside you are filthy and unclean."
2) At Vacation Bible School we were told a missionary story about a young boy who made some error according to his heathen religion, and the heathen priest punished him by hammering nails into the soles of his shoes and making him walk a long ways to the heathen temple. The story went on in exquisite detail about how the nails dug into his flesh, shredding his feet and causing him agonizing pain. As he trailed blood and tears he was taken in by kindly missionaries who bound his feet gently and explained that THEIR God would NEVER be so mean. It was the most graphic and traumatizing story-- just sick. Who thinks that is an okay story to tell young kids?
3) When my teacher explained that only the saved go to heaven, I asked what would happen to people who had never heard of Jesus, like isolated Amazon Indians or Africans or something like that. "EVERYONE has had a chance to hear of Jesus," she said, and even is that is true now, which I doubt, it certainly doesn't seem likely to have been true years and years ago, so were there generations of people all over the globe, billions and billions, going to hell just because they hadn't heard these cheery Baptist stories? Even when I was just out of kindergarten that sounded pretty unreasonable of any sort of decent God.
From Phil in Kentucky: My incipient crisis of faith was initiated at the age of 5 when my playmates and I were caught red-handed staring upward at 6 year-old bad-girl Vernita (she was a cusser), standing on a tree-limb and pissing for our astonishment. One of us, Clarkie, was run over the next day by his father's Dr. Pepper truck. This was interpreted as God's revenge for his transgression. The surviving six 5 year-olds were forced, as punishment, to serve as his pallbearers. Having no feelings at that age, other than what I was told to feel, it took me many years to resolve my guilt and my sincere efforts to find redemption for my evil nature.
From Rafael in Puerto Rico: Someone wrote this message in one of the walls of my Humanities department: "Jesus says: Evangelize!!"
Kids at my college were not short in imagination so somebody wrote this underneath it: "Jesus says: Vandalize??"
From Melissa: I grew up in a rural town in central Georgia and was taken to a Baptist church most likely the first Sunday after I was born. I was in that church for 19 years of my life. During that time, two ministers of music hit on me. Both were married. The first one happened when I was 16. I was very shy and had very low self-esteem, so I was flattered when he began showing me attention and kissing me. Of course, now I realize I was being molested to a degree. The second time, I was 19. This minister of music was also chairman of the deacons. He never touched me, but the things he said to me had extreme sexual undertones. I even went to the pastor about it, not intending for him to tell this man. I just wanted to talk with somebody. Of course, he tells the deacon, and I'm threatened with a slander suit. Sexual scandal isn't just reserved for the Catholic church. It's everywhere.
From Erin: I grew up in southwest Michigan, in a small town of about 3,500 God-fearing white Christians. My parents were leftover hippies who wanted their kids to have some land to run around and play on, and although they did their best to show us that there was a world outside our sick and sordid little town, I still haven't forgiven them for making me spend my childhood there. It was painful and damaging in a way that will stick with me forever.
In my hometown:
-- the school board yanked our comprehensive sex-ed curriculum and replaced it with "values"-based, Jesus-babble, non-information
-- my first classmate to bear a child did so in 8th grade (and was the hit of the cafeteria when she brought the kid into school during lunch hour)
-- by the time I graduated high school, 20% of the girls in my class had at least one child or were pregnant
-- in 10th grade, I politely and repeatedly asked my Econ teacher to please stop a) preaching about God, and b) telling gay jokes in class, as I thought both were inappropriate. (Needless to say, I was labeled a hell-bound dyke for the rest of my high-school career)
-- and this one is recent: my 18-year-old brother, who took a job at a video store to help earn college money, was making banal small-talk with a frequent customer, who happened to be male. Later, the store manager gave him a hellfire-and-brimstone lecture about the sinfulness of homosexuality, and threatened that his "homo-curious" behavior would not be welcome in the store. My brother -- showing remarkable chutzpah for a kid his age, I think -- told this asshole to take his shitty video shack and shove it, and walked out the door. My brother tells me that the store, "Family Video," has just a spectacular selection of porn, and is, in fact, the only video store in town that offers such selections.
I hated growing up with such hypocritical, hateful, stupid, spiritually bankrupt people. My ideas of spirituality involve a thoughtfulness, a degree of introspection, a value on the greater good, a premium on logic and kindness, and a generosity of spirit that was completely absent in that town. I think about all the potentially good kids who fester in environments like these, who lack the resources to develop critical-thinking skills and to ultimately get the hell out, and I am
at once furious and completely bereft. What do we do?
Continue to send your stories to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
A Circus of Faith (Part of the Christ Weary series):
Here's what the Rude Pundit wants hangin' in every courthouse, in every statehouse, in every outhouse in Uhmerka: a big, bloody, flesh-stripped, weeping Mel Gibson-approved Jesus, nailed to that motherfuckin' cross. He wants it to be there next to the flag in the IRS offices, in the Homeland Security offices, every fuckin' public building, every school, everywhere. It'll be mandated: flag, portrait of Bush, bleedin' Jesus, yowling in pain 'cause those fuckin' nails hurt, motherfucker. That way, every time someone walks into a government building, oh, that person'll know the score: this is a Christian nation, asshole, get used to it. (And the Rude Pundit thinks we should just drop the charade of Judeo-Christian - it's the rhetorical equivalent of "Clarence Thomas is a conservative black man.")
Goddamnit, it feels like the eighties all over. Didn't we go through this before with Ronald Reagan? Didn't we have to listen to the blathering of madmen and their bitches about the need for faith in American life? Didn't we have to see the quivering jowls of Jerry Falwell flappin' at us from our TVs back then? How many fuckin' times are we gonna have this fight? The difference is that the Christian right has gotten better at disguising their intent through secular-sounding language - in a sense, using the tools of legalese to promote a religious agenda.
For instance, the whole battle over the display of the Ten Commandments is such a bullshit bait and switch. In the original case, before the Supreme Court, stupid fuckers in backward ass counties in Kentucky tried to hide the Ten Commandments in a display of real, actual historical documents that mentioned "God" in one way or another, like the Mayflower Compact or the Declaration of Independence. The argument is that the Ten Commandments forms one of the bases for the American legal system, but the display also equates it with an historical document, and unless Indiana Jones has finally come back from Egypt with the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments are part of a book of faith. (And America's strange lack of laws about worshipping other gods or honoring ma and pa would seem to put a lie to the notion of the Moses tabs bein' all that important.) As the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals put it, "When distilled to their essence, the courthouse displays demonstrate that Defendants intend to convey the bald assertion that the Ten Commandments formed the foundation of American legal tradition," an assertion which is, simply, utter, stinky, lying bullshit.
Ah, but now the Bush administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow the display of the Ten Commandments on government property. And on tour, like Destiny's Child and Usher, is the Alabama Supreme Court great, huge rock monument of the Ten Commandments. Private schools are bringing the children to see the giant marble chunk, maybe fondle it like a fetish. And, in case anyone wants to argue that it's not a bunch of deluded idiots involved in this display, check out the homepage of Dixie Rising, one of the sponsoring organizations for the Ten Commandments info for the Southern Party of Georgia. It's lyncherrific. Let's not bet that there's large numbers of Jews linin' up to see the Ten Commandments monument on its flatbed truck of love.
The Ten Commandments debate is such a small, small part of the larger picture here. There's the sad, overcovered public school teacher in California who used his classroom to evangelize to his students, covering it up with "lessons" on the American colonists and Founders. His handout contained quotes from "Great Leaders" on the Bible. Oh, terribly interesting lesson, one might think. Sure, sure, one might be troubled with the inclusion of Rutherford B. Hayes and Herbert Hoover, like maybe teacher Stephen Williams is grasping at straws in the "Great" category. But perhaps more troubling is the last Great Leader after a list of presidents: Jesus Christ. Again, again, again - the conflation of the fundamentalist belief in the historic truth of the Bible with actual history. (This was the story that made the rounds as "The Declaration of Independence Banned From School." Remember a well-told lie . . .)
Let's be clear here, shall we? There are two primary reasons that "God" is mentioned so much in documents by the Founders of this country: one is convention - it's just what you fuckin' did. It's like saying, "Dear Electric Company," when, in reality, the electric company ain't that "dear" to you. The other reason is that the Founders knew they had to use propaganda in order to appeal to the yahoos living in glorified cabins in the woods of New Hampshire: if you invoke "God," then stupid people will think you're legit. The "Creator," whether "God" or "Jesus," is the shiny trinket that distracts the children so the adults can do their work. Whatever Ben Franklin may have believed about deities great and small, he knew that the masses had to be placated so that they could go about the work of building a fuckin' nation. When Thomas Paine, the rudest of the Founders, decided to wreck notions of a public religion in The Age of Reason, he sent the manuscript to Franklin. A bespectacled whoremonger, Franklin understood the average new American, and he warned Paine not to publish the book: "Think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security." Franklin feared the unrestrained public; they needed religion as a distraction in order to avoid savagery. (Oh, how Thomas Paine was abandoned by the Founders after the book was published, who, like good politicians, all scrambled to show how "Christian" they were by condemning Paine.)
Ahhhh, now we get to some truth. You see, the Bush administration can pay all the lip service it wants to "Christian" goals and fundamentalist propaganda. But it's all a circus, man. Sure, sure, it's destructive, as with all the data about the failure and misinformation of abstinence-only programs. But faith is the big top we're all invited in to watch and yell and scream about. It was the great distraction of the election. It's the wink-wink, unspoken justification for the war. Meanwhile, if clowns like Falwell do their funny dance for our amusement, if we get too distracted by the high-wire artists who push for the Ten Commandments displays, we won't notice the world burning outside the tent.
Tomorrow: More of your tales of Christ weariness.
Here's what the Rude Pundit wants hangin' in every courthouse, in every statehouse, in every outhouse in Uhmerka: a big, bloody, flesh-stripped, weeping Mel Gibson-approved Jesus, nailed to that motherfuckin' cross. He wants it to be there next to the flag in the IRS offices, in the Homeland Security offices, every fuckin' public building, every school, everywhere. It'll be mandated: flag, portrait of Bush, bleedin' Jesus, yowling in pain 'cause those fuckin' nails hurt, motherfucker. That way, every time someone walks into a government building, oh, that person'll know the score: this is a Christian nation, asshole, get used to it. (And the Rude Pundit thinks we should just drop the charade of Judeo-Christian - it's the rhetorical equivalent of "Clarence Thomas is a conservative black man.")
Goddamnit, it feels like the eighties all over. Didn't we go through this before with Ronald Reagan? Didn't we have to listen to the blathering of madmen and their bitches about the need for faith in American life? Didn't we have to see the quivering jowls of Jerry Falwell flappin' at us from our TVs back then? How many fuckin' times are we gonna have this fight? The difference is that the Christian right has gotten better at disguising their intent through secular-sounding language - in a sense, using the tools of legalese to promote a religious agenda.
For instance, the whole battle over the display of the Ten Commandments is such a bullshit bait and switch. In the original case, before the Supreme Court, stupid fuckers in backward ass counties in Kentucky tried to hide the Ten Commandments in a display of real, actual historical documents that mentioned "God" in one way or another, like the Mayflower Compact or the Declaration of Independence. The argument is that the Ten Commandments forms one of the bases for the American legal system, but the display also equates it with an historical document, and unless Indiana Jones has finally come back from Egypt with the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments are part of a book of faith. (And America's strange lack of laws about worshipping other gods or honoring ma and pa would seem to put a lie to the notion of the Moses tabs bein' all that important.) As the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals put it, "When distilled to their essence, the courthouse displays demonstrate that Defendants intend to convey the bald assertion that the Ten Commandments formed the foundation of American legal tradition," an assertion which is, simply, utter, stinky, lying bullshit.
Ah, but now the Bush administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow the display of the Ten Commandments on government property. And on tour, like Destiny's Child and Usher, is the Alabama Supreme Court great, huge rock monument of the Ten Commandments. Private schools are bringing the children to see the giant marble chunk, maybe fondle it like a fetish. And, in case anyone wants to argue that it's not a bunch of deluded idiots involved in this display, check out the homepage of Dixie Rising, one of the sponsoring organizations for the Ten Commandments info for the Southern Party of Georgia. It's lyncherrific. Let's not bet that there's large numbers of Jews linin' up to see the Ten Commandments monument on its flatbed truck of love.
The Ten Commandments debate is such a small, small part of the larger picture here. There's the sad, overcovered public school teacher in California who used his classroom to evangelize to his students, covering it up with "lessons" on the American colonists and Founders. His handout contained quotes from "Great Leaders" on the Bible. Oh, terribly interesting lesson, one might think. Sure, sure, one might be troubled with the inclusion of Rutherford B. Hayes and Herbert Hoover, like maybe teacher Stephen Williams is grasping at straws in the "Great" category. But perhaps more troubling is the last Great Leader after a list of presidents: Jesus Christ. Again, again, again - the conflation of the fundamentalist belief in the historic truth of the Bible with actual history. (This was the story that made the rounds as "The Declaration of Independence Banned From School." Remember a well-told lie . . .)
Let's be clear here, shall we? There are two primary reasons that "God" is mentioned so much in documents by the Founders of this country: one is convention - it's just what you fuckin' did. It's like saying, "Dear Electric Company," when, in reality, the electric company ain't that "dear" to you. The other reason is that the Founders knew they had to use propaganda in order to appeal to the yahoos living in glorified cabins in the woods of New Hampshire: if you invoke "God," then stupid people will think you're legit. The "Creator," whether "God" or "Jesus," is the shiny trinket that distracts the children so the adults can do their work. Whatever Ben Franklin may have believed about deities great and small, he knew that the masses had to be placated so that they could go about the work of building a fuckin' nation. When Thomas Paine, the rudest of the Founders, decided to wreck notions of a public religion in The Age of Reason, he sent the manuscript to Franklin. A bespectacled whoremonger, Franklin understood the average new American, and he warned Paine not to publish the book: "Think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security." Franklin feared the unrestrained public; they needed religion as a distraction in order to avoid savagery. (Oh, how Thomas Paine was abandoned by the Founders after the book was published, who, like good politicians, all scrambled to show how "Christian" they were by condemning Paine.)
Ahhhh, now we get to some truth. You see, the Bush administration can pay all the lip service it wants to "Christian" goals and fundamentalist propaganda. But it's all a circus, man. Sure, sure, it's destructive, as with all the data about the failure and misinformation of abstinence-only programs. But faith is the big top we're all invited in to watch and yell and scream about. It was the great distraction of the election. It's the wink-wink, unspoken justification for the war. Meanwhile, if clowns like Falwell do their funny dance for our amusement, if we get too distracted by the high-wire artists who push for the Ten Commandments displays, we won't notice the world burning outside the tent.
Tomorrow: More of your tales of Christ weariness.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Why Bill O'Reilly Ought To Be Sodomized With a Menorah:
You know, when Bill O'Reilly, Fox "News" broadcaster and a man for whom one falafel in the hand is worth two in the bush, told one of his radio callers, in essence, "If you don't like Christmas, Jewey McKikenose, then maybe you oughta head to Israel and spin your dreidel in the sand," the Rude Pundit wondered what O'Reilly would tell, say, an atheist who finds the whole let's-give-Jesus-a-helluva-bris treatment a bit over the top. Would he tell the Hindu guy down the street to head back to India? Would he tell the Buddhist woman at the local Super Shanghai Buffet to get back to Mongolia? Would he tell the atheist to go to the moon? Where would that atheist, that Buddhist, that Hindi be safe from the marauding Christ lovers in the mall with their multi-colored light nativities a-twinklin' on their lawns? All the poor self-proclaimed Jew on the phone with O'Reilly said was that, as a Jew, he felt pressured by the Christapalooza of Christmas, which really only is a guilt trip distraction from the passion of the shopping. And, you know, the whole deal only became a holiday in 1876 because of pressure from businesses benefiting from the growing orgy of tree decorating and goose-killing.
When O'Reilly declared that "overwhelmingly, America is Christian. And the holiday is a federal holiday honoring the philosopher Jesus," all the Rude Pundit could wonder is where the fuck's Plato's holiday? Or Kierkegaard's? Or perhaps John Locke's, considering his influence on, say, the actual creation of the country? And on Christmas, when people are heading to work at Wal-Mart and Denny's and all the other places that stay open so that Bill O'Reilly can have a merry Christmas, we'll all be thankful that even more overwhelmingly, in this America, cash, not Christ, is king. Is that insulting enough to O'Reilly's "majority"?
(And someone please fucking tell O'Reilly that a menorah has eight, not seven, candles - nine, if you count the middle. Oh, and add that gift-giving is a little bonus for Hanukkah, not its raison d'etre.)
Just a brief one today as Clark Kent duties beckon. Back tomorrow with a longer entry on more fun with the Religious Right. On Friday, more tales of the Christ weary.
You know, when Bill O'Reilly, Fox "News" broadcaster and a man for whom one falafel in the hand is worth two in the bush, told one of his radio callers, in essence, "If you don't like Christmas, Jewey McKikenose, then maybe you oughta head to Israel and spin your dreidel in the sand," the Rude Pundit wondered what O'Reilly would tell, say, an atheist who finds the whole let's-give-Jesus-a-helluva-bris treatment a bit over the top. Would he tell the Hindu guy down the street to head back to India? Would he tell the Buddhist woman at the local Super Shanghai Buffet to get back to Mongolia? Would he tell the atheist to go to the moon? Where would that atheist, that Buddhist, that Hindi be safe from the marauding Christ lovers in the mall with their multi-colored light nativities a-twinklin' on their lawns? All the poor self-proclaimed Jew on the phone with O'Reilly said was that, as a Jew, he felt pressured by the Christapalooza of Christmas, which really only is a guilt trip distraction from the passion of the shopping. And, you know, the whole deal only became a holiday in 1876 because of pressure from businesses benefiting from the growing orgy of tree decorating and goose-killing.
When O'Reilly declared that "overwhelmingly, America is Christian. And the holiday is a federal holiday honoring the philosopher Jesus," all the Rude Pundit could wonder is where the fuck's Plato's holiday? Or Kierkegaard's? Or perhaps John Locke's, considering his influence on, say, the actual creation of the country? And on Christmas, when people are heading to work at Wal-Mart and Denny's and all the other places that stay open so that Bill O'Reilly can have a merry Christmas, we'll all be thankful that even more overwhelmingly, in this America, cash, not Christ, is king. Is that insulting enough to O'Reilly's "majority"?
(And someone please fucking tell O'Reilly that a menorah has eight, not seven, candles - nine, if you count the middle. Oh, and add that gift-giving is a little bonus for Hanukkah, not its raison d'etre.)
Just a brief one today as Clark Kent duties beckon. Back tomorrow with a longer entry on more fun with the Religious Right. On Friday, more tales of the Christ weary.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Donald Rumsfeld's Secret Desk Drawer:
Donald Rumsfeld keeps the mummified cocks of dead male American soldiers in a special drawer in his desk, one only he has the key to. He tells himself that it's a tribute, all of these cocks sliced off at the moment of the death rattle erection, hard and firm and well-preserved, just like America, just like him. It's one reason why the bodies of dead soldiers arrive sealed in caskets, never to be opened again. It's because of the secret order from the Defense Secretary: when a male soldier dies, take the hard cock and send it to the Special Officer of Cock Mummification so that Rumsfeld may be presented, every week, with a bag full of dead soldier's dicks. The word has been spread among the troops, the wounded and dying men who make a bed of the streets of Baghdad, of Mosul, of a thousand cities whose names we shouldn't need to know, but must, unceasingly, be able to recite: it is an honor to have your cock laying in Rumsfeld's drawer. Rumsfeld is proud of his drawer: it's a vision of a perfect world, all races, all creeds, all sizes, all together in a pile, 1100 or so of them.
Dear, dear Donald - he is as multifaceted as his cock collection. Sometimes he speaks obvious truths that sound like nuggets of wisdom. As he told reporters on his plane to Kuwait yesterday, on his way to attend the inauguration of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, "You put up a poorly equipped police force against a well-equipped Iraqi insurgent force and you’ve got a mismatch, as you would with any military." So true, so true, and that poorly equipped police force must be backed up by American soldiers, don't you know. When he was asked what mistakes he might have made in the past as he was about to embark on his second term as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld said he had two (the same ones he's admitted in interview after interview as the newly reannointed cabinet member): the size of the insurgency, about which he said, "But I don’t think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you’d be in the degree of insurgency you’re in today and resistance on the part of a mixture of Baathists and pro-dictatorship, pro-Saddam people, mixed in with some foreign terrorists and extremists." Of course, the State Department had warned of this, but maybe they're not "intelligence" in Rumsfeld's world.
The other was, of course, the WMDs, but not in the way you might imagine: "One [mistake] is the fact that one of the basis for going into Iraq that the administration articulated was the conviction that they had weapons of mass destruction which would be findable and that is, of course, why our forces put on chemical suits all the way up from Kuwait into Baghdad everyday because everybody believed that to be the case. And at the moment, that has not turned out to be the case. It may later, but at least at the moment it hasn’t." Again, something he's repeated: the belief that weapons haven't been found only "at the moment," with the underlying conviction that they will be found.
Rumsfeld is a fount of philosophy, a veritable encyclopedia of rationale. On deaths in Iraq of Americans and Iraqis, he said, "People are killed by the hundreds every year in every major city in the world, but they’re not on television for some reason," which means he hasn't been paying attention to the local news in every major city (if it bleeds, it leads, motherfucker, if it bleeds, it leads). On those, like, say, John McCain and just about every retired general, who would say that more troops are needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rumsfeld opined, "A fixation with sheer numbers, it strikes me as a 20th century phenomenon more than it is the 21st century phenomenon." And Rumsfeld flew on, meeting troops in Afghanistan, shaking their hands, sizing up their cocks for his collection.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile, the 1000th soldier was killed in action; meanwhile, in the last gasps of dissent in the CIA, the agency issued two reports about how desperately awful the situation is in Iraq; meanwhile, a pathetic attempt at truth-seeking is going on in a lawsuit filed in Germany against Rumsfeld and others for the horrors of Abu Ghraib; meanwhile, if you go to the press release section of the DOD website, all you see is a list of doom, release after release after release officially reporting another dead soldier, another cock to line the drawer.
But here's the real secret of Donald Rumsfeld's drawer of dead dicks and the reason why he declined when he was offered the first vagina of a dead female soldier. At night, when everyone but the guards and the late shift analysts have gone home, Rumsfeld goes into his office and locks the door. He tells his Secret Service agent not to let anyone knock. Then he lowers the lights and drops his pants. He opens the drawer and drags his hand through, fingering them to tell which one feels right for the evening. Sometimes he digs down deep, to cocks that have been there for over a year, and he pulls one out, feels its heft and shape, and then sits on the floor, pulling his achy legs back, and starts to fuck himself with that dead soldier's cock. Getting it in good and deep, watching his own dick get semi-hard as he shoves that dead American dildo in and out, telling himself, "Oh, yeah, oh, shit, these are the spoils of war" before dribbling a weak release of semen onto the carpet emblazoned with the insignia of whatever branch of the military he happens to be sitting on, naked below the waist, spent from fucking himself to deep pleasure.
Donald Rumsfeld keeps the mummified cocks of dead male American soldiers in a special drawer in his desk, one only he has the key to. He tells himself that it's a tribute, all of these cocks sliced off at the moment of the death rattle erection, hard and firm and well-preserved, just like America, just like him. It's one reason why the bodies of dead soldiers arrive sealed in caskets, never to be opened again. It's because of the secret order from the Defense Secretary: when a male soldier dies, take the hard cock and send it to the Special Officer of Cock Mummification so that Rumsfeld may be presented, every week, with a bag full of dead soldier's dicks. The word has been spread among the troops, the wounded and dying men who make a bed of the streets of Baghdad, of Mosul, of a thousand cities whose names we shouldn't need to know, but must, unceasingly, be able to recite: it is an honor to have your cock laying in Rumsfeld's drawer. Rumsfeld is proud of his drawer: it's a vision of a perfect world, all races, all creeds, all sizes, all together in a pile, 1100 or so of them.
Dear, dear Donald - he is as multifaceted as his cock collection. Sometimes he speaks obvious truths that sound like nuggets of wisdom. As he told reporters on his plane to Kuwait yesterday, on his way to attend the inauguration of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, "You put up a poorly equipped police force against a well-equipped Iraqi insurgent force and you’ve got a mismatch, as you would with any military." So true, so true, and that poorly equipped police force must be backed up by American soldiers, don't you know. When he was asked what mistakes he might have made in the past as he was about to embark on his second term as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld said he had two (the same ones he's admitted in interview after interview as the newly reannointed cabinet member): the size of the insurgency, about which he said, "But I don’t think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you’d be in the degree of insurgency you’re in today and resistance on the part of a mixture of Baathists and pro-dictatorship, pro-Saddam people, mixed in with some foreign terrorists and extremists." Of course, the State Department had warned of this, but maybe they're not "intelligence" in Rumsfeld's world.
The other was, of course, the WMDs, but not in the way you might imagine: "One [mistake] is the fact that one of the basis for going into Iraq that the administration articulated was the conviction that they had weapons of mass destruction which would be findable and that is, of course, why our forces put on chemical suits all the way up from Kuwait into Baghdad everyday because everybody believed that to be the case. And at the moment, that has not turned out to be the case. It may later, but at least at the moment it hasn’t." Again, something he's repeated: the belief that weapons haven't been found only "at the moment," with the underlying conviction that they will be found.
Rumsfeld is a fount of philosophy, a veritable encyclopedia of rationale. On deaths in Iraq of Americans and Iraqis, he said, "People are killed by the hundreds every year in every major city in the world, but they’re not on television for some reason," which means he hasn't been paying attention to the local news in every major city (if it bleeds, it leads, motherfucker, if it bleeds, it leads). On those, like, say, John McCain and just about every retired general, who would say that more troops are needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rumsfeld opined, "A fixation with sheer numbers, it strikes me as a 20th century phenomenon more than it is the 21st century phenomenon." And Rumsfeld flew on, meeting troops in Afghanistan, shaking their hands, sizing up their cocks for his collection.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile, the 1000th soldier was killed in action; meanwhile, in the last gasps of dissent in the CIA, the agency issued two reports about how desperately awful the situation is in Iraq; meanwhile, a pathetic attempt at truth-seeking is going on in a lawsuit filed in Germany against Rumsfeld and others for the horrors of Abu Ghraib; meanwhile, if you go to the press release section of the DOD website, all you see is a list of doom, release after release after release officially reporting another dead soldier, another cock to line the drawer.
But here's the real secret of Donald Rumsfeld's drawer of dead dicks and the reason why he declined when he was offered the first vagina of a dead female soldier. At night, when everyone but the guards and the late shift analysts have gone home, Rumsfeld goes into his office and locks the door. He tells his Secret Service agent not to let anyone knock. Then he lowers the lights and drops his pants. He opens the drawer and drags his hand through, fingering them to tell which one feels right for the evening. Sometimes he digs down deep, to cocks that have been there for over a year, and he pulls one out, feels its heft and shape, and then sits on the floor, pulling his achy legs back, and starts to fuck himself with that dead soldier's cock. Getting it in good and deep, watching his own dick get semi-hard as he shoves that dead American dildo in and out, telling himself, "Oh, yeah, oh, shit, these are the spoils of war" before dribbling a weak release of semen onto the carpet emblazoned with the insignia of whatever branch of the military he happens to be sitting on, naked below the waist, spent from fucking himself to deep pleasure.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Torturing White People:
Let us say, and why not, that in 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, the United States government decided to use any means necessary to break up and destroy any radical terrorist cells in the nation. Maybe we could even pretend that Timothy McVeigh wasn't captured. (The Murrah Federal Building attack was so stunning, so horrific that when 9/11 happened, several people who had no access to PDBs about Bin Laden asked the Rude Pundit if he thought it was the work of the same type of white supremacist terrorism. "No," the Rude Pundit answered, having seen the planes driven into the Towers on CNN. "White Americans don't plan suicide attacks. Too much ego.")
Let's say that the government declared "war on domestic terror" and the military, working with local law enforcement, went into compounds and farms in the Upper Midwest and Northwest, to South Dakota, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, and mass arrested anyone who was linked to Aryan Nations or White Aryan Resistance or name your favorite "stupid fucking backward ass losers who blame everyone but the white people who actually have power" organization. And in this sweep of short-haired white males and the white women who enable them, the local cops decided to pick up everyone who's ever looked at them crossways. Farmers, janitors, motorcycle gangs, all swept up and sent to the newly established prison at Guantanamo Bay. And maybe some of 'em were just thrown into prisons in South Dakota, Idaho, etc., etc., Packed 'em in there. Shaving the heads would be a quick task for most of 'em.
You get where this is going, this "fun with analogies" tale. We get pictures of all these suspected terrorists, white people one and all, with electrodes on their nuts. We get Red Cross reports about the way in which these evil white motherfuckers are subjected to routine humiliation, psychological torture, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, the usual shit. The government would justify it by saying they have to do everything they can to prevent another Oklahoma City. They're our own citizens and aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions, the administration would say. They come up with legal justifications in the form of memos. When they're ordered to give the terror suspects hearings on their charges, the government sets up kangaroo military tribunals. As the Rude Pundit said, by this point, you get the fucking analogy, right? (And he's strived to divorce this from any politics - this ain't about "What Clinton couldn't do that Bush is allowed to do" or any such bullshit.)
Do you think, for a second, that if reports were that large groups of non-French white people were being routinely subjected to torture at the hands of our government (and, let's be perfectly clear, anything the government does is in our name; therefore, this is you doing it, too), that if photos of bloodied, battered, leashed, sodomized, dog-bitten, nude white people had "surfaced" that we would ignore it? That we'd just sit back and relax at the notion that the good and godly government knows what it's doing when it comes to torturing the white terrorists who, after all, blew up the Murrah Federal Building? That the media would give scant attention to the white people who are being deprived sleep in order to force them to give information about shit they know nothing about? That we'd look at those pictures of pyramids of naked white asses, shinin' in the flash of the camera lens, and think, "Fuck them, they killed children"? (The sad, sad, stomach-churning truth is that so many of us wouldn't care, we'd think they must deserve it, we'd "trust" the government.)
Here's what's going on: you know all those movies, like Lethal Weapon, Rambo, etc., etc., where the American hero is chained like a dog while men in uniforms, usually either with Russian accents or Middle Eastern or Asian skin, approach said American hero and tell him, "Tell us what you know," and when the American hero says he doesn't know anything, they beat him, or threaten to rape his wife, or turn on the electricity, or thrown water on him to wake him up, or whatever. You know the films. They're calculated to make you wanna see that torturing motherfucker get the worst possible death. Yeah - drop kick 'em on the spiked fence. That'll teach 'em to torture Bruce Willis. Well, reverse it, motherfuckers. Change the context.
'Cause what's going on right now is the opposite. The people chained up are Middle Eastern. The uniformed young men walking into the room are American. Now, do you think maybe the Middle Easterners who learn of this shit don't want the worst possible death for those who perpetrate the torture? And if you can abide this torture, if you don't give a shit about what's being done in your name, then you deserve whatever America you are allowed to have, not whatever America you can make.
Christ Weary Update:
So far, over 100 tales of abuse at the hands and words of the faithful have arrived. Keep the stories coming of your confrontations with the religious right. Send 'em to: rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Let us say, and why not, that in 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, the United States government decided to use any means necessary to break up and destroy any radical terrorist cells in the nation. Maybe we could even pretend that Timothy McVeigh wasn't captured. (The Murrah Federal Building attack was so stunning, so horrific that when 9/11 happened, several people who had no access to PDBs about Bin Laden asked the Rude Pundit if he thought it was the work of the same type of white supremacist terrorism. "No," the Rude Pundit answered, having seen the planes driven into the Towers on CNN. "White Americans don't plan suicide attacks. Too much ego.")
Let's say that the government declared "war on domestic terror" and the military, working with local law enforcement, went into compounds and farms in the Upper Midwest and Northwest, to South Dakota, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, and mass arrested anyone who was linked to Aryan Nations or White Aryan Resistance or name your favorite "stupid fucking backward ass losers who blame everyone but the white people who actually have power" organization. And in this sweep of short-haired white males and the white women who enable them, the local cops decided to pick up everyone who's ever looked at them crossways. Farmers, janitors, motorcycle gangs, all swept up and sent to the newly established prison at Guantanamo Bay. And maybe some of 'em were just thrown into prisons in South Dakota, Idaho, etc., etc., Packed 'em in there. Shaving the heads would be a quick task for most of 'em.
You get where this is going, this "fun with analogies" tale. We get pictures of all these suspected terrorists, white people one and all, with electrodes on their nuts. We get Red Cross reports about the way in which these evil white motherfuckers are subjected to routine humiliation, psychological torture, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, the usual shit. The government would justify it by saying they have to do everything they can to prevent another Oklahoma City. They're our own citizens and aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions, the administration would say. They come up with legal justifications in the form of memos. When they're ordered to give the terror suspects hearings on their charges, the government sets up kangaroo military tribunals. As the Rude Pundit said, by this point, you get the fucking analogy, right? (And he's strived to divorce this from any politics - this ain't about "What Clinton couldn't do that Bush is allowed to do" or any such bullshit.)
Do you think, for a second, that if reports were that large groups of non-French white people were being routinely subjected to torture at the hands of our government (and, let's be perfectly clear, anything the government does is in our name; therefore, this is you doing it, too), that if photos of bloodied, battered, leashed, sodomized, dog-bitten, nude white people had "surfaced" that we would ignore it? That we'd just sit back and relax at the notion that the good and godly government knows what it's doing when it comes to torturing the white terrorists who, after all, blew up the Murrah Federal Building? That the media would give scant attention to the white people who are being deprived sleep in order to force them to give information about shit they know nothing about? That we'd look at those pictures of pyramids of naked white asses, shinin' in the flash of the camera lens, and think, "Fuck them, they killed children"? (The sad, sad, stomach-churning truth is that so many of us wouldn't care, we'd think they must deserve it, we'd "trust" the government.)
Here's what's going on: you know all those movies, like Lethal Weapon, Rambo, etc., etc., where the American hero is chained like a dog while men in uniforms, usually either with Russian accents or Middle Eastern or Asian skin, approach said American hero and tell him, "Tell us what you know," and when the American hero says he doesn't know anything, they beat him, or threaten to rape his wife, or turn on the electricity, or thrown water on him to wake him up, or whatever. You know the films. They're calculated to make you wanna see that torturing motherfucker get the worst possible death. Yeah - drop kick 'em on the spiked fence. That'll teach 'em to torture Bruce Willis. Well, reverse it, motherfuckers. Change the context.
'Cause what's going on right now is the opposite. The people chained up are Middle Eastern. The uniformed young men walking into the room are American. Now, do you think maybe the Middle Easterners who learn of this shit don't want the worst possible death for those who perpetrate the torture? And if you can abide this torture, if you don't give a shit about what's being done in your name, then you deserve whatever America you are allowed to have, not whatever America you can make.
Christ Weary Update:
So far, over 100 tales of abuse at the hands and words of the faithful have arrived. Keep the stories coming of your confrontations with the religious right. Send 'em to: rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Friday, December 03, 2004
Christ Weary, Part 4 (The Weary Speak):
Let's be clear here: "Christ" is shorthand for the fucked-up, backward ass, violent, hate-filled beliefs of Christian fundamentalism. It is not the Biblical "Christ" and his words of, you know, love, peace, and fellowship. The Biblical Christ never says, "Thou shalt exhort thine enemies to 'Bring it on.'" The Rude Pundit has said before that the Christ in the Bible is a liberal who invites us all to party on in a socialist heaven. That is a dude the Rude Pundit would like to break bread and fish with while suckin' down wine-from-water. That, however, is not the Christ who has been shoved in our faces by the evangelical right. They want Rambo Jesus, kickin' ass, a warring motherfucker who shows fags and secularists they better love the Lord or they're gettin' drop kicked into the fiery bowels of hell. Or voted out of office.
But the Rude Pundit asked, and, yea, the readership answered. You responded to the Rude Pundit's request to donate your stories of Christ weariness with an outcry of outrage over the outreach of out-of-their-minds born agains. From sea to shining sea, in states blue and red, you have poured your damaged souls out. The Rude Pundit hears your cries, and, yea, come to the Rude Pundit and he shall caress you in his loving arms into secular ecstasy, paying close attention to your nipples. Here's a sampler (with minor editing) of the nearly 100 stories you sent in (and, as usual, the Rude Pundit makes no guarantees about the "truthfulness" of these tales of woe):
From Sargasm: I had an awful first experience with those right wing nuts. When I was 10, my little brother started going to Sunday school with the neighborhood kids. A bus would pick them up and take them to church. I didn't want to go, even though these kids' parents would always encourage me to attend. Then one Sunday, I realized my brother was coming home with candy. He had received it for answering questions on the day's lessons on the bus ride back. Being a sweet tooth fanatic, and just an overall know-it-all kid, I thought it was a sweet deal. So that next Sunday I went to Sunday school with them. The biblical stories were alright but sort of boring. On the ride back I answered a few questions and got some candies. I
thought I had hit the jack pot. As we were all piling out of the bus, one kid turned to me and sneered, "You damn nigger." I was frozen by the hatred that I felt
and being that it was my first racist incident in my life I didn't know what to do. I felt like shit. I confided in a friend and asked her what I should do.
The next Sunday I went back on the yellow bus, and made sure to answer every question on the way back. And then on the way out of the bus, I went up to the kid and sneered at him, "You stupid honky."
I didn't know what a honky was. But my friend had reassured me it would do the trick. I don't think the kid got it either. But he did get the venom I put in the word. Needless to say that was the last time I attended Sunday school.
From Deborah in Georgia: Growing up Universalist/Unitarian in the Deep South, surrounded by batshit hysterical Baptists, I was repeatedly told that I was going to hell. Baptist Hell was an unambiguous realm of boiling cesspools staffed by pitchfork-carrying demons. Baptists seem to take a particular delight in scaring the shit out of small children, combining their lurid Hell monologues with gut-chilling, neurosis-inducing horror stories of the End Times, the Rapture, etc. One of my most traumatic childhood memories is of being forced to attend Baptist Vacation Bible School while visiting my cousins. Trapped in a tiny, hot room somewhere in the bowels of a church annex, nauseated by the tomb scent of pastel concrete block walls, I listened in abject terror as a smiling woman solemnly assured our class that the world was coming to an end at any moment. A lovely thing to tell kids growing up in the 1960's. If the Russians didn't nuke us first, Jesus would.
From Neil in Illinois: I was a doctoral student hanging out at the student union eating some food and this young guy comes up to me and asks if I could spare some time to answer some questions. He remarked that he was a graduate student collecting data for his master's thesis and he had a brief survey he wanted me to fill out. Although I thought it odd, I said yes and he sat down with me. He handed this very short, 10 item survey and asked me to respond honestly and all that stuff. Being a doctoral student, I knew a little about survey research and I noticed right away what this was about. The first question read, "Do you believe in God?". Second
question read, "Do you believe in a heaven and a hell?" THEN right after the second question was a Bible citation with the verse following it. It was John 3:16 or some shit like that. Before I even answered a question, I told him that this was bullshit
and what he was trying to do was witness to me by giving me the ridiculous survey. He admitted that he was from a local bible college and I told him that his deception was very similar to the way cults recruit on college campuses. He didn't like that too much and left.
From Emily: My brother has a Darwin fish on his car. Last month he noticed that some assdouche had keyed a word in the paint: "Jesus."
From Julie: I had a house fire two years ago. I lost all my possessions and one of my cats. I was talking to a woman I know who is a fundamentalist Christian, and she told me (trying to be helpful, I think): "The Bible tells us God punishes us like a father."
From Jo: It's been twenty years since I fled the God-soaked South, so I guess I can talk about it.
Shall I tell you about the shrieking of my Baptist-born mother, accusing me of spreading my legs like the whore of babylon when I'd never had so much as a date?
Shall I tell you about being packed off to evangelical high school, where our ninth-grade history teacher told us the only reason to educate women was so that they could raise good sons? Where "lying horizontally" on campus was against the rules for girls (as was whorish clothing like jeans)? Where the instructor of the compulsory New-Testament Bible class took us on field trips to his church so that we could watch him and our headmaster sway back and forth, arms raised and eyes shut, while another congregant babbled in tongues (oh, the satisfaction I later took losing my virginity behind that church).
Shall I recall Religious Emphasis Week, the annual evangelical indoctrination fiesta to which all students (including the roughly 25% who were Jewish) were subjected? The Christian oath that all teachers are required to take (effectively barring the unsaved from employment)? The school motto "And Jesus increased in wisdom and
stature and in favor with God and men"?
No, I wasn't raised by snake-handlers in Upper Shithole, Alabama. Appallingly, this was the most prestigious prep school in the southeast, where the moneyed sons and daughters of Atlanta's ruling class were sent. This is where you went if you were born in Georgia and actually wanted to learn how to read. In the South, this is what
passes for mainstream.
From what I hear, the place has gone even further 'round the Bible bend in recent years. Mailings from the current headmaster (god only knows how they find me after more than 20 address changes) consist mostly of ungrammatical ravings about the need to train pastors and send them forth into the world, or some such shit.
Okay, gang, let's cut this off here for today. Next Friday, we'll put up more of your stories of confrontation with Christians, including fun with Jews, workplace worship, and more. Or if enough continue to come in, the Rude Pundit has reserved the name "Christ Weary" for a new blog that would be devoted to these tales. Keep 'em comin': rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Let's be clear here: "Christ" is shorthand for the fucked-up, backward ass, violent, hate-filled beliefs of Christian fundamentalism. It is not the Biblical "Christ" and his words of, you know, love, peace, and fellowship. The Biblical Christ never says, "Thou shalt exhort thine enemies to 'Bring it on.'" The Rude Pundit has said before that the Christ in the Bible is a liberal who invites us all to party on in a socialist heaven. That is a dude the Rude Pundit would like to break bread and fish with while suckin' down wine-from-water. That, however, is not the Christ who has been shoved in our faces by the evangelical right. They want Rambo Jesus, kickin' ass, a warring motherfucker who shows fags and secularists they better love the Lord or they're gettin' drop kicked into the fiery bowels of hell. Or voted out of office.
But the Rude Pundit asked, and, yea, the readership answered. You responded to the Rude Pundit's request to donate your stories of Christ weariness with an outcry of outrage over the outreach of out-of-their-minds born agains. From sea to shining sea, in states blue and red, you have poured your damaged souls out. The Rude Pundit hears your cries, and, yea, come to the Rude Pundit and he shall caress you in his loving arms into secular ecstasy, paying close attention to your nipples. Here's a sampler (with minor editing) of the nearly 100 stories you sent in (and, as usual, the Rude Pundit makes no guarantees about the "truthfulness" of these tales of woe):
From Sargasm: I had an awful first experience with those right wing nuts. When I was 10, my little brother started going to Sunday school with the neighborhood kids. A bus would pick them up and take them to church. I didn't want to go, even though these kids' parents would always encourage me to attend. Then one Sunday, I realized my brother was coming home with candy. He had received it for answering questions on the day's lessons on the bus ride back. Being a sweet tooth fanatic, and just an overall know-it-all kid, I thought it was a sweet deal. So that next Sunday I went to Sunday school with them. The biblical stories were alright but sort of boring. On the ride back I answered a few questions and got some candies. I
thought I had hit the jack pot. As we were all piling out of the bus, one kid turned to me and sneered, "You damn nigger." I was frozen by the hatred that I felt
and being that it was my first racist incident in my life I didn't know what to do. I felt like shit. I confided in a friend and asked her what I should do.
The next Sunday I went back on the yellow bus, and made sure to answer every question on the way back. And then on the way out of the bus, I went up to the kid and sneered at him, "You stupid honky."
I didn't know what a honky was. But my friend had reassured me it would do the trick. I don't think the kid got it either. But he did get the venom I put in the word. Needless to say that was the last time I attended Sunday school.
From Deborah in Georgia: Growing up Universalist/Unitarian in the Deep South, surrounded by batshit hysterical Baptists, I was repeatedly told that I was going to hell. Baptist Hell was an unambiguous realm of boiling cesspools staffed by pitchfork-carrying demons. Baptists seem to take a particular delight in scaring the shit out of small children, combining their lurid Hell monologues with gut-chilling, neurosis-inducing horror stories of the End Times, the Rapture, etc. One of my most traumatic childhood memories is of being forced to attend Baptist Vacation Bible School while visiting my cousins. Trapped in a tiny, hot room somewhere in the bowels of a church annex, nauseated by the tomb scent of pastel concrete block walls, I listened in abject terror as a smiling woman solemnly assured our class that the world was coming to an end at any moment. A lovely thing to tell kids growing up in the 1960's. If the Russians didn't nuke us first, Jesus would.
From Neil in Illinois: I was a doctoral student hanging out at the student union eating some food and this young guy comes up to me and asks if I could spare some time to answer some questions. He remarked that he was a graduate student collecting data for his master's thesis and he had a brief survey he wanted me to fill out. Although I thought it odd, I said yes and he sat down with me. He handed this very short, 10 item survey and asked me to respond honestly and all that stuff. Being a doctoral student, I knew a little about survey research and I noticed right away what this was about. The first question read, "Do you believe in God?". Second
question read, "Do you believe in a heaven and a hell?" THEN right after the second question was a Bible citation with the verse following it. It was John 3:16 or some shit like that. Before I even answered a question, I told him that this was bullshit
and what he was trying to do was witness to me by giving me the ridiculous survey. He admitted that he was from a local bible college and I told him that his deception was very similar to the way cults recruit on college campuses. He didn't like that too much and left.
From Emily: My brother has a Darwin fish on his car. Last month he noticed that some assdouche had keyed a word in the paint: "Jesus."
From Julie: I had a house fire two years ago. I lost all my possessions and one of my cats. I was talking to a woman I know who is a fundamentalist Christian, and she told me (trying to be helpful, I think): "The Bible tells us God punishes us like a father."
From Jo: It's been twenty years since I fled the God-soaked South, so I guess I can talk about it.
Shall I tell you about the shrieking of my Baptist-born mother, accusing me of spreading my legs like the whore of babylon when I'd never had so much as a date?
Shall I tell you about being packed off to evangelical high school, where our ninth-grade history teacher told us the only reason to educate women was so that they could raise good sons? Where "lying horizontally" on campus was against the rules for girls (as was whorish clothing like jeans)? Where the instructor of the compulsory New-Testament Bible class took us on field trips to his church so that we could watch him and our headmaster sway back and forth, arms raised and eyes shut, while another congregant babbled in tongues (oh, the satisfaction I later took losing my virginity behind that church).
Shall I recall Religious Emphasis Week, the annual evangelical indoctrination fiesta to which all students (including the roughly 25% who were Jewish) were subjected? The Christian oath that all teachers are required to take (effectively barring the unsaved from employment)? The school motto "And Jesus increased in wisdom and
stature and in favor with God and men"?
No, I wasn't raised by snake-handlers in Upper Shithole, Alabama. Appallingly, this was the most prestigious prep school in the southeast, where the moneyed sons and daughters of Atlanta's ruling class were sent. This is where you went if you were born in Georgia and actually wanted to learn how to read. In the South, this is what
passes for mainstream.
From what I hear, the place has gone even further 'round the Bible bend in recent years. Mailings from the current headmaster (god only knows how they find me after more than 20 address changes) consist mostly of ungrammatical ravings about the need to train pastors and send them forth into the world, or some such shit.
Okay, gang, let's cut this off here for today. Next Friday, we'll put up more of your stories of confrontation with Christians, including fun with Jews, workplace worship, and more. Or if enough continue to come in, the Rude Pundit has reserved the name "Christ Weary" for a new blog that would be devoted to these tales. Keep 'em comin': rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Christ Weary, Part 3 (Southern Baptists Are Just Soooo Cute):
The news just keeps comin', fast and furious, about the myriad ways in which the Christian right is capitalizing on the nation's queasiness about hot ass-fucking, looking to outlaw faggotry wherever it can, stopping just short of concentration camps, because, you know, that'd make 'em like Nazis. Via Americablog, Alabama Representative Gerald Allen wants to ban books that have gay characters from all libraries. So he's introduced a bill to the legislature that "would prohibit the use of public funds for 'the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.' Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the 'homosexual agenda.'" Now, as near as the Rude Pundit can tell, the homosexual agenda generally consists of shopping, dancing, and fucking people of the same sex. Not so much of an "agenda" as it is a "desire to live life without stupid fundamentalist assholes isolating and condemning them."
God, how giddy the Christian right press was when the Wyoming killers of Matthew Shepard said the motivation for beating Shepard to death was money for drugs, and not Shepard's homosexuality. The Southern Baptist Convention's news bureau practically wet itself at the thought that a "hate crime" was not committed, giving the 20/20 story big play on its website. Why, you might ask, would whether or not Shepard's murder was a "hate crime" would matter to Southern Baptists? Let's be simple and not ironic or glib at all, in case any of them are reading: because they hate homosexuals and any sympathy for homosexuals. And if the gay rights movement loses the ability to use one of its martyrs, well, then, so much the better.
To paraphrase Tip O'Neill, all worship is local. Sure, sure, back in the day, when televangelism was polluting our TV screens, everyone associated faith with Falwell, Swaggart, Bakker, and the like. But here's the deal: the people across the country who watched were, for the most part, good, godly citizens who already attended churches. Televangelism was a supplement, not a replacement (except for the elderly and shut-ins who were bilked out of millions of dollars). If we on the left wanna understand, with our jaws dropped open, what the fuck is going on, we need to look locally, at the preachers and congregations that do the heavy lifting for the larger evangelical movement. And not just at the wacko "God Hates Fags" set. We're talkin' mainstream holy hatred.
Take, please, the aforementioned Southern Baptists, who claim 16 million members at 42,000 churches across the country, all of whom are at least paying lip service to the Baptist Faith and Message negotiated out by the conservative group. Like under "Family" and the strange contortions of logic therein: "The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." So, like, whuh? The wife and husband are of "equal worth," but the wife must "submit herself" to the leadership of the husband. So, it's like if you have a pair of whores, and you call them "equal," but there's only one that you'll shit on after you have her fuck you with the nine-inch strap-on. But, really, they're equal. (Ahh, you might answer, but what if the one hooker likes being shat upon? Then that whore is ready to become a Southern Baptist wife.)
Across the country, Southern Baptist pastors suck down this shit and spew it back at their flock. So Pastor Mac Williams of the Two Rivers Community Church of Dayton, OH will look at the Evangelism tenet of the church and its admonition to "make disciples of all nations." And then he'll pass on to the congregation that "We are not to try to make disciples of all nations, we are to actually do it!" Now, translate that into the Jesus-addled mind of a man in the audience who sees Islamic terrorism on TV, and what do you think that man is going to believe about the solution to the current war? And do you think that man has any chance of voting for, say, John Kerry?
Or maybe look at the website of the First Southern Baptist Church of San Diego, which in its "About Us" section states plainly, "America is in a state of moral decline and we believe that the message of Jesus Christ can change lives and bring hope and healing to all who will receive that message."
It's often been said that the problem with liberals is that they see doubt, nuance, grays, even in their own beliefs. How can that face off against such ironclad faith, like in the words of Keith Cook of the traveling "On the Go" Ministries: "Never before in the history of the world has mankind been faced with such a godless society. Terrorism and materialism rule side by side. Morals and decency have been thrown aside for prosperity and pleasures. Young people and adults go from one fad to the next looking for happiness. The mood is set for a tremendous spiritual awakening."
And that's the Southern Baptist Convention's mission right now, a spiritual awakening in America. They've even got a three-year plan, and we're about to head into the final stage of it in 2005, with a "What Now?" campaign on TV and radio (One wonders if ABC, CBS, and NBC will broadcast those ads). For the love of fuck, they're training people in some kind of bizarro SWAT team of faith: the Evangelical Response Center. Oh, yes, the past election has emboldened the entire religious right. Hell, fuckin' Falwell has even brought back the Moral Majority (the 80s are sooo retro-cool).
You have to know the enemy before you can defeat it. You have to know just how huge it is. The Rude Pundit has consciously avoided making this just about Southern states, because the evangelicals are not stoppin' at the edge of the red areas. As he said on Tuesday, these fuckers are not going to give up. They've tasted blood in 2004. As far as they're concern, they're really only five Senate seats away from complete domination. And as they continue to fuck up this country, sinking it under the strain of their lies about Christ's love when all they want to do is codify hate, we who are Christ weary, so goddamn sick of having our faces shoved into the piles of Jesus shit stinking up the streets of the nation, have to figure out what we do about it.
Tomorrow: your stories of Christ weariness. Next week: How we fight.
Keep sending them - your tales of confrontation with the saved, the born again, and your parents. Dozens and dozens have come in so far. E-mail to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
The news just keeps comin', fast and furious, about the myriad ways in which the Christian right is capitalizing on the nation's queasiness about hot ass-fucking, looking to outlaw faggotry wherever it can, stopping just short of concentration camps, because, you know, that'd make 'em like Nazis. Via Americablog, Alabama Representative Gerald Allen wants to ban books that have gay characters from all libraries. So he's introduced a bill to the legislature that "would prohibit the use of public funds for 'the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.' Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the 'homosexual agenda.'" Now, as near as the Rude Pundit can tell, the homosexual agenda generally consists of shopping, dancing, and fucking people of the same sex. Not so much of an "agenda" as it is a "desire to live life without stupid fundamentalist assholes isolating and condemning them."
God, how giddy the Christian right press was when the Wyoming killers of Matthew Shepard said the motivation for beating Shepard to death was money for drugs, and not Shepard's homosexuality. The Southern Baptist Convention's news bureau practically wet itself at the thought that a "hate crime" was not committed, giving the 20/20 story big play on its website. Why, you might ask, would whether or not Shepard's murder was a "hate crime" would matter to Southern Baptists? Let's be simple and not ironic or glib at all, in case any of them are reading: because they hate homosexuals and any sympathy for homosexuals. And if the gay rights movement loses the ability to use one of its martyrs, well, then, so much the better.
To paraphrase Tip O'Neill, all worship is local. Sure, sure, back in the day, when televangelism was polluting our TV screens, everyone associated faith with Falwell, Swaggart, Bakker, and the like. But here's the deal: the people across the country who watched were, for the most part, good, godly citizens who already attended churches. Televangelism was a supplement, not a replacement (except for the elderly and shut-ins who were bilked out of millions of dollars). If we on the left wanna understand, with our jaws dropped open, what the fuck is going on, we need to look locally, at the preachers and congregations that do the heavy lifting for the larger evangelical movement. And not just at the wacko "God Hates Fags" set. We're talkin' mainstream holy hatred.
Take, please, the aforementioned Southern Baptists, who claim 16 million members at 42,000 churches across the country, all of whom are at least paying lip service to the Baptist Faith and Message negotiated out by the conservative group. Like under "Family" and the strange contortions of logic therein: "The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." So, like, whuh? The wife and husband are of "equal worth," but the wife must "submit herself" to the leadership of the husband. So, it's like if you have a pair of whores, and you call them "equal," but there's only one that you'll shit on after you have her fuck you with the nine-inch strap-on. But, really, they're equal. (Ahh, you might answer, but what if the one hooker likes being shat upon? Then that whore is ready to become a Southern Baptist wife.)
Across the country, Southern Baptist pastors suck down this shit and spew it back at their flock. So Pastor Mac Williams of the Two Rivers Community Church of Dayton, OH will look at the Evangelism tenet of the church and its admonition to "make disciples of all nations." And then he'll pass on to the congregation that "We are not to try to make disciples of all nations, we are to actually do it!" Now, translate that into the Jesus-addled mind of a man in the audience who sees Islamic terrorism on TV, and what do you think that man is going to believe about the solution to the current war? And do you think that man has any chance of voting for, say, John Kerry?
Or maybe look at the website of the First Southern Baptist Church of San Diego, which in its "About Us" section states plainly, "America is in a state of moral decline and we believe that the message of Jesus Christ can change lives and bring hope and healing to all who will receive that message."
It's often been said that the problem with liberals is that they see doubt, nuance, grays, even in their own beliefs. How can that face off against such ironclad faith, like in the words of Keith Cook of the traveling "On the Go" Ministries: "Never before in the history of the world has mankind been faced with such a godless society. Terrorism and materialism rule side by side. Morals and decency have been thrown aside for prosperity and pleasures. Young people and adults go from one fad to the next looking for happiness. The mood is set for a tremendous spiritual awakening."
And that's the Southern Baptist Convention's mission right now, a spiritual awakening in America. They've even got a three-year plan, and we're about to head into the final stage of it in 2005, with a "What Now?" campaign on TV and radio (One wonders if ABC, CBS, and NBC will broadcast those ads). For the love of fuck, they're training people in some kind of bizarro SWAT team of faith: the Evangelical Response Center. Oh, yes, the past election has emboldened the entire religious right. Hell, fuckin' Falwell has even brought back the Moral Majority (the 80s are sooo retro-cool).
You have to know the enemy before you can defeat it. You have to know just how huge it is. The Rude Pundit has consciously avoided making this just about Southern states, because the evangelicals are not stoppin' at the edge of the red areas. As he said on Tuesday, these fuckers are not going to give up. They've tasted blood in 2004. As far as they're concern, they're really only five Senate seats away from complete domination. And as they continue to fuck up this country, sinking it under the strain of their lies about Christ's love when all they want to do is codify hate, we who are Christ weary, so goddamn sick of having our faces shoved into the piles of Jesus shit stinking up the streets of the nation, have to figure out what we do about it.
Tomorrow: your stories of Christ weariness. Next week: How we fight.
Keep sending them - your tales of confrontation with the saved, the born again, and your parents. Dozens and dozens have come in so far. E-mail to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Christ Weary, Part 2 Cont'd (Fucking Falwell):
Here's one of the Rude Pundit's favorite fun facts about "Minister" Jerry Falwell: In 1989, he ordered that all of the employees of his empire had to join his church. And that they all had to tithe ten percent of their earnings to said ministry. So, like, if you were offered $20,000 to clean the Toilets of Jesus' Love, it was automatically reduced to $18,000 because of the enforced goodness of your heart. But Falwell has always and forever been about opportunism, from his takeover of Jim Bakker's PTL Club to his choice to fan the flames of whatever hate will get him the most attention, but mostly gay-bashing and anti-abortion politics.
Falwell is like a bitch in heat, rubbing his throbbing pussy up against whatever pole will tickle his kooz. And when someone comes along that'll fuck him? Shit, that's, well, fuck, manna from heaven. Reagan, Bush, Sr., and others have all lined up to gladly fuck Falwell. "Yeah, you slovenly bitch, you want it, you want it," Reagan shrieked while fucking Falwell, "Now gimme those evangelical votes or no more fucking for you." Falwell loves it when politicians fingerfuck him, teasing his clit. Oh, praise Jesus, how he squeals when his clit is squeezed.
And just like the tragedy of September 11, 2001 provided George Bush with a reason to go on living, so did it Falwell. Here's what this soft-talkin' porcine prophet of doom was saying on September 9, 2001, when his slide into irrelevance was almost complete: while talking about the events that were happening around the world that indicated the coming of Christ, one of the top seven was the increase in speed of transportation. Falwell marvelled at how fast he could get anywhere and "this explosion of transportation has made it possible for Jews from all over the world to migrate to Israel. God is bringing all these things together, because His Son is coming soon." The Internet, the UN, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all signs of impending rapture, although, Falwell assured us, "I am not predicting when Jesus is coming back."
But then, praise Jesus, 9/11 happened, and all of a sudden on 9/16, Falwell's talkin' about being invited to the National Cathederal to pray with the President. Preachin' the good word, Falwell said of Bush, "His favorable have ratings soared to about 90%, equalled in modern times only by his dear father during Desert Storm." And, by 9/23 , Falwell was preachin' about how a revival can come about in America in the wake of 9/11. After pontificating about unity of brethren and repentance of all sins, Falwell's final words were about, what else, tithing to the church: "When God’s people are revived, what happens? They give money to God, and they give it abundantly above what they have been giving. As a matter of fact, when God gets a hold of a heart, no gift is too small, and no sacrifice is too great. We give to God." Hallelujah.
You wanna know what happened after 9/11 to shove a hot poker up the ass of the Christian conservative movement? It's the same things that have alway motivated charlatans and thieves for time immemorial: crass opportunism, desperate people ripe for exploitation, and sweet-talkin' con men (and women) ready to take the suckers for all they're worth. Falwell and the end of days, Bush and the imminent threat of Iraq - what's the fuckin' difference, huh?
Which all brings us to Falwell's surfacing on Meet the Press this week , where Falwell attacked Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine for voting for John Kerry because Kerry's pro-choice: "I wouldn't vote for my mother if she were pro-choice." (This would be the same mother who would have been offended at the idea of her son fucking her in an outhouse, a la Hustler back in the day.) It was all so, so sad, with Falwell trying to talk to Al Sharpton about Martin Luther King, with Falwell declaring that gay Republicans should become Democrats, saying, strangely (racist-ly?) to Sharpton, "You guys are great at spending someone else's money." He lied about what he said right after 9/11, when he blamed it on feminists and other bugaboos. He said the Soviet Union would still be in control of Eastern Europe if Wallis had had his way when the Reverend (and millions of others) protested Reagan's "Peace Through Strength" looting of America. And, most bizarrely, he said this about his children and grandchildren: "This morning in the shower I prayed for all 15 of our family by name, by need."
And there's the image you need to be left with for today. Jerry Falwell, soaping his cock and balls over and over, calling out the names of his grandchildren, praying to Jesus, loofah in hand, foamy slippery soap bubblin' up, prayin' with all his might that the needs of the children are taken care of.
(Tomorrow: Fun with local preachers. Friday: Your tales of Christ weariness)
Keep the stories flowing. Dozens upon dozens have been flowing in. Lord, please give us a break from your holy people, you're yelling. Send more stories of your confrontations with the holy, the righteous, the saved to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Here's one of the Rude Pundit's favorite fun facts about "Minister" Jerry Falwell: In 1989, he ordered that all of the employees of his empire had to join his church. And that they all had to tithe ten percent of their earnings to said ministry. So, like, if you were offered $20,000 to clean the Toilets of Jesus' Love, it was automatically reduced to $18,000 because of the enforced goodness of your heart. But Falwell has always and forever been about opportunism, from his takeover of Jim Bakker's PTL Club to his choice to fan the flames of whatever hate will get him the most attention, but mostly gay-bashing and anti-abortion politics.
Falwell is like a bitch in heat, rubbing his throbbing pussy up against whatever pole will tickle his kooz. And when someone comes along that'll fuck him? Shit, that's, well, fuck, manna from heaven. Reagan, Bush, Sr., and others have all lined up to gladly fuck Falwell. "Yeah, you slovenly bitch, you want it, you want it," Reagan shrieked while fucking Falwell, "Now gimme those evangelical votes or no more fucking for you." Falwell loves it when politicians fingerfuck him, teasing his clit. Oh, praise Jesus, how he squeals when his clit is squeezed.
And just like the tragedy of September 11, 2001 provided George Bush with a reason to go on living, so did it Falwell. Here's what this soft-talkin' porcine prophet of doom was saying on September 9, 2001, when his slide into irrelevance was almost complete: while talking about the events that were happening around the world that indicated the coming of Christ, one of the top seven was the increase in speed of transportation. Falwell marvelled at how fast he could get anywhere and "this explosion of transportation has made it possible for Jews from all over the world to migrate to Israel. God is bringing all these things together, because His Son is coming soon." The Internet, the UN, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all signs of impending rapture, although, Falwell assured us, "I am not predicting when Jesus is coming back."
But then, praise Jesus, 9/11 happened, and all of a sudden on 9/16, Falwell's talkin' about being invited to the National Cathederal to pray with the President. Preachin' the good word, Falwell said of Bush, "His favorable have ratings soared to about 90%, equalled in modern times only by his dear father during Desert Storm." And, by 9/23 , Falwell was preachin' about how a revival can come about in America in the wake of 9/11. After pontificating about unity of brethren and repentance of all sins, Falwell's final words were about, what else, tithing to the church: "When God’s people are revived, what happens? They give money to God, and they give it abundantly above what they have been giving. As a matter of fact, when God gets a hold of a heart, no gift is too small, and no sacrifice is too great. We give to God." Hallelujah.
You wanna know what happened after 9/11 to shove a hot poker up the ass of the Christian conservative movement? It's the same things that have alway motivated charlatans and thieves for time immemorial: crass opportunism, desperate people ripe for exploitation, and sweet-talkin' con men (and women) ready to take the suckers for all they're worth. Falwell and the end of days, Bush and the imminent threat of Iraq - what's the fuckin' difference, huh?
Which all brings us to Falwell's surfacing on Meet the Press this week , where Falwell attacked Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine for voting for John Kerry because Kerry's pro-choice: "I wouldn't vote for my mother if she were pro-choice." (This would be the same mother who would have been offended at the idea of her son fucking her in an outhouse, a la Hustler back in the day.) It was all so, so sad, with Falwell trying to talk to Al Sharpton about Martin Luther King, with Falwell declaring that gay Republicans should become Democrats, saying, strangely (racist-ly?) to Sharpton, "You guys are great at spending someone else's money." He lied about what he said right after 9/11, when he blamed it on feminists and other bugaboos. He said the Soviet Union would still be in control of Eastern Europe if Wallis had had his way when the Reverend (and millions of others) protested Reagan's "Peace Through Strength" looting of America. And, most bizarrely, he said this about his children and grandchildren: "This morning in the shower I prayed for all 15 of our family by name, by need."
And there's the image you need to be left with for today. Jerry Falwell, soaping his cock and balls over and over, calling out the names of his grandchildren, praying to Jesus, loofah in hand, foamy slippery soap bubblin' up, prayin' with all his might that the needs of the children are taken care of.
(Tomorrow: Fun with local preachers. Friday: Your tales of Christ weariness)
Keep the stories flowing. Dozens upon dozens have been flowing in. Lord, please give us a break from your holy people, you're yelling. Send more stories of your confrontations with the holy, the righteous, the saved to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Christ Weary, Part 2 (Fucking Falwell):
Sweet fuck, we are a Christ weary nation. As evangelicals prance about with "moral values" hard-ons, the rest of us are tired of those cocks being shoved in our faces. It's showing itself every time we turn around now, from the FCC's burning desire to eliminate sex from the airwaves to the refusal of CBS and NBC to air a commercial by the United Church of Christ about its inclusivity (meaning, you know, they don't hate fags) to the current debate over abortion policy. It's been going on for far too long, and one of the most visible faces of the hate of the religious right has been Jerry Falwell, a jowly Jesus jizz swallower who the Rude Pundit has been battling for the better part of two decades (and Falwell's been doing his thing for much longer). Sure, sure, there's more important "thinkers," as David Brooks pointed out yesterday, and, sure, sure, at the end of the day, the local preacher has more influence over a congregation than, say, James Dobson or Tim LaHaye, but Falwell's been out there, using Jesus for his own glorification for a long, long time now, so that, as Falwell wants, the Christian conservative movement's identity is symbiotic with his own.
Goddamn, the bullshit we've had to endure over the years since Falwell decided to weave politics and "religion" with the Moral Majority in the late 1970s. Falwell supported apartheid in South Africa, called Desmond Tutu "a phony," and urged his followers to buy Kruggerands back in the mid 1980s. In 1984, after Reagan let Falwell through the White House gates to pray with him, the good, loving preacher said, "The Democratic Party is largely controlled by the radical ideas of a dangerous minority - homosexuals, militant feminists, socialists, 'freeze-niks' and the like," while the Republican Party was devoted "to the liberation of the unborn" and its leaders were "God's instruments in rebuilding America." He said AIDS "could be God's judgement against a nation that chooses to live immorally." (And this leaves out so, so much hatred spewed by the Moral Majority and Falwell's other efforts.) We thought we had lost Falwell in the 90s. His influence over politics was waning. He was reduced to hawking tapes that alleged Bill Clinton was a murderer. Liberty University was almost bankrupt. And the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush shoved the evangelicals to the sidelines. But, lo and behold, one 9/11, and Falwell is back in the full-fledged spotlight, with his remark that abortion, feminism, and homosexuality caused the attack.
For many of us, we became fully cognizant of this fool, this figure of pomp and arrogance, this demented meatloaf during the Supreme Court case in 1988 when a unanimous court (including Rehnquist and Scalia) laughed out loud at Falwell's belief that he had been personally injured by a Hustler parody of him as a backwoods yahoo who fucked his mother in an outhouse. Said the man who had consigned gays to painful death, equated feminism with prostitution, and so many other kind, generous sentiments about Larry Flynt's parody: "I have never been incensed by a political cartoon or any other kind of a cartoon other than Mr. Flynt, when he suggested that as a minister of the Gospel that I have been involved incestuously with my late mother, who died at age 82 some years earlier, a godly woman whose memory has never been blemished by anyone, and when he suggested that my mother was a whore, a prostitute. I cannot imagine that any red-blooded male in any nation on earth not being incensed by that." The Falwell v. Flynt decision is what let's the Rude Pundit do what he does.
(More this afternoon, including what Falwell means now. Tomorrow: Fun with local preachers.)
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit asked you to send your stories of your confrontations, battles, and grapples with the religious right. And so far a couple dozen of you have responded with tales of woe about how Jesus may save, but his self-ordained reps on earth are just evil fuckers. Keep it coming. Send to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
Sweet fuck, we are a Christ weary nation. As evangelicals prance about with "moral values" hard-ons, the rest of us are tired of those cocks being shoved in our faces. It's showing itself every time we turn around now, from the FCC's burning desire to eliminate sex from the airwaves to the refusal of CBS and NBC to air a commercial by the United Church of Christ about its inclusivity (meaning, you know, they don't hate fags) to the current debate over abortion policy. It's been going on for far too long, and one of the most visible faces of the hate of the religious right has been Jerry Falwell, a jowly Jesus jizz swallower who the Rude Pundit has been battling for the better part of two decades (and Falwell's been doing his thing for much longer). Sure, sure, there's more important "thinkers," as David Brooks pointed out yesterday, and, sure, sure, at the end of the day, the local preacher has more influence over a congregation than, say, James Dobson or Tim LaHaye, but Falwell's been out there, using Jesus for his own glorification for a long, long time now, so that, as Falwell wants, the Christian conservative movement's identity is symbiotic with his own.
Goddamn, the bullshit we've had to endure over the years since Falwell decided to weave politics and "religion" with the Moral Majority in the late 1970s. Falwell supported apartheid in South Africa, called Desmond Tutu "a phony," and urged his followers to buy Kruggerands back in the mid 1980s. In 1984, after Reagan let Falwell through the White House gates to pray with him, the good, loving preacher said, "The Democratic Party is largely controlled by the radical ideas of a dangerous minority - homosexuals, militant feminists, socialists, 'freeze-niks' and the like," while the Republican Party was devoted "to the liberation of the unborn" and its leaders were "God's instruments in rebuilding America." He said AIDS "could be God's judgement against a nation that chooses to live immorally." (And this leaves out so, so much hatred spewed by the Moral Majority and Falwell's other efforts.) We thought we had lost Falwell in the 90s. His influence over politics was waning. He was reduced to hawking tapes that alleged Bill Clinton was a murderer. Liberty University was almost bankrupt. And the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush shoved the evangelicals to the sidelines. But, lo and behold, one 9/11, and Falwell is back in the full-fledged spotlight, with his remark that abortion, feminism, and homosexuality caused the attack.
For many of us, we became fully cognizant of this fool, this figure of pomp and arrogance, this demented meatloaf during the Supreme Court case in 1988 when a unanimous court (including Rehnquist and Scalia) laughed out loud at Falwell's belief that he had been personally injured by a Hustler parody of him as a backwoods yahoo who fucked his mother in an outhouse. Said the man who had consigned gays to painful death, equated feminism with prostitution, and so many other kind, generous sentiments about Larry Flynt's parody: "I have never been incensed by a political cartoon or any other kind of a cartoon other than Mr. Flynt, when he suggested that as a minister of the Gospel that I have been involved incestuously with my late mother, who died at age 82 some years earlier, a godly woman whose memory has never been blemished by anyone, and when he suggested that my mother was a whore, a prostitute. I cannot imagine that any red-blooded male in any nation on earth not being incensed by that." The Falwell v. Flynt decision is what let's the Rude Pundit do what he does.
(More this afternoon, including what Falwell means now. Tomorrow: Fun with local preachers.)
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit asked you to send your stories of your confrontations, battles, and grapples with the religious right. And so far a couple dozen of you have responded with tales of woe about how Jesus may save, but his self-ordained reps on earth are just evil fuckers. Keep it coming. Send to rudepundit@yahoo.com.
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