A Military Memoir By The Worst Infantry Trainee In The History of Mankind

INTRODUCTION

I can't, at this moment, remember my specific moment of arrival at Fort Benning, GA in March of 1985 for Infantry Basic Training. I had been recruited by the downtown Army National Guard unit in Syracuse, NY, although my lack of aptitude for or proficiency at anything vaguely military was phenomenal. And I should have known better. But at that point in my life, I felt at a dead end, unappreciated, and was chafing for some vast, transformational experience that would kickstart my existence and help me move toward some more fulfilling destiny, and I guess I figured what the hell. The military had been a vital, life altering crucible for many before me, and I seemed to be otherwise trapped, so why not?

I'd find out why not.

Still, as I say, I can't remember actually arriving at Benning. I remember bits and pieces of the plane rides down there, of the Atlanta airport, and I remember quite well the first barracks I was put up in, with a bunch of other equally uneasy new recruits, still in our civilian clothes and civilian haircuts, thinking that the way the reception sergeant had chivvied and herded us around that afternoon and evening was kind of brusque and rude, and wondering how much worse it would get. Wondering if this would, indeed, be some major turning point for my life, or just turn out to be a prodigious, incomprehensible mistake.

I believe, the morning of that first full day there, they actually got us up at six a.m. I'm sure that whenever they got us up, other guys in my intake group grumbled about it being too early, and I wasn't thrilled about it, either, but even then, I was pretty sure that actually being allowed to sleep until six a.m. wasn't something we should get used to.

I clearly remember how quickly hierarchies seemed to be set up in the process... not just regarding the actual rank structure, but how fine and distinct the gradations between intake groups immediately became. Guys who were three days or so ahead of us, but who already had their uniforms and equipment and Army haircuts, seemed infinitely more experienced and knowledgeable in the lore of the system than I did. (This was to remain a constant throughout my training, as I would infrequently come into contact with training groups farther along in their cycles than I was, and to me, they always seemed like ancient, weary veterans, sophisticated and informed by a dreadfully won acumen of just how things worked, footsore and world weary travelers of a dreadful road that still lay before me, and that I myself would inevitably have to traverse myself, whether I wanted to or not.)

In fact, it's worth noting at this point that one's 'willingness' to be in the military is really only valid as a moral argument, once one arrives and military indoctrination begins. Sure, there is no draft and we were all volunteers. Yet we were all also, nearly to a man, completely unaware of the realities of what we were getting into when we signed that piece of paper and took that oath. We'd seen a few movies at that point and thought we understood, if only vaguely, the mysteries of drill and discipline. We felt we had a grasp on what would be expected of us, and obviously, we all felt we could handle it; we all knew other guys, whom we considered peers, who had gone through it and survived.

And none of us, not one, had even the slightest real idea what we would be going through, and none of us, not one, would have stayed past the first week of real Basic Training if we'd been allowed to quit.

(When I say 'none of us', I am exercising a deliberate poetry, because in point of fact, there was one fellow in my intake group who knew more or less exactly what he was in for, because he had deserted from the Marines, and for some idiotic reason, had joined the Army under a false name, perhaps thinking he wouldn't get caught and could have a chance to start over. He honestly seemed to like the military, or at least, he seemed to prefer it to whatever else he'd had. It took them a few weeks to process his fingerprints, but eventually, they figured out who he was and took him away. As with anything else in the military, though, it happened inefficiently, and he was under company arrest and assigned to work details and CQ duty for a few weeks before they finally came and got him. On one occasion, when I was doing my laundry, I overheard him talking to another guy, and I remember him saying plaintively "Yeah, I don't know what guys complain about. This isn't that bad." For me, it was plenty bad, and going to get worse, but still, it was a relief to hear someone say that.)

'Volunteering' for the military, for the vast majority, is an act of utter ignorance, encouraged by recruiters with quotas who are very aware that if they tell you what you're really in for (systematic anti-humanistic degradation and humiliation designed to break down most overt, learned behaviors, and virtually all sense of individual identity not connected with your military unit, in order to replace them with the sort of ingrained discipline necessary to turn the product of a civilized society into, not simply a killer, but a trained, focused killer who would, hopefully, kill only on command and in the 'appropriate' context), you won't sign up. The system is equally aware that the vast majority of young sheep herded into it by recruiters want no actual part of the actual military; therefore, they make it extraordinarily difficult to back out of what you will have, almost as a matter of course, foolishly and unwisely decided to embark on, and will quickly come to see as a colossal error in judgement.

And so it was that, played like a violin by a maestro of a recruiter, I found myself in a barracks in Georgia, still in my civilian clothes, bemused by the thought that military food wasn't really as bad as I'd been led to believe and awed by guys a few days further along in their own cycles, who already had the uniforms, the equipment, and the haircuts. Although they knew barely more than I did (the couple I'd seen around the induction barracks were, at that point, waiting a few days to be assigned to a training company) they seemed nearly lordly in their apparently far greater experience.

However, the military moves fast, except when it doesn't move at all, and before the end of that first full day, we'd all been crammed into a bus and taken off for mass inoculations. While being moved around, our induction sergeant tried to instill in us a little basic sense of marching and formation, but without any of the murderous, vicious haranguing, verbal abuse, and quick disciplining through push ups and other humiliating physical tortures that would be used to enforce obedience and punish errors once we arrived at our training platoon. I tried to listen, and when it seemed tolerated, to ask questions, as I was feeling desperately insecure and grasping after any kind of reassurance that additional knowledge might have brought me. However, everyone who might actually know something about what was in store for me was vague, which I found maddening at the time, but looking back now, can see simply came from the fact that I had no vocabulary in common with the people I was asking my questions of. They couldn't tell me what it would be like in any adequate way; you could only really describe it to someone who had been there... or at least, that would have been the problem of the average non-articulate Army soldier. Clearly, I hope to do better.

There was also the fact that, even had anyone described clearly what I was in for, it would only have scared the shit out of me. Much later on, while my company was running through a particular obstacle course on a rather swampy, muddy training range, one of the drill sergeants (not one of my platoon's) who had generally shown himself to be comparatively friendly and accessible, and who apparently chose that moment to resent the fact that many of the recruits in his platoon seemed to perceive him that way, dropped everyone in his eyeshot, in ankle deep mud, for an apparently endless series of pushups. "You people seem to have mistaken me for someone who cares about you," he bellowed out over the chaotic, bobbing, panting array of shoulders, helmets, and asses in mucky camouflage. "I'm not your mama. I don't love you."

That attitude is a typical one, or at least, it was, when I went through Army Infantry Basic Training. It's obviously and honestly not true, of course. Most drill sergeants are relatively decent human beings and, just as in the movies, they do tend to form some sort of bond with their recruits. It's human, and you can't help it. (Some drill sergeants, on the other hand, are genuine sonsofbitches and a few are out and out psychotics, but in my experience, they're in the minority.) However, they're taught to act cold and uncaring, so that when they threaten you with imminent bodily harm, curse at you, tell you you're worthless, and act as if they're about to kill you with their bare hands, you'll believe it, and be motivated by their scorn, and their anger, and their contempt.

Beyond that, being a drill sergeant means being cruel, and for most human beings, cruelty is part of our nature. Compassion, empathy, kindness, consideration... the notion that other people have feelings too that are just as important as ours... these are things that seem to be, for the most part, learned social responses and behaviors. Babies don't feel them, and a child who isn't taught to feel love and gentleness and kindness fairly early often won't learn at all. On the other hand, no one seems to need to teach even the youngest kids to be cruel and mean; that seems to be something that simply comes naturally. I suppose this is all a product of the essential and inescapable solitude and loneliness of the individual human condition, but whatever the case may be, the vast majority of human beings have cruelty and mean spiritedness somewhere within them... and when one is a drill sergeant, one is not merely allowed, but actually encouraged, to be an utterly evil prick. In fact, one is told that in this particular context, being an utterly evil prick is more than simply one's job, but one's duty, and that in fact, by being an utterly evil prick, one is not only serving the abstract concept of one's country and one's military branch, but you're also actually helping the poor schmucks you're being a complete bastard to.

I mean, you can't beat that deal with a stick... you get to be a total asswipe, all day, every day, to a bunch of hapless twits who are utterly dependent on you... and you get to feel proud of yourself for it, too.

The best drill sergeants I knew... Sgt. Dennis, Sgt. Aguirre, Sgt. Lozano... seemed to be able to rise above it, and although they certainly simulated uncaring brutality well, there was an ephemeral line I felt they never crossed, and I never got the feeling that they truly relished and reveled in their power to humiliate and their authority to degrade. Deep down inside them, I felt, they still retained a certain respect for the innate humanity and dignity of their charges. They did what they had to do, and I'm sure they felt justified in doing it; I have no doubt they thought it was their duty, and would someday even save the lives of some of the men they trained.

I'm sure the worst drill sergeants I saw there... Sgt. Robbins, a truly vicious prick in Fourth Platoon named Sgt. Collins, and others whose names I can't remember right now... told themselves the same things. But those guys also undeniably enjoyed their authority and they liked making people crawl in a way that Dennis, Aguirre, Lozano, and most likely Sgt. Laffey, our company's Senior Drill Sergeant, and Captain Lambert, our Company Commander, simply didn't have in them.

Yet enjoy it or not, a drill sergeants job was to establish and keep authority through brutality, an utter lack of empathy, and a constantly maintained façade of ferocious contempt and vitriolic hostility. In some, the façade was thinner than in others, but they all had to do it, and would do it, and did do it... otherwise, they wouldn't have been there.

All of which means that, if any induction sergeant early on in the process had had the capacity to clearly articulate what lay ahead for the group of saps and chumps he was in charge of for a few days of outfitting and initial orientation, he still most likely wouldn't... for the good and simple reason that it's terrifying. Basic Training is at its most fundamental level a season in hell, and a primary element of that hellish experience lies in the fact that the authority figures you are given no choice but to rely upon expend an enormous amount of energy behaving as if they not only don't care about you, but on many occasions, actually despise you and would like nothing better than to see you suffering or dead. And some of them mean it, too.

Much later, Sgt. Aguirre, who was a drill sergeant for Third Platoon, after I'd been through weeks of training, would confide to me in an off guard moment, "There's a reason for everything we do". While I doubt that that's true... or if there is, the reasons are things most drill sergeants don't even know... I'm sure that there is indeed a reason why drill sergeants are trained to behave at all times as if the only emotions they feel for the confused young men suddenly thrust into their care are scorn and disgust. In fact, I'm sure there are many reasons, some of which I've already mentioned. Nonetheless, it's a terrifying thing, to suddenly find yourself in an utterly alien place, surrounded by people you don't know, and where the authority figure you are forced to trust and rely on tells you every day, through explicit words and implicit behavior, that he thinks you're worthless and wishes you were dead.

To me, memory is rarely a linear thing for very long, but generally functions as an associative mosaic. Therefore, since I don't have anything like a journal from this time period, and have mercifully forgotten many details of my Basic Training, this account of my season in hell, undergoing Army Infantry Basic Training as a member of Second Platoon, Company C, Sixth Battalion, First Infantry Training Brigade, at Fort Benning, GA, will be meandering and disjointed, as I move from one topic to another, writing everything interesting I can think of on each. That's how I remember my time there; as a patchwork quilt of vivid images and emotional snapshots, and as a seemingly endless, suffocating nightmare. Hopefully, I'll be able to convey at least the essence of the experience to any readers this account may one day have.

One last note: the Army experience does not so much embrace profanity and vulgarity as it is simply immersed completely in it; words like 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'goddam' and various sexually charged insults like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' are as inescapable in nearly every spoken sentence in Basic Training as they are in any fifth grade public school boy's lavatory. Therefore, I've chosen to include such language in this account. There may be members of my potential audience who will be shocked and even offended by this. If so, don't read any further.

                  -     Introduction to In The Early Morning Rain, by D.A. Madigan

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So, my eldest daughter, being who she is, really wanted to go to the River City Gay Pride Parade last night. She had all these grand plans for who she was going to go with, but, in the end, all her careful scheming came to naught and she was left moping around the house, badly wanting to attend the event, but not wanting to go alone.

I couldn't blame her; I've gone to a lot of stuff alone in my life -- malls, movies, parks, the beach, parties, weddings, all that kinda shit -- and that's always at least a little bit depressing, but attending this sort of mass event where there are always thousands of other people there, none of whom are alone... well, that's an entirely different magnitude of despair. And this Gay Pride Parade and associated events afterward? About as bad as it could get, for a solitary attendee. To mingle at this affair by yourself for any length of time and not come away feeling suicidal, one would need to be the Unabomber.

But wait, you say. Yr. Humble Narrator seems to be speaking with an unaccustomed assurance about said event, and how could that possibly be? Wellllllll... see, I kind of wound up there last night. For a couple of hours. Because... er... well... my oldest daughter really really really wanted to go, but couldn't find anyone to go with her, and I didn't want her to be sad. So, off I went, traipsing merrily like Dorothy down the Yellow Brick... er... I mean, striding manfully (MANFULLY, mind you, DAMNED manfully, at that) like Kurt Russell in TOMBSTONE down a dusty Arizona street towards an inevitable date with a carnage strewn destiny.

Yeah, yeah. That's the ticket.

Eldest Daughter seemed to have a good time, although we wound up coming home earlier than planned because there just wasn't much going on. She bought a t-shirt and a rainbow necklace from vendors there. Alas, I had no money, else I would have brought home a t-shirt for my wife proudly emblazoned with SORRY, GIRLS, I SUCK DICK, which I imagine was meant for a slightly different target demographic than that of my lovely spouse, but which would still be entirely appropriate in her specific context.

We watched the parade, which was, to my perhaps overly critical eyes, a pretty shabby affair -- you want to seriously see Sexual Deviants On Parade with something like a big budget behind it, you need to attend the Tampa Gasparilla Night Parade, something I've never done, but, as I lived in Tampa for seven years, have seen many pictures and heard many tales of. River City's Pride Parade seems to mostly consist of tired dykes and hard done looking fags perched on and crouched paranoically in motorcycles and the backs of small convertibles, waving wearily to the small but enthusiastically cheering crowd. A few paraders lethargically toss out miniscule strings of beads, a few others scatter the occasional stingy handful of Dubble Bubble or Tootsie Rolls onto the pavement at their feet, much like elderly farm wives tossing feed to their chickens... the only participants who seem at all enthusiastic about it are the Christian Gays, thrusting their JESUS LOVES US TOO signs vehemently in every direction like battle axes at the slavering Hun, and the trannies, who in my limited experience always seem to be either dementedly, near maniacally cheerful about everything, or about to commit ritual seppeku with their own nail files.

After the parade petered out, Eldest Daughter and I adjourned to a nearby park area where various vending booths had been set up and a pretty good lesbian rock band was attacking the nearby atmosphere with various classic remakes and a few decent original tunes. We wandered about, more or less aimlessly. Eldest Child had promised to purchase me some Gay Fried Dough if there was any to be had and I wanted to have it, but it had been Chicken Tender night at Castle Anthrax, and my wife (Bad Wicked Naughty Zoot)'s homemade chicken tenders are the stuff that dreams are made of, so I wasn't at all hungry, and the Gay Fried Dough went by the wayside.

Which was good, as it freed up Eldest Child's meager funds for the purchases I have already detailed. We also scoffed up a reasonable amount of free swag, including a small inflatable ball puzzlingly imprinted WALKIN' WITH JESUS, a Gay Frisbee (a gift from a generous couple of quite pretty girls, who each had one and didn't mind sharing) and a few other odds and ends I can't remember right now. (I had a Tootsie Roll, but some deaf gay guy standing near me at the parade motioned imperiously that I should give it to him, and he was astonishingly homely, so I did, lest the same bad fairy who had cursed him turn her ire on me.)

What I noticed while I was there -- and this will seem unkind, mostly, I suppose, because honest observations of this sort pretty much are -- is that the proportion of attractive/average/ugly people in a nearly all gay population is startlingly skewed from the mainstream towards, well, shall we say, the unhandsome. I mentioned in passing to Eldest Daughter while we were listening to the rock band that if Hollywood ever shot a big budget version of this event, every single person in attendance would be totally hot... but the actuality was nearly anything but that.

There were, every once in a while, good looking people of either gender wandering around (the pleasant couple who shared one of their frisbees with us among them), but they were as lost in that crowd as a few grains of pepper would be in a sea of salt. But while attractive people were, perhaps, proportionally slightly under-represented compared to a more mainstream crowd at, say, a busy theme park, what really struck me was the lack of normal, average looking people. Everywhere you looked there were human eyesores on two legs; truly, staggeringly ill-favored individuals covered the ground like an infestation of ambulatory toadstools.

I was proud that my daughter was so beautiful, but I always am, of all my daughters, and, in fact, their indisputable beauty is among the least wonderful of their attributes, as they're all smart and funny and kind and sweet, too; at the same time, I felt so dreadfully bad for most of these people, and had to wonder, how many were truly gay or bisexual, and how many were simply so desperate for affection that they'd willingly left the mainstream -- or been all but forcibly exiled from it -- to search for love and acceptance elsewhere, among other outcasts like themselves?

Whenever I see a handicapped person, I always wish I had the power to make them whole; to regenerate their wasted or missing limbs, to make their eyes or their ears or their vocal cords work, to give them back the gifts that cruel fate seems to have robbed them of. Last night, I felt that way for hundreds or thousands of people, based only on their appearance. And it made me wonder, how badly must our society treat the truly unattractive among us, that some of them at least would trade that kind of mass contempt for the in-built bias nearly every non-gay person almost instinctively feels against homosexuals?

Moving on beyond all that heavy shit, though, the band was pretty decent. They closed out their set with a rendition of "Proud Mary" notable only in what it lacked compared to CCR's version, and, well, the fact that in the first verse, instead of "Left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day", these chicks sang "working for A man every night and day", which rather startled me with just how much contempt for an entire gender (instead of, you know, the ruling wealthy ownership class) you could pack into a tiny three letter substitution like that.

I had no idea what the band's name was, but while I was listening to their unfortunately lethargic rendition of their last number, I though to myself that maybe this was their signature tune, and the name of their band was Proud Mary, which strikes me as an excellent name for a gay rock band, male or female. But on the way out of the park Eldest Child advised me that they were the Blue Umbrellas, which is, I suppose, an okay name, but Proud Mary would be way, way better.

For all of that, I had a pretty good time hanging with my eldest girl, and am glad I went if only so she could.

Sometimes, being a parent is actually somewhat rewarding.

Who'd a thunk?

I've recently finished Neil Gaiman's latest anthology, FRAGILE THINGS. With one exception, I like the material in it well enough. (That one exception is unconscionably vile and fills me with sputtering, incoherent rage whenever I let my mind dwell on it for so much as an instant, but never mind, we'll get to that later.)

Still, while I like Gaiman's writing fine (for the most part) there's something about Gaiman himself, the man behind the prose, that irks me enormously. Or, at least, there's something about the way he presents himself in the lengthy introduction to this book, where he talks at length about all of the stories in it -- how he came to write them, what they mean to him, etc.

I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is about Gaiman's self presentation in this introduction that annoys me so much, so while I'm thinking about that further, let me talk about some of my own short stories, and how they were written, and what they mean to me --

WITH A REBEL YELL, SHE CRIED 'MOE, MOE, MOE' -- Award winning writer and editor, and my closest closest friend for 30 years, Brian Aldiss, called me up out of the blue one fine Sunday a few years ago and said he was editing an anthology of stories in which the idea was to take famous pop culture figures and immerse them in some sort of equally famous, but utterly incongruous, fantasy settings. I wracked my brains and couldn't come up with a thing, until I was sitting up late one night in Wayne Knight's ski lodge at Aspen with my golden retriever Thoth-Crinagoras (in part named after one of my favorite classic Greek poets, Crinagoras of Mytilene, whose brilliance is easy to overlook if you've only ever read his work in English translation, which, of course, most of you only ever have, so I can understand if you disagree with me here, although you're wrong) and the phone jangled and it was my good good friend Jerry Bruckheimer calling for me. Jerry wanted to talk to me about directing my own screenplay adaptation of my best selling and award winning novel BUDDHA WAS A HINDU, AND A VERY GOOD ONE, TOO, and I was pitching this idea that had just come to me for a sequence where Abraham Lincoln would fall ill just before giving the Gettysburg Address and Buddha would have to put on a disguise to take his place, and there was a Three Stooges movie on the telly, and it all just jelled in my head. I typed the story up in fourteen minutes flat while Kylie Minogue knelt on the floor beneath my typing desk praising my evocative prose style in her sweet, breathy, husky neo-brogue. Intermittently.

And of course, that story won the Hugula Award for Best Science Fiction Fantasy Written While Being Serviced By A Semi-Obscure Australian Starlet for 2004.

Hmmmm. Okay, I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, and I still can't figure out what it is about Gaiman's short story introductions that I find so aggravating. Something in his tone... I can't quite pin it down. Well, fine, let's just talk about the stories, then.

A STUDY IN EMERALD is one of the coolest short stories I've ever read, no lie. If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, or a follower of Lovecraft's Elder Deities mythos, you'll enjoy this story, and if you're an admirer of both fictional worlds, you'll just adore it. The ending comes as a real surprise, too, and, unlike most surprise endings, this is a very pleasant one.

THE FAIRY REEL - poem. ::shrug:: I don't read these things for poems. Sorry.

OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR - Nicely told, for what it is, which is, in the end, pretty pointless and anti-climactic rubbish.

THE HIDDEN CHAMBER - poem. Yawn.

FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES etc etc etc - Interesting. Nowhere near as funny as Gaiman thinks it is, though... pretty much endless, not particularly novel, and not very humorous, variations on the same tired schtick from start to finish. Fun to watch him play with the language, though. It nearly always is.

THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE - Um... boring?

CLOSING TIME - Um... weird. Interesting. I'm not sure the ending Gaiman puts on it can possibly work within the context of the story, however badly he wants it to.

GOING WODWO - I'm just not going to mention the poems any more.

BITTER GROUNDS - Very readable. Nonetheless, this is one of those stories that, along with several of Gaiman's SANDMAN arcs, really makes me think that what Gaiman wants to be, more than anything else, is one of those authors like James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, that nobody can even remotely begin to understand ten consecutive words they've written, but everyone pretends they can and it's all quite brilliant, because they're afraid they'll be thought stupid otherwise. Gaiman's prose style is as lucid as ever, but you get to the end of this particular story and you haven't got more than a vague idea what the hell has happened, or how it ended, really, but it's all been presented in a way that's supposed to make you think you're the one who has the problem. Me, I read a piece of fiction I don't understand, I tend to blame the writer; communication is a writer's JOB. But I'm often surly; I admit it frankly.

OTHER PEOPLE - Gaiman seems to be of the opinion that this is some brilliant little self contained story thing like Fredric Brown might write. I think, um, well, the ending is entirely predictable from the form, and, as a bonus, makes no sense. I mean, sure, the guy shows up in Hell and there's this horrible demon who is going to torture him for all eternity and, after a while, the demon vanishes and he looks in the mirror and discovers that HE has become the demon, and then, the door opens and the original guy walks in again, but... sure, okay, so he gets tortured for eons and turns into his own torturer, and now he's been sent back in time to the start of the sequence and he's going to torture his original self for eons again, but then... when his original self turns into him again... where does 'he' go? Does he go back and start again as the original person, or... No. It doesn't make any sense. Sorry.

KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES - I liked this story quite a bit. You pity the main character, and loathe him, all at the same time. And the central narrative itself is interesting, too. It's kind of like SANDMAN meets, I don't know, LAYER CAKE.

GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS seems rather pointless.

THE FACTS IN THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH is... well... fun to read, I guess, but anyone who is surprised by anything that happens at any point in the story hasn't read much Gaiman, or fantasy in general, prior to this. But it does give Gaiman a chance to go one some more about how important a writer he is and how much in demand his work is, in Hollywood, and, you know, throughout the world, a bit at the start, so that's all right.

STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS - Well, it's all well written, and it accomplishes the task of letting Gaiman tell us just how wonderfully close his friendship with some pop star is, but, again, while it's all very evocative and wonderful, I prefer an actual story.

HARLEQUIN VALENTINE - It... I... um... I don't know what to say about this one. The reversal in the middle seems forced, and honestly, the story just doesn't work for me very well. But this may be a case where the flaw really is in me. Gaiman seems to like these stories where characters abruptly shift identities right in the middle, and the rest of the world shifts right along with them without ever noticing that things have ever been different, as if all of life is just a dream, and there is no objective reality. I understand that's an interesting basis for some good (as well as some spectacularly bad) fiction, but I've never been fond of the notion. I'm an objective truth kind of guy.

Also, as a writer and a reader, I'm very wary of undefined characters with strange, dreamlike powers that can do whatever the plot requires at any given moment, but who can somehow never seem to do anything that would be inconvenient to the writer, ever, under any circumstances at al. Gaiman is very fond of these characters, and it's a flaw and a weakness and he should give it up but he won't. He's much better at writing stories about these kind of characters than, say, Chris Claremont is, but that's because Chris Claremont writes like a man who is getting hit on the head with a hammer over and over again while trapped in an aquarium that is slowly filling with overused motor oil, and Gaiman writes like a very talented, if unfortunately somewhat lazy, writer.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN -- If you love THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA even a tiny little bit, even the merest fraction of how much I love THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, then you mustn't read this story, because if you do, you will want to find Neil Gaiman and trap him in an aquarium slowly filling with overused motor oil while hitting him over the head again and again and again with a large hammer. Or, better, a small hammer; one just large enough to hurt quite a lot without actually knocking him unconscious or killing him. That way he stays alive in constant pain until the distilled petroleum product slowly fills his lungs and he drowns horribly with much the same smell in his nostrils and taste in his throat as dinosaurs floundering down into tar pits did, and for writing this piece of vile and abominable insect shit he deserves to, too. I have never really understood, on an emotional level, the concept of 'blasphemy' until I read this story, and now, I can also understand the Spanish Inquisition, and not the one with the comfy chair, either.

HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS? is an oddly satisfying little story where everything fits together very well. You can't really feel sorry for the narrator, who is actually quite an appalling fellow, or his paramour, who isn't much better.

MY LIFE is much, much funnier than that whole FORBIDDEN BRIDES mess.

FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT is every bit as pretentious and, you know, trying SOOOOOO hard to impress Goth chicks, dude, as it sounds, but, I admit, much more fun to read than I expected, for all of that. Still, I like a story to have a story in it, if you know what I mean.

FEEDERS AND EATERS is a genuine horror story. Not some nasty, brutal, witless Clive Barker thing that isn't about anything except a grisly central image, but a genuine horror story, like people used to write, when other people actually bought horror.

DISEASEMAKER'S CROUP and IN THE END both exasperated me, but sometimes I'm a bit dull.

GOLIATH is, actually, a very cool story, if, ultimately, an entirely depressing one. It's sad when someone actually finds out the objective truth, and the objective truth sucks pretty hard.

PAGES FROM A JOURNAL etc etc etc is... um... well... there's not much to it. I found it disappointing. But I'm like that, really.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES is one of those maddening stories where something extremely cool and important happens and the narrator of the story didn't see it and can only hint at whatever it is and the author never gives you any more information than that and it's just fucking AGGRAVATING. Because without the really cool thing that probably even the author doesn't really know anything about, the whole thing is just this lengthy description of an interesting party where nothing much goes on.

Still, as a wannabe myself, it's nice to know that you can get away with shit like this, once you're famous enough.

THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME is a poem I'll mention, because I really enjoyed it.

SUNBIRD is very interesting, but, again, if you can't figure out how it ends a hundred words into it, you're just not trying very hard.

THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN is a novella featuring Shadow from AMERICAN GODS. I was very disappointed in AMERICAN GODS, and I guess I like this novella a little bit better, but Shadow is still kind of a whiney jerk.

I should note that for all my bitching above, I very much enjoyed reading this anthology while I was reading it. I found many of the stories in it ultimately disappointing, but Gaiman is always fun to read, and, well, I read for pleasure, so, there you are.

I just expect better from Gaiman, because, well, he's capable of it, and when he's just dicking around pointlessly as he does for most of this volume, it's always a disappointment, and, pretty much, a waste of talent.

And he seems rather full of himself. A toady would rush in at this moment to say, well, if anyone deserves to be full of himself, it's Neil Gaiman, but in all honesty, that just doesn't work for me. Hubris is always ugly, and arrogance is never merited. I'm sure it's very nice to be Neil Gaiman, so sure, in fact, that I don't need to have him tell me, over and over and over again.

Addendum: I meant to mention this the whole time I was writing the above entry, and then I got to the end and the kids were clamoring to get on the computer and I had to get ready for work and I just hit PUBLISH POST and forgot about it -- "With a rebel yell, she cried Moe! Moe! Moe!" is the brilliant work of the brilliant Mike Norton; I saw it on his HC Realms profile right before I wrote this thing and laughed uproariously at it (he has a picture of Moe Howard, and under it, in italics, that particular legend) and it was indelibly imprinted on my brain at the time I was typing this thing, and I really really did mean to credit Mr. Norton, and then I didn't, and I'm very very sorry.

So, yesterday, my middle daughter was telling me she had to write a comedy sketch for her e-school teacher, and then call said e-school teacher up on the phone and do the sketch for her out loud.

She's not thrilled about it, and I wish I could help her with it, as I love to write comedy, even though few if any actually seem to enjoy the comedy I write. But her plight reminded me of a Monty Python type skit I myself wrote back in high school, while, of course, under the influence of regular weekly hits of FLYING CIRCUS on the local PBS station, interleavened with showings of HOLY GRAIL every three or four months (whenever they were having a pledge drive) .

I think I actually wrote it all down in a notebook somewhere back in like 11^th grade, but I foolishly threw out a drawer full of notebooks and sketchbooks and old character sheets from early college superhero RPGs and letters from old girlfriends and a lot of other rubbish like that during a move from one apartment to another back in the mid 80s. It's one of those decisions I deeply regret now, as I'm sure there was stuff in there that I could no doubt use to blackmail award winning comic book writer Kurt Busiek with to a very lucrative tune indeed. Alas, it's all in a landfill somewhere in Upstate New York now, no doubt rotted into mulch.

Still, having recounted the outlines of the sketch for my middle and youngest daughters yesterday, and then been forced by them to re-recount it to my wife/their mother when she got home, because they thought it was so funny, I feel like I may as well while away a few idle hours trying to set it all down again.

My youngest daughter is up at the moment, and in the back bedroom watching something truly horrifying on Nickelodeon, because I just couldn't take listening to one more nanosecond of it.

Okay. Here we go:

OPEN in a dingy hallway. As we pan down this hallway, we see a bench running along one side of it that is filled with unsavory characters - characters, in fact, that are dressed so much like criminals as to be visual near-parodies of various sorts of robbers and burglars. Many of these characters are just extras, but the sharp eye will pick out, scattered amongst them, most of the members of Monty Python - Graham Chapman is there, dressed in a striped shirt with a number stenciled on it with a ball and chain still attached to one ankle, Eric Idle has a black wool cap and a domino mask and is wearing a black sweatshirt and black trousers, Michael Palin looks like a riverboat gambler with an elaborate suit, long mustachios, and a filigreed walking stick, etc.

The camera POV arrives at a door leadinginto a small, shabby office just as the door is opened from within and yet another obvious criminal type, perhaps Terry Jones dressed as a Chicago era gangster complete with violin case, exits, obviously disgusted. He calls back into the office as he leaves:

JONES: And you can take all your sodding kangaroos and shove them right up your...(JONES realizes he has an audience - pauses, turns to next fellow in line) oh, right, sorry, yes, you can go in. Good bleeding luck to you!

We see GRAHAM get up and shuffle inside the office. We follow him inside, and see JOHN CLEESE, nattily dressed in a nice business suit, sitting behind a desk that has several file folders scattered around on it. There is an empty chair in front of the desk. CLEESE waves GRAHAM into it.

CLEESE: I don't see what's so damn difficult about some kangaroos... well, then! Hallo! Good to see you! Have a seat. Now, you are...

CHAPMAN: Diggory, sir, an' it please you.

CLEESE: Mf, Diggory, yes, it looks as if you're a bit Diggory indeed! Just tunneled out of some place, did we? Heh heh.

CHAPMAN: Er... yessir... (glances around furtively, in a paranoid fashion) Er... about this job, sir...

CLEESE: Yes, yes. Well. As you've read the advert, you know. What we're looking for here is The Perfect Plan for robbing the Bank of London.

CHAPMAN: Yessir. (Takes out a small notebook, begins flipping through it. ) Now, what I've got...

CLEESE: Now, you understand, when I say perfect, I mean PERFECT. We'll accept nothing less. Every possible contingency must be catered for well in advance.

CHAPMAN: Uh... yes sir... I think I've covered the waterfront, so to say...

CLEESE: WELL in advance. That's what I'm saying. Every POSSIBLE contingency. You do see, don't you? It's a mad world, after all, and anything can happen, and we don't want to get pinched, do we?

CHAPMAN: Uh... well, yessir. Um... see, by my plan, we need a squad of six men. Three on the drills, three to scoop out the loose rubble...

CLEESE: Ah, so it's a digging plan. Tunnels, eh? A digging plan from Diggory. Well, I'm breathless with anticipation. Do you have details?

CHAPMAN: Yes sir, if you'll look here (leans over desk, shows CLEESE notebook - CLEESE pages through it a bit, ooohs and ahhhs)

CLEESE: Well, this looks very good. VERY good indeed. (CHAPMAN sits back in his chair, looking pleased. ) But, I do have a few questions, about your contingency planning. Now... (CLEESE opens a file folder, picks up a piece of paper, then puts it on the desk and points to a place on it. CHAPMAN leans over to study it. ) Here, you see... this is the main checkpoint, with four guards stationed here at all times. Now I understand you plan to tunnel underneath and avoid the guards all together, and that's just brilliant, really. But... suppose one or two of these guards has gone to the loo, which is down these stairs nearer the vault, and thus, they hear your drills and sound an alarm?

CHAPMAN: Well, sir, my wife and her sister... rather smashing birds, a good bit of the all right, if you know what I mean... they'll be stationed inside the main lobby while we drill, and their job is to keep those guards distracted. And believe you me, they'll have no trouble doing it.

CLEESE: Excellent. (CLEESE replaces the piece of paper in a file folder, opens another folder, studies a piece of paper, then pushes it towards CHAPMAN. ) Very well, let's try this one. Somehow or another, an alarm has been set off and the coppers are on their way. What, if anything, do you do?

CHAPMAN: Ah. Well, sir, my nephew is a bit of a wizard with the electricals, and by that point he would be stationed in the service tunnels just down the thoroughfare. At a signal from me, he would cut several wires, causing all the traffic signals in downtown London to go barmy at once, utterly paralyzing traffic. In the confusion, we would nip off smartly in our miniature helicopter, and be on the beach in Belize before the coppers got their knickers straightened.

CLEESE: Excellent. Yes, just excellent. Well. I can see you've a wonderful plan and have thought it through very well... hmmm. Well. No more of these run of the mill questions for you, let's just... yes. The fellow who was in here before had a lovely scheme, too, but then this one question tripped him up. Shall we try it out on you?

CHAPMAN: I'll 'ave a go, sir, if you please.

CLEESE: Good man. Very well. (Opens file folder, takes out another sheet. ) Jolly good, here it is. Suppose, in the middle of your robbery, a herd of feral kangaroos somehow appears in the vault with you and begins hopping about, you know, rather violently. (CLEESE demonstrates how the kangaroos would hop, with his fingers on the desk.) What would you do?

CHAPMAN: (sits silently)

CLEESE: Come now, man, it isn't that difficult! Feral kangaroos! Dozens of them! Leaping about insanely, cavorting like maddened trolly-mongers all over the beastly place! It's chaos! A right bloody shambles! They're biting you about your bollocks and causing untold havoc! Your whole heist is going pear shaped and lolly doodle all around you! Surely you have some sort of plan!

CHAPMAN: Uh... (pages through notebook) Right, sir, I'm sorry, I just had a little plugged up sinus for a moment there... I'm fine now... let me see... yes, here it is. Out of our six man squad, two men would break away and deploy the large, weighted nets packed along specifically against this contingency... well, against animal incursions in general, I should say. These things will hold anything... maddened alligator, rogue gorilla, enraged terrapin, rabid whelk... they'll do a few feral kangaroos a treat, let me tell you, guv. And while that's being dealt with, the rest of the robbery proceeds smoothly.

CLEESE: Really? Let me see that. (CHAPMAN hands CLEESE the notebook, CLEESE pages through it for a moment. ) Well, this is really quite extraordinary. Wizard! Yes, this is brilliant. BRILLIANT. All right then. I think we may have found our plan. Just one more question.

CHAPMAN: Yes sir?

CLEESE: What... (CLEESE pauses melodramatically for a beat) ...if the sun goes nova?

CHAPMAN: (stares at CLEESE as if CLEESE has lost his mind) I... what if WHAT?

CLEESE: The sun. Goes nova.

CHAPMAN: (stares at CLEESE in utter bewilderment) You're not bloody serious.

CLEESE: EVERY contingency. Must be planned for. WELL in advance. (CLEESE waits a moment. CHAPMAN says nothing, obviously astonished. CLEESE gets up behind desk, walks around to clap CHAPMAN on the shoulder. ) Well, rum luck, then. Thank you SO much for coming by. Send in the next fellow, will you?

CHAPMAN: It... I... wait. You want a plan that takes into account the bloody sun bloody BLOWING UP?

CLEESE: Yes, yes, every contingency... (leans out office door, calling down hall) Next, please...

CHAPMAN: But we'll all be fookin' DEAD, won't we? I mean, if the bloody sun goes nova, then...

CLEESE: (pushing CHAPMAN out door as ERIC IDLE attempts to sidle in past him) Yes, yes, best of luck, do run along, HALLO! Nice to see you, do come in! (CLEESE shoves CHAPMAN out the door, closes it firmly, goes back behind his desk. IDLE sits down. )

CLEESE: All right. Now, look. You have a plan for robbing the Bank of London?

IDLE: Oh, yes sir.

CLEESE: Jolly good. But, see here, my good man. Normally I'd look at your plan and review it and then go over a few contingencies and... but, you see, everyone is getting into a spot of bother a bit later on in the process, with what seems, at least to me, to be some very simple, easily foreseeable... mmmm... glitches, yes. So, would you mind if I just skipped to the tougher inquiries, to save time?

IDLE: Not at all. However you like.

CLEESE. Excellent. Very well. Hmmm. (glances down at paper still on his desk) . So, then... in your plan for robbing the Bank of England... your PERFECT plan... what if the sun goes nova?

IDLE: Ah. In that case, sir, what would happen is, Team Gamma would immediately deploy the experimental Solar Shields. Field testing indicates that these portable radiation filters would provide Teams Alpha and Beta with sufficient protection to complete the robbery in ample time, and get to their escape vehicles. In fact, should the sun go nova, it will actually help the caper, as, you know, all the guards and coppers and such will be too busy screaming and exploding into flames and falling into little heaps of dust to be much bother to us.

CLEESE: (peers with some disbelief, but dawning hope, at IDLE) You... solar shielding? You actually have... you don't find it to be an absurd question?

IDLE: Oh, no sir. The sun could actually go nova at any instant. Crazy world, anything can happen, you know. You have to plan for these things.

CLEESE: Well, then. Hm. (lifts up cover of another file folder furtively, sneaks a glance into it, looks at IDLE, then pounces: ) Feral kangaroos!

IDLE: (waves hand contemptuously) Riot control shotguns, sir, loaded with dense rubber pellets, set to spray over a wide dispersal cone. That'll sort out those rompers in jig time.

CLEESE: (smiling hugely) You give me hope, sir. Hmmm. Let me see. Now, if the guards from the central command post are out of position, say, down near the loo. What would you...?

IDLE: Knock out gas infiltrated into the air conditioning vents five minutes before Teams Alpha, Beta, and Gamma enter the building, sir.

CLEESE: Excellent, excellent. So... going back to the beginning, then... what is your basic plan for getting into the vault? It's a tricky time lock...

IDLE: Er... the vault, sir?

CLEESE: Yes. The vault. Where they keep the money.

IDLE: Well... I... they keep the money in a vault? With a lock and all? Well, that's... hmmm. That's rather hard, sir. I... I hadn't considered that.

CLEESE looks horrified and appalled. Opens his mouth -

THE END.

So we were over at Comic Book World the other day and I picked up a postcard from the counter emblazoned with pictures of characters from something called Approbation Comics, which my wife advises me is a local comic book company. Hey, I'm thinking like the retard I often am, maybe they're looking for writers.

So I get home and I go out to approbationcomics.com and look around. Right on their front page there's a column of links, and among that column of links is one titled JOBS, so I hit JOBS and see the following text:

APPROBATION WORK-FOR-HIRE

It's hard to break into comics (believe us, we know!). There are only so many books and companies on the market and a couple of hundred thousand creators who want to be writers, artists, etc. Of those hundred thousand the hard truth is a majority of the potentials are not ready for professional work. Either they don't have the necessary skills at present time or they are unable to work under a regular deadline and produce quality work.

Now do you still believe you are ready to break into comics? For some this is where doubt may creep in and that's ok. There are places available to help build your abilities and you can return with full confidence. Others may give up right here. Once you give up completely there is no help left. For the few who still want to face this industry now head on, continue reading:

Approbation Comics is a small indy company. We promise to look at each and every submission we receive, but please remember our primary job is to produce comics. Feedback may take the usual 4-6 weeks, or it may take longer depending on our workload. Rest assured if your submission is good enough you will receive a response.

And I'm thinking 'oh FUCK yes, I will hit this place with so many spec scripts they will be picking their teeth with the things, because I have the necessary skills and I have the the ability to work under a deadline and produce quality work and I could even find a way to write that sentence without using the word 'work' twice in the same eight word stretch'.

So then I read further:

We are currently accepting submissions from talented Pencillers, Inkers, Colorists, Painters, and Letterers.

And I'm, like, oh.

This company is run by assholes.

Actually, even at this moment of which I write, I had a sneaking suspicion in the back of my brain that in point of fact, this company isn't really run by assholes.

So I look around a little bit more. This company apparently publishes several different series, which rejoice in titles like CHAOS CAMPUS: SORORITY GIRLS VS ZOMBIES, CHI-SAI (featuring a female ninja sort who looks enormously like Steven Grant's crappy female ninja character Whisper), VAMPIRES UNLIMITED, METAMUTOIDS, and AGENTS OF N.O.V.A., among others.

And... yeah... just as I figured must be true... this company isn't run by assholes. It's run by asshole, singular. Because, from what I can tell, every single title is written by the same guy, whose name happens to be Bart A. Thompson.

No other writers need apply. Nope. Good ol' Bart is just looking for talented pencillers, inkers, colorists, painters, and letterers.

I probably shouldn't call him an asshole. In fact, I frankly admire him. I mean, I would never in a million years have thought of setting up an entire company just to trick... er... lure... um... inveigle... eh... entrap... hm... okay, I mean, provide an opportunity to... talented artists and letterers, to draw and ink and color and letter my scripts.

Mind you, if I had the money to set up my own company where I was the only writer handling all the titles, I would be publishing things with titles like SCORPIO and TEAM VENTURE and PULSAR and FIRE-ANT and PARTISAN and stuff like that... not things called SORORITY GIRLS VS ZOMBIES or VAMPIRES UNLIMITED or METAMUTOIDS. And if I actually had the money to pay people to do creative tasks, I wouldn't be the only writer; I would, at the very least, ask my old buddy Mike Norton if he'd like to write something for me.

But, still, these are minor and trivial quibbles, and there is really no difference between myself and Bart A. Thompson, other than the fact that I can actually write (but have no money to fund my own publishing company) and he has money (but cannot write a lick).

It's always the way, isn't it?

El Pusso Supremo George R.R. Martin snivels in a Live Journal post as follows:

I am, however, getting bloody sick of all the off-topic comments, and the trolls who use any LJ post of mine, regardless of subject, as another excuse to slam me about DANCE being late. I can't stop you from posting such comments, of course... but I can and will remove 'em, and ban the posters. LJ makes that pretty easy, I'm glad to say. And life is too short to deal with trolls.

It is, of course, Whinemeister Georgie's absolute right to delete any messages and ban any person he feels like from commenting on his blog, and I may well have already been banned and don't even know it. But it's interesting to me that Prince Hissy-Fit has chosen to typify as 'off topic' anyone who 'slams' him for being late with A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, a volume originally promised for (I believe) 2002, and whose current excerpt/sample, on his blog, carries a 2004 copyright date.

In other words, the book itself is five years late, and even the SAMPLE he has up was written three years ago.

Beyond that, while Martin has certainly seen some success over the years with his other writing projects, I have to assume that the phenomenal success of the ICE AND FIRE series has put more money in his pocket since the late 90s than every other project he has ever been paid for... perhaps even, combined.

All of which means, complaints that the latest installment of his book are late can never be 'off topic', because the completely unacceptable tardiness of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is absolutely the only germane subject when it comes to George R.R. Martin right now, and it is absolutely the only topic he should be concerning himself with.

Martin clearly doesn't like that, but what he likes and does not like is entirely beside the point. We ICE AND FIRE fans are the people who are paying his bills, and WE are the ones who will decide what is 'off topic' and what isn't, and he has only himself to blame for it. All his bullshit about the new NFL season, or whether or not there will ever be ICE AND FIRE miniatures or an ICE AND FIRE movie or when the next WILD CARDS anthology will come out, is stupid and pointless and, by definition, 'off topic'. He needs to be working on ICE AND FIRE. He needs to be doing that exclusively until the fucker is completed, or until he announces that he gives up and there will never be a finished ICE AND FIRE series.

It's interesting that he seems to think this attitude makes me a 'troll', though.

I've often pondered how one would legitimately define the word 'troll' in its Internet context, as it seems to largely be a word that means whatever a certain person is pointing to at the time, in terms of comments on a blog or other message board. I've been called a troll many, many times, and what I get from that usage is, a 'troll' is anyone who posts anything to any website that the owner/operator of said website doesn't want to read or be troubled with.

This seems to be the definition the perpetually tardy (and pissy about it) George R.R. Martin is using. He's tired of having people chide him about how late A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is, and he's certainly not going to bring the topic up, so anyone who does is off topic, and a troll, and he'll delete said off topic comments and ban said trolls from his site.

Still, I'd like to think that if intelligent, well meaning people of good intent got together to discuss the issue, they could come up with a more objective definition of the world 'troll' than simply 'anybody who posts anything I don't like on my website'.

It seems to me that if a necessary component of 'trolling' is personal invective. Someone who talks about a professional's work product, or about whatever the topic of a particular blog or a particular blog entry is, without lapsing into insults aimed at the blogger him or herself, is probably not a troll. Unless, of course, the person only seems to be hanging around a particular blog for purposes of being contrary... but even there, I think being a 'troll' is something beyond simply being unpleasant. I think, to really qualify as a troll, you have to be deliberately trying to fuck with someone (or someones) because it gives you personal pleasure to fuck with them.

Now, I do not doubt that Martin has many angry fans out there (I'm certainly one of them) and maybe a few of them have become so resentful that they would, indeed, qualify as 'trolls' by this definition... but honestly, I doubt it. There's little point to fucking with Martin simply for the fun of it; most of us who are screaming loudest at him to FINISH THE FUCKING BOOK FOR THE LOVE OF SWEET BABY JEBUS are people who are avid admirers of Martin's work. We don't want to fuck with him; we want him to finish the goddam book... and then write the next one... and the one after that.

And this is hardly out of line. If Martin didn't want to have hundreds of thousands of people screaming for the next ICE AND FIRE volume, he should either (a) not have written the first three so well and/or (b) have been professional enough about his writing to get the subsequent volumes out in a timely fashion.

Thus and so, Martin typifying every comment he gets in regard to DRAGONS' lateness as 'off topic', and everyone who posts such comments as 'trolls', is just more self indulgent petulance from a man so massively unprofessional that he not only can't finish a particular book in five solid years, but he's willing to blame everyone else for this personal and professional failure but himself... especially the people whose money he's been taking this whole time, and whose money he will continue to take, not just when he finally finishes the next installment, but whenever someone decides to market yet another ICE AND FIRE line of merchandise.

At first, last, and always, here are the only words George R.R. Martin welcomes from his fans -- slobbering, sycophantic adulation of the most utterly nauseating persuasion... and his own name filled in after PAY TO THE ORDER OF.

Anything else is off topic, and anyone offering it is a troll.

I gotta think, George R.R. Martin's reality must be just loaded to the gunwales with trolls, these days.

...I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

There's this guy I know that, every time he hears the word 'parent' in the same sentence with my name, he snorts in derision.

As it happens, he is my wife's ex husband... my children's biological father.

In the past, mostly from this guy and whoever he happens to be dating at the time, I've heard aspersions on my ability to parent, based on things like my income, my education level, my hobbies, and my ability (or lack thereof) to drive.

This is all, I suppose, fair enough. I am not a biological parent; should I die tonight in my sleep, I will do so without having passed my particular genes along to a new generation. If people out there want to believe that loving children, caring for children, sharing your life constantly with children, supporting children, putting your own wants and needs and desires secondary to those of the children you live with, always, is still in some way inadequate to qualify one for the term parent -- if, in fact, these folks insist that the only way one gets to be parent is through gene donation -- then, fine, I'm not a parent. Not a REAL one.

But not so very long ago, my then-seven year old step-daughter came into the bedroom I share with her mother and said, apologetically, that she'd just thrown up, and she had tried really hard, but she hadn't quite been able to make it to the bathroom. And my wife needs her sleep, as she gets up at 5:30 every morning so she can take the kids to school before she takes herself to work. (I generally get up with her, but after they're all off I get to go back to bed.)

So I got up.

Now, let me tell you, I was expecting maybe a little pool of throw up, somewhere near the toilet. I was rather astonished and appalled to find our entire hallway leading to the bathroom splattered and splashed with reddish-maroon puke, much of it pressed into the linoleum in little kid-shaped footprints. That hallway looked like fifteen 7 year olds had spent an afternoon beating on a pinata full of vomit in it. It looked like an entire 2nd grade class had a puke-balloon fight in it.

So I sighed, and cleaned it up, and cleaned up my daughter, if I'm to be allowed to refer to her in that regard, and changed the sheets and blankets on her bed, and got her a drink of water, and kissed her on the forehead, and put her back to sleep.

I may not be a real parent. But I swear to God, after nights like last night, and days like today where I washed all the soiled laundry from the vomit festival last night, I really feel like one.

Also, if I'm not a real parent, could an actual Real Parent out there somewhere give me a rebate on the several thousand bucks I've spent on these kids that are not really mine over the past couple of years? I'd really appreciate that.

Thanks.

So, after what seems like an entire adulthood spent loathing the Harry Potter franchise on spec, I've finally sat down and hacked my way through the first Harry Potter book.

It was not by any means anything I'd call a pleasure, although I had vague hopes when I started that it would prove otherwise and it would turn out that I'd been wrong to hate the entire franchise from a distance so much for so long.

I finally sat down to read the goddam thing dutifully, out of a sense of long overdue moral obligation. As a man who has despised everything about Harry Potter since the first book was published, entirely by osmosis, I decided I might as well actually read one of the fucking things, to see if my entirely negative opinion of all things Potter was in any way justified by the source material itself.

Now, as I said, I was at least faintly hoping to be pleasantly surprised. And unfortunately, I was not. I will say this, though... reading the book out of a sense of ethical obligation is strangely appropriate to the text itself, because it seems to me that it was written in much the same manner. Which is to say, at least in the first book in the series, J.K. Rowling writes as if she's cleaning a toilet. It's a nasty and unpleasant job, and she'd rather be doing any number of other things, but by God, that toilet needs to be cleaned, so she's going to do it.

Rowling shows neither flair nor talent for manipulating the written word in this novel. Neither does she seem to have a particularly fine or sophisticated grasp of story structure, plot, characterization, or exposition. Her dialogue frankly sucks, her writing style, such as it is, contains nowhere within it so much as a subatomic particle of grace or wit, and she badly, badly needs someone with authority, somewhere, to bar her from ever, ever, EVER inventing another world-specific proper noun again.

None of her world specific name coinages work well. Every once in a while she comes up with something that is more or less adequate to the task she sets it -- Slytherin, for example, isn't a terrible name for group of kids who are all destined to one day be evil sorcerers (although, in all honesty, if every sorcerer who eventually goes bad is always a Slytherin, why not start, like, teaching all the Slytherin kids crappy magic? Or just drowning them?).  But even here there's nothing even remotely subtle; you hear the phrase 'Slytherin' and if it doesn't strike you that there's something vaguely sinister there, then you were most likely shocked to be told that that guy Grimas Wormtongue was a bad 'un, too.

Voldemort isn't a terrible name for a villain, either. It ain't great. But it works okay.

Yet, for every made up phrase or proper noun she comes up with that kinda-sorta works okay, albeit in a halting, stumbling, haphazard fashion, there are eighteen more that are just retarded. Gringrott's? Who the fuck is going to bank at a place that sounds like a toe fungus? Hufflepuff? C'mon, she stole this from the Three Little Pigs; how is that supposed to be cool? Hogwarts? Seriously, you want me to go to school at a place called Hogwarts? It sounds like something that's resistant to penicillin. Knuts? Knuts? Do I even have to describe how hard I'd have to be struck in the head and just how fucking brain damaged I'd have to be as a result before I ever let myself refer to a bunch of coins in my pocket, even to myself, as Knuts? Fuck all that.

Probably the worst name Rowland ever came up with, though, is one that's all through this franchise -- not quite as common as Hogwarts (a phrase which, honest to jebus, makes me wince every time I hear or read it), but one that's pretty well traveled nonetheless -- Dumbledore. I mean, hello? The wisest of the wise, everybody's magical mentor, the Gandalf, the Obi Wan Kenobi, the Professor X of the entire Harry Potter universe... and he sounds like he flaps his gigantic ears to fly. Seriously, what the eff was Rowland thinking?

Now, I knew she came up with crappy, stupid sounding names and phrases before I ever picked up the book; I got all that just from living in a world packed to the rafters with insane, drooling Harry Potter fans. I guess I was just hoping that, once I saw these dumbass phrases in their original context, they'd seem better, somehow.

Well, so much for that.

Here's the thing, though. I know it's extremely picky of me, but, well, even within a fantasy context, I still like my fictional worlds to make some kind of sense. Now, I understand what Rowland is trying to do here... she wants to create a world that is very similar to ours, but in which various fantasy elements (like magic, and magic users, and magical creatures) also exist. Rather than integrate these fantasy elements into our more mundane reality, which would create an entirely different sort of culture and society and world for everyone to live in, she wants to keep this all separate... so she can have the real world we all live in and are familiar with, but, at the same time, have all these fabulous fantasy elements that only a select few actually know about and interact with.

It's a great gimmick. Probably the most appealing thing about the books is this distinction between Muggles and Magical Folk, especially since it's pretty much designed to make any loyal Harry Potter fan feel superior to anyone not initiated into the inner mysteries... a Muggle, as it were.

As an aside, one reason I've always largely loathed Harry Potter is an unpleasant experience I had back in 1999 -- I think -- with a fellow temporary employee I was forced to interact with during a brief clerical assignment at an insurance office in Tampa. This fellow saw me reading something geekish -- I couldn't tell you what it was now -- on a break and decided to befriend me. However, upon learning that I'd never read a Harry Potter book, and had no desire to borrow any of his so I could remedy this grievous character flaw, he began to berate me by saying "Well, you're just a Muggle. Huh haw, huh haw! You don't know what that means, but that's because you're a Muggle! Huh haw, huh haw! You're a Muggle!"

Actually, I did know what the phrase 'Muggle' meant, because I'd read about the Harry Potter phenemenon by that time, and the word had been prominently mentioned in the articles I'd read. But I didn't bother to argue with him, I merely tried to ignore him as best I could for the remainder of the time I had to work with him... which wasn't easy, because he liked his own 'joke' so much that he compulsively repeated it, along with braying spasms of near hysterical laughter, every time he saw me after that. I think it was probably one of the deepest disappointments of this fellow's life to that time, that he couldn't get anyone else working the assignment to start calling me "Muggle", too.

Now, I'm very familiar with the phenomena of spurious elitism. It's a malady many of my geekish brethren fall victim to, and it's understandable. Many geeks are outcasts and rejects, living on the fringes of normal society because they are conventionally unattractive, or sometimes simply so gauche and otherwise socially clueless as to be intolerable to anyone who isn't also an outcast. For such people, the chance to be an expert in anything has a powerful draw, and the more obscure their area of expertise is, the more superior to non-experts they feel. I've had similar experiences to the one I described above with fellow geeks whose 'expertise' lay in other fringe areas... Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: the Gathering, superhero comics in general, the occult... any time someone has learned a lot of trivia about something that most people just don't give a shit about, there's a danger they will become insufferably arrogant about it... as if the fact that they can (mis)quote reams of Monty Python or Dr. Who dialogue for hours on end somehow makes them superior to people who have actually had real sexual intercourse with partners who were living, conscious, willing, and human, all at the same time.

Chronic to geekdom though this condition may be, I will say this -- I have never seen a subgrouping of geeks more prone to spurious elitism than Harry Potter fans. They all seem to have embraced the concept of being a "non-Muggle" with the avidity of a Templar snatching up the One True Holy Grail, and while it is certainly correct that few Harry Potter fans I have known have been remotely as rude about the whole Muggle thing as the guy I mention above, nonetheless, it seems to me that nearly all devoted fans of Harry cherish, in their heart of hearts, the notion that they themselves are certainly intrinsically and undeniably superior to mere Muggles.

Which brings us back to my affection for fantasy worlds that make actual internal sense: Here's something about Harry Potter's reality I do not understand -- why is the 'wizarding world' (yet another truly horrible phrase coinage) kept secret from the Muggles?

When Harry asks this question of Hagrid in the volume I'm reading, he is told that if Muggles knew about magic, they would expect magical solutions to all their problems. The implication is, providing magical solutions to Muggle problems is bad, and therefore, the very existence of magic and magic users must be kept secret from these tiresomely needy Muggles. Otherwise, one supposes, wizards and witches would be kept busy feeding the hungry, curing cancer, disarming nuclear weapons, coming up with cheap power sources, fixing global warming, ending wars, and all that crazy bullshit, and wouldn't have any time to sit around in magical pubs drinking magical ale and sending each other magical mash notes via magical owls.

Obviously, this explanation troubles me. This is very much like saying that people who don't know how to blow glass aren't allowed to have incandescent bulbs in their homes, and if you can't construct a central processing unit from copper wire and cadmium chips, you have no right to access the Internet. Magic, like applied engineering and basic scientific knowledge, is a field of human knowledge whose primary purpose is problem solving (or it would be if it actually existed). You shouldn't need to be able to cast a spell to benefit from the existence of working, functional sorcery, any more than you should need to be able to wire your house before you enjoy the benefits of electricity.

Now, I'm only 3/4s of a the way through the first book, and I don't even know if I'm going to finish this one, much less essay another, so it's very possible that at some point someone smarter than Hagrid may provide Harry with a much more intelligent reason why 'the wizarding world' keeps its existence entirely secret from all the Muggles.

Still, I doubt it. I think the reason is exactly as presented -- wizards are a bunch of stuck up, preening pricks who don't want to be bothered using their magical powers to help improve the existence of a bunch of worthless stupid good for nothing Muggles. Not that fans of the franchise will object to that, since it seems to be pretty much how they feel about Muggles, too.

Now, having said all this, I don't think there's much of anything wrong with the Harry Potter franchise that couldn't be cured by someone with actual writing talent. Neil Gaiman would probably write a terrific Harry Potter novel. I just don't think J.K. Rowling has managed it yet... or, at least, she didn't with the first one, which is likely all I'm going to read.

Hrm.  On further thought, Neil Gaiman has already written a terrific Harry Potter novel; it was called THE BOOKS OF MAGIC and it was a graphic novel set in the DC Universe featuring a character named Tim Hunter who was very much like Harry Potter and which was published, I'm pretty sure, some time before Rowland came out with Harry Potter. 

Odd, that...

One further note -- it's extremely difficult for me to accept that anyone as beloved of the entire 'wizarding world' as Harry Potter is, would be allowed to be raised in an environment as emotionally abusive as the Dursley home. I mean, you're wizards, you can do all this amazing shit (with BROOMS! and MAGIC WANDS! arrrrrggggghhhhhh) you love this kid beyond all sanity or reason, Voldemort has apparently died or gone into hiding somewhere, and you have no respect whatsoever for Muggle laws or Muggle customs -- and yet, you let the Dursleys treat Harry like dogshit for ten years? (Yeah, I'm talking to YOU, Dumbledore -- hang your head in shame, you child abandoning bitch, you).

Difficult though it is for me to accept that state of events, however, it is absolutely impossible for me to believe that Harry could have come out of that formative experience with anything like the personality Rowling describes him as having. This kid has spent his entire life up through the age of 11 without the slightest shred of affection or approval, being locked up in closets, beaten up, slapped around, berated, humiliated, degraded, and neglected, the last of which is the best he can ever hope for. This poor little bastard has lived in hell every minute of every day for the first ten years of his life, and you're telling me that a gigantic hairy guy with a magic umbrella shows up one day, and suddenly, Harry becomes this sweet lovable affectionate noble courageous heroic emotionally well balanced and mentally healthy kid?

There's no fucking way. Realistically, the first book in this series should have been titled Harry Potter, Very Nearly A Serial Killer; swear to God, this poor little prick would have been torturing every cat he could get his hands on since he was six years old. Give Harry Potter, Boy Sociopath a magic wand and show him how to use it, and as soon as he gets a chance, he's going to be walking around downtown London blasting random passersby into cinders and giggling hysterically while he does it.

AFTER he turns the entire Dursley family into Monterey Jack and runs them through a gigantic magical cheese slicer, I mean.

Anyway. Maybe the series does get better, at some point, but it's going to have to do it without me. I'm done.

Here's something that, while I've kind of known it for years, I suspect, in some vague, incoherent, mostly instinctual way, I only recently fully and cogently articulated to myself:

The primary difference between the left and the right is:  tolerance.

Like I said, I think I always knew this -- you certainly are sure you always did as you read that right now -- but it never came as clear to me before I typed that response.

The conservative viewpoint is a great many things, but boiled down, it is Us Vs. Them. It is tribalism run rampant. It is xenophobia honed down to a monofilament edge, distilled out into 200 proof white lightning in a clay jug. It is intolerance with bells and whistles and snow chains and four wheel drive and a great big M60 machine gun mounted in the truck bed.

Conservatives love the fight. Any fight. It's why they're constantly stroking off over whatever conflict we happen to be in right now, or if we're not, that they want us to get into right now. It's why every battle the U.S. fights is The Next Global War With All Civilization At Stake. It's why they talk about World War V. (The Cold War, you see, was World War III, and then the first Gulf War was World War IV, and our current mass terrorist attack on a few thousand guys with homemade bombs and several million innocent Arabic bystanders is World War V.  It makes perfect sense, if you're completely insane.)

It's why everything with them is war, war, war, all the time, time, time.

Because when We're At War, Citizen, the essential conservative ideology kinda-sorta makes sense... well, it comes as close as it's ever going to, anyway.

At base, conservatives hate it when someone says "well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree". They cannot tolerate the idea of tolerance, they refuse to co exist with co-existence, and the only good person with a dissenting viewpoint from theirs is a dead person with a dissenting viewpoint from theirs.

They enjoy it when it's Emergency Time and the shells are flying overhead and it's Life or Death, Kill or Be Killed, A Man Wearing A Turban Is An Enemy -- Shoot! Because in times like that, dissent really is treason, wanting to tolerate other points of view really is dangerous weakness, and liberals really are yellow bellied enemy collaborators... or at least, that's how it seems to them it not only should be, but it MUST be, If Civilization And The American Way Of Life Are To Survive And Flourish.

It's absolutely nuts, but at base, we are all conservatives. We all hate people who disagree with us, we all wish they'd just shut up, and sometimes they get us so mad with their goddam alternative viewpoints and non-mainstream opinions that we want to kill them. That's the little kid in all of us, who just wants his or her way, right now, right now, RIGHT NOW, and who can't understand why it can't be that way all the time.

Liberals drive conservatives nuts, because basically, we are grown ups.  We insist on tolerating dissenting points of view. We demand civil liberties for everybody, even the people we find reprehensible and vile. That's not the conservative way; conservatives believe that freedom of speech is only for the people who agree with them.

Here's the problem conservatives have when they live in an even remotely free society -- freedom is a liberal concept. The basis of freedom is tolerance -- I tolerate your choices as long as they don't interfere with my choices, and you do the same for me. Conservatives find this infuriating and baffling. The conservative concept of freedom is that, yeah, everyone should be free to do whatever they want, as long as whatever they want to do is decent and proper and doesn't offend God or the neighbors or vary in any particular way from the acceptable mainstream that me and my buddies all enthusiastically inhabit.

The concept that people should only be free to do whatever they want if whatever they want is the same as what everyone else wants is not freedom at all. That's compulsory mass conformity, and the only way you get that in any sizable group of human beings is by having some of them point guns at the rest of them. Which, again, is why conservatives like wartime so much, because if it's wartime, you get to point the guns at the people you don't like. Disobedience of an order during wartime is punishable by summary execution, soldier. Fall in, stand at attention, and march where you're told, by God, or we've got a bullet and a bodybag with your name on them.

It's not that they WANT to be so strict, mind you, but otherwise, you risk destroying morale. Can't have that. We're at WAR.

It is most likely the reason we are at a perpetual disadvantage in this kind of social or cultural conflict. By our nature we believe in tolerating those who are different from us, even the really stupid, bigoted, close minded and hateful ones. And we keep reaching out and saying "Hey, can't we all just get along?" But conservatives have no desire to get along with liberals. They just want us to agree with them -- OR DIE!

It's why Republican dominated Congresses have no trouble punishing their Democratic minorities with childish measures straight out of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, but Democrat dominated Congresses have a hard time doing the same thing back. We want to rise above the mean spirited impulse. We want to get out of the gutter. We want to elevate the discourse. We want to be civil, to start over, to make things work.

Conservative are happy to let liberals do all that, too... when liberals have the upper hand. But never ever expect the same consideration in return; that's not consistent with the conservative mindset.

If there's a resolution to this conunddrum, it lies (believe it or not) in the wisdom of Sean Hannity. Long, long ago -- well, back when Clinton was still in office and Fox News still viewed itself as something of a radical underground -- Hannity said something about liberals that went roughly like this -- you can live next to them, you can work with them, you can be friends with them -- you simply can never, under any circumstances, let them have any kind of real power.

That's exactly true, but it's true of conservatives, not liberals. You can housebreak them, dress them up, take them out places. You can have them over for a beer and some barbecue, work side by side with them, go to your kid's soccer games with them... as long as you're in charge. As long as liberalism is in the ascent, conservatives are willing to deal, because the last thing in the world they want is to remind us just how badly they kick us around when the shoe is on the other foot.

But having won this election, we must never, never, never lose another one. We must never, never, never allow conservatives to be in charge again. Conservatives like war, conservatives hate tolerance, conservatives are vindictive, and mean, and short sighted, and greedy, and deeply, deeply xenophobic.

They are the worst in all of us, and we cannot ever let them run our world again.

Okay, so my wife had this great idea for doing a list of movies that start with each letter of the alphabet, only in this case, trying to pick all ROTTEN movies instead of your favorites. And she did a great job, which doesn't surprise me and shouldn't surprise you.

But on her list, she mentioned that 'a few guys she knows' would have liked to see a particular film listed at her F spot, but she felt it was necessary to put that stinker of a FLINTSTONES movie in there instead.

I shan't argue with her; there are doubtless many films worse than the movie she referred to, and some of them also start with an F, no doubt. 

And  yet... and yet...

Given the givens, I cannot help but feel motivated by my wife's omission of this particular movie from her own alphabetized Rotten Movies List to post my own, similar, list. A list that contains what I consider to be some truly, truly awful material produced within the medium of film. Not the worst ever, no, the hands down all time champeen Worst Movie That Ever Has, Ever Will, or Ever Could Exist, is irrefutably SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, which my wife already listed. Yet, while S4:QFP is without a doubt the worst, most unthinkably horrible shitastic abomination ever captured on celluloid, it has one advantage over this other stinkbomb my wife omitted in favor of FLINTSTONES -- nobody likes it. Nobody thinks it's great. Nobody ever puts it on their lists of Favorite Movies or The Best Movies Ever Made. And, especially, nobody, but NObody, ever calls SUPERMAN IV 'Capraesque'.

All of which I have seen other people do with this other movie, this horrifying artifact of celluloid whose name begins with F, and which should never, never, never, under any circumstances, be listed on any sentient being's Favorite Movies list, or Best Movies Ever made list, or, especially, described by any person with more than a single digit IQ as 'Capraesque'.  

Bearing all that in mind, here is my list of Wretched, Wretched Films for each letter of the alphabet:

*A FIELD OF DREAMS film festival

*Boy, does FIELD OF DREAMS ever suck

*Cetaceans won't watch FIELD OF DREAMS because they're way smarter than we are

*Doc Nebula would happily throw a burning torch into a great big pile of kerosene drenched celluloid composed of every existing copy of FIELD OF DREAMS

*Ewwwwww, FIELD OF DREAMS

*FIELD OF DREAMS sucks sucks sucks

*Goddam FIELD OF DREAMS

*Hulk smash FIELD OF DREAMS (please, please)

*Idiots prance about ululating about how Capraesque FIELD OF DREAMS is

*Jesus Christ I can't believe what a craptastical suckapalooza FIELD OF DREAMS is

*Kill without mercy whoever first conceived the notion of filming FIELD OF DREAMS

*Lick me, FIELD OF DREAMS fans

*Mulch every existent copy of FIELD OF DREAMS, and then immerse the mulch in acid

*Nuke FIELD OF DREAMS until it glows, then piss on it in the dark

*Oh HELL no you can't ever make me watch FIELD OF DREAMS again

*Punch FIELD OF DREAMS right in the throat

*Quash resolutely any attempt to ever show FIELD OF DREAMS anywhere at any time

*Riot in the streets before watching FIELD OF DREAMS

*Say, FIELD OF DREAMS is bilious tripe

*Tomorrow, FIELD OF DREAMS will still be a shitty, shitty movie

*Under no circumstances imaginable is FIELD OF DREAMS worth watching

*Violence is never an appropriate response to anything except someone trying to make you watch FIELD OF DREAMS

*Winged monkeys attack FIELD OF DREAMS!

*X-rays reveal that the extraordinary suckitude of FIELD OF DREAMS pierces all known dimensions

*Zatanna, saying "eivom taerg a si SMAERD FO DLEIF" could still not make FIELD OF DREAMS into even a vaguely palatable movie, much less a good one

There.

Oversight corrected.

A lot of reality shows parade across the various TVs in my home these days. Back when I was single I rarely watched TV at all, mostly, I suppose, because I never had cable until I moved in with SuperWife (then SuperGirlfriend) but also because to me, a TV is largely a monitor for whatever technology I hook up to it that shows me movies.

I love movies, I hate most TV.

And the TV I hate above all other TV is reality TV.

There really isn't any reality TV that doesn't fill me with the warm sweet urge to empty a full clip of ammo into the television screen, but even amongst the intellectual and creative wasteland that is reality TV, there are pockets of horror that transcend the normal horrors of the banal, arid, and sterile genre. Such pockets go by names like ROCK OF LOVE, or I LOVE MONEY, or pretty much anything that features a family we're supposed to find fascinating because apparently the parents either refuse to make responsible use of birth control or are too stupid to figure out how.

But even with all of these, well, I generally figure that the one saving grace of reality TV, if it can be said to have one, which is probably doubtful, is that everyone involved in these horrifying shows is there voluntarily. In fact, they line up by the stadiums-full in hopes of being singled out for the wonderful privilege of being humiliated, insulted, and abused on national TV.

And I figure, if they're that stupid, well, they get what they get.

Still, the longer I live, it seems, the shorter the list of People I Do Not Want To Kill With A Chainsaw becomes.

Stacy London and/or Clinton Kelly, of the TLC reality show WHAT NOT TO WEAR, are definitely not on that list.

I've occasionally gotten glimpses of this show as others in my family have avidly perused it. And the brief glances I've had before I flee, fuming and muttering, from the room have always infuriated me.

These two morons London and Kelly, who have somehow gained the apparently unshakable and nearly criminal delusion that their opinions of what other people choose to clothe themselves with actually matter in some meaningful way, essentially walk the Earth like Cain in KUNG FU, seeking out poor hapless dumbasses who fail to dress they way these buttheads think is proper. Having found a victim, these twittering shitbags then prance about snarkily for the next several days, belittling and badgering their chosen target over said target's taste in clothing, after which they destroy every item of clothing their current victim owns and replace them with a batch of froo froo crap that looks like the sort of thing a human version of Barbie or Ken might wear, if we presume Barbie or Ken is homosexual, was raised by retarded preppies, and is so neurotically insecure that upon being braced by a couple of fashion Nazis who have apparently been spying on him/her without his/her permission for the last several weeks and who want to invade his/her closet and destroy all his/her shit, he/she doesn't immediately smash both their larynxes with the heels of either hand and then coolly watch these fuckwipes choke to death on their own thin, inbred blood.

I hated this show when I thought the poor cretins who were taking this abuse were actually volunteers, as seems to be the case with every other reality show. But yesterday my children informed me that on WHAT NOT TO WEAR, the people singled out to have their fashion sense forcibly upgraded are not, in fact, volunteers... they are folks whose relatives and friends have sent in their names to the producers of WHAT NOT TO WEAR, after which, cretins London and Kelly film them surreptitiously for days or weeks to establish exactly how poorly they dress, prior to walking up to them and saying "Surprise, you don't know how to dress yourself, we're going to insult and abuse you on TV!"

It amazes me that nobody has killed these little shits yet.

Amazes, and appalls, and disappoints me.

As I say, there are other reality shows that are nearly as horrific as WHAT NOT TO WEAR.  But at least when Bret Michaels starts to get a little twitchy, he doesn't send his roadies out to kidnap a tour bus full of trailer trash bimbos whose names, addresses, and photos were forwarded to him by their cretinous families.  At least the dimwits on any given season of SURVIVOR weren't press ganged  after being unwittingly signed up for involuntary exile by their in-laws.   At least all those evolutionary dead ends on I LOVE MONEY or THE BACHELOR or BEAUTY AND THE GEEK  or TOOL ACADEMY went into their particular ordeals under their own steam. 

And at least, you know, they're allowed to keep their favorite clothes after appearing on the frickin' shows.  

I've got a funny uncle. Occasionally, he sends me email forwards -- raving right wing/conservative crackpot stuff, usually with the latest Limbaugh/Hannity/Coulter lunatic distortions or outright lies emblazoned front and center in all bolded full capitals bullet points. Stuff about all the people Bill and Hillary Clinton have had assassinated to cover up her lesbian love affairs, and how the New World Order is going to steal your baby and raise him up to be a liberal Muslim suicide bomber, and all that shit. You know the drill, I'm sure.

Yesterday, he sent me an email that linked to this page, advising me that he had joined The Resistance, and he hoped I would, too.

I... you know, it's... they... you couldn't...

There are no words. Really. The English language isn't adequate to express how I feel about this. But, what the hell, I got a blog, and like Gene Kelly, I gotta dance:

12 years of Republican dominance in Congress (1994 to 2006), with another two years (the last two) of a nominally Democrat controlled Congress where Republicans still managed to obstruct, stall, and filibuster any and all meaningful reform Democrats tried to enact. The stolen Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, the insanely triumphant cackling and self righteous "Iz you a patriot or iz you ain't" shrilling of the far right blogosphere, the far right 'intellectuals', the far right talking heads on FOX and MSNBC and CNN, the far right whatever. Watching Karl Rove smirk and Ann Coulter strut and Rush Limbaugh posture and Bill O'Reilly preen, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

18 years of Gingrich, DeLay, Hastert, Foley, Santorum, Craig, any number of Bushes, and Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, relentless, ubiquitous Cheney, who somehow managed to be everywhere at once and nowhere at all, from his 'undisclosed location', with a smoking shotgun over one shoulder and a great big F bomb perpetually rolling off his oily, evil tongue. And who is managing it even better now; who is currently, to misquote an old credit card commercial, everywhere we don't want  him to be.

Has it all been worth it?

Is this, at long last, our reward, for gritting our teeth and putting our heads down and somehow trudging our way through the last near-20 years of systematic corruption and corporate/government abuses like a farmer up to his chest in chickenshit and pig vomit? Did we go through all that just so we can watch as the entire conservative movement goes into a screaming shrieking spasm of Cheyne-Stokes respiration, as they undergo a complete and utter meltdown when finally, irrefutably, inarguably, a wearied, disgusted majority of the American people catches up with the rest of the civilized world by unequivocably standing up and saying "You know what, we're really tired of your stupid bullshit"?

Three ruined nations, a shattered world economy, a wrecked and poisoned global biosphere, a destroyed public education system, a thoroughly corrupted and debauched media, a body count of innocent victims running into the millions... these are just some of the costs of doing business for the last two decades of grotesque Republican fearmongering, profiteering, and assets plundering.

Watching from the sidelines as our Republican leaders and their avid, barking, jackel-like cheerleaders Search and Replaced "truth and justice" with "spin and corruption", "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" with "depraved indifference to human life"... as they turned the American dream into an American nightmare, as they sacked two foreign countries and gutted the underlying principles and fundamental economy of our own, slaughtering millions and smearing our national psyche not only with blood, sweat, and tears, but also with pus, snot, and shit... a million or more shattered lives, exchanged knowingly for a few hundred bloated, smirking plutocrats, cackling as they dive into their vaultfuls of gore-stained, bomb-blackened, bulletholed greenbacks.

Hell, what's a little... or a lot... of innocent viscera spattered across a great big mountain of currency? In the end it all still spends. Hold your nose, wipe it off on the shirt you stole off someone else's back, and stuff it in your wallet. Nothing wrong here. Move along.

It is worth it, now that we've finally emerged on the other side of that long bloody tunnel?

Of course not. Nothing could make the non-stop parade of corruption, slaughter, and degradation the Republicans have enacted for the last eighteen years worth it, but sure as Bill O'Reilly loves him some loufahs, it's fun to watch the little sonsofbitches running in circles frothing and foaming and pawing at the air now.

It's not worth it, by no means is any of it worth it, I'd give it all up in a heartbeat for a chance to go back to Florida in 2000 and cast a different vote... but, in the absence of that option, well, I'll sit back and enjoy what I see spread out before me at the moment. Which is to say, the magnificent vista of 55 million right wing nutjobs who voted for McCain, flopping around in the bottom of the boat like stunned, asphyxiating trout, eyes popping, gills heaving, tails flapping in furious indignation as suddenly they realize that the out of control executive powers they happily bestowed on one of their own are about to pass into the hands of a goddam socialist liberal Democrat... who isn't even Caucasian.

Which brings us back to my 'funny uncle', and the funny, funny stuff he emails me sometimes.

So, he's joined The Resistance.

The Patriotic, Resilient, Conservative Resistance.

As an American citizen, while he will show respect to President-elect Obama, (yeah, right) he still opposes the far-Left and socialistic elements that comprise the centerpiece of President Obama's agenda. He recognizes that it will take a patriotic and resilient Citizen Resistance to block implementation of this agenda and he joins with others who oppose these threats to our liberties.

Proudly, no doubt. Head held high, eyes feverishly gleaming in the dawn's early light, modern day musket-equivalent (probably an XM-8, if he can come up with the scratch, or a Vietnam era surplus Kalashnikov, still readily available virtually everywhere, if he can't) belligerently brandished before him. Ready to fight, shoot, kill, and die... or, at the very least, to type viciously into his DSL connection and forward a whole lot of really idiotic spam while clenching his teeth heroically and patriotically, to protect America from President-elect Obama's far Left and socialist agenda.

And what, exactly, is this far left, Socialist agenda? Well, let's check it out together.

Specifically, my crazy ass uncle resists:

Socialistic wealth redistribution including any and all tax increases and big-government welfare programs.

Here's what I love. When rich motherfuckers increase their already insanely bloated personal bankrolls by cheating and robbing and bilking and scamming the poor desperate working folk whose toil actually produces the wealth that the super-wealthy so avidly and avariciously enjoy, we call that free market capitalism, and the rabid right wing worships it as something near-divine, an inspiration handed down from on high by Almighty Jeebus himself.

When somebody comes along and says "Let's straighten out the tax code so that the wealthy pay something kind of remotely approaching what should be their fair share for the ongoing upkeep of this country, and let's make sure that instead of most of those taxes going into some wealthy private defense contractor's pockets, we put a good chunk of it into public entitlement programs, and public education, and other things that would benefit the non-wealthy working class", well, jesus christ! It's time to posse up; the commies are comin' for our guns and our wimmen-folk.

The rich perpetually picking the pockets of the poor? That's okay, in fact, that's God given, it is, in the words of one of the Republican's most favored sons, The Way Things Ought To Be. The poor getting some of their money back from the rich? Insanity! Take to the streets!

Silencing conservatives through the Fairness Doctrine and other efforts that restrict free speech.

The Fairness Doctrine says, if you're using a public trust like the public airwaves, which the government regulates and licenses in the name of the people, and if you're going to spend a certain amount of time promulgating one extremist point of view, you have to give those who wish to promulgate opposing viewpoints equal time. Will this ruin conservative talk radio? I can only hope. In all honesty, though, I can't see why it should. If a radio station wants to give Rush Limbaugh 4 hours of airtime a day, then they'll have to turn around and give, say, Michael Moore or Howard Stern 4 hours of airtime a day. So half the time their audience is raving right wing nutjobs, and the other half it's slavering left wing moonbats. You don't think advertisers want to sell products to either market demographic?

Beyond practicality, the Fairness Doctrine is, well, fair. Radio stations don't own the airwaves, they just lease them. Objective truth may be beyond our capacity to find in the emotionally charged political atmosphere, but at least we can require media outlets to present more than one point of view. It may not get us all the way there, but it's a damn good start.

Beyond all this, President Obama apparently doesn't support its reinstatement, which makes me sad, but which makes the whole argument kind of moot.

Open border anarchy including amnesty for illegal aliens and promotion of multi-nation "unions".

I personally find it laughable and hilarious when some dipshit whose parents, or grandparents, or great grandparents, or great great great grandparents, came over here from Europe back when immigration control was virtually nonexistent, gets up on a stump and shakes their fist and pisses their undies and sprays spittle all over themselves because they're afraid that different, darker skinned people who weren't born on this continent or different, darker skinned people who actually WERE born on this continent are going to, like, overrun America and snatch up all those great lettuce picking jobs and hump everybody's daughters, or somebody's, anyways.

America is now and always has been a nation built on the hard work of immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their descendants here than they would have if they stayed where they were born. (It is also a nation built on the slaughter of the indigenous population by technologically superior invaders, and if the universe was an inherently just or decent place, an armada of highly territorial aliens would be landing all across America right now, slaughtering the majority of us with their deathrays and herding the survivors into the swamplands of New Jersey. But never mind that now.) That America is a great melting pot, and a place where anyone can come, work hard, and prosper, has been in the past and should be again one of our greatest cultural values.

Those who feel that they are more entitled to a piece of the American dream than others who were born elsewhere are blind to the true historical virtues, such as they are, of the United States of America, and cannot truly be considered patriots by any thinking American.

Government-run health care that weakens our system and imposes more tax burdens on citizens.

As opposed to privately run healthcare that is contributing to the destruction of our economy and causing hundreds of thousands if not millions to live in poverty, sickness, and despair every day of their lives. But that's okay, because our current system isn't 'socialist', and really, that's all that matters.

Weakening of our military through rapid pullback from Iraq, defunding our troops and overall disarmament.

You know what weakens our military? Let me count the things that are currently weakening our military --

* Sending them off on badly planned, poorly executed missions which result in several thousand of them being killed and several hundred thousand of them being maimed, disfigured, crippled, and ruined for life. Also, overstocking our military with criminals, sociopaths, the emotionally unstable, the borderline retarded, the socially dysfunctional, and the desperately poor, because decent, law abiding, intelligent, sane Americans with enough money to choose anything besides the military don't want to get sent over to the Middle East where they will be killed, maimed, disfigured, crippled, or otherwise ruined for life.

* A shitty, corrupt, Republican-controlled Veteran's Administration.

* Young, fit, avidly pro war, conservative American 'patriots' who will not join the military, and who will not let their children join the military, and who vehemently oppose allowing us to withdraw other people's children from an illegal, immoral conflict that is devouring our armed forces the way a chickenhawk war blogger slugs down Twinkies and microwave popcorn.

* Americans who think 'supporting the troops' means slapping a magnetic ribbon on their bumper, instead of getting them out of harm's way.

These are things that weaken our military, and given all of these things, how getting our asses out of place we never should have gotten into in the first place, along with spending less money on guns so we can spend more money on healthcare, education, and infrastructure, really factors much into it is beyond me. Bush, Cheney, and their Republican lackeys have all but DESTROYED our military, while pocketing billions in illegal, immoral war profits. If all Obama does is 'weaken' our military, it will be a vast improvement.

Social liberalism including radical pro-abortion agenda, the end of marriage and the homosexual agenda.

Nobody is 'pro abortion', and abortion would be much, much less frequent if conservatives would allow easier access to contraception for those that want it and better, saner, more useful sex education in schools for those that need it most. Beyond that, though, an individual's right to choose to have, or not have, whatever medical procedures they desire, or do not desire, on their own bodies is a fundamental one, whether the medical procedure in question strikes you as morally dubious or not. (For the record, I despise abortion, but that's subjective, and I don't believe my subjective hatred of something should necessarily be legislated, because it's not my body, and therefore, not my decision.)

What was the middle thing... oh, yeah, the 'end of marriage and the homosexual agenda'. Heh. Letting more people get married is hardly 'the end of marriage', and the 'homosexual agenda' is, essentially, enforcing Constitutional guarantees of equal access to and protection under the law of the land to every American citizen, not just the ones whose sex lives you happen to approve of.

And, again, President Obama has stated many times that he isn't in favor of gay marriage. I can only hope that, now that he's actually been elected, he drops his waffling and says what he should -- marriage is part of the law, and the Constitution guarantees all Americans equal access to the law. But he's probably hoping to get re-elected, so I imagine I hope in vain.

Liberal court activism that undermines faith, family and liberties while expanding government control.

With Democrats in at least nominal control of both Congress and the White House, I fully expect and anticipate that within the next year, we'll see this talking point quietly dropped by every conservative pundit. Why? Because a substantially Republican appointed judicial branch will become the right wing's last, best hope of staving off the widespread enactment and enforcement of liberal, leftist, progressive policies, that's why. Suddenly, judicial activism will no longer be a terrible thing, it will, instead, become the patriotic duty of all decent, right thinking judges everywhere.

Having predicted that, I will also say that faith and family are private matters that should (ideally, anyway) never be touched on in any way, positive or negative, by the government. As to 'liberties', just for one example near and dear to the rabid right, celebrating Christmas is, indeed, a basic human right. Forcing everyone who doesn't want to celebrate Christmas to pretend to anyway in every aspect of any possible potential public display and over every public airwave, on the other hand, is not a basic human right and is, in fact, a grotesque invasion of the basic civil liberties of many other people who may prefer to celebrate some other form of Midwinter Solstice holiday, or, for that matter, none at all. So celebrate Christmas if you want to (I certainly do) but, y'know, shut the hell up about it, and especially shut the hell up about what other people choose to celebrate, or not, their own damn selves.

That's liberty... liberty for all, not just spoiled white male Christians who can't get over the fact that they don't control the world any more.

Post-American globalism that diminishes our global role and threatens our national sovereignty.

In other words, a world where Americans actually have to deal with the negative consequences of their arrogant, idiotic, and immoral actions and attitudes towards non-Americans, is not a world my uncle, or any of his fellow Resistance members, wants to live in.

Environmental extremism, the CO2 tax,undermining coal and nuclear, and bans on
exploration.

Because we all know the Rapture is coming soon anyway, so fuck the environment, we want our big gas guzzling Humvees and ginormous flat screen TVs and Jesus wants us to have them, too. So THERE.

I would take the Resistance more seriously if I did not know that these people are Americans, like me. And Americans, like me, don't do anything that requires us to get up out of a comfortable chair, put down our beer or our soda, and make any effort whatsoever beyond reaching for a kruller, or a remote control.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the The Resistance exceeded its target of a million registered members by Inauguration Day, 2009. Why shouldn't they? 55 million people voted for McCain, and to join the Resistance, all you have to do is sit on your ass and type some stuff into your computer.

When it comes to actually doing something, though, well, I suspect the Resistance won't amount to much.

Although I imagine the group will very quickly be able to put together a truly astonishing array of Photoshopped Sarah Palin porn...