2012 Year End Review: Part 1

2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end.  The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond.  2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:

Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):  The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse.  It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable.  Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention.  Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds.  It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment.  Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone.  The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair.  Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country.  It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something.  At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.

2012 Douchebag of the Year:  Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared.  Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year.  Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land.  Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on.  At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years.  Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann.  Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist.  I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades.  You just know she used the N-word a lot.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle.  Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire.  But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays.  Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems.  Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem.  Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year.  Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation.  According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns.  It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.


Death We Regret The Most:  Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things.  Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do?  Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation.  It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.

More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!

God Rest Ye Merry Hucksters

As the fair month of November slips quietly away, I look with a bit of dread on the rapidly-approaching holiday season.  I know there will be lots of parties and dinners and gatherings to attend, and it will be very nice to spend time with all the wonderful people in my life, but a little bit of me is already starting to cringe at the orgy of greed and consumerism which is already rushing towards us.

Yesterday there was a story on the local news about some pathetic idiot who is camped out in front of a Best Buy store or something here, in anticipation of being the first one in the store when Black Friday hits.  That would be four days later.  Apparently this sad schmuck has nothing better to do than waste four days of his life on the opportunity to drop a bunch of money on some electronic gifts for his niece and nephew, which will probably be forgotten in a month or two.  I'm not sure which is worse, this fool squatting on the doorstep of corporate America or the local news idiots publicizing him like he's some kind of retail warrior or something.

This year it seems more apparent than ever that Thanksgiving is becoming an afterthought, a secondary holiday whose main purpose is to mark the beginning of the REAL holiday - the start of the Xmas shopping season.  This month I've heard more about Black Friday than about Thanksgiving itself, and that is really sad.  Thanksgiving is the biggest secular holiday and the one with the most meaning.  What could be more fitting and proper than to be thankful for all the good things in your life and to draw your friends and loved ones near to you and celebrate being together?  Sharing a good meal, a glass or two of wine, and good conversation is to me a gift that no store-purchased bauble could match.  And yet, people seem to be very willing to eschew the good things in life for the pursuit of the biggest bargain, or the lowest prices.

A lot of people will wage their assault on the local shopping mall with all the grim precision and painstaking detail of a major military operation.  It is so unseemly and undignified to be such money-grubbing, shopping-crazed automatons - robots pre-programmed by a lifetime of carefully-honed and targeted commercials to go out and shop on command.  The more money you spend, the more you love someone; that seems to be the take-away from all this.  In the single-minded pursuit of this end, so much of what makes life worthwhile seems to drop away and get left behind in the glitter and the dust.

So this year, I'm going to do what I have been doing for the past 5 or 6 years - reject all the buy-or-die hysteria, push back on the annoying, intrusive and hyperactive sales pitches, and instead concentrate on the real reason we celebrate the season - the friendship of people we love and with whom we share more than just a parking space in a shopping center lot, the coming winter solstice, and soon afterward a new year and a new springtime, and another year full of promise and opportunity, sadness and joy, and more wonderful people and rabbits gracing my life and touching my heart.

Suck It, Cleveland

There certainly has been a lot of publicity in the world of professional basketball regarding one Lebron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and going over to the Miami Heat. You would think that God came down to the Vatican and told them, "Listen, I'm done with you people and I'm not your God anymore. I'm becoming a Buddhist." The announcement brought a lot of weeping and wailing and rending of garments (literally - there were lots of videos of people ripping apart Lebron James tee-shirts and actually setting them on fire) from the benighted residents of the Mistake on the Lake (as Lake Erie-hugging Cleveland is sometimes unkindly called). But what does this very public NBA beat-down of Cleveland really mean in the long view?

I will gladly admit that I am probably one of the least sports-oriented people on the planet. I think all sports are a complete waste of time and a really frivolous and unproductive way to let your life slip away. I realize it's all just entertainment, and I see very little difference between the Big Three sports (baseball, football and basketball) and professional wresting, something at which everyone finds justifiable to sneer and regard as a vulgar, down-market, lowest-common-denominator pastime for the unwashed masses who live in trailer parks by the railroad tracks. So the James ship-jumping didn't even register on my radar. I ranked it alongside or just a little below the latest panty-free romp by some trashy D-list Hollywood celebutard or Sarah Palin's most recent bout of intellectual diarrhea. But to a lot of people this was an earth-shaking event which took on a life and importance usually reserved for terrorist attacks or medical breakthroughs.

I can see how this could be reasonably important to the two cities involved, and also for the couple of other towns that tried to lure James to their teams. Looking a little bit below the surface you see this mostly revolves around money. Lebron James is a major draw for the sport, much as disgraced Ambien enthusiast Tiger Woods is to golf. James certainly puts butts in seats for the games in which he plays, and that translates into elevated ticket sales and corollary expenditures like paper cups of warm beer and hot dogs that have been boiling in a gigantic pot since Memorial Day. Throw in other taxable merchandise such as shirts, coffee mugs and bobble-heads, and you've got a tidy little revenue stream for whichever city can lay claim to being the fiefdom of King James.

But there are two things that I apparently never got the memo on regarding professional sports. One is the enormous disconnect I perceive between what pro athletes are paid and what their services seem to be worth. Does Lebron James, or any athlete for that matter, deserve an eight-figure salary for working only part of the year doing what most people regard as a game? As far as I'm concerned, and I've said this at least one other time in this blog, any police officer, teacher, nurse or firefighter anywhere in this country performs a more valuable service in one day than Mr. James or Mr. Woods or any other athlete performs in their entire career. But this is what I call (somewhat melodramatically, I admit) the "poisoned fruit" of our capitalistic economy; that is, you will get paid according to the demand for your services, not their intrinsic worth.

The other thing I don't "get" is the emotional connection that fans like to imagine exists between a professional sports team and whatever city they are playing for at the moment. Fans in Cleveland took Lebron James' decision to bolt as a personal insult of the highest magnitude. Plenty of them seemed deeply distressed and offended, as if the honor and virtue of their mother was very publicly questioned. You can see the flip side of that outrage when a team wins a very critical game or a title - fans go berserk and rampage the streets, flashing their "number one" finger at the news cameras and somehow interpreting the outcome as a major accomplishment on their part. People, listen to me: they are professional athletes. They are play-for-pay, and they could care less if their paycheck comes from Cleveland or Miami or Phoenix or Boston or Los Angeles. Their fan base is nothing but a monolithic, faceless cash machine to them. Thus, one day Lebron James can be the shining light of Cleveland, worshiped by hundreds of thousands of residents, and the next day he is reviled and cursed as a modern-day Benedict Arnold times a thousand, and his images are being ripped down all over the Cleveland area. If all that love, hero-worship and emotional attachment is real, how can it be turned on its ear in a second?

Interestingly, the general manager, I guess, of the Cleveland Cavs really jumped the rails when he lambasted James on an official website in very strong, colorful terms as the perpetrator of some horrendous, unforgivable crime against his adopted home town. Realizing that James bailed on the team because he considered his chances for bringing home an NBA title better down South Beach way, the manager blurted out a public promise to the Cleveland fans that he will "personally guarantee" them an NBA title next season. Whoa, over-promising a little there, dude? Let's do the math on that one, shall we:

1) The Cleveland Cavaliers did not secure a title this year +
2) Their super-star player will not be with them anymore. =
3) NBA championship next season? NOT LIKELY.

Cleveland has been one of those hard-scrabble, rust-belt cities who have been gleefully trashed on a regular basis for decades, if not centuries, by the rest of the country. Sure, the city is run-down and dirty and a pale shell of its former glory, but what older U.S. city east of the Mississippi isn't? I lived in Cleveland for three years while attending college, and it's really not that bad a place. Faint praise, I realize, but I'm doing my best here. I can see how the long-suffering, perennially ragged-on hometown fans kind of snapped whenever their star player bolted from lovely Cuyahoga county. But in the grand scheme of things, residents of Cleveland should not pin their sense of self-worth, or the worth of their city, on the money-driven choices of a professional athlete. Maybe they should have taken the high road, wished James luck in dealing with those horrendous palmetto bugs and the alligators that will be sauntering across his lawn, and turned their attention to making their team and their city as good as they can be. Screaming and cursing and banging your head against a wall is not the way to go. It's bad for the wall, and it earns you nothing but a headache.