Words Of Our Lives

Apparently words have expiration dates on their usefulness or popularity.  An august journalistic body known as the Associated Press came out with some changes to their style guide, which a lot of other journalists and even normal people use as a reference for spelling, grammar, etc.

It seems they have decided to drop the words "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" from their roster of Mighty Fine Words.  The reason that they gave was that the "-phobia" suffix was too close of a reference to a psychological disorder and they don't want people to think the words have anything to do with mental illness.

I've always felt homophobia is a mental illness anyway, so I don't understand what the issue is.  It really irritates the life out of me that people discriminate against gay people only because of their choice of who they love.

Gay marriage is not a threat to any form of traditional "heterosexual" marriage.  I'll tell you what are threats to traditional marriage:

Stupid people who have no business getting married and spend the rest of their time fighting each other are a threat to traditional marriage.

Idiots who get married and divorced multiple times like they are changing socks or something are a threat to traditional marriage.

Serial baby-makers with minimal or non-existent parenting skills who bring way too many innocent children into their crazy dysfunctional world to abuse, neglect and abandon, thus ensuring the next couple of generations will be equally as screwed-up, are a threat to traditional marriage.

Disgusting pigs who cheat on their spouses at the drop of a hat are a threat to traditional marriage. The 50% divorce rate bears this out.  Compared to them, the lesbian couple down the street who have lived together for 30 years is not a threat.

Some people are against gay marriage because of their religious beliefs.  To them, I say keep your religious beliefs to yourself.  Anyone is entitled to believe in whatever god-delusion seems to complement their personal agenda, but what one is NOT entitled to do is inflict their beliefs on their fellow citizens.  Believing in something doesn't make it true, and it doesn't give you the right to dictate to other people what they have to believe.

Fundamentalist Christians would scream like stuck pigs if someone tried to pass a law making them believe in Buddha or the Easter Bunny.  Idiotic brain-dead Tea Baggers howl that Sharia law is being imposed in various parts of the United States.  They would pronounce it an abomination if someone tried to force the teachings of the Qur'an on them, but think it's perfectly okay to force the teachings of the bible on their neighbors.  So much for their "love thy neighbor" crap.

Fundies also like to assert that their bible is the literal word of their god and it contains specific prohibitions against homosexuality.  The book of Leviticus is most frequently cited in this case.  Leviticus also contains a lot of other preposterous nonsense about shellfish and wearing certain fabrics, but the fundies pay no attention to that.  This cherry-picking of what you are (or are not) going to believe from the bible shows the worst kind of selfish intellectual cowardice there is.  Either you believe in the bible completely, 100 percent, or you don't believe it at all.  There is no middle ground with religious faith, especially when you're trying to ram it down other people's throats.

Since I'm just as qualified as anyone else, I'd like to throw out a couple of popular words and phrases which have outlived their usefulness and relevance, assuming they had any to begin with.  So, these are things which shan't be said any longer, thank you very much:

"YOLO" - or "You Only Live Once," a cryptic tag line which is used to justify any manner of unacceptable or obnoxious behavior, under the premise that life is short and we should be allowed to try anything once.  Basically a free pass for stupid behavior that doesn't involve death or widespread destruction, YOLO takes its place next to the execrable "It is what it is," a vile little Mobius-strip of circular anti-logic which is the linguistic equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air and passively surrendering to the idiot gods which rule this life.

"Double down" - or actually, lying again.  This came into prominence during the last presidential election when a Republican made a completely absurd, blatantly untrue statement, and when called on it, merely repeated the same bullshit more emphatically.  It is a consequence of Republican supporters who freely and willingly release themselves from the confines of logical argument - which has been used successfully for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks - and instead embrace the stupidest lies and fabrications imaginable because they sound good to them or at least, on the surface, appear to agree with their agenda.  Repeated endlessly on faux-journalistic crapfests like Fox News or by repulsive mountains of sweaty flab like Rush Limbaugh, Republicans and Tea Baggers discard facts as if they were articles of clothing soiled in a septic tank explosion, and will gleefully endorse any kind of ridiculous claptrap as long as it seems to reinforce their personal prejudices.  As someone once said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but not entitled to your own facts."

"Fiscal cliff" - Hopefully this is something we won't have to hear about after December 31st of this year.  Completely fabricated, man-made and unencumbered by any form of reality, it is not really a "cliff" but rather a slope or slide.  Come January 1st, 2013, the entire country is not going to plunged into a dark, fearsome recession.  The banking system won't collapse and the internet won't go belly-up.  With no action from our wonderful leaders, taxes will go up and everyone will start screaming poverty, especially the so-called "job creators" (who, by the way, have been really incompetent in creating jobs over the last two years), but the cliff is really a stepping-stone to the next Armageddon-du-jour in modern American life, the debt-ceiling negotiations upcoming in February.   That will be another round of batshit-crazy political posturing and self-flagellation which serves no useful purpose other than to deceive the low-information majority of American citizens into believing that Congress is actually doing something valuable to justify their existence.  Which is the biggest scam of all.

And no, I'm not getting rid of the term, "batshit-crazy."  I still love using it and it's so very appropriate for almost any occasion.

The Crazy Train of Summer

I've blogged about the joys of summertime in Phoenix in a previous post, so we're not riding that bus again. As our high temperatures sit well north of 110 degrees (114 forecast for this afternoon) with little sign of abatement for the next three days, the unrelenting, monotonous heat is making everyone here mean, irritable and cranky. I didn't include "crazy" since crazy is a facet of life in Phoenix that knows no season, but the sudden burst of baffling behavior across the country makes me wonder what's up. People in, say, Boston can't blame the heat like we do.

Has anything interesting happened in Boston recently? Well, someone tried to break into their own house and the police didn't like it. No sir, not one bit. Harvard professor Henry "Skip" Gates (and I'm not going to ask how a black man got the nickname "Skip") found his front door jammed upon his return from a trip so he broke into his own house. The police were called and things kind of went to hell after that, with the professor being arrested and booked for disorderly conduct (charges since dropped) after an acrimonious encounter with the police sergeant in command. From all accounts it sounds like what should have been a minor incident turned into a show of temper and macho posturing, and the media have conflated it into a major racial issue. Both sides dug in their heels and accusations of "racial profiling" were raised.

Racial profiling has become such a flash point of race relations in this country, which seemed to radically improve for a while when Obama became president. Not so fast, I am told, racism is still alive and well in this country, and that's true. The news this morning said that there was no mention of race in the original 911 call to report the "break-in." Is it such a big difference to say "There's a couple of guys breaking into my neighbor's house" as opposed to "There's a couple of black guys breaking into my neighbor's house?" In the second sentence you're just adding observational information which happens to be true, information which might conceivably make apprehension easier. Is that racist? I don't know. At any rate it seems that "beer diplomacy" is making its entrance on the national scene as both aggrieved parties have been invited to come to the White House and have a brewski with the Prez and hopefully work out their differences. A certain amount of detente was achieved with Communist China several decades ago with "ping pong diplomacy," which used the game of table tennis to start a dialogue, so diplomacy involving unlikely activities can sometimes work. I'm hoping it does in this case, because we really need to get past this.

The caboose on our Crazy Train of Summer is occupied by recently minted ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, who just will not go away in spite of all my frantic bargaining with the universe to reform my behavior and become a devout Christian if she would just slip and fall into a huge peat bog somewhere in the melted tundra of Alaska and disappear forever. But no, she has to stage a series of picnics in her state to say goodbye over and over again to the people who voted for her, supposedly in good faith that she would actually fulfill her commitment and serve her term. What she's going to do in the near future we're not sure, but you can bet the rent it will be unpleasant to the extreme.

But since Palin has never met an open microphone she didn't like, she jumped on every opportunity to bleat in her annoying, fingernails-on-a-blackboard Caribou Barbie voice that she loves the Alaskan people so very much but doggone it, those pesky ethics accusations were just too much of a chore for her to deal with. She is like an incredibly bothersome seven-year-old girl who drives everyone insane with an endless stream of self-centered, narcissistic demands, like "Look at me! I'm quitting my job!" and "Look at me! I'm gonna write a book!" and "Look at me! I'm walking out the door!" and "Look at me! I'm (fill in whatever you want)."

They even asked her Eddie-Bauer-mannequin of a husband, Todd, what they were going to do now and he mentioned something about going bear hunting. Hey there Toddster, you want to have a really interesting experience? Why don't you lose the high-powered rifle and go mano-a-mano with one of those grizzly bears? I can just about guarantee you a unique adventure you'll never forget. And if you survive, you can truly call yourself an outdoorsman because you met nature on its own terms and won. I know that leveling the playing field and being fair is nothing you nor your wife know anything about, since it's way too much fun to use those helicopters and automatic weapons to indiscriminately slaughter wildlife at taxpayer expense for no good reason whatsoever, but why don't you try it for once? It would make so many people so very happy, which would give a certain amount of meaning to your boring little life.

When I was a child my parents would talk about the "dog days of summer" and I was always intrigued by that. Turns out that phrase came from the fact that starting in early August, the Dog Star Sirius - Alpha Canis Majoris, the brightest star in the nighttime sky - would rise and make an appearance in the pre-dawn sky right before the sun came up. So as we stumble into the dog days of summer, we can only hope that the Dog Star will bring some of the common sense and cheery optimism of our canine companions into the collective consciousness of the nation. God knows, we could use a shot of sanity right now about as much as we could use a big blast of cold air from Canada.