2013: The Year In Review (Part 1)

Like the rheumy old geezer you're forced to sit next to in a theater or on a three-hour plane flight, 2013 is coughing, hacking and wheezing its way into the outhouse of history.  While not as bizarrely awful as 2012 (and that was due in large part to the presidential election), this year will go down as having more than its share of weird, unsettling and just plain annoying happenings.  So, let's take a look back at the crazy quilt of human folly that was 2013 and present some well-deserved awards for galaxy-class stupidity, starting with our premiere award:

The MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Award:  We thought we were going to get through this year without millions of right-wing dimwits getting all whipped up into a frenzied lather over some faux-controversy, like they did with the Chick-Fil-A idiocy last year.  You might remember that the COO of C-F-A made some ill-advised comments to religious publications that he was proud of financially supporting some groups that advocated a "traditional definition of marriage" (a.k.a. homophobia and bigotry disguised as piety).  When some people suggested we may want to direct our discretionary spending to a restaurant chain that wasn't quite as intolerant and hateful, the conservative sheeple were summoned into action by the right-wing garbage-mongers on Fox News and other pseudo-journalistic bastions of stupidity.  What better way to show your innate homophobia than by running down to your local Chick-Fil-A outlet and ordering up a big mess of their nasty fried chicken?  Yeah, that'll show those queer-loving liberals - go out and buy a shitload of artery-clogging, greasy animal parts.  A lot of people really had no intention of eating what they bought; many of them threw the food away immediately.  But gol darn it, they were going to make a STATEMENT and stand up for the First Amendment rights of some idiot who insists on sticking his nose into the lives and business of fellow Americans.

Back to 2013:  Fox News tried to get the ball rolling by kicking off their annual "War Against Christmas" pseudo-controversy.  When it appeared it wasn't getting enough traction with their easily-distracted-by-shiny-objects viewers, they decided to let slutty Botox abuser Megyn Kelly spew some incomprehensible drivel about Santa Claus only being white or... something? I don't even know.  But the shitstorm really spooled up to high gear when the patriarch of a clutch of barnyard animal-human hybrids that appear in some ridiculous reality show called "Duck Dynasty" cut loose with a rambling diatribe in GQ magazine that was pretty stunning and extreme in its stupidity, racism and homophobia.  Now I've never seen "Duck Dynasty," nor would I ever consider soiling my brain with whatever genetic-cesspool nonsense those hairy snake-oil salesmen are perpetrating on a dimwitted, gullible American public.  I spend my entire life avoiding those kind of people and trying hard to convince myself they don't really exist.  But you would really have to be living on some other planet these past couple of weeks to not have heard about this crapfest on nearly every news outlet.  The A&E network almost immediately tried to distance itself from the one program on their schedule that was an absolute cash cow, and "suspended" the noxious old fart from his own show.  Always eager to show its clout, the right-wing stupidity machine went into overdrive and cast this suspension as a heinous, unwarranted violation of someone's First Amendment Free Speech rights.  There's that pesky First Amendment again.  It's almost as misused, misquoted and misinterpreted as the Second Amendment.

The right wing loves to shriek like a stuck pig whenever they imagine someone violating their own rights, but gleefully and willingly will try to curtail the rights of any group of people they don't agree with, such as gay people seeking marriage equality or adults seeking to maintain access to a legal birth control procedure.  Then you get irrelevant, obsolescent gasbags like the scrawny, brittle, trailer-trash queen Sarah Palin dragging herself out from under some rock and shoving her pinched, ravaged face in front of any camera she can find, forcefully broadcasting her opinions like anyone gives a screaming shit about what she thinks.  The ignorant conservative hordes jumped up at their leaders' command and goose-stepped their way down to their local Walmart or Cracker Barrel restaurant and willingly blew their (irony alert) welfare checks on useless crap they really didn't need, just because some media hack told them they were defending some pseudo-celebrity's right to free speech, and snapped up every bit of Duck Dynasty schlocky merchandise they could get their fat, stubby fingers on.  It's astonishing to me that those idiots will do whatever their right-wing puppet-masters tell them to do, without a smidgen of critical thought.  As long as they see other people like them doing the same thing, they think they are on the right side of things.  Adolf Hitler would be so proud.

It's really difficult to understand how this country has changed so much that some repulsive, grubby old scumbag can spout a load of vile, disgusting hatespeech to a national magazine and then have millions of idiots defend his right to call gay people "terrorists" and make astonishingly ignorant statements about how black people were better off under slavery.  Twenty years ago someone saying that would be roundly criticized and condemned from every part of the political spectrum.  Nowadays, you could come out in favor of child molesters and as long as you managed to sneak in some Bible quotes, you will get people defending you and your right to be an asshole in public.

How did that happen?  I think it's the result of a number of things; one of them being the death of civil political discourse and intellectual thinking in this country.  The internet and social media have given everyone a global, anonymous platform to expel any and all kinds of hateful, disoriented thinking, with little or no consequence or accountability.  The gun lobby has set an example of scorched-earth policy by vehemently opposing even the smallest, most innocuous and toothless tightening of gun laws in this country.  Even the slaughter of 20 innocent children in December 2012 meant nothing to them.  The only thing they cared about is the fictional "slippery slope" which would surely lead to the government forcibly confiscating everyone's firearms if they banned one assault rifle or extra-capacity ammo clip.  Throw in an ignorant, uneducated population that accepts claptrap like that as gospel, and the spineless, cowardly stooges in Congress who are firmly in the back pocket of the gun manufacturers, and you have a great example of neo-fascism knocking at your door disguised as "patriotism."

But I digress.  Thankfully, Christmas is providing a welcome (albeit short) relief and distraction from all this small-minded stupidity, but I fear the argument will only be resurrected next month as the new season of that Duck Dynasty trashfest starts up.  It seems the conservative parts of the population will put up with absolutely any kind of horrible stupidity and intolerance as long as it's painted with the varnish of "religious expression," which has become the dog whistle to automatically incite the vast unwashed hordes to jump up and do whatever they are told.  After all, Jesus is on their side.  Or so they think.

Therefore, I give the Much Ado About Nothing Award to Duck Dynasty and their mindless followers for all their spectacular bigotry and ignorance.  They have taken the entire country one giant step closer to hell.

Digital Melting-Pot

Digital technology has sped up the reaction time of everyone, and nowadays it's very common for something to happen in the world and almost instantaneously, reactions and comments pop up on Facebook.

Twenty years ago, none of this was even imagined, let alone remotely possible.  And back in the day, when I was young, news came from either the newspaper, the radio or national televised news shows.  We got our news basically twice a day, when the newspaper was thrown on the front porch, or when the evening news programs came on.

Today, we are immersed in news from the second we awake to when the nights go out at night.  Instead of a couple of places to get news, we have many dozens.  The internet has brought an astonishing, incomprehensible amount of information to our fingertips, pretty much for free, day and night.  But so much of this information comes not from independent, credible news sources, but from thinly-disguised echo chambers of political entities for whom journalistic truth is the enemy, not an ideal to which to aspire.

In the vast, global, digital melting-pot that is Facebook, there is always something cooking.  The media stew it serves up can be a smorgasbord of interesting, funny and enlightening photos and comments from my Facebook friends - whom I genuinely appreciate and enjoy reading - to a witches' brew of insanity, paranoia and batshit-craziness from the darkest gutters and cesspools of the American psyche.

Politically-inclined FB pages are public pages, and that opens up the floodgates for all the virulent strains of craziness that seem to be running rampant in this country.  In particular, conservative trolls are ever-ready to inflict their narrow-minded, pointless slander and undisguised racism into any and all discussions, even if they are not even slightly political.  No insult is too cheap, no snide remark too juvenile to make when it comes to denigrating our President.

Disclaimer:  I have certainly put in my time as a liberal troll, and I spent a fun-filled two weeks after the elections last November carpet-bombing political pages and websites with all the eat-shit-and-die liberal gloating I could muster.  I gleefully and mercilessly rubbed as many conservatives noses as I could into the messy bowel movement that was the Romney campaign, with completely predictable results.  Heads exploded everywhere, and the bile and hatred I elicited was quite impressive.  I felt that if I could raise conservative blood pressures to stroke-inducing levels and ruin as many of their days as possible, I was doing my job and life indeed was wonderful. It was almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, but eventually it ran its course and I don't do it anymore.  At least not as much.

The Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in mid-December brought a whole new array of crazy conservatives to the forefront, and these were the extra-paranoid, gun-nut variety.  It really is something when you find out how many of our fellow citizens spend their lives gripped by an intense, irrational fear that someday, vast armies of criminals, armed to the tits with AK-47s, are going to march down every street in every town and city in this country and storm the doorway of their home in a enormous Armageddon-type apocalypse, and the only way they can hope to survive is to make sure everyone in their family, from little two-year-old Nutley to ninety-year old Grandma, has a couple of automatic rifles at their disposal to dispatch all these bloodthirsty felons to the lower depths of hell where they belong.

I was surprised to find out that a lot of people take seriously the notion that their individual liberty and freedom are in constant, grave peril, either from armed, highly-organized criminals or from our own government.  Paranoia and conspiracy theories go hand-in-hand, and these people can see heinous, nefarious plots in every single thing that happens.  Evil socialist Muslim Kenyans are behind everything, and they are well on their way to converting every Starbucks in this nation into Islamic indoctrination centers, and Walmart will start selling burkas any minute.  Actually, it would really be a good idea if some of Walmart's customers wore burkas.

These pathetic, disturbed individuals have a doomsday scenario playing in an endless loop in their heads, that they will someday have to engage in mortal combat with a mysterious Fascist movement which will suddenly rise to power and all the U.S. military forces will fight blindly for the prophet Mohammed, despite nearly 250 years of Judeo-Christian culture and government influence.  How little faith these people have in their fellow citizens, and in the form of government which has produced the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and has gotten us through a bloody Civil War and two World Wars as well as numerous other skirmishes.  To these hopeless paranoids, it's just a tiny step to go from an established, representative democracy to Sharia law.

The Republican party, along with their mangy, yappy little attack dog the NRA, is expert at cultivating and empowering such mindless paranoid fantasies, and there seems to be no limit to the number of gullible dupes and stooges out there who are ever-so-eager to swallow this claptrap.  Personally I feel it's indicative of the extreme intellectual laziness that has taken hold in his country.  Why make the effort to learn about the world and the things that are happening in our culture, when you can sit comfortably on your couch with your TV and a giant bag of Doritos, and let blowhards like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the dimwitted hacks of Fox News fill your head with whatever garbage they choose, because somehow it sounds like they might be right, or at the very least their drivel seems to fit into your personal delusions and biases? They are the professionals when it comes to providing very simple-minded, ineffective, populist solutions to complex problems. Why bother thinking about stuff on your own when you can let someone else do the thinking for you?

There is a herd-mentality aspect in people that makes them want to be a part of something bigger, which seems counter to the famed American "independence of spirit."  People want to align themselves with other like-minded people, because there is safety in numbers and comfort in shared attitudes.  Going out on a limb and actually deconstructing problems in order to understand them is scary and way too much work, and many people just do not have the mental capacity, experience or inclination for critical analysis, thanks to our failing educational system.  They instead opt for the demagogues who speak in terms that sound familiar, or at least non-threatening, and engender an us-and-them separation that puts their followers clearly on the "us" side, and anyone who doesn't agree with them or maybe challenges their long-established biases and prejudices are the "them" that they have to be afraid of.

What people don't understand they fear, and that's been true throughout history.  Overcoming fear requires courage, fortitude and persistence. Sadly, sometimes it seems all too clear that people are not being enlightened by reason and understanding, but instead are turning their backs and marching into the darkness.

News From Hell

The past six days have been an amazing news cycle, one of the busiest we've seen in ages.  A lot of very important stuff happened, and there was something for everybody to love and hate.

First off, last Friday the jury in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse trial came back with 45 guilty counts out of 48 charges.  The whole situation is pretty dreadful and awful, and is an object lesson in how things can get completely out of control when authority figures feel they can do whatever they damned well please and the "good ol' boy" network will shield and protect them.  Sandusky's predation on young boys is stomach-turning in the extreme, and the administration of Penn State University choosing to do nothing in the face of undeniable evidence is something they will have to answer to and pay for dearly.

One has to wonder how such horrendous abuse seemed so easy.  There has been a lot of investigation into the mindset of child molesters, and a lot of them pick occupations or endeavors that place them in direct contact with their quarry.  Sports coaches in the past have been automatically assumed to be benign and the vast majority of them are, but for the small percentage who are child predators, it provides an ideal shield and opportunity for their nefarious activities.

When I was a child, I was taught that adults were to be obeyed unconditionally and they were always right.  For me it was a fact of life that if the teacher gave you a beating in school for doing something wrong, when you got home you got another beating, because the teacher was always right, and you were always wrong.  That kind of blind, abject deference to "authority" creates the perfect climate for abuse.  It's like if a burglar comes to your home to rob it, and you welcome him with open arms and make him a nice dinner as he ransacks your house.

Sandusky will die in prison, as he deserves, but what of the lives he has destroyed with his sick activities?  There are no winners in this whole sorry situation, just pain and wreckage.

The following Monday had the Supreme Court striking down most of Arizona's hateful, racist SB1070, the draconian anti-immigration law passed in 2010, much to the delight of the bigots and hate-mongers in this wretched, godforsaken state.  Governor Jan "The Walking Dead" Brewer signed it with much fanfare, and used the resulting court challenges as a tool to raise nearly $4 million to defend it.  Even as recently as last week, when conventional wisdom indicated (incorrectly, it turns out) the Court would uphold the legality of SB1070, that dried-up old corpse was gleefully sending training materials out to police officials.  So it was particularly gratifying when the Court struck down most of the provisions of the law, and left the door wide open for future legal challenges to the part of it that was left standing.  Brewer immediately went on the news media and we were treated to the pathetic sight of that delusional, hatchet-faced old hag trying in vain to spin the ruling in her favor.  It's been obvious for a very long time that Brewer is incredibly stupid and most likely mentally disturbed, and she can add pathetic embarrassment to the very long list of reasons why she needs to go.

There was also a ruling in a Montana case which very tragically affirmed the vile, loathsome Citizens United ruling of 2010, which opened the floodgates to a deluge of corporate money into the election process.  This is plainly astonishing, as nearly everyone except the Republicans agree that the original ruling was a horrendous, horrific abomination and probably one of the very worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of this country.  As Mannequin Romney says, "Corporations are people!" and much to the detriment of this country, the Court agrees.  Another terrible, awful ruling from a Court that seems to take the side of corporations over the welfare of the American people.

Of course in the midst of all this history there just has to be some batshit-craziness, and that was provided by the witch hunt tight-assed douchebag Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca) is waging against Attorney General Eric Holder.  There was this little sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called "Fast and Furious." started during the George W. Bush administration, which sought to trace firearms used by Mexican drug cartels back to sellers in the US.  They ran into a little snag due to the incredibly lax and ridiculous gun laws in (where else?) Arizona.  It seems that a couple of people plopped down $350,000 for 650 guns, got them, and just waltzed across the border to the south where drug cartels got an early Navidad, because according to AZ gun laws, there wasn't anything illegal or suspicious about a purchase that size. Now that this fiasco has blown up all over the place, AG Holder is getting blamed for everything, and the 2nd Amendment gun nuts are all bent out of shape, saying the failed sting operation is all a big scheme by the Obama administration to ram stricter gun laws down everyone's throats.  Because it's so important to be able to spend $350K on guns without some law enforcement agency asking you a lot of inconvenient questions.  Yeah, they really ARE that stupid.  They're gun nuts.

The big-deal ruling dropped this morning, when the Supreme Court basically reaffirmed the constitutionality of Obama's centerpiece Affordable Health Care Act, individual mandate and all.  There is still much to discuss and learn about this ruling, but the important take-away is that Republicans and right-wingers are crapping broken glass now, and will do so for the foreseeable future.  It is extremely gratifying to see all the right-wingers losing their shit in a very public fashion.  Anything that makes conservative right-wingers unhappy makes me EXTREMELY happy, and I have a great deal to be happy about this morning.

Beckapalooza

I suppose it's just not possible in this day and age to get through a summer without a massive display of insanity and idiocy in Washington, DC. Last year it was the Voter Values Summit, a surreal circus parade of the worst of trailer-trash culture, who proudly displayed their complete disregard for personal grooming and acceptable clothing styles, and demented, confused senior citizens, carrying signs that showed they are blissfully unencumbered by arcane, elitist notions like grammar, logic and spelling.

This year did not disappoint, as we were treated to a comprehensive exhibition of just about every kind of psychological disorder there is, led by obviously-mentally-ill, right-wing jaybird Glenn Beck. Now, I can't stand to watch Glenn Beck for more than three seconds. Part evangelical preacher, part Ronald McDonald on bad acid, and part Freddie Kruger in clean clothes, Beck seems to have cornered the media market on histrionic, embarrassing rhetoric, punctuated by episodes of blubbering, over-wrought emotionalism that would be deemed too over-the-top for even a dinner-theater production of Steel Magnolias. Very skilled in the use of wide, sweeping, and ultimately meaningless generalizations and evidence-free predictions of dire consequences if people don't straighten up and listen to him, Beck has understandably found a huge audience in the millions of Americans who choose to let Fixed News, I mean, Fox News do their thinking for them and provide them with their opinions and talking-points served pablum-style, in easily-digestible dollops.

It seems to be an indictment of the failure of the political system that so many people feel so detached and disenfranchised from it that they think their only reasonable alternative is in feel-good, us-against-them, hate-mongering, racist political organizations such as the Tea Party. That's like if someone sets your house on fire or murders your spouse you decide to go to the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus for help. Everything that Beck says is designed to wrap his mindless followers in the mantle of righteousness and religious infallibility, since they take every opportunity to remind everyone that God is on their side, and all who disagree with them are dirty, bearded Islamic terrorists who are ready to fly a squadron of jet aircraft into buildings in every major city in the U.S. Beck even went to so far as to say at his rally something like "Today is the day that America turns back to God!"

Really, Glenn? Just because you say so? Did you bother to ask God if He goes along with that? Oh excuse me, I forgot: you and your followers have regular conversations with God and He most definitely is on your side. How did you get the power to make that statement for an entire nation? Did you bother to ask the Muslims and Buddhists and atheists and Jews and Hindus and all the millions of devout non-Christian believers who make America their home? Don't you think that was just a teeny bit presumptuous of you to speak for an entire nation? Personally I don't think you're qualified to speak for a Rotary Club in rural Nebraska, but that's just me. Now I know your followers aren't exactly the most inclusive group in the world, and I wonder just how many African-Americans or Asian-Americans or gay/lesbian Americans are welcome in your lily-white masses? Or is it that only your fundamentalist, Republican, Caucasian "sheeple" (more on that word later) are the ones who feel they have to "turn back to God." Do you think maybe it's God that has turned away from you since you embarrass Him so?

But this was not a "political" rally, according to Beck. Of course not, despite the fact that it was held in the most political city in the United States and - what a surprise! - on the 47th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington that gave the world the transcendent "I Have A Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. What an absolute abomination and desecration of King's memory and legacy to have a puffy-faced, cartoonish buffoon like Glenn Beck prancing and parading around on the steps of the monument where King once stood and changed the world with the power of his simple words and heartfelt ideas. Forty-seven years later, people are still inspired and thrilled by King's powerful statements. Twenty-four hours later, no one really remembers or cares what was said at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday. And that's the way it should be.

And, not that there weren't enough annoying, embarrassing and pathetic creeps already in attendance yesterday, but the loathsome, vile and execrable Sarah Palin had to be hauled down from the meth-infused garbage dumps of Wasilla, Alaska to bleat out another round of moronic ramblings and faux-populist drivel. It just took seeing a video clip of her dragging her bony, scrawny ass across the stage to nearly make me have a second look at the dinner I had an hour before. She apparently left 15 minutes after finishing her speech - and presumably after collecting her six-figure fee - but she still had the nerve to get onto Twitter (the pre-eminent Theatre of the Damned for the Internet Age) and blather about how the "sheeple" (presumably a homemade contraction of "sheep" and "people", now that "refudiation" has been thoroughly discredited) of the "main stream media" underestimated the crowd size and downplayed their coverage. Oh, would these "sheeple," as you derisively call them, be the same media people who for some reason follow you around and give your special brand of inbred ignorance a national platform wildly out of proportion to its value? And how without them you would be a nobody - a shrill, brittle harpy trapped in a loveless marriage with poorly-raised children who can't stand the sight of you - with absolutely no hope that tomorrow will be any less wretched and meaningless for you than today. Without them, Palin would be a dollar-store Ann Coulter whom everyone would ignore and dismiss as a crazy, crack-addicted skank.

How did it happen in this once-proud nation that we have come to celebrate, elevate and in fact encourage stupidity, idiocy and mediocrity in our political system? How is it that pathetic, miserable pieces of crap such as Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and at least 100 other cultural cesspits still manage to pollute the airwaves and intellectual discourse in this country? That's one of the drawbacks of a free society - you have to put up with the profoundly stupid people that invariably make up the population, as well as the profoundly inspiring ones. The problem is, in this cruel, mixed-up and hateful universe in which we live, the good really do die young and the evil, psychopathic people seem to live on, and on, and on.