Cleaning the World, One Lie at a Time

Cleaning the World, One Lie at a Time

I have a secret confession. I harbor a deep (and somewhat unsettling) love of animated, talking vegetables. My glee can scarcely be contained when I chance upon a commercial with a singing radish, or that one where the carrots talk to each other in the grocery store. I love it! So imagine my joy when my channel surfing landed me on an entire program made up solely of talking produce! I could hardly wait for my first exposure to the show, after seeing the ad for Larryboy: The Angry Eyebrows, about a pontificating cucumber.

But as I watched the program, my enjoyment was tempered by WHAT the cute little fella was saying. He was quoting scripture, moralizing about right and wrong, talking about Jesus! What in the hell is this? Now I�’m a good man, but I don�’t want to be preached to by anybody, particularly not an over-ripe melon, or a godly gourd. I found the biblical aspect of the program detracted from the quality of the show, and really wasn’�t necessary to the plot. Veggie Tales promised so much, but my introduction to it was ruined by pious propaganda. I could barely stand to watch it. I took the rest of the tapes back to my rental store and resigned myself to never enjoying talking vegetables again.

Oh, Hell Yes!

Oh, Hell Yes!

While it might be the most loved sport worldwide, soccer on the professional level hasn’t made much of an impact here at home. Granted, for most of its history, American teams haven’t fared well against more seasoned foreign opponents, but the 2002 World Cup is showing that the Team USA is no longer the doormat of world soccer. After defeating a highly regarded Portugal team to open the Cup, we held on enough to back our way into the second round, thanks to a victory by South Korea over Portugal, even though we got beaten (and beaten badly) by Poland. (We don’t have enough time, or bandwidth, to explain how you can advance in the World Cup when you only win one game out of three). We faced longtime rivals Mexico in the second round, and world opinion gave the US little chance — they were playing on a day’s less rest, and had looked progressively worse as the first round drew on.

Guess what? We kicked their ass. Final: USA 2, Mexico 0. (For those new to soccer, it is not a high scoring sport, at this level. Two goals is a healthy margin of victory).

Murder! Bodies! Blood!

Murder! Bodies! Blood!

Many of us take pleasure in things that we’d just as soon not expose to the light of day — large collections of ABBA records, a fondness for Family Ties reruns, perhaps. But my “guilty pleasure” is truly that — I find the stories of serial killers, homicidal maniacs, and the reasons behind their “guilty pleasures” arresting to read. Many people go through a phase of being interested in “true crime” at some point in their lives, but generally move past it, not wanting to dwell too long on the dark side of human nature. Not me.

I think my fascination with the topic started with a viewing of Helter Skelter, starring Steve Railsback as Charles Manson. He was quite good as the lunatic leader of a bunch of losers, but the image that stayed with me all these years was that of the maid running up the driveway of the Tate household screaming “Murder! Bodies! Blood!” after she discovered the hacked bodies of the dead. I immediately read Vincent Bugliosi’s book upon which the movie was based, as well as the far superior The Family by former Fug Ed Sanders. From that point, there was no stopping my obsession. I devoured anything that I could find on the subject, from the great works of Thomas Thompson (Celebrity, Blood And Money, et al) to quickie supermarket exposes on Albert Fish.

Falun Gong’s Challenge to China

Falun Gong’s Challenge to China
Danny Schechter
Akashic Books

Subtitled “Spiritual Practice or ‘Evil Cult‘,” this report and reader could go a long way to educating western minds to the exercise practice known as “Falun Gong” and the problems the group has suffered under the hands of the repressive Chinese government. The keyword here is “could.” Thousands of Falun Gong adherents have been jailed, detained, and in some cases killed in Chinese prisons, but worldwide media attention has been scant to their plight.

Falun Gong is a set of exercises with some minor philosophic commentary woven in — not exactly a force that will topple a government, correct? However benign the group is, the Chinese government seems focused on its destruction, declaring the group an “evil cult,” and outlawing it in 1999. China does not seem to like groups of people congregating for any reason, and the punishments it metes out for those who do so are harsh. This book is filled with accounts of people jailed and tortured for practicing Falun Gong, accounts that seem so extreme when read in a culture such as ours that allows free assembly and some measure of free speech. A list of resources are added for those who feel motivated upon reading the book, to do more.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

Ignorance is Not Bliss

Watching the clouds of smoke billow over New York and Washington was a sobering sight. Although I personally haven’t learned of anyone I knew that is missing after the attacks, due to the sheer number of people in the World Trade Center, a macabre version of “six degrees of separation” will undoubtedly find everyone in this country connected in someway to one of the lost. Of course, in a larger sense, we are all only one degree away — any attack on an American is an attack on us all, any affront to a human being is an affront to all. Many outcomes of this aggression are being bandied about, from US strikes on “those who harbor terrorists” (which would include most of the civilized world), to “bomb them back to the stone age” (they are already there, thanks in large part to Soviets a few years back). Closer to home, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants greater powers to conduct intelligence, including the expanded use of wiretapping and surveillance. And according to many polls, most Americans are just fine with whatever the powers that be deem necessary to keep this from happening again. They rush from prayer vigil to candlelight service, bedecked in Old Navy T-shirts with the American flag proudly displayed, the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the wind from the antenna of their gas-guzzling SUV. The world has a new Hitler in Osama bin Laden, the Taliban function quite well as Nazis.

Goodbye Minor Life Form

Goodbye Minor Life Form

Everything you know — or think you know — about the world is the product of the last 1000 years. Printing, electricity, the internal combustion engine, computers, et al have been created in a tiny sliver of the life of this planet. Long before we developed our frontal lobes and grew smart enough to get in out of the damn rain, this planet supported a fully functioning system of life. Then along came man. For thousands of years, the Earth barely noticed his presence — he lived, he ate some bugs, and when the big clock ticked its final tock, he fell over wherever he was, and died. In a few moments, perhaps another creature came by and ate up all his good parts, and the cycle of life continued on. And this process worked quite well, up until the very recent past, when one species got the big head and started screwing with the program. By disregarding nearly every evolutionary concept in place up until his arrival, man has blundered about with the foolish notion that he alone exists above the laws of nature. Every great advance that man has made has carried the potential for harm, and in almost every case, man has made sure that he exploited his surroundings, and in doing so, maximized the chance that something bad would happen. But generally, our planet has been strong enough to withstand and tolerate most of mans foolishness, and it will continue forever to do so, because it makes the rules. It’s man who steadfastly refuses to READ THE DAMN MANUAL and display the sense of common earthworm, a creature that ain’t much to look at, but does have enough gumption to stay away from predators and to establish a residence in a place that will sustain him. Nope, man has divined himself brighter than the lowly earthworm and in his infinite wisdom spurned the lush comfort of a hole in the earth surrounded by nutrients, instead convincing himself that the barren rock of the sidewalk and roadway is actually the finer place to stake a claim.

Things My Father Never Taught Me

Things My Father Never Taught Me

I can’t remember the last time I saw my father. While I was with him frequently for the year and a half before he died, the person who expired two weeks before Christmas wasn’t my father. His mind was gone – had been since the first time I saw him stretched out in the Veterans’ hospital. AIDS-related dementia, it was called. All I knew was that the man I spoke to thought I was a high school classmate of his, decades before in south Georgia. He thought the men in the other beds were Mexican students, bent on causing trouble. It only took me a few moments to realize that any attempt to change his mind was fruitless. I spoke to his doctors, once I could track them down. My father had been receiving outpatient care for AIDS going on six months.

I had spoken to him during that time – we had always lived in the same city. He complained of forgetting words, and his speech was hesitant, unsure. Granted, he was in his sixties, but my father had been an actor for years. His voice was a magnificent instrument, made to sing Handel’s Messiah or deliver chilling George Bernard Shaw monologues. So when he stumbled over simple phrases, it might have caught my ear, had I not been dealing with other problems, such as an impending divorce. I was distracted by the inevitable loss of my son, and I use that as my excuse.

My parents divorced while I still in high school, and in the years after, he and I gradually grew apart. Not out of any sort of anger – more that we were two people trying to grow up, and into new ways of life. I was trying to become a father, and he was learning what being single and homosexual meant to a man from Cario, Georgia. He lived in a bad part of town, and I didn’t get around much. I was closer to my mother. Having no brothers or sisters, it was basically just us. We did all right.

Open letter to Bowflex

To Whom It May Concern:

Although I watch very little television, I have realized that it is impossible to do so for any amount of time without encountering an ad for Bowflex. In the past your ads were simply annoying for a brief amount of time, quickly forgotten until 7 minutes later, when it would run again. But last night I saw your new ad, which features two men back from Afghanistan, proclaiming how the Bowflex kept them in shape while at war.

Are you so removed from any sort of human decency that you don’t realize that using the specter of the war in Afghanistan to sell an exercise machine is a repugnant and callous exercise in tastelessness? People died in Afghanistan. Innocent people, whose only “crime” was living in the wrong place at the wrong time. That the death of these people is trumpeted and celebrated at all is morally indefensible, but using it as fodder for your attempts at greater market share is loathsome.

While I doubt much discussion occurred among your board of directors prior to the running of this commercial, and I also doubt that this letter, or any others of its ilk that you might receive, will do anything but prove the effectiveness of your ad campaign, I do hope that at some point your company will reconsider the tactic of attempting to profit from the misery of others. War is perhaps at some point a necessary evil of our world. It is never a cause for celebration, no matter the outcome or the causes for which it was fought. But to use it as a marketing tool is an insult to those who died, and to all people with a shred of decency-decency you most obviously don’t share.

The Sky is Falling (in Places) but Some of it is Going to Land on You

The Sky is Falling (in Places)
but Some of it is Going to Land on You

Fickle bunch, we are. In order to sate our ravenous, but short-lived attention spans, we gorge ourselves on hype. Star Wars , Zippergate, you name it, we suck it up. Then we get bored, and move on to the newest bit of zip, but not before we attempt to downplay our fervor for yesterdays item. From half-price Jar Jar Binks dolls to a Blair Witch backlash, we are careful to trumpet that WE weren’t the ones going to the hottest movie, or wearing those huge butt-ugly bellbottom pants.

We’ve treated the Year 2000 problem pretty much the same way. Two years ago, Y2K was all the rage, and people seemed to feel it was a credible issue — one that would wreak havoc on our lives, cause the downfall of society as we know it, yada yada yada. Now, less than four months before the moment, we’ve decided as a mass to dismiss as wild hype any mention of possible problems connected with the change from “19” to “20.”

To all of you who feel that the attention paid to this issue is now passé hype, I have something for you to ponder on. The root of all hype is money. (Hell, the root of most everything is money!). A truly massive hype job starts with greed and grows into public mania. Except for outsourcing testing labs like the one I work at, some old programmers, and book publishers, nobody is making money on Y2K. People are instead spending a whaleload of money just to maintain the status quo. Most of it is too little, too late.

At the time of this writing, only three states (Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska) are ready for Y2K. That’s right — your state, that incredibly well run entity that attends to your every need, is pouring your tax dollars into a black hole of “oops,” hoping that they will get an extension on December. The same folks that handle the DMV, road construction and school security have it all under control.

Ha. Want a Jar Jar Binks doll?

Slim Shady, Network Engineer

Slim Shady, Network Engineer

I recently pulled up in traffic next to an expensive looking Jeep driven by a mid-twenties white guy. He had the official cube worker uniform — blue button-down shirt, nice tie, Dockers. On the seat beside him was a Cisco networking manual. So, up to that point, I could identify with him — I too am a cube rat, working in the IT industry. Although I was about 15 years older than him, we had more in common than not.

Until the next track on his CD started up, and incredibly loud and vile rap music blared across the intersection. At this point our paths diverged. My feeling about rap music and its culture goes far deeper than a simple dislike for the songs. The image of an urban professional co-opting a culture of violence and brutality as the soundtrack of his life is unsettling. The notion of this person reproducing is depressing beyond belief.

When I was growing up, in those pre-MTV days of the seventies, I was an Alice Cooper fanatic. My first concert was the Billion Dollar Babies tour, and I played my copies of Killer and Babies daily. Comfortably ensconced in white bread suburbia, I enjoyed the guitars and the pounding drums, but I never for a moment suspected that the person performing as “Alice Cooper” really had feelings about “Dead Babies” or actually loved the dead, as the song went. And when I saw him in concert, I knew the snake was a prop, and that Cooper didn’t actually defeat a giant tooth. I went from Cooper to the Clash, Zeppelin to the Ramones. I lived and breathed rock and roll, and still do.

Now I’m the parent of a 14-year-old boy who watches too much wrestling on TV, and always turns up Eminem when it comes on the radio. Now hearing the edited version of “Slim Shady” is one thing, but there is no way in hell he’s ever gonna sit down and listen to the The Marshall Mathers LP, at least not on my watch. Although he’s a bright kid, constant exposure to the homophobic rants, simulated murders and general negative portrayal of most everyone in the world can certainly have no good effect on the developing psyche of a young boy. So when I see the 20-something network professional tapping his foot to a musical world where a man is not a man unless he packs a Glock, where women are hos and bitches and homosexuals are at best objects of derision, if not violence, I see a person who has nothing to pass to the next generation.