I was out late this evening because I am the father of three boy children and when one is the father of three boy children, one makes an effort to go and see movies about superheroes at the earliest possible moment said movies are available for consumption. For us that meant Guardians of the Galaxy at 7:30 pm on a Thursday night. Why movies that are supposed to open on a Friday are now coming out at night on a Thursday doesn't make a lot of sense to me except to acknowledge that there is no order left in the world, neither words nor time as concepts hold any kind of recognizable meaning, you should just relax and enjoy the chaos as the universe sloughs us off along the path of cold, formless entropy.
The movie was pretty good, although I'm getting to the point where I'm afraid I may be too old to actually enjoy anything anymore. I stayed in last weekend and watched Snowpiercer, a Korean/American thinky action piece that currently enjoys a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. To give you an idea of what kind of neighborhood we're talking about, the film that won the first ever Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings, is rated at 97% on the site. So obviously it's roughly as good as that.
You know what I kept thinking about? Why there were whole sections of it lifted right out of The Matrix films. John Hurt was great in it. Octavia Spencer was great in it. Tilda Swinton was absolutely revelatory in it. Chris Evans was also in it. But more and more now all I can really do is wait for movies to remind me of other movies I've already seen. As with music. As with books. I feel my encroaching joyless decrepitude and all I can do is sigh.
As I have since I was 13, I keep wondering why more things can't just be like porn. For different reasons now, though. Back then it was because I wanted some kind of cover to explain my constant and apparently unprovoked pubescent erections. Now porn I think is the only thing I can go back to over and over again and still get the response from it I was hoping for, no matter how derivative or repetitive. Of course now I feel kinda bad for the girls in it and wonder about exploitation. But you know, later.
Guardians of the Galaxy reminded me of a lot of things. It would be easier to process if I knew how that was supposed to make me feel. Nostalgic? Honored? Ripped off? Vindicated (assuming it was something I liked)? Like everything else now, it mostly gives me mild indigestion and makes me want to take a little bit of a nap.
Boy, I can't wait to see what I'm like when I'm 80.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Girl Talk
I've had almost a month to think about this Hobby Lobby thing. I touched on it for just a second a few weeks ago in the normal way you're no doubt accustomed to reading here, Automated Russian Advertising Bot,* in a cheap throwaway line at the end of an overlong post filling the unnecessary space between (probably) boner jokes.
I'm trying to get through it, admitting of course that case law is not my primary area of expertise. What is my primary area of expertise, you ask? First of all, obviously, very insulted that you had to ask. Clearly it's bringing joy to a world audience through the medium of free internet content posting in a format that died with the last Bush administration.
My second primary** area of expertise? The ladies. Again, totes obvs. I say "totes obvs" because that's the way ladies talk now and I'm totes flu in their ling. Because I understand them on a level few men ever could. Because I was raised by women, almost exclusively. And because I used to be one.
Not biologically, obvs-iously. But I did used to stay home raising children, a job for which I was paid pennies on the dollar compared to what my then-wife was making in her less important job creating semiconductors. In fact it was even more repressive because pennies on the dollar would have been a big fat raise for me. Nope, I took my payment in child vomit and baby tears, with no hope of recuperation or equivalency, right up until the time I started receiving child support and a generous alimony. And stepped into a job almost immediately after I started looking, almost immediately out-earning my female peers. So you know, I've seen it from both sides. I feel your pain. Well, not "feel," but I think I could pick it out of a crowd.
Given my unique gender-transcending wo/man gaze, I see the Hobby Lobby decision and I know what it is saying to you, ladies: eeeease up on the whorin'. That's right, don't sweat the smaller details of who can buy Plan Whatever to pre-murder an unmade baby, blah blah. If you'd just stop being such a wanton slattern, you wouldn't need that particular pill or an IUD or clothes that showed off your ankles. Save up the money you would have spent on thongs and/or vajazzles and use that to buy your slut-pills if you have to. But the cheapest option? Lock it down. Don't be the free-milk supplier. Be the cow.
Even with all my insight, though, I have trouble understanding why women's reproductive rights are such a struggle. Clearly the patriarchy thing is real, with only Penis-American justices voting on the side of the religious preferences closely-held by a conglomeration of merchandise and leased retail space recorded on legal documents. All the ladies on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority ruling, but rarely do women vote en bloc in that way. Which I think is the heart of the issue. Other groups with civil rights issues can organize and mobilize around single issues or people, like the LGBT community or even a population as large as African Americans, as we've seen in the last couple of elections especially.
But women, who are also denied levels of coequal civil rights, can't behave as a minority might because they aren't a minority. Sure, they make up 50%+ of the population and even more of the electorate, but they are being undermined from within by the phenomenon of social and religious conservative women. More than half the men plus a large-enough chunk of women asking (in a very carefully limited and willfully contrarian way) How Would Jesus Vote? tangles up the picture for the electoral success of women's rights as an issue.
And to some level, if I'm really a supporter of women's self-determination, I have to be OK with that. If women want to vote in, as a random unrelated example, sharia law, the point of being a supporter of women's rights would be to say, loudly and definitively, that the principle isn't Plan B or Planned Parenthood, it's exactly that self-determination, no matter who contrary it seems to be on the face of it.
Luckily, as a former woman, I'm also inoculated from the taint of patriarchy, so when I say something like "What are you, fucking crazy with this? Don't you have daughters? How dare you attempt to impose your limited, medieval worldview across an entire population?" it's not condescending man-splanation, it's the honest engagement in an exchange of ideas between two politically indistinguishable human beings. One of whom is totally fucking wrong.
--
*the Blogger software very kindly tracks the source of page visits. As far as I can tell, 95% of my readership generates from somewhere along the frontier with Kazakhstan and would like to sell me some very poorly lit porn featuring some borderline-sclerotic models. I appreciate the attempt at reciprocation. And your very dedicated continued readership.
**I can't use "secondary" because we're talking about distinctions without difference here. In terms of laudable personal attributes, these are first among equals. And also second among equals.
I'm trying to get through it, admitting of course that case law is not my primary area of expertise. What is my primary area of expertise, you ask? First of all, obviously, very insulted that you had to ask. Clearly it's bringing joy to a world audience through the medium of free internet content posting in a format that died with the last Bush administration.
My second primary** area of expertise? The ladies. Again, totes obvs. I say "totes obvs" because that's the way ladies talk now and I'm totes flu in their ling. Because I understand them on a level few men ever could. Because I was raised by women, almost exclusively. And because I used to be one.
Not biologically, obvs-iously. But I did used to stay home raising children, a job for which I was paid pennies on the dollar compared to what my then-wife was making in her less important job creating semiconductors. In fact it was even more repressive because pennies on the dollar would have been a big fat raise for me. Nope, I took my payment in child vomit and baby tears, with no hope of recuperation or equivalency, right up until the time I started receiving child support and a generous alimony. And stepped into a job almost immediately after I started looking, almost immediately out-earning my female peers. So you know, I've seen it from both sides. I feel your pain. Well, not "feel," but I think I could pick it out of a crowd.
Given my unique gender-transcending wo/man gaze, I see the Hobby Lobby decision and I know what it is saying to you, ladies: eeeease up on the whorin'. That's right, don't sweat the smaller details of who can buy Plan Whatever to pre-murder an unmade baby, blah blah. If you'd just stop being such a wanton slattern, you wouldn't need that particular pill or an IUD or clothes that showed off your ankles. Save up the money you would have spent on thongs and/or vajazzles and use that to buy your slut-pills if you have to. But the cheapest option? Lock it down. Don't be the free-milk supplier. Be the cow.
Even with all my insight, though, I have trouble understanding why women's reproductive rights are such a struggle. Clearly the patriarchy thing is real, with only Penis-American justices voting on the side of the religious preferences closely-held by a conglomeration of merchandise and leased retail space recorded on legal documents. All the ladies on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority ruling, but rarely do women vote en bloc in that way. Which I think is the heart of the issue. Other groups with civil rights issues can organize and mobilize around single issues or people, like the LGBT community or even a population as large as African Americans, as we've seen in the last couple of elections especially.
But women, who are also denied levels of coequal civil rights, can't behave as a minority might because they aren't a minority. Sure, they make up 50%+ of the population and even more of the electorate, but they are being undermined from within by the phenomenon of social and religious conservative women. More than half the men plus a large-enough chunk of women asking (in a very carefully limited and willfully contrarian way) How Would Jesus Vote? tangles up the picture for the electoral success of women's rights as an issue.
And to some level, if I'm really a supporter of women's self-determination, I have to be OK with that. If women want to vote in, as a random unrelated example, sharia law, the point of being a supporter of women's rights would be to say, loudly and definitively, that the principle isn't Plan B or Planned Parenthood, it's exactly that self-determination, no matter who contrary it seems to be on the face of it.
Luckily, as a former woman, I'm also inoculated from the taint of patriarchy, so when I say something like "What are you, fucking crazy with this? Don't you have daughters? How dare you attempt to impose your limited, medieval worldview across an entire population?" it's not condescending man-splanation, it's the honest engagement in an exchange of ideas between two politically indistinguishable human beings. One of whom is totally fucking wrong.
--
*the Blogger software very kindly tracks the source of page visits. As far as I can tell, 95% of my readership generates from somewhere along the frontier with Kazakhstan and would like to sell me some very poorly lit porn featuring some borderline-sclerotic models. I appreciate the attempt at reciprocation. And your very dedicated continued readership.
**I can't use "secondary" because we're talking about distinctions without difference here. In terms of laudable personal attributes, these are first among equals. And also second among equals.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Las Californias
Unlike most Californians, I was actually born here. There aren't a lot of perks that come along with this fact, unless you count the exhilarating lack of ironic detachment I get from wearing apparel themed after the California flag.
Well, there are a few more perks, but I'm really not supposed to talk about them in mixed company. I mean with non-Californios, obviously, not racially. In fact I'm pretty sure if all of us natives were going to get together and start excluding the less-represented racial minorities, the middle-class white men like myself would be the first ones cast out to try our luck amongst the Iowans and Wyomingites. Wyomingites? Wyomingans. Wyomingers? I have no idea. Either way, I clearly mean: other white people.
Honestly though, the ups-is-downs-ism of majority-minority demographics is just one of the weird-ass, vaguely threatening things that I love about not just living here, but being from here. Another: there aren't a lot of other places to live where the Number 1 threat to your long-term health and physical and financial well-being is the ground. Earthquakes before? Piece of cake, almost never give them a thought.* Earthquakes during? Pure unadulterated terror, at the rootsiest, primal-est, most existential of all levels. Earthquake just after? Totally fucking awesome. You get to go check out the Cal Tech seismology lab website with all your friends and exactly the same time, you get to catalogue the angle of deviation of pictures on the walls to fill in any and all gaps in smalltalk for the next five to seven days,** you get to go straight back to picking at your salad of uncooked chard and warm candy cane beets with the maximum amount of re-composed ennui while drinking in the lingering panic of all the expats from places where bedrock is never your enemy.
California is a maddening, unwieldy, dysfunctional, unsustainable conglomeration of antagonistic physical needs and world views. All those things are given. Worse, it's all overseen by the lamest of figurehead governments, all branches of which have been gelded by a massively under-thought system of direct representation by a series of cynical and contradictory statewide ballot initiatives, which is responsible for giving this supposedly liberal state the great tradition of targeting the minorities least able to defend themselves for persecution with measures like Prop. 187 or Prop. 8.
Man, there was going to be a "but" there at the end and I lost it...
Oh yes! Look, there are some great things about California as well. Beaches and mountains... palm trees I guess, blah blah. That's all chamber of commerce bullshit. The bonds that tie us together are deep. Really deep. Which is not hard because there are places where the mantle of the earth is exposed. I think seismic instability is what holds us together. If the Central Valley is the heart of the state, then the San Andreas Fault is our aorta. And by that I mean it operates constantly under tremendous amounts of stress and is guaranteed to one day kill us.
Not only will it one day, it and all it's little shithead brother and sister faults have tried to kill us already. Like thousands of times. North and south, the whole state. Northridge, Loma Prieta, Sylmar, San Francisco, too many others to name. But these are the things we SoCal people can share with the NoCal people. You know, the people we hate the most. More than Texans or Floridians even, and that is saying something. But we're locked together in this completely meaningless struggle against the great undefeatable foe, Plate Tectonics. And to steal water from anywhere and everywhere we can because human life is not sustainable in these densities with the weather patterns and watersheds as they are. But sometimes your best buddy is the guy you hate the most because the needs of the moment dictate it. Haven't you ever seen Tango and Cash? Everything you need to know about this state is in that movie. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
We've stuck it out this long. Since 1850 we've been one state. And before that we were all the Alta California province of Mexico and of Nueva Espana before that. And now some dickhead tech nerd wants to break us up so he doesn't have to share his money with schools and roads in places in the bumblefuck outback of our state like Los Angeles and San Diego? No sir. As a native, I object. If we're getting broken up, it's going to be physically. By an earthquake. Shaken right off the earth like hose-water off a dog's back. We've earned it.
Or, no, I guess we could be broken up by a violent revolution caused by the ever widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, which this idiotic six Californias plan would exacerbate, intensify and possible precipitate. Hang on, I've just changed my own mind, sir. Objection withdrawn. I'd like to get a shot at looting what I imagine are your very well appointed homes. Proceed.
--
*Feel free to double-check the veracity of that statement with my homeowner's insurance carrier.
**Depending on the Richter scale magnitude. If you're still talking about anything under a 4.5 a week later, you might as well start slipping in some "y'all" and "you betcha" into your conversations.
Well, there are a few more perks, but I'm really not supposed to talk about them in mixed company. I mean with non-Californios, obviously, not racially. In fact I'm pretty sure if all of us natives were going to get together and start excluding the less-represented racial minorities, the middle-class white men like myself would be the first ones cast out to try our luck amongst the Iowans and Wyomingites. Wyomingites? Wyomingans. Wyomingers? I have no idea. Either way, I clearly mean: other white people.
Honestly though, the ups-is-downs-ism of majority-minority demographics is just one of the weird-ass, vaguely threatening things that I love about not just living here, but being from here. Another: there aren't a lot of other places to live where the Number 1 threat to your long-term health and physical and financial well-being is the ground. Earthquakes before? Piece of cake, almost never give them a thought.* Earthquakes during? Pure unadulterated terror, at the rootsiest, primal-est, most existential of all levels. Earthquake just after? Totally fucking awesome. You get to go check out the Cal Tech seismology lab website with all your friends and exactly the same time, you get to catalogue the angle of deviation of pictures on the walls to fill in any and all gaps in smalltalk for the next five to seven days,** you get to go straight back to picking at your salad of uncooked chard and warm candy cane beets with the maximum amount of re-composed ennui while drinking in the lingering panic of all the expats from places where bedrock is never your enemy.
California is a maddening, unwieldy, dysfunctional, unsustainable conglomeration of antagonistic physical needs and world views. All those things are given. Worse, it's all overseen by the lamest of figurehead governments, all branches of which have been gelded by a massively under-thought system of direct representation by a series of cynical and contradictory statewide ballot initiatives, which is responsible for giving this supposedly liberal state the great tradition of targeting the minorities least able to defend themselves for persecution with measures like Prop. 187 or Prop. 8.
Man, there was going to be a "but" there at the end and I lost it...
Oh yes! Look, there are some great things about California as well. Beaches and mountains... palm trees I guess, blah blah. That's all chamber of commerce bullshit. The bonds that tie us together are deep. Really deep. Which is not hard because there are places where the mantle of the earth is exposed. I think seismic instability is what holds us together. If the Central Valley is the heart of the state, then the San Andreas Fault is our aorta. And by that I mean it operates constantly under tremendous amounts of stress and is guaranteed to one day kill us.
Not only will it one day, it and all it's little shithead brother and sister faults have tried to kill us already. Like thousands of times. North and south, the whole state. Northridge, Loma Prieta, Sylmar, San Francisco, too many others to name. But these are the things we SoCal people can share with the NoCal people. You know, the people we hate the most. More than Texans or Floridians even, and that is saying something. But we're locked together in this completely meaningless struggle against the great undefeatable foe, Plate Tectonics. And to steal water from anywhere and everywhere we can because human life is not sustainable in these densities with the weather patterns and watersheds as they are. But sometimes your best buddy is the guy you hate the most because the needs of the moment dictate it. Haven't you ever seen Tango and Cash? Everything you need to know about this state is in that movie. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
We've stuck it out this long. Since 1850 we've been one state. And before that we were all the Alta California province of Mexico and of Nueva Espana before that. And now some dickhead tech nerd wants to break us up so he doesn't have to share his money with schools and roads in places in the bumblefuck outback of our state like Los Angeles and San Diego? No sir. As a native, I object. If we're getting broken up, it's going to be physically. By an earthquake. Shaken right off the earth like hose-water off a dog's back. We've earned it.
Or, no, I guess we could be broken up by a violent revolution caused by the ever widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, which this idiotic six Californias plan would exacerbate, intensify and possible precipitate. Hang on, I've just changed my own mind, sir. Objection withdrawn. I'd like to get a shot at looting what I imagine are your very well appointed homes. Proceed.
--
*Feel free to double-check the veracity of that statement with my homeowner's insurance carrier.
**Depending on the Richter scale magnitude. If you're still talking about anything under a 4.5 a week later, you might as well start slipping in some "y'all" and "you betcha" into your conversations.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
And a Little Child Will Lead Them (to Fontana, Apparently)
OK, so the Benghazi thing continues to be an inexhaustible source of misses, despite the best efforts of local boy professional camera-face and auto theft hobbyist Darrell Issa.
The promised Obamacare debacle keeps on stubbornly refusing to materialize, not only by failing to murder anyone as promised but in fact by defiantly giving record numbers of people medicine to keep them alive longer. This is typical Obama cynicism, dressing up what sounds like a great piece of long-overdue legislation and exploiting it for what it really is: a bald-faced political payout to swing voters to himself and the Democrat party. Just because you're paying them in preventative MRIs or dialysis doesn't mean it's not a bribe.
Maybe there's a way to make this Syria-Iraq thing his fault, but you know, that's foreign policy stuff that might take a long time to develop and even longer to explain... Maybe we'll get lucky again and some high-level national security people will willfully ignore direct warnings of terrorist threats resulting in some kind of horrific human disaster and THEN we can whip out the ole Book of Military Blank Checks, but until then, people are just going to keep watching other people jumping face-first into padded platforms. Best to wait until September when people start aggressively not giving a shit about original television programming.
Hang on though... what about the browns? No, not the regular ones, the other ones. The ones who don't talk English like us. Maybe that will finally throw O'Bummer for a loop? You know how he goes around being interested in people and what happens to them. That's got to present itself as an exploitable weakness eventually!
Admittedly, maybe picking on busloads of defenseless and abandoned children isn't the best as far as optics go. But you don't pick at the oozing sore you wish for. You pick at the oozing sore you've already got. Or I guess you make yourself a new sore, but then you have to wait a couple of days before it goes sufficiently oozy and we're dealing with a 24-hour news cycle here,* people. Nobody has time.
I have to say I'm super chuffed to see that, in addition to Riverside County's own Darrell Issa and the Benghazi stuff, in Murrieta, a town neighboring his constituency, my people have rushed out to be front and center of all the televisuals of red-faced, screaming adults staring down and intimidating away the looming scourge of orphan children in dire need.
Sadly though we don't win for the crazy. We're never going to be able to match Texas. All we've got are some lame signs and misguided indignation. Texans have vowed to give warnings in a language the children don't understand before then shooting them. To be fair I guess I should say they didn't explicitly say they meant just the children. In the interest of due process, one assumes these volunteer justice-bringers will remember to check for papers on the bodies of the people they've already shot.
Congressional Republicans won't be falling for the same trap as Obamacare though, oh no. They're not going to sit around and just let the president do someting. Sure, they've hectored him into some kind of action, but when he offers funds for the effort they want, they are of course immediately skeptical:
And that's straight out of the liberal-socialist handbook: more government. All you can do is shake your head. No really, I mean that's literally all you can do. Everything else is probably treason.**
--
*I feel like I just dated myself. Are we down to 12-hour cycles? Six? How fast does that twitter thing run?
**Exception: I think we all agree that the last place to send buses full of unsupervised children is to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops. Hopefully we aren't already too late.
The promised Obamacare debacle keeps on stubbornly refusing to materialize, not only by failing to murder anyone as promised but in fact by defiantly giving record numbers of people medicine to keep them alive longer. This is typical Obama cynicism, dressing up what sounds like a great piece of long-overdue legislation and exploiting it for what it really is: a bald-faced political payout to swing voters to himself and the Democrat party. Just because you're paying them in preventative MRIs or dialysis doesn't mean it's not a bribe.
Maybe there's a way to make this Syria-Iraq thing his fault, but you know, that's foreign policy stuff that might take a long time to develop and even longer to explain... Maybe we'll get lucky again and some high-level national security people will willfully ignore direct warnings of terrorist threats resulting in some kind of horrific human disaster and THEN we can whip out the ole Book of Military Blank Checks, but until then, people are just going to keep watching other people jumping face-first into padded platforms. Best to wait until September when people start aggressively not giving a shit about original television programming.
Hang on though... what about the browns? No, not the regular ones, the other ones. The ones who don't talk English like us. Maybe that will finally throw O'Bummer for a loop? You know how he goes around being interested in people and what happens to them. That's got to present itself as an exploitable weakness eventually!
Admittedly, maybe picking on busloads of defenseless and abandoned children isn't the best as far as optics go. But you don't pick at the oozing sore you wish for. You pick at the oozing sore you've already got. Or I guess you make yourself a new sore, but then you have to wait a couple of days before it goes sufficiently oozy and we're dealing with a 24-hour news cycle here,* people. Nobody has time.
I have to say I'm super chuffed to see that, in addition to Riverside County's own Darrell Issa and the Benghazi stuff, in Murrieta, a town neighboring his constituency, my people have rushed out to be front and center of all the televisuals of red-faced, screaming adults staring down and intimidating away the looming scourge of orphan children in dire need.
Sadly though we don't win for the crazy. We're never going to be able to match Texas. All we've got are some lame signs and misguided indignation. Texans have vowed to give warnings in a language the children don't understand before then shooting them. To be fair I guess I should say they didn't explicitly say they meant just the children. In the interest of due process, one assumes these volunteer justice-bringers will remember to check for papers on the bodies of the people they've already shot.
Congressional Republicans won't be falling for the same trap as Obamacare though, oh no. They're not going to sit around and just let the president do someting. Sure, they've hectored him into some kind of action, but when he offers funds for the effort they want, they are of course immediately skeptical:
Republicans, who have pressed the White House to do more to tackle the crisis, gave the proposal a wary reception.“The House is not going to just rubber-stamp what the administration wants to do," said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, who is a member of Speaker John Boehner's border crisis task force.Manufacture crisis. Demand action. Receive proposal. REFUSE ALL ACTION! Obama can say "This isn't theater" all he wants, but that just proves how out of touch he is. Everything is theater. Take away the theater and what are you left with? That's right: government.
And that's straight out of the liberal-socialist handbook: more government. All you can do is shake your head. No really, I mean that's literally all you can do. Everything else is probably treason.**
--
*I feel like I just dated myself. Are we down to 12-hour cycles? Six? How fast does that twitter thing run?
**Exception: I think we all agree that the last place to send buses full of unsupervised children is to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops. Hopefully we aren't already too late.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
The Sun is Rising
I come to you, flush with pride on the eve of the anniversary of the publishing of the document giving the double middle finger to Euro-trash voting-restrictive government by white men only. And it would only be seven short years later that the war would be won and we would be free to implement immediately all the principles professed in the Declaration of Independence. Or really I guess like 11 years later when our present Constitution was completed. Or if you want to get really, really technical, I guess maybe when the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution were passed abolishing slavery and guaranteeing equal protection under the law. And if I were getting really nitpicky, maybe I'd say we had to wait until the late 1960s and the Lyndon Johnson administration before we saw the de jure rights alluded to in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become de facto in any kind of enforceable way through large parts of the country. BUT STILL, July 4, 1776... Big day. Big day.
I like to think we're still holding true to the tenets expressed in the Declaration. You have to remember them in context. These were a bunch of dudes sitting around together, pretty sure that they'd all hang for treason, just spit-ballin' some ideas to throw some hardcore shade in the direction of the then most powerful man on the whole planet, King George III of the United Kingdom. It's really just the most successful ever single page taken from a super bitchy burn book, directed only at one guy. It was something thrown together as a goof that has gone on to totally unexpected social and cultural ubiquity. Like Grumpy Cat or Gangnam Style.
We can be snarky about it I guess, with the little details about the subjugation of women or the slavery oversight implicit in the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clause, but I think because of the total expectation of failure, they were free to roll out some blue-sky thinking. The Declaration is aspirational. It's not descriptive, it's prescriptive. "This is what we'd like our country to be, if only we could get this gross imperialist monkey off our backs."
It's provided us a blueprint of what to shoot for since then. And sometimes we had to actually shoot for it. But even though we've constantly been harangued and delayed and even derailed by foot-draggers and panicked reactionaries from amongst our own ranks, that hasn't stopped us from retconning those hard-fought, barely won victories of bloody attrition into gold-nugget tropes of foundational, revelational TRUTH. This is what the Declaration of Independence allows us to do. African slaves and their American descendants got their missing two-fifths back. Eventually. Chicks could totally vote. Eventually. Gay people were allowed to not enter into horrible sham marriages with straight people of the opposite gender because it became legal for them to enter horrible honest marriages with one another. Eventually.* And we do it all with graceful cover, where we can crow that look, from the very beginning, this is what America is all about. Eventually.
Failure into victory. That's why this week's heroes are Tim Howard and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Soccer and reproductive freedom. Setbacks now, sure, but you know... say it with me... eventually.
--
*More or less. Getting there. Good work this week, Kentucky!
I like to think we're still holding true to the tenets expressed in the Declaration. You have to remember them in context. These were a bunch of dudes sitting around together, pretty sure that they'd all hang for treason, just spit-ballin' some ideas to throw some hardcore shade in the direction of the then most powerful man on the whole planet, King George III of the United Kingdom. It's really just the most successful ever single page taken from a super bitchy burn book, directed only at one guy. It was something thrown together as a goof that has gone on to totally unexpected social and cultural ubiquity. Like Grumpy Cat or Gangnam Style.
We can be snarky about it I guess, with the little details about the subjugation of women or the slavery oversight implicit in the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clause, but I think because of the total expectation of failure, they were free to roll out some blue-sky thinking. The Declaration is aspirational. It's not descriptive, it's prescriptive. "This is what we'd like our country to be, if only we could get this gross imperialist monkey off our backs."
It's provided us a blueprint of what to shoot for since then. And sometimes we had to actually shoot for it. But even though we've constantly been harangued and delayed and even derailed by foot-draggers and panicked reactionaries from amongst our own ranks, that hasn't stopped us from retconning those hard-fought, barely won victories of bloody attrition into gold-nugget tropes of foundational, revelational TRUTH. This is what the Declaration of Independence allows us to do. African slaves and their American descendants got their missing two-fifths back. Eventually. Chicks could totally vote. Eventually. Gay people were allowed to not enter into horrible sham marriages with straight people of the opposite gender because it became legal for them to enter horrible honest marriages with one another. Eventually.* And we do it all with graceful cover, where we can crow that look, from the very beginning, this is what America is all about. Eventually.
Failure into victory. That's why this week's heroes are Tim Howard and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Soccer and reproductive freedom. Setbacks now, sure, but you know... say it with me... eventually.
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*More or less. Getting there. Good work this week, Kentucky!
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