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May 20, 2009 - May 13, 2009

Sunday, March 30, 2008

FLASHBACK. All the young'uns I know have learned not to tell me that their objection to things they don't know anything about is that they're "boring." The word refers to a surfeit of knowledge, not an incurious lack of knowledge or interest. Until kids prove they know something, they have no right to declare they're bored. (Most parents are too "bored" themselves to apply this kind of discipline.) So: When I use the word "boring" I really mean it.

"Earth Hour" was boring. Boring in the way that hearing a Sarah Lawrence women's studies major condemn men is boring. In the way that hearing a Vegan rail about the soul-sickness of those who like a Porterhouse steak is boring. In the way that people who are in love with the whole idea of death talk about "saving the planet" as if that were some kind of humanistic goal is boring. In the way that hearing anyone reference anything ever said by Al Gore as some kind of wisdom is boring.

Think about it. Your idea of progress is watching the lights go out on civilization? It's never occurred to you that the beginning of the self-absorbed obsession you have with yourselves occurred in the torchlight of the aged twenty-somethings who finally had the post-sunset leisure time to invent social criticism (i.e., art) in the Lascaux caves 15,000 years ago?


But you've used your so-called rationalism to turn everything 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Your ancestors equated light with life. You've tricked yourselves into equating light with death.


The next step for you is understanding that your idea of human guilt is an irrational religious condemnation of life in general and of conscious life in particular. I feel sure you can accomplish that small remaining leap of logic. Just allow yourselves to imagine that each of the evil, insignificant flies in the following footage has a history, a family, a life, and an infinite set of emotional experiences probably more varied than your own.


Then come back and tell us how virtuous it would be -- in the grand scheme of things, you know -- to snuff it all out for the sake of a planet you have anthropomorphized, based on no evidence whatever, as Gaia.

We don't need any more "Earth Hours." What we need is for humans to remember who their friends are. Which doesn't include a multi-trillion ton chunk of iron and rock.

But never mind our objections. The ending you have planned for all of us is so much more romantic that it has already been written by a woman who was, if anything, even more spectacular than Gaia.


Her name was Ayn Rand. She was, like many of you, an atheist. But she wasn't a self-hating, delusional moron. Like most of you.

Just something to think about. After the glory of Earth Hour and all.

What a bunch of putzes.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

YAH YAH TRICK. The old punks have had their say. Time for the sagely voice of youth.

Whether you realize it or not, OldPunk has addressed all the objections, contentions, and accusations of all the "haterz" in the comments section. Every last one. Your excuse for calling him racist, whatever it is, has a successful rebuttal in one of the last two posts. If you're up to the task of reading a massive block of text thicker than three whole lines, that is. And even if you aren't.

I'm sorry. I'll be nice.

I'll put this as plainly as possible. White criticism of Black America is not, as one commenter claimed, de facto racism. It may not be "allowed," but like any judgment, it sure can be valid.

Nor is use of the N-word de facto racist. You think white people are, like, biologically incapable of jocular use of the last dirty word in the English language? Nigga please.

You have to understand. The whole race issue is very different for all the white kids born since 1980, like me. Those of us who weren't extremely poor were raised to hate racism. Yes, hate. Yes, as a rule. If you're white, and hate racism so much, don't think of yourself as one of the precious few or something. Anti-racism has, in fact, been a main point of the social orthodoxy kids have been raised with for a couple decades at least.

And here's something interesting: Another tenet of said orthodoxy was that society was racist. Even though, in all important particulars, it just wasn't anymore. Yes, I know you can recite a big long list of contrary cases and incidents. Even so, I maintain there's not enough exceptions to disprove the rule. (If you disagree, well... we'll have to agree to disagree. And if you don't agree to that, go ahead and fuck off. I said I'd be nice, but give a nigga a break.)

All of my batch of white kids who went to public school learned the Martin Luther King story every February for 12 years straight. From Rosa Parks to I Have a Dream. It went like this:

Racism is bad. Once, there was legalized racism in the south. MLK desegregated the schools and buses and diners and drinking fountains, then led every black person in the country and a few whites in a march to the Washington Monument, where he said someday we should stop being racist altogether. Which is impossible, of course, because white people will always, always be at least a little racist, even if they don't know it. They (we) can't help it.

I believed it. Until I became a surly teenager and realized the N-word was the heaviest artillery in my 'Piss Adults Off' arsenal. (N-)Bombs away!

Thing is, I never used it around black people. a) I didn't want my ass beat, and b) even when it was some black dude I could have taken in a fight, I had just enough empathy to show a scintilla of respect (of course, if you had called it "respect" to my face, I would have beat your ass).

My hilariously casual use of "nigga" continues to the present. The best way to get a rise with it is to pretend using it is no big deal. That raises people's hackles so quick. So satisfying. I still don't use it around blacks, because I only believe in punching very good friends in the balls, and I haven't yet become close enough w/ any black person to rib him with an N-grenade. I'm a rude dick only up to a point, and I pride myself on that.

Lots of my peers feel the same way. And-- don't take this the wrong way-- we don't care even a little if you think our attitude is inappropriate. We know we're not racist, and obviously even our flawed "bust balls to make friends" approach works a whole lot better than yours.

So there's that.

The N-word isn't the real central issue. The reaction to "nigger" is a visceral expression of how we've come to define racism for ourselves. From An Amerian Glossary:

Racist. Any white person who fails to feel or exhibit continuous uncritical love for any or all people who are not white. [emphasis added]

That's the problem here. Everyone, including whites, needs to be free to express their observations and suppositions. About anything and everything. No matter how noxious or egregious their conclusions may be. Since human beings depend on their minds to, you know, function, the brain really has to be free to do its thing. I know we think there's ideas and beliefs that are too dangerous not to be stomped on with a heavy boot, because giving them any air at all will lead to Willie Mays getting dragged behind a truck or whatever.

But real prejudice is easy enough to diagnose when we come across it that we don't have to be prejudiced against it. Thinking things through as a rule is a much better plan than establishing a No-Fly Zone over certain notions. That's responsible for most of the recruiting power currently enjoyed by white supremacists and skinheads. They're the only ones allowed to even appear to be unafraid of the subject.

For the record: White Supremecy is crap. Utter idiocy. Enough black men and women have demonstrated profound achievment and capability to place the entire race beyond suspicion of subhumanity. Which is why the black community is worth worrying about. Because it sure as hell looks, to anyone willing to look, like the highest aspiration of any black man younger than 40 is to live, and die, like Al Pacino in Scarface.


What's that? Do I go out of my way to denounce all white trash? Nope. Because I see plenty of white people who aren't trash. I see few enough black examples who aren't to wonder if it isn't anomalous. And oh my God, don't start screaming about "the media" now. Chris Rock, that whistleblower of racial politics, put that excuse to bed a while ago:

Are you starting to get it? This is what an honest discussion of race looks like. It's ugly. It's uncomfortable, for all "sides." It entails risking your tolerance on the results of your understanding. It is not a contest. It is not a forum for showing off your love by hating those who don't love. It is definitely not a time to reinforce only the smug assumptions you already have. The ideas you come across in the course of it stay with you and bother you long after you're done talking.

You don't like that?

YAH, TRICK, YAHHH!

YouTube WednesdayThursday:

IT'S THAT DAY AGAIN. A mixed bag of topics today, from the ridiculous to the sad and back to the ridiculous again. First up is a report in Wired.com which puts the "climate change crisis" in a whole new light:


Talk about a stretch. How many human beings were there on earth in 6000 BC? Maybe 10 million? That's like scattering the population of London all over the planet. And they were already changing the climate. Right. So how is it that with a world population of 6.5 billion today, we still have reputable scientists (and we do, despite the pompous qualifier in the Wired.com piece) unconvinced that human beings are changing the climate right now?

The answer lies in that "anthropo" prefix in the preferred new name for the holocene. A more accurate suggestion would be the "anthropocentric era." The contemporary religion of scientific materialism, including its bombastic atheism, tracks closely with the oldest principles of Old Testament religion. In their view of all the vast wonders of nature and the cosmos, the only thing they regard as vile is the species of mankind and the fruits of his efforts to build civilization. In other words, the very scientists who decry the Judeo-Christian insistence on putting man at the center of creation as a monolithic exception are doing exactly the same thing. When the Christians do it, it's an act of irrational superstition. When scientists do it, it's the assertion of an objective fact. In this context, it's easy to identify the new Original Sin of the evil creatures we are as fire, the invention that finally gave man the edge in his battle to survive and prosper. How ludicrously retro can you get?

We'll leave it at that, but for those who think we're overstating the case against contemporary scientific zealots, here's a highly literate and thoughtful review of the leading new gospels of atheism (long but well worth the reading), and here's a glimpse at how professional scientists are trying to use the tools of their trade to finally hunt down and exterminate God. Just for fun after all that, here's another humorous recutting of Quest for Fire excerpts.

All those simian bullies with their bones and grunts can't help but remind us that the great scientist and writer Arthur C. Clarke died last week at the age of 90. We noted his passing at the time, but since then by an odd coincidence, we have also lost two other fine contributors to the arts, one in his 90s and one in his late 80s.

The New York Times has a fine obituary of Richard Widmark, who managed to have an incredibly long and successful acting career while maintaining his personal privacy and a 55-year marriage to the woman he wed before he ever became a star. He never once appeared on a talk show but preferred to let his work speak for itself. Which it does. He rocketed to fame in his first movie role, playing a character so creepy that the performance remains riveting to this day.


Studio heads literally drafted him (via contract trickery) in the wake of that role to come to Hollywood to play a series of deranged villains, but he escaped the typecasting to become a leading man and an unselfish character actor. Here's a scene from one of the most star-studded movies in Hollywood history. Note Widmark's almost invisible entrance and the way he subsequently becomes the center of gravity in the courtroom, despite the knots of pain and hatred that surround him. You can still feel him as a steady-eyed presence anchoring the orbit of emotion even when he's not on camera.


The reasons for that unassuming but potent gravity are nicely presented in the Times piece, along with a long list of movies you might want to rent from Netflix or whoever your flick provider is.

The same is unfortunately not true of the week's other huge loss, Paul Scofield, who died last Thursday at the age of 86. Compared to other great actors -- of which he was absolutely in the first rank -- he had a fairly short filmography in which many of his roles were but brief appearances or in hard-to-obtain British TV productions. He spent a lot of his career on the British stage, where he was known as the greatest King Lear of his generation. And while he did make a movie of Lear, the production was so dark and eccentric that it did little to showcase his brilliance; it also seems very difficult to locate a copy of in any form. Mostly, what we've been left with is his fine performance in The Train and the movie that made him famous in the U.S., A Man for All Seasons.


In terms of the kind of career he chose to have, he seems a throwback to an earlier time, before the movie star lionization of great Brit actors like Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Nicol Williamson, and Anthony Hopkins. The irony is that his demeanor as an actor is curiously more modern than that of his more famous colleagues, less histrionic, more deeply involving. With him we're not seeing a pyrotechnical show, but the interior drama of a mind grappling quietly with eternities. Above all there's that miraculous voice, with its hint of passionate tremolo, so precise that even its pauses become one with its meticulous tone, as inevitably perfect as Glenn Gould playing Bach.


It's a crying shame we don't have more to remember him by in this over-loud and over-exposed media generation.

Did someone say "loud and over-exposed"? Yes, the media are too much with us, especially in this feverish election cycle, and so we'll close out this entry with a hilariously brave and doomed attempt by a print journalist to immerse himself in the TV-radio-Internet ocean of punditry. Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post chose Valentine's Day for a 24-hour assignation with the blogosphere's leading pundits, the continuous news/commentary broadcasts of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and CSPAN, as well as the 800-lb gorillas of talk radio. His tools were a laptop, five TVs, two radios, an endless supply of coffee, and a universal remote. His mission was to liveblog what he calls the "firehose" of the information media. With becoming formality -- and perhaps a smidgen of the solemnity of a sacrificial victim -- he wore a tuxedo for the occasion.

Along the way he encountered a true diversity of opinion and subject matter. He experienced "the Drudge Report, Daily Kos, The Fix, the Corner, Captain's Quarters, Buck Naked Politics, Instapundit, the Page, the Hotline, Michellemalkin.com and, of course, Memeorandum" in the blogosphere, as well as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Larry King, James Carville, Hannity & Colmes, Ann Coulter, Keith Olbermann, and a continuous stream of politicians, over-hyped events, and cable-news talking heads on both sides of the aisle. He found the ordeal overwhelming, dispiriting yet sometimes exhilarating, and finally exhausting. It's actually quite a good piece, and we have no desire to carp. If it weren't for the fact that this is YouTube WednesdayThurday, we'd probably stop here with a recommendation to read the whole funny story and draw your own conclusions.

But it is YouTube WednesdayThursday, and we were struck by the three individual encounters he seemed to find most traumatic. An admitted "liberal" (and even "lefty"), he was quite frankly discomfited by Rush Limbaugh:


Of course he manages at length to quell the panic he feels at momentarily liking Limbaugh -- although to be fair, he seems to allow that he might be straining at straws even in this -- but one can't help surmising that the real reason for his surprise about Limbaugh is that he, like so many of Rush's most ferocious critics, hadn't ever really listened to the man in person. The first 30 seconds or so of the clip below summarize what is probably an epidemic phenomenon (although the rest of it is illustrative of what Limbaugh has been subjected to, if not of his usual cheery mien):


Then Weingarten has a moment of genuine horror when he listens to the Michael Savage show, obviously for the first time, and finds himself roaring through the thesaurus in search of a word even stronger than "shameless." There isn't one. Most of us can sympathize with his reaction to Savage. But many of us will also have to laugh at the next moment of horror that freezes his bones. It's much later at night. He's still flipping channels. He goes to CNN:


Uh, here's the exact Olbermann clip he's watching:


The building tirade takes Weingarten completely by surprise:


Truthfully, we salute Mr. Weingarten. He seems like somebody one could talk to. That's encouraging.

Which is an excellent note on which to bid you all adieu.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

CLEANING UP THE MESS. I take a few days off to recover from St. Patrick's Day, and all hell breaks loose. If he'd asked, which he didn't, I could have told him that there's no point whatever in trying to have a dialogue about race in America. Nobody wants it. It's our own national Kabuki Theater. We all agree to pretend there's no particular problem, and then we put on our lavish makeup and costumes to act out a stupid lie that will eventually sink the country but can never be acknowledged until it does.


So we went to his little house in his little town at the edge of America and we dragged him, kicking and screaming, to the place of punishment. We pointed out to him, -- during the interrogation -- that he is the only person in the whole country who has ever written , let alone said or thought, the worst word ever coined in the history of human life on earth. We showed him the blistering contempt of Glenn Reynolds, Ace of Spades, Dean Barnett, Sadly No, Salon, FireDogLake, AlicuBlog, and all the others who have never committed, or even contemplated committing, a thoughtcrime in their lives, and he finally caved, confessed, blubbered his remorse, and begged for mercy. That's when we waterboarded his sorry ass.

You should see him. It's great. He really thinks he's drowning. The terror in the room is so thick even the attendants have to leave every few minutes to keep from throwing up.

Eventually, we'll take him back to his cell and explain the facts of life to him. There's a basic equation we WILL succeed in teaching him. The blogosphere is not about free speech, initiating dialogue, speaking your mind, sharing your perverse views with others who may not have heard them before, or being the kind of dick who just pisses a whole bunch of people off to no purpose. It's about climbing the ladder. The mainstream media is dying. The blogosphere is a tournament to determine who will replace them.

You know the book, "Everything I Need to Know in Life I Learned in Kindergarten"? Same principle applies here. Blogging is like coloring. You have to stay inside the lines. You can pick any outrageous color you want, and people will love you to death for your color choices (tits are the best colors, and PhotoShops of Hillary), but just remember to STAY INSIDE THE FUCKING LINES. That's the only way you get to be Conservative Blogger of the Year or Left-Wing Idiot Asshole Blogger of the Year, which are the only true tickets to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: keynote addresses at blog conferences, guest appearances on Fox News and CNN, nationally promoted podcasts of you and your bedmate interviewing other bloggers on webcam, and publication of that book you're writing about the transformational importance of the Internet.

It's been a costly experience for us here at InstaPunk, and you can bet I won't be taking any time off for a few months But now that we have your attention, it's an appropriate time for me to point out that we have just installed spamware that will apologize to each and every person on the Internet for what OldPunk said. And we'll also be offering podcasts on iTunes (and DVDs) of the OldPunk interrogation and waterboarding events on webcam. All these webisodes will be offered free of charge, although we will, of course, be asking a modest $29.95 shipping and handling fee to cover distribution costs..

Down the line, perhaps in month or two, we'll all be offering a line of T-shirts emblazoned with the legend, "I Survived the Racial Assault of OldPunk." We're presently working with our supplier to finalize color options and pricing.

And I probably shouldn't even mention this last marketing gambit because it's still only in the talking stages, but what if you could get your own numbered podcast (or DVD) of OldPunk actually expiring from fear and self-hatred during his waterboarding experience? How much would you pay for that? And would you pay more if we could also make available a limited number of test tubes containing OldPunk's genuine, certified, blood extracted from his pitiful old ass post-mortem?

I've got to go now. He's spluttering something awful at the moment. Better make sure his pacemaker isn't short-circuiting or something. (If we auctioned the pacemaker, should we do it here or on eBay? Never mind. The marketing director is crunching the figures as we speak.) I'll get back to you on the specifics.

Anyway. So sorry. Watch your email for the official version. And rest assured that InstaPunk won't make any remotely similar errors during the remainder of our campaign for Conservative Blogger of the Year, 2008. (That's right, Ace. Look out! We be coming.)

Ciao.

UPDATE. On the off chance that this post wasn't servile enough, I want to take this opportunity to apologize personally to Ace of Spades, 2007 Conservative Blogger of the Year, for any implication or inference by OldPunk that Ace is somehow an ambitious, illiterate, sex-pandering, gay wannabe, one-joke practitioner of blogorrhea, meaning the nonstop posting of absolutely nothing just because the topic happens to be in the news and maybe we can dig up a mildly related old YouTube video that has tits and ass to boot. If OldPunk said anything like that, it's absolutely no reflection on the blog as a whole, which is doing its darndest to win 2008 Conservative Blog of the Year. (Ballots will be emailed you shortly via our slick new spamware.) The truth is we all love Ace of Spades here, especially the crack-whore person who is grosser than any female we've ever met, and we all agree there just couldn't be any better representation of all that's so outstandingly wonderful about the conservative cause in America.

There. We said it. And we feel so much better for having unburdened our chests about the unpleasantness that caused Ace to diss this site because of one of our late contributors. Ace is the Man. Absolutely. So shrewd, so insightful, so topical, so borderline brilliant bold. And we're also happy to announce that we contributed $5 to the fund appeal that's making its way around the Internet to buy Ace a spell checker and a grammar book. When he gets those things, his gay joke -- and that headline punchline he uses every single time -- will absolutely improve on every telling.

Okay? Cool. That's a huge relief. We just couldn't have taken the moral disapproval of a world class conservative like Ace for one more day. We promise to be better and much moraller from this day forward. We've already arranged for an RSS feed from Maxim to get our tit quotient up to speed. Yes, we're competitors here. And as we said already: "Ace, we be coming." We've even gotten our shipment noitification from Amazon that the book we ordered on Jizz Jokes is on its way. (Um, maybe we shouldn't have given away that part. Forget we said anything...) Uh, well, you know. We're all square now, Ace, right? We luv ya, dude. But not in any gay sort of way. (Sorry. That just slipped out. Sorry.) AOS Lifestyle all the way! Cool!

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