another from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses
Excitable Jack Horner
Excitable Jack Horner
sat in a corner
eating his curds and whey.
He put in his thumb
and pulled out a crumb
and like an ass began to bray.
satire
from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses
Bad Choices
In Nashville, Mississippi,
not far from the Rio Grande,
there lived a French Canadian trapper
named Hedrick Eckelmann.
He wrote a short novella
about the Second World War.
It ran ten-thousand pages;
he called it Less Is More.
He married a gal named Betty Sue,
who gave him two fine sons,
but she died a virgin at 44
cleaning one of his guns.
Terribly devastated,
he remarried within a week,
and lived happily ever after
until he choked on a steak
right outside of Nashville
in the heart of the Lone Star State,
right across the river from Canada.
Damn, he could’ve had a V-8.
The Not-So-Official Donald Trump Campaign Theme Song
Campaign theme songs go all the way back to Andrew Jackson’s “The Hunters of Kentucky” with these inspiring lyrics:
We are a hardy, free-born race,
Each man to fear a stranger;
Whate’er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger.
And if a daring foe annoys,
Whate’er his strength and forces,
We’ll show him that Kentucky boys
Are alligator horses.
Sometimes candidates choose already established tunes, like FDR’s appropriation of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and JFK’s employment of “High Hopes.” Other times candidates commission original songs as Barry Goldwater did with the all but forgotten Tom McDonnell and Otis Clements number “Go with Goldwater.” These songs are often flops. I seriously doubt that any of you codgers out there remember the ’68 election campaign song “Nixon’s the One.”
Nevertheless, I can’t tell you how honored I am to have chosen myself to compose the theme song for Donald’s Trump 2015 campaign, which is entitled, appropriately enough, “Donald Trump, We’re so Pumped.” Let’s hope it ends up being more successful than the Republican candidate’s 1972 theme song “Nixon Now,” which you can experience for yourself here.
To be sung to the tune of “The Mickey Mouse Club Theme Song”
Ah, one, a two, sing:
Who’s the man in the GOP,
Whose best for our country?
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
*
Not Bush, Not Walker, Not Carson!
They’re as bland as they can be
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
*
Donald Trump!
We’re so pumped!
Donald Trump!
He’s on the stump!
*
Let’s raise a middle finger and fuck propriety:
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
*
Come along and join the throng
On the road to prosperity
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
He has a solution, embraces pollution,
Gets results, slings insults.
(Who cares if the rest of the world is retching?)
*
Who’s the alpha of the pack,
Who can heal our sick country?
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
*
Hey there! Hi there! Ho there!
He’s as angry as you and me,
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
Donald Trump!
We’re so pumped!
Donald Trump.
He’s on the stump!
*
Come along, let’s sing the song
And start a P-A-C
D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!
*
Yay Donald!
Yay Donald!
Yay Donald Trump!
The Havisham Syndrome: Why Children Haters Become Teachers
art by Steve Messa
Don’t know about you, but whenever I see a colon in a title, I think, okay, this essay’s not likely to be all that whiz-bang exciting, but it’s probably well researched and well developed. If I’m interested in the subject matter — e.g., the elopement of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vintage Bengalese pornography, or the psychology behind wives of professional golfers wearing skinny jeans with factory-installed rips — I’ll check it out. What I expect from a title with a colon is serious, academic exegesis.
In the case of this essay, however, despite the title’s colon, my conclusions of what factors impel child-haters to enter the teaching profession rely on intuition, not research, so, strictly speaking, it’s about as scientific as a Discovery Channel documentary on the search for Noah’s ark. Nevertheless, intuition is a powerful mental force, a subconscious storehouse of forgotten events. Intuition is like a precocious child tugging at the sleeve of your consciousness, trying to get your attention to point out something important you’re too tall to notice.
One more caveat: the following theory is based only on one incredibly callous individual who made two years of my early adolescence the educational equivalent of the Bataan Death March. But I suspect that if my theory is true for her, it must be true for others as well. So bear with me as unveil my explanation of a phenomenon I have dubbed “the Havisham Syndrome,” which answers the question: why would a child hater choose to spend the working years of her life surrounded by children.
Choosing the Teaching Profession
Perhaps because I considered each school day a prison sentence and spent as much time glancing up at clocks as I did down at my work, I always shake my head in wonderment when someone tells me she knew she wanted to be a teacher for as long as she can remember, so obviously, for some, certain aspects of the profession override its promise of poor pay, tons of take home work, and low social status.
Many teachers, for example, go into teaching because they love children. They find very young human beings adorable, so they don’t mind spending their days herding miniature but toweringly egocentric bipeds to and from art class or to the dining hall where the teachers’ lunches go cold while they clean up spills, break up arguments, or try to cajole the little Brittany to take at least one bite of something nutritious.
Other teachers, believe it or not, love middle school students. They find seventh and eighth graders endearing and early adolescence ripe — and I don’t mean ripe in the olfactory sense — I mean ripe as in propitious, a time conducive for instilling life-long habits that will produce solid citizens.
Others are drawn to teaching because they love their subject matter and think it’s important, that a knowledge of history, math, or art is life enriching.
Still others, like me, stumble into teaching through a combination of happenstance and incompetence.
And then there are those who choose teaching because it’s an undemanding major with fairly good job prospects (i.e., if you don’t mind teaching in an impoverished school district with sub-Saharan murder rates). Whatever the case, the motivations of most teachers are neutral at worst and very positive in most cases.
However, in my career both as a student in Summerville schools and as a teacher elsewhere, I’ve encountered hateful, sometimes cruel people[1] who seem to have been drawn to the classroom to make young people’s lives miserable. There’s a sadistic streak in some teachers, teachers who make out multiple-choice questions like this:
Which of the following doesn’t fit?
A. mobsters B. gangsters
C. hipsters D. bankers
I bet you chose D, right? You idiot. The answer is C. Hipsters aren’t obsessed with money.
Even if these teachers are obviously wrong, they can’t admit a mistake. They have favorites, usually popular, brilliant, or rich kids, but treat the average or slow student with undisguised contempt.
Take my 7th and 8th grade English teacher, for example.
A Case Study
Even though the chances of this woman’s still being alive or her one offspring’s running across this post are about as remote as Ted Cruz’s opting for a Che Guevara tattoo next time he gets smashed on tequila in a South Texas Barrio, for the sake of discretion, I’m going to refer to her as Mrs. Choakumchild, after M’Choakumchild from Charles Dickens’ biting satire on Utilitarianism, Hard Times.)
It’s my belief that Mrs. Choakumchild entered teaching because of deeply rooted psychological problems, problems arising from her own experiences as child in the classroom. Let’s face it, children have an inherent pack mentality that prompts them to single out weird, unattractive, and/or socially clueless kids and turn them into the class pariah. Young Mrs. Choakumchild – let’s say her maiden name was Gradgrind — no doubt hit the hat trick here.
Of course, when I had her as a seventh and eighth grader, I couldn’t have told you how old she was. She did have a daughter a year older than I. In any case, Mrs. Choakumchild was significantly overweight, had stringy, poorly dyed orange hair and a withered right arm that dangled at her side. Her sharpening a pencil in the wall-mounted pencil sharpener was a terrifying experience. She would claw-like grasp the pencil in her right hand, cross over with her left hand, and vigorously crank the handle as if grinding meat.
She had absolutely no friends, ate her lunches alone in her room. I never remember her smiling once during the two years she taught me. Nor do I remember her ever saying something positive about my work. I was in the advanced section, and once she informed me in front of the entire class that I was “an error in classification,” that is, I didn’t belong in the class. Later, in my senior year, when I had won a school wide award for a piece of fiction, my mother, who was a substitute teacher, showed it to Mrs. Choakumchild, perhaps wanting to show her how well she had taught me. After reading it, her only comment was, “He still can’t spell ‘government.’”
My Theory
Obviously, Mrs. Choakumchild was not a people person, nor did she seem at all fond of children. So we can rule benevolence out as a motivation for her becoming a teacher. She may have during college developed a great love for sentence diagraming (it seems that’s what we mostly did), but part of that love for a subject entails wanting to share it with students, not cram it down their mental feeding tubes. On the other hand, it is possible she went into teaching for the reason that women had much fewer job opportunities in those days, and I can’t rule that out.
I think, however, that it’s possible that she went into teaching for the same reason Miss Havisham adopted Estella in Great Expectations, to exact revenge. You’ll recall that being jilted at the altar, Miss Havisham decided all men were evil and reared Estella to be cruel so she could punish boys who fell in love with her. Likewise, Mrs. Choakumchild came to the conclusion that all children are inherently cruel, so decided to gain control over groups of them and to get her revenge. Of course, if true, this behavior would fall under the category of sadomasochism, because it she hated children, being around them couldn’t be pleasurable.
Could this be true of other teachers as well?
Of course not. The theory is preposterous. (Note the post is classified under satire). However, teachers do possess an enormous amount of power, and they need to be extremely careful in what they say. Obviously, I remember all too well Choakumchild’s comments on my intelligence, and she really did make me think I was stupid. Also, I know that over the years that I certainly have said things to hurt students’ feelings, and the thought of that makes me sick.
[1] Once one of my PE teachers yelled out as at obese boy was running the hundred yard dash, “Hold your arms up, X, so I can tell if you’re running or rolling.”
The Journal of a Sojourn in the Realm of Hyperliteracy
Introduction
My girlfriend and I have recently booked an all-inclusive vacation package to the Realm of Hyperliteracy.
She’s 47 – hardly a girl – but she is not, strictly speaking, my partner because we do not cohabitate, and certainly the descriptor paramour stresses too much the sexual component, which though important, is not the central focus of our relationship.
I wish I could call her my fiancée, but the truth of the matter is that she is a widow twelve years my senior, and remarrying would not be financially prudent because of certain stipulations in her insanely possessive late husband’s will.
Perhaps in the Realm of Hyperliteracy, I shall discover the perfect word to describe an exclusive sexual partner with whom one does not reside. In this case, one envies the German language’s facility to create multiple compounds. In German, one can have a steadysexmatewhodwellsapart, but in contemporary American English, one is stuck with inaccuracies like “girlfriend,” or worse, vulgarities like “main squeeze.”
As you may know, the Realm of Hyperliteracy is the brainchild of Sir Oglethorpe FitzSybil, who in the foothills of the Austrian Alps has established the perfect vacation spot for extroverted bibliophiles who crave conversational partners who express themselves precisely, men and women who recognize that singular antecedents demand singular pronouns, men and women with whom one can communicate without fear of their not knowing the definition of agitprop or schadenfreude, men and women who have read Flaubert’s Salammbô as well as his Madame Bovary.
In short, men and women who find the splitting of infinitives infinitely irritating.
The brochures have made it exceedingly clear that each visitor has been carefully screened – and endured a comprehensive exam – to insure that he (forgive the colloquialism) passes muster.
Felicity (not her real name) is taking me to Realm of Hyperliteracy to celebrate my thirty-fifth birthday. As you remember, it was exactly at three-score-and-five that Dante Alighieri awakened in that dark wood and began his journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. Although rarely celebrated as a significant birthday in the States — one never hears “Sakes, sakes alive/ Reginald is turning thirty-five” — one could argue that since it’s half of the biblical allotment of seventy years, the thirty-fifth anniversary of one’s nativity is truly a momentous milestone.
I’ve decided in the tradition of Boswell and Johnson to keep a journal of my travels so that in my later years I can recall accurately the events. Photographic equipment of all types, even cellular telephones, is strictly forbidden. Visitors are limited to one carry-on sized bag. When one books, he provides his measurements, and the wardrobes of rooms are stocked with clothing that patrons are required to wear during their stay. Need I mention that computers are verboten as well?
Day 1
I wish I could say that our grand launch is going smoothly, but alas, that would be a prevarication. The passage through security was especially vexing because I had not been informed that the TSA had relaxed their security guidelines; therefore, I had unnecessarily segregated my liquids into plastic bags, and when I began removing my belt and shoes, a very unpleasant man in a uniform who was a dead ringer for Oskar Dirlewanger growled menacingly at me. He projected a heightened sense of expediency, which turned out to be completely unnecessary because we ended up sitting in the plane for a seeming eternity before our taking off.
More vexing is– I use the appellation loosely – the gentleman sitting to my left (I have ceded the window seat to Felicity). Before I feigned a nap, this contemporary Kowalski jabbered non-stop for hours detailing his numerous trips abroad, a monologue rife with indelicacies of phraseology. No, I have never visited a “tittie bar” in Amsterdam nor “had me a wheat beer in Dusseldorf.” If I had a Euro for every time he has punctuated his sentences with “you know,” I could have flown first class instead.
Even more vexing still, I’ve made the mistake of sharing with Felicity the introduction reproduced above, and she erroneously argues that the verb in the second sentence of the last paragraph should be are instead of is, i.e., the sentence should read, according to her, “Photographic equipment of all types, even cellular telephones, are strictly forbidden.” Despite that “equipment” is obviously the subject — no one says the “the equipment are in working order“– she argues that the aggregate of plurals after the subject, “types” and “telephones,” supersedes the singular subject and poetic license demands the less sonically jarring plural “are.”
“But I am not a poet,” I said somewhat hotly.
Unfortunately, she kept on, and I regrettably ejaculated in frustration the interjection “balderdash” at which she turned her head to the window and cried herself to sleep.
As I record these words in my journal, the gentleman to my left is snoring like a draft horse.
Day 2
Perhaps, it is the jet lag or a hangover from the malodorous mood of the flight over, but I find the gated grounds and cluster of buildings of the Realm of Hyperliteracy to be less grand than the photographs of the brochures suggested. “Potemkin village” is perhaps hyperbolic in its censure; however, there is something, let us say, Disneyesque about the ersatz bricks that form the manor’s façade.
Furthermore, even though the hotel boasts fifty rooms, very few people – a mere nine, including yours truly and his companion – are staying here. Except for a young bohemian, whose profusion of tattoos would be the envy of Flannery O’Connor’s O.E. Parker and the bohemian’s paramour, a gum-smacker who looks as if she selected the shade of blue of her dyed hair from a Sherwin-Williams paint palette, the rest of the hotel patrons have reached, at the very least, their eighth decade.
It’s as if they’ve been bused in from that depressing poem of Philip Larkin’s.
Furthermore, we’re not allowed to leave the grounds, meaning that all meals must be taken at the hotel.
However, there is something about which to look forward. During the evening cocktail party – attendance mandatory – they’re going to stock our closets with clothes, now that the one or two outfits we packed in our carry-ons have been, shall we say, exhausted.
Well, we’re off to the cocktail party. I shan’t go into the so-called “make-up sex” Felicity and I facilitated, but let us merely convey that it was very satisfactory.
Day 3
| What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent | |
| This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! |
I fear that anyone reading my depiction in this journal of the events of last night will dismiss them as the ravings of a madman or consider them the product of some gothic fiction writer’s over-stimulated imagination, some imitator of Poe’s lurid attempt to out-Monk-Lewis Monk Lewis.
It began with the cocktail party, hosted by none other than Oglethorpe himself. He looks as if he’s stepped right out of, as they say, central casting, a pudgier cross between Christopher Lee and Basil Rathbone; in other words, he’s tall with slicked-back hair, a patrician English accent, and a hawkish nose.
One of the lamentable aspects of extreme old age is that the process seems to efface the individuality of its victim. I could hardly distinguish the two women and the two men from each another. They, to-a-thing, each had white hair, or some white hair and age-spotted scalps, wrinkled faces, necks, hands. Even more vexing, they all were as deaf as cinder blocks. Indeed, I couldn’t believe they had passed the perquisite exam that lies at the heart of Realm of Hyperliteracy’s application process. The multiple-choice section was exhaustive and the free response essay questions ridiculously esoteric.
So Felicity and I found ourselves forced to chat with the Bohemian and his consort who claim their names are Ataturk and Absinthe, obvious noms-de-guerre.
Both also claim to be on a tenure track at NYU. In their speech, they attempt to approximate the patois of the so-called Beat Poets, whom they revere. In other words, they consider themselves “hep cats” who find “strict grammatical formalism a mere product of class bias,” and when I admitted that I could not share his and her enthusiasm for Ginsberg and his ilk, Absinthe traced in the air with her fingers the geometric outline of a square.
After a couple of watery scotches, Oglethorpe instructed that we return to our rooms and dress for dinner.
Indeed, the closets had been stocked, and indeed the garments fit well – my tuxedo was Orlon but sufficiently tailored – but whoever provided our attire had failed to provide undergarments, and when Felicity went to retrieve a brassiere and the lower undergarment from the bag she had packed, we discovered a note on the dresser informing our clothes have been removed to the laundry.
Every single gown was diaphanous, as sheer as a provocative negligee, and I prayed to that non-presence that Emily Dickinson described in her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson as “a vacancy” that the two crones with whom we must dine that evening had been provided with less revealing attire.
Of course, not attending dinner was not an option. As soon as the bell chimed to come downstairs, the listening devices I had not noticed turned into speakers blasting Barry Manilow at ear-piercing decibels.
But, no, the crones, they too! They too were dressed diaphanously!
When we gathered at the table, I glanced at the female octogenarians the way one feels impelled to glance at highway carnage but quickly glanced away. Suddenly, for the first time I could truly appreciate the “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” On the other hand, there were Felicity and Absinthe, leaving not nearly enough to the imagination. It occurred to me that younger women did enjoy certain advantages that age had robbed their older sisters of. [Note to self, recast sentence without offending ending preposition].
I was seated next to Ataturk, who winked at me and said, “Oglethorpe” with the initial O vowel shortened to an “ah”
“Yes? Oglethorpe.”
“Ogle – Thorpe. O-g-l-e-thorpe.”
I felt like a fool for not thinking of it myself.
I’ve always preferred Henry James to Hemingway, but I’m finding that the latter’s stripped down style might be preferable here for the sake of journalistic expediency. I have clandestinely composed these notes in the wee hours. I must manage to get to sleep. After breakfast there’s a reading . . .
Day 4
An all day reading in German of Kafka’s The Kastle with surtitles projected in English on a sheet hung from the ceiling.
Day 5
I’m at the end of my rope. Rope! A rope, my kingdom for a rope! Certainly, Solzhenitsyn could not have endured this! That hook-nosed son-of-a-bitch! I’m gonna kills his ass. None of the maids speak English. There’s gotta be a way out. Tunneling? Maybe Ataturk will join my cabal, a cabal of two, tea for two, and two for tea.
Day 6
Ata sez the gates are electrificated. Saw a bird fly into it and get fried. Felicity has abandoned me and sleeps now with Oglethorpe. Same deal with Abby and Ata. The old folks have died off, one a day. Ata sez we be good as dead. No way we getting outta here to write reviews of this horrorshow holiday.
Day 7
A carrier pigeon has landed on the sill of my barred window. Is it a vision or a waking dream?
Political Correctness Academy
Warning: Through no fault of the author’s, the following fascinating and informative piece contains language that marginalized people may or may not find offensive.
* * *
You’ve no doubt all heard the probably specious story that Eskimos have something like 300 or 600 or 300,600 different words for frozen water whereas we denizens of warmer climes only have a handful – sleet, snow, hail, slush, etc. The idea is that because they spend so much time dealing with frozen water they can distinguish subtle differences in its consistency and so it follows that —
Beep Beep Beep!
Un-oh, a new word processing app I just purchased, Offensive Connotative Terminology (OCT), has just generated a pop-up that informs me that “Eskimo” means “raw meat eater,” a pejorative name given to them by enemy tribes to the south and that E-words would rather we refer to them as Inuits, even though, as it turns out, Inuits do in fact eat raw meat. (No wonder then that there is a paucity of synonyms in the Inuit language for fire).
Fellini’s “Little Person” nun from his film “Amarcord”
I’ve lost my train of thought. Where was I? Oh yeah, that creepy obsession Fellini and David Lynch have with midgets. What’s the scoop on that?
Beep Beep Beep!
The damn thing’s gone off again. Looks like the word “midget” set it off. Let’s see, here’s a link in the pop-up that might offer an explanation.
[click]
Midget, denotation, “very small fly.” Popularized by PT Barnum and therefore associated with freak shows. Politically correct alternatives, “little person,” “dwarf,” “person with dwarfism,” or “person of short stature.”
Forget it, no way I’m going to write about Fellini and Lynch now. Try crafting a sonorous sentence with “person of short stature,” and to my sensibility “midget” conjures a less ominous image than “dwarf,” but anyway, I gotta go. I think I used “midgets” instead of “dwarves” in a piece I wrote about Folly Beach’ s freak show of a tavern, the Sand Dollar Social Club, a while back, so I better go back and edit it. [LINK TO SAND DOLLAR PIECE]
Beep! Beep! Beep!
OTC Suggestion: replace “freak show” with “side show.”
Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.
Guilty Pleasures
David Carr
In the wake of the the death of David Carr, the New York Times, his employer, ran a series of reverential articles extolling his wit, reporting skills, craftsmanship, generosity, work ethic, etc. He was by all indications what my friend Jim Klein calls a “cat” — short for “hep cat” — what Cab Calloway defines in his Hepster Dictionary as “a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.”
While I was checking out Carr postmortem, I ran across a video [VIEW HERE] of him and his colleague, film critic AO Scott, discussing “guilty pleasures” — in Scott’s words “the stuff you like but maybe you don’t want other people to know you like.”
They rattled off rather bland shit (the appropriate word) that they didn’t mind admitting they enjoyed, like reading the New York Post and watching Jersey Shore (more heroic admissions might have included Japanese Massage Porn or collecting vintage tampon cases, but who can blame them?).
Carr and Scott then roamed the Times Building “on a dirty Safari,” as Carr put it, eliciting from their colleagues embarrassing indulgences that no self-respecting cat would ever admit to, like listening to on a regular basis the Archies’ song “Sugar, Sugar.”
I bring up guilty pleasures because I’m re-reading Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, a book I once defended in a published letter in Newsweek, a book that President Jimmy Carter cited in a widely panned speech accusing his countryman of suffering from a malaise, a book I had hoped in this second reading would prove Lasch a forgotten prophet, but, alas, Lasch’s cultural analysis turns out to be self-righteous, all-knowing, hectoring, in short, a heaping pile of Freudian gobbledygook.
Like when you read about a strange exotic disease and start thinking you’re experiencing its symptoms, I’m fairly certain now that me-myself-and-I suffer from a narcissistic personality, that I’m an utterly self-absorbed asshole in constant need for affirmation from others, someone who has constructed a way-too-cool persona to cover his pathetic insecurities. Unlike most narcissists, however, I have formed a couple of lasting relationships, and I don’t have any interest in celebrity culture, so perhaps there’s hope for me.
Therefore, in an attempt to remove the way-too-cool mask of my persona, I thought it might be therapeutic to admit to a couple of my guilty pleasures (despite the narcissistic indulgence of doing so in the first place more or less confirms my self-diagnosis). Nevertheless, here goes.
Guilty Pleasure #1. I love reading obituaries and consider myself a master critic of the genre. I read perfect strangers’ obits from the first sentence through their career recaps down through the survivors all the way to where memorials can be sent. I especially take note of verbs indicating passage from this life to non-being. Just last Sunday I read about some 98-year-old who “has stepped into the glory.”
Guilty Pleasure #2. What started out as an anthropological exercise of studying television series The Lone Ranger as an artifact from the Late Fifties has degenerated into a full-blown addiction. How can someone who earns his living teaching literature suspend his disbelief and squander hours watching a show where horses gallop from the wide open plains directly into a film set with fake trees? How can he ignore the never-ending chain of coincidences? The guns shot crisply from hands 20 meters away? Good questions. Search me.
Guilty Pleasure #3. The Monkees. Not as bad as the Archies, But close. I hasten to add I only own one song, “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone.” It could be worse. “Daydream Believer,” for example.
Okay, enough of this confessional shit. I need to get back to writing my memoirs.
The Invasion of Texas – Coming to a Theater Near You Soon!
I’ve just come up with a great idea for a movie, an action packed contemporary shoot-‘em- up extravaganza and cautionary tale mixed into one, Masada meets Waco, a tale of states right patriotism, the importance the 2nd amendment, and the nefariousness of a godless federal government led by a closet Muslim who signs executive orders as frequently as Phil Mickelson signs autographs.
I’m going to call the movie The Invasion of Texas.
Here’s a blitzkrieg scenario. The federal government plans a massive multi-state military simulation exercise called Jade-15, ostensibly to train the army for foreign desert engagements; however, the entire operation’s real goal is to take over Texas, place it under martial law, and to confiscate all weaponry from Texas’s citizenry.
The movie opens with the governor channel surfing from abomination to abomination, the Bruce Jenner Diane Sawyer interview, a Fox News special on Benghazi, Miley Cyrus twerking. His cell’s ringtone “Don’t Mess with Texas” goes off.
It’s Chuck Norris (playing himself) asking for an emergency meeting.
Using the image above, Morris explains what the feds are really up to. The governor calls up the national guard and gives Norris permission to go underground.
The movie flashes back and forth from White House/ISIS planning sessions and Norris planning sessions. Employing carrier pigeons to evade the prying eyes and ears of the NSA, Norris assembles a ragtag group of Dirty Dozen-like patriots insurrectionists (e.g., Ned Nugent, Sarah Palin, etc) who develop an elaborate plan to thwart the bad guys, i.e the USA.
Jade-15 is launched, and the Texas Patriots counter the attack but find that their shotguns, hunting rifles, snub-nose revolvers, and even their AK-17s are no match against the tanks, F-17 Fighters, attack drones, Navy Seals, Green Berets, Army Rangers, and nuclear arsenal that the USA has at its disposal. the Lone Star State defenders, including the governor, are driven back to San Antonio where they seek refuge in the Alamo.
In the last scene the governor Custer-like with a pistol takes down Indian American soldier after American soldier until his handgun jams and the camera mercifully pans skyward into a setting sun.
The End
Whispers of Schadenfreude, Mike Pence Edition
As the self-proclaimed Jimmy Swaggart of Buddhism, I openly admit where I fall short of the ideal established by the Enlightened One, and certainly the cultivation of compassion is an area in which I fall way —make that — abysmally short.
I do sincerely wish that through meditation I could relax the tight little angry fist of my heart and show some empathy for those I dislike when they stumble, rather than luxuriating in a warm, soothing, spiteful bath of schadenfreude.
For example, rather than empathizing with Governor Mike Pence of Indiana as he made a gargantuan ass out of himself on national television, I smirked derisively, enjoying every drop of perspiration forming on his quivering upper lip as if they were karmic pearls bestowed upon me by a benevolent universe. Certainly, I’m no stranger to making a complete ass out of myself, though, of course, I haven’t had the opportunity as yet to elevate my asshoodness to a level worthy of the adjective gargantuan, never having been interviewed by a local broadcast reporter much less by George Stephanopoulous. However, given the chance, I think I’m capable of it.
And certainly, Pence is worthy of compassion if we consider wretches worthy of compassion. I suspect that Pence hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep since deep into last week. Perhaps his problem lay in his admittedly not-exactly-heroic condition of not being able to lie well extemporaneously. In case you’re just now emerging from a coma, Pence refused to answer Stephanopolous’s yes-or-no question as to whether under Pence’s new Indiana Restoration of Religious Freedom Act, a florist (i.e., a business) could refuse to provide flowers for the wedding of a gay couple. (If you haven’t seen it, you can watch an edited version here:
A more practiced liar would have hissed, “Of course, not,” but then again, I suspect that the bill’s raisin de etre is to have “the base” at least think fundamentalists can refuse to cater or provide flowers to gay weddings, coming as it does right after the SCOTUS nixed Indiana’s ban on gay marriage. So rather than telling a lie, he ineffectually tried to dodge the question, transforming himself from a possible presidential candidate to an international laughing stock, the plump bourgeoise target of many a comedian’s acid-laced arrows.
(Not to worry, he made up for his refusal to lie by providing a tractor trailer load in subsequent days)
And, of course, Indiana’s super-majority Republican government would have gotten away with it, as my native South Carolina did with its law, if it had not been for certain segments of corporate America, including NASCAR, deriding the law as bad for business, which just goes to show, as Bob Dylan pointed out lo so many years ago, “Money doesn’t talk; it screams.”
Well, perhaps this confession is a first, halting step from my detour from the golden 8th-fold path, or maybe not. I hear Pence made Letterman’s Top 10 list. Maybe I’ll check that out instead.
Undergraduate Existentialism Circa 1973
Rick Borstelman 2003
Existentialism was all the rage in the 60’s and ‘70’s when I intermittently attended classes in high school and college. The philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus must have hit its peak then, because the authorities allowed students to smoke — in high school in certain outdoor designated areas, and in college, right there in class. If existentialism is about anything, it’s about the rights of the individual, as we shall see.
Søren Kierkegaard
Where I went to college each desk in the Humanities Building had a disposable cardboard ashtray. Students bogarted their Marlboros as they took notes, scrawling as best they could the professor’s explanation of Kierkegaard’s exegesis of the Abraham and Isaac story, scrawling (in my case, illegibly) observations like
Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior—yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought. And yet faith is this paradox…
The fact that you couldn’t follow the argument, that you couldn’t figure out what the fuck the subject of the third “is” was wasn’t* important because professors didn’t test you on the material; they had you write essays just as unintelligible as the texts you couldn’t understand, which represented a triumph of subjectivity over objectivity because who has the authority to tell an individual that his reading of the text is incorrect. That would have been so fascistic.
For example, here might be my undergraduate explanation of the passage I quoted above:
See, the individual smoker who is superior to the rest of the class who doesn’t smoke gets to smoke because the smoker’s subjective universe is paradoxically the only universe because if it weren’t for him, the individual smoker, there would be no universe, the way there was no universe as far as he was concerned in 1492 because he was not as yet a sentient being who possessed the autonomy to light up a Marlboro, despite that the individual who sits behind him, who, once again, would not exist for him if not for his being able to perceive her, or, in this case not perceive her, as she suffers an asthma attack because of the smoke that would not exist except for him.
You got A’s for this type of shit — at least I did.
Meanwhile, next door, in the poetry class you might have students reading this poem by Emily Dickinson:
Abraham to kill him
Was distinctly told—
Isaac was an Urchin—
Abraham was old—
Not a hesitation—
Abraham complied—
Flattered by Obeisance
Tyranny demurred—
Isaac—to his children
Lived to tell the tale—
Moral—with a mastiff
Manners may prevail.
Now, this poem, despite its implicit criticism of the All Mighty, poses dangers for the existentialist because it doesn’t exactly offer a multitude of defensible readings. The poem rather obviously suggests that Abraham agreed to kill his beloved son Isaac because Abraham was afraid God was going to sic a big ferocious dog on his ass.
These were the types of classes existentialists should avoid because the professors tended to dismiss the right of the individual to spell words whichever way he wanted. These fascist bastards took off points when you spelled “p-a-i-d” “p-a-y-ed.”
*Verbs of being rule in existentialism; the fact that I strung three in a row suggests I get it.
Fredrich Nietzsche
In the progression of existential philosophers, Nietzsche comes next chronologically, and back in 1973, he was a lot easier and more fun to read than Kierkegaard. Plus, Nietzsche was quotable, the king of the aphorism. You’d even heard of some of his sayings before, like
And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
All things are subject to interpretation.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
God is dead.
The problem with Nietzsche, though, is that these killer quotable quotes are imbedded in long, rambling essays that lack structure and sometimes seem to contradict themselves, so by the time you get to the end, you’re not sure what his main point is.
Once you got to Nietzsche in your 1973 existential survey, all that was necessary is that you kept your mouth shut if you were a Christian and not try to exercise your first amendment freedom-of-speech right because chances are your professor was an atheist who would rip you to shreds because, after all, the universe would not exist except for him.
In other words, he’d sic his rhetorical Mastiff on you.
Jean Paul Sartre
Although Sartre’s masterpiece On Being and Nothingness makes Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling read like a Hemingway story in comparison, the ideas themselves are not that hard to understand.
What you got is a consciousness and whatever the consciousness is perceiving, and because this consciousness has a negative power of nothingness that can create a lack of self-identity, you, the individual, need to exercise your freedom by bringing into being and acting upon your individual spontaneous choices, and if you fail to do so, if, say, you decide not to run off to Best Buy and purchase a TV monitor the size of a drive-in movie screen and instead grade those sophomore essays, you have committed “bad faith,” which leads to “nausea,” which is really stupid of you because life is meaningless, and you’ll be dead in no time and therefore kiss good-bye the universe that only exists because you perceive it be.
On on that happy note, it’s DVD time.
You Do Hoodoo 