Hatemail Vol. 1: Publicity Stuntsmen

Reason.com, that bastion of libertarian bullshit, published an editorial on free speech and the importance of insulting Islam.  The writer of the article relates an anecdote in which poet Alan Ginsburg asked a Muslim cabbie if the fatwa death sentence against Salman Rushdie was justified.  When the cabbie said yes, that an insult to Islam warrants an execution, Ginsburg yelled "Then I shit on your religion!"  

In light of the failed Times Square bombing, which may have been targeting Viacom (the parent company of anti-Muslim blasphemers South Park), the writer of the article asks "why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab? If Islam justifies, or is understood by millions of Muslims to justify, setting off a bomb in Times Square, then I shit on Islam."  

I thought I'd take this as an opportunity for Trivial Pursuit: The Blog to launch a new series, in which I post (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate-mail I send to professional writers.  In this case, that writer is Mark Goldblatt, professor of Bible Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a position that may be the academic form of a double negative (where two stupid things cancel each other out to make something smart), but in his case, it's more likely that it merely forms something doubly stupid.  This makes me regret sending him the following, which actually dignifies his editorial with a serious response:

Hi Mark Goldblatt,

I want to pick a fight with you.  I posted the following on the Reason comments thread, as well as on my own personal blog. 

http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/hatemail-vol-1-publicity-stuntsmen.html

What's the point of shitting on all of Islam when its only a small subsection who deserve it? That's the type of indiscriminate attack that characterizes terrorists like Shahzad.

Ginsburg was a poet, who understood how to choose his words. When he bitched out that cabbie, saying "I shit on Islam", he was targeting that cabbie specifically and that cabbie alone. He was saying to that one guy, if those are really your perverted beliefs, you've succeeded in turning me against the religion you hold so highly.

Now the writer of the article asks, "Why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab?" Because the writer is not the poet that Ginsburg was, because the writer is not even much of a writer, he doesn't understand that words need to be chosen carefully, they need to be suited for their specific context, and saying "I shit on Islam" is not appropriate for a public forum, unless you want to unnecessarily insult the majority of Muslims, who wince at the actions of bin Laden and Shahzad.

There's nothing brave about broadcasting "I shit on Islam", and there's nothing noble about depicting Mohammed and violating Muslim cultural norms just for the sake of insulting their religion. Those are indiscriminate attacks, and as many have pointed out, they provoke mostly indiscriminate responses. Theo van Gogh was a martyr, but so were the countless innocent bystanders who were collateral damage of other retaliations. A vast majority of these victims had nothing to do with the words or images that sparked the response; meanwhile, the instigators have escaped mostly unscathed, but not without benefits to their public profiles.

The writer asks why more people haven't taken a broadsword to Islam. Well South Park did, and unless you're autistic, Lawrence O'Donnell obviously did as well. There's nothing uniquely courageous about the writer of this article, who confuses a publicity a stunt with an act of bravery.  If anything distinguishes him its that he's a bit classless and his thinking is rather imprecise; God willing, the terrorists won't be as imprecise if, God forbid, they choose to retaliate.

I await your response,
Ken Drinkwater

 Reason's slogan is "Free Minds and Free Markets", which is a good summation of Libertarians:  too intellectually vain to be conservatives, too greedy to be liberals.  Of course, the Libertarians will say that this is an oversimplification, that liberals, in addition to being anti-corporate, can also be bad on civil liberties.  This is true to an extent, but it would be hard to base an entire magazine around smoking bans and the right to carry Uzis.

And as much as they believe in the power of the free market, this is the only magazine that has to adopt the NPR model and ask its readers for "tax-deductible" donations.  Perhaps though, this is a test-run of their theory that if you people think higher taxes will help society, you can go ahead and volunteer your own damn money.

Role Playing

What the hell is a sex surrogate, anyway?  Can you hire one and ask her to just pretend she's a prostitute?

 I never actually bought into Dr. Melfy.  She suffered from Sam Waterson Syndrome, where the actor doesn't seem smart enough to do the character's job.

Scams, Shams, and Flim Flams

I may have unearthed a scandal, a case of corruption involving the Copps, the Copps by my house, in Shorewood Hills.

Once every month or two, this grocery store will have a special on family-paks of  boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Normal price is $4.39 per pound, the sale price is $2.00 per pound, a savings of over 54%.  This is the type of deal that's so good, they limit it to two 3-lb. packages per customer; what this means is I made six separate trips to Copps that week, all of them on my bicycle, because I'm too fucking cheap to drive the mile-and-a-half.  I now have 36 pounds of chicken in my freezer; the pennies saved represent the most money my unemployed ass has earned in a while, coming to what should total $86.04.  Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it?

 

What kind of slogan is "Living Up To Your Life"?  As Adam Carolla says, its always a red flag when someone says, "I wouldn't lie to you".

The thing about this chicken is, it always has an abnormal amount of mucus in the package, several ounces worth.  My cynicism predisposed me to think that perhaps this was why the chicken was being discounted, maybe it had undergone a sub-optimal freezing process, sublimating some of the moisture out of the breasts, and that this was a low-rent move by Copps, but still forgivable because of the price.

Now, I'm starting to view the whole deal with a much more jaundiced eye.  The district attorney of Los Angeles has charged the grocery store Ralph's with ripping its customers off; the allegations include that the store has been charging customers for the weight of the ice crystals on frozen fish.  A man gets to thinking, is Copp's deliberately adding that fucking mucus to each package, are they watering down their chicken to scam me out of my hard-earned pennies?

As WC Fields once said, "you can't cheat an honest man" - I thought I was getting a real steal of a deal, but instead I just got what I deserved - I got cheated.  But turnabout is fair play, so if Copps are a bunch of swindlers, that means they're asking to get scammed themselves; they've opened themselves up to a shake down.  Next time they offer this special, I'm of half a mind to go in there with a digital camera (doesn't actually have to be functional), and demand to talk to a manager, so I can bend him to my will.

I'll ask him why the fuck there's so much fucking mucus in the motherfucking chicken, who the fuck is responsible for the packaging of the motherfucking chicken, and what the fuck, does he think I'm fucking stupid?  Also, how the fuck am I supposed to feed my motherfucking family when you keep trying to cheat me?  That's when the fuck he would offer me either some hush money or the top-secret "player's pass" version of the Rewards Card, which I'd guess is what the CEOs and managers get to use, giving me all my groceries at cost. 

I need the key to the club inside the club, the VIP section of the Key Savings Club.

The thing is, I'm a little apprehensive about trying to extort these cats, because I can't afford to get banned from this store.  Every couple months, they have some incredible deals on Chocolate Chex - six boxes for $8.00, a savings of $10.00.  Its also the closest grocer to my house, the next nearest is probably an extra mile away.  Its hard as hell to ride a bike while carrying a bag of groceries and a 30-pack of High Life, although the upside to that is, people on the street will actually cheer for you as you ride by.

Lady Antebellum?

Did you know there's a band called Lady Antebellum?  This may surprise you, but it's a country band composed of Southerners.  One of them is a hot chick, who presumably represents the Pre-Civil War South.  This is some smart marketing because it allows their hick audience to fantasize about having sex with the idea of slavery.

 Things were better for all of us back then.

Tops and Bottoms

I was thinking about "updating my wardrobe", which is always an intimidating prospect, but now, thanks to the internet, I can experiment in the safety and privacy of my own home.  I went to the Urban Outfitters website, and witnessed some shit that can only be described as flamboyantly metrosexual.

I wanted to check out their shorts, but I couldn't find any because they don't have a shorts category, they have a "Bottoms" category.   And rather than having a shirts category, they have a section for "Tops".  This is gay on at least two levels, and possibly several more that I'm not even aware of.  The theme of the site is "All The Young Dudes", which is a song, written by paragon of androgyny David Bowie, that has lyrics like "Now Lucy looks sweet cause he dresses like a queen, but he can kick like a mule it's a real mean team."

In the greater context of this website, the pink font doesn't even rate on the gay scale.

I wasn't really ready for any of this - it was too much too soon, but the website does have one attribute that makes me feel a little more comfortable.  They seem to be copying American Apparel, where the models are "unconventionally attractive/conventionally unattractive", but they take things one step further.  The next phase in the evolution is to use models with terrible posture and low self-esteem.  On one hand, this means my look is finally fashionable.  On the other,  instead of just being called a loser, maybe I'll also be called a poseur.

The computer science look is in.

Barefaced Lies

Combining his love of Contrarianism with his hatred of Islam, Christopher Hitchens rants in support of the proposed French law that would ban Muslim women from wearing their veils in public places (including "streets, markets, and shops").  He thinks eliminating a woman's choice actually increases her freedom, claiming that the women are only wearing the veils because their husbands force them to do so, "in fact, we have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice."  

He's not clear on what would qualify as an assurance, but apparently a woman's word is not enough, because as the NYTimes says, "many women who wear the veil insist that they are doing it as a free choice and see a ban as a restriction of their liberty."  Hitchens might argue that they're only saying that because their husbands are threatening them, but at a certain point, you have to take women at their word, otherwise you're insulting womankind by denying them agency.  For example, when a woman tells you "no", you don't claim that she's been brainwashed by religion and that she really means "yes".

Hitchens argues that "mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk.  This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities."  The thing is, France is not Tunisia, France is a developed first-world nation that can actually protect its women in a straightforward manner.  In these backwards Muslim countries, you have situations where a woman will be stoned to death for being raped, and the neighbors and the local police turn the other cheek.  These women are being oppressed by huge swaths of society,and radical measures are needed to protect them.  That's not the case in France; if a woman wants to escape an abusive situation, she has many more options.

And even if there are French women being forced by their violent husbands, it doesn't seem like this ban is going to liberate them.  It seems just as likely that their husbands will respond by locking them in the house.  If Hitchens were really concerned about women, shouldn't he be focusing on setting up battered-women's shelters?

"We won't have to drive too far, just 'cross the border and into the city"

His other objections to the veil are bullshit.  He argues that we aren't allowed to wear ski masks or other facial coverings into a bank, and that society shouldn't give special treatment by allowing an exception for Muslim women.  That would be a valid point if the law were limited to banks alone, but its not - the law would ban the wearing of veils in all public places.  Hitchens and French President Sarkozy make the argument that, in the age of terrorism, facial identification is necessary everywhere, including the streets, but if that was their real concern, the ban would include all facial coverings, not just the veil.  Besides, what kind of terrorist would opt for the burqa; if you're trying to blend in, wouldn't you go for a hat and sunglasses, or perhaps wait for a cold day and don a nice Western-style scarf.

Hitchens also argues that a facial covering might block your peripheral vision while driving, making the veil a danger to others.  Again, that might be a valid concern if the law only pertained to drivers, but the law pertains to all public places.  A chicken-shit public safety argument is also a little odd coming from someone who argued that smoking bans were un-American.

If there was a society where women were only allowed to show their tits, they would inevitably evolve to have nice racks, but that's neither here nor there.

Hitchens argues that he has a "right to see your face" and that the veil is "an offense to the ordinary democratic civility that depends on phrases like 'Nice to see you'".  Its a half-clever line, but an odd argument coming from a libertarian who's made a career out of being an asshole; all of a sudden, he's claiming that civility and politeness should be enforced by the police.  You don't see him arguing for a law against being drunk and belligerent on cable news.

In a polite society, it should be illegal to not cover a face like his.

In his pompous and roundabout way, Hitchens says that allowing Muslims to wear veils makes a special exception in favor of one religion, "Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith."  But its not a special exception because there aren't any laws in place against other forms of facial covering.  There are no laws against scarves in winter, ski-masks on the French Alps, or hats, sunglasses and large beards.  If any exceptions are to be made, they're in Hitchens' proposal that Muslims be singled-out for exclusion from civil liberties, that they be barred from the rights that allow someone to dress like ZZ Top.

In his TV appearances, Hitchens gets a lot of leverage out of his resonant English voice; its that old phenomenon where we assume the British are smart just because of their accents.  The classic example is when the Ewoks mistook C3PO for a god.

In his columns, Hitchens creates the illusion of sophistication by writing in an overly complex and purposely indirect fashion.  This gives the reader the impression that he's making some ultra-intelligent point that's just beyond the reader's grasp, and the reader defers to him out of fear of looking stupid.  In reality, there's no hidden level of sophistication, only sophistry.  Rather than striving for clarity, he creates obscurity, to obfuscate the weakness of his rationale; in the absence of any legitimate justification, you can assume his real reasoning lies with his personal vendetta against Islam.  This is purely speculative, but it often seems like his little holy-war is just a clever way for him to condescend both God and liberals at the same time.

Outing Steve Nash

He's been living a lie for too long, its time to out Steve Nash - as a man who's secretly gray.  Not that there's anything wrong with it, after all, it isn't exactly a choice.  But as a gray man myself, what offends me is his hypocrisy and the fact that he's trying to hide it.

He spent so many years cultivating an image as a blue-blooded Canadian male, a masculine man with traditional values, a rugged guy who could care less what his fucking hair looks like; he rode this image to success at the ballot box, winning two MVP awards.  Now all of a sudden, he's fagging it up at the salon, getting dye jobs with Demi Moore.

What's my evidence?  I don't need proof, a gray man can just tell.  But if you look closely in these NBA Cares commercials, his mane is strangely uniform in color, and it seems to be unnaturally stiff, like its been treated with harsh chemicals.  And if you catch him in the right lighting, you'll see little clear Favre-like specks on his chin, which may be signs of greying whiskers. 

Another giveaway is his smarminess, a surefire sign that he's hiding something.