Just fucking unbelievable.  The premise of the show was that these four unthoughtful dicks were going to make their dreams come true with the help of MTV, and that they would in turn try to help a stranger make one of their dreams come true every time one of their own did.  But instead of making dreams come true like not allowing people to die of operable cancer because they don’t have enough money to pay for the surgery (while 58% of our national budget is allotted for a preposterously overfunded military), the boys dream of singing the national anthem at NBA games, and in turn help other people achieve dreams like calling their friend they haven’t talked to in a long time because they’ve been mad at them.  Throw in some weighty, stupid pronouncements about working together, score it with some Coldplay (or whoever is now occupying Coldplay’s role as Coldplay) and you’ve got easily the most all-encompassingly offensive show ever created.  Amidst the context of late 2009 — with Obama’s lame attempts at reform beginning to obviously fizzle despite a lingering general optimism –  the show’s vain nefariousness was particularly egregious.  Wanton capitalist greed may have just nearly destroyed the country (only to have the United States’ taxpayers bail out the most guilty parties), and the outrage generated by that transgression may have just been diluted into a pathetically feeble attempt at socialized medicine by our broken government which was negotiated with the healthcare monopolies to increase their profitability — “But it’s OK, man.  We just gotta work things out… and help each other… and MTV can help us with that!”  I couldn’t watch one second of it.  I mean, I’m as big a fan of tragi-comedy as the next person, but there’s a pretty big difference between watching a bunch of vapid ambitious idiots make  fools out of themselves for vapid ambitious producers, and taking a “things will never, ever, ever get any better” pill in television-program form.

A few months after I’d seen the Buried Life trailer my wife and I were walking to our normal breakfast spot when I saw a couple of cackling, 20-something, white dicks manning a scaffold to put up a mural on the laundromat across the street from our apartment.

“What the fuck kind of Buried Life bullshit is this?”, I angrily asked my wife.  “I mean what the fuck?  I’m a little white, private-school shithead and I’m gonna put my stamp on the neighborhood, man’.”

I eventually settled down and came to grips with the fact (again) that there are just too many soulless smart people controlling too many clueless stupid people in the world to not have it ruined forever – and ate my breakfast.  A couple of weeks later the neighborhood was graced with this:

I really didn’t think much about it initially.  I assumed the Buried Life dicks were making some kind of popsicle ad, but I wasn’t really sure.  Was the laundromat going to be sold to make way for some bullshit haute popsicle-tique?  There was no way; the laundromat was making a mint.  Could one of the guys who had painted it been dubbed the King of Pops in his frat at Auburn for his ability to sequentially take beer bong hits and eat popsicles?  I wasn’t sure and the whole thing dissipated from my mind.

I live in the Poncey Highlands neighborhood in Atlanta.  There are maybe five neighborhoods in Atlanta that are acceptable enough to live in; Poncey Highlands is centrally located between all five and is thus Atlanta’s only neighborhood where you can easily live without a car.  Ironically, one of the neighborhood’s most famous landmarks is a gas station/convenience store called Buddy’s.  It shares a parking lot with the laundromat where the Buried Life dicks painted their mural.  One morning in early spring 2010 my wife returned from an errand and announced, “That stupid mural is for some asshole selling popsicles out of a cart in the Buddy’s parking lot.”  I told my wife that that made sense, that the mural had probably created a little neighborhood buzz and was a good business move, but one that couldn’t possibly be conceived of or executed by anyone but a gigantic asshole.  “Oh, you’ve got no fucking clue!”, she said. “This guy is the asshole!”  I smiled blithely at her enthusiasm and went about my day, only faintly seeing the great asshole peripherally as I rode my bike to work.

The city of Atlanta is an odd case.  Not only is it an inland city, but there aren’t really even any geographical phenomena of consequence to establish a natural center of town:  there’s no Lake Michigan, there’s no Mississippi River; there’s just… where Atlanta is.  So sprawl is a huge problem.  In recent years more Atlantans have been moving into the city proper trying to find life outside of the commute and strip mall, away from the chain restaurant and pop-up neighborhood.  But we’ve got our work cut out for us.  White flight in the 60′s significantly diminished the tax base to fund infrastructure in the city, and the process of gentrification has essentially been an organic neighborhood-by-neighborhood development without much help from a disorganized Atlanta city government , and increasingly racist Georgia state government.  As I said before, the Poncey Highlands neighborhood is centrally located, pedestrian friendly, has as good of public transportation as Atlanta can currently get, and possesses every other necessity one needs to comfortably live without depending on a car for transport to a far away place to spend money.  But as pleasant as all this may be, it’s not exactly Manhattan.  As a bike-fag, I can move all over the city and keep myself  pretty interested, but most people are too lazy to do so and thus every day in Poncey Highlands is a fairly similar scene: tons of people walking around to do a very limited amount of shit.  And it’s for this reason –and the Buried Life bullshit — that I knew the great asshole known as The King of Pops™ was going to really annoy the shit out of me, but as usual… I had no fucking idea until later exactly how right I was.

I grew up principally in a town called Austell, Georgia which is a lower-middle class suburb of Atlanta.  The ethnic makeup of Austell is currently roughly 1/3 Latino, 1/3 black, and 1/3 white (it’s worth noting that the area was 90% white 10 years ago).  The main greenspace/community area for Austell is Tramore Park, which is essentially a soccer complex with a large playground and a walking track.  Due to my roles as father and soccer-fag, I’ve spent more time in Tramore Park than a Libertarian at a sports bar.  On a given weekend there are as many people at Tramore Park doing whatever they’re doing to enjoy themselves in their community as there are people in Poncey Highlands doing the same.  But what’s interesting to me is that there was always someone selling popsicles out of a cart at Tramore Park.  I think there were a lot of them, actually.  I don’t really remember though, because selling popsicles out of a cart is NOT A BIG FUCKING DEAL and is far less interesting to me than, say, the list of black people Dave Matthews dreams of being photographed with.  I bought several varieties of popsicles from many ethnically diverse popsicle entrepreneurs at Tramore Park.  I hope those popsicle entrepreneurs are doing well today, because selling popsicles for a living has got to be tough… unless, of course, you’re an exploitative, blond-haired/blue-eyed shit, who can fool an endless supply of people into believing that eating your popsicles is not only fashionable and cool, but is also helping the fucking world.  Here’s a visual manifestation of what that means: My first experiences with The Asshole™ were pretty predictable.  I knew the King of Pops™ was going to say he used only organic, locally grown ingredients in his popsicles.  But, you know, who didn’t know that shit?  I knew he was going to do well.  He’s in a neighborhood everyone flocks to to do a limited amount of shit, and he looks like an android designed to appreciate The Arcade Fire.  So I was kind of prepared.  At first I decided I liked him even less than I had reason to because he was wearing the same hat I found on a beach in Hawaii — a hat that I would wear on the rare occasions I felt silly enough to wear one.  Then, I noticed the ridiculous fucking flavor combinations he was offering: one day it would be tamarind grapefuit, curried raspberry, fig cilantro, and onion strawberry; followed the next by cherry peanut-butter, banana oregano, garlic watermelon, and basil asparagus.  It was just fucking ridiculous.  Everyone in the fucking world knows that a coconut popsicle tastes much better without being combined with turmeric, so if it weren’t enough that this dick was trying to Steve Jobs the popsicle entrepreneurial paradigm, now he was attempting to challenge the world’s narrow parameters of popsicle appreciation. It was if he had been created by a god out of the ingredients of CNN, The Food Network, and bullshit.

The key thing to remember in life is that people are really fucking stupid.  At the time of the King of Pops’s emergence, the country’s financial system had just been revealed to be a gambling house insured by the taxpayer.  Through a combination of the manipulation/reliance on the lack of concentration of the American people, the “hope” most of us had voted for had been complicatedly bureaucratized into the ethersphere, and the idea had predictably been taken by most Americans that their best interest was being taken care of — they just didn’t know exactly how that process was working.  And who could criticize such faith; corporately controlled government has always had the intentions of the average voter as its elan vital.  So with this scenario as the backdrop, the citizens of one of Atlanta’s most fashionably Democratic ‘hoods (only the fashionably Democratic say ‘hoods), began to galvanize themselves in a political expression of solidarity:  the buying of unnecessary pretentious goods from a privileged white person.  Now people may argue that I don’t know the intentions of these popsicle buyers — that they were perhaps just buying popsicles; I would respond to that assertion by saying that’s a little like saying that people who buy CDs from killallniggers.com just want to listen to music.  When an asshole communicating a fashionably Democratic image starts a business communicating a fashionably Democratic product image bought by consumers adhering to the cliches of Democratic fashionability in a fashionably Democratic ‘hood, I’d say it’s pretty clear what’s occurring:  a business phenomenon of fashionable Democratic bullshit.   The view outside of my apartment turned into a spectacle of the absurd.  At first it was just a small line constantly queued up to the asshole’s stand.  Then the alternative weeklies came.  Then the Food Network came.  Then CNN came.  Then he started selling t-shirts.  That’s right: at any given moment in the Atlanta area you can be reminded that someone bought a popsicle from a guy as a fashion statement.  All of a sudden there were so many people ostentatiously hanging out of the hatchbacks of their Subaru Outback Sports eating popsicles that the functionality of the setting at Buddy’s effectively morphed from inner-city gas station to place in the city that people drive to to park and eat popsicles.  And I swear to whatever cosmic authority may or may not exist:  people were walking to buy popsicles from the King of Pops™,  leaning up against the walls in the area… eating popsicles like badasses.  The ubiquitous alternative weekly listed the King of Pops™ as the best reason to live in Atlanta’s best neighborhood.  That’s only slightly less ridiculous than saying the best reason to live in the Western hemisphere is this:

The King of Pops™ became such a phenomenon that people from out of town would try and “cool-ly” relate to me by citing their familiarity with The King™.  Once, I was having a drink with my wife in a courtyard and an MTV-conditioned suburban gay dude asked me where I lived:

“In the neighborhood — right across the street,” I responded.

“So you’re into the King of Pops™, I guess”, he smugly spouted.

“No.  I, um, have a lot of negative opinions about the King of Pops™.”

“OMG could you be more jealous?  He is so hot.”  The MTV-conditioned suburban gay dude didn’t delve any deeper into my dislike of The King™, and one of those perfectly fabricated walls of misunderstanding was formed — with not another word to be spoken amongst us for the rest of our lives being the end product of that summit.

I haven’t really touched on this specifically because it opens up an entirely different line of tangentia, but part/nearly all of the reason for the King of Pops™ success is that he falls into the realm of what’s known to most people as Attractive™.  He has blond hair, blue eyes, isn’t fat, and has pleasant skin.  So let’s spell out this phenomenon like this:  if a regular black guy were selling popsicles in spot X, he’d sell 15 popsicles a day; if a generically attractive Nick Cannon-esque black guy were selling popsicles in the same spot X,  he might sell 30 popsicles a day — BUT if a regular white dude sold popsicles in spot X  he’d sell 75 popsicles a day, and if a Paul Walker-esque looking white dude sold popsicles in spot X  for the same stupid fucking people unwilling to reconcile their shortsightedness of everything with their aspirations to sophistication in the midst of their laziness…  he’d be on CNN.  Nothing sells like denial.

The ambitions of this blog are naive and amorphous.  Can an independent community of  anarchistic communicators replace the role of commercially sanctioned/qualified media demagogues?  And can people exposed to this idea:find the wisdom to see past this idea:

Only time, effort, and the fate of our presence in what we understand to be the universe will tell.

My Alabama football blog got more attention than I expected.  It got a lot of hits (for an egotistical “Let me tell you what the fuck is going down” blog), spurred some dialogue amongst the non-converted, and also managed to offend large portions of my family who stumbled upon it even though I had no intention of being anything other than an anonymous dick-headed purveyor of social criticism/faux avant-garde arrogance/passe uber-snarkism.

The simple fact is that I’d always wanted to write about University of Alabama college football.  It’d just always been such a striking phenomenon to me.  Here’s this state with so many deep complex problems incurred by the history of its Southern/geographically rural reality, so isolated from mainstream American intellectual dialogue/media exposure, so associatively rich with the quintessentially American traits of independence and rebelliousness , yet so tame, trite, and conformist in what its inhabitants chose to rally around as an expression of solidarity/identity.  The actuality of the phenomenon was spelled out loud and clear in my University of Alabama blog:  Alabamans aren’t so much enthralled with University of Alabama football as much as they want to establish a universal sense of pride amongst themselves in a way every one of its citizens can grasp and identify with.  Living in a nation where your regional history, existence, and substance is generally derided, ignored, or scoffed at generates a desire to establish a presence in which you feel like you can be recognized.  Given the reality of the state of Alabama’s circumstances, it’s no real surprise that it chose to flex its collective voice through a medium through which it felt it couldn’t be ignored: nationally competitive popular sport.  National political realities/complexities are all but ignored in sports media and –in the case of college football specifically– the path to success isn’t limited so much by rules as by a desire to succeed.  My problem with University of Alabama football lies in the over-commitment of the state’s citizenry to such an essentially useless medium of self-identification.  Culture in the state of Alabama has developed around a desire to succeed in something that’s been nationally ordained as a symbol of American success, but that is essentially worthless.  So in a desire to cultivate pride, Alabama has essentially acquired for itself the reputation as being the state that cares the most about meaninglessness — which belies the inherent spirit of its inhabitants.  As much as I loathe the effect of college football on the American heartland, I’ve always been something of an Auburn fan simply because I know that being a fan of Auburn collegiate football in the state of Alabama is a symbol that you believe there’s more out there. And there is more out there, and while no other component of the  reality we know is as nefarious and misguided as University of Alabama college football (except for the Coen brothers’ film No Country for Old Men), the problem has very little to do with the citizenry of Alabama, and much more to do with American football’s influence and history in general.

The origin of American football was a strange morphing of rugby (a comparatively fluid –albeit equally boring– English game) and jingoistic ideas about America’s status as a violent, dominant, imperialist power.  The first collegiate football games were essentially rugby games, but gradually became brutal manifestations of violence that Theodore Roosevelt was so mortified by (as any compassionate elephant hunter would be) that he introduced legislation via Presidential mandate to illegalize the game entirely due to a garish number of fatalities and injuries in the early 20th century.  Threatened by a real governmental attempt to banish its very existence, football enacted certain rules that “cleaned up” the game in terms of violent egregiousness, but that turned the game into less of an “anything goes fight to move the ball forward” into a more sanitized, stagnant war simulation.  The game inherited  the strange phenomena of “the line of scrimmage” (starting position) and four “downs” (attempts)  to move the ball forward 10 yards, with each successful movement of the ball 10 yards or more within 4 downs resetting the cycle anew.  In addition, a game-clock was introduced from which each increment of “battle” would be subtracted from the total amount of game to be played, stopping for changes of possession, plays run outside of the boundaries, penalties, et cetera.  Thus instead of a blatantly violent, essentially lawless melee, the sport became more of a strategic equivalent to legal war:  under the rules allowed by the laws of the game, the team which functioned most effectively would be the winner.  This proved to be enough of a deft move to keep the fans of the original barbaric game engaged, appealed to the growing American nationalism of the day, and won over even more fans as it was less obviously unseemly.  It was from here that football established itself as kind of a grassroots manifestation of American conquering pride.  Other countries played games; we played wars.

With the sport of football so lacking in the traditional fluidity, grace, artfulness, and skill associated with most other popular world sports at the time,  the appeal of the sport was essentially limited to a certain breed of aggressive dumb men, but in the early 1960′s the NFL capitalized on the sport’s prior appeal of violent, obedient, calculated physical domination by positioning itself to not only take advantage of the dawn of television as juggernaut, but also to shrewdly utilize  its lack of history as a game to morph its product –by rule change and emendment– into a desirable television/advertising product first and foremost.  With the possible exception of basketball, most popular world sports exist as sports in which television must operate around the parameters of the game, the construction and tradition of the sport being created as a participatory endeavor first, essentially creating a situation where television has to work around the game to function effectively.  Some examples are: 1) in tennis, the commercials occur at tasteful breaks between games and sets, 2) in baseball, between innings, 3) in soccer, at half-time and within camera view during matches, etc.  American football is perhaps the only game on record to exist as an intentional devolution as sporting phenomenon and evolution as business/marketing idea.  People rarely “play” football outside of socially loaded organizational paradigms involving a need to “obey and achieve”, and when they do it turns into a confusing amalgamation of something entirely different: kids don’t play backyard football anymore (because they’re smart enough to know there’re a billion better things to do with their time) , but when I was a kid we did… by creatively turning the game into something we could understand.  This was no mean feat:  professional football commentators/coaches/players/referees are frequently at a loss to explain where the game stands during a given competition because the list of rules is such a staggering combination of opacity and abundance that it’s completely acceptable for all of them to have to take breaks during games to confer and figure out what the hell is even going on.  This is a key point:  in other sports the question is about whether or not an infraction of the rules occurred.  Was the ball out of the play boundaries, was a foul committed by/on a player?  In American professional football, there are usually several instances per contest where no one but the referees are even  remotely confident of the legality of a play.  Are you a football fan?  Quick, what are “too many men in motion”, what is “illegal procedure”, what is an “illegal formation”?  No wikipedia-ing allowed.  Why is football the national past-time when 99.999% of it’s followers aren’t even sure what’s going on?  Because the interest in football isn’t as a sport, but as a vessel of American consumerism and pride expressing itself through a paradigm of conformity.  The business genius the NFL realized when it began its relationship with television in the 1960′s was that nobody really cared about the sport of American football, they just cared about “rocking ass American style”, and the NFL used TV to give them what they wanted.  The uniforms were sensational and telegenic, making the game’s players seem less like athletes and more like gaudy, super-heroic, violent astronauts.  The pre-game, half-time, and post-game shows spent more time building cults of personality around the stars of the game than reporting the contents of the actual game or developments within the sport. The game which –was already nearly unwatchable as a pure sporting event– instituted even more rule changes to allow for more commercial breaks.  A football game wasn’t very identifiable as a sporting event, but was in fact a hodgepodge of television production, with a typical game consisting of 11 minutes of game action and 215 minutes of filler.  This was the key to football’s explosion in popularity during the mid 60′s and 70′s.  “You don’t like sports?  Well you don’t have to like sports to like football, because it’s not really a sport. It’s a show.”  There’s nothing essentially wrong with this superficially.  Why someone would arbitrarily decide to attach passion and commitment to meaningless games involving balls and rules is rooted in luxurious entertainment at best and willful ignorance at worst, but if there is a value to sport it’s in its ability to showcase pure competitive drama.  Every sports contest isn’t entertaining, but most do have the potential to be captivating simply because –at best– sports are a medium of showcasing human skill and creativity in a dramatic setting that is by rule uncontrived.  American football became the opposite of this.  “Don’t know what’s going on?  It doesn’t matter, here’s a promotion for NBC’s new sit-com.  Still don’t care, wait until half-time when we’ll have interviews with the cast of The Dukes of Hazzard.  Still don’t care?  Give us a minute and we’ll have dumb beer commercials with nearly-naked, sexually available, mentally vacant women.”  In becoming a vehicle for entertainment rather than sport, American football became wildly successful by combining its appeal to aggressive American nationalism with an ability to become a pure medium for capitalist entertainment.  The effect on America has been dreary.

My Alabama football blog explored the worst case scenario effect of American football on a mostly rural level.  College football  is by and large a game of rural America whose appeal to participants and supporters is to establish for themselves a nationally heard voice for their area.  I grew up mostly in the South.  The first SEC football game I went to was not only spectacular, but was also the first time I ever saw national media in the same place I was.  When you think about how many people have experiences like this, it’s easy to see why college football is such a huge deal in rural areas.  When I was a kid attending my first SEC football game in the most spectacular setting I’d ever been in with television cameras everywhere, my first reaction wasn’t to question the social health of what was going on, but was to think: “This is  definitely the raddest shit I’ve ever seen in Starkville, Mississippi.”  College football is most of rural America’s connection to the rest of America, its identity as it were.  And this identity expands outward.  In most rural societies high school football is a big deal.  My little league football team was a waaay bigger deal than it should have been.  Going to football games becomes the family highlight of the week. Little girls want to become cheerleaders.  Little boys want to play football.  A few goth kids hang out at Denny’s and are called faggots.  This is rural America.  I’m not entirely stoked about it, but I understand.

What’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to understand however is the NFL’s stranglehold on America’s collective conscience.  The NFL’s marketing brilliance/shamelessness has been documented here and elsewhere, but what I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about is the effect the NFL’s diet of pure consumerism is currently having/has had on America’s citizenry.  I don’t think there’s another entity that’s as destructive to the intellectual fabric of America (with the possible exception of the American folly of pitting the Democratic vs. Republican hegemony as meaningful –though it mightn’t be a stretch to draw the roots of the latter from the former).  Think about it: 1)  a sport based upon the fundamental tenets of violent, obedient, legal physical-domination is the sport of the nation even though the nation itself doesn’t entirely understand the rules of “its sport”, 2)  it’s perhaps the leader in American  propagation of misogyny as the only place for women in the sport is to exist as shiny, supportive, sex-objects, 3) it has become America’s dominant television entity by essentially offering 1 part contrived base elements of cliched-machismo with 14 parts stupid advertising.  This is America’s game.  Guess what this creates?

This is a really obvious example, but it’s perfect (it’s not like the NFL does anything that isn’t obvious).  This sums up about 99% of the NFL.  That stupid fucking commercial ran for years, with like, 10 different incarnations.  ESPN played a special updated segment of it once a week with the lyrics changed to coincide with whatever had happened in the NFL that week, the only thing remaining constant being the stupidity and misogyny.  Rural America might be aligning itself a bit unhealthily with a sport in search of community and identity, but the NFL is making the majority of the men everywhere in America completely retarded. And the effects reverberate through society.  My favorite example of this reverberation is on plane rides.  There are three types of people on plane rides: 1) those that want you to leave them the fuck alone, 2) those that want to talk to you about the NFL, and 3) those that wouldn’t mind talking to you but are afraid you’re just going to talk about the NFL.  It goes like this:  businessmen on flights are the loudest people on the plane, most major airport cities have NFL teams, and the businessmen think the best way they can break the ice with you before they tell you about how responsible they are for their company’s “unit growth” is to talk about the NFL.  It’s real fucking lame.  They all speak in what my wife calls “the NFL accent”: that loud, blowhardedly presumptuous, arrogantly overconfident voice that’s frequently punctuated with self-satisfied fake laughter.  All businessmen on airplanes have the NFL accent –unless they own the plane– but the NFL accent and the NFL are everywhere.  The sweet part is that the rest of us have to deal with it.

I used to work at a bar outside of Atlanta that did 30% of its business on Sundays because all the NFL games were on different televisions and it stayed full from open to close with NFL fans.  They were nearly all the same people.  They had good enough jobs to enjoy themselves on Sunday but weren’t necessarily happy or financially secure.  They’d all moved from somewhere else because they’d heard Atlanta was a good place for jobs.  They’d come to this sports bar to watch their NFL team to support the team they’d grown up with, and be around some other people they might talk to but rarely did.  There were plenty of women there –obviously fulfilling roles as “cool wives/girlfriends”– and they seemed to be just about as into it as the men, which wasn’t much.  There were a few very loud, clownishly obnoxious men, whose ridiculousness was the only consistently entertaining feature of those Sundays.  It was the same all year round.  Every Sunday was exactly the same.  Even the playoffs were the same.  A kind of grimly depressing surrender to what they thought was supposed to be the best thing to do that day, even though it was mostly just a sad spectacle punctuated by various levels of intoxication.

But Super Bowl Sunday was different.  All the TV’s were on one game.  The volume of the game boomed over every inch of the bar.  There was excitement over the game and whatever manufactured drama had been created by the media.  Everybody talked about how they thought the half-time show would go, and discussed their opinions on Bruce Springsteen or Jessica Simpson or whoever the hell was  supposed to go on.  Excitement brimmed over the commercials as the Super Bowl has the most expensive commercials on Earth  — and NFL fans are into expensive commercials like Radiohead fans are into fashionable hats.  When the game started, oohs and ahs sounded in unison.  Laughter arose throughout the bar during every dumb gag during every hackneyed commercial.  The loud buffoons were there, but instead of taking the edge off the dreariness, they actually made everyone happy.  The half-time show offered the “cool wives/girlfriends” an opportunity to voice whatever opinions they had on mass popular culture/music as the men got drunker.  I remember that no one wanted half-time to end.  No one would openly admit that they didn’t care about the game, but when the second half started, there was a tangible feeling of decline, kind of like the moment on Christmas day when all the presents are open, and the only thing left to do is play with what you’ve got.  The game winded down as did the mood of the bar.  People were still happy it was Super Bowl Sunday, but knew the end was near.  The game ended and the very drunk stayed and the not so drunk left, much the same as any Sunday, but I remembered how happy everyone in the bar had been.  It struck me that all these people just wanted to connect with something, and that for some reason they’d gotten it in their minds that that thing was supposed to be the NFL.  I didn’t know, nor did they, what they would do until the next football season.  Sure they’d follow the ridiculous things NFL fans keep track of during the off-season like the draft, player-signings, etc., but what they really wanted wasn’t football but a connection to something.  It was truly tragic.  I thought of college football fans’ passion stemming from regional pride and began to see more vividly than I had ever seen before that these people’s devotion to the NFL had instilled in them an emptiness they didn’t understand.  They wanted to be a part of something bigger, but had instead just become voids, trained culturally to accept advertising in the stead of meaningfulness.

The insidiousness of American football really dawned on me.  From the black Americans that associate it with success and an America they have a part in despite the marginalizing effects it has on black America at large;  from the many women that are expected to tolerate its misogyny as a part of standard American culture;  from the homosexuals who find in football’s every manifestation a sentiment of livid homophobia; from the boys and girls that grow up in rural areas thinking football’s their connection to the rest of America;  from the innocent television viewers that think football’s the heart and pride of America, and from the throngs of the slightly askew for which football’s conformist hegemony of homogeneity establishes a de facto existence of ridicule, American football has negatively affected the lives of the overwhelming majority of its citizens.  It’s Super Bowl Sunday today.  Start the rebuilding process and watch the Karate Kid Part III instead.  Let the healing begin.

First I want to say that I love Barack Obama.  You go brother!!!  LOL!!!  I am so happy that America truly has a black president and I think that he will inspire black people to be the best we can be.  As a black woman I am so proud that someone of my race is president.  If you are not black you cannot understand how important this is to us.  All of our lives we are told we can do anything we want but sometimes it is hard to believe.  Well I think that what Barack Obama has done has shown us all that this is truly true.  We may have to work a little bit harder than some but if we do work hard enough we can accomplish all of our dreams.  Maybe one day I can even be president.  I know what yall are saying!!!  A black female president!!!  Girl you lost your mind!!!  LOL!!!  Well I know it may seem crazy but I think that Barack Obama has taught us all to believe and I am learning all I can about our president and politics.  My friends say that I am addicted to CNN!!!  They may be right!!!  LOL!!!  Well I hope one day I can be president and I am starting to move toward that goal by becoming a community organizer like Barack Obama was before he was a senator.  I hope I can be a senator after doing work in the community and then hopefully be president.  I know it sounds crazy but if you tell yourself that something is crazy then you will think it is crazy and that is the best way to end a dream.  I have learned that from Barack Obama along with many other things.  My whole house is decorated with things I bought at the Obama Zone in the Dekalb Mall.  I am almost addicted to that place!!!  LOL!!!  Here is a picture of me outside of my favorite store.

Chillin' at my home away from home!!!

The other thing that is big news besides Barack Obama being the first black president is that Michael Jackson has passed away.  I think it is very important that Michael Jackson be remembered for what he is.  A inspiration to us all!!!  Many people forget that Michael Jackson is a important person in black history because of all of his controversy and because some think he tried to be white but it is important to remember that no one is perfect and Michael Jackson had a very hard life with a abusive father and he lived at a time when racism was everywhere not just in the boardroom.  Michael Jackson was a entertainer that crossed racial lines forever and made it possible for every black entertainer after him to have a career that could be loved by all colors.  Michael Jackson was also a pioneer in the world of videos.  Without Micheal Jackson videos would never be the true art form they are today.  A lot of you may be wondering how I feel about the controversy between Chris Brown and Jay Z at the BET Awards.  Some of my white readers may not know this but Chris Brown wanted to perform at the BET awards because Michael Jackson was a inspiration to him but Jay Z did not think it was good to have someone who had hit a woman on a show honoring Michael Jackson and said he would not perform at the BET Awards if Chris Brown was allowed to perform.  This is such a hard issue to judge.  I know that Jay Z was saying that Michael Jackson should not be seen as a person who inspires a person to beat women but I truly think that Michael Jackson was a person who stood for second chances and forgiveness and I think Chris Brown should have been allowed to perform.

Well thats all for now.  I have to go to the East Lake YMCA to get my workout on!!!  You know I hate it but I got to!!!  LOL!!! I love all my readers and I promise to respond to all of yalls comments.  Until next time.

Stay blessed,

Ry Ry

VS.

Hound Dog

I was born in Bountiful, Utah to a military officer and a schoolteacher in 1975.    Until I was 2 years old I lived in Utah, which is an astoundingly beautiful, idyllic place, that even its disdainfully haughty Mormon populace can’t ruin.  In 1977 my family moved to Germany and we stayed there until I was 6 years old, giving me an opportunity to grow up in an imaginatively stimulating, historically rich foreign culture–which isn’t to say that I was hot shit for living in nice places (because almost all Europeans and Utahns are retarded), just that my upbringing prior to 1981 was positively influenced and imaginatively nurtured.  In 1981 my father was re-assigned by the military and my family moved to Fort Rucker in Enterprise, Alabama.  Enterprise was a fine town to be a kid in.  Most of the inhabitants were from military families so the makeup of the citizenry was fairly diverse, and to me it just seemed like a more wide open, hotter version of Germany–with a lot of gnats.  People seemed interesting and hopeful.  Life seemed to be bright for most everyone there.  I thought Alabama was a great place to live.

My father was born and raised in McCalla, Alabama, a tiny town outside of Birmingham that is best known for being the town where iconic American athlete Bo Jackson was born–a fact the mostly white, mostly racist populace isn’t particularly proud of.  Instead of being a small town’s legendary native son, he’s more of a footnote…and a commentary on just how little a black man is valued in Alabama.   While living in Enterprise, my father took me to McCalla to meet my family in Alabama for the first time.  I remember being instantaneously smitten with the bucolic, serene beauty of the place.  It was like a Bob Ross painting come to life.  I rode around in the back of pickup trucks as much as I possibly could and generally just awestruckly absorbed the seemingly infinite expanse of creeks, pastures, dirt roads and convenience stores that made up this incredible, fantastically pastoral world.  After a few days I was able to comfortably settle into the ethereal sense of awe enveloping me enough to  explore and establish closer relations with my family there.  As with any family there are those you love, and those you’re connected to without connection.  I had begun to sense even as a 6 year old that there was something that came along with the isolated beauty of McCalla, Alabama; a nefarious force I couldn’t then label insecurity.  I began sensing some strangely negative sentiments from some of my newly met family members that didn’t quite make sense to me.  Why, I wondered, could anyone have bad intentions in such a  serenely perfect place?  Then darkness revealed itself.  It all became clear.  The devil made his entrance.   Jada Pinkett-Smith walked through the door.

“Are you for Alabama or Auburn?!”, blurted out one of my less than kindred spirit Alabama cousins.  I can still remember the feeling that the discordant sentiment I’d been struggling to find the root of was being revealed to me as I wondered what on Earth  I was being asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Is Auburn a state?”, I asked, confused and morbidly interested.

“No stupid.  It’s a football team.”

As a child growing up in Germany the only thing I really identified as being American was the NFL, so I had some interest in that and knew all of the teams.   ”They’re not in the NFL are they?  I only know about the NFL.”

“Pfft.  You’re dumb.  They’re college football.”

“I don’t understand.  College is like where you go to school  after high school, right? They have football teams in college?”

“Yeah, and in Alabama you root for Alabama or Auburn.”

“Do you have to?,” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Realizing that asking this person to weigh the philosophical value of attaching a vested interest in an academic institution’s football team was perhaps more of an issue than this person was willing to confront, I decided on an alternate plan. ”Who are the teams again,  Alabama and Auburn?  Alright, who are you for?”, I asked.

“Pfft.  I’m for Alabama.  Roll tide.”

“OK.  You’re for Alabama…then I’m definitely for Auburn.”   And so I was.   Minutes later the word was being spread around Granny Stacy’s house that I was for Auburn.  I didn’t know the rules of football, still wasn’t completely clear on what college had to do with football, and couldn’t identify the helmet of the team I was being ridiculed for being “for”, but nonetheless it seemed to be something of some importance to my family, and it became clear to me that most of the members of my family that seemed strangely at odds with the serene beauty of Alabama, were big Alabama fans, and seemed to delight in the ignominy they could now cast on me for something I didn’t care or know about.   In short:  it was their way to be assholes.  Some of my family members came up to me and told me that it was OK, that they were for Auburn too.  They were much nicer people, and I seemed to get the feeling that they were less for Auburn and more for not being a total fuckhead about some non-important bullshit.  A year later Bo Jackson from a mile down the road was the best high school football player in the nation.  He decided to go to Auburn.  I felt like I knew why.

I spent the next 5 years moving around the South and gradually started to understand why college football was a big deal.  Most Southern states don’t have pro sports teams, and even in those that do, most rural Southerners relate more strongly with something they can have a connection to (i.e. a university) than with something like a pro sports team, which is seen as more of a city folk thing.  I found it a bit unfortunate that the region chose to identify itself through a rather artless, gaudily commercial sport, but by this point I’d learned that most people weren’t very comfortable with imaginative possibilities, and that if they could they’d articulate the value of imaginative possibilities as being ”for faggots”.    So when I was 12 years old my father decided he wanted to get out of the military to move closer to his family in Alabama.  Having been so smitten with Alabama before, I was very excited to move there.  I knew about college football now and  figured I understood the mentality of the University of Alabama fans in my family a bit better now and figured it wouldn’t be that much of an issue.  I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d made a pre-arranged wedding for my daughter to Chris Daughtry.  In the rest of the South, people care about college football.  It’s a tie that binds.  I have become a University of Florida football fan over the years even though I find American football to be grotesque, crass,  and socially and intellectually destructive.  I guess it’s just because I’ve grown up in the South.  At some point it just seemed like kind of a dick move to tell everyone around me that what they liked was stupid, and I got involved in it because I wasn’t ready to go goth in the 2nd grade.  But people in the South have some perspective about college football.  It’s the thing they’re into that they talk to strangers about.  It’s what they do on Saturday.  Fans of University of Alabama football don’t just watch the games on Saturday.  Being an asshole Crimson Tide fan is the totality of their being.  They buy crimson SUV’s and permanently adorn them with University of Alabama flags and McCain/Palin stickers.  They dress like old dead coaches as a serious fashion statement.  They dress their newborn children in “Bama” baby-gear the day they’re born.  They keep University of Alabama flags on their porches 365 days a year, and make the decision to wear Alabama Crimson Tide clothes to the Birmingham mall (the center of Alabaman state culture) even though 80% of the people there are also doing so.  If you haven’t lived in Alabama, you don’t understand.  Check this shit out:

I mean seriously.  Are you fucking kidding me?  At what point do you stop pretending that you’re into a college football team and just start crying in the street asking strangers if they’ll tell you they love you.  This is a grown fucking woman wearing an Alabama Rob Zombie hat (a frightening enough concept in its own right), the Roll Tide version of those slutty shorts disgusting 16 year old suburban chicks wear to the mall to prove to guys they could work at a Hooter’s if they wanted to,  a pair of sunglasses that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr. blush, and a painting of a college football mascot wearing a Bear Bryant hat (more on him later) replacing the functionality and legality of a shirt–in a heavily populated public place.  This woman is 50 years old.  She more than likely has children.  Let’s think about a few things here.  Look at the crowd behind her.  They’re not like freaked out or anything.  She has stopped to have her picture taken to “save the moment”.  She’s gonna go back and hang out with those people behind her in a minute.  The novelty of what she’s done has already dissipated to those around her.  She’s just gonna go and chat with her crowd behind her in a minute about, oh, I don’t know– what would she be talking about?  Maybe she’s gonna tell the people behind her that she wishes Vin Diesel were white.    The other sociological issue I find amazing is that she’s basically getting away with indecent exposure because she’s advertising a college football team on her breasts.  This only happens in Alabama.  I can’t go to Athens, Georgia,  and write “UGA” on my wiener and “Go Dawgs” on my respective ass cheeks and not get arrested.    But believe it or not, this is the endearing sect of Alabama football fans.  These “I’m so rowdy and I get so fucked up, and I love the Tide and Budweiser and Kid Rock owes his entire career to my dumb ass ” are the Alabama fans that have just hopped onto the asshole parade.  This chick’s just mind-blowingly dumb and lives in a society too fucked up to define itself in a way that’s not completely disgusting.  The devil doesn’t live inside this woman, she just heard the devil had a keg, and this is the only way she’d get into the party.  This woman is tragically funny, this shit is fucked up:

This is a grown Nickelback  fan with a very, very large tattoo of Paul “Bear” Bryant on his back.   As you can see he’s wearing a houndstooth hat, just like Bear Bryant used to wear.  You can also see a  sixty year old woman walking nonchalantly in front of him.  She is wearing a crimson sweater.  In a few moments she’ll tell him how much she likes his tattoo and hat.  He will say thank you.  Unlike any normal 60 year old woman, she won’t be afraid of a large idiotic shirtless redneck with a massive idolatry problem advertised all over his being, because the object of his idolatry is Bear Bryant, Alabama football’s version of God,  which is to say, everyone else’s Satan.  A mythological figure in the state of Alabama, Paul “Bear” Bryant is both a product of Southern insecurity desperately  attempting to establish identity, and a shrewd manipulator of that sentiment–essentially using the groundswell of pride amongst insecure, distrustful Alabamans to establish himself as a demi-god.  It’s difficult to find good information on Paul Bryant because most people that have taken it upon themselves to do research on him have less in common with historians and more in common with Jihadist Muslims.  On his wikipedia entry there are unsubstantiated claims of him having saved hundreds of lives in the Navy in a ship accident, though it is a documented fact that his division never saw action in combat.   He was dubbed “Bear” for his alleged exploits as a bear wrestler in fairs.  His status in Alabama is essentially that of an ass-beating, shit-kicking alternative to Jesus.  He was , in fact, a member of a fraternity at the University of Alabama, which means that whatever information about him may or may not be aggrandized fiction, it’s 100% certain that he was an unfathomable asshole.   It’s well documented that his treatment of his players was abusive, with numerous instances of players being hospitalized due to malevolently inhumane practice conditions.  The University of Alabama under Bryant’s stewardship was one of the last schools in the United States to give black players scholarships, and when following the trajectory of Bryant’s  career, it’s very apparent that Bryant’s chief motivations were creating and propagating his own legacy and mythological status.  For example, during Bryant’s most successful run as  head coach at Alabama there were no rules regarding maximum number of football scholarships per program, so on any given Saturday the University of Alabama might be employing 10 times the money of their opponents (in a contest of purported amateurs) because of a lack of perspective by the University of Alabama’s fans and boosters, and a megalomaniacal opportunism ready to be seized upon by Bryant.  So as other state institutions spent resources on their students and faculty, the University of Alabama spent money on football.  Bryant’s influence in the state of Alabama is not limited to football.  Bryant’s egotistically garish management of the football program has made the University of Alabama a lot of money and established itself as the dominant cultural  force in the state, but at a frightening cost to the intellectual fabric of Alabama.   In Alabama poets write poems about Alabama football, painters paint portraits of Bear Bryant, and musicians learn how to play “Sweet Home Alabama” and play it in pro-Tide bars for the rest of their lives.  Most books in a given Alabama household are related to college football.   It’s no coincidence that the same state that gave rise to a college football team defining its cultural identity is now perhaps the most heavily Republican state in America.  The same insecure tendencies that cause a state to effectively lash out at the rest of America by stacking the deck of an amateur athletic contest are the same tendencies preyed upon by the Republican party’s attempt to brand itself as a party of maverick, swashbuckling, self-reliant  heroes –from which they can then disenfranchise the rights of those citizens in the name of the bottom line of their corporate campaign contributors.  The average Alabaman now grows up with three choices:  1) take advantage of the beautiful natural surroundings and live a life of stoic discommunication/detachment/self-motivated independence, 2) aspire to becoming a member of a fascist regime under the guise of college football fandom, or 3)  get the fuck out of Alabama.  This is something I know a lot about as an Atlanta resident.  Atlanta is my home.  Atlanta is a lot of things.  One of those things is embarrassing…because we’ve basically become a refuge for all the citizens  in the Southeast who know they’ve gotta get the fuck out of wherever they’re from, even if they don’t know anything else.

This is what I’m really talkin’ about.  Look at this shit and tell me you’re not scared.  No?  Look closer.  Notice that every male is wearing a collared shirt.  Every single one–even the asshole Will Ferrell guy with the sunglasses rope and his tongue hanging out in the bottom left.  This picture is presumably taken in the student section, which is where the most terrifying Tide fans hang out.  These are college students at a state institution of learning that are all trying to look like the exact same asshole Titleist salesperson.  These people represent the  perceived apex of Alabaman social status; which is to say that Alabama football has successfully turned the high point in social achievement in the state of Alabama into being a bigger asshole than the bad guys in Caddyshack II. Note that nearly every person and every single girl has a pom-pom .  Have any of you ever shaken a pom-pom?  I did it once earnestly and a part of my soul is still crying because of it.  And on a broader note, why would any woman give a shit about football?  It’s boring, violent, completely unfluid and isn’t even fun to play.  My daughter’s mother made the mistake of talking her into playing softball last year, and to be supportive I attended all the practices and games.  During one of the practices some of the girls began chanting “Florida Gators rule!”  Another group of the girls began chanting “UGA” and “Go Dawgs!”  in response.  At one point my daughter began to chant “UGA” because she was from Georgia and sensed it was necessary for her to pick a side. I instinctively admonished her, reflexively blurting out, ”Madison Stacy, you do not yell about things you don’t care about!”  I was a bit embarrassed that I’d said that in front of a bunch of softball parents/Ron White fans, but even they all knew I was right.  There is no intelligent reason for a healthy female to cultivate an interest in American college football.  A girl forcing herself to get into college football is the same thing as a guy forcing himself to get into Cosmopolitan sex surveys: they’re both insulting enough to the intelligence of the gender they’re designed to appeal to, and adding stupid cross-gender interests to the list of dumb shit that  dumb people do only makes people more stupid in more ridiculous ways.  I’m not even going to say anything about trying to find a black person in this picture.  Good luck with that.  Evil is the absence of imagination succumbing to fear.  The following is a video depiction of what exactly that means.  Roll tide.

So that’s about it you know.  That’s what I know.  Every once in a while I’ll have some of my more politically astute friends recommend a video or book to me suggesting there’s strong evidence that the 9/11 attacks might’ve been indirectly orchestrated or “intentionally ignored” by certain Republicans (everyone Bush knows) with oil/defense interests in an attempt to create a strong enough anti-Arab sentiment to spur a U.S. presence in the Middle East to not only strengthen it’s position in the “oil wars”, but also to encourage growth in the largest sector of America’s economy:  the defense industry.  I know something about government contracts in Iraq being given out to certain companies that have supported the Republican party very well financially; contracts that very often are financed by the American taxpayers to establish an exploitative operation in a usurped land by soldiers that aren’t paid nearly as much to pacify and ready the land for exploitation as those who obtain the contracts to financially exploit Iraqi resources.  I listened to Air America before they took it off the air here in Atlanta (when I could stand to listen to the heinously awful programming they offered).  I’ve seen OutFoxed.  I know the deal.  But I don’t have the time to follow all the shit going on, you know?  There isn’t a major news outlet on television that’s willing to acknowledge any of these issues, lest they be accused of being a part of the “liberal media”, who are apparently a group of literate, upper-middle class, predominantly white men (the actual demographic make-up of most journalists) who will stop at nothing to turn our society into a welfare state for Mexican criminals, lazy black people, amoral gay men who wish to poison the foundation of the family through same-sex marriage, and man-hating liberal lesbians that want to have multiple abortions via artificial insemination to support their government subsidized stem-cell research production business.   I don’t have time to look up and down at everything the Republican party’s doing to fuck over everyone except the few assholes rich enough to take advantage of the benefits they acquire for themselves by fleecing the rest of the country.  I do know that I opt against buying health insurance because there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t be dropped if I were to become ill enough to actually need it unless I had government health insurance, and that the health care/pharmaceutical industry has the second largest profit margins in the United States  (next to the oil industry, of course) for a reason: their business is making as much money as possible for themselves while expending as little time and resources as is legally allowable dealing with the inconvenience of patient care.  So I don’t pretend to be a political expert, but I’m becoming more and more of one everyday simply because if I don’t it’ll probably be detrimental to my financial and physical well being.  That’s a fact of life I’m coming to grips with every day.  In the capitalist game of exploitation, the only thing worse than lacking capital is lacking capital and information.

November 28, 2007:  to some people it was just another day, another opportunity to wear an American flag bandanna while riding an over-priced motorcycle with flames somewhere on the gas-tank to eat at an over-priced corporate restaurant with flames somewhere on the menu.  To others it was another day to pretend that having a tramp stamp hadn’t completely removed all credibility from their existence, and still for others it was a day to wear a Police reunion  t-shirt to a crowded bar and brood in utter hopelessness.  For most it was was just another day to pretend not to be annoyed by Will Smith.   But for those with a sense of history and taste, November 28th, 2007 will always be remembered as the greatest day in excruciatingly embarrassing/hilarious entertainment history:  the day of the first Republican YouTube debate  in our world.

I’m just going to say it now.  If you’re a Republican you’re either a very bad, very misinformed, or very stupid person.  Let’s get that out of the way.  We all know the Republicans in our lives:  the ignorant racist rednecks, the marginally financially successful that think voting Republican puts them in some elite club or that the Democratic party’s ultimate goal is to tax them into submissive poverty,  the old people that value a President that pretends to be religious more than their own health, people that name their guns, etc.  This is the Republican party’s base. Imagine if you will a bunch of evil, rich, white guys aspiring to be in the pocket of every major corporation on Earth, all trying to suck up to a base that is at best unfathomably ignorant and at worst purely evil.  Now imagine that same base of unfathomably ignorant purely evil people getting the opportunity to pose questions to the  charlatan candidates via shittily conceived and executed YouTube videos broadcast nationally, and you can begin to understand maybe the second dumbest thing that’s ever happened in the world next to everything Billy Corgan’s ever done.

The Republican YouTube debate started out with a bang, but before I get into what that bang specifically was, I’ll make a bit of an educational digression.  For those that may not be aware, the worst thing that happened in the world in the year 2007 happened in my unfortunate hometown of Atlanta, and the following is the story of this terrible, harrowing event.

The Atlanta Braves are a phenomenon of upper-middle class mediocrity here in Georgia; that doesn’t mean that Atlanta Braves fans are mainly upper-middle class, it means that the overwhelming majority of The Braves Nation aspire to the Vapid Upper-Middle Class Myth:  don’t be black, go to church and Braves games, get some type of sales job, and you will be successful.   The people that go to Atlanta Braves games are the worst people in the world, and they attend Atlanta Braves games with no other intention than to simply be somewhat indicative of assholeness.  Nobody watches the games.   People just tell their friends via cellphone they’re at the Braves’ game and drink beer and hang out with a lot of people wearing either North Face clothes and trail shoes, or Hollister clothes and SEC hats.  Everyone that attends an Atlanta Braves game is a Republican in waiting, simply because the idea that a person would waste $100 doing something it’s completely impossible to enjoy is a personality characteristic exclusive to Republicans driven by the Vapid Upper-Middle Class Myth.  I often meet people from outside the Southeast and they usually seem to have it in their minds that the most frightening phenomenon they associate with the South is NASCAR.  I’ll be the first to admit that NASCAR fans aren’t the most enlightened collective, but having grown up around NASCAR I know that the prioritized list of things to do in a NASCAR fan’s mind at a race goes something like this:

1)  Get fucked up enough to pretend to be a  gay Mexican named “Pee-dro”.

2)   Pretend to not be bothered by Lenny Kravitz or whatever banal African-American celebrity is being employed by NASCAR that week to diversify it’s image.

3)  Know who Lance Armstrong is currently dating.

4)  Have a reasonably lucid argument as to why your favorite driver is not a faggot, and why all other drivers are.

Now I’m not saying that NASCAR fans aren’t generally a perfect example of the misguidedness of our nation in every sense imaginable, but having grown up observing these people in the South and as evidenced by the list above, NASCAR fans are human beings that are generally just engaging in a cultural phenomenon they’ve grown up around and enjoy for whatever reasons.  The average non-Southerner that attends a NASCAR race is probably a little scared initially, then disarmed by how incredibly nice the drunken redneck he’s been talking to for 3 hours about  the “underrated filmwork of ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper”  actually is.  Which is to say succinctly, NASCAR fans are usually dumb, but very rarely evil.  For example:

The same can’t be said of Atlanta Braves baseball “fans”.  I understand that other people from certain regions in the United States pretend to like baseball to seem sophisticated (because apparently only the truly sophisticated can be satisfied watching 99.9% of nothing happen for four hours), but the Atlanta Braves baseball fan is another creature entirely.  The Atlanta Braves baseball fan doesn’t give a shit about baseball.  It is a proven fact that no Atlanta Braves baseball fan can even name the starting lineup of the Atlanta Braves, despite the fact that he/she spends literally hundreds of hours a year in the presence of the phenomenon known as Atlanta Braves baseball.  The decision to go to an Atlanta Braves baseball game is a decision bred of telling the rest of the world to fuck off — a way to say, “I may be a Christian, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to piss on the freshly killed corpses of people that can’t afford $200 sandals,” without words;  or, “I am such a badass and I rule so much that I spend shitloads of money on stuff that bores the shit out of me.  Give me the lamest form of entertainment known to man, and with a few Coronas and 25,000 of my closest equally lame friends, I’ll be just fine.  That’s how I roll.”

So I hate baseball…a lot–and Atlanta Braves baseball much more so.  But I do have one use for baseball in my life.  I put my daughter to bed every night she’s with me.  She likes to have the television on as she falls asleep.  The problem is that whatever’s on can’t be too interesting or else she’ll pay attention to what’s on the television rather than going to sleep.  Enter baseball.   Baseball is the one thing that no one in their right mind wants to pay attention to.  Even people that claim to be baseball fans don’t want to watch baseball, they just want to have it on so they can let everyone know they’re a fucking asshole.  In my many years of bartending I’ve had 7000 assholes ask me if I could turn one of the TV’s to a baseball game, only to find them paying no attention to the game for the remainder of their lame stay at the bar.  However, given the fact that baseball could coax a coked-up Robin Williams into a Van Winkel-esque slumber, it’s what I tune the TV to when my daughter’s trying to go to bed.  So sometime in August 2007 (I think) I had the TV tuned to a Braves’ game while Maddy (daughter) was going to sleep.   The game ended and the post-game show came on–which kind of intrigued me.   A post-game show for baseball?!  Isn’t that kinda like an inspirational montage of an 80 year-old woman’s day long cyber-solitaire session?  The idea of the possibilities of undemanding entertainment people that could watch a baseball post-game show might tolerate really had me excited.  Would we see Frank Caliendo as George W. Bush telling fart jokes?  Advertisements for a new television channel featuring nothing but Ben Stiller movie trailers?  Perhaps a feature on some of the Braves going on a hunting trip with Bill Engvall?  As I ran possibilities through my head, the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life played out before me.  To properly understand the terror of what I was soon to witness you have to understand two things:  1) There’s some asshole guy that plays for the Braves named Mark Teixeira (pronounced ta-share-a) who’s apparently good at doing whatever baseball players are supposed to be good at (besides inspiring tribal tattoos).  2)  There’s a breed of person  that exists predominantly in the Southeastern United States called a “frippie”.  Frippies are a subculture of people that have managed to merge the seemingly oppositional cultures of hippiedom and fraternity life.  Basically the ultimate fuck you to the rest of the planet, frippies have figured out that everything in the world is OK, and that all of the world’s ills would be solved if we all just listened to shitty acoustic/jam bands named after an experience with food, wore name brand pre-worn clothes, and had rich parents to take care of us while we were busy thinking about absolutely nothing in college.  I always knew that frippies made up most of baseball’s young audience, but I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see.

The host of the post-game show announced that a special treat would be in store for the television audience tonight as two young men had composed a song in honor of Braves “sensation” Mark Teixeira.  The two young men came out, one with an acoustic guitar, both wearing “mandals”, SEC hats,  and pre-worn clothes.  They sat down and it began.  As they began, both frippies demonstrated the ultimate frippie move right off the bat:  the obvious shaking back and forth of the head to signify the fact that they were, like, really into the music.  With my good taste already horribly offended, the guitar player played perhaps the most obnoxious string of strummy, bullshit, barre chords I’ve ever heard in my life while the other guy began to sing…about how much he loved Mark Teixeira. The song was rife with pointing at the camera, affected shoulder shrugging, and all manner of completely embarrassing histrionics I haven’t seen the likes of since my days of competitive Mormon theater.  I  also feel it’s important to add that the crux of the song was that the two fellows would rhyme the word “Teixeira” with rhyming phrases like “I don’t care-a”, “it’s not fair-a”, etc.   If you can imagine the Barenaked Ladies deciding that they wanted to combine their musical obnoxiousness with a new front man who was all about drinking Sam Adams Light and calling complete strangers “bossman” you can start to begin to understand how truly horrifying this was for a human being with any amount of compassionate interest in the mental health of humankind.   Needless to say the song was a hit.  They ended up playing the song before a bunch of games at the stadium, it was played on the radio incessantly, and a YouTube video of the performance was downloaded like 100,000 times a day for a month.  Completely mortifying.  I promise you that if you do not own a Kenny Chesney album, the video you’re about to watch will be the most uncomfortable experience of your  life:

So the reason for this lengthy digression on the Atlanta Braves and the phenomenon of frippie-dom is this:  after Florida governor Charlie Crist came out looking like a Hulk Hogan/Bennie Hinn Floridian-superhuman and assured us all that the Republican YouTube debate would be “…the people’s debate…about the future of America…about integrity, honor, duty, and loyalty”,  some frippie from rural Washington (frippies live everywhere that sophistication doesn’t) came out and attempted to out-retard the Mark Teixeira Georgia Retards.  Though it’s absolutely true that nothing in the entire world will ever be as purely stupid as the Mark Texeira song by the Mark Teixeira Georgia Retards, the number of people that experienced it accidentally has to be pretty low, and the majority of the people that willfully experienced the artistic equivalent of Will Smith fronting a reggae/nu metal/prog-rock band are base subhumans that deserve whatever vile punishments Creflo A. Dollar’s god decides to inflict on them.  So barring the extremely unfortunate experience I had of putting my daughter to sleep with a baseball post-game show on,  the risk of thoughtful people having to see a guy with a guitar, mandals, and a hemp-necklace embarrass himself and everyone around him had been relatively low…until Chris Nandor from Snohomish, Washington took time out from his lacrosse league to serenade the Republican candidates with a song.

The candidates on stage in this debate weren’t stupid.  They were evil, dishonest, megalomaniacal and insidious, but there’s a certain kind of sympathy one feels for the swindler at having to engage his unsophisticated victims –and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the candidates as Chris Nandor gave embarrassing little political quips over trite guitar playing that they all had to pretend to be entertained by.  It was the first time in my life I’ve ever felt sorry for people trying to fuck over the citizenry of the United States by pretending to be religious good ol’ boys turning the complex issues of economics into a simple “We’re for economic freedom” argument to delude the voting base of America into further patriotic demise.   It’s that fucked up.

Something pretty amazing occurs while the video’s playing for the candidates that’s pretty much the essence of what happens in this debate. As the song begins you feel sorry for the candidates for having to endure the frippie’s bullshit, but almost immediately the candidate’s reactions reveal the heart of why Republicans are always a threat to ruin our country:  Republicans make everyone feel like they’re not stupid… even Chris Nandor.  The debate began and the contest to make stupid people feel like they weren’t stupid was on.  The participants, and their rating on the AMSNIP (Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public) meter:

John McCain: Obviously insane.  No chance in hell of winning anything, including a heterosexuality contest versus Matthew Broderick.  Implied a non-involvement in Iraq was tantamount to allowing World War III to begin and stopped just short of saying that his tax plan was the best for America because he’d endured years of torture as a P.O.W.  Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public meter:  6.  He’s from Arizona so it’s doubtful he knows any black people except for Charles Barkley, but I guarantee you he tells his close friends , “There’s black people…and there’s niggers.”

Duncan Hunter:  What the fuck?  I can understand obscure Democratic candidates onstage, what with the need to truly state a Liberal message that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are too poll conscious to espouse, but why in God’s name is there a need for a non-charismatic version of a Republican candidate for president.  It’s not like any of these guys have a different message.   It’s all the same “I’m for you and against big government and tax and spend Liberals” and yada fucking whatever.  Having a boring Republican candidate that doesn’t act like an asshole is like buying any Prince album after Purple Rain: profanely unwise excessiveness.  He did make an honorable attempt at craziness late in the debate when he gave an almost sexual description of his gun collection.  Also confronted the major issue of lead toys from China by imploring us all to buy American, which’d be nice if there were anything American left to buy besides shitty cars and novelty hot sauces.  AMSNIP meter: 3.  Would probably be higher if he knew any that weren’t strategically placed behind him.

Tom Tancredo:  This guy falls into the same category as the dude above.  He did mention something strange about having taken on Geraldo which was completely bewildering.  I mean, I’m pretty sure that it’s a better idea when running for President of the United States to talk about the time you got so high and drunk that you cried while listening to “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” than it is to brag about how you took on Geraldo.  Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public meter:  2.  He really loves to say nigger,  but doesn’t want to give Geraldo any political ammunition to use against him.

Ron Paul:  As the Libertarian candidate Ron Paul brought sensible views to the foreign policy discussion, and was soundly booed by the crowd–all of whom were apparently ready to bomb the fuck out of Iceland.  Looks like Ichabod Crane with AIDS.  AMSNIP meter: 0.  So busy patting himself and other fellow Libertarians on the back for their perceived social vanguard-ism that he’s forgotten what a nigger is.

Mike Huckabee:  If elected president, promises to decorate the White House with tons of homey Jesus shit and keep all bathrooms stocked with Reader’s Digest.  Seems like a condescending narrow-minded preacher because he’s actually a condescending narrow-minded preacher.  Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public meter: 5.  Will only say nigger in the presence of voters who believe that Jesus said nigger.

Rudy Giuliani:  The most intelligent of the candidates lost big for simply giving fairly reasonable responses to the questions Republican crazy people want crazy answers to.  It’s worth noting that this guy’s megalomania is  frighteningly palpable.  If he ever gets elected he’s going to pass a bill making it illegal for people to pose questions in his presence.  AMSNIP meter : 7.  Uses the word nigger daily, but says “A nigger doesn’t have to be a black person, a nigger can be any ignorant person that interferes with my plan to rule the world and incurs the wrath of my death squad.”

Mitt Romney:  Yet another reminder that people in Massachusetts can drink the rest of the country under the table.  Apparently the entire citizenry of Massachusetts got so fucked up on election night that they all forgot to write in Mark Wahlberg and accidentally voted Mitt Romney governor.  A smug, unlikeable, buffoon-ish, Mormon android, Mitt Romney achieves the impossible by being more unlikeable than Adrian Zmed in Bachelor Party.  Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public meter: 8.  The only chance in hell this guy has to get elected is if everyone in the country that likes to say nigger voted for Mitt Romney because he changed his campaign slogan to “Mitt Romney.  For a Nigger Saying America.”

Fred Thompson:  If you’re going to vote Republican you owe it to yourself to vote for Fred Thompson.  To those that may not be aware, Fred Thompson is the actor that plays all those creepy Republican racist guys in movies when a character is credited as “creepy Republican racist guy.”  The issues that the candidates were asked to address were astoundingly stupid.  One guy asked the candidates to talk about their gun collections.  Another asked if they believed “every word of the bible is true”.  A white woman from Alabama who had converted to Islam asked what America could do to improve its image in the Middle East.  Someone asked what Jesus would do about the death penalty.  And in the single most ironic thing I’ve ever seen, a dude named Montavius asked the Republican candidates what they would do about black on black crime.  Asking a Republican about what he’s going to do about black on black crime is pretty much the same thing as asking a Trekkie what he’s going to do about William Shatner living in his basement. What all of these questions have in common is that all of them are so stupid they seem to defy common sense…and no one on Earth is better at answering stupid questions that defy common sense than Fred Thompson.  And that my friends is what being a Republican president is all about.  Accidentally Might Say Nigger In Public meter: 10.  Fred Thompson calls Swedish people snow niggers.  Fred Thompson calls attorneys law niggers.  Fred Thompson calls ants ground niggers.

So that’s about it.  It was a night for the ages.  A night where you could not only watch sleazy asshole politicians lie directly to your face and grovel for your vote by pretending to be as dumb as the dumbest people in America, but a night you could watch the dumbest people in America make shitty internet videos for the shittiest people in the world to pretend to relate to.  As far as morbidly depressing, brilliant, unintentional comedy goes, you really can’t beat it, but as for what this means for the future of our country–well it means we have a future of morbidly depressing, brilliant, unintentional comedy to look forward to. Not only should you not vote for these guys even if you’re one of the .01% of the country whose interests they might actually try to serve, but you shouldn’t vote for any of these guys because they’re all a bunch of ass-clowns.  And even though it might be hilarious to have President Fred Thompson declare a War On Niggers, I could just write a blog about that and we could have all the entertaining possibilities that might entail without the actual genocide.   Until I do that just watch this video and see why Fred Thompson calls these guys his “core constituency niggers”.

Enter foodie-ism:  foodie-ism lets people know that you’re all about enjoying only the finest of shit life has to offer in only the finest of ways.  Foodies drink “crafted” beer.  Foodies let you know that if you’re not dividing your wine drinking experience into 47 delineated steps that you’re wasting your goddamn time and might as well kill yourself.  Foodies call people that cook food geniuses…for cooking food.   Calling someone a genius for cooking food is like calling someone a genius for creating an excellent workout plan–and quite possibly as ridiculous as Bob Saget referring to his comedy as art (which has been documented). Read a food review from whatever publication of whatever city you’re in about a restaurant and instead of seeing the words you might intelligently expect to see in such an article like:  “good”, “gross”, “expensive”, “cheap”, “decent”, “loud”, “comfortable”, “service”, or “environment”; you’re probably more likely to see these words instead: ” breathtaking”, “inspired”, “tones”, “impressions”, “notes”, “artistry”, “pairing”, “ambiance”, “deft”, and of course…”dazzling”.  Fucking dazzling. Quantifying what amount of impression something needs to make to be properly deemed dazzling is admittedly kind of a vague deal, but I’m quite sure that I’ve been “dazzled” maybe 5 times in my life, and none of them had anything to do with eating a truffle.  I’m pretty sure the only way I could ever be dazzled in a restaurant was if 8 of the waiters did acrobatic flips back and forth on giant flaming pogo sticks over a group of breakdancers with Barack Obama masks on while I pounded Irish Car Bombs listening to My Bloody Valentine through headphones peaking on acid.  But apparently, at some point, stupidity and full of shitness morph together to create a sophisticated ability amongst foodies to be routinely “dazzled by the deft pairings of the inspired genius of the chef in his minimalistically  breathtaking food studio”.  Foodie-ism is now so rampant that there are now like foodie splinter groups with like different lead assholes to cover the gamut of lame idiots trying to be cool by being into food.  In addition to the super-lame “enjoying the finer things in life finely is what life is all about”  regular assholes the Food Network and the Travel Channel have been trotting out for years, we now have Anthony Bourdain to  cater to the “hip, restaurant workers that know what the scene is all about”, and Guy Fieri to cater to foodies that still want to be into drifting and movies starring the Rock.  You see, you don’t have to be sophisticated to be a foodie.  In the same sense that foodie-ism is just an evolutionary way for people to ambiguously define their coolness (e.g. defining your social personality through music), there are different branches of foodie-ism for you to express your foodie individuality.  Anthony Bourdain is like the foodie guru for people that think listening to Vampire Weekend and getting fucked up all the time makes them artistic, while Guy Fieri’s got his own ”How would Rob Zombie eat a hot dog?” thing going on.  Think of the band equivocation thing like this:  if the people that’re into “breathtaking dazzling pairings” were into a band they’d be into Rush– prattling on about talent, knowledge, virtuosity, and whatever faux-elitist bullshit they could think of; if the Anthony Bourdain people were into a band it’d be the Sex Pistols “‘cuz they’re like real and shit and question authority”, and if Guy Fieri people were into a band, that band would definitely be Nine Inch Nails, cuz’ Guy Fieri does with foodie-ism exactly what Trent Reznor does with music:  simplifies everything simple people think is complicated in a way that makes them feel like they’re sophisticated.  My favorite Guy Fieri phenomenon is his name. Guy Fieri pronounces his name fee-yay-day.  If you ever refer to him please do not use this ridiculous pronunciation.  If by chance you happen to be comparing some guy you once saw waiting in line at the theater to see “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” to Guy Fieri, please say fee-air-ee… because that’s how his name is spelled.  The idea that some asshole is asking an entire nation to operate against its understanding of its native language to get his name right is preposterous.  Kevin Bacon is the worst person in the universe and even he doesn’t spell his name Kevin Bartkowski and then show up screaming at the 8 personal assistants he’s requested at an underwear commercial shoot that his last name is properly pronounced “bacon”.  But then again we’re talking about a guy who has two restaurants, one named Tex Wasabi’s and the other Johnny Garlic’s.  I’m not making that up.  Here’s a little commercial sample of the guy who’s the foodie icon of choice for the same people that have either referred to Eminem as a genius, or have owned a Get Up Kids album:

The thing that’s irritating to me is that nobody seems to be vocalizing how retarded all of this bullshit is. People aren’t making fun of foodies, which fucking blows my mind.  As with all evolution, success is the key.  Foodie-ism evolved because it’s significantly easier for someone like me to meet a guy wearing a Peter Gabriel shirt and tell him he’s hilarious, than it is to convey that people are assholes for fetishizing a perfectly good part of life in a manner inconsistent with good judgment or reasonable human behaviour.  But it can be done.  Don’t let these assholes fool you into thinking that every time they say they’ve found a phenomenal, high-energy, Venezuelan/Thai fusion food studio  or a “funky new joint downtown that serves mean fall off the bone ribs”–that in a related alternate reality they’re not dreaming about owning a Harley Davidson and wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt. The next time someone at a bar asks you if you know why India pale ales are called India pale ales, ignore the question and ask them how they feel about feminism or socialized healthcare.  That person is both guaranteed to not talk to you for more than another 20 seconds and also to at least briefly feel misguided and stupid, both of which are better than hearing some dumb story about some shit you don’t care about from some asshole who thinks it’s awesome that Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” is being played on the jukebox.   Billy Corgan is an asshole.