Ingrace

Here we are again at the time of year when we celebrate a government-sanctioned holiday to pressure me to be thankful even though I'm a whiny, crotchety, old man, with barely an ounce of thankfulness in him. Want me to be thankful? Get off my back about being thankful. ;)

That last bit in the last paragraph was a winking smiley face, for those of you that are 114 year-old hermits living ten miles from nowhere in a shack in the bayou, chain-smoking Pall Malls. It's what people have resorted to use on the Internet to signify "what you just read was an ironic attempt at humor." It's often necessary on the Internet because there are no other clues that the humor-lame need. No laugh tracks, for instance.

Having said all that I remember that many of you don't know what "ironic" means. Well, thanks for asking, it means a lot of things, but in this context it refers to the "winking".

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? Don't make me ever have to use another winking smiley face. You don't need them. It's taken care of in the title: "Adventures in Irony." Don't make me call it "Adventures in Winking."

Here's a relevant news item. Until recently to qualify for Food Stamps your income needed to be under 130% of the poverty level. Now it just has to be below 200% of the poverty level. The theory behind this change is that with rising food prices and rising gas costs, it's getting harder for people to afford food. Hey, I have a crazy idea! Why don't we just raise the poverty level 54%?

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? The Washington State Legislature could get off their collective butts and pass an inflationary increase in government assistance. There's been a 50% increase in the Consumer Price Index since 1993, the last time Washington State raised Government Assistance for the Unemployable (GAU). It's been $339 in all that time, notwithstanding inflation, notwithstanding that, as the state has just recognized in regard to Food Stamps, the CPI doesn't tell the whole story (e.g. rents have gone up way more than 50%), notwithstanding that we're only talking about two-tenths of one per cent of the population that needs it desperately, or they'll become homeless.

Ha, ha, that was a joke! Winking smileys galore! They're already homeless! $339 per month? With rents what they are today?

As a matter of fact, using my outstanding math skills and a cheap $2 calculator, I have been able to estimate with great confidence that if you just increased GAU to an amount sufficient to rent a room and buy clothes, up to 44% of King County's homeless people could get off the streets.

Raise GAU enough, and developers would go after that money. There's your Housing First program. Just like the Food Stamp program is really a benefit for food producers and grocery stores, likewise GAU can be a benefit for construction workers. We could think of it as a bailout, twice removed.

The money it would cost to raise GAU a reasonable amount would be more than offset by the savings in money spent on services.

Of course, that would put a lot of social-service workers out of work. Maybe that's why you don't hear a lot of social-service agencies talking about the ridiculous fact that GAU isn't pegged to inflation, and isn't adequate to prevent homelessness. Hell, I was even tempted not to mention it myself. If homelessness in King County were to end, Real Change wouldn't be needed anymore, and I wouldn't have these opportunities to complain every week.

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? Take some of the energy you were going to apply to feeding the poor one day a year, and apply it to getting our legislature to do what it takes to make half the state's social service industry unemployed. Let them all get jobs in drywall.

On Jesse and Other Hams

With the death of Pope John Paul II, we have lost a great friend of the poor and a great supporter of freedom and justice. I find myself thinking it cannot be. He's punking us, right? This is all a gag; the cardinals are in on it; they'll go through the whole process of picking some unknown as the new pope -- white smoke, black smoke, white smoke, black smoke – the new guy will step forward, and -- surprise! -- it's John Paul II again.

Of course, we here at Irony Central feel it is our duty to laboriously root out and expose ironies wherever they are, even surrounding the recently deceased. So we can't help but note that some of JP II's so-called socially conservative positions yield delicious ironies.

Let's take his opposition to the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. It may not be ironic that the Pope considered rubber prophylactics to be unnatural means of preserving the benefits of abstinence without preserving the form, while he considered a tube surgically introduced to the stomach by way of the navel (in grotesque imitation of God's own umbilical cord) to be a perfectly natural means of preserving the benefits of eating, without preserving the form. But there is literal irony in the way that John Paul insisted during his last days on not being taken to an intensive care unit.

Speaking of people whom I mostly agree with but not always, I was struck by Jesse Jackson's last minute push to restore Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. One of his assertions in that regard was especially interesting. He said, "We cannot hide behind the law and not have mercy."

Overlooking the debate over the notion that it is mercy to ignore someone's wish to die with dignity, I see Jackson equating obedience to the law and support of the courts' decrees with evading moral responsibility. This from a man who would have been president?

Here's another rule of mine: if a private citizen disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, that's civil disobedience. But if an elected official disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, he's substituting his morals for the people's laws and our constitution, and so then he's an arrogant ass.

Jesse Jackson is only spared that judgment by never having been elected. But he tried to talk Jeb Bush into being an arrogant ass. And the irony is: Jeb Bush wasn't! What a strange world we all live and die in.

I'm reminded of another irony connected to Reverend Jesse Jackson that I passed up last year. Remember the big flap about gay marriage that everybody was jabbering about during the presidential campaign? During that time Jesse made a little speech at Harvard in which he downplayed comparisons of the gay civil-rights movement with that of African Americans, saying, "No slave was ever enslaved because he was gay."

In fact, during the slave era, enslavement of Africans was justified on a bogus theory that they descended from a gay man! And Reverend Jackson, being a reverend, should have known that!

You see, there's this passage in the Bible that says one of Noah's sons, namely Ham, "saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without." So then Noah cursed Canaan (son of Ham) with perpetual servitude.

During the slavery era, that little passage was widely interpreted like so: Ham actually had sex with his drunken, passed-out, father, euphemisms aside. "Canaan" did not refer to just one of Ham's sons, but "Canaan" was taken to stand for all the descendants of the offender Ham. These included all black Africans in the view of Christians of those days.

Of course, nobody thought that Ham's crime was solely what we would call it today: incestual rape. No, it was seen primarily as committing a homosexual act. There's your irony.

Goodbye Carrot-Head

We've got your Real Change right here! Out with the Old! In with the New!

When I started writing this column in the dim past I was beardless and thin and my head somewhat resembled a carrot. Thus "carrot-head man" was born as a self-portrait and we used him to represent me all these years on this page. But I am now bearded, fat, and my head somewhat resembles a bell pepper. Moreover, I can't draw bell peppers. So, goodbye carrot-head man. Hello some photograph, one that we will try to doctor to keep from scaring anyone.

As Real Change marches forward into its brave new future of weekly publication, I find myself pausing to reflect on the past. Mostly when I do this I reflect on my own past because other people's past would be history and I would have to study to reflect on that.

I reflect on poorer days, when I would sell myself to university psych professors and students as an experimental subject. I did so occasionally when I was a homeless college student. It made more sense to me than being a medical subject, because I figured they'd be less likely to do permanent damage. Plus, on my campus, they always paid $5 just for applying, even if they turned you down.

I got turned down once because I knew too much. The experimenters wanted someone who hadn't heard about Milgram's study of obedience to authority. That was the one where Stanley Milgram found that more than 60% of people studied, when told forcefully enough to do so, would administer dangerous and painful electroshocks to innocent strangers, even when it appeared that the victims might die. Since I knew that all I got was $5 that time.

All of this jumped into focus this week when I read an article in the Seattle P-I about a new study planned to find out if believing in God helps you deal with pain.

Now, a lesser-known aspect of Milgram's study and it's spawns were indications that the more religious subjects in such experiments were more likely to obediently torture their victims than were the less religious.

Of course, religious doesn't equate with believing in God. Still, I see a host of ironies rising up to drag me into a fiery pit of flaming sulfurous irony-hell.

In the new study volunteers will submit to pain and experimenters will see whose brains show the most pain activity, those of the believers or those of the non-believers. Then, to make things more interesting, they'll show various religious symbols, to "see if that helps."

What a great idea! Let's show a crucifix to a guy in agony and see if he gets the message! How about a nail or a martyr's knuckle? OK, maybe we should consider other sorts of symbols. How about one of those pictures of a lamb being led by Jesus? That would probably work.

Isn't it just wonderful that religion has now come full circle since the Inquisition? In the Olden Days it was a bitch rounding up heathens for torture. Nobody wanted to hurt. But now everyone wants to be the newest and best Jackass for Jesus.

First, you get paid. All of these kinds of studies pay their "volunteers," who are invariably impoverished college students and poor people living near colleges. Secondly, if you are at all religious, this is your chance to prove to the world that your gospel/doctrine/prophet/or whatever really works the one miracle everyone wants the most: numbness.

This might work: apply, but tell them you're a masochist. Get disqualified, take the $5 and run.

No Rest from 9-11

When I think of terror I think of Hitchcock's Birds landing on the jungle gym behind what's-her-name, Tippi Hedren. Terrorism is supposed to invoke terror, right? As I remember it, it was Mao Tse Tung himself who once said, "Effective terror is targeted terror which uses fear to immobilize the enemy. Boy, that Hitchcock Bird movie was scary, wasn't it? Know what else? The bourgeoisie suck." Not that Mao Tse Tung was into that sort of thing. He was mostly into American jazz.

So, anyway, here I am, three weeks after September 11, looking back on it, assessing how scared I have been.

Immediately after the attack I began to avoid skyscrapers. My newest insight: "Skyscrapers bad." No more Sunday picnics at the top of the Washington Mutual Building enjoying the bright, idyllic, scenes of falcon chicks as they happily feast upon predigested squab. By contrast, the Space Needle suddenly looked safe to me for the first time since 1962. Now I welcome massive 7.0 earthquakes in old "human-scaled" four-story buildings.

I started freaking out at the sight of turbans, excuse my sixty-ism, because Osama bin Laden wears a turban according to the only photo anyone seems to have of him. (What's up with that? It's been three weeks and nobody can find his high school album?) Of course, as you know, this meant I couldn't ride cabs. If someone could please find a picture of bin Laden wearing a homburg, that would improve matters a bit. I still wouldn't take cabs though (no money.)

I began running from Stans. I knew Osama bin Laden himself wasn't a Stan, but he was friends with some Stan. I couldn't be too safe -- I had to stay away from all Stans. Fortunately Stanley isn't a very common name in the circles I travel, which consist primarily of communists, former elected officials, historians, streetwalkers, and circus performers, so that only meant being afraid of one guy.

I can no longer stand to have airplanes in the house, nor can I pet them. I used to love airplanes, but now I am afraid that the big ones will turn on me and bite me, and that the little ones will dump messes on my head.

I am now terrified of box-cutters and razor blades, especially in the hands of swarthy men. Strangely, I have at the same time lost all my fear of carving knives, hatchets, bayonets, pistols, grenades, assault rifles, tanks, cruise missiles, tactical nuclear weapons capable of fitting in a suitcase, and postal carriers.

Arabic writing, or anything that looks like arabic writing, like two smiley faces next to each other, one upside-down, or a small flock of worms escaping a hot sidewalk, makes me scream like a little girl.

When I watch the Flintstones, or even just think about the Flintstones, I shudder at the very name of Barney Rubble. CNN has the same effect. Dan Rather makes the blood drain from my face and my spine tingle. No change there.

Worse than being afraid of CNN, I can't watch disaster movies on the VCR anymore. No more Towering Inferno, Titanic, Earthquake, Twister, Volcano, Dry Spell, Bees, Andromeda Strain, Asteroid-Hits-Earth (any), Backdraft, Updraft, Downdraft, Independence Day, Independence Day (worth mentioning twice), or Waterworld (not really a disaster flick, but disaster enough in itself.)

OK, I'm ready to admit now that I have been lying throughout this column. "Irony is dead," indeed. It'll take a lot more than what bin Laden's got to kill the irony around here. I am not at all as scared as all that.

Still, I suspect that some of the above may describe a lot of Americans. If so, then my one and only big fear may be realized: that Osama and his obedient terrorism-fodder have successfully bombed us back to the Fifties.

Happy Pills Are Here Today

Well! Good news, the med train’s moving again and this time we're riding first class. This new stuff is great. I can't stop telling people everywhere I go about ***** (brand name) pills. Hint: if it were Prozac, it wouldn't work for me. If it were Valium it wouldn't work for me. This is not your Grandmother's pill. This pill works for me!

No, it’s not Viagra.

Not that it can't work for anyone else. Just after two weeks of running around telling everyone about my wonderful new tablets, I found that two of my face-to-face friends were also taking them. We are pill buddies! We started talking about forming a *****-User's Society, where we could congregate without being transgregated by Non-*****-User's.

For isn't transgregation the greatest evil that humans are capable of? For doesn't it say in Barnabas 6: 6: 6: "O Lord forgive us our trespasses, but forgive us not our transgregations (if any) for if we are so totally lame, we deserveth no breaks?"

Yes, we don't need no transgregators. We don’t need no transgregators today. I mean if you aren't In you're Out, get used to it and stay there, right?

That was Irony, #11, combined with Obfuscation, #15. I'm actually compiling a little list of humor techniques. In reality transgregating is NOT wrong, hahaha , I only said that it is wrong in order to be "satirical" (#11b.) I used Obfuscation (#15) partly because it’s a hoot and partly because if I told you what I was REALLY talking about some of you might have been bummed out, and we can't have that in a humor column.

Speaking of bummers, how about those social workers who don't know the difference between anxiety and fear? Don't they just burn you up?

I'm sure you've all had this happen to you: you've gotten off the streets, into low-income housing. You've gotten Food Stamps. You've noticed that, due to an inability to concentrate on anything but the derangement of your own twisted mind for more than an hour at a time, your rent is due. And you don't have it. So you apply for uh, um, shame on you, so they assign you to a social worker. And you spend the first fifteen minutes with her/him convincing your new social worker that you are NOT there due to being psychotic, you have a good solid grip on reality, really...

And THEN you say to the social worker, who has a degree in this sort of thing, and is paid to use it, that you think maybe your problem is in part an anxiety disorder. And after you say that she/he says "Are you feeling anxious now" and you say "Yes" and she/he says “what is it you are afraid of?"

AAAAARRRRGGGHH!!!! Don't you just hate it when they do that? Well I do, & do you want to know what I want to say when I hear that question? Well, I’ll tell you what I want to say!

I want to say: "It's anxiety dammit! I'm not afraid of anything! You should see me drive! You should be sitting in the passenger seat up front! I'd be willing to pay the laundry bill just to have the fun of watching the look on your face as we rocket down Queen Anne Ave (20% grade, 25MPH limit) at 70-100 miles per hour and me saying what YOU are NOW experiencing is fear, this is NOT what I am experiencing when I talk about anxiety I know the difference why don't you it's your job look it up in a dictionary you ignorant &*^$#@*!" and then I would just barely come to a controlled stop at the busy intersection at the bottom of the hill and peel the dampened/soiled social worker out of the car, hose the seat down etc.

But I just want to do that. I don't do it because I am not psychotic.*

If you enjoyed that, thank #9 and #2’.

Now let’s try to use ‘Juxtaposition in Concept’ #4b. We have discussed and . We’ve backed ourselves into a corner this time, Cindy, haven’t we? Guess we’ll have to dance our way out of here...

Juxtaposition in Concept #4b

Or, Opus 4b, I’d Rather Not Have to Say So

“I’d rather not have to say so...

BUT it’s all about what we should know, y’know?”

Said the Grasshopper to the Ant.

“It takes a teacher able to show! Not tell! To show!

But don’t take my word for it! Ant!”

Said the Grasshopper, closing a stupid book.

Y’know? Education isn’t all talk... (Think about it. Sorry for the lousy rhyme.)

* Important: No social workers were harmed during the conception or execution of this column. Any resemblances between described social workers and actual social workers, living or dead, are purely coincidental and unintended.