How Is Your Stupid Today?

In order to prepare for what columnification I do here, I read far too much news and save bits and pieces on scraps of paper and electronica. One of those bits: Panels with wires sticking out of them depicting a cartoon character making the gesture popularly known as “the bird” sparked panic in Boston, resulted in charges against two men who distributed them, and may lead to further charges against the company that put them up to it.

Some people around here have tried to make out like Seattle is way cooler than Boston in this regard. After all, we got paneled too, at the same time, by the same broadcasting company, and we didn’t go bat-spit freaking Stupid and arrest people and turn on the sirens and redden our terror alert signs.

Upon closer inspection, however, Seattle is not that much different from Boston, just out of temporal synch with it. This is the city that in 1996 arrested and tried Jason Sprinkle, AKA Subculture Joe, for inducing bat-spit freaking Stupidity and a rush-hour traffic nightmare as nine city blocks were cordoned off to protect us all from a truck with the words “Timberlake Carpentry Rules (The Bomb!)” painted on it. So we were the Boston in 1996. Maybe in 2015 Boston will be the Seattle.

The truth is, Americans everywhere are fully as capable of becoming as bat-spit freaking Stupid as any crazed mob in any movie filled with stereotypic foreign babbling crazed mobs you’ve ever seen. That’s the whole reason we’re at war with Iraq right now. We Americans panicked when somebody actually attacked us, so as a nation we went bat-spit freaking Stupid and attacked somebody else who had nothing to do with it, and we’re still so Stupid we’re still doing it, and court-martialing people for trying to save us from doing it.

I was further reminded of what nut-cases we are capable of being when I learned that it was necessary for a three judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to ascertain that it is not OK to arrest a man for using the word “goddamn” at a town board meeting, like happened a while back in Montrose, Michigan. Later, it may be necessary for the Supreme Court to reiterate that fact, because Montrose may appeal.

Again, don’t congratulate yourself that Montrose is the Stupid this time. When you’ve got the pox, you’ve got the pox. You don’t say, “oh I don’t have the pox, it’s just my elbow that has it.” If your elbow has the pox, you’ve got the pox.

Just because Stupidity breaks out in random places, doesn’t mean it isn’t always everywhere. It’s in all of our blood. You could be the Stupid next. Or the Stupid could be your own mayor or your own police chief.

Your could be like the New York dealer of over-priced antiques who is suing four homeless guys for more than a million dollars. He says he knows he isn’t going to get the money. He says he’s suing for the money “for legal reasons.” Yeah, and I’m laughing at him for psychiatric reasons.

Sometimes that’s all you can do.

In the early eighties a writer for the New York Times was reporting on a New Mexico celebration that she said was some sort of “community chicken killing festival.” She also referred to it as a “gang pluck.” Not only did the New York Times fire her for writing like that (even though it’s been reported she was originally hired for the purpose of livening up their prose!) but when the woman died this week they couldn’t bring themselves to quote the “gang pluck” line in her obituary.

Being fired by the New York Times might have been a crushing blow for some writers, but Molly Ivins apparently just laughed out the door and kept laughing all the way out death’s door, too.

We need to all remember how she managed to pull that off. It gives us hope.

The Democrats’ Gift Horse

The games congressmen play. These days it’s High Horse (AKA High Horse, High Horse, Now Who’s On Their High Horse?)

I have long enjoyed games myself. Growing up as an only child in a sick, sick, sick, (pretend I wrote it 13 times), family, often living in isolation, I became adept at what you could call the Meta-Game Game, also known as Now What Might I Want to Do? The idea of this game is to invent a game, then another game, then another game, until a death in the family occurs, hopefully not your own. At no time is it necessary to play the games invented. In fact, if you play one of them, you automatically lose at the meta level, and have to start all over.

Some of the best games I came up with had no rules or instructions. For example, Figure Out How To Walk On Air pretty much says it all in the name. The game consists in spending hour after hour trying to figure out how to walk on air. One day I made the mistake of actually playing a spinoff game called Figure Out How To Bounce A Ball Off Air, and broke a window.

Having become so good at entertaining myself in isolation, I tend to take that skill for granted. So I’m always a little surprised when I discover people who are incapable of ever playing quietly by themselves. People like ex-Congressman Mark Foley, for instance. This is a guy who will never be satisfied with an imaginary friend.

Foley was playing a fantastic game of High Horse. High Horse isn’t as sophisticated a game as the Meta-Game Game, but that doesn’t mean that great play isn’t possible. Foley’s move of chairing the congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, in between exploiting underaged former pages for minor real-time titillations and jollies on the internet, was extraordinary, and will surely go down in High Horse history. For anything even close you have to go back to Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992.

Of course we’ve all been watching the entire Republican Party consistently win at High Horse for the past quarter century, ever since Reagan got even for that time Nixon fell off his. Their capture and ownership of the phrase “Family Values” continues to impress all of us, all the more so as their economic policies crush poor families.

Now the party that tried to force Clinton out of office for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office and trying to keep it a secret is faced with charges of having a pedophile in their midst and trying to keep it a secret.

Now, I don’t know if you can necessarily say that Mark Foley is a pedophile. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl. That was certainly something, wasn’t it? Did anyone call him a pedophile? Well, OK. But still, sixteen is practically ‘round the bend, when it comes to boys.

Anyway, for Hastert and Company to be aware that Foley was sending inappropriate emails to former pages and not call for an investigation, all the while trumpeting Family Values, that should earn them big points, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for staying on their game.

But the Republicans aren’t the only ones playing. We also have Democrats jumping onto their own Horses, pretending that if you vote Democrat next month it will be a vote for decency.

The Democrats are missing an opportunity to raise the game of High Horse to a whole new higher level. What they need to do is come right out and tell the truth, that the behavior of the Republican leadership was typical of all political leaderships in the face of such scandal, and that they, the Democrats, would have probably reacted the same way, because it isn’t the Republicans that are broke, it’s the whole system.

Then they could say, “Ha, ha, we told the truth and you didn’t.” And they’d be the new winners.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Let’s say “embarras de richesses” too many times!

I’m going to talk about freedom of speech. But, who am I to make a fuss about freedom of speech, when I am so full of it? Look, I’m speaking right now, with printed words! Can you say “embarras de richesses?” I can’t! I don’t know how!

Nevertheless I know what it means. I exemplify it! For example this appears to be my 201st column. That means I have let my speech out to run freely 200 times just in this rag alone. Embarras de duck-licking! That doesn’t begin to count speaking incidents at bars, nightclubs, carnivals, and poultry farms.

No way though do I epitomize this sort of thing. For that look at the generic Washington State politician running for office.

In case you missed it, it’s again legal in this state for political candidates to lie about their opponents. For five or six years before last week it was against the law for candidates to lie about each other (they could lie about themselves all they wanted.) But now that law has been struck down because it violated the candidates’ freedom of speech to have their speech constrained by the truth.

When it comes to politicians, “it’s not that the truth shall set you free, but that the truth shall handcuff you to the bed and shall make you watch it model leather pants for hours, which is just plain naughty,” said the court, in effect.

So this state’s highest “embarras de richesses” award, in the Too Much Free Speech Category, goes to our hard-working politicians. Congratulations, guys and gals!

Now lets talk about people who can look forward to less freedom of speech in the near future. Gosh, let’s see, who might we be talking about? We can’t be talking about the politicians; we just said they can babble about anything. Could it be the rich? No, rich people can just buy full-page ads in the Seattle Weekly when they want to say something unpopular that needs to be protected by the First Amendment.

It would be poor people! Of course! Poor people living in buildings run by Seattle Housing Authority!

As reported in our last issue by Cydney Gillis, SHA was planning to prohibit residents of 28 buildings from putting signs (including flags!) in their windows. This was justified on the grounds that A) it would make the buildings prettier, and B) other apartment owners (commercial ones) prohibit the same.

YES, SHA, AND IF OTHER APARTMENT OWNERS JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE, WOULD YOU ALSO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE? Now, with that outburst out of the way, I am ready to delve deeper into this issue and calmly analyze one by one the validity of the two reasons offered for this rule.

In connection with reason A, Virginia Felton, SHA spokesperson, was quoted saying that “we’d like our public housing buildings not to look like college dorms.” Well, tough. The First Amendment is not preceded by a One-Halvesies Amendment that states, “SHA’s sense of esthetics shall not be violated.”

Reason B is trickier. Yes, commercial apartment owners insist that renters sign an agreement to accept such rules before allowing occupancy. And I notice that SHA plans to appear to act just as a commercial apartment owner would, by letting residents choose to either sign an agreement to comply or be evicted.

But that’s just a sham. Commercial apartment owners get away with such threats because the courts accept the myth, in their case, that the renters are free to negotiate or go elsewhere.

No such myth is functioning on SHA’s behalf. SHA knows, and the courts know, that their residents have no place else to go. The threat of an eviction that would result in homelessness to preserve a trite middle-class boneheaded esthetic standard is unjustifiable. So SHA needs to chill, go back to art college, and broaden its taste in the decorative arts.