Might Makes Jackasses

Here's a pet peeve of mine that I'm sure you all share: arrogance. We can't stand arrogance. All of us hate it. So how come it keeps happening? My biggest gripe is with people who justify crimes with arrogance.

Once while walking up the Ave in the U District I saw a couple walking toward me, the woman holding a balloon. Before they reached me a group of five frat guys came up and snatched the balloon away. When the woman's partner demanded it back the guys laughed and threatened to beat him up. Just then a policeman appeared and the matter was laid before him.

Incredibly, the frat guys complained to the cop that the couple had no business demanding their balloon back, ON THE GROUNDS THAT THE COUPLE WAS OUTNUMBERED AND EASILY OVERPOWERED. "There's five of us; we could take them; if they cause trouble by telling us we can't have their balloon, don't they know they're asking for it?" They actually said that the policeman should tell the couple to leave them alone, because not to do so would result in a fight that would get them hurt. They were concerned about maintaining the public order!

As amazing as it sounds, there are people in the world who think that way all the time. I first realized the truth of this when I was a cab driver. Hardly a shift went by when there wasn't some cowboy in the cab telling me I had to run red lights to get him where he was hurrying to, ON THE GROUNDS THAT HE WAS PAYING ME.

Once the dispatcher sent me to a house in the neighborhood of 85^th and Roosevelt, and when I arrived nobody came out to get in the cab so I had to go to the front door to announce myself. Two men greeted me, one with a pistol. While I stood in the doorway, not knowing if I would be shot if I said something they didn't want to hear, they told me they were hiring me to drive downtown by myself to fetch them two hookers. They told me I should do what they said BECAUSE THEY WERE GOING TO PAY ME $100. They said it would be OK if I couldn't find them good-looking hookers, ugly ones would do, and that they would share them with me. I said thank you very much, but that nevertheless I would decline their kind offer. They were shocked. I never did figure out why they pointed a gun at me. Maybe it was to keep me from running off with their welcome mat. They were probably thieves as well as johns. No one is less trusting than a thief.

The general rule seems to be: If I'm a monkey and I want to take a dump on your head, it's all right because I'm a bigger monkey than you, or I am just one of a gang of five monkeys and we outnumber you, or anyway I'm paying you so you have to do what I say BECAUSE MY MONEY SAYS I OWN YOU. You could call it Karl Rovism: this is our planet because, owing to our previous thefts of its wealth, we now have all the money, so we own all the people everywhere that we have stolen from.

This rant was inspired by the tiniest of provocations, namely Jeff Tweiten's theory that Seattle's No-Sitting Ordinance shouldn't apply to him while he's trying to set a new Guiness World Record by waiting in line for a movie. As best as I can determine this theory is founded on the principle that he should be able to sit or lie on the sidewalk for 136 days or more BECAUSE AT THE END OF THAT TIME HE WOULD BE BUYING A MOVIE TICKET, THEREBY PROVING THAT HE DESERVES MORE CONSIDERATION THAN HOMELESS PEOPLE, who are just about surviving, and other stupid crap like that.

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.