Everyone Thinks YOU'RE Rude

The headline in the Times last Saturday said, “Land of the rude: Poll finds Americans behaving badly,” so I thought I was going to read about Americans telling pollsters they could take their poll and “shove it,” or inquiring about the availability of the pollsters’ sisters, or insinuating that the pollsters had canine ancestry.

Then, as I continued reading, I found out that America itself had been asked how rude it is in the poll and had answered “very.” That is, we are supposed to take America’s word for how rude it is. It turns out 70% of us think that everybody else lacks manners. My first reaction is, this is the America that can’t find Iraq on the map, and doesn’t think it needs to, but considers itself competent enough to decide whether Iraq deserves to be invaded or not. We’re asking this country to critique itself?

“Now, now,” I tell myself, “calm down; maybe some good will come from it. Maybe everybody will have arrived at some great new collective insight, like when we all agreed as a nation that Jar Jar Binks deserved a premature death.”

But it was not to be. Reading further I discovered that the rudeness people were talking about had little to do with Star Wars. The big concern was men not opening doors for women, members of some women’s lacrosse team wearing flip-flops in the White House, and crude behavior on TV shows. “It’s not like the old show, Father Knows Best,” says some overwrought couch potato who can’t distinguish TV from reality.

And who gets the blame? Me! That’s who! I’m a nasty baby boomer and it was I and my other nasty boomer co-conspirators who ruined this country. We dragged “Father Knows Best” into the dirt, exposing its cast as the alcoholics, wife-beaters, and heroin addicts they were. We raised all the rest of you to knock down little old ladies and use them as doorstops and paperweights. We made George Lucas create Jar Jar for us, precisely to torture the rest of you. We had all the sex and smoked all the cigarettes and ate all the carbohydrates, so now they’re all used up, and you. can’t. have. any.

That’s right. We baby boomers are responsible for turning this great country into a nation of rude, disgusting, flip-flop wearers. Before we boomers came of age in the late sixties all Americans were polite and well behaved.

Just how polite and well-behaved was America back then?

Americans were SO polite in those days that no conversation among white people was complete until there was at least one use of the N-word AND at least one additional gratuitous ethnic slur applied to one other minority. An entire conversation devoted solely to putting down Negroes was considered an opportunity lost. How rude!

Americans were SO polite in those days that they made sure their police had attack dogs to politely teach manners to anyone who asked for too many rights. If that didn’t work, they would break out the flip-flops. Ha, ha, that was a joke. No, they would break out the ax handles. In a polite society, minorities know their place!

Americans were SO polite that we never let women and children talk about sex. Only men were allowed the power to do that, in private. As a result, when American children were raped by people they trusted and the children tried to report it to other adults, they were accused of being vulgar and had their mouths washed out with soap and water. In a polite society rape victims shut up!

In 1964 some Concerned Citizen would’ve stepped up to that flip-flop wearing lacrosse playing commie tomboy-if-she’s-not-a-lesbian freak in the White House and given her the sucker punch in the gut she had coming to her. In a polite society, women toe the line!

That’s how polite America was, before we baby boomers ruined everything.

We Need A Marriage Bank?

I'm writing this over the Valentine's Day/ President's Day weekend. The word now is that, at Mayor Gavin Newsom's direction, San Francisco will issue as many as 2000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples before the courts consider an injunction to stop them. Nearly a thousand have already been married in civil ceremonies authorized by the mayor's office and conducted by volunteers who have given up their three-day weekends for the honor.

And kids these days say we baby boomers had all the fun. Look out, there haven't been this many outraged bigots since those poor tired white people were deprived of Rosa Parks' seat at the front of the bus in 1955.

At least the white riders of that Alabama bus could justifiably whine that they were deprived of a seat. What with seats on a bus being a limited resource and all, you can strain your imagination and visualize how some white guy could get all up and righteous that HIS personal racially reserved seat had been usurped.

But today people declare that the "sanctity of marriage" entitles heterosexuals to have all of it even when there's no shortage! And were only talking about civil marriages! Nobody is forcing churches to recognize any of these same-sex marriages.

Speaking of the sanctity of marriage, the last I heard it was still a violation of the US Constitution for either state or federal US government lawmakers to promote the sanctity of anything or anyone in legislation. So why has the California legislature done so, we wonder idly and pointlessly, with un-bated breath and without question mark.

To me, the really interesting question lies with the clash of morality and legality. This subject is usually subsumed under the categories of "civil disobedience" and "human rights" and in my humble opinion grossly over-simplified at every turn in accordance with the ideologies of the simplifiers.

Not that I am a stranger to simplicity. Hey, I took Philosophy 105 and got me a C+ for the section on John Stuart Mill. I learned to spell "Stuart."

What I'm trying to say is, the courts have to figure out whether what Gavin Newsom is doing is legal. He says California's law is illegal under the state's constitution, and that he's only upholding the latter. In which case he is merely the only California mayor to take his oath of office literally in this regard.

But there is no question in my mind that he has done what is morally right. Morality falls heavily on the side of the oppressed, and no matter what Christian Fundamentalists may think Christians aren't oppressed in this country. To encapsulate, Christians are to same-sex marriages as white folks were to de-segregation. You can be one of the ones who get in the way, or not.

In the words of Jesus, "Get thee behind me, Satan." When you are oppressed I'll stand with you. When you are the one doing the oppressing you need to hear it plain and simple, so you can know when to get down off people's backs.

Speaking of getting the plain-and-simple out, and such: I've been obsessing about the practices of certain Christian missions lately, thanks to some semi-private input I've recently received. I'm talking about the practice of requiring poor people who are invited to a "free" meal to attend a church service beforehand.

This practice is wholly legal and justifiable to the extent, and just to the extent, that the meals are intended exclusively for Christians, and that we all are prepared to agree that non-Christians ought to fend for themselves. Let sinners, secularists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, whatever, set up their own "free" meals for their own poor people, right?

But it has come to my attention that there are some who would go out of their way to call non-Christians to these feasts, without setting aside the church-attendance requirement for them. I just want to go on record, as saying that exploiting the hunger of poor people to promote your religion is immoral and reprehensible. Please don't.

No Shortage of Scapegoats

I have a real challenge this time. It has been suggested by none other than our Production Manager and writer Molly "What's That Accent?" Rhodes that I talk here today about those attacks on homeless people that occurred in Cleveland about three weeks ago.

Molly reported on those attacks in our North American Newsbriefs last issue. Four kids, aged 16-19, videotaped themselves using a stun gun to paralyze sleeping homeless people. They then urinated upon them, among other things. How funny is that? Not very.

It's even less funny than we reported. For instance the authorities only charged the kids with misdemeanor assault charges. That in spite of the fact that they attacked at least six people with the stun gun and at least one person was also struck on the head with a rock. This was a terrorist attack on people who were sleeping, who were harming no one.

Even less funny: three days after the kids were caught and the story was all over the Cleveland news a radio co-host at Extreme Radio WXTM/92.3 FM in Cleveland went to the site of the attacks and exploited homeless people à la "Bum Fights" by offering them $10 and free pizza to be shocked with a stun gun. Three let themselves be shocked and ten more were desperate enough to get in line for it, and the majority of callers to the show thought it was funny, according to the other co-host.

Last night fellow editor and writer babe Anitra Freeman was riding a bus and wished to enter a conversation but for the first time in possibly years she was unable to butt in, because the people talking were so engaged. What stirred their passions so much? They were convinced America was headed toward fascism and there was no stopping it.

There sure are a lot of the signs. I see three sides of fascism coming into place. On the one side you have a government that only cares about you if you are a corporation. That's your basic idea of fascism, government for the corporations. Mussolini really promoted the hell out of that aspect of it.

You also have the side represented by these four teenagers in Cleveland. These aren't rich kids we're talking about. They lived in a slum. They may have been nearly as poor as the people they attacked.

Did you all read very carefully what we wrote about Lyndon LaRouche's campaign? Polly Keary wrote: [LaRouche] wants to create an "International Youth Movement" in order to build "a large cadre of deployable youth" to reverse what he calls a decadent Baby Boomer culture.

Well isn't that special? Can you say, Brownshirts? So it will be Baby Boomers this time, instead of Jews? How pluralistic of him.

This country is full of recruits for the new Brownshirts. There are plenty of poor desperate youth ready to believe any message scapegoating any segment of society. Why not Baby Boomers? The media has already convinced everybody that Baby Boomers invented decadence. Never mind that there's plenty of decadence to go around in every generation and that the Boomers just got the big spotlight on them. That's what they get for growing up during the rise of mass media and television.

And of course, why not homeless people? Hell a lot of them are the same people anyway. Besides they're easy to find, and if you get them with a stun gun while they're sleeping they can't fight back, unlike some of those nasty Baby Boomers who have money and lawyers.

Where was I? Oh yes, I've been witnessing the rise of three sides to fascism. The third: the glorification of the masses. You have to convince the majority that they are superior to the scapegoated minorities. Let's see, the masses are Christian, let's pander to that.

Who will put these ingredients together and do to America what Hitler did to Germany? Does Bush have the charisma? Is LaRouche too sidelined? Stay tuned.