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.

Comedy of Terrors

I’m writing this the morning of Aug. 7, 61 years and more than a day after the dropping of “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. That event, in juxtaposition with recent history, no longer has the power to surprise me.

Consider this stupid quote from Osama bin Laden: “As I watched [in the eighties] the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me [to] punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.” So the destruction of towers of Lebanon inspired him to want to destroy the World Trade Towers... to start killing... so that we will be inspired to... STOP killing? Why does he think we are so different from him?

Oh, right. He thinks we’re different from him because he hears us telling ourselves so. He’s a terrorist. He targets civilians cheaply using our own overgrown commercial airlines against us. We are not terrorists. We are noble soldiers who have earnestly invested some of our unique vast hoards to amass expensive precision war machines so that we can kill only combatants, except of course when civilians accidentally get in the way, which of course they always do, saddening us always.

CNN says this morning that so far, on this 27th day of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, there have been 95 Israeli deaths, including 35 civilians, and 716 Lebanese deaths, mostly civilians. We are saddened by every one of those deaths, just as we are saddened by the non-terrorist unfortunate deaths of Hiroshima victims who got in the way of our non-terrorist justified war weapon which we dropped on them. Collateral damage is a bitch.

Some of you are probably thinking right now that I’m anti-Israel in all this mess and I want Israel to roll over and let Hezbollah annihilate it. I don’t want that at all. But before I discuss that, I want to talk about my favorite Shakespearean tragedy.

My favorite Shakespearean tragedy is the play I call Mercutio, a Tragedy of About Six Scenes Cobbled Together from Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare. I call the whole play, Romeo and Juliet, A Comedy. What else can you call it when the so-called hero and hero-whine are candidates for the top Darwin Awards of their century?

How is “melancholy” Romeo, “Montague’s only son,” a tragic hero? What heroic stature does he have at the outset of the conflict? He is heroically melancholy? He is heroically hard up? He is heroically able to ponce around with a sword and pretend he knows how to use it? He is, heroically, a stupid fish? How do we pin down this guy’s tragic flaw? The same way we pin down Juliet’s tragic flaw — we lock them both together in a crypt without any air holes and wave generally in the direction of it. Oh, look now! We don’t have to; they’ve killed themselves with their mutual shared stupidity, saving us the trouble. There are your tragic flaws; they’re both perfectly dead, thus imperfectly alive.

Meanwhile, Mercutio has three things going for him. 1) He actually can use the sword, although nobody’s perfect, especially when Romeo’s on the team. 2) He actually has a brain and sense. 3) He knows they’re all ludicrous, and he has a heroic gift for saying so.

We have no trouble finding Mercutio’s fatal tragic flaw. In spite of knowing what I know, namely that Romeo is a fish (“... flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!” —Mercutio to Romeo), in spite of correctly deducing that Romeo is a madman, Mercutio remains faithful to his crazy stupid friend until his very end when he is stuck, thanks to help from the very same stupid friend he is faithful to.

So where was I? I was going to say I can’t turn my back on stupid humans either. But I can still call down a pox on all their houses anyway.

I hope that makes sense to someone.

Kvetch-a-Sketch

Once more into the breach.

Even when I write about something only mildly controversial I tend to get that feeling. I think it stems from growing up in a world-class dysfunctional family, in which my official name was “Your Idiot Son,” as in “what did Your Idiot Son just say?” or “When is Your Idiot Son going to shut up and take out the garbage?”

My trepidation is doubled when I realize that the controversial subject may itself be about dysfunctionality, so all my thoughts on the subject will probably serve to stimulate recollections of being backhanded for expressing thoughts.

That’s what came to mind when I heard of this whole Muhammed-cartoon controversy. First: the world is one giant dysfunctional family. Second: Ouch, I’m the poster-child. Third: Shouldn’t I be ducking right now?

In case you’ve been in a padded cell for the last couple of weeks, lucky you, the news is that back in September a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published a bunch of cartoons, most of which depicted the prophet Muhammed. This was done because the paper’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, had learned of difficulties a Danish writer had in getting his children’s book about the prophet written. The editor thought that sounded like self-censorship right there in the State of Denmark.

Self-censorship! Man the ramparts! Don’t shoot till you see the whites of your own eyes!

I mean, what’s the proper remedy for self-censorship? If I cut off the hand that wags at me, do I not bleed? Yes I do, it’s my own friggin’ hand.

I’m trying to fathom the thinking on all sides of this issue. So Flemming Rose was one of those kids who realized at a certain age that he had never previously said the f-word to his parents (a word which in Danish means “pull my finger,” I imagine), so all at once said it to them and found out immediately why he had never said it before. It was because, before then, he had had some sense. After that, he had no sense at all, as any that remained was knocked out of him, so he continued behaving senselessly to this day, and here we are. This is what they call the cycle of abuse.

Sure, (understatement alert) the widespread violent reaction has been dysfunctional also. What is especially dysfunctional is the reaction that says, “Oh yeah, well then, here are twelve hideous cartoons that will be certain to insult the Jews, or, now we will burn American flags, or we will burn the embassy of the country your paper is printed in.” “Oh, well, if you’re going to insult me like that, I’m going to punch this other guy. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Is it too much to ask people professing to defend a religion of peace to be merely nonviolent? Nonviolent doesn’t mean peaceful, it just means not hurting people. You can still raise a lot of hell within those parameters.

I’d wish a pox on everyone’s house but it seems to have already arrived. Now it’s become necessary for an ex-president to warn the general public against substituting anti-Islam for anti-Semitism, and that some of the cartoons in question did in fact cross the line from political commentary to religious intolerance. That would be the same ex-president that came up with, “Don't ask; don’t tell.”

A little more than five hundred years ago Muslim Spain had a similar rule regarding non-Muslims, which made it more, not less, tolerant than the rest of Europe. Just slightly more than two hundred years ago American revolutionaries were publishing tracts under fake names because there was no freedom of speech here yet. As recently as the 1940s Europe fought a big war in which freedom of speech was a peripheral issue.

Maybe that’s a clue. It wasn’t much later that I got my first chemistry set, and had the urge to blow stuff up with my new toy.