mighty forces

Refreshing honesty

It’s rare for right-wingers to actually come out and say what they mean. They don’t say they hate gay people, they say “gay marriage undermines the family.” They don’t say they are afraid of brown people, they say “America must protect its borders.”

And they don’t come out and say that the public school system exemplifies everything they hate in American society: multiculturalism, community, free thought. Just like with abortion, attacks on public schools and public school teachers are really meant to chip away at the foundations until there’s nothing left. But they rarely admit their true goal of shutting the whole system down.

So that’s why this piece reprinted on FreeRepublic is so refreshing:

A World Without Public Schools

Even the Freeper commenters realize that such bracing honesty might not go over so well with the masses. I can only hope that they follow this up with “A World Without Mexicans” and “A World Without Abortion.” Let’s put our cards on the table, people.

Evolution humor

I Believe in Evolution, Except for the Whole Triassic Period

I said at the beginning of the Bush administration that within 10 years or so the Onion would be irrelevant, because real life would become too much of a parody of itself. I wonder if this hasn’t already happened.

Anyone? Bueller?

Not sure if anyone is reading this. If you are, please leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new site. (In MT I have to approve comments because of the scary amount of comment spam. So your comment might not appear right away.)

Thanks in advance. How’ve you been?

Homer Simpson on the Bible

“If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn’t, it’s that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.”

Since I’ve been sort of a hermit these last couple of years, I haven’t had a lot of people to bounce my incessant Simpsons pop cultural references off of. I guess I can do it here, now. Aren’t you lucky?

Embarrassing pop culture admission

Over the weekend I watched an entire double episode of the original “Bionic Woman” series. In a tiny window on a series of chopped-up video segments. On YouTube.

Clearly, if “Bionic Woman” doesn’t come out on DVD in the United States soon, I may suffer a mental breakdown of some sort.

Puppies

If Michael Moore made a movie about how puppies are cute, the right wing crapweasels would tie themselves in knots finding new ways to hate those ugly goddamned puppies.

Julia Sweeney

I just finished listening to Julia Sweeney’s show “Letting Go of God,” where she talks about her transition from Catholic to atheist. It’s sweet, sad and hilarious in turns, and I recommend it highly. I was so impressed I fired off an e-mail to her this morning, telling her how much I loved the show and how it intersected with a lot of stuff I’m thinking about these days.

Amazingly, I got a wonderful personal e-mail reply from her this afternoon. Isn’t the internet great?

“Away From Her”

My second experience at the Hilldale Sundance Theater was “Away From Her,” Sarah Polley’s film starring Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer’s Disease. Christie is luminous as Fiona, a woman far more practical about her condition than her husband, a former professor. Rather than going the Lifetime route of showing Christie’s condition gradually worsening, the story is about the couple’s struggle when she goes to live in a nursing home, and the aftermath of that decision.

It’s a beautiful, sad film that is hard to sit through, because almost instantly you care about these people deeply. You feel the weight on both their shoulders, alongside the love they feel for each other. Christie is wonderful, but so is Gordon Pinsent as her lion of a husband, caught in an impossible situation.

As I watched the movie I realized how little I think about old age and the inevitabilities that come with it. Although statistically my life is half over, in a lot of ways I don’t think it’s started yet.

UPDATE: I think I’ve been a little too literal in this review. I realized this after reading this comment on IMDB on the movie, a comment I completely agree with:

You will see advertising and hear talk about “the one with Julie Christie having Alzheimer’s,” but that describes “Away from Her” no better than saying “Hamlet” is about a man who cannot make up his mind.

Fatty Fatty Boombalatty

I’m something of a renegade, even in the liberal bubble of Madison, for always being a Michael Moore fan. Fact is, I’m more than a fan – I think the man is a hero. It’s fashionable, even among liberals, to screw up your face like you’ve just eaten a lemon when Moore is mentioned.

To me, then and now, the man has been one of the few people with the balls to stand up and say, we have to draw a line. This is wrong. This is crazy. This is not America. How many people are actually willing to do that? Congress won’t. The voters won’t. The press won’t. And after corporate scandals, campus shootings and our President at lower-than-Nixon approval levels, perhaps he was right all along, eh?

Now “Sicko” is coming out, Moore’s indictment of the American health care system. And predictably, the righties already have their panties in a bunch. He went to Cuba! Yes, the man took some ailing 9/11 rescue workers to get some decent health care, an offense that apparently rates right up there with genocide (I was going to say ‘torture,’ but we Americans like that now.).

I for one am looking forward to “Sicko” and whatever else Moore comes up with in the future. His making Dean Esmay apoplectic is just a bonus.

Religion again

Why is it commonly accepted that the religions of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Druids and others are just a collection of superstition and myth, while Christianity is real and relevant? Why is the virgin birth accepted, while Zeus hurling thunderbolts is just so much easily-dismissed hokum?