Subversion!

HOLIDAY MUSIC TRANSGRESSIONS: PART THREE IN AN ONGOING SERIES

Part One: "Jingle Bells" to the tune of "Tomorrow Never Knows"

Part Two: "Happy Christmas"

Christopher Hitchens' column in Slate today helped me invigorate my disdain for Christmas hysteria, as did the generic Christmas music that plays non-stop in my mother's kitchen.

It does give me some perverse joy to know that "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" could be written, recorded and broadcast in a Christian nation. It's got home invasion and (double) adultery and the most mythic age gap since God and Mary. And all of this witnessed by a child. Still, the song is too coy, even for a country that remains coy about sex. That's the scary thing about this holiday. Even sin and sex become androgynous and innocent.

Speaking of "holidays": The word means "holy days," which means all these crazy fundamentalist assholes who insist on "Merry Christmas" as opposed to "Happy Holidays" have no reason to be angry and just decided to make one up. Thanks, religion, for helping us mistake our stupidity for righteousness. Nothing wrong with saying "Merry Christmas" as opposed to "Happy Holidays" or something else. But it's a preference, not a moral absolute (a distinction religious fanatics deliberately ignore).

Andy wrote a good post on this on Dec. 12.

And now I have to go buy some more shit.

More about urine

...which has snuck its way into my blog before. I ran a search on a site, looking for more info on the subject of that post (guys in a Wisconsin town who got convicted of pissing in public and had to write apology letters that ran in the local newspaper). I didn't even search "pee." I searched "urine," and that's one of the sponsored search results that came up. As far as I know, there is no human urine up for auction on eBay now.

Langwatch: a lovers' quarrel

Today I wanted to get some work done and things were getting noisy around the house, so I went up to the Panera in Altamonte Springs. Right after I sat down and got ready to do some writing, I realized there was a brutal breakup argument going on in a booth about ten feet away. The guy must have been talking really low, but the girl was screeching aloud for all to hear.

"You never let me breathe," she said. "I'm GLUED TO YOUR ASS 24/7!"

I've never heard this phrase before, at least not in a relationship context. It's a lot cooler than the roughly equivalent "joined at the hip." For some reason, it would have made more sense to me if she'd said that he was glued to her ass. But it's funnier the other way around.

I couldn't hear what the guy was saying, but from what she said, it sounded like he was trying to hold things together despite all realities. If it's any consolation, sir, her face wasn't worth it.

Fuck You, Road Avenger

Fuck you right up your big red ass.

Road Avenger is my name for the weekend psychopath mongoloid I encountered Saturday in Tallahassee. I was driving around with my friend and one of his friends and came up on an intersection near the Florida State campus. This guy was in front of me, talking on his phone and haplessly drifting into my lane. I honked at him and changed to the right lane. Then he changed over in front of me and deliberately slowed down. Because I do not like to suffer shitty asshole drivers, I pulled off to the left and drove away, honking and giving him the bird. This was probably stupid and gratuitous of me, and I don't see why the middle finger thing has to be the universal gesture to make at assholes on the road. Road rage needs some kind of equivalent to the Geneva Convention. If we had that, I think what I did would be considered standard procedure. I think the rules would also state that there would be no need to carry the argument further because I WAS RIGHT.

A few minutes later we were approaching a stop sign on a little side street, and, holy fucking batshit, from the opposite direction, here comes Mongo Twat in his car, trying to block us off. I got my right wheels up onto the low curb and got around him. Then he started following us. My friend said, "great—you had to go and piss off the one psycho in this town." This being the capitol of Florida, I'm sure it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Anyway. At the next stop sign, he pulled up behind us and got out of his car and started running at my car. As I pulled away, he punched my rear passenger-side window but didn't damage it. This did, however, obliterate our theory that maybe he was some kind of cop.

And a couple streets later we had to stop again, this time behind another car, giving Road Avenger the time to walk up to my window and start shouting at me.

"WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM BACK THERE? WHY YA HONKING AT ME?"

"You were drifting out of your lane and slowing down. GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY CAR."

"WHY YA SHAKING?" (Because I have bad nerves and because meatheads like you, stomping about looking for fights, are a disruption in the flow of life itself, like a big wet fart in a steam bath).

A large utility truck was coming the other way while this went on, and we kept hoping that it would just crush the guy. Unfortunately, the street was not narrow enough, though maybe he was so enraged that he wasn't paying attention. If the truck had rolled over him, I would have got out of the car and taken a moment to laugh in his flattened face. You know why? Because he's a fucking thug. If you think a well-deserved insult is a good excuse to go on a rampage, you're a cheap shit thug. Shaking? Scared? Sure. I knew nothing bad would happen, but the advantage this kind of guy has is that he can momentarily intimidate you with his willingness to go apeshit.

I told him I was calling the police. My friend's friend took over phone duties while we kept trying to lose the guy. He eventually disappeared. We met with a cop, which was pretty useless at that point because we hadn't got Road Avenger's license plate number. It's sort of hard to do when someone is pursuing you down a two-lane road. Mostly I just wanted to spite the guy. He hadn't broken my window so there wasn't much grounds for a criminal charge, and it wouldn't have got that bad anyway. Especially not in broad daylight.

Later my friend and I were talking about it and we had to wonder: Who the hell is this guy? What does he do? And, given his nice car and all, doesn't he have something to lose by playing psychotic vigilante games? I think that when I gave him the finger, he just wanted to prove to me that I couldn't follow it up. Fine. I couldn't follow it up, and I shouldn't have to. If this guy can't admit that he was wrong, he should consider me the least of his problems. The point is that he was wrong and I didn't have anything else to say to him. In conclusion, Road Avenger, fuck you. You're a shitty driver, you're a petty psychotic son of a bitch, and your mother takes goat cock up the ass in hell.

Information superhighway euphemism discussion opportunity

The name of Starbucks Coffee's inner-city program, as described in the November 2005 issue of The Next American City, is a real larynx buster: "Urban Coffee Opportunities." This is not as direct as Ben & Jerry's "PartnerShop" program (which is different but has the same ostensible goals), and, well, it just sounds silly, being a product of the corporate-yuppie language breeding ground (compare: David Cronenberg's The Brood).

Maybe I'm just getting thrown off by the illusion of directness the word "coffee" provides in this name. At least the program name also names the product. That's why it seems so out of place in between "urban" and "opportunity," which together seem to say: "We've developed a special program for poor black/Hispanic city dwellers." It doesn't bother me that this is true; it is good to bring jobs to places where poor people need jobs and get charged out the ass for basic needs. Still, just like most of the syllables in "Urban Coffee Opportunities," the cheery PR front is unnecessary, and also condescending to the people the program is supposed to help. According to the TNAC article, a Starbucks that opened in Compton got more than 200 employment applications on opening day. A "Help Wanted" sign would have sufficed.

Word abuse: "Democratic"

In an article in this week's The New York Times Magazine, an executive with a company that invented a new parking-meter system says the invention makes parking "more democratic."

The system, InnovaPark, tells parking meters when a car leaves a space, and the meter reverts to $0, even if there's paid time left — so the next person to pull in can't mooch off the leftovers.

This doesn't make parking more democratic. It makes it more bureaucratic —— in that it brings parking enforcement and nitpicky asshole-ism into the computer age. This system says that if you buy parking and don't use all the parking you paid for, abandoning the remainder, the city owns it again, instead of the next taker to come along. But maybe that takes us away from the definition of "democratic" and into more nitpicky shit about economic regulation.

The only point, of course, is for cities to grub more money from meters and tickets. Being more "democratic" is beside the point — just as it is when people invoke "democratic" principles to criticize the decisions of appointed judges or justices. In these cases, "democratic" conditions are those in which everybody has to take a certain kind of shit in the same specific way.

One could argue that this makes parking more democratic in the sense that it eliminates an advantage that isn't based on merit or work. Even so, how egalitarian do you have to get? The word applies vaguely to the situation. In this and many other cases, it's just a rhetorical flash grenade people throw out there when they run out of good arguments. The desired effect, as far as I can tell, is that you'll be overwhelmed with the idealism of the statement and will have a hard time refuting it with logic (because it's not logical), even though it's being used to justify something that's a huge pain in the ass.

Statistically speaking....

Scene: a Dad and his Kid are driving past an airfield...

KID: Dad, aren't people who fly on planes afraid of crashing?

DAD (bringing the car to a rest at a stoplight, looking toward the kid): Well, son, statistically speaking, your chances of getting killed in a car crash are much greater than your chances of dying in an airpl—

Looking over the kid's shoulder, he sees a jetliner barrelling off course from the runway and through the fence toward the intersection

DAD: GAAAAAAAH! JUST WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF CRASH IS THIS?

Everything goes black.

So this is Christmas...

...and what have you done?

HOLIDAY MUSIC TRANSGRESSIONS: PART TWO IN AN ONGOING SERIES

Today I was eating lunch at Jimmy John's (where the music, by the way, is always bad and oppressively loud, just like the decor) when I heard a recent and very earnest cover of John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War is Over)." I'm not sure who sings the version I'm talking about, as apparently dozens of people have covered this song, but I've heard the version a few times before, and judging by the rich tones and dreadful moaning inflections of the voice, I'm guessing it's someone from the nightmarish late-90's-to-present phase of bad rhythm and blues. Or Celine Dion. It reminded me of Yolanda Adams' cover of "Imagine" at that John Lennon tribute show that was on TV in 2001. So bad. So damn bad. Instead of "nothing to kill or die for," she sang "nothing to live or die for." Well, shit!

It's really impossible for a cover of this song to go down smooth, because it just hasn't earned the attention it gets. This is not one of those astoundingly great John Lennon songs. It's from Lennon's "pompous tripe" phase, just like "Imagine." The reason he could get away with this—apart from being really fucking famous—was the relaxed grace of his voice. Give "Imagine" to any other singer and all you've got is a bunch of generic barking hippe/humanist crap. Lennon sounds at least patient, if overly optimistic. Same with "Happy Christmas." Even if it would irritate me to sit down and read the lyrics, I like the mellow and worn-out sound of the original. This cover is like a huge balloon from the Macy's parade crashing into your house.

Piss-poor content

The Reporter in Fond du Lac, Wis., helped carry out a local judge's mandate that three men convicted of urinating in public publish apologies in that paper. Why didn't the paper fight this? There are several good reasons to, journalistically and legally.

First, this judge is effectively forcing the paper to print content that he commissioned—a batshit insane violation of First Amendment rights. The government clearly has no compelling legal or social interest in carrying out the sentence this specific way. It doesn't serve national security or protect anyone's immediate safety.

Second, the whole point of this sentence is to publicly condemn and humiliate people for a stupid but pretty minor crime. While there's nothing wrong with running a small crime item about it, or with printing the men's names, the apology letters are not worth the space they take up—and they make the paper a willing accompice in a moronic and mobbish campaign. This is basically like allowing the courts to print a free advertisement telling people to come throw eggs at the town drunk, who will be locked up in the stocks all afternoon in the town square. The point is that people apparently have a visceral tendency to enjoy condemning and embarassing other people with impunity, which also explains the Spanish Inquisition, lynchings, Nazism, and McCarthyism.

Third, these people can't fucking write. Their letters are repetitive and you can tell that they are written under duress, that these guys are just writing what they think the judge wants them to write. Even if you think such a puishment is deserved, or that judges should be allowed to impose sentences like this (both of which would make you a moron), you'd have to admit that it doesn't really help these people understand why what they did is a crime. It just humiliates them. Pure humiliation is not nnecessarily a deterrent. If anything, it makes people more irrational and more scared. It also contradicts our legal tradition, which, if you look at the Constitution, is grounded more in property rights than in moral feeling.

Fourth, this is bad content judgment. Even in little, unregarded Fond du Lac, there is more newsworthy crime than this, and probably more interesting opinions. And unlike a good news story or opinion piece, these letters don't get to the facts or tell you why you should care (well, you shouldn't).

My guess would be that "community"-mindedness kept the paper's editors from thinking twice. While this is just a small local paper, it's also owned by Gannett Company, which owns USA Today, and according to its Web site, a total of 99 daily newspapers and 21 TV stations. Is there or will there be a company-wide policy on things like this?

At least one of the men had the decency to acknowledge the idiocy of all this:

I'm really sorry for having to waste space in The Reporter so you can read this. Once again I am very sorry for my conduct.