I've been reading about what a violation of basic intelligence Sarah Palin is capable of committing in front of a national audience. I've read all about it in publications partial to either side of the partisan fence. But in fairness, I thought I should giver Mrs. Palin a fair chance and judge for myself. Well, today I found this:
"Health care reform and reducing taxes and reigning and spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans."
So, among other things, we have to reduce taxes in order to reduce taxes. Everyone got that?
Nevermind the fact that she first answered the question by saying that she "were" ill along with Americans she has purportedly spoken with about the bailout plan. She then gave it her support for reasons I still haven't managed to decode from her answer. She then moves on to say (I think) that taxing us lowly citizens, effectively granting large scale corporations the same rights as individual people will stimulate job growth and also cut taxes. So raising taxes in an already sagging economy will create jobs and reduce taxes. Everyone got that?
I watched this one and a half times. Halfway through the second viewing, I closed the page and I actually took the nearest object, a spoon, and shoved it up my own ass. Because if I'm ever going to be in that much pain, I'm going to do it to myself.
Now, I'm aware that this is just one clip, and that she may not always be this bad. But on the other hand it's not spliced up, either. You heard the question and this is her answer, if you can even give her as much credit to say that she "answered" at all.
Has everyone seen the excruciating, horrifying Q&A with Miss South Carolina 2007? If so, you'll probably want to skip this next clip because I think if you watch it more than once, you'll actually forget how to read. But if you haven't seen it, and you want to see something that makes Sarah Palin look like JFK by comparison, enjoy:
Friday, September 26, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Fourteen Year Olds Reading Kafka
I've been unusually social the past few weeks. I have two friends who live in my building, A and T, and September is kind of birthday month for some of my older friends (D, M and...Db[?]). I went to Austin to see a friend from college, and I hope to soon go to Seattle to visit a friend from I-don't-remember-where.
I'm finding that a lot of the same topics are coming up when I spend time with these different groups of people. I'm not deliberately keeping tallies. Maybe I should, because I regularly embarrass myself by continuing a conversation with T in Oakland that I actually had with D in Concord. Is everyone getting this?
It seems obvious that topics would find their way into conversations among people of the same age group, in this case late 20's and early 30's. But things like mortgage, the stock market, car payments and talk of starting families isn't something my friends and I regularly delve into, at least not willingly. We talk about the current political shortcomings of the U.S. because how can you not? But if you want to get everyone talking, bring up a traumatic high school experience.
It's deliciously ironic that talking about high school is an old faithful antidote to potentially awkward social atmospheres. It is both an ice breaker and something to fall back on when the night starts to wear on and you're almost out of liquor. I'm pretty sure that in years to come, deals between major corporations will be struck not on a golf course, but in a bar, with a good old session reminiscing about the woes and trappings of adolescence. Even the SWPL blog touched on it.
I often try and compound these conversations with questions about books assigned in high school classes. Which ones did you like? Which ones didn't you like? It interests me to know what texts made an impact on people at that age, when each day teeters among such heavy extremes and we unwittingly parade ourselves before some unseen committee.
To me it's very telling, perhaps because books played such an important part to my own development. For other people, and for me too, books are ancillary to experience. What you read in English class and what you did during your lunch period couldn't be more different. I have to concede, but if there's anything that could tenably be an exception to this, if one author could have told all our stories, whether we cared to admit it or not, it would have to be Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
"The Metamorphosis" probably vies with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" for the dicstinction of "Weirdest High School Reading Assignment." Even people who have no interest in literature can quote you the first line of "Metamorphosis" ten, fifteen years later. At the risk of stating the obvious, Kafka provides no preamble, nothing to elucidate Gregor's horrific, inexplicable tranformation. "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant insect." I'm sure scholars of St. Paul or Aquinas could do a good job explainining the mystery and absurdity right out of The Metamorphosis, and thank heavens I didn't have one in my sophomore English class.
Holden Caulfield was, is and probably always will be the fictional character most lionized by American high school English students with so much as a passing interest in literature. His depth is remarkable, and in the massive cauldron of contradictions that make up his character, none of us have to look very far to find something of ourselves in him. Who isn't tired of "phonies?"
But the delightful, tragicomedic anecdotes about high school and the baleful forces that asserted themselves in so many ways--from acne pimples to nervous nausea--don't call up Holden Caulfield in my mind. Time after time, I'm reminded of Gregor.
I haven't read The Metamorphosis in years, but the interpretation of my first reading fifteen years ago (!) stubbornly keeps itself fixed somewhere in the peripheries whenever I revisit it, despite more mature, studied readings since. Like many teenagers, I questioned my own signficance, and what is more picayune or casually done away with than a beetle or cockroach?
Then there were the changes going on in my body. Not to sound melodramatic, but they sometimes bordered the harrowing, the grotesque. The horror that overcame Gregor upon discovering his transformation wasn't completely alien to me. I may as well have been a fucking beetle going to my locker in the morning, what with the stinkeying and nonverbal condescension that plagued me and lots of other people at one time or another.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Perhaps I feel like the scholars who put "The Metamorphosis" on the high school reading list didn't consider the multifarious implications that allowed for the deeply felt parallels I drew when I read it. Generally speaking, the story's credibility is derived from the exquisite evenness of its structure, its philisophical complexity, and the manifold erudite analyses that have procured a place for "The Metamorphosis" high up in the precincts of the western canon. I once read a paper on the political implications of Gregor's parents. Did Kafka foresee the rise of fascism?
Well, Gregor's parents were my parents. Gregor's parents were every authority figure. Gregor's parents were the order and discipline that these people bestow with so much importance. They represented the routines and distinctions in life that were as ostensibly reliable and unshakable as the walls that made up Benicia High School. But they were cold and monolithic, insensitive and deaf to all the bullshit that falls in between. Sudden, unforseeable changes are little more than hurdles that need quick doing away with. I'm not trying to debunk the merits of serious reading.
I'm just saying that Gregor kind of told my story.
I'm finding that a lot of the same topics are coming up when I spend time with these different groups of people. I'm not deliberately keeping tallies. Maybe I should, because I regularly embarrass myself by continuing a conversation with T in Oakland that I actually had with D in Concord. Is everyone getting this?
It seems obvious that topics would find their way into conversations among people of the same age group, in this case late 20's and early 30's. But things like mortgage, the stock market, car payments and talk of starting families isn't something my friends and I regularly delve into, at least not willingly. We talk about the current political shortcomings of the U.S. because how can you not? But if you want to get everyone talking, bring up a traumatic high school experience.
It's deliciously ironic that talking about high school is an old faithful antidote to potentially awkward social atmospheres. It is both an ice breaker and something to fall back on when the night starts to wear on and you're almost out of liquor. I'm pretty sure that in years to come, deals between major corporations will be struck not on a golf course, but in a bar, with a good old session reminiscing about the woes and trappings of adolescence. Even the SWPL blog touched on it.
I often try and compound these conversations with questions about books assigned in high school classes. Which ones did you like? Which ones didn't you like? It interests me to know what texts made an impact on people at that age, when each day teeters among such heavy extremes and we unwittingly parade ourselves before some unseen committee.
To me it's very telling, perhaps because books played such an important part to my own development. For other people, and for me too, books are ancillary to experience. What you read in English class and what you did during your lunch period couldn't be more different. I have to concede, but if there's anything that could tenably be an exception to this, if one author could have told all our stories, whether we cared to admit it or not, it would have to be Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
"The Metamorphosis" probably vies with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" for the dicstinction of "Weirdest High School Reading Assignment." Even people who have no interest in literature can quote you the first line of "Metamorphosis" ten, fifteen years later. At the risk of stating the obvious, Kafka provides no preamble, nothing to elucidate Gregor's horrific, inexplicable tranformation. "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant insect." I'm sure scholars of St. Paul or Aquinas could do a good job explainining the mystery and absurdity right out of The Metamorphosis, and thank heavens I didn't have one in my sophomore English class.
Holden Caulfield was, is and probably always will be the fictional character most lionized by American high school English students with so much as a passing interest in literature. His depth is remarkable, and in the massive cauldron of contradictions that make up his character, none of us have to look very far to find something of ourselves in him. Who isn't tired of "phonies?"
But the delightful, tragicomedic anecdotes about high school and the baleful forces that asserted themselves in so many ways--from acne pimples to nervous nausea--don't call up Holden Caulfield in my mind. Time after time, I'm reminded of Gregor.
I haven't read The Metamorphosis in years, but the interpretation of my first reading fifteen years ago (!) stubbornly keeps itself fixed somewhere in the peripheries whenever I revisit it, despite more mature, studied readings since. Like many teenagers, I questioned my own signficance, and what is more picayune or casually done away with than a beetle or cockroach?
Then there were the changes going on in my body. Not to sound melodramatic, but they sometimes bordered the harrowing, the grotesque. The horror that overcame Gregor upon discovering his transformation wasn't completely alien to me. I may as well have been a fucking beetle going to my locker in the morning, what with the stinkeying and nonverbal condescension that plagued me and lots of other people at one time or another.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Perhaps I feel like the scholars who put "The Metamorphosis" on the high school reading list didn't consider the multifarious implications that allowed for the deeply felt parallels I drew when I read it. Generally speaking, the story's credibility is derived from the exquisite evenness of its structure, its philisophical complexity, and the manifold erudite analyses that have procured a place for "The Metamorphosis" high up in the precincts of the western canon. I once read a paper on the political implications of Gregor's parents. Did Kafka foresee the rise of fascism?
Well, Gregor's parents were my parents. Gregor's parents were every authority figure. Gregor's parents were the order and discipline that these people bestow with so much importance. They represented the routines and distinctions in life that were as ostensibly reliable and unshakable as the walls that made up Benicia High School. But they were cold and monolithic, insensitive and deaf to all the bullshit that falls in between. Sudden, unforseeable changes are little more than hurdles that need quick doing away with. I'm not trying to debunk the merits of serious reading.
I'm just saying that Gregor kind of told my story.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Homeless EMT
I'm a real hypocrite when it comes to the argument against calling homeless people "bums." Naturally, I understand that it completely overlooks the possibility of affliction. Let's say, for instance, you once had a good job but you also had a heroin addiction and a junky lifestyle which may or may not have exacerbated a case of paranoid schizophrenia, now in the late stages. On top of all this, your friends have given up on you and you have no family or loved ones to speak of or shout about at 4 in the morning three feet from my apartment window.
You're homeless. You may have had a decent job at some point, but with your mental disorder you don't even qualify for the lowest rungs of employment. In fact, they'd rather hire sane people who don't know so much as a smattering of English. I feel sorry for you, and I wish I could help you in some way. But I'm at a loss.
Let's say you're hard up for money or food or a drug fix, so you break into my car and take one of the few marignally stationary items left after living in Oakland for five years, replacing more windows than I care to count. In this case, the lid to my electricity jack.
You're a fucking bum. Mental disorders and relapses aside. No more sympathy. I'm like Mr. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange: I'm something of a philanthropist when lowly, misunderstood subjects of discrimination are a risk to other people. But fuck with me somehow, and I turn into a monster.
I'm a pushover, and I don't really feel this way all the time, but goddamnit, living in the city can really suck.
I can only count one instance where a homeless person/bum tried to prey on my sympathy. Or was it my naivete? There's sometimes a fine line between being sympathetic and being naive, but in this case, the guy must have just been banking on the hope that I was a complete dipshit.
I was living on 23rd Street and MLK near downtown Oakland. For those of you who have never been there, imagine a milieu from Robocop except without so many people. I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artist/punk rock type of folks. It was a terribly run down area, but rent was cheap and I had even less money then than I do now. Despite my poverty, which was obvious if paid any mind to the holes in my clothes, I frequently found myself accosted and asked for money.
One day, as I was driving to work, I was sitting at a stoplight on San Pablo and 27th St. It was summer and I had my window down. Before the light turned green, I looked to my left and saw that I was being approached by a guy who was obviously homeless. Yellow eyes, black, disheveled. But this guy stood out from other homeless people. This guy had a stethoscope.
It was clear that he was coming towards me, and the first thing that ran through my head when I saw the stethoscope was, "Jesus. What kind of horseshit story is this guy going to try and sell me?" I didn't have to wait long, because he got to my car in a big hurry.
" 'Ey man. We got us a situation." He tried to put an urgent trill in his voice, but he was a bad actor.
"Oh?" I was trying my best not to smile. The urgency in my voice was much more convincing. "What is it?"
"Our ambulence broke down. We got a guy down the street bleeding real bad. We gotta get him guy to the hospital."
I tried to maintain a look of alarm on my face while looking this dickhead over . What made the whole thing so great was that he didn't even have anything on that even resembled something an EMT would wear. He just had, you know, bum clothes. And a stethoscope.
"Oh no! Where is he?"
The homeless crackhead mugger guy wearing the stethoscope pointed down towards a long alleyway couched between a boarded up building and a recently closed liquor store. Now I was ready to laugh. How convenient.
I looked up and saw that my light had turned green. "Okay!", I cried. "I'll be right there!" Then I casually merged onto 580 and drove to work.
I didn't know whether I wanted to give the guy a couple bucks for the charade, or whether I wanted to punch him in the face for thinking I was such a dumbass to fall for some stinky homeless dude wearing a stethoscope trying to pass himself off as an EMT whose ambulance has broken down and, I guess, has no way of calling for back up.
I've always wondered what would happen if I would have pretended to fall for it just for kicks. I remember not having any money in my wallet, and after living on 23rd Street for as long as I did, there was nothing left in my car to take. I guess they could have taken my car, whoever "they" were. Did he have a bunch of other homeless guys wearing stethoscopes laying in wait until given the signal to descent on me all ninjitsu style?
Fucking bums.
You're homeless. You may have had a decent job at some point, but with your mental disorder you don't even qualify for the lowest rungs of employment. In fact, they'd rather hire sane people who don't know so much as a smattering of English. I feel sorry for you, and I wish I could help you in some way. But I'm at a loss.
Let's say you're hard up for money or food or a drug fix, so you break into my car and take one of the few marignally stationary items left after living in Oakland for five years, replacing more windows than I care to count. In this case, the lid to my electricity jack.
You're a fucking bum. Mental disorders and relapses aside. No more sympathy. I'm like Mr. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange: I'm something of a philanthropist when lowly, misunderstood subjects of discrimination are a risk to other people. But fuck with me somehow, and I turn into a monster.
I'm a pushover, and I don't really feel this way all the time, but goddamnit, living in the city can really suck.
I can only count one instance where a homeless person/bum tried to prey on my sympathy. Or was it my naivete? There's sometimes a fine line between being sympathetic and being naive, but in this case, the guy must have just been banking on the hope that I was a complete dipshit.
I was living on 23rd Street and MLK near downtown Oakland. For those of you who have never been there, imagine a milieu from Robocop except without so many people. I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artist/punk rock type of folks. It was a terribly run down area, but rent was cheap and I had even less money then than I do now. Despite my poverty, which was obvious if paid any mind to the holes in my clothes, I frequently found myself accosted and asked for money.
One day, as I was driving to work, I was sitting at a stoplight on San Pablo and 27th St. It was summer and I had my window down. Before the light turned green, I looked to my left and saw that I was being approached by a guy who was obviously homeless. Yellow eyes, black, disheveled. But this guy stood out from other homeless people. This guy had a stethoscope.
It was clear that he was coming towards me, and the first thing that ran through my head when I saw the stethoscope was, "Jesus. What kind of horseshit story is this guy going to try and sell me?" I didn't have to wait long, because he got to my car in a big hurry.
" 'Ey man. We got us a situation." He tried to put an urgent trill in his voice, but he was a bad actor.
"Oh?" I was trying my best not to smile. The urgency in my voice was much more convincing. "What is it?"
"Our ambulence broke down. We got a guy down the street bleeding real bad. We gotta get him guy to the hospital."
I tried to maintain a look of alarm on my face while looking this dickhead over . What made the whole thing so great was that he didn't even have anything on that even resembled something an EMT would wear. He just had, you know, bum clothes. And a stethoscope.
"Oh no! Where is he?"
The homeless crackhead mugger guy wearing the stethoscope pointed down towards a long alleyway couched between a boarded up building and a recently closed liquor store. Now I was ready to laugh. How convenient.
I looked up and saw that my light had turned green. "Okay!", I cried. "I'll be right there!" Then I casually merged onto 580 and drove to work.
I didn't know whether I wanted to give the guy a couple bucks for the charade, or whether I wanted to punch him in the face for thinking I was such a dumbass to fall for some stinky homeless dude wearing a stethoscope trying to pass himself off as an EMT whose ambulance has broken down and, I guess, has no way of calling for back up.
I've always wondered what would happen if I would have pretended to fall for it just for kicks. I remember not having any money in my wallet, and after living on 23rd Street for as long as I did, there was nothing left in my car to take. I guess they could have taken my car, whoever "they" were. Did he have a bunch of other homeless guys wearing stethoscopes laying in wait until given the signal to descent on me all ninjitsu style?
Fucking bums.
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