Seal of approval

The Conservapedia has been around for several months now, but the homeschool-safe version of Wikipedia has yet to cease functioning as an article of amusement. Like everything else in the world of Christian Conservatism, it exists because of the perceived "anti-Christian" bias in its predecessor, which, since every other institute in society suffers from the same malady, makes me wonder if reality itself doesn't have some kind of inveterate left-wing inclination.

Fred at slacktivist had this to say last Friday:

The stupid on display here is a source of endless amusement. But while smarter monkeys might have made for a less laughably embarrassing site, I've come to believe that the whole enterprise was conceptually doomed. C-pedia's "About page suggests it is intended as a conservative alternative to Google and Wikipedia. That's just not possible.

The cooperative, democratic, open-source ethos of Google and Wiki is antithetical to the supposedly conservative values espoused by the C-pedia's contributors. The original is based on the idea that all of us, together, know more than any of us individually does. The "alternative" is based on the idea that some ideas are forbidden and must be censored. The model for the Conservapedia's form of collaboration isn't so much Wikipedia as it is one of those totalitarian youth clubs in which children are commissioned to report subversive comments by parents or teachers.

This is an ongoing problem with the cultural false-populism that has been de rigeur in right-wing circles in recent years. Rhetorically, they tell us ordinary Americans don't need highfalutin pointy-headed academics giving us lectures about science, art, or what-have-you, but in practice they routinely engage in the same tactic (witness the blackout on Al Jazeera English from a few posts ago as an example). We are apparently capable of having our own beliefs vis a vis evolution but not in deciding what cultural fare is fit for our consumption.

Given their basic authoritarian nature, it's surprising they would attempt to engage in any kind of populism at all, with how quickly and easily their own actions would betray it.

Lastly, this post wouldn't be complete without having a bit of fun with the Conservapedia myself. Thanks to Jos in comments in the slacktivist thread, I discovered the entry on the Netherlands, where we can see the real priority After an aimless, disjointed introductory paragraph, three of the next four graphs invoke, in sequence, God, a connection to the United States, and a description of the country's major corporations and financial institutions. Nothing to be found on its early history, or any of its rich cultural and artistic history. Or Orange.

And then there is the entry on soccer, which begins with this line;

The most popular sport in the world and a form of football,

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. I was expecting at least a mention of soccer diabolically undermining the Christian principle of supply-side economics.

Bird's the word

I have a hard time doing "backbone" posts; the kind of fundamental reference point that I'll be noting often in future posts but which I'd rather not do because I want to get to the more fun and exciting stuff. Nevertheless I have to do it, otherwise I'd be facing the task of explaining it in every relevant post in the future, and this then causes me to put off doing those posts. So pretty much nothing gets done, as usual.

The topic at hand is the FUBAR nature of the American political glossary. I agree, of course, that it is more important to know what a person believes rather than what to call them, but we also need an accurate shorthand that will sketch out a general idea of what to expect thereof, because we haven't got the patience to go over the same things in every conversation. If I say "I'm a progressive," it's probably unnecessary to explain my position on the estate tax, say. But the shorthand nature of the news media and the natural duplicity of politicians has twisted these words to have hardly anything resembling their original meaning, or any meaning at all, even though they are still expected to have the same explanatory power.

The classic case of recent years is the desecration of the word "liberal," which, with the rise of the talk-radio gasbag, has become an all-encompassing insult covering essentially everyone who is not a conservative Republican. They toss the word around in public company like someone (quite possibly them) might bandy about an ethnic slur. There is a great scene in the film "This Divided State" where Sean Hannity, giving a speech at the Utah Valley State College auditorium, peppers virtually every clause with the word. "Liberals," whoever they are, are coming to destroy the Average American. There is no limit or standard to whom they will hang the word on; even Hillary Clinton, the epitome of doughnut-soft DLC centrism is tagged by the knuckle-dragging right as some kind of "super-extreme liberal."

There's only one problem; as polls repeatedly show, Average American is, on a great many issues, quite solidly liberal. Hell, if polls are to be believed, the Average American is just a few steps short of being screamin' red, and not of the Jesusland shade. But the trick that has worked so well for the right has been to associate these stances with "liberals," the Bad People you don't want to be, even though there's no substantive reason for it. In our language, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's an anteater.

Sadly, this problem is often aided and abetted by actual liberals and mainstream Democrats, who will run away from the scary L word under euphemisms like "progressive." My personal favorite, drawing from another documentary "Our Brand is Crisis," comes from one DLC-style political consultant who actually drops the term "social democracy." The irony here is mainstream liberals, afraid of a word that has been chained together with whooping radicalism, are exchanging it for terms historically associated with positions much further left. This, consequently, drains those terms of any meaning because some jelly-legged liberals won't stand up for themselves.

This brings up another important distinction, between "left" and "liberal," that is largely unknown to most Americans, since the absence of any significant, organized "left" is a uniquely American characteristic. In fact, many of the scarce-few American politicos who do claim the term "liberal" might actually be better associated with the international left, but who reject the label for their own reasons (the left being a bunch of delusional, unserious hippies, naturally.) The odd term "left-liberal" has been coined to describe these folks.

The American Right has clearly won the language war in the past 20 years, largely because they have tried harder and refused to be publicly shamed by their label in the way many liberals have. The result has been a complete disconnection of word from meaning. Everyone knows someone who's said at some point "well, I'm not a liberal, but.." or "I'm not a feminist, but.." This progressive (quack quack) isn't going to play that game.

To end this disaster of a post on a lighter note, you'll be interested to know the Wikipedia entry for "doughnut" is currently locked to prevent sock puppetry.

Sunday Debs

It is at this point that Chicago particularly prides herself upon her “charities,’ hospitals and eleemosynary endowments, all breathing the sweet spirit of Christian philanthropy—utterly ignorant of the fact, designedly or otherwise, that these very institutions are manifestations of social disease and are monumental of the iniquity of the system that must rear such whited sepulchers to coneal its crimes.

I do not oppose the insane asylum—but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

With the ten thousand “charities’ that are proposed to poultice the sores and bruises of society, I have little patience.

Worst of all is the charity ball. Chicago indulges in these festering festivals on a grand scale.

Think of cavorting around in a dress suit because some poor wretch is hungry; and of indulging in a royal carousal to comfort some despairing woman on the brink of suicide; and finally, that in “fashionable society’ the definition of this mixture of inanity and moral perversion is “charity.’

Fleece your fellows! That is “business,’ and you are a captain of industry. Having “relieved’ your victims of their pelts, dance and make merry to “relieve’ their agony. This is “charity’ and you are a philanthropist.

In summing up the moral assets of a great (?) city, the churches should not be overlooked. Chicago is a city of fine churches. All the denominations are copiously represented, and sermons in all languages and of all varieties are turned out in job lots and at retail to suit the market.

The churches are always numerous where vice is rampant. They seem to spring from the same soil and thrive in the same climate.

And yet the churches are supposed to wage relentless warfare upon evil. To just what extent they have checked its spread in the Windy City may be inferred from the probing of the press into the body social to ascertain “what is the matter with Chicago.’

The preachers are not wholly to blame, after all, for their moral and spiritual impotency. They are wage workers, the same as coal miners, and are just as dependent upon the capitalist class. How can they be expected to antagonize the interests of their employers and hold their jobs? The unskilled preachers, the common laborers in the arid spots of the vineyard, are often wretchedly paid, and yet they remain unorganized and have never struck for better wages.

Eugene V. Debs; What's the Matter with Chicago?; 1902

First they came...

It's a tough time for the world of independent press. The latest bit of bad news is the shuttering of Punk Planet, a longtime standard-bearer of the alternate press which unfortunately I hadn't discovered until hearing the news last week. It was felled by the first half of a recent double-whammy on the indie press, the bankruptcy of the Independent Press Association. The latter half is the jacking of postal rates for small publishers (let it not be said of the new Congress doesn't know where its bread is buttered.)

Feels like jumping from one sinking ship to another...

Banned in the USA!

Democracy Now! interviews Josh Rushing, the former Marine press officer featured in Jehane Noujaim's film about the Al Jazeera TV network Control Room, who left the military and now works for Al Jazeera's international English-language network.

Rushing tells of an assignment in North Dakota where he encountered the curiosity of a local newspaper reporter and...some other folks.

JOSH RUSHING: Well, I go up, and it was kind of interesting, because a reporter came out on my first day there, a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she was surprised at how I was dressed. And I thought, well, maybe I’m kind of casual to be on TV. I was in blue jeans. And she said, “No, I thought you’d be in robes and a head scarf.” You’ve got to be kidding. Why would I be in robes and a head scarf? “Well, you’re Al Jazeera, you know. And that’s what we were looking for.” So it was --

AMY GOODMAN: So she came out to do a story on you --

JOSH RUSHING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- doing a story in her town.

JOSH RUSHING: Absolutely, right. And so, you know, I gave her a nice interview. She kind of got it. And a couple days later she called me, really terrified and upset. And she said a federal agent had been to her office, had asked her to step outside. She said, “Can I bring my reporter’s notebook?” And he said, “No. I’ll be the one asking questions,” took her out and started asking her questions like, you know, “Who did you talk to? Did he seem like a citizen? Did he seem like an American? Did he have a camera? He didn’t take pictures, did he?” “Of course, he took pictures. They’re doing a story, you know? A news story.”

And he said there were possible international implications to me being that close to the unsecured border. Let alone, I came from Washington, D.C., where my office is three blocks from the White House. Now I’m a danger in northwestern North Dakota. So it turns out he was from the Border Protection, Customs & Border Protection. He went around and did that to everyone I interviewed so that I couldn’t go back and get another interview. We were going to go back and do the high school graduation, and we were unwelcome at that point, because people were worried. They were worried -- are there international implications they don’t know about? Had they said something that would put the country at risk to me, or even worse, maybe put themselves at risk from their own country? At the time, it was the NSA wiretapping story that was in the news. And even this reporter worried about calling her mom, because was she now on the wiretap database, and would that put her mom on the list, as well? So I was going through this kind of weird time, where I’m being followed by federal agents. I’m just trying to do a story about the value of Small Town America.

Al Jazeera English has quickly grown into one of the three largest international news networks in the world, along with the BBC and CNN International. But you will cannot see it in the great majority of the United States, because the right-wing arbiters of Freedom and Democracy have decided there are certain things that should be hidden beyond sight of the dumb ol' proles, and have threatened any cable or satellite provider that would dare carry it with the unleashing of mass hysteria This, to me, is simply outrageous, and renders laughable any serious consideration of "press freedom" in 21st-century right-wing America. As much as we rightly ridicule Faux News as the American Pravda, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone suggesting it be blacked out.*

I have no opinion one way or the other on Al Jazeera English's content (how could I, after all?). I'm sure it's broadcast from an Arabic perspective (though the English channel has hired many ex-BBC and other Westerners) but there should be nothing grossly indecent about that, unless you're of the inclination that "Arab = terrorist" and vice-versa, which is something to which not even "liberals" are immune. I'm thinking in particular of last year's UAE port security fiasco, which many Democrats gladly jumped on ostensibly to prove the hypocrisy of the Bushies without realizing it meant they would be adopting the same fallacy.

I do know that all of Al Jazeera is financed almost entirely by the Emir of Qatar, a small gulf emirate made enormously wealthy by oil money, and he pours great gallons of it into his pet television network. This brings me to another rant; the great fallacy of "foreign oil," the great carrot that is used to sell alternate energies to the Heartland. The ethanol industry, which has become big backers of Indycar racing and supplies all of its fuel, ran ads touting the supposed benefits of its product, the most important of which, it reminded us, was lessening our reliance on "foreign oil."

Note that lessening our reliance on oil is not a bad thing, though I am told by various environmentalists that ethanol is mostly a red herring, but that is not what was specified here. The problem is "foreign" oil, because oil itself is not so bad so long as the profits go to nice Americans and not to dirty brown foreigners who aren't advanced enough to have it. (Sadly, "foreign oil" xenophobia is another trap "liberals" sometimes willingly buy into.)

*This would be the point at which someone mentions "RCTV" which I have not talked about in large part because I trust almost nothing written about Chavez or Venezuela, whether from the American press or the sympathetic leftist press. I will note, however, that whenever one of the above listed openly aids in the plotting of a coup against a democratically-elected leader, I may change my mind.

Before-my-time nostalgia nonsense!

Let's see if no-techy me can figure out how to do this....

(via Lawyers, Guns and Money) I'm not sure where this originates, except it presumably comes from the prime of the 1980's "Satanic Panic" that briefly had the fundamentalists in thrall convinced everything from television programs to "Christian Rock" and the Catholic church were discreetly leading the world into the service of Satan. Sadly, I only arrived at the moment it was beginning to wane, so I barely remember anything.

I miss the days when the fundies were campy and kooky instead of bent on the subjugation of heathens. "Harry Potter" of course has brought some isolated resurrections of the Satanic Panic, but nothing so widespread (unless Harry turns out to be gay, I suppose.)

Welcome to the Terrordome

I have to do another book plug this week (I can't believe I've read two whole books in the past seven days; what's happening to me?), this time for "Welcome to the Terrordome" by Dave Zirin. Zirin writes about politics, race, resistance, activism and other subjects in sports, so when I learned about him I couldn't get my hands on his material fast enough. His prose isn't otherwordly, but he has an pleasant enthusiasm and a reasoned, methodical approach to polemic. It's a great tribute to how sports are significant to society, not in the outcome of the events themselves, but how they reflect us in our unguarded moments.

There are any number of things I could pull out to talk about, but I'll settle for one that highlights this point. It's a national travesty that proto-fascist gasbag Rush Limbaugh can pollute the public airwaves while seeing only modest resistance, except in one case. Limbaugh, like any good 'Murican male, fashions himself an armchair quarterback, and several years ago was hired as a commentator for ESPN. Being unable to contain his political hobbyhorse for long, Limbaugh suggested that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated by the media because if its "social concern" to see a black quarterback succeed. Suddenly, the public was outraged, not because Limbaugh had injected politics into sports, but because he thrust his politics into a realm which everyone understood and saw them to be ridiculous.

Zirin writes a weekly column which you can find on his website edgeofsports.com

...or else!

Several months ago there was a stir when a petition by the anti-gay fundies in Massachusetts led to the state legislature voting to reconsider the state's position on same-sex marriage at the next constitutional convention. If the measure managed enough votes, there would be a general ballot referendum which could reverse the state's status as a vanguard in marriage equality in the USA.

Fast-forward to yesterday at the convention, where the initiative flopped badly, getting only 41 of 200 votes (it needed a mere 25 percent to get on the ballot).

As usual, Pam's House Blend has the best compilation of reactions from the zany wingnuts, including my favorite, this bit of high melodrama from old favorite Tony Perkins.

More than 200 years ago, the Second Continental Congress resolved that one flag would represent America to the world. It ordered that "the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." Today, on the very date reserved to honor the flag's proud and glorious history, what was seen waving throughout Boston wasn't Old Glory, but a handful of rainbow flags, symbols not of unity but of division.

Their actions today may prove to be the very motivator they feared. After Massachusetts, pro-family forces across the nation will be even more motivated to pursue a federal amendment protecting marriage. Despite the shameless games and political maneuvers, we must not give up on the fight. The flag that has led us into every contest for America will lead us now, reminding us of the founding ideals, like marriage and family, that so many have died to protect.

It's not very proper, but part of me can't wait to see the looks on the faces of all the fundies when the inevitable force of marriage equality doesn't produce the byproduct of total social destruction they've so long predicted. Of course, they've left it purposefully ambiguous as to what these consequences would be, in part so they can claim them when they come, and in part because they have no idea what they might entail. The latter would require a world-view with predictive power, which, as perhaps best exemplified by the faux-science of "intelligent design," is beyond the ability of the Christian conservatives. They can only interpret past events as "God's punishment" for one thing or another (see the late Fallwell's 9/11 gaffe); they can't possibly predict what God's reaction will be to marryin' homos, but I'm sure they'll be waiting with excitable breath.

And yes, I know we will all burn in Hell for eternity, but that's hardly satisfactory since it requires the unpleasant business of dying before they get to take out their revenge fantasies, and that simply isn't fast enough.

Here's your future

My reading habits are pretty scatter-shot; I don't read with any great procedure or toward any particular goal, just because any I might set seems like too large of a mountain to climb, and I'm mostly without any idea of where to start hiking.

So when I read, it's usually something completely random that I've decided to take a flyer on, which doesn't make me cultured but does occasionally drop something inspired into my lap. Such is the case with Julia Scheeres' memoir Jesus Land, which dropped into my lap unexpectedly but quite fortuitously. Though I went in expecting to relate a little more than what I did, I was still completely transfixed by it. I'm a lousy reader who can never finish anything he starts, and I quaffed the last 200 pages down in one sitting. That's about the best endorsement I can give.

Jesus Land is Scheeres' story of growing up in Indiana with a white family which has adopted two black children. Her parents stern Calvinists, and see it as their Christian obligation to save the lost souls of savages. They are cold, distant, and domineering, and especially abusive of the children not furthering their genetic lineage. Scheeres is especially close to the younger boy named David, and much of the book is the story of their close relationship and how it becomes strained when the family moves out of the almost-urbane town of Lafayette into the country where the complicated world of high school is further spiked with racism and intolerance.

But Indiana being littered with bigots isn't going to surprise anyone. The real corker of Jesus Land is the second part, set in a reform school in the Dominican Republic where wealthy Christians can pay an exorbitant fee to have their recalcitrant teenagers re-educated with the love of Jesus. The rampant authoritarianism of the school is mind-boggling; new inductees quite literally cannot move without asking permission from a staff member. Students are ranked on a hierarchy, with each successive level giving more privilege, and the easiest way to move up is by ratting out the misdeeds of a fellow student in the interest of "being a good witness for the Lord."

It is a vile and distasteful place, far from any regulations concerning child abuse, a notion some Christians regard as a government conspiracy to subvert their authority. I can still remember hearing a sermon as a child where the preacher mocked the "child abuse hotlines" that were beginning to appear at the time as an encouragement for children to rebel against their parents. For people whose public concern seems to center on nothing but children, it's baffling why some Christians seem to hate theirs so much, as reflected in the combative parenting techniques popular with the Dobson crowd.

As you might expect, almost no one comes out of this hellhole filled with any more Christian charity than when they started, but that is hardly it's real purpose. It exists as many things in the lives of the rural, Christian elite do; to cover up any improprieties that might paint anything less than a rosy picture of their Rockwellian American paradise. Scheeres says she took the title "Jesus Land" to represent a kind of amusement park, a kind of imaginary tourist trap (sadly now becoming real) where everyone puts on their Sunday best for the customers but none dare mention what the carnies do when the rides have closed down.

Okay

After going 25 and a half years without ever encountering the word "pulchritudinous," I've just seen it twice within a span of barely ten minutes; first in today's Kaufman, then in this article at CounterPunch.

Which sign of the apocalypse is this?

Catching up

Well, of course, I have to say a few words about the mammoth television event on Sunday, by which I mean Federer-Nadal III (what, was there something else going on?). Since I did not post a victorious photograph on Sunday night you should know the outcome, which was identical to one year ago; Rafa kept Roger from winning the sequential slam and remained undefeated in his career in the French Open in what has quickly become an annual Sunday-morning tradition in early June.

As he did last year, Federer had chances to take a lead early in the match, but wasted over a dozen break points in the first set, then found a rhythm briefly to take the second. But he subsequently lost serve early in each of the final two sets and was unable to get a sniff at retrieving it from Nadal.

One of the criticisms often leveled at Federer by those who doubt his stature among the all-time greats is that he has not had to consistently face someone reasonably equal to his own ability, the way Borg had McEnroe or Sampras had Agassi, etc., and on the other surfaces, this might have some merit. But in the current era of tennis, the clay specialists are the dominant force on that surface, and Nadal is king of them all, already perhaps the best ever. So while one could suggest a person who might have taken away some of Federer's ten other major titles, were it not for the presence of Nadal, Federer would be looking at a streak of winning thirteen of the last fifteen majors, and nine in a row. That's unimaginable by anyone's standards.

Roland Garros hasn't seen a different winner of either gender since 2004, as Justine Henin matched Nadal's three-peat with an easy win over Ana Ivanovic. With Kim Clijsters retiring, I'm feeling a bit unmoored without a rooting interest on the women's side right now, but Ivanovic might be a promising prospect (anybody who demolishes Sharapova as she did in the semis is automatically in my good graces). Ivanovic struggled a lot in her first-ever Slam final against Henin, as one might have expected, but she has a big game and moves well, and a great on-court demeanor (I may have blinked, but I could have sworn she appealed to the chair umpire to overrule a bad line call that went in her favor in the final. Instant fan right there.)

Knocked up

Pam's House Blend reports on a new book on sex and evangelical teenagers aptly titled "Forbidden Fruit" by Mark Regnerus who uses new survey data to elucidate the sexual habits of the offspring of our favorite starchy Victorians.

The fate of the True Love Waits movement, which began with the Southern Baptist Convention in the '90s, is a perfect example. Teenagers who signed the abstinence pledge belong to a subgroup of highly motivated virgins. But even they succumb. Follow-up surveys show that at best, pledges delayed premarital sex by 18 months -- a success by statistical standards but a disaster for Southern Baptist pastors.

...When evangelical parents say they talk to their kids about sex, they mean the morals, not the mechanics. In a quiz on pregnancy and health risks associated with sex, evangelicals scored very low. Evangelical teens don't accept themselves as people who will have sex until they've already had it. As a result, abstinence pledgers are considerably less likely than nonpledgers to use birth control the first time they have sex. "It just sort of happened," one girl told the researchers, in what could be a motto for this generation of evangelical teens.

Everybody has their own story from high school about good church kids swearing an oath to their virginity and one day turning up pregnant. Everybody except me, that is; I didn't really know any evangelicals until I hit college, and my impression is that by this point in their lives kids have either checked out of church or they're true believers for life. While I was once told it was easily knowable by observation which of the good evangelical couples were going to the naughty places (Christians being good at nothing if not passing spurious judgment on superficiality), but I was unaware of anyone ever hitting the jackpot officially. Of course, I was never more than a low-level foot soldier, and there are ways of keeping such things under wraps, including those which one might otherwise assume would be anathema to a pious Christian.

But I think most of them really, honestly believed with the utmost sincerity everything they said they did, for which I have a reluctant respect, because I obviously couldn't pull it off. Chastity was a new kind of ascetic benchmark; they had overpowered their sexual will to such an extent that it was overturned, and the proof of their virtue was in abstaining. That's what happens to the people who stick around long enough. (Of course, a necessary tangent is that the temptation of sex must be available in order to be denied; which explains why I remained a virgin all these years despite no great pious reasoning or spiritual willpower, see below).

That's all roundabout and has nothing to do with teenagers (late teenagers, perhaps) who were the subject of the initial survey that got us here. Several years ago there was an effort by some evangelicals to create a kind of "alternate dating" program for evangelical teens that effectively attempted to give parents yet more decision-making power over who their kids saw and prevent young couples from going out alone as much as possible. Though it was never pitched as such, (it was usually clouded with Christianese proclamations about "commitment") the real purpose was likely an attempt to curb the above phenomenon without caving in and giving kids real sex education. I would be interested to see whether this had any staying power, and whether or not it had the desired effect.

One, two, three strikes you're out

According to a study from the UK, size doesn't matter after all (at least, not to women).

While men agonise over the length and girth of their member, women are more interested in a man's looks and outlook on life, it found.

According to two studies, 90% of women prefer a wide penis to a long one, while other studies found that penis size was behind grooming and personality on a woman's list of desirable attributes.

Inevitably, I still feel unredeemed. I think the post title pretty much speaks for me in this case.

(link via Republic of T.)

Well, that's that

Three seasons in a row now. A fitting tribute to Gary Bettman's NHL, the scruffy, bespectacled kid who burns with unrequited love for the affluent blonde when there are many passionate if homely girls ready to run into his arms. But there's gold in them Sun Belt hills, so by golly we've got to come bearing our best gifts to them so their brittle attention spans might turn briefly our way.

Sure, it's fair. The Senators deserve to lose the series, they had plenty of opportunities and folded. It's just disappointing. The nature of the NHL is that it's such a crapshoot that there can be no "wait 'til next year." If you get your shot and blow it, you're likely to be waiting for a long time before it comes around again.

Naughty business

There are times when I think, in 2007, that every idea for a film, book, song, etc. must have been taken by someone. When I heard that director Steve Anderson had created a documentary of the word "fuck," what surprised me was not so much that Anderson had thought of it but that no one had thought of it before.

Anderson's film, aptly titled "Fuck," is a salute to our most cherished and most revolting profanity, reveling in its incomparable versatility and trying to understand how, exactly, the word became the equivalent of linguistic duct tape and simultaneously for cultural conservatives became a magical force of corruption. What it does not do is spend a great deal of time haggling over the word's origins, of which surprisingly little is known with certainty. It is Germanic in origin, was probably used first sometime in the 15th century, and has always been known in English as a crude term for the act of copulating. What it is not, contrary to competing popular legend, is an acronym for "Fornicating Under Consent of King," or anything else.

Though the film generally takes a steadfast libertarian position on free speech, featuring interviews with the likes of Drew Carey, Kevin Smith, Ron Jeremy and others as well as a tribute to pioneer Lenny Bruce, who once noted "if you can't say 'fuck,' then you can't say 'fuck the government.'" But it also tries to understand the arguments of cultural conservatives like Alan Keyes, Miss Manners, and radio gasbag Dennis Prager, and gamely tries to make them seem reasonable, a nearly-impossible task given their insistence on sounding ridiculous.

The primary argument we hear repeatedly from the pearl-clutching puritans about the word "fuck," or any other so-called "obscenity," is that it marks the speaker as crude and "low-class." Yes, that's the word one of them uses. I might have been disappointed the film did not explore the classist nature of the words our society considers profane, but it works out when we get this critique from an unlikely source. Our "foul language" comes from, in various euphemisms, sailors, soldiers, ghettos, and other unclean commoners who might soil the pristine ears of our stuffier classes (I have not seen "The Aristocrats," which may address this in more detail considering this is integral to understanding the joke).

The other old favorite of the cultural conservatives--something you've probably heard many times from your parents or teachers--is that saying "fuck" betrays a lack of vocabulary, and therefore intelligence, and you would not say it if you were intelligent enough to think of something different to say. This is perhaps best exemplified by the two great scribes of modern conservatism, George Will and William F. Buckley, who believe drowning people in multisyllabic words and impeccable grammar is necessary and sufficient to make enlivened writing. The other two words that come to mind are "Left Behind" and, subsequently, the rest of "Christian publishing, which should prove to anyone that abstention from use of "fuck" is no guarantor of quality.

Prager insists, as many of his ilk now do, that "fuck" is now a necessary imprimatur of authenticity for any artwork in our eroding Western culture. This is no doubt true for a certain segment of people. Unfortunately they are all in high school, and this juvenile belief will pass most of them by, an idea (that children eventually grow up) that seems to give conservatives fits. Like on other fronts on the great Cultural Crackdown, what we are led to believe is done to protect the innocent children is really there to simplify and degrade all of us into becoming like children ourselves. As a childless know-nothing, I can imagine a necessary conversation about what how our children need to be protected, but I can't conceive of any scenario in which hearing the word "fuck" has ever corrupted anyone.

It is a marker, to be sure, but only for people looking for an easy way to pass judgment on their fellow man, which, come to think of it, fits our cultural conservatives like a glove. It is an easy way for them to do their God-appointed task of separating wheat from chaff without having to work hard, or do any consideration of of a person's life or works, a penetration that would too often prosecute themselves, an implication which is to be avoided at all costs.

Sunday Mark Twain

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

-Mark Twain, "The War Prayer," 1904

Hope

Huh, take II

"But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number."

-Bill O'Reilly

I'm not sure what's fallen on Billo's head, but I think he might have figured it out!

(via)