Friday, May 16, 2008
Politically Incorrect
Holy hell!
It's been a while, kids! Two whole months since I've made a deposit to the Gallowmere thought bank. It hasn't been that I've been intellectually impoverished. Sometimes the reason as to why I don't make posts here is because I very well am intellectually broke.
This time, however, it's simply neglect. I've been getting some things done here and there which should be pretty beneficial, and which I hope to make public soon enough. Also, I've been spending loads of my time having affairs with other people's novels, and playing Grand Theft Auto 4, I admit, I wasn't that crazy about the ones which came out the last generation, this one is a major step up. The story is what gets me, and its phenomenal satire. It's really addictive and immersive, but possibly over-hyped. I have almost exclusively done the missions, and have yet to explore the "sandbox" features of virtually fucking prostitutes, running over them, and getting my money back. The rest of my time has been spent embracing my political junkie habits.
In past posts I've made little political musings, making fun of political figures and inserting colourful candor on what I'd do if I woke up to find myself as the President of the United States of America or even more preferably, some sort of world dictator. Considering this, and finding myself obsessively keeping up with the mainstream media's coverage of the 2008 Presidential race, I figured I as might as well weigh in on where I lightly stand.
First off, I have to comment that I find it deeply embarrassing (though I'm not sure on which end) that I'm 99.9% more interested in American politics than I am in Canadian politics. Canada is where I reside and where I was born. And I would rather live in Canada than America any day, Canada's much less exciting than America is, but it's also a lot less fucked. But things being fucked and things being exciting go hand in hand I guess. Canadian news, politics, and media are only useful as sedatives. The major undertone I get from the political scene is, "Should we be the 51st state(Conservative), or show we try and carve out our bland national identity(Liberal)?"
I've been into politics since 1996 when I was in the sixth grade and my class kept up with the race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. For Social Studies we kept up with American politics, and learned a lot of the terminology. The icing was put on the cake when I got to visit Washington DC that summer.
Back then I didn't have any political affiliation. I liked Bill Clinton, because he seemed like a "nice guy", and I never saw what business of the nation it was that the President got a blowjob in the oval office. In 2000 when I was in an American High School, I had an excellent English teacher, [Mrs. Pacino] who themed our course on Libertarian Literature. In her class I was introduced to Vonnegut (I still shed an imaginary tear for the guy). Vonnegut was a socialist, but he wrote the anti-egalitarian satire Harrison Bergeron. We read short stories about corporal punishment, corrupt schools, and transcending stereotypes. We also read the dystopian novels Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. 2000, the turn of the millennium was an election year. It also marked the beginning of things going to shit for America. My teacher was Pro-Bush, because she was all for limited government which is what Bush, that societal virus, that dimwit, that two-bit Texan, that doubletalking fucktard was all about in his election. I admit, I liked the idea of less government and a less controlled state. Yet, I didn't like Bush. I still didn't align myself with a political party. I used to say he's a "scary guy" who would want to go around the world picking fights and starting wars to try and impress his daddy. Who'd think I'd ever be right about anything?
Teachers of mine have either really hated me or really loved me, and [Mrs. Pacino] was one of the ones who fell into the latter. She was a great lady (not because she loved me, honest!) but I bet now she must have shoved that Bush 2000 pin right through her heart. Her whole class was all about limited government, anti-censorship, privacy, freedom of thought, individuality, and all that libertarian jazz. Yet the man she voted for and whose name she wore on her chest turned out to be a fascist of the worst kind, choking the juice out of America and not to mention the world. Him and his camarilla headed by puppet master Dick Cheney. He proposed the Patriot Act, having people snitch on each other if they're being possibly "unpatriotic". Giving authorities the right to listen in on your phone calls and see what you're checking out from the library. I mean, to be fair, if I had my phone calls listened in on, they would only be treated to a load of nonsense, but it's my right to not want third parties listening in on me as I give a friend advice on getting rid of a bad case of crabs.
He said he was a "uniter, not a divider" yet America now seems more divided than ever. Though, to his credit, he has united Americans in his own disapproval. His approval rating is around 22%. I'm sure he hasn't scored that low since his college days.
He's a compassionate conservative who handled 9/11 like a drunken first grader, and couldn't even locate Louisiana on the map during urricane Katrina.
And most of all, I thought Republicans were supposed to like money, but now America's facing a major recession. Their economy's gone to shit. Everybody's going broke except for oil barons. And people have to think, he comes from a family which has its roots in the oil business. He gets elected, and the price of oil skyrockets. Coincidence? I think not. Now their dollar's in the stinker. That one affects me on a mundane level because now that their dollar is pretty much leveled with the Canadian Dollar I get an onslaught of half educated customers coming into my store to upbraid me and my coworkers about US/Canadian prices. Also, now that their dollar sucks, I won't be getting as much for my books the fine day my royalty cheques come in. I'm a capitalist pig, I'll admit it, so I'm more than pissed off about their economy falling since I depend on theirs more than I depend on the Canadian economy. Prime reason, I have a strong interest in ideas, and intellectual property is not Canada's richest resource.
People put him in office twice... TWICE! Because he's a gristle-head just like most Americans. He's the guy they could have a beer with as opposed to the eggheads he was up against in 2000 and 2004. Let's be frank, macho assholes are more fun to be around than pragmatic eggheads. Cold hard facts are normally not what people want. People want to have a good time. Action movies with tenuous plots and lots of explosions and CGI do much better than documentaries or movies with thought provoking stories. And George Dubya, the party boy Texas cowboy is more of the kind of guy Tom Nobody can relate to. I have friends who are gristle-heads and I admit, they're fun to be around... in small doses. But more things can be accomplished with the eggheads, the pragmatists, the responsible people.
Though, if I had it my way, I'd make it so that stupid people wouldn't be able to vote. In order to vote, people should be given tests each term where they answer questions regarding policy. They would be asked questions about the ideologies of political parties, chiefly the ones they're registering for.
I've heard people say they want to vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. So what, though? So was Maggie Thatcher, and look how kind and maternal she was. If a vagina equipped people with finer deductive judgment abilities, more women would've known to not sleep with dumb Joe schmoes off the street and have their babies. And more recently, it has become obvious that during the democratic primaries, she's become the favourite amongst "White working class voters with no education" especially ones who live in "rural areas". In other words, she's secured the redneck vote. She seems damn proud of it too, she as much as said in interviews. Good for you, Hillary! You know how to appease to one of the most repugnant of constituencies! I mean I'm sure there is a niche of people of that demographic who are actually half decent, but, to do some Jeff Foxworthy shtick: "If you're white, working class, live in a rural area, cling to guns and religion, and think Barack Obama's an African sleeper cell double agent related to Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden... you might be a redneck." I don't think Hillary herself is a redneck, even though she sure as hell plays the redneck game to court their votes. She even goes as far as trying (to borrow a line from The Wasp Factory) to "out-man those around [her]". Talking about shooting guns with her dad and immediately "obliterating" Iran. She tries to paint her democratic opponent Obama as a pansy because he wants to be diplomatic. She relentlessly throws dirt at a candidate who's in her own party. And one of her endorsers went as far as to claim that she has "testicular fortitude". A label that she was happy to accept. Having macho assholes in the office is what got us into this mess. If I can go off on a tangent, I have to say, I never got the concept of feminazism when it equates women acting like they're as big of dicks as some of the most reprehensible men can be. What progress. And to top it off, she'll pull all that macho bullshit, but then show that she can cry like a dear matriarch.
I don't really hate her I guess. But I'm not the most fond of her. She voted for the Iraq war and only came out against it later when she figured she would need a platform. I don't know how good her judgment is just for that. And I don't trust her motives. I will at least give it to her that as she has come to the realization that her campaign clock is ticking and ticking pretty damn loud, she's starting to show signs of relent. I just hope she doesn't get picked as VP though, she'll probably try to poison Barack's tea, or something.
And yes, I admit have some "bitterness" towards her because I am a self confessed Obama supporter. 
I like Barack Obama. I don't even know why. I'm not really an Obamaniac, but I like what he stands for. Though the fact that there are Obamaniacs says a lot. For a change, he's a candidate that people who support him actually like. For a while, it's only been that people would vote for the candidate who wasn't "the other guy". I'm sure that McCain voters will mostly be voting for him because he's the Republican, or because he's not Barack Obama.
Reasons I'm for the guy are: I like some of his approaches to foreign policy; ending the war in Iraq as soon as possible, and actually trying to be more diplomatic with "enemies". He seems good on social liberties, though, of course, he will be raising taxes and possibly instituting more government funded programs, and he supports things like affirmative action which is a menacing form of egalitarianism, and something which sacrifices the legitimacy of people who do work hard to get where they're going. But I've bought into his buzzwords of "change" and "hope". Also, while he is African American, or at least 50% African American, he does very little to make an issue of it. Which is refreshing. The race card is played out. Platform-wise he's a close to Billary McClinton, but at least he's not as much of a special interest whore. And I think he'll stick more to his word over Hillary Clinton, the master panderer. Also, when he is wrong about things, he doesn't turn on the spin machine as much as Hillary does. Of course he's full of shit about some things. In almost any job, you have to be full of shit to a certain degree. Lying is an essential behaviour of survival, like eating and fucking. I'm full of shit in my day job. If I could be honest, I would have given loads of customer lip, constantly saying, "The customer his seldom right!" and I would insult the loads of shlock and hokum they bring up to the counter. And in writing, I'm almost 100% full of shit as I am doing nothing but making things up from page to page. It's only when things cross the lines of ethics and venture to the territory of deceit where things go wrong.
Some of his bullshit came back to bite him in the ass with the Reverend Wright imbroglio. I think he's an atheist or agnostic, first of all. I have no evidence, only a hunch. Just the fact that his dad was a Muslim turned atheist, and his mother was an agnostic. He's all for separation of church and state, and at least acknowledges atheists and "nonbelievers" as people unlike daddy Bush who said he doesn't think atheists should be considered Americans. Finally, when asked of his faith, all he said was, "I'm a member of Trinity United Church." Not a Christian. Hell, I'm still technically a member of [Mount Hopeful] Seventh-Day Adventist church even though I don't believe in any of that, and haven't been there in years. Being a member of something is different from believing in it. But it's only a hunch. People have made all kinds of claims about him based on hunches, lunacy, or downright malice, and I won't dignify them by repeating them. I think that the reason he found membership in a prominent black church was as a means of political expediency. Let's face it, most people in America are of religious faith, and the faith most people normally are of is Christian. So I'm guessing that he joined the church to kill 2 birds with one stone; to show religious membership, and for street credentials with the black community so that he wouldn't seem out of touch. I don't blame him for that, no harm is done in feigning religious faith. Yet, Vonnegut comes to mind again. In his novel Mother Night, there's a line "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." A lot of people are now going to associate him with the ridiculous thoughts of his racist, antisemitic, and downright loony megalomaniac of a pastor. It will haunt him come fall when he's up against the GOP, and possibly his 2012 election should he win this one.
Yet if I were an American Citizen, even though I do have a soft spot for Barack Obama, and know and "hope" that at the end of the day, he's more than likely going to win the presidency, I'd have to vote for the nominee of the Libertarian party which is looking most like Wayne Root. though Bob Barr seems like a viable candidate. However, I'm not sure how Libertarian it is to try and have a man impeached because he was getting oral in the Oval Office.
I really liked Ron Paul who is a Libertarian running as a Republican. Sort of how Hillary is a Republican running under the guise of a Democrat. Ron Paul comes across as a bit of a kook, and I don't doubt that I do too. So of course, a lot of his views coalesce with mine. He wanted less taxes, more civil liberties, doing away with stupid government sanctioned organizations (the MPAA and FCC would definitely be in there), ending the war in Iraq, and having a less imperialistic/less interventionist foreign policy.
But John McCain, a man whose name always makes me think about that Canadian brand of tacky heatable eatables (which I am known to eat more often than not) won the GOP nomination. He's lost his mind. He's beaten and worn out. In 2000, I liked him when he was the Republican candidate against George Dubya. I think he's a good man, and a war hero who's been through some tough shit. If he won the nomination back in 2000 and went on to win the election, I don't think America would have been in the mess that it's in now. But now, he's put in a tight spot. He can do nothing but pander if he wants to win this election. But now, he wants to continue the war, carry out Dubya's policies, and his so-called differences from his Republican predecessor are dubious. His views on the economy are embarrassing. I guess they would be when he gets to live off of the wealth of his young(er) trophy wife. He hasn't really been getting attacked much because of the big (but waning) competition between Obama and Clinton. A lot of people, especially in Canada seem to genuinely think or have at least thought that the entire election was exclusively between Obama and Clinton and that other people were like third party runners. More people are interested in those prospects than the old war vet. Once the spotlight is on him, his blemishes will start to show. He's got his share of dirt which is pretty much being ignored only because of the sensationalism of the Obama/Clinton battle. I'm not very worried about him at the moment. Hel'l probably keel over before it reaches November, anyway, and people will be voting presumably for Romney and his Magic Mormon underwear or maybe it'll be Cunnilingus Rice who can be the Republicans' answer to the titillating idea of a black and a female running for office; she's both in one neoconservative package. Throw in the fact that she may or may not be a closeted homosexual, and the Republican Party suddenly has the facade of being the more progressive half of the party of one since the days of when Lincoln freed the slaves and a group of democrats started the KKK.
In America, and maybe even in my country, they should hold a referendum. One where the only way people can vote is by proving they know what they're voting for. It would mean when people register to vote they would have to understand the voting process. There should also be larger attention given to the other political parties. And most of all, for god's sake, I hope campaigning will one day stop being the Hollywood farce it is nowadays in America. I find it entertaining, yet ridiculous at the same time. I mean, at the end of the day, maybe that has a lot to do with why I gravitate more towards their political news than Canadian political news which is so remote.
I admit, last year when I voted, I didn't know much about the parties I was given choices to vote for, the only reason I voted is because people who I see who don't vote are usually just ignorant slackers. So I voted, but I submitted a spoiled ballot. Then there are people who don't vote are the whacked out conspiracy nuts. I mean, I'll be the first to admit, most of my views are far from ordinary. But if you hear what some people have to say, or if you dare to search the underbellies of the internet, you'll find some startling theories. My favourite has to be the reptilian agenda. My niece's mother is religiously invested in that lunacy. Every time I see her, she has a new conspiracy theory to share. She and my brother were both victims of the [Lunatarian Religio-philosophico-politico Sect] which had some kooky ideas. That religion was a pastiche of many religions, new age philosophies, conspiracy theories and mysticism. Somebody whose ideas the cult leader adapted from was David Icke whose school of thought professes, "the more outlandish the claim, the truer it is!" When I asked her what her thoughts were, she said she doesn't even bother watching the news because it's already preset for Hillary Clinton the Reptilian overlord to win. And when she wins she's going to initiate the new world order, one where people are microchipped, and there will be robot police patrolling every corner of the streets. The democratic nomination is slipping from beneath her feet more and more every day, but I won't get ahead of myself and say there's no chance in hell that she can win the nomination still. But I doubt my conspiracy nut ex-sister in law knows that. I would like to see where America gets the money to fund such programs, unless she's implying the reptilians are actually the Chinese who are currently picking up America's massive tab. I hope she doesn't think that. I'll leave her to not voting, uninformed people shouldn't vote. Being a Libertarian, I am highly skeptical of big government. What convinces me more than anything that the earth hasn't been hijacked by reptilians? Because most governments are inept! People in general are dufuses and power whores. If you put them in power, these features are magnified. It's the same the same thing that happens when you see idiots getting instantly rich, they do things like buy spinning rims for their cars, and TV screens in their toilet bowls and snort coke all day. They become overwhelmed and do things just because they can. This war was nothing but a cock flexing done exercise by a bunch of indifferent chicken hawks and avaricious oil barons.
Oh, one more law I would make: If you're in my generation (18-35) and you support this ridiculous war, or if you vote in support of the war, and you're fit to join the army, then you should be automatically drafted upon dropping your ballet. There's no reason as to why you shouldn't be out there risking your life if you're willing to have other people your age do so. And if you're not in good enough shape, then you should donate yourself to an alternative fuel plant. That would solve America's fuel problem, fix the overpopulation problem, and also help boost its economy! Soylent Fuel! Oh, and it would also help improve the gene pool. Win win win!
See everyone in hell!
