Rhinocrisy

It’s nice having ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist allies, sometimes. The best anecdote I have: some pro-Palestinian types showed up to protest at an Israel Day celebration in Boston one time. The cops were also in attendance, to prevent the hostile crowds from erupting into violence. Some healthy shouting and chanting ensued, and things were going full-tilt when a bus pulled up near the anti-Zionist crowd. A whole troop of ultra-orthodox Jews filed out. Alarm bells are already going off in the cops’ heads. A friend of mine, a prominent Palestinian activist in the area, begins approaching the lead member of the group. The cops now know claret is imminent, but they’re too far away to stop anything from happening. So they can only watch in horror as the two meet …and embrace each other like brothers. “Wha-wha-wha??!?” say the cops. Priceless.

But never mind that. Attending a conference on the Holocaust in Iran, put together by Ahmadinejad, populated by Holocaust-deniers like Fourisson and David Duke, is simply inexcusable, no matter how strong your anti-Zionist politics.

Following a post on Sepia Mutiny about those six imams who got kicked off a U.S. Airways flight, I did some reading around. The subject was briefly covered in a few shoddy press releases, skimpy on the details, and then wildly overblown for a few weeks by right-wing blogs. So far I have learned:

• The imams were doing a “security test” to look for weak points in the airline’s protocol.
• Some of them requested seat-belt extensions, which “research” by Greg Lang has revealed is “one heck of a weapon”.^*
• They seated themselves according to the layout favored by the 9/11 hijackers.
• They deliberately orchestrated this stunt in order to make money/raise a kerfuffle/make it easier for future terrorists to overwhelm our security.

Amy Goodman seems to be the only person who got the imams’ story, which, not surprisingly, is completely innocuous.

A while ago I read a really nice Fake Moon Landing web-site, which simultaneously argued from two different (absurd) positions - the moon landing was fake, done in a studio, etc., but at the same time the astronauts were clearly being dogged by aliens. Similar site here. This sort of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is infuriating, to say the least. Kind of makes you jealous of Superman, who at least gets to tangle with a smart opponent.

---

^* This really deserves no comment, but let me just point out that, given the incredible range of dangerous items one can take onto an airplane, including a near-limitless number of potential edged weapons, a seat belt extender is perhaps the stupidest fucking choice you could make.

I’ve desperately been in need of a laugh, and this column by Jonathan Chait in the LA Times gave it to me! The article is titled “Bring Back Saddam Hussein”, with the tag: “Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution?”

I find this astoundingly funny. What can we do with it? Let’s try our best:

• “Euthanizing cancer patients may help reduce our bloated health-care budget. Have a better solution?”
• “Exterminating the Kulaks might allow me to get some sleep at night. Have a better solution?”
• “Keying my boss’s car may compensate in some small way for my years of useless busywork in this dead-end corporate job. Have a better solution?”
• “Punching that fucking rhinoceros in the jaw may make him stop charging our car. Have a better solution?”
• “Bubble gum might be just the thing to stop up the six-foot long tear in our silk hot-air balloon. Have a better solution?”
• “Stapling my car-keys directly to my wrist may prevent me from misplacing them so often. Have a better solution?”
• “Wearing these spandex shorts might get that girl to notice how big my johnson is. Have a better solution?”
• “Opening the pressurized door above the wing might allow some fresh air into this stuffy airplane cabin. Have a better solution?”

I could do this all day.

Every Christmas, hotheaded demagogues of the American right wing howl their outrage over a purported War on Christmas. Try as we might, those of us in the reality-based community haven’t yet managed to laugh them off the public stage.

Meanwhile, many of these same theocrats have declared war on one of the two truly American holidays. While they still tolerate Thanksgiving (perhaps because they think they can turn it into a Christian allegory, Landover Baptist notwithstanding), they have lost their patience for Halloween. At the school where my partner works, teachers sent home permission slips to find out whether parents would let their students take part in Halloween activities, including demon-worshipping activities such as costume-making. Many of the parents refused to give permission. Another associate of mine plays music at a farm where kids go to pick pumpkins and take hayrides. One school that sent a group in the past week instructed him not to play any Halloween music.

Of course it’s not just the hard right that has decided that Halloween has gone too far. The city of San Francisco just posted this gloomy buzzkill of a website to discourage revelers from ravaging the charming Castro neighborhood. Or, for that matter, from coming and having a jolly good time. Ostensibly, we can expect that on Tuesday night, the only people who will show up in the Castro will be those prone to disobeying instructions or without Internet access — just the demographic they were looking for, I’m sure.

What all of this ignores is that Halloween is the closest we have in the U.S. to a glimpse of our collective repressions, our collective id. It is arguable the most important holiday of the year, up there with Thanksgiving as a secular celebration and more important than Thanksgiving in that it provides an annual outlet for whatever urges have built up and gone unexpressed. It is a leading indicator of the culture.

For years, gay and transgender culture was most visible on Halloween. Today, with homosexuality barely raising eyebrows and trans-men and trans-women showing up in broader and broader parts of the culture, we see Halloween becoming a celebration of hypersexualization, especially of women and girls but also of men and boys. I would be interested to hear from others what you think this reveals — I think it might relate to the ever-widening reach of pornography clashing with our continually prudish sexual norms.

It is also one of the few times people feel comfortable showing how they really feel about, their political leaders — there are plenty of bloody George Bushes to go around this year, and former New York City mayor Ed Koch used to march in his city’s Halloween parade asking attendees his signature line, “How am I doin?” But he was concealed in a costume that allowed people to say what they really felt. The costume: An Ed Koch mask.
This sort of periodic airing of the id goes back to Hawthorne, who traced it back to Puritan times.

The War on Halloween, of course, like the War on Christmas, is mostly in the heads of those of us worrywarts who wish our favorite holiday could pass unmolested, which might in turn imply that the holiday had lost its power — Christmas had become secularized, losing its power as a religious ceremony, or Halloween had lost its power to shock.

And like the War on Christmas, every word written complaining of the War on Halloween is a more valuable word left unwritten to express dismay at much less figurative, more awful wars over which I might have more control. (Gee, a military assault on a 5-month insurrection in a city that is as close to me as Columbus, Ohio, an assault justified by the death of an Indymedia documentarian of all people. Please tell me why this isn’t foremost in my mind. Please tell me why I care about Halloween more than about a hot war close to home, fought with weapons that I paid for with my taxes. Perhaps I am idiot.

bang.^*

Late update: N. Korea appears to have flunked its test. Maybe less Song of Experience, more the last lines of The Hollow Men. Or, as the news networks delighted in reminding us today, like this.

---

^*I remember when George Bush was elected and I thought, `well, if we can just drift through the next four years without any major crises, how much harm can he do?’

OMG i hav 2 tell u abt this thing i found out its a nu way to talk!!! seems like every 1 on da internet is doing it lol lmao. actually u no it is not ez it is like a dialect even! altho i havnt dun any kindof linguistic analises(sp??) so i dunno if its rely tru… probably its just a pidgin(?). ne way wut do u think??? i used 2 thnk since kidz were online all day they wud b reeding more n also riting bt seems like they dont lmao!!! i mean did u eva see ne1’s my space page no 4 real they are so gay i mean no 1 can spell its like they neva red ne books or ne thing. makes me sad o well cud just be im old and its like youth culture?? but then y is it so dumb?? cud b now ne 1 can rite online even if u r an idiot so we get more idiots riting?? i dont think thats it i think it is anti-intelectualism cuz if u dont spell rite and form complete sentences no 1 will think u r a nerd lol!!! 2 bad u wud think ppl wud want 2 b smarter n rite gud bt seems like frivolity is da rule 2day. goddamn i hope wen i hav kids they can rite gud cuz i wud be ashamed if they rote like an illiterate person… yo where is da pride??? ^_^ ne way l8rz much luv!!!!

aside from everyone?

Prize quote: “Although countries have talked about encrypting data that’s stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.” Good thing the countries of the world don’t want their borders to have any complicated infrastructure. That would have made it much harder for me to sell my passport next time I needed money while traveling. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

Plenty of people fear that the leaders of the U.S. are fired by apocalyptic fantasies.

And according to a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans think the events portrayed in Revelation will happen; 17% think the events will take place within their lifetimes.

I pity the fools.

They don’t realize that the Rapture took place on September 4, 2005. I was burrowing across the country with my pal in a car. We saw first one vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road, with belongings but no person inside. Then another. A few miles later, yet another.

There it was — these folks were Raptured up. I mean, all told, it’s not like there were going to be very many taken into the Kingdom. 144,000 — 12,000 from each of the tribes. Goodbye to them. I wonder if they’ve found what they’re looking for.

Now as for the rest of y’all, quit your hopeless, unrequited carping at the toenails of your almighty and get down with your bad selves. We have Sodoming and Gomorrahing to do.

Not content with making a building that looks like the headquarters for Team Depeche Mode, the planners behind the new World Trade Center-replacement continue to insist on calling the building the “Freedom Tower”.

Now, one must give them credit: they had the good sense to trash their previous design, which might have given unsuspecting tourists the mistaken impression that the city had suffered an abortive attack by some sort of giant robot, one of whose limbs (complete with trapezoidal metallic faux-biceps and pulverizing laser-cannon attachment) had been severed and left behind.

However, the new design really isn’t THAT much better, and it still features the pulverizing laser-cannon attachment, along with pulverizing laser. I was a fan of the short-lived ghostly light sculpture (”Tribute in Light”) put up a few years back to mark Ground Zero. This laser-cannon attachment, though, doesn’t pull it off nearly as well and just ends up looking hokey.

Hokey is, I have to conclude, what they’re going for; why else would they have dubbed it the “Freedom Tower”? My god, can you imagine the embarassment of its inhabitants describing their place of employment?

ROGER: I work in the Freedom Tower.

BELINDA: I’m sorry, where?

ROGER: The Freedom Tower.

[BELINDA laughs explosively, sending a piece of pimento flying from her mouth onto ROGER’s tie.]

BELINDA: Oh, I’m sorry… hmmm… Freedom Tower! (Giggles.)

And moreover I fear the word “Freedom” is starting to suffer from that phenomenon of overuse, where you repeat a word so many times that it begins to feel rubbery and unfamiliar, as if part of your brain has become fatigued and refuses to acknowledge its meaning anymore. And the men who are fond of overapplying it so clearly misapprehend that meaning that I’m starting to despise the word itself. Its constant application is meant to reassure us of some great Value, no doubt, but as the word erodes I’m finding that the Value itself is becoming increasingly slippery, until, perhaps, I will cynically doubt whether it exists at all, whether it was ever anything other than the blubbery syllable floating off the lips of disgusting demagogues.

Wow! Crooked Timber points the way to this story, on Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen’s bill to prevent schools from using public funds to buy books about homosexuality, or even by homosexual authors!

This must be a really embarassing time to be a Republican. But me, I’m hoping that these paltry sorts of culture wars (Mr. Allen is surely condemned to the rubbish-heap of endless ridicule) will escalate into la vraie chose. If I play things right, I could end up being burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno! If I’m really bad, they may even nail my tongue to my jaw so I can’t speak poisonous lies!