In spite of the fact that I've spent as much time concocting overwrought blog droppings over the past three months as I have sucking on a crack pipe, the idea of sitting out the home stretch of the Great Rube Uprising of 2010 is kind of unfathomable. Yes, it's been difficult to stay away this long whilst the left hurled endless trial balloons of fail in their desperation to dissolve the population and create a new one. But when you're busy, lazy and, well, aware that there were more bodies in Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer than there ever are at your blog at any moment, it seems more important to bookmark everything that irritates or amuses you than to endeavor to breathlessly post about them. In sum, those bookmarks create a rather vivid collage of the folly that is leftism, but when you're standing at the intersection of laziness and ambition, every item looks like a building block for a weighty treatise or unified theory of leftards. Why suffer the indignity of routinely playing small ball when you can do nothing instead?
What's interesting is that like stagnant water draws disease-carrying insects, so too can a blog untended attract the left. In the Spring I wrote a post about race with a deliberately provocative headline and in the ensuing months of inactivity here, it has consistently received hits like no other. There are limits to what one can extrapolate from site statistics, but when the visits are overwhelmingly coming from the insular environs of leftlandia, it's pretty obvious you have pinkos desperately probing the bowels of the internet for meme support. Meme first, evidence later, - even if one has to manufacture it. I don't remember when that wasn't the left's motto. And as I noted in an update to the post a few days ago, I'm sure it must have been a disappointment to the lot of poor little leftists that the contents of my obscure little blog were in no way useful to their cause.
The Democrats got a new logo in my absence. They're never wrong, it's always the message which needs recalibrating. And I'll be damned if they didn't nail it with a blue block "D" in a circle with a thick blue frame. A jackass had obvious limitations, but a "D" can mean so gosh darn many things. I'm partial to Denouement, whereby Barney Frank gets his pecker cut off by one of Sean Bielat's robots and Nancy Pelosi packs his greasy knob in her purse for those cold, gray, lonely nights when she no longer has a gavel to rock herself with while weeping by the fire. Unfortunately for the fadwhores of teh left, the letter affords one boundless opportunities for truthy self-expression. And I'm about nothing if not that.
I've been way too busy with work to do any blogging lately. It's easy enough to avoid inspiration/temptation to post by shutting out the news for a spell, but real life can still intervene in the form of - in this instance - being subjected to a couple of progressive twerps loudly discussing politics on the subway. I don't suppose I really need to recreate their discussion here since there's more variety rolling along on the conveyor belt at a butt plug factory than there will ever be in the sentiments expressed by proggies. This particular conversation took about thirty seconds to devolve into a diatribe about the South.
Yes, in a city with a 38% high school graduation rate - in a subway car full of the kind of uneducated, shabbily-dressed people who are rounded up each election day to pull the lever for the Democrats who've been selected for them - these beta male sheep naturally felt no compunctions about loudly slandering an entire region of the country as being evil and stupid and blaming them for the current woes of Chocolate Jesus and the Democrats.
I don't feel like offering the South's defense, but I always feel dirty when confronted with New Yorkers caught up in mindless and irony-free bouts of provincialism. So, uh, I'm hereby encouraging a half-assed reverse boycott of the insular douchebags who scurry about Manhattan like rats. Buy some uniquely Southern shit.
Southern Culture On The Skids is one of the most fun live bands ever. They revel in their hillbillyness while plowing through songs with a melange of influences, and even though their music is as much a playful parody of the South as it is an homage, they've long transcended the label of novelty act by virtue of being so fucking awesome.
With a great selection of hand-printed, whimsical art-like posters celebrating Southern culture, Yeehaw is a must for anyone with an empty wallet and walls that need them some pictures. Just ignore the dopey Obama sign they made in '08 and anyone with an affection for country, the blues or assorted other musics of the South is bound to find a few winners for their walls.
To try Aunt Ruby's Peanuts for the first time is to want to find your way to Planter's HQ and punch Mister Peanut in the junk for having wasted your time all these years. I had no idea that every roasted peanut I'd ever had in my life sucked so hard until I experienced the crunchy goodness of these little bastards.
Bread pudding never sounded particularly appetizing to me. Bread? Who gives a shit. Pudding? Meh. Then my brother went on a grotesque shopping orgy at some online Cajun food retailer and I subsequently found myself confronted with a bowl of Blue Magnolia Pumpkin Spice Bread Pudding. They have other flavors, but I wouldn't know what they taste like because the pumpkin is so over the top in deliciousness that I see no reason for my eyes to wander. Just add some raisins, follow the sauce recipe on the package and you've got yourself a crazy good dessert that even an idiot could put together.
And finally, there's Blenheim Ginger Ale. Pretty hard, if not impossible, to find outside of the South, but there are plenty of sites where one can order it online. It's definitely not ginger ale for pussies, and popping open a cold one expecting refreshment on a hot summer day after going for a long run is likely to make your head explode. It's strong stuff and leaves a nice burn in the back of your throat. But as a mixer for booze - especially bourbon - the stuff has no equals that I know of.
So, that's it. This is a little afield of what I typically blog about. But "Fuck you very much" dweeby Manhattanites who can't let me focus on the work that pays the bills because you can't even take a subway ride without pulling the strings behind each other's backs and spouting your pre-programmed brain vomit.
"...Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about "Your country's never been invaded." ... "You don't know the horror, the suffering. You think war is..."
I snapped. "A John Wayne movie," I said. "That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie - with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You're right. And let me tell you who the bad guys are.
They're us. WE BE BAD.
"We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock-market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France, Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars.
We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in the Cap d'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.
"You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get out hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fcuk longer, and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in New York than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and siht them out before lunch."
Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile.
God, don't these people have dentists?"
That pretty much sums up my patriotism. Quiet most of the time. More content spending holidays like the fourth getting drunk at a party on my buddy's roof than running around with a flag and musing on what the day means. He does have the best view of the fireworks in all of Manhattan, after all, and when they go off they look like they're coming right at you. It's even better if you're baked. So not much contemplation of the founders goes on. But nothing stirs me out of my soft and privileged complacency like some Eurotwat or beta male lefty badmouthing America. Then, they'll experience a different kind of fireworks going off in their face.
Every time Obama infuses a speech or comment with a dose of Americana he looks like he's enduring some odd mixture of an out of body experience and the physical strain of opening a pickle jar. He's like watching a bad "B" movie full of no-names where everything seems a little off until someone says "get oot of here" and you realize that rather than having been made by aliens it's just a dopey Canadian flick.
The left has certainly endeavored to destroy Palin by subjecting her cultural differences to ridicule, but most Americans can recognize the fundamental American-ness of her Alaskan lifestyle. It's just awash in regional quirks. Obama, the product of a leftist bubble, is not an American at all even if the media practices a variant of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to his fundamental discomfort in his own country. He is, so to speak, the tip of the spear in the left's no longer glacial pace of carving out an entirely separate culture than the rest of us.
I wouldn't waste one second of my time on this did it not so perfectly dovetail into the preceding comments on Senator Byrd. Dwight Armstrong, one of four creeps who bombed a building - killing a physicist and wounding several others - on the campus of the University of Wisconsin finally kicked the bucket this week. The Washington Post's obituary headline simply characterized him as a "Vietnam War protester." The New York Times obituary headline at least characterized him as someone "who bombed a college building in 1970" and opened the piece by characterizing it as "a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism." I like the way domestic terrorism is couched in qualifying terms. The Times then devotes much of the obit to rationalizing Armstrong and his cohort's behavior in light of the era.
So, did the "protest" go "horribly wrong" because it resulted in death and injury unlike when Armstrong and his brother previously attempted to bomb a government facility from an airplane? One must assume so - Bernardine Dohrn says "Hi" from the campus of Northwestern! Absent that untidy fact even his subsequent imprisonment for running a meth lab would likely not have precluded him from joining the throngs of violent ex-hippies making money on the moonbat lecture circuit. What a shame his short career in activism was marred by a dead guy.
But don't hold your breath expecting similar mainstream media treatment for a nut who, say, blows up an abortion clinic. The rationalizing power of the memory hole has room for only one ideology.
The most prominent living member of the Democrat Party's former intimidation and enforcement arm is dead. Robert Byrd's name will live on in the umpteen billion landmarks to his humility which have been erected in West Virginia, but his past has long been buried or downplayed by a party whose sole convictions are the accumulation of power and affirmations of their superior virtue.
But hey, if a party man like segregationist Jimmy Carter can assure his constituents that the new white school won't be built where they'll have to cross paths with the black kids walking to their school and one day rise to the status of revered elder statesman, then why not Byrd? It's not like he urged violent revolution and blew shit up like a certain professor and sought after left wing speaker friend of the president's. History is for bludgeoning other people. The left is all about pretending inconvenient things never happened. There's a narrative to protect, after all.
Poor Al Gore. One day you're running for president and seeking advice from Team Castration on how to not come across as a pussy, the next day it looks like the walls are caving in because you cast aside your only evident virtue and dragged your manmeat on board the short bus to Loopyville. The conspiracy-minded might even sense that this all comes to light by way of a cold breeze from Chicago - even a paunchy prize-winner isn't untouchable after dissing The Won, after all.
I couldn't care less if the Goracle is putting his wooden unit in Tipper Jesus or a toothless crack whore, but the mere idea of dining on Larry David's leftovers calls for 50 freakin' gallons of brain bleach. Immediately. The only thing pink in Laurie David is her political sentiments.
The woman later contacted police in January 2009 and gave a statement, saying she was called to Gore's hotel room at around 10:30 p.m. on October 24, 2006 to provide a massage. While doing requested work on his abdominals, the woman claims Gore pushed her hand to his groin area and later tried to have sex with her.
In her statement to police, the alleged victim calls Gore 'a crazed sex poodle,' She says she was intimidated by his 'rotund' shape, and that he had a 'violent temper, dictatorial, commanding attitude.'
Even if it's pure fiction this is still a masterwork of hilarity. Keep doing your thing dawg [poodle]. The women of the world must not be denied your manhood even if you must force it on them, so share your flop sweat and your bloated, rippling carcass wherever your little jet takes you. Hump some wind turbines and other inanimate objects as well. Whatever distracts you from your work as an eco-huckster is mighty fine with me.
One doesn't anticipate that a simple act like seeking out the trailer for Cory McAbee's demented and brilliant low-budget musical space western The American Astronaut will lead to riotous laughter at the expense of an insular, dimwitted left-wing Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State. But such are the blessings of our interconnected age.
McAbee is rather unique in that his offbeat film work and his band The Billy Nayer Show are so in synch that their sensibilities make it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Weird scarcely begins to characterize his ouevre, but to my way of thinking it has too much of a soul to ever feel like the work is straying into gratuitously oddball territory. You either embrace his alternate universe or you don't.
So, as one who happily embraces McAbeeland, what am I to make of it when my little search for The American Astronaut trailer also yields the funniest conservative rock and roll song ever?
My initial reaction to the song was as if someone had handed me a magical elixir of meat, beer, gold and Jessica Biel's naked body. I felt like a sailor coming into port and learning that today is "Free Hooker Friday." What else can compare to a song which inspires chuckles of recognition and wingnut wood with every verse?
But wait. No one makes a fool out of a too Waspy by half Irish Catholic with a Jewish-sounding fake internet name without risking the dirt nap from my roving squadron of attack bats. Before I gleefully share the song with the wingersphere, I thought, Does it mean what I think it means?
I pondered this for a bit. I thought about the list of conservative rock songs John J. Miller of National Review had compiled a ways back. That had been sort of a variation on a standard dorky conservative parlor game. Something done in fun, that we all know only matters in the way that George Washington Carver's presence in grade school history texts does. A little psychic gratification in a medium that matters to us on a personal level, yet more often than not expresses political sentiments we're inclined to disagree with.
Peanut butter didn't change the world any more than a smattering of lyrics with conservative sentiments changes the essential nature of rock - or even the politics of a particular artist. Alienation, angst, base emotionalism and adolescence are both the cornerstones of rock and of leftism itself. Conservative sentiments are bound to slip out on an intermittent basis in rock if for no other reason than some of the accumulated wisdom of a civilization is apt to reach shore even on a wave of adolescent vomit. After all, the history of rock and roll leans far more heavily on the insights of dropouts than it does scrunts who spent four years being indoctrinated beyond their intellectual competence at Oberlin College. Dogmatic leftism is a learned pattern of thought, after all, and exponents are its unwittingly servile monkeys.
The reason for even a momentary struggle with this song's meaning was that it's hard to imagine McAbee and his bandmates being right of center. Yet, my respect for his oddball craftsmanship is put to the test by how bad the song is should the perspective be anything else. Thus the conundrum. The song is hilarious on a conservative's terms. It's a failure as irony because the critique of the (California in particular) left which informs it is borne of genuine insights as opposed to anything that would enable it to successfully parody a conservative perspective. In a process which resolved itself in less time than it took for me to write about it here, I netted out at who gives a fuck? I think the song is great. Funny. And as a conservative I enjoyed it immensely.
What started as an effort to grab a movie trailer would have simply evolved into the kind of short post I prefer - featuring a funny rock video that I knew wingnuts would get a kick out of. Easy Peasy lemon squeezy. But what I hadn't anticipated was that in scanning National Review for John J. Miller's original piece I'd discover that one of the aforementioned servile monkeys - Michael T. Spencer - had just flung twenty pages worth of primate excrement in the Journal of Popular Culture on the subject of conservative expropriation of popular music. In the simian vernacular of academia, that means conservatives stand accused of “investing meaning in rock music through a dialectical process of negotiated use.” Miller's article was the focal point in this effort.
It's rather dispiriting that academia has devolved into such petty ideological short-bus-esoterica masquerading as scholarship, but the paper is awash in unintentional humor. Spencer cites comments on random left-wing blogs as authoritative and posts on right-wing ones to bolster his convoluted argument. SCIENCE! He misspells "Barak" Obama. He Doesn't know that the Georgia Satellites were a rock band. He butchers the timeline of the first Gulf War, thus rendering idiotic his criticism of Miller's suggested impetus for the lyrics in a particular Metallica song. But beyond things like that and the mountain of naked assertions which share this lumpy bed, the ultimate absurdity here is in the premise itself.
Does this ramen noodle gorging grad school chimp see no irony in his critique in light of the masturbatory zeal with which his peers attach significance to vapor trails in reinterpreting all manner of artistic expression? He mocks his own profession while typifying it. And in the bargain he accuses right wingers of failing to understand irony. It's like rain on your wedding day, Michael.
Miller made fast work of undressing him. It is worth reading in full, as is the Journal of Popular Culture submission itself.
When I was a kid Dennis Hopper was little more than a train wreck fading into obscurity. But even that is projecting a boomer perspective on it, as I'm sure I'm not alone among GenXers in having not given the guy any thought at all.
But then 1986 happened. Hollywood's no stranger to second acts, but River's Edge, Blue Velvet and Hoosiers were more like a nuclear explosion than a comeback. In a time we otherwise defined by the works of John Hughes, Frank Booth and "Shooter" were and still are two of the most vivid and memorable characters the decade had to offer. This weird, creepy washed up hippie became forever etched in our consciousness the way only actors and films from your youth can.
Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, River's Edge, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, Colors, Red Rock West, True Romance and Speed in addition to his photography and other artistic endeavors represent quite an oeuvre by any standard. But the fact that he emerged from the dung heap of counter-cultural jackassery to become a great American who didn't take himself at all seriously may well be his greatest accomplishment of all. Vaya con dios.
Memorial Day Weekend is a bit early for a post like this, but since my friends and I chose not to get our usual summer house I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic for the endless string of lost weekends this week traditionally marks the beginning of. Swapping the ocean breeze for the subway's urine-stench-infused heat blasts fills me with dread for summer on a number of levels, but the essentials - stifling heat, a smattering of friends to idly bullshit with, ample booze and good music - are readily available wherever you are.
Not just any tunes will do though. Some music just meets the oppressive heat head on and elevates late day lounging in the sun to a glorious zen-like state of alcohol-fueled inertia. I suppose I could extol the virtues of The Allman Brothers in this regard or, conversely, mock the brain-damaged jackholes who pollute the air with aural flotsam like reggae, Jimmy Buffett or hacky sacking trustafarian monkeyboy jam bands. But this is my nostalgia trip and my fricken' blog, so I'm just gonna force feed visitors a heaping helping of relative obscurity on account of what is either my insufferable pretentiousness or my generous urge to share.
KOSTARS - Never so lonely The Kostars' album Klassics with a K was a one-off side project by two members of Luscious Jackson. That's a band which probably merits a spot on this list in its own right, but the Kostars are more subdued in a 70's AM radio from a parallel universe sort of way. The album positively oozes summer. A little girly, but sublime.
DANDY WARHOLS - Godless The Dandy's have had modest commercial success over the years, but their music for the most part is more moody and evocative than straight up pop. They're so right when a hot summer day begins to slip into twilight that having the gayest band name in the history of rock seems of precious little importance.
BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB - Shuffle your feet In August you have the really stupid idea to go on a very long road trip with your girlfriend. The air conditioner is on the fritz. The car is overheating and you're in the middle of the desert. You finally happen upon a service station and get help (like in every road movie ever). Then you head into the adjacent bar full of shady characters to cool off and pass the time. Someone hits on your girlfriend so you puff out your chest like an idiot and end up walking funny for weeks due to the pool stick Cletus rammed up your ass while "Tiny" was knocking your teeth out. This is the band that was on the jukebox. You should have just stayed home and gotten drunk on the porch.
YO LA TENGO - Autumn sweater Just put the song title out of your mind. It's more like the soundtrack to watching the heat rise from the street while you put a cold beer on your forehead and wish you weren't too lazy to stand up and open the umbrella on the patio table. Also doubles as good late night music for pitching woo. Or maybe I just like saying "pitching woo."
JUDE - Save me I don't know that Jude is evocative of summer in the way others on the list are, but singer/songwriters ranging from Jim Croce to Cat Stevens to Freedy Johnston merit a place in a lazy summer rotation. And in addition to much of his music being beautiful with an airy, hypnotic vibe, he's openly conservative in the left-wing artistic cesspool that is LA. That moves him to the head of my list - especially compared to a Jihadist nutbag like (whatever name Cat Stevens currently goes by).
WHITEST BOY ALIVE - Inflation Three cheers for Euros imitating Anglo music in English with English-language band names! Look at me! Notice me! love me! Increasingly, our little brothers across the pond who eat unthinkable animal parts and think dimly of us while desperately seeking our approval are producing fresh and interesting music. Whitest Boy Alive is a good example. Summer urban-style, evoking empty streets (like the video!) as people hide inside or frolic at their weekend getaways, leaving the streets to the young with no money for escaping and a smattering of confused Canadian tourists.
LUNA - Tiger lily An otherwise corny term, "dreamy" is nonetheless the first word that comes to mind in describing Luna. Like a meal where every bite reveals a different flavor combination, they feel less like a cohesive unit than individuals emitting beautiful sounds which complement one another and drive a song forward. A low key sonic bombardment melded perfectly with Wareham's urbane lyrics and singing voice which eventually grows on you.
ROBERT MITCHUM - From a logical point of view Yes, it's calypso. But it's Robert Fucking Mitchum. With a Caribbean accent! After terrifying two little kids in Night Of The Hunter, this dope smoking wingnut upped the ante with the greatest ill-considered celebrity musical venture this side of the cast of Star Trek. And you're not gonna get sand between your toes, whip up a pitcher of Rum Punch and listen? Bullshit I say.
Well, my nostalgia itch is scratched. Part II when the weather is more appropriate.
The year was 1991. The date, July 5th. It was a day all in attendance will not soon forget. They'd traveled by foot, by ramshackle bus and by burro across unforgiving terrain. They braved scorching heat, grabby federales and the constant fear that any rustling overheard in the brush might be the dreaded Chupacabra - no longer content to apply its fangs to their goats under cover of night.
It was all a small price to pay for this moment.
They'd seen the posters affixed to cantina walls. They'd heard the whispers which then escalated into a chorus of fevered excitement. For the first time, two institutions of Mexican high culture - the glorious luchadores and the regal fighting cocks - were to be as one in the fight of the century. Mexican pride in a dark rich mole of blood and brutality. A true Mexican championship.
Representing the cocks, well, it was never a question. The fierce "El Gallo Loco" had burnished quite a reputation for himself with a vicious aerial peck, slide, peck move which took all of one second to incapacitate an opponent. He would then preen in a circle around the fallen, stand fully erect with his head stretched toward the sky and commence a nose dive straight for his mark's neck.
And then he'd pause right before impact to ham it up for the crowd. Sometimes he'd do this twice. A cocky cock, this one, but the crowd ate it up. As word spread, so did the carnival atmosphere. But as always in this noble but ill-fated land, never is there glory to which tragedy doesn't soon befall. El Gallo Loco's legend was such that none dared bet against him. And what, pray tell, was the point of running a gambling enterprise if nobody bets on the inevitable loser?
El Gallo Loco thus found himself eventually banished from what was his life's calling. He was abandoned by the powers that be and left to roam the countryside scaring small children for his own amusement and savaging goats for sustenance. He grew ever more agitated and took to the drink.
Representing the Luchadores was also an easy choice. Felipe Calderon was not an ordinary luchador. He had a fighting style more refined, perhaps owing to his Spaniard oppressor blood. It was said he was a bit of a dandy, a ladyboy, and that this young stallion's mounting string of easy victories were due to his opponents' reluctance to administer beatdowns to a chica. His legion of fans rejected this view and like "El Calderon" himself when faced with such lies they would place their right hands on their hips and exclaim: "Scoreboard! Bitches!"
And that was that. He was, after all, a champion.
And so, when that day arrived they found themselves face to face in the ring. The man with panache, savoir faire and derring-do; The flamboyant and fearless fighting cock fresh off a stint in rehab. Feathers were ruffled. Flesh was pecked. The floor was covered in blood and sweat. But after six grueling rounds of back and forth, El Calderon collapsed in exhaustion.
In landing, he'd flattened the relentless El Gallo Loco like a corn tortilla. The onlooking peasants - many of whom had questioned his very gender moments earlier - were exultant. "El Presidente! El Presidente!" Their chants as spontaneous as they were vigorous. "El Presidente! El Presidente!" they persisted. Mexico had but one champion now.
Luchador. Crusher of rambunctious poultry. Why not, indeed, president? And so the crude viral campaign began. They affixed his picture to candles. Young boys whittled his likeness with wood scraps. Old men scratched his face in adobe when the blazing midday sun and rotgut Mezcal conspired to give them visions. Even drug lords in Chihuahua forbade the beheading of any man or woman who slightly bore resemblance to him.
With seasoning and the hopeful prayers of a nation, that day - his ascendance to the presidency - did finally arrive. And the people went to work. And the violence, it ended. The exodus abated. The corruption slowed to a trickle. Ignorance was vaporized. Ambition reigned supreme across the landscape. It has been a riveting Mexican story of renewal these past few years. The tale of a great man and his people, the denouement of which found Felipe Calderon in the full bloom of manhood at the house of the American Devil wagging his finger like a proud and wise luchador to the raucous applause of the enlightened. Congreass has not seen his likeness. What a moment. What a man. What a culture. What a country.
There was a moment after artist Molly Norris backed away from her proposed "Everyone Draw Mohammed Day" when it really seemed like all was lost in the cause of standing up to Islamic thuggery. A steady stream of cowardice ranging from the feckless Yale University Press to spineless Comedy Central made courage which spanned the life cycle of a mayfly look less like the clumsy birth of a movement than it did freedom's pathetic last gasp.
But before going further some untangling is in order.
Surely everyone is aware that conservatives are paranoid, hateful, xenophobic fear-mongers with a propensity for violence. It's been mentioned on network TV on occasion and fat-fingered former theater critic Frank Rich says so in the New York Times. Conservatives are knuckle-dragging spittle-flecked retards in last year's clothing. They're liars who lie for lucre and lead a flock of mindless sheep into the bowels of delusion. They're backwards enough to believe in God and sufficiently blank and repressed to buy into the antiquated tenets of Christianity without question. They're anti-brown people. Anti-vagina people. Pro-fatty foods. Judgmental. Bloodthirsty. And above all else they're angry because the rest of Americans have evolved.
They're too stupid to believe in evolution too.
They're mocked and reviled and taunted from the commanding heights of the mainstream media and popular culture on down. Even the president calls them Teabaggers. And while the point could have been made in far fewer words, how else do you replicate the incessant barrage which emanates from the same quarters where people still giggle over Palin jokes like special needs children entertained by their flatulence? And, more importantly, how does one reconcile the obsessive amount of taunting directed at Americans they characterize as stupid, unhinged, dangerous and consumed by irrationality with their rhetorical cowardice when dealing with Muslims?
You'd be forgiven for thinking it's a reflection of their stupidity that they freely characterize conservatives in a manner which is wholly fabrication while fearing the wrath of Islamists for merely telling the truth about them. When you have billionaire asslown cum Nannymayor Michael Bloomberg suggesting someone opposed to healthcare reform could have left the failed car bomb in Times Square and MSNBC jabbering idiot Contessa Brewer confessing in the aftermath that she rather wished it had been the case - because the fact that it was a Muslim will inspire "more" bigotry - you're faced with people so tangled in their own platitudes that they couldn't grasp reality if it was wearing a strap-on and playing sphincter hockey on their backsides.
It can seem bizarrely, brazenly incongruous - this penchant for attacking domestic opposition and appeasing Islamists all the while suggesting they're cut from the same cloth. It's hard to fathom the process that leads to orgasmic glee when the opportunity presents itself to make contrived or wholly imagined connections between a misdeed and the right - while obvious acts of Islamic terror call for exhausting all possibilities and minimizing reality. And the subtext, always, fear of some imaginary backlash against innocent muslims by the crazy right. It's all self-evidently illogical and typified by how this whole narrative emboldened the left's attacks on Bush's prosecution of the war on terror until such time as Obama kept everything in place and upped the ante with a more vigorous employment of predator drones.
But logic has nothing to do with any of this. While they flatter themselves as essentially being the forces of rationality caught in the middle of what amounts to a "religious" war, progressivism is a competing (faith-based) religion. And because they see their primary competition and enemy as being domestic conservatives, they view Islamism through the prism of their cartoon version of the American right. They must. As mentioned, it aided their domestic narrative to paint the GWOT as the mindless handiwork of paranoid, xenophobic and belligerent cowboys devoid of rationality until such time as they had the burden of leadership.
The narrative persists. But so does the threat. So however much the left is tangled in their spider web of bullshit, they're at least on board with the reality that while they can persist in their clown shoes rhetoric about paranoid and belligerent wingers, their domestic agenda is finished should Islamists strike an America where Obama and his acolytes' hollow posturing is accompanied by an anti-terror policy of proggies diddling with their vaginas. So there's a sliver of logic amidst the perverse contortions - that inconvenient rubber meets the road thing which so taunts the platitudinous lefty vomit that would otherwise emanate from the likes of Comedy Central and the Yale Press were they insulting groups less apt to kill them.
The common thread for the left in all this, however, is not reason or nuance; neither a grasp of complexity nor the living equivalent of such in the form of an elaborate chess game. Just cowardice. Plain and simple. A fear of Islamists whom they hope to wish away with asspuckered rhetoric and appeasement. A fear, domestically, of honest policy debate and where that would net out in terms of the expressed will of the American people. In that way they're more like Islamists than they are different, only in a drastically less testosterone-fueled milieu favored by bitchy women and effeminate men.
UPDATE: Maybe Molly Norris is the William Wallace of the progressive left after all. While progressives in the media, academia and the political class are persistent bed wetters with regard to their public utterances about Islamists, a friend's recent trek through the left-wing neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn revealed that perhaps I'm being too hard on them. There is an undercurrent of defiant blasphemy and it seems to be spreading in progressive communities across the country. Hipster infidels thumbing their noses at the Muslim world. Beta males and weepy emo girls by day. Fatwa bait by night. Maybe the nuances of leftism are just too much for my small brain to sort through after all. I mean, I would never insult the prophet and risk death by Islamists myself. But well done with the blasphemy, Williamsburg! Ditto Berkeley and San Francisco! May you be spared Allah's wrath.
YO LA TENGO - Autumn sweater
Just put the song title out of your mind. It's more like the soundtrack to watching the heat rise from the street while you put a cold beer on your forehead and wish you weren't too lazy to stand up and open the umbrella on the patio table. Also doubles as good late night music for pitching woo. Or maybe I just like saying "pitching woo."
JUDE - Save me
I don't know that Jude is evocative of summer in the way others on the list are, but singer/songwriters ranging from Jim Croce to Cat Stevens to Freedy Johnston merit a place in a lazy summer rotation. And in addition to much of his music being beautiful with an airy, hypnotic vibe, he's openly conservative in the left-wing artistic cesspool that is LA. That moves him to the head of my list - especially compared to a Jihadist nutbag like (whatever name Cat Stevens currently goes by).
WHITEST BOY ALIVE - Inflation
Three cheers for Euros imitating Anglo music in English with English-language band names! Look at me! Notice me! love me! Increasingly, our little brothers across the pond who eat unthinkable animal parts and think dimly of us while desperately seeking our approval are producing fresh and interesting music. Whitest Boy Alive is a good example. Summer urban-style, evoking empty streets (like the video!) as people hide inside or frolic at their weekend getaways, leaving the streets to the young with no money for escaping and a smattering of confused Canadian tourists.
LUNA - Tiger lily
An otherwise corny term, "dreamy" is nonetheless the first word that comes to mind in describing Luna. Like a meal where every bite reveals a different flavor combination, they feel less like a cohesive unit than individuals emitting beautiful sounds which complement one another and drive a song forward. A low key sonic bombardment melded perfectly with Wareham's urbane lyrics and singing voice which eventually grows on you.
ROBERT MITCHUM - From a logical point of view
Yes, it's calypso. But it's Robert Fucking Mitchum. With a Caribbean accent! After terrifying two little kids in Night Of The Hunter, this dope smoking wingnut upped the ante with the greatest ill-considered celebrity musical venture this side of the cast of Star Trek. And you're not gonna get sand between your toes, whip up a pitcher of Rum Punch and listen? Bullshit I say.
Well, my nostalgia itch is scratched. Part II when the weather is more appropriate.