Secretly Ironic

One time playing Scattergories with some friends, everyone was asked to think of a bad habit beginning with the letter J. Most of the group picked the obivous (and not actually bad) habit. The winner said “jingoism.”

So when you start to say you support that war because it’s in America’s interest, stop and think. First off, America includes more than just the United States. Second, go-it-alone is not in anyone’s interest. And third, consider yourself and your nation in context.

I don’t always think religions have the moral high ground, but most of them are opposed to this war. The WTO, a natural US policy ally if there ever was one, thinks we’re charging off a cliff, economically. Meanwhile, we’re changing the names of food in the congressional cafeterias. Administration experts are joining the chorus of journalists who decry the monomanaical focus on killing Saddam.

This isn’t some fifth column, outside-agitated, dirty longhair hippie crowd. The diminishing, increasingly strident group known as “middle America” needs to wake up and notice that manifest destiny went out with the free-ranging buffalo and the smallpox-laden blanket. They’ll figure it out, eventually. The question is, are you going to think about it, and learn it on your own, or are we all going to be suffer for your self-abuse?

More Ready.gov parodies: via email, via mailing lists.

I’m not so much interested in the Department of Homeland Security any more though. I’d rather look into the Department of Cryptogramic Botany, or maybe Invertebrate Zoology. The Senate Department of Urban Development (Berlin) has a wonderful walking-tour page. Maybe I should just go to the Complaints Department.

In the art department, I’m fond of the Dirty Wallpaper site, which has some nifty graffiti and so forth, and Davegraphics. But if you spend too much time in that department, you’ll get an art degree and be poor.

Speaking of poor, my dear friend’s younger sister arrived in town this week, in the company of a gentleman who goes by the name of Dolores. I think it was Dolores, I may have misheard, but it sounded something like that. An odd name for anyone, especially a boy. May be a nome de guerre, or perhaps a mere alias. The two are quite the merry pranksters, though, and their vigor has filled my friend’s week with awkward, silent reproach. You see, the youngsters are youthful swashbucklers for justice and street credibility, and they disapprove of my friend’s lifestyle and line of work as though she were a sodomite. In other words, she’s working for the man and they’re fucking hippies.

“Danger, war, prison disaster, a tide of heartbreak and human misery…”

This past summer there was a nationwide abduction scare. Before that it was sharks. Remember satanic cults and daycare child molestors? This week we’re all about the Elizabeth Smart hubub in the news. (Thought it was Jessica at first…) Before that, the Columbia and Challenger tragedies. Do you remember Heaven’s Gate, the suicidal cult of web developers from the 90s? It’s true that there are very real dangers and very real tragedies, but many of the items that fill the news these days aren’t. And
it’s often hard to tell the difference.

An anonymous reader sent me an essay he wrote shortly after the Heaven’s Gate suicides, addressing differences between real tragedies, from which we can learn, and faux tragedies, which are mere spectacle. It is included, in its entirety, below.
Continue reading “Fearmongering Hysteria”