Down On The Lot Of Ya

The View from the Afternoon - Arctic Monkeys (mp3)
Perpetual Motion Machine - Modest Mouse (mp3)

Want some fun numbers? Try these on for size.

• Fewer than 25% of people like Sarah Palin.
• The Tea Party gets 36% approval.
• Nancy Pelosi? 29%
• Harry Reid? 16%
• John Boehner? 12%
• 92% of Americans give the economy a bad rating.
• Obama's approval numbers are hovering in the high 40s.
• Democrats in general? 31% approval.
• Republicans in general? 25% approval.

I can't find the numbers on a general opinion of Wall Street, but I'm going out on a very large limb and saying the numbers aren't good. (Here and here are where I got the other numbers.)

Here's the general gist: The more you are in the public sphere, the more likely you are going to be despised. Now, more than ever.

This isn't just politics. We're seething at Wall Street and big greedy corporations. We despise unions protecting their chaff. We're tired of celebrities who won't shut up. We curse the talking heads on TV, and we are annoyed with athletes who can't seem to keep their private lives private. And the Pope? Are you kidding? Gozer the Destroyer has a higher approval rating.

We're sick of all of it. The bigger you are, the harder you've already fallen.

The level of vitriol and venom is rising from the Land of the Common Man and Woman.... and I've got this wild feeling, based on almost no true historical understanding, based on nothing but pure gut instinct.

We're on the verge of the next '60s.

Sure, it won't be exactly the same. We won't all wear tie-dye shirts and join cults. But that era was marked, above all, by an overwhelming distrust of authority, and we're headed that way again.

Today, different people of different persuasions -- cultural, political, socio-economical, racial -- distrust different groups more and less. However, the bottom line is that we as a nation are less eager to trust The Man, The System, The Church, The Celebrity, or The Big Business.

When's the last time America felt like it was overrun with riots and violence? When it seemed like our country, while not at Civil War, was busier fighting one another than we were fighting the enemies at our proverbial gates? The '60s and early '70s.

Whereas then it was led by restless youth, people of color fighting for equality and respect, and other variations on the "left" theme, the New '60s will be represented by people on both sides. Conservatives and liberals both carry their anti-authority torches and protest signs. Both sides are increasingly mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.

As a relatively trusting soul, this coming era is going to be very uncomfortable for me. I'm not going to like it. It's already making me sad, how little we seem to like one another. But I keep telling myself this: Most of us ordinary people like one another just fine. We all mostly get along. We're just sick and tired, it seems, of people on big screens and with big microphones talking down to us like they know more or do more or are better-equipped than we are to know what's right and wrong, good and bad, just or unfair.

So I'm going to continue my trusting and optimistic ways by hoping that this coming era of anti-authoritarian animosity and distrust will be a healthy reality check for our country, and that we will emerge from this, perhaps 20 years from now, a better and more unified nation than we are today.

Either that, or we'll eventually break off into smaller Democratic nations like the Eastern Bloc has been doing for the last 20 years, with Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton all serving as presidents of 1/4 of what used to be the United States. (Oh c'mon, you just KNOW Clinton would find his way back into a seat of power...)

My point is, buckle up. The next 20 years are gonna be tense, occasionally violent, and full of suspicious citizens. But maybe we'll be more awake and alert, as a country. Since far too many of us have been sleepwalking like cokeheaded bums since Jack Tripper stumbled into his apartment with Janet and Chrissy, maybe this change won't be so bad. But it won't be pretty.

Desperate North Georgia Housewives

Wrapped Around Your Finger (live) - Tori Amos + Bjork

In multiple, peripheral ways, I'm connected to what is the most unbelievable, soap opera trial to hit our notch on the Bible Belt in a mighty long time.

Tanya Craft, a former kindergarten teacher in North Georgia, is on trial for molesting three young girls in her home on various occasions.

What started as a case that no one seemed to question -- how rarely are criminal charges of child molestation anything less than open-and-shut? -- has emerged as the kind of story which once again reminds us that you can't even make up the kind of shit going on in reality, because no one would buy your story for it being too unrealistic.

Take the most twisted episode of Desperate Housewives you've ever seen, throw in a little bit of COPS and a little bit of the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, and add a dash of that old Holly Hunter movie, The Positively True Adventures of the Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, and you might start to get some vague sense of the circus happening just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Here's the best and most detailed reporting on the case:
The Chattanoogan.com

Here's the best and most detailed TV crew on the scene (with TWO reporters!):
WRCBTV.com

It's the most popular local topic on Twitter!

And then there's the real twist. Sitting hundreds of miles away at a computer in Maryland is a man named William L. Anderson. Just a blogger.

Except Mr. Anderson is the kind of blogger that is, at least outside that courtroom and in the realm of public opinion, what can be considered a "game-changer."

A few years ago, Mr. Anderson made it his mission in life to prove, almost from the first day he heard about the story, that the Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a stripper were innocent. He has now turned his attention -- at the rate of two posts every weekday -- towards the Craft trial in North Georgia. He has no interest in appearing or acting unbiased. He is convinced the trial and the key players involved are a sham and an embarrassment. He has an untold number of people connected to the situation on his side and also providing him with details some random dude in Maryland could never otherwise get. And he has uncovered one after another of the most eye-popping small-town Roscoe P. Coltrain kinds of screw-ups in the justice system that make you scared to ever set foot in a small town.

• A Facebook status update written by the prosecutor, with comments left by witnesses for the pending trial.
• A mother claiming on the stand that her daughter had never taken acting classes, yet with information on IMDB that suggests she's taken acting classes in Atlanta (that information was dismissed by the judge).
• A lead child advocate in sexual abuse cases who doesn't even have a college degree, not even three years after the case began, who asked a girl 16 times on video whether she was molested, only to apparently be told after they left the room that it happened, who then failed to document in any way this admission.
• The judge sitting on the case represented the defendant's husband in their divorce but refused to recuse himself from the case.

It doesn't stop there. Just start reading the comments left by Bob's favorite person, ANONYMOUS, and Mr. Anderson's responses, and things get even wilder.

We might never know The Truth about what, if anything, happened between this woman and these little girls, but we can be certain of this: The Reality is seriously screwed up, and the truth doesn't seem to be all that important in a court of law.

The only thing that's certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that three girls have been forever scarred and victimized. The only question is how and by whom, and whether it had anything to do with the adult in question touching them in sexual ways.

The Video Version of Valdemort

She's Out of Sync - Devo (mp3)
Two Times - The Blakes (mp3)*

Didja ever do those "What's Grosser than Gross" jokes as a kid? Just wonderin'.

I first heard of "The Video That Shall Not Be Named" last fall. A number of young alumni were back in town, and I stopped by early into their evening, before their mental state was in any way altered. During the conversation, someone brought up TVTSNBN. Immediately, the rest of the young guys reacted viscerally, with beloved fake-retch sounds and other such reactions of discomfort or disgust.

Now, this caught my attention because 19-year-old males are, in general, disgusted by very few things in the 21st Century. They've seen everything. Terrorists beheading hostages. Dogs having sex with cats. Laguna Beach. Trying to disgust or shock a present-day male in the 16-22 demographic is like trying to make Dick Cheney cry. It's virtually impossible.

So, I can't deny being a little curious when they reacted with such collective and universal disgust about TVTSNBN. They then started talking about videos on YouTube where people recorded their friends or relatives watching this. One dude recorded his grandmother watching it, they explained, and it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.

As with many conversations where one is the outsider on an insider joke and one doesn't much care, I quickly tuned out and forgot about it.

Then, a few weeks ago, TVTSNBN reemerged in my conscience. One of my favorite female rockers has her own blog, and I visit it every month or two to catch up on her -- I'm kind of like a stalker who can't afford to actually stalk -- and her latest entry was about her experience watching TVTSNBN with two of her friends. The entry was only a couple of sentences, but she basically said watching it made her feel alive. (Picture at left stolen from Steven via Kay's blog.)

Well hell, I thought, if this supercool badass chick can handle it, what's the big deal?? This, my friends, is what's known as faulty logic. Yes, I watched TVTSNBN. I hunted it down, and I watched it.*

Several years ago, I got so far as to click PLAY on one of those terrorist beheading videos but stopped it and closed it before ever getting anywhere near the actual beheading part. That I allowed myself the curiosity to click PLAY in the first place left me with a hollow feeling in my gut for several days, and I still squirm a little when I recall that I even went as far as I did. (NOTE: To those who've seen it, bully for you. I ain't judging. I'm just sayin' that my physical and emotional innards objected powerfully to my curiosity.)

Because there was no death or mutilation involved in TVTSNBN, I never reached that level of self-revulsion. I mostly looked at the subjects involved as I imagine Ming the Merciless looks at the stupid Earthlings at the beginning of the Gawd-awful guilty pleasure of the 80s known as Flash Gordon. I'm pretty sure if Ming had seen TVTSNBN, he would have destroyed Earth quickly rather than screwing around with it for the better part of two hours while Timothy Dalton wondered how the f*#k he got himself into green leotards for what had to be a career low even in the infancy of his career. (And yes, I watch that movie every time I see it playing on TV, 'cuz it's one of the world's penultimate guilty pleasures.)

The morning after my TVTSNBN viewing, I was still bothered. Not haunted; nothing quite so serious. Just bothered. Bothered that people did this. Bothered that people filmed it. Bothered that millions have watched it. Bothered that I jumped on board. Bothered that I have witnessed something that could not have ever conceivably reached my eyes at any time in any other decade prior to the 21st Century.

We're not talking Susan Boyle singing Les Miz here. We're talking a video of Susan Boyle degrading herself in ways that, if I told you the readers to "Think of the most horrific and disgusting non-violence-related act you could film Susan Boyle doing," you'd fall shy of TVTSNBN more often than not.

We are in a virulent age. Everything hits us sooner, faster, harder, and with less mercy, and what used to require men on ponies or Morse Code now requires a

Less than 48 hours after witnessing TVTSNBN, I found out about some heavy rumors involving some folks I know. Rumors of an extreme and sexual nature. Rumors involving kids and police and arrests. Ugly stuff. So naturally the rumors spread like wildfire around me. Along with the talk of what did or might have occurred between two kids whose lives will never again be normal came conclusions we yearn to draw. The #1 comment with a bullet: Surely the alleged predator was at one point also a victim of similar acts. Otherwise, how would he know how to engage in such skin-crawling acts? 

I thought this. Others thought this. It's the natural conclusion of people born before 1980.

But I have crossed to the other side. I've seen TVTSNBN.

It is now possible for a kid to watch stuff on an unsupervised computer that would make even deviant adults shudder. What used to be described simply as "pornography" now needs to be separated into categories like a record store, and any kid with some alone time and an Internet connection can basically witness pornography's version of death metal.

Or, put another way, I'm pretty sure teens don't engage in "rainbow parties" because they witnessed their parents do it.

Is TVTSNBN a sign of the end-times? Will it corrupt even the incorruptible? Part of me hopes so. I'd like to think this is about as low as our species can go, taste-wise. But then I remember that scene in Braveheart where bloodthirsty parents are holding their children on their shoulders so the kids can get a better view as that mean old rebel Scotsman gets disemboweled. Best I can tell, in previous eras and centuries, kids witnessed executions of all kinds, from crucifixions to disembowelments to lynchings to firing squads. If our species can survive all that, then surely TVTSNBN ain't the end of the world.

When I made an equally-obscure reference to TVTSNBN on Facebook, I got a personal record of 13 comments. Seems lots of folks have decided to bring the apocalypse one step closer by witnessing this for themselves. And nothing brings people together like a shared experience of extreme disgust.

And, as best I can tell, none of the people I know who have seen TVTSNBN have done things terribly deviant after the fact. Well, not anymore deviant than the shit they were doing prior to watching. So even something as off the charts as TVTSNBN can't seem to shake my belief that all our hand-wringing over the Evils of Technology is 95% misguided.

* -- I've since been informed that the version I watched isn't the "original." The original is supposedly even worse than the version I watched. That this is possible boggles my feeble mind.

P.S. If you're reading this and find yourself seeking TVTSNBN, and if you end up watching it, please just leave a comment to that nature as a reminder that when someone tells you not to look at something, it's only human nature to want desperately to do so.

P.P.S. Those of you who knew what I was talking about and have seen it, please feel free to tally your experience. Those who know but avoided watching, kudos to you!

The original choice for second song was "Nobody Drinks Alone" by Keith Urban, but I bought it on iTunes before we could convert them, so I went with the backup. All of these songs can be found and purchased through Amazon.com or iTunes.