Open Letter to God's Crappy Spokesmen

With God On Our Side - Buddy Miller (mp3)

The text located on the blog linked here -- and numerous others -- was sent to me via email by Johnnie Carter, MD, a man I don't think I know. Originally I was going to respond directly to Dr. Johnnie Carter, but I decided instead to make it an open letter to many stupid people all at once.

Here's one of my favorite segments:

Bottom line: my America is vastly different from Obama's, and I have a higher obligation to my Country and my GOD to do what is Right!

For eight (8) years, the Liberals in our Society, led by numerous entertainers who would have no platform and no real credibility but for their celebrity status, have attacked President Bush, his family, and his spiritual beliefs!

Here's another:

They have made every effort to remove the name of GOD or Jesus Christ from our Society !

They have challenged capital punishment, the right to bear firearms, and the most basic principles of our criminal code !

They have attacked one of the most fundamental of all Freedoms, the right of free speech!

Dear Stupid People, a.k.a., Drs. Johnnie Carter, Charles Stanley, and David Barton, and the other stupid people who read more than five words you wrote without turning green from infectious puke,

I respect that you have (in theory) earned some kind of doctoral degree, but I don't respect your right to annoy me via my business email with a bunch of ugliness cloaked under the illusion that you have any notion about God or what He wants. Your hypocrisy and the smugness with which you seem to espouse beliefs that even claim to originate from the same Bible I've studied has vastly more in common with the Pharisees and Sadducees whom Jesus decried than it does with His disciples or followers.

(FACT: You can't say Sadducees without saying "SAD.")

You introduce your spew by listing those things you don't share with President Obama. NEWS FLASH: You don't "share" anything with anyone because your particular brand of absurd Christianity imparts absolutely zero value on sharing. (Note: Sharing stupid opinions doesn't count.)

You are a fearmonger. You are a hatemonger. You are far too full of yourself to have much room for a higher power. God's priorities, I'm quite certain, are not in the order of (1) Death Penalty, (2) Firearms, and (3) Free Speech (from what corner of your sphincter, exactly, did you pull this one by the way?)

I don't know how you got my email address, but I politely request that you never again send me anything of this nature. I can handle untold numbers of political emails, but when you dare to have the audacity to speak for the God I worship, and when you dare to suggest God would be more horrified by your precious tax burden than he would with war, violence, and poverty, then you have far overstepped your bounds.

It's a shame you didn't work on Basil Marceaux's campaign. It's not too late to throw him on the ticket with Palin in '12.

Sincerely,
Billy

Written with God's full support and encouragement. As far as you know.

The Prison Sissy of Cell Block 12E

What I've Done - Linkin Park (mp3)
The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon (mp3)

When it comes to my hair, I am a serial haircut monogamist. I find someone who cuts it well enough, who can carry on a conversation well enough, who charges a reasonable enough price, and I stay with her for a year or so. My current monogamous hair relationship is with a woman named Candace. Nice, uber-skinny blonde in her mid-40s who can fire off some seriously cynical quips. Almost as if cutting hair for two decades has made her bitter. Go figure.

Candace cuts hair in the mall. It's the only reason I go to the mall anymore. When I break up with Candace, I won't go back there for haircuts. Getting your hair cut in the mall isn't something to go bragging about.

So I park outside JC Penney and go in. I get my hair cut. I take a detour through Barnes & Noble on my way back to the car. Once in the parking lot, my car's not where I thought I left it. I look for a few minutes and start to worry that my precious Honda has been jacked. The Honda Accord is the most jacked car in the US, I recall hearing once. (It's actually the Civic, but still.)

What I do notice, however, is that someone in the next row has left their car out in the middle of the aisle. I chuckle. Did the moron park there accidentally, thinking they were in a spot? How can you not notice something like that?

I keep looking for my car.

Then, that horrible ominous sound goes off in my head. It's the sound of an evil light bulb. And I look back at the car in the aisle. It's blue. It's a Honda. It's got a baby seat in the back.

Yup. It's mine. I'm the moron.

I left the emergency brake off. It's a stick, and I left it out of gear. The lot apparently has a .01% grade to it, so as I walked across the lot to go in and get my haircut, my car was likely inching at a snail's pace back... back... across the aisle, until its ass bumped or nudged the car on the other side, a black Honda CRX from the early '90s, beat all to hell and with a paint job that looked like Mikhail Gorbachev's head would appear in a photo negative.

I grab a sheet of paper from my backpack, upon which I plan to write my name and number to stick under a wiper. As I'm placing said sheet in said wiper... up drives Paul Blart. Yes, the Mall Police were in hot pursuit of my pasty white ass.

After getting out to inspect the "damage," Officer Blart informs me that he has contacted the Police Department, and although he cannot keep me at the scene by any use of force, my choosing to leave the scene would be construed as leaving the scene of an accident. He also asks me to move my car back into a space for which parked cars were originally intended. So, I slump my Toonces ass back to my car, pull it into my original parking spot, and sit and wait 40 minutes for the po-po to arrive.

Because the descent into hell is a slow spiral staircase rather than a deep freefall, things get a little more pathetic when Tackleberry arrives.

It seems the insurance card in my glove box expired in March. My darling wife had applied for a change of address and was waiting for the new one to arrive before handing it to me. Not only that, but because this all happened on Memorial Day, the company's contact line was closed for the day, so I had absolutely no way to prove to this officer that I was presently covered.

The officer then engages in a lengthy diatribe about how he could technically arrest me for this. As he's talking, and as I'm saying "Yassuh" and "No'suh" and nodding a lot, I drift into an alternate LOST-esque universie where I've been sentenced to life in prison for expired insurance. I became the Prison Bitch of Cell Block 12E and had my ass traded around more than Pokemon cards in the '90s all because of a piece of very important paper.

Fortunately, at the end of his lecture, the officer did what he didn't have to do: he let me go. He left the accident report information in the dude's windshield wiper. He bid me adieu. He chuckled, I'm assuming at the thought of just how pitiful anyone with a penis must be to fail to put their car in gear or hit the brake. And the event was over.

I am not your run-of-the-mill moron. I hope your Memorial Day was less pathetically amusing than mine.

To conclude, here are my wife's words of comfort and love at the conclusion of my story: "It's still not as bad as driving away from the gas station with the pump still in your tank."

Thank you, honey, for always having the right words.

TMI

Stay Over - The Rescues (mp3)
The World is Our ____ - This Will Destroy You (mp3)

Alison was almost three years older. She was the middle daughter of one of my mother's best friends, and we spent a ton of time together growing up. I always gravitated to older kids, and Alison was no exception.

One night when I was in fifth grade and Alison spent the night, she and I were in my room playing before bedtime, and I dropped my pants and showed her my property. I don't remember what instigated this decision, but it wasn't a dare, and it wasn't a request. It might have been when I was changing into pajamas. Anyway, as best I can recall, her reaction was a mix of fear and utter shock. She was in seventh grade. I was 10 and she was 13, and she was far more than 3 years' my superior in maturity, having been raised in a turbulent family household I suspect had many of the soap opera problems stereotypical of the 1970s.

This confession isn't something I'm proud of. In fact, flashing Alison qualifies as one of the three or four most shameful memories of my life.

Part of this shame stems from having no understanding of why I did what I did. Maybe I was testing her friendship or trust. It couldn't have been particularly sexual -- I don't even think I had yet stumbled on my first Playboy hidden in the bottom of my dad's closet. But she had definitely blossomed physically, and I knew she was seen as attractive, so maybe there was something cluelessly sexual about it.

Not knowing why, but also knowing I did it with the awareness that the action was wrong, makes the memory harder to live with, thus the greater shame. It's when we do bad things that we just can't quite explain, that make no sense to anyone including ourselves, that moving past the shame feels the most difficult.

Working in a school with teenagers, those of us who earn trust are inevitably and regularly exposed to the underbelly that damns them. Yet we must also cling to our love of that age group and our desire to do what we can to see them through it.

I don't want to steal Bob's thunder, but he recently ran an anonymous experiment with his class in honor of A Clockwork Orange in which he asked each of them to submit a note describing the worst thing they've done but never got caught doing. Bob said the responses included "most everything you'd worry about, this side of murder. You name it, and it was probably in there."

Maybe some of them were exaggerating or making stuff up. But most were probably being honest.

Boys who graduated have returned and told me stories of "bad decisions" involving alcohol, drugs, drag racing, disturbing pranks. They don't talk as openly about sex -- maybe I seem too prudish, or maybe they know that's dangerous ground -- but I've overheard many tales of group sex, drunk sex, computer sex, cell phone sex. One boy a few years back was sharing a video he recorded on his cell phone of his girlfriend giving him oral pleasure. One boy in our middle school got caught in his math class looking at a cell phone picture of a naked girl. She was out of school that day and had sent it from her bathroom. Home alone and bored in eighth grade in 2008 ain't what it was 20 years ago.

And these are, as people like me enjoy saying, the good kids.

Limiting myself solely to the teens and parents in my own circle of acquaintances, I know of at least two dozen teenagers who have engaged in something sexually scandalous: having sex with an adult, or sexting personal pictures or videos, or impregnating/getting pregnant, or multiple partners in a single night.

With modern teens spending more than half their awake time hooked into something electronic, it shouldn't surprise that an increasing number of these scandalously bad decisions center around computers and cell phones. It's also no surprise that this is leading to more suicide attempts related to sexting and the like. The morality play of the Paris Hilton sex tape plays out in shrunk-down versions in high school hallways and small towns all over this great country.

Bob says -- and I'm kinda paraphrasing -- that the lesson of A Clockwork Orange is that successful adults survive their teenage years without getting caught.

If I were in fifth grade today, and I had exposed myself to a 13-year-old female friend while alone with her in my bedroom, and if she had told her mother, and if her mother had told authorities... well, I feel absolutely certain that my life would be drastically different than it is today. I highly doubt I would be allowed to work a job around kids.

There's a super-awesome article in Slate called "No Brakes!" about how a parent can help minimize the risks for their children. Any parent should read it, probably four or five times.

I'm left with two thoughts about all of this:

1. I used to get pissed off when people talked about how much tougher kids had it today with drugs and temptations. I can no longer deny that they suffer from TMI. Literally, they have too much information coming at them too fast; they are exposed to often out-of-control and out-of-context (and usually unsupervised) information, while also given more power and methods to communicate. That's an incendiary combination.
2. My writing suggests that this challenge is restricted to teenagers, but adults are caught in it, and teens are just taking their cues from us. Watching a sobering and electric show like Breaking Bad only serves to remind that we adults are world leaders in "bad decisions." Walter White is quite possibly the most horrific reflection of the American everyman I've ever seen. Maybe we don't all deal with terminal cancer by manufacturing crystal meth, but the metaphorical connection between him and most of us is clear and undeniable.

Teenagers are just us, except with the valid excuse of inexperience and ignorance. Adults know far better and do far worse.

Medical Morons in the Age of Information

Bad Medicine - Bon Jovi (mp3)
The Sick Bed of Cuchuliann - The Pogues (mp3)

Americans might well be the dumbest and most-easily duped people in the history of the world. Here we are, in what we claim to be an Age of Information, but none of this information prevents us from being stupid. In fact, one could argue, the glut of information makes it much easier to be stupid--er. Stupider? More stupider?

We have people on both sides of the political spectrum who are railing against the swine flu vaccine. Celebrities who have no more medical training or knowledge than you, me, or the Keebler frappin' Elf are claiming that the vaccine is more dangerous than the flu it aims to prevent. (Yes, I'm talkin' ta you, Bill Maher, you friggin' smug ignorant sumbitch.)

I've asked probably a dozen doctors and nurses and pharmacists, some friends and some mere acquaintances, their opinion of the vaccine, and almost all of them just shake their heads. Of COURSE my children should get vaccinated, they say, with the unspoken DUH on the end of it. Not a one of them hesitated or mentioned concerns about how vaccines are a deadly secret scourge to our way of life... because that crap is right up there with black helicopters and the X-Files.

Welcome to the Age of Information, where 95% (98%? 99%?) of all professionals educated in the field of medicine agree, yet where journalists and wackos focus half their attention on the 5% of kooks who disagree so they can be "balanced." We might be enlightened, but we've got a wacky notion of balance.

You want useful information on the subject of vaccinations? You want the history of paranoia? Listen to a few segments from NPR's On the Media. Here's one on the H1N1 vaccine, and here's one on the hysteria that broke out in Britain because a girl died of a brain tumor but people thought she died from a vaccine. Educate yourself, for Christ's sake, rather than looking to pandering, demagoguing kooks to tell you what to think! (And if that category must include me, then so be it, but go learn for yourself!)

It's important to note that the criticism is not so much aimed at medical professionals, but rather at the people in charge of wielding and managing the information. If you want the real reason why newspapers are dying, it's because they do an awful job of filtering anything for us. They'd rather report cotton candy than broccoli. And even when the broccoli shows up, its been cooked to death and drowned in so much butter you'd think it was served at a movie theater.

As yet another report on OTM suggests, part of it's because science reporters are all but extinct. I don't know if this is a killer factor, but it can't help.

What I do know is that when a significant portion of the population has boonswaggled itself into thinking it can't even trust its government to tell its people when a vaccine is safe and effective -- or as safe and effective as anything else involving medicine and the human body... people sometimes die having their tonsils removed, for fuck's sake -- then the Age of Information truly proves that too much of anything, including information, does more harm than good.

Culture is in one kind of trouble when the only people who can read the Bible and other books are priests and monks. But maybe it's in an altogether equally-treacherous kind of trouble when we all think we're equally capable of being experts about anything and everything just 'cuz we can read shit off the Internet.

The Age of Information risks eroding all sense of trust in any kind of educated authority. And this is a distrust that breaks political barriers. One side believes Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh are honest and knowledgeable, which is a crock, but the other side has doctors blathering on the Huffington Post with the same kind of crap.

And, yet again, as always, the future of our society must rest and rely on those of us in the middle. Let's hope we hold up and keep our heads above the rising tide of the Information Tsunami.