Not Necessarily The News

Excuse me while I try to yell over the braying of the sheep, because what we've got here is a failure to communicate. So...Michael Jackson died. You know what? Big deal. The guy hasn't done any appearances outside of court since the late 90s. I'm still not convinced this isn't another attempt to rip off McCartney. (See: Paul is Dead) "But he touched millions!" the crowd says. I don't think he was ever formally convicted of that. (If you think that makes me an asshole...Hi! I'm Chris, have we met?)

So, while the media turns into a Perez Hilton sideshow, the US is pulling out of Iraqi cities. Hundreds have died since the announcement was made. No vigils are being held. The International Pissing Contest is reaching a crescendo as North Korea threatens to launch nukes and Iran takes offense to Obama's stance against the violence. Hundreads have died. Thousands more potentially should this go the distance. Jesse Jackson is not pushing for answers. Probably because there's less cameras over there covering it.

You go ahead and light your candles for a fallen pop star who had faded well before he vanished. I'll take the "asshole" stamp you've given me, press it firmly to my forehead, and wear it with pride. I'd rather be regarded as an jerk for not caring about the one so long as I don't bleed indifference over the many.

A desparate piece

I stopped at the Sunoco near my work. The place has been open for about a year now and has yet to have fuel in the pumps. I go in to get cigarettes and some water. As I'm leaving a fairly attractive woman approaches me. She says she's got her baby in the car and she needs money for gas to get home. I can spare five bucks, so I let her have it. She sees I have a cigarette, and I give her one. I figure my good deed for the year is done. I'm reaching for my keys, and she asks if I'm single. I say yes, and go about opening my door. She comes back around to my side of the car and states that if I can give her fourty dollars for gas and cigarettes, she'll make it worth my while. I'm filled with a kind of sadness that the economy has gone this far. I am not naive, but she obviously wasn't a working girl, and in an act of need was willing to give herself for money. I told her that if I had the fourty to spare, I'd give it to her without compensation, but I can't spare it. She seemed kind of saddened by this, as if her last ditch effort wasn't good enough. I told her to just take what I gave her and get her kid out of this heat.

I'm still puzzled and slightly depressed by this.

We need a fix.

We need it fast.

Mothers shouldn't need to resort to this to get by.

Democracy

A major election is held and a president that a country didn't necessarily vote into office garners control. The masses complain mildly and turn up their noses.

A major election is held and a president that a country didn't necessarily vote into office garners control. The streets amass with rioters, protesters, and police presence.

It's amazing how one country treats the process like it means something great, and another country treats the same process like picking their favorite Super Bowl commercial.

Now maybe I'm making derogatory comments towards the kettle, but how jaded have we become? Sure, we've got who everyone wanted in office now, save for those few delusional die hards on the right wing who keep swearing our head man is in cahoots with Al Queida, Marylin Manson, Anne Murray, Satan, and Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumm, but the most we got out of the questionable election of W was a bit of whining and some sarcastic comments. (Guilty)

Iranians, on the other hand, in a similar but not exactly the same situation, have been staging protests for days. Women are shedding their burkas (for lack of regional nomenclature) in protest. Streets are borderline war zones. The people, in so many words, are pissed off.

Where was that? Where did our revolutionary spirit go? It's still in the Constitution. It was telling us it's perfectly ok to toss out the government if it got this way. But we did...nothing. Then did it again 4 years later. In all fairness, it was like voting between your drinking buddy and a week old morgue resident, but that's not the point.

I seriously admire the Iranian people for speaking out and making a difference in a country where doing so could cost them their lives. I seriously wish we had had the moxy to do so ourselves, in a country where the most it would have got us is some bad press and glib remarks on Fox News.

Adrienne

I found out last night that one of my exes died back in February. She was one of the rare exes that didn't completely hate me after the break up: Her main issue with me was that I wasn't black nor was I a white guy pretending to be black. Anyway, she was horribly misunderstood, had an attitude but heart at the same time. Beneath her Asian white trash paradox of a persona was an individual who was never afraid to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed.

I'd say I'd miss her, but I'd be lying. We hadn't talked much in the last year. I don't really feel anything other than knowing that she had the potential to do good, and given more time she may have succeeded. If there is an afterworld, she's probably sitting with Estelle Getty and Bea Arthur watching her favorite episodes of Golden Girls.

Note: Don't mistake the last paragraph for whimsy. I've been out of stock on that for years and the shipment of it sank in the ice roads north of Manitoba.

I'm not going to ask any of you to say a prayer for her, because you didn't know her and that would make me a hypocrite. I won't even end this with anything schmaltzy like "stay in touch with those you care about" or any other such bullshit that you could easily find on the inside of a Hallmark card.

Nobody say "Sorry" to me, because I don't really feel anything. I think maybe typing all of this was an effort to see if I would. I guess now I know.

Fin.

Interlude

Celebration

For the first time in 5 years I saw my son. It was this Sunday, in the manufactured village known as Celebration, FL. For the occasion, it is aptly named. The place exists, though it probably shouldn't. The morning was beautiful, and my son is happy and healthy and still remembers his old man. I felt like a heel for having to go to work after only getting to spend an hour and a half with him, but child support doesn't pay itself. I was actually happy and in somewhat good spirits for the first time in a long while, listening to him telling me stories, not wanting to leave my side. Smiling. These are the things I should remember and should have stuck with me, and they do, but the happiness was like a new born cub, and the dark sarcastic bitterness that usually fills me snatched it up like so many hyenas. I still hold on to it, but now the thoughts on the town of Celebration that were lingering in the back of my mind the entire time surface.

If you have never been there, it is essentially a residence for the people of Disney and Electronic Arts. Not the park employees, mind you, but the higher ups and animation staff. The town skillfully crafted and beautiful, yet soulless. Sort of like someone made an architectural homage to Paris Hilton. The city streets are perfectly clean and lined with tidy small shops that I'm sure had happy proprietors who could market their wares and make a decent living. The market district had the look of a set from a Leave it to Beaver episode. I had to have a cigarette just to mire the air. It was too pristine.

We ate at the Market Street Grill. The food was good, but I couldn't help but think there was something sinister behind the smiles of the employees there. I saw it mostly in the waitress. The others hid it well, but looking back it does me good to know that in the suburb that Disney built there is still an underlying sense of desperation among the working class. Those that know that all is not fresh churned butter and fluffy pancakes, but there is the watered down coffee of the real world that they must return to at the end of the day.

Part of me envies the town. Part of me despises it. Both want to burn it to the ground. But I digress, as I feel I may have let the darker side take a hold of me too long, and I have been too long out of the light.

The Slow Suicide of GM: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obama

I'm sure you've heard the news by now. GM is going under like the Titanic. What you may not know is that this particular vessel hit the iceberg over 30 some years ago and has been sinking ever since. Campfire time, boys and girls, while I spin you a yarn of ignorance that could have been penned by the Brothers Farrelly.

We have to go back a ways, to the days when GM was sitting pretty on manufacturing cars to the customers liking and the world looked good for the American auto industry. It was just after WWII, and the US economy was the only economy left standing. There was much celebration and copulation and a good bit of that was taking place in the back of a GM vehicle. And things looked good. For a while.

Then came the Korean War, and the US Government commissioning cars from Japan as we still pretty much occupied the place and it was located so conveniently near the place where we needed to be. Come 1957, the Toyota Crown was introduced to the United States. It didn't go over so well, but it didn't die off either.

Enter the 70s and the first gas crisis. I'm sure there's a way for this to be pinned on disco or the Osmonds, but I haven't found it yet. That's beside the point. The fuel efficient and steady Japanese car began taking a big upswing in US sales, while the gas swilling US vehicles began sitting thirsty in ditches or as lawn ornaments. What happened? Well kids, the government set new levels of gas efficiency expectations, and the Japanese companies complied to these with ease, where as GM decided to go the loophole route and start building more trucks and introducing the SUV as a way to get around the stringent gas rules. But the problem stems back a bit further.

The Unions. See, back when the money coming in for GM was good, the Unions wanted their cut and GM complied, offering their employees pay plans for life and some of the best benefits money can buy. Where did the money for all this come from? The Research and Development department, of course. Instead of investing in technologic advances that would keep them ahead of the game, GM made the foolish gamble of putting their faith in an unchanging product and bowing to the demands of people who...for all intents and purposes...had no real idea about the coming trends in the mechanical and economic climate.

And Mr. Obama is not the first person to bail out GM. GM has been getting government protection since the 70s, as it was once the staple of the American automobile industry and to let it die would have killed the whole thing. Essentially all this last bail out did was buy a bit more time to get the funeral plans laid out. Face it, GM has been the business equivalent of Terri Schiavo for the last 30 some years, and we've been forcing money down it's feeding tubes in hopes of seeing some kind of life, but it just isn't there.

This brings me to Chrysler and the person CNBC dubbed "The Worst CEO of All Time," Bob Nardelli. Chrysler is a different beast all together, and I can almost guarantee they are in the situation they're in due to this man. Let's take a look at his track record for a moment, shall we?

Nardelli got his start at GE, where he was shut out from becoming the CEO by one Jeffery Immelt. Literally within minutes after leaving GE, Nardelli recieved a call to head up Home Depot. Here's the thing...for the first few years it almost looks like he was doing a decent job over at the Depot until you look at the fact that their growth rate...while still rising...was cut nearly in half when he took over. When the company was pretty much bankrupt and getting thrashed by Lowes (due in no small part to the awesomeness that is Gene Hackman's voice) , he took a nice 210 million dollar severance package and left.

Bringing us to Chrysler. The man actually blamed the poor auto sales on his company making cars too good. and I quote: "We spent about half a billion dollars in the first several months. Our warranty costs are down 29%. It's an interesting comparison because in the hearing today, going around the panel, the majority of the Senators said that citing specific vehicles that they own that they've got 60, 70, 80,000 miles. The comment was you guys are making them too good and therefore, we're not buying vehicles and we're contributing to your problem. That was from the Senators on the committee today. On April 30, 2009 Bob Nardelli announced that he would leave the company as soon as the bankruptcy was over."

And that was just talking to Wolf "I've got the coolest anchor name ever" Blitzer. In April, he turned down the government loan because it would have required him to cap the executive salary. 8 days later, the company filed for bankrupsy.

The bilingual hell that is Dora the Explorer*

*pronounced 'Explora,' because rhyming is more important than teaching young kids the importance of proper annunciation.

My niece is borderline 2. She is a huge fan of the saucy latina moppet known as Dora. However, Dora is the greatest plot to undermine American society since the fluoridation of water, Mandrake. Teaching our youth Spanglish when their minds are merely sponges, cultivating a society where the English language is perfectly ok to mangle so long as you do it in the presence of a monkey with a pair of golashes on. /limbaugh

The truth of the matter is that the show just creeps me out. The over long silence as the characters stare dead eyed at the screen, the inept ferret-thing thief. The talking backpack. The insidiously catchy and mind deadening song of the Map. To make matters worse, there was a recent effort to "grow up" what...for all visible purposes...is a six year old girl who's show aims to a demographic of 1 - 6. She's now going to be a "tween" for the older audiences.


So...the grand plan was to turn her into a Bratz doll?

I understand that parents are busy these days and the Grand Moff Television must raise our children, but can we please....PLEASE....stop the madness?