junkmail - braindump edition

It's the little sins that wear your soul away...

It is, at the end of the day, a little ridiculous, he decided. Waiting in line, five deep, for a bottle of water. It was of course his own damn fault, but how could he have known? Who even goes into convenience stores any more? Slow people, people without bank cards to use to just pay outside. People like this first guy in line, with personal fucking checks. A check! For five dollars in gas, a bag of chips, and one of those god-awful tabloid magazines. Who even wrote checks? He didn’t think he even had any, or at any rate he wouldn’t know where to find them. And now he had to wait in line for all the I’s to be dotted, T’s to be crossed, identification to be checked, because he had to have a drink of water.

And of course, next would be the lottery expert; that rarefied and lovely specimen of humanity who not only believed it possibly (even likely!) to win the damn thing, but who felt it was vital to make the right choices. Five of that card, three of this… what do you mean that game ended? Clearly the winning strategy of the Christmas-themes scratcher was flawed in some inherent way. And then, the numbers… Some people played their birthday, their anniversary, those goddamn numbers for that TV show; but the lottery expert played all of these and more, in a dizzying display of mathematicaly fluidity, made somewhat less interesting by the fact that it DIDN’T FUCKING MATTER.

All these and more, queued up mindlessly to transact their excruciatingly mundane business, and he bearing witness to it because he just have to have a Poland Springs at that moment. Talk about mundane. There they were, counting out their exact change, trying to figure out how to get back a dime instead of three pennies, failing, and throwing said pennies into the insultingly paternalistic “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” tray. Disgusted, perhaps at the fetid brown coins, perhaps at their own inability to subtract small numbers, or perhaps… well, who knows what else? Finally, he got through the biomass to pay his $1.07. Fucking ridiculous was what it was, and nobody’s fault but his own. It was worth it, though, for the look on the bored teenager’s face when he scooped up every penny in that disgusting tray, turned, and walked out to his car.

Justice Alito - You are no John Lennon

So, from time to time, I amuse myself by reading the decisions of the US Supreme Court. Those wacky Supremes! It’s either due to my extremely brief flirt with becoming a law student, my unseemly crush on Nina Totenberg, or the fact that these 9 unelected individuals control, in large part, the direction of Western civilization that fascinates me.

Plus it makes me feel smart. And it is a good way to avoid work, because having legal opinions up is something that, while not common, can at least look somewhat like it’s in the realm of work-related activity. And sometimes it helps me sleep at night.

Today I’m reading Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, mainly because I heard somewhere that Justice Alito was trying to be all hip and down with the youth culture and whatnot. Also because I’ve heard of these Summum wackos before, and I always like to see how members of one arbitrary cult try to ban the activities of an arbitrary cult with which they disagree.

The decision is, in itself, not particularly interesting. Due mainly to the fact that respondent Summum framed things as a Free Speech issue and not a religious speech issue, it was mostly just argued that, in fact, the city can say whatever they damn well please, and just because they don’t want to put your ridiculous cult’s monument in their park doesn’t mean they’re squelching your freedom of speech.

Which is true as far as it goes, but a far bigger issue to me is that, by accepting a Ten Commandments monument, but not the Seven Affirmations of the Summum people, the City is in essence declaring that one religious point of view is somehow more “correct” than another. This is where Justice Alito attempts to get all clever and pop-culture relevant by invoking John Lennon.

He essentially opines that putting up a Ten Commandments monument doesn’t necessarily impart a message of judeo-christian morality because, you see, people can ascribe many different meanings to any piece of art. Which again, is true as far as it goes, but I think he picks some egregiously stupid examples. First of all, there are very few interpretations of the Ten Commandments that aren’t roughly in line with “we love christianity (or at least judaism)”. And his second example, the Imagine mosaic in Central Park, is just stupid, and is what brings us here to today’s little rant.

From the decision:

Some observers may “imagine” the musical contributions that John Lennon would have made if he had not been killed. Others may think of the lyrics of the Lennon song that obviously inspired the mosaic and may “imagine” a world without religion, countries, possessions, greed, or hunger.

See, first of all, I think nobody is imagining that first one. I think it’s a baseline cultural opinion that, when you think of John Lennon you either think of his vast and incalculable contributions to the culture of the human race, or you think of the whole “no religion, no countries, no possessions, no greed, no hunger” thing. Cause that’s, y’know, pretty much what he had to say and what he wanted us to think about.

And now Justice Alito wants us to think that, well, maybe some people might not think about that. I mean maybe some people see “imagine” in Central Park and think of how great Halliburton is! It could happen! And maybe some people see the Ten Commandments and think about how they really want to convert to Hinduism! Yeah, that’s the ticket. So really, Pleasant Grove City is advancing Hindus by accepting that monument, and you damn hippie kids don’t have a problem with that, do you???

But really, I just want Mr. Justice Alito to stop quoting John Lennon. John Lennon was awesome. John Lennon is one of those people I always put on my lists of “famous dead people I want to have lunch with”. I wouldn’t cross the street to take a piss on Mr. Justice Alito if he were on fire. And further, this is the same guy who dissented in Wyeth v. Levine, in which a musician was crippled and lost her livelihood due to the negligent labeling of a drug. You don’t get to side with Big Pharmacy by defending their right to not reimburse a musician for destroying her ability to produce further creative work on the one hand, and go around acting like you have any understanding of John Lennon on the other. If I may be so bold, were he alive today, I don’t think Lennon would cross the street to extinguish Mr. Justice Alito either.

It’d be a waste of good urine.

"Friends"

So, I’m a member of a couple of these new-fangled “socialized media” sites, or whatever the kids are calling them. And, in each one, I have a spare handful of “friends” or “followers” or “sycophants” or whatever this particular ad-delivery system chooses to call them. And I look around and notice that most people tend to have like, hundreds.

Of course in one sense I know full well that not all of these people are “friends” in any sane definition of the word. On the other hand, it is a truism that the number of people I interact with in the Real, Physical World is vanishingly small. Outside of family and work, it’s probably like… one? There are a couple more if you add people from the local library where I work on the Board. But the fact remains that even if I wanted to inflate my online ego, I would basically have to start picking names out of a phone book to get up to 100 people that I’m even acquainted with.

And so, possessing as I do the unique combination of deep introspection and great self-loathing, it occurs to me that this is pretty fucked up. I mean, aren’t we some kind of ape which has specially evolved to be social? What of my monkeysphere? Why can’t I have a vast collection of people I can pretend to be good buddies with?

I guess this is why years and years ago, I got excited over a mailing list I used to run. It got a couple hundred subscribers and generated a lot of interesting commentary. It took a while to sink in that even this relatively small number of people cared what I had to say, but after a while it was intoxicating. I guess this is the truth of fame, no matter how small.

On a day-to-day basis, it’s possible to just move through life and not care too much about the small nature of my social network. But when it’s pinned to the corkboard of social networking, wriggling pathetically, it makes one want to come up with elaborate metaphors of desperation.

Democracy -- ur doin it rite

We’re in the 3rd day of the new Presidency and boy howdy, things are coming right along. Gitmo, closed. Ex-presidential records, opened. White House, blogged. Granted, I still don’t know what to think about the whole Rick Warren thing, and there’s still a whole bunch of assholes out there (see California and Florida’s gay marriage votes), but shit’s getting done, and it’s good shit. Top Men are scouring through the mess that the Shrub tried to cram through in his last days, in order to properly dispose of it. Actual communication with other world leaders is occurring and/or pending. And there was even a little shout-out to Non-Believers! Truly, we are living in a less-fucked-up age. Obama’s just a man, not a god, and we’re still in for some truly bad economic fucktitude, but y’know, it might all just work out for a little while, which is kind of a good thing.

Also, some extremely brain-damaged people are trying to say that Obama’s not *really* President because he screwed up the Oath. But I’m not even going to get into that, cause I’m so mellowed-out by the whole thing.

I'm only happy when it rains....

So, in one sense I’m really, really glad that the epic, 2-year-long presidential election is over, and the forces of sanity emerged victorious. And I’m happy that for the next 4 years, at least, we won’t have to constantly look over our collective shoulder to make sure the government isn’t fucking us again. Or at least, we only have to worry about the Congress doing it.

On the other hand, as a part-time Internet sleaze-merchant, it kind of cramps my style. I shall have to satisfy myself with the knowledge that the Bushies and Palins of the world are still out there doing stuff, even if they don’t happen to have the reigns of power. For instance, our good friend “Joe the Plumber” is, inexplicably, still finding public attention. In the vernacular of today’s youth, “lolwut?” So I’ll still be OK for the rare time I feel like making a spectacle of myself.

New Year, while it may in most respects be a case of “same shit, different digit”, can also be a time when you start doing stuff, like writing, that you’ve mostly given up on. I don’t fool myself into thinking that I’m doing anything but shouting down a very deep, mostly empty hole, but it feels good, so there it is.

Oops

So, it appears that my last posting was not, in fact, written by Ron Paul. It was written by a staffer of his, in a newsletter with his name on it, without having been edited by him. But nevertheless. So we’ll just have to be happy with disliking him for all the other reasons that libertarians are poor choices.

In other news, a group of guys beat another group of guys at some sort of sport yesterday.  This is apparently important to some people, so I thought I’d mention it.