yeah, but tell us how you really feel, mkf

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there was a time in america when, if a public figure fucked up badly or showed his true ugly face, the public outcry would be such that his disgraced ass would have little choice but to leave public life and retreat into ignominious retirement, rarely to be seen or heard from again (see joe mccarthy, richard nixon, et al.).

that time, sadly, has long since passed.  today, such people use the sudden media prominence that said fuck-up affords them to elevate themselves into even higher positions of authority and influence.  barney frank, david vitter, alan greenspan, ben bernanke, larry summers, george w. bush and condoleezza rice are but a few examples that come most easily to mind.

the reason for this is no great mystery--standards of behavior and performance in america have declined so radically in the last 40 or so years that incompetence, corruption and sociopathy in our celebrities, athletes and chosen leaders are not only forgiven, they're rewarded with even greater power and influence.

but as bad it's become in mainstream america, in order to experience the ultimate expression of this phenomenon at work, you have to look to the folks that the african-american community choose to elevate as their leaders. and while i could devote entire blogposts to such luminaries as marion barry, alcee hastings, charlie rangel, jesse jackson, bobby seale, louis farrakhan, william jefferson, maxine waters, jeremiah wright and sheila jackson lee, tonight's post is devoted to the man who currently occupies the throne in this pantheon of said knaves and malefactors:  the loathsome, despicable al sharpton.

for those of you too young to have experienced the real al before he reinvented himself as the genial, folksy, besuited pundit you see on TV today, i have but two words for you:  the first is "tawana", and the second is "brawley" (google her if you don't know).

while the fallout and scandal which ensued from the above-referenced fiasco should have discredited this charlatan forever, he went on to even greater glory when, not satisfied with the mayhem he had wrought in the above instance, he seized upon the opportunity to fan the flames of unrest following racially-charged incidents in the crown heights and bensonhurst neighborhoods of new york.  in so doing, this megalomaniacal, malevolent fuck discovered, probably as much to his own surprise as everybody else's, that by threatening an escalation of tensions via the rabble-rousing at which he so excelled, he could pretty much bring the powers that be to their knees.

well, you can call ol' al any number of things, but one of 'em ain't 'dumb'.  thrilled and emboldened by his newfound power, he cleaned up his image and took his show on the road, becoming a media darling and joining jesse jackson in threatening large corporations with all sorts of demonstrations and boycotts for their perceived discrimination against minorities unless they ponied up huge chunks of cash to his "national action network".  and, one after another, they caved--companies like Pepsico, Chrysler, GM and Colgate-Palmolive fell like dominoes before mighty al, filling his coffers to overflowing (so much so that you'd think he'd easily be able to cover his IRS tab--but no, in addition to his other sterling qualities, al's a tax cheat, too).

and now, he's attempting to pull off his biggest coup yet:  whereas in the past, the damage of which al was capable of inflicting was generally limited to local or regional fallout, he has assumed a starring role in the trayvon martin story, vowing an "escalation" (his favorite word) of demonstrations and civil disobedience in sanford, florida, unless the police force there immediately hop to his tune and arrest young mr. martin's killer.

and this time, the simmering resentment and rage that al and his fellow race-baiting grifters have so adroitly tapped into--and that they are in no small part responsible for creating--threatens to boil over and spread far beyond the small town where this tragedy took place.

and if it does, you can bet ol' al will be safely removed from it all, publicly disavowing any responsibility while privately grinning like nero as he stroked himself while rome burned.

god, i hate this motherfucker.

the guttermorality case for religion, part 2

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[this started out as a response to comments made to the previous post, but then i figured, why bury it way down there where only, like, two people will see it?  so it became its own post; this way, four people will see it.]



when i posted the first part of this thread the other night, i figured it would be good for a response from each of my two most faithful commenters, and in that i wasn't disappointed.  one, predictably, took the high road, while the other, also predictably, went for the jugular (in the most loving and constructive way possible, of course), but both responded pretty much as i expected they would.

let's start with will:

With a due respect to Mr.Vonnegut, I think Science shoots down a few more -- in fact many more -- things in the bible; virgin birth, walking on water, feeding thousands from enough food to be held in just two hands, and bodies being taken up into the sky. There's lots more also.

you take mr. vonnegut too literally;  the examples he used, i think, were meant to represent the whole of religious mythology.  what i take his quote to mean (and the reason i used it) is that, even if you strip away all the fairy tales, the basic tenets of most faiths hold up remarkably well.

I stand on the side of being an atheist and secular humanist who raised two adopted Korean orphan daughters as a single gay father and saw them turn out to be literate, honest, civic-minded and generous human beings of whom any culture would be proud.

will, one of the things you tend to do when refuting one of my sweeping pronouncements is use yourself as an example of why i'm wrong, as if you are in any way typical of the mass of grubby humanity.  i assure you, you are not.

I do not personally believe that religion is needed to be a moral, principled person.

nor do i, a fact i made clear in the post.  but i do believe that if one lacks either the benefit of a religious upbringing as a basis for one's moral and philosophical grounding or a strong association with those who have, then in order to achieve the secular equivalent, one would have to be either classically educated, or a serious autodidact.  unfortunately, the vast majority of people today are neither of those things.

In fact, given organized religion's track record, I think it isn't a help but a hindrance to that goal.

here, i think you're guilty of the sorta broad-brush stereotyping and bigotry that would horrify you if it were applied by a conservative to, say, transgenders or racial minorities.  i could, for instance, drown you in all kinds of statistics showing that poor religious people donate a far greater portion of their worldly goods to charity than do rich secular humanists, or that people of strong faith tend to lead longer, more satisfying lives than nonbelievers.

i understand the gist of your argument, though.  i started questioning the validity of christianity in early adolescence, about the time my developing critical faculties made it impossible to overlook the contradiction of importuning a god who had preordained everything already.  the final nail in the coffin of my faith was driven the day i half-heartedly tried to explain the whole jesus virgin-birth-and-resurrection thing to an incredulous jewish classmate--the words coming outta my mouth sounded as hollow and stupid to me as they obviously did to her.

and god knows organized religion is in many ways a mess; when you raise men to power over other men in any institution, be it religion or government, corruption of the original idea is inevitable.  but even with all of religion's evils, in no way do i think the world would be better without it.


now, on to noblesavage:

I have always thought it odd that you have this moralistic streak that borders on the puritanical...it just seems so out of place with, well, what you do much of the time.

in case you hadn't noticed, captain obvious, exploring that contradiction is the point of this whole goddam blog (see masthead).

It is also out of synch with your libertarianism. But, then again, you lurch to the right on numerous topics including global warming, so perhaps you are at home with the morality police -- if only they do not get to know you too well.

"morality police"--how the hell did you get that outta what i wrote?  lemme tell you what i believe, noblesavage.  i believe that for any group of people to have any hope of creating and maintaining a free and just society, three things are necessary:  (1) a strong family and community structure, (2) an enlightened, educated populace, and (3) a common, agreed-upon code of conduct.  i further believe that, to the degree a given society has pulled off those three things, relatively little policing, moral or otherwise, is necessary.

america today?  between the sexual revolution, the advent of birth control, the rise of the internet and inflation eliminating the one-income family, we've pretty much decimated (1), the powers-that-be in concert with the teachers' unions have effectively destroyed any hope of (2), and the cults of multiculturalism and political correctness have pretty much dealt the death blow to (3).

you don't believe me?  take off your rose-colored glasses and look around you:  while the 1% systematically steal everything that's not nailed down right under our dumb, oblivious noses, we occupy ourselves with rioting over sneakers, sending our third-graders off to school to orally copulate one another, and dismantling our infrastructure to sell for scrap.

if you can't see how drastically society has deteriorated over the course of your lifetime--i mean, people are routinely doing things today we couldn't have conceived of in our worst nightmares 40 years ago--while at the same time our individual freedoms are being stripped from us daily (in order to "protect" us), then no amount of blathering by yours truly is ever gonna open your eyes to the truth.

Most religious denominations give you a built-in ready to wear moral code. That is true.

which is the whole point of my post.  the moral codes of most of the world's religions (scientology and a few others excepted) weren't randomly whipped up overnight by a cabal of puritanical buzzkillers; on the contrary, they evolved over the millennia as a tried-and-true way to moderate the foibles of human nature, and thus allow people to live together in relative harmony.

without the foundation of a "built-in ready to wear moral code", most people just make it up as they go along, which is pretty much why we are where we are today.

In any case, I don't see you ever going to church, so I guess you just like the idea of it in the abstract...or think it is good for people who need it and you don't need it -- but everyone else does.

i did my time in sunday school, and it served its purpose--it gave me a well-developed conscience, a pretty thorough grounding in the concepts of right and wrong, and an ideal way of living to measure against the way i actually conduct my life.  which is probably one of the reasons i drink.

*     *     *     *     *

that's it--another one in the can.  and now that i've finished extolling the virtues of religion, i'm gonna allow myself a moment to bask in a warm, well-earned glow of godly satisfaction before i get back to my regular business of drunken ranting and tales of random sexual encounters.  you can understand that, right?

the guttermorality case for religion

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A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete.  All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the whale.  Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness.  People who find these lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness.  Science has nothing to do with it. 

kurt vonnegut

like many of my generation, i didn't spend a lot of time in church growing up, but like most of my generation, i was raised and surrounded by adults who had.  i didn't appreciate the significance of this fact until fairly recently.

there weren't a lot of rules and laws governing personal behavior back when i grew up, because there didn't need to be.  today, we're filling the moral vacuum that is the downside of the sexual revolution with all kinds of stupid freedom-restricting curfews, zero-tolerance policies, hate-crimes statutes and anti-bullying laws, as if pursuing such a government-mandated strategy is a reasonable substitute for good parenting.

and, as someone who was raised in such a way as to not require such nanny-state oversight in order to make his way through life without hurting other people, and on behalf of all other such people, may i say i resent the living fuck out of it.

*     *     *     *     *

am i saying a secular upbringing can't produce ethical, empathetic, enlightened children?  of course not--it's done all the time, but it's generally a result of those rare parents who have a game plan and work it hard--some basic philosophical underpinning that'll act as counterbalance to everything the kid picks up out in the world.  otherwise, where's he gonna get his moral and ethical grounding?  i'll tell you where:  from TV, the internet, his school and his dumbass friends, that's where.

for myself, if the universe were to be so imprudent as to place an impressionable child in my care, you would soon see my agnostic ass seeking out, joining and regularly attending a goddam church.

the guttermorality recipe of the day

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unlike my forebears, i am not an inspired cook, but i try to plod along as best i can.

take this, one of my favored recipes, for instance: it's one my mother offhandedly rattled off back when i was on my own for the first time and called to ask how to make her world-famous soup (she only makes one, but it's enough).

in the ensuing years, she's made countless refinements to the recipe, but i still stick with the version she gave me way back when--not only because i still love it after all this time, but because it never fails to blow away whomever i make it for.

oh, and because it's easy.

so when she asked me what i wanted for my last meal before she headed east with my sister, it was really no contest--and i made her stick to the original recipe, which goes something like this:

ma's beef-and-vegetable soup

ingredients:

1 lb. or so of stew meat, cut into 1/2" cubes--or if you're in a hurry, 90% lean hamburger [or if you're a pussy, i suppose you could use ground turkey] 

4-6 large carrots, chopped into chunks 

4-6 stalks celery, chopped into chunks 

one large white onion, quartered and sliced into 1/4" strips [unless you're having v over for dinner, because he's allergic] 

one large baking potato, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes   

one large can of non-sweetened, non-creamed corn, drained   

one large can diced tomatoes

[anything else you wanna substitute or add, feel free--it's a pretty forgiving soup]

here's the procedure:

toss the meat into a large pot with barely enough water to cover and boil until the meat's about medium, at which point you pour in the secret ingredient--oh wait, did i fail to mention this already?--which is

one quart of V-8 vegetable juice [yeah, i know, but trust me--cook without prejudice]

once it all starts to bubble, add the carrots (because they take the longest to cook); and then, once they begin to soften, add the potatoes, celery and onion.

once the potatoes are soft, drop the heat, add the corn and tomatoes, and then add salt and (lots of) pepper to taste.

and then serve to your awestruck guests, who, trust me, will think you are a goddam culinary genius.

[accessory dishes: if you're south of the mason-dixon line, cornbread is pretty much de rigueur; if you're in a pinch or merely a yankee, saltines will suffice.]

i'll miss you, ma, but at least you left me something to remember you by--for the rest of the week, anyway.

smoke

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i like the way a fresh, firm pack feels in my hand.  i like peeling away that little piece of cellophane and seeing it twinkle in the light. i like coaxing that first sweet cylinder out of its hiding place and bringing it slowly up to my lips, striking a match, watching it burst into a perfect little flame and knowing that soon that flame will be inside me. 

i love that first puff, pulling it into my lungs, little fingers of smoke filling me, caressing me, feeling that warmth penetrate deeper and deeper, until i think i'm going to burst--then, whoosh! watching it flow out of me in a lovely, sinuous cloud, no two ever quite the same.

bebe glazer        

* * * * *

i've been thinking a lot about june r lately.

who the fuck, you ask? mrs. r was the mother of my (other) best friend in high school, bruce (briefly mentioned in this post).

lovely and always well put together, mrs. r was one of those rare women who exuded simultaneous gentility and warmth, and i was very fond of her, to the point of happily accompanying her on a couple of long day trips when bruce wasn't available. rather than being the awkward sorta encounters between a mom and her son's friend you might imagine, our time together always flew--we loved the same books, and could talk endlessly on a variety of subjects (yeah, i was that kinda adolescent).

but the thing i remember most distinctly about mrs. r was the way she smoked, because she handled that filthy habit as graciously as she did most other aspects of her life, and in a manner utterly unlike anyone else i've ever known.

see, at the end of each day, once the dinner dishes were washed and put away, she would settle into her favorite chair with a book or to watch a little TV, and smoke her single salem of the day--that was it, just one.

"i look forward to this little moment all day," she told me once in her lilting rhodesian accent, smoke curling from her lips. "i thoroughly enjoy it, and then i'm done--i don't really think about it again until the next evening."

needless to say, of all the ways in which mkf could not possibly be more unlike june r, this is one of the biggest.

* * * * *

of all the people who evinced astonishment when i finally managed to kick my constant, chronic habit in the fall of 1993, i think the fact of it came as the biggest shock to me.

and it wasn't even intentional--what happened was, i contracted a dose of bronchitis of such severity that, for the first time in my life, i was literally too sick to smoke.  when it finally cleared up three weeks later, i decided to try out my new lungs for a few days before i went back into the trenches.  those few days turned into a week, and then a month, until one day i looked up and realized, "holy shit, i'm not a smoker anymore".

it wasn't quite that easy, of course--the adjustment took a full five years. i had to avoid all the triggers--other smokers, for instance, but mainly music.  all it would take to ignite an almost-irresistible urge to light up was the opening notes of a favorite song. but by god, i perservered, and i succeeded.

and then little shane came along [speaking of whom, guess who regularly hits me up at least once a week, as i knew he would?]--and left temptation in my path at precisely the wrong moment.

that first day was glorious--songs that had gone flat from overuse during repeated bouts of drinking suddenly took on vibrant, new life--it was like i was hearing them for the first time.  and the sudden mental clarity--my god, the thoughts and ideas that came rushing into my newly-awakened consciousness with that first drag, i can't even begin to describe.

i managed to keep it in check for the first couple weeks--five a day, no more, and never before i left for work at 4:45.  i burned a CD--called, of course, "smoke"-- of special songs to accompany that first cigarette, and that previously-dreary 15-minute drive suddenly became the high point of my day.

but then, things happened--i had to drive out to texas to fetch my mom, and i couldn't be expected to brave all those long, bleak miles without a smoke or two, right? and since she smokes and i'm nothing if not a good host, i certainly wasn't gonna sit here and let her do it all by herself.

so, bottom line, i'm back up to my former pack a day plus, and no single cigarette is special anymore.

damndest thing, though--since i started smoking again, i've lost even the slightest trace of desire for alcohol (thus clearing up the mystery of why mkf the sudden middle-aged lush was never much of a drinker in his youth).  hell, i'm practically having to choke down the necessary cocktail in order to finish this post--between drags, naturally.

this nonsense will have to come to an end, of course, and soon--the headaches are back, and i'm finding i can't handle the penalty that sweet, sweet smoke exacts on my lungs like i did when i was a kid.

but meantime?  it's you and me, bebe.