Cynical Streak

Well, the best American Idol contestent, by far, got kicked off the show. Why? Because cool people don’t vote. What about overweight mid-western church goers with American flags embroidered on their jumpers?

Oh, they vote all right, for dorks like Katharine McPhee. These are the wishy washy non-thinkers who line up to buy the latest Disney movie soundtrack album, which is exactly the kind of dreck that McPhee will record. These dopes also settle for mediocrity when voting for President. We elect the average Joe who we’d like to have a beer with.

The one time George Bush flashed a little edge during the debates with John Kerry, his supporters recoiled.

The Washington Post agrees with me, too.

“The departure of rocker Chris Daughtry from “American Idol” means that the squishy middle has won once again. Daughtry was voted off the show this week, leaving behind three uninspired performers who may appeal to the masses but lack any distinctive personal style.”

All this reminds me of rapper/bad dancer Sean Combs’ campaign to get black folks out to vote by sporting “Vote or Die” t-shirts. Now more than ever, Puffy has a point. The conservatives are mobilizing to shread our Constitution as we speak. Vote or Die is true now more than ever: just ask the thousand bloated corpses floating around New Orleans.

Watching David Blaine’s endurance stunt, in which he damn near killed himself, I wondered, could this be good for proponants of self mortification? With Time Magazine’s recent cover story on Opus Dei exposing the practice of whipping the shit out of yourself for the love of Jesus, maybe Blaine is inadvertantly promoting personal mutilation to the masses.

To quote the Happy Catholic,

To serve others requires mortification, a continuing realisation of the presence of God, and a forgetting of self.

Now, this is utter bullshit, meant to humiliate and guilt people into tithe paying, sexual repression and obedient service. The Pope, in his guilded palace and Prada shoes, clearly doesn’t practice this type of torture on himself.

At least Blaine gets a likely lucrative TV deal out of it. But the last thing we need is a big public spectacle making it sexy to beat yourself to a pulp for no apparent reason.

The Vatican is reconsidering its ban on condoms by married couples when one spouse is HIV positive. If you and your spouse are about to get amorous and the hang-ups of this guy pop into your head, then perhaps you shouldn’t bother. If you empower someone who looks like Marilyn Manson at 80 to inform your reproductive decisions, your gene pool is not likely meant to survive to the next generation anyway. The Catholic church is so obsessed with outpacing the population of Muslims, it can’t bear the thought of a single drop of life juice wasted. AIDS epidemic, shmepidemic; have 10 babies, then die of AIDS. At least you were a good Catholic!

Can someone please explain to me why anyone voluntarily stays in this club? (Uh, except my Dad, who’s finally finished paying off my 20 years of private Catholic schooling.)

Joaquin and Oisin.

Friday afternoon amusement: watch Rumsfeld grasp for his lifejacket of rhetorical questions when faced with pointed questions about Iraq.

“Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?” asked Ray McGovern, the former analyst.

In his comment to my post Frequent Naps or la Mort!, Jason Kropsky writes

“…The Chinese will whine. Not now, maybe, but in due course. First the sexual revolution will hit (which it has in coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou) and then the worker’s revolution. (sexuality/the breakdown of family culture has a funny way of working as a catalyst for change)…”

The sexual revolution is surely hitting in the cities I visited in 2002 (I didn’t spend any time in the countryside for comparision.) See my
photographic evidence, mostly taken in Beijing and Shanghai.

A huge wildcard will be the imbalance between the male and female populations. Will women be idolized and fawned over at birth, rising to a new social status? Or will they be subjugated, bride-kidnapped or traded like chattel in China’s new market economy?

I’m optimistic that the burgeoning middle class will continue to fuel democratic stirrings. Look how many fewer people spend dusk ’til dawn in
the fields versus 1952, leaving them more time and more people to network with.

Houllebecq sounds like he reads too much Camus. Luckily, I think it’s been banned in China. Unfortunately, most young chinese people have never even seen a photo of The Tank Man (not yet google-able in China).

See Frontline’s excellent documentary about this time, viewable online.

Jason notes that parents in China must now worry about paying for their children’s education. This is great! It will shift resources to private alternatives - parents won’t passively chug Commie propaganda if they have to pay for education with their hard-earned money. And when private education flourishes, censorship will be far harder to impose.

The Washington Post writes the shocking news that the press is less than thrilled about their skewering by Stephen Colbert. I can’t imagine what the President and press corps were expecting when facing an address by Colbert, but we in the factocracy are delighted.

See thankyoustephencolbert.org to add your two cents and see the videos.

Every once in a while, to test my gag reflex, I watch a bit of the O’Reilly Factor. It’s so exaggeratedly absurd, it comes off like a parody of the Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live. O’Reilly talks derisively about the “media” as if FOX is some indie channel just tryin’ to get a nut, even though he’s the highest rated news show on cable TV.

And chances are, most of these people are not tuning in for chuckles! At least most of them are probably adults. The thought of O’Reilly writing a book for kids is almost as scary as the existence of a book called Homeschooling for Dummies, which I imagine that people also buy oblivious to the irony.

Anyway, today O’Reilly briefly tolerated a report by Geraldo Rivera (formerly known as Gerald Rivers) unctiously supporting the Latino protesters. As much fun as it is to see a Jewish guy straining credulity to identify with his Hispanic bretheren, O’Reilly cut him short to remind us that illegal immigrants have no rights in this country. So by all means, feel free to run over one with your car tonight on your way to Barnes & Noble.

Hispanics seem to be the only ones not watching O’Reilly in this country. According to Nielsen Media Research, blacks and whites are united in harmony every Tuesday and Wednesday night when we all watch American Idol together (go Chris!). But there is not one single English-language program in the Hispanics’ top-ten rated programs. So if they want to flex their economic muscles and stage a business strike like blacks did in the 60s’ boycotts, fine. But staying home from school and refusing to assimilate is a sure path to poverty and racial tension. My bother-in-law drifted here on a raft from Cuba and married a nice Irish girl; he went from cleaning hotel rooms to a white-collar job and is a few credits away from an MBA, and is uncontrovertible proof that the American Dream model works.