2003-04-17 - 12:55 p.m.
Some people say it better than I ever could.
This may not be any consolation to Mr. Gilliard, but I predict that, 30 years from now, today's smothered and hothouse-raised children are going to look at their kids, think back on the Orange Alerts, Amber Alerts, structured play dates, ridiculously padded car safety seats, duct tape, school metal detectors and WHAT-ABOUT-THE-CHILDREN???-spewing politicians who wouldn't give them a moment's peace or free time during their childhoods, and say, "Fuck that. I'm gonna let my kids get in as much trouble as they want."
If you haven't read The Culture of Fear and/or seen Bowling for Columbine yet, do so. Now. Basically, we're a nation of big frightened pussies with lots of missiles, and when the rest of the world isn't terrified that we're going to bomb the shit out of them in next week's "defensive" war, they're laughing their asses off at us.
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Besides the curator of the Iraqi national museum, do you know who I feel sorry for? Private Jessica Lynch. The next 10 years are going to be one crappy Lifetime Original Movie after another for her, and there's nothing whatsoever she can do about it.
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And oh, yeah--is anyone in the media ever going to ask where the hell Saddam Hussein is? First Osama becomes vaporware, now him. It just adds to my general disgust with the whole scriptedness of things--right down to the part where the Special Guest Villain slips out of the hero's grasp and lives to taunt another day. Hello? I'm MIGUELITO, goddamn it! I wrote the user's manual for this shit. Napoleon had a ME complex, for crying out loud!
(Credit to Uncle Joe for that last line.)
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Books I brought home from Portland this weekend:
* Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. I don't normally go in for massive meta-analytic tomes on the History and Significance of Punk, but this is one of the classic works in the canon. I got about halfway through it on the train ride home. It doesn't go much beyond the New York and London scenes, and for this SoCal boy it's kind of annoyingly cliquish as a result (another book by a different author, We Got the Neutron Bomb, takes a similar approach to the L.A. scene), but it's still worth reading just for the reminder that punk music didn't always equal Blink-182.
* The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali. I'm not convinced this was a wise purchase. At the store it looked like a pretty solid analysis and comparison of bin Laden-style Islamo-fascism and Shrub-style Christian NO FUNdamentalism by an ex-BBC journalist and documentary filmmaker, but on second and third glance I'm afraid I may have paid way too much money for just another silly paleo-Marxist polemic. During a casual flip-through yesterday I actually found the phrase "running dog" in the text. "Running dog"! I had no idea that people still said that kind of stuff, or that anyone outside of the Symbionese Liberation Army had ever really used that phrase with a straight face. Oh well, at least the cover art is cool.
That brings my stack of Books I Haven't Gotten Around to Reading Yet back up to a comfortable dozen. Huzzah!
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