Asshole of the Century

Monday, December 24, 2007

A Merry Christmas to All My Pagan Friends

In the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to cut back on the vitriol and share the gift of good will with all my friends and readers, be they Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Pagan. I would like to invite all of us to break spiritual bread together in the knowledge that we are all cut from the same cultural cloth, part of the same people.

I know that fact is difficult to recognize sometimes with all the doctrinaire dolts getting airtime, walking around in the cloth of my faith, along with all of the religious nay-sayers who have elbowed in to compete with them for space on the shelves and on the airwaves. Yes, it’s become all the rage in our great public forum, the mass media, to pit the secular against sacred, the God fearing against those who deny his/her/its very existence. But I encourage everyone to take a step back from this simplistic, two-dimensional debate and recognize the common intellectual heritage we all share. It is not too late to pull ourselves from this cultural precipice, to hark back to the not-so-distant past, when we made room for both Bertrand Russell and Reinhold Niebuhr, when great minds were at the center of our culture, unlike the trivial combatants who have come to dominate the current age.

I share a common cultural heritage with all my atheist and pagan friends, one based on the scientific method and belief in the ability for the common man to decide own his spiritual fate, both gifts from the Protestant Reformation, which began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg and may have reached its zenith when Francis Bacon advocated for the first time in human history the primacy of inductive reasoning. Whereas classical Greek and Roman logic was based around deductive reasoning, that the truth was best divined after first developing abstract concepts to look at the world that could then be used to decipher specific evidence, Bacon turned Classical logic on its head, saying that you can’t decide the truth of overarching theories without first examining the specific evidence, paving the way for the modern, experiment-driven scientific method that we all benefit from today.

But enough of my Protestant apologia. I’ll just say that I am quite comfortable in debating the facts of the world with a Born Again Christian as well as any one of my many pagan/agnostic/atheist friends in a way that I would not be with someone from a different cultural history, because somewhere back in our cultural genetics is the recognition of debate as a good thing, that this type of argument takes place in a sacred space where everything may be questioned because that is the only way that the truth will be discovered, both for us as individuals and for our society and the planet as a whole.

So I break bread with the Pagan and the Jew, the Agnostic and the Methodist, because all are united in our search for meaning. If I have an issue, it is with the Humanist, because his worship of man ignores our base monkey selves, the carnivorous primate in us who tracks across the planet, alloying vision with blood lust.

It is no coincidence that our most famous current humanist, Christopher Hitchens, is also one of the most vociferous defenders of the war in Iraq. It is a man with dreams that is to be feared, not a man with religion. It is when a religious man dreams of changing the world that he causes problems, but as Hitchens demonstrates in his abject support of the American military empire, beware a Humanist with dreams most of all, for all too often the gulags are soon to follow, and Robespierre may soon be lying bleeding to death in his bathtub. The modern anthem of the humanist is John Lennon’s “Imagine”, which I had an immediate aural revulsion of when I first heard it, like I could instinctively tell at age eleven that it was a song written by a man in his pajamas, both vacant and scary.

But I trust that you, my dear reader, are the antitheses of that, no matter what your religious persuasion, or lack thereof, and I encourage you to pursue your own spiritual quest in this solstice season, whether that involve taking communion or howling at the moon.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Oprah and a Planet of Whores

Like many men, I suspect, I am periodically subjected to a pregnant woman whom I know only casually sharing her ultrasound, publicly passing around a photo of her barely evolved fetus, sometimes giving it a cute name or describing distinctive family characteristics to the indistinct blot on the photograph.

Since when did showing a photograph of your womb become a public event, to be shared with vague acquaintances? I’ll tell you when: Since women started behaving like whores. I guess that’s the price men must pay for modern society’s near universal open crotch policy. I know that I spent the better part of two decades as a single man, riding high on free pussy.

Let’s face it, you have a better chance of tossing a penny into Lake Michigan and striking a mermaid than you do of finding a 25-year woman who is still a virgin in this town. I don’t care what the race, religion, politics or socioeconomic status of a bride these days, it’s a pretty safe bet that she isn’t going to the altar having never accepted another man’s cock. In fact, it’s now considered the only reasonable way to lead your life. I’ve heard grown, 30-something, settled people gathering and whispering askance at a couple who are young and getting married without first living together to test things out. “How imprudent!” seems to be the tilt of the gossipers. It represents the absolute failure of the Catholic League and all these right wing religious groups, their total inability to grasp the direction of the culture around them, that most Born Again Christian girls are also quite ready to spread their legs for a man, you’ve just got to work a little harder at convincing them of your “sincerity”.

Every guy knows this. And, like I’ve said, we’ve benefited handsomely from these new arrangements. Of course, there’s a price to pay. A nation of promiscuous women has quickly become a nation without shame. It’s become a nation of Oprah watchers, willing to cluck about their feelings for hours on end like a barn full of hens, willing to make public all of their intimate physical and psychic complaints, real or imagined, whether waxing about inattentive partners or talking about their yeast infections.

And of course a nation of whores is even less equipped to properly clothe and instruct their daughters than their own mothers before them, leaving us with a generation of 12-year olds dressing up for school like they are preparing to race down to the strip club and do a quick pole dance on their lunch break.

I know it won’t even start to turn the tide, but the next time a woman at work or a casual friend shows me a photo of her fetus in the womb, I’m going to tell her, “Please, unlike your pussy, why don’t you save that photograph for your husband.”

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Here's to Michael Forbes

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should state up front that I find golf to be one of the biggest wastes of human ingenuity and natural resources on the planet, ranking somewhere between NASCAR and the burning of the rain forests, the sporting equivalent of the millions of old Air Supply albums slowly rotting away in landfills across greater American suburbia.

In the first place, golf is not really a sport to at all. The whacking of an inanimate object is not a sport. Golf may require a lot of talent, it may take a lifetime to master, as they say, but a sport involves some notion of direct human competition. Sport is, in its essence, ritualized warfare. Someone’s got to be trying to stop you from hitting that inanimate object into a hole. Football is a sport. Basketball is a sport. Ice hockey is a sport. Golf is an outdoor hobby, beloved by many, but it is not a sport.

I’ve had friends tell me that I look at golf with a jaundiced eye because I am a lover of tennis, and that the players of tennis and golf are like cats and dogs, forever doomed not to get along. That may be true, and while I’ll save for another time any kind of extended defense of the game of kings, let me briefly state that tennis is a battle of brain and brawn, one that rewards all the great sporting skills, including strength, speed, and dexterity. The fact tennis is a sport may not make it superior to golf, but for me it is a much more satisfying game. So I realize that I’m a yapping terrier here, upset at the Persian who left its filthy hair all over my master’s Ottoman, when I probably wouldn’t give a shit if a dog had done the same thing.

That said, I blame golf most of all for being a land grab by those who want to mercantilize our public space, to buy up our open space and then charge the well heeled jocks among us to walk around and whack their balls on it. This may not be so apparent in an older community like Chicago, where the public space, from the city parks to the forest preserves, were set aside long ago, back when the ideals of American democracy were taken seriously. But if you head out to many new communities, particularly in the South and West, a huge chunk of the “public” open land consists of golf courses.

When many of these golf courses are first built (and “built” is the right term, because they are among the most artificial of environments, a fantasy landscape created to mimic an imaginary pastoral scene that never really existed, often plopped into a native landscape of scrub brush or desert), it may seem like a fair exchange, because the course is paid for by the developer, it lowers the overall density of the development, and it allows the folks who can afford to live around it a nice view and peaceful walks at night. But what is lost in this equation is that soon all of the property on the outskirts of this development will also be developed, and that in a decade or so the golf course will be the primary open space left, as the city fathers didn’t deem it a priority to set aside truly public spaces like parks and nature preserves, and the developer was only too happy to cooperate with this blinkered idea of what constitutes a community. So golf courses become the primary open space in these towns, accessible only to those willing to pay to play on it or live around it. The rest of us plebes are not welcome.

Which brings me to Michael Forbes. You might have seen on the news that Donald Trump is trying to buy up a 1,400-acre chunk of mostly open wilderness on the northeast coast of Scotland to turn into a designer golf resort, but that a few of the Scottish locals are stepping up to fight him (for a summary of the battle over the proposed Trump resort, click the Tribune link here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/thursday/chi-trump_hundleydec06,0,2253940.story)

Key among them is one Michael Forbes, a former worker on an offshore oil rig, who saved up to buy 23 acres of Scottish heath that is in the middle of the proposed golf resort and who refuses to sell his land to Mr. Trump, no matter what the price. There’s also Mickey Foote, producer of the first Clash album, who now lives in the Aberdeen area and has helped organize opposition to turning 1,400 acres of pristine Scottish wilderness into “a gated community for rich people.”

The Aberdeenshire Council’s infrastructure committee recently rejected Trump’s proposal, looking to negotiate some environmental safeguards before approving the project. Predictably, Trump refuses to negotiate, so the two sides are at a standstill. If this was in the U.S., with the federal courts and U.S. government now firmly in the hands of the people rich enough to afford a phalanx of D.C. lobbyists, Mr. Trump would simply have some governmental authority declare that Mr. Forbes land is now Trump’s via eminent domain. And a version of that may still happen, as the Scottish executive has “relieved” the Aberdeenshire Council of its authority in the matter.

You couldn’t find a more appropriate poster boy for golf than Donald Trump, if for no other reason than his abysmal taste in women matches well with the Stepford Wives of the PGA. Not so coincidently, he is also the perfect symbol for the new American aristocracy, where the sons and daughters of wealth who learn to play the game have the inside track to much of the trillions being handed out by the global banking industry, even when, as in Trump’s case, he’s shown no ability to manage money, has a penchant for trashy architecture that rivals his bad taste in women, and has had to declare bankruptcy two times and counting. If he didn’t have the right connections, Trump would be the kind of dissolute spendthrift that the Republicans write laws against. Instead, he’s an American icon. “You’re fired,” Trump arrogantly declares, playing his role for the camera, and America, or at least a large chunk of the TV watching public, eats it up.

After failing as a real estate developer in the 1980’s, Trump struck it rich, at least for awhile, in the “gaming” industry, as it is called, and, while I’ve spent many a night with my parents in the casinos of Laughlin and Vegas, and I really enjoy the occasional game of Texas Hold ‘em with the guys, “gaming” has got to be one of the most tawdry ways on the planet to make your cash, a mathematics of guaranteed return that feeds on the human addiction to take bad risks. If you ask me, the bourgeoning U.S. casino industry is a tell tale sign of the approaching Apocalypse, up there with multi-million dollar executive bonuses and aerosol cheese.

So here’s to Michael Forbes, a little guy who refuses to be bowed by the Great American Jackass. I wish him well.