Subdivide and Conquer

So I've been existing in an alternate reality for a blissful while but sooner or later the cold light of day intrudes and human stupidity demands comment. This is what I have to say about the recent George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case:

I'm not a lawyer. If I were, I wouldn't be writing this because I would have killed myself. That is what I think lawyers should do. They should kill themselves. That's right. If you are a lawyer and you're reading this, please go and do this immediately. Thanks. Be sure to do it in as messy a way as possible causing the maximum amount of psychological distress to whoever finds your twisted and gooey corpse so that  you can posthumously spread just a little bit more misery around before you descend to the ninth level of Dante's Inferno where you belong. *

I'm prefacing my remarks with this because unlike half of the armchair quarterbacks on social media I don't pretend to understand the labyrinthine mechanics of our justice system, the Stand Your Ground law and whatnot.  Thanks again lawyers. Thanks a fucking bunch. But I am a human being with the requisite empathy that a member of society should possess and therefore do think it is tragic that another human being lost his life due to a feedback loop of fear and aggression that could have easily been avoided.

That's the thing about this situation that is truly annoying to me: people seem to be so caught up in identifying with whatever subdivision of humanity they have inserted themselves into that they are missing the point. This is the dominant problem of our society as I see it and until we learn to think properly the same problems will continue to arise. People will be killed by other people that have dehumanised them to the point that they are able to do the unthinkable. How is this done? Personhood is trumped by a generic label that makes them into an 'other'.

Well I suppose that could be worse.

Why do we keep doing this when it is so detrimental to our society? Is it because we just can't help it? Nah. We can do better. We choose not to. It has always been easier to herd animals once you tag them and train them to respond to a bell or some similar signal, and our entire culture is a huge Pavlovian dinner bell.

We should be aspiring to more than the default factory settings our circumstances of birth have dictated to us, and it should be obvious by now that those institutions that want to reinforce our identity with certain demographics have some nefarious reason for doing so. Religious leaders want to create divisions within cultures so that fear of The Devil keeps the flock filing through the doors of the church and putting money in the collection plate every Sunday. The Union leader castigates The Scabs so that the dues keep coming in. The Republican leaders reminisce about ‘the Good Old Days’ which is really just a code phrase for ‘the Days Before Women and Minorities Got a Voice in Politics’to ensure that scared white men will continue to make campaign donations. And clearly the Media has a vested interest in fomenting class and race tensions for the same reason that they love hurricanes. When shit hits the fan people stay glued to their televisions.It is obvious that leaders that seek to divide us into little subgroups are doing so merely to control us. The question is Why do we allow it?

Damn straight.

The answer is that people naturally gravitate towards other people that physically resemble them. We tend to trust those that have the same skin colour and features as us, and ostracise those that are different. It's easy. But just like it took us a couple of thousand years to break the whole ‘clubbing each other over the head for fun’ habit, this tendency can be overcome with diligence, if we cared enough to bother. The Powers that Be have no interest in people thinking before they act. They desire a reactionary and id driven society that they can manipulate and sell stupid products to. This after all is the basis of our economy: impulse shopping and ‘retail therapy’. The kind of people that think things through and weigh the consequences of their actions scare the shit out of them. They make for bad t.v. If George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin had better impulse control this would be a slow news week indeed. Of course we don't really expect a teenager to have mastered his impulses as much as a grown ass man, and I can't help thinking that Zimmerman losing sleep over the idea of armed vigilantes coming to get him has a cosmic symmetry. 

                              This is funny because the white people in it don't actually kill anybody.

*perhaps after reading this you may be thinking 'wow,  is she oblivious to the contradiction inherent in this here blog, that after complaining about dehumanising people this writer would call for the mass suicide of a particular group of people, i.e. lawyers. This must be ironic right? Nope. I still want all the lawyers to die. 

Separate But Equal

  

 I’m too young to have been around in the days when upstanding citizens in the U.S. thought that setting dogs on little black children that had the audacity to want to go to school with little white kids was a pretty good way to while away the hours between The Lawrence Welk show and Leave it to Beaver.

"Man I can't wait til Al Gore invents the internet!"

 The rhetoric that was used back then to justify blatant disparity has been taken out of Pandora’s box, dusted off and is now being used all over again to discriminate against another minority group: gay people.  I'm glad that we've come far enough as a society since then that the vitriol is only figurative this time, but I still want to shake some people when I hear the idiotic arguments against gay marriage.

The most asinine talking point (and this is something that is used repeatedly) is the 'slippery slope' argument. For those among you that have never watched the Fox News Channel this is the assertion that if the state allows people of the same gender to marry there is nothing stopping people from marrying multiple partners, children or their pets. No shit. This is a thing that people say with a straight face. People that use this argument also are unable to distinguish between homosexuality and a paedophilia, probably because of repeated exposure to Catholicism, a religion in which Altar boy robes are apparently difficult to distinguish from sexy lingerie for many of the clergy.

I love how the term 'traditional marriage' is constantly used:

I didn't make this but I wish I did.

As a lesson in hypocrisy, mouthpiece for all things conservative Rush Limbaugh is on his fourth marriage. His third wedding (to a woman who had also been married thrice before her marriage to Rush) was officiated at the home of Justice Clarence Thomas and was attended by William Bennett. Yes that William Bennett- the author of the blustery Book of Virtues. There is no record of Mr. Bennett decrying the validity of the vows spoken 'Til Death Do Us Part' yet again by a couple on their collective sixth marriage. Rush's fourth marriage was attended by an illustrious gathering of noted conservatives, including Clarence Thomas (again), Rudolph Guiliani, Karl Rove and Sean Hannity, the guy who  fretted about the possibility of the government removing tax exempt status for churches that refused to perform same sex marriages on his histrionic radio program the other day. If they didn't take away Creflo T. Dollar's tax status for using church funds to buy his $23,000 gold toilet I think that Hannity's church is going to be ok to keep on hatin'.

Another bankrupt argument I heard used by a protester on the radio was , "How dare the Court disregard a clear referendum in several states and legalise gay marriage when the majority are clearly opposed to it?"
Ummmmm....

I'm pretty sure this was the majority of the town at the time.

 Clearly, the idea that people like that will someday feel bad about being on the wrong side of history is optimistic.

March Madness

I bet you thought this blog was going to be about basketball right? Nope. But now that I have your attention...

I want to talk about something else that happens in March and involves baskets: Easter. Even though I was raised by the unholy union of a Pagan and a very devout Atheist I love Easter. This is only contradictory if you are one of those people that are unaware that pretty much every Christian holiday is superimposed right smack on top of the older Pagan ones. So basically if you are a Republican congressman from a state that was formerly part of the Confederacy, but otherwise it makes total sense. Easter is jolly good fun, especially if you're not a Christian, because Christians have to bother with all that ecclesiastical business that is incomprehensible to the rest of us. Such as Easter week:

Manic Monday
Shrove Tuesday
Ash Wednesday
Thirsty Thursday
Good Friday
Super Saturday
and....
Easter Sunday.

Or something like that.

I recently saw a contentious debate on a religious tolerance forum the other day where folks were arguing that Easter is not a Pagan holiday, because the historical evidence was rather thin about Eostre, an alleged Anglo Saxon Goddess of Spring whence the holiday got its name. Apparently the only reference to Her in historic documents was by St. Bede, an English monk known for the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and considered to be the Father of English History. So he probably didn't know what he was talking about. I'm far from a Biblical scholar but I'm pretty sure that if during one of our school mandated annual viewings of the seminal 1961 classic King of Kings the rock on the tomb of Jesus rolled away and a bunch of rabbits and eggs came bouncing out I would have remembered.

Also, Jesus was a cracker, obviously

 Easter is on the first Sunday after the Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. That couldn't sound any more Pagan if you had Bjork ululate it from the top of a volcano clad only in sheepskin and a crown of mistletoe.

Many Christians have tried to eradicate all vestiges of Paganism from their practice or revise history to pretend that there were no religions in Europe prior to the Apostles spreading the probably mistranslated word of Christ to the fur clad barbarians. This is like cutting all the pictures of your husband's old flame out of his high school yearbook. It's petty and just a tad whacko because all structures, either physical or philosophical are built on the bones of what came before, including and especially Christianity. Seriously, Christianity is a sequel to Judaism. It's like the Highlander II of religions, except that Jesus was a really nice person who made the religion friendlier and more accessible than the Old Testament, whereas Highlander II just made you want to cut your own head off.

The story of the dying God echoes through all the religions because that narrative is part of our Collective Unconscious: Tammuz, Osiris, Orpheus, Adonis, Elvis. We need to believe that heroes that are killed are reborn stronger. It's Humanity's ancient way of convincing itself that it's ok to cut down the wheat at harvest time because it will come back in the Spring. And when Spring does return, we celebrate. Let's not be stingy with this joy. The flowers are opening, the birds are singing and dark time is over. Let the God rise from the lettuce patch, roll away the stone, open the gates of Graceland, whatever. There is sunshine enough for all of us.

Diet Catholic

At the risk of seriously dating this particular post I've got to comment on something as we wait for the Papal Smoke to issue forth from the Vatican Chimney like the Holy Ghost took a big ole bong hit. It's funny watching the 24 hour news channels armchair quarterbacking this whole process like it has any relevance at all. The camera pans out over a ginormous crowd of people in the big courtyard of the most pimpin' house on Earth and it's mystifying what they're all doing out there. I mean, there are more than a few nuns in the crowd and I can see why it's such a big deal to them. This guy is basically their new fake boyfriend, whoever he his.

"He looked right at me!"

I had a guest last night in the restaurant remark, "Black smoke today girl! No decision yet!" and I struggled momentarily to compose myself and respond accordingly. Was that a joke? Uhhhh....

But I digress. The latest in a string of absurdities is an article linked here about Catholics wanting their new pope to be more liberal. 

• 71 per cent of Canadians (55 per cent of Americans) want to allow priests to marry
• 62 per cent Canadian (52 per cent of Americans) want women to be ordained
• 57 per cent of Canadians (43 per cent of Americans) want to allow birth control

Now I'm no expert but I think that maybe these guys are misunderstanding how the Catholic Church works. It's not a democracy like California. The Pope says to build the Death Star and they build it, they don't get a vote on it or anything. If they don't build it he puts the squeeze on the Cardinals and they come on board and figure out who's responsible for the delay and use the Force to crush this person's trachea while the other priests look on in mute, subdued horror.

...Or something like that. The point is that the Pope is the king of the church. He makes the rules and the Catholics follow them. No matter how big a pain in the ass. Do you Catholics find that system old fashioned? Yes of course you do, because it is. So is making burnt offerings in a temple and eating the blood and flesh of a dead god. The only thing I can think of that might be more old fashioned is cutting out people's hearts on the top of your pyramid temple and throwing the bloody things down the steps into a pit in the bottom of which lives the Rabbit god that eats the moon.

Western Catholics are gradually ignoring more of the edicts of their Pontiff for convenience. Not that there's anything wrong with that- it's common sense that if you can't afford to feed 143 kids that you should not have 143 kids. But I'm not sure that giving up Twizzlers for Lent is really cutting it.

The idea that Catholics want their church to modernise to the level of current society is indicative of just how much our world has changed in the couple of thousand years since they started. It used to be that the  social standard originated in Rome and the Faithful (and everyone else that didn't want to get burned as a witch) adjusted their lifestyles accordingly. How quaint to think that Catholics now want this reversed. The people whose soldiers still look like this:

"Oh Alphonse, you dapper little minx!"

There is a name for a Catholic church that allows priests to marry and doesn't require the members to be beholden to the whims of an old man in a castle: I believe they're called Episcopalians.

I Have Bigger Issues To Bitch About

So it is with some embarrassment that I realise it's been six months since my last post. While my jet set lifestyle does take up a great deal of my time the real reason for my silence is that since I got a new job at a restaurant that I love I'm no longer filled to the brim with restaurant induced rage that boils over and congeals into blogs. So am I ready to throw in the towel and stop writing about the bottomless well of human stupidity? Shit no, dear readers. I'm widening the lens of my analysis.

No, more bigger

To Serve Man is heretofore going to be a place to shoot the shit about mankind's silliness on a much larger scale: a COSMIC scale. I think it's time we started talking about how silly religion is. I'm not going to apologise for this. Nobody that is religious has ever apologised to me or as far as I know to anybody else for the weird stuff they believe or the silly things they do because of it. I have never knocked on anyone's door and given them a pamphlet telling them that they are most definitely NOT going to Hell and that Jesus does nott give a crap about them because he has been dead for 2000 years.

Everybody on this planet has to deal with religion and  the consequences of silly beliefs every single day so To Serve Man is now officially about the biggest issue there is.