America in 101 euphemisms

January 8th, 2013

  1. Friendly Fire
  2. Person held to service or labor
  3. Enhanced interrogation techniques
  4. Intelligent design
  5. To misspeak
  6. A misstatement
  7. Restroom
  8. I’m washing my hair that day
  9. Adult entertainment
  10. Gentlemen’s club
  11. To take someone for a ride
  12. Curvy
  13. Full-figured
  14. Wardrobe malfunction
  15. Air support missions
  16. Senior citizen
  17. To kick the bucket
  18. Heavy casualties were sustained
  19. Engage the enemy
  20. To see a man about a dog
  21. Reaching second and third base
  22. Aisle manager
  23. Loan office
  24. Nuptial ceremony
  25. Trying for a baby
  26. Shock and awe
  27. Pro-life
  28. Pro-choice
  29. Trail of tears
  30. Pre-owned
  31. Fun-loving
  32. The Plan B pill
  33. “The birth pangs of a new Middle East”
  34. Pacification
  35. Transfer of population
  36. War on Terror
  37. “Smoke him out”
  38. The peculiar institution
  39. Mission Accomplished
  40. The Surge
  41. Security contractor
  42. Waterboarding
  43. Collateral damage
  44. African American
  45. To freshen up
  46. To powder one’s nose
  47. To sleep with
  48. Freaking gosh darn heck
  49. Freedom isn’t free
  50. Institutionalized
  51. Doing time
  52. Sanitation engineer
  53. Differently abled
  54. Coalition of the willing
  55. Insurgency
  56. Neutralized
  57. Bootlegging
  58. Dental appliances
  59. A negative cash-flow position
  60. Sunshine units
  61. Hearing impaired
  62. Visually impaired
  63. Lost their lives
  64. A negative patient care outcome
  65. Torn between two lovers
  66. To defecate
  67. To copulate
  68. Rocky Mountain oysters
  69. Drumstick or white meat, madam?
  70. Water closet
  71. Downsize
  72. Outsource
  73. Area denial artillery munitions
  74. Securing the area
  75. Surgical strike
  76. Protective custody
  77. Executive action
  78. Family values
  79. Undocumented alien
  80. Urban contemporary music
  81. Substance abuse
  82. Special renditions
  83. The birds and the bees
  84. Sanctioning
  85. Harvesting whales
  86. Kinetic military action
  87. Post-kinetic development
  88. Prolonged detention
  89. Nation-building
  90. Reaching across the aisle
  91. Separate but equal
  92. A credibility gap
  93. Hiking the Appalachian Trail
  94. Pro-marriage
  95. Overseas contingency operations
  96. Denied area
  97. 85% fat free
  98. Till the fat lady sings
  99. Dry counties
  100. Tennessee white whiskey
  101. The Noble Experiment

“Well, she was just seventeen” : Anti-gay lawyer goes pimping for porn in Canada

November 22nd, 2012

Remember Larry Craig? He was the Republican Senator from Idaho who was arrested for “lewd conduct” in a Minneapolis airport restroom in 2007 after allegedly attempting to induce an undercover police officer in the stall beside him to engage in sexual activities. After a voting record with highlights that included strong support for “don’t ask, don’t tell” and vehement opposition to gay marriage, Craig then had to deal with the eight gay men who came forward to the Idaho Statesman newspaper claiming they had each had some sort of sexual encounter with the Senator. With his reputation in ruins, Craig’s position became untenable and he never ran for office again, the gulf between his public pronouncements and private fixations having revealed a Grade-A hypocrite.

There is something deliciously dramatic and inevitable, almost oedipan, about those who arm themselves with the breastplate of righteousness in their public lives and claim divine inspiration for their work. Next time you hear some distinctly pontificating speech, complete with all the moralising bells and whistles, set your watch and wait. It is likely that in no time at all, he or she who uttered the words will be found squalid and exposed, tied up as they surely will be in a heap of threatening text messages, crusty toilet paper and a defence that becomes thinner and more ludicrous by the minute.

And so the baton has now been handed to a certain Lisa Biron, a New Hampshire-based lawyer who worked for the euphemistically-named Alliance Defending Freedom (this firm has the distinction of containing three of the most favoured buzz words used by bigoted anti-gay groups; a token ‘Family’ would turn this ménage à trois into a full-blown foursome), a group that aims to “keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.” Alas, federal prosecutors have said that Biron transported a teen girl from Manchester, NH to somewhere in Ontario, Canada, where she forced her young and presumably highly distressed kidnappee to engage in sexual acts with another, as yet undisclosed, person while being filmed by Biron. Biron has also been arrested for owning a computer stuffed with child pornography and, to top it all off, witnesses have testified that this defender of Christian values (another popular word among the dogmatic) has been found in possession of various illegal drugs.

So next time you hear those speeches, just sit and wait. The internal paranoia swimming around the minds and bodies of those purporting to do God’s work on Earth will eventually burst forth.

 

Occupiers’ Garden: OWS goes to Washington, D.C.

January 30th, 2012

“You know what? They never even fucking told me. They never told me what they arrested me for,” shrieks Athena, a New Yorker whose voice is anything but that of a goddess. I was first drawn towards her because she was walking around the West lawn of Capitol Hill like someone who had been told that there was a nickel for every blade of grass she stepped on. Stomp stomp stomp. It was an unseasonably warm but soggy day, making for progressively squelchy stomps as the day wore on. She was simultaneously singing. Let it shine, let it shine. I’m gonna let it shine. All over the West lawn, I’m gonna let it shine.

It was like Marian Finnucane doing a Shakira impression, with a hint of Sarah Palin for good measure. Well, at least she wasn’t just standing there looking miserable with a ‘Down with capitalism’ sign. She was also taking dozens of photographs of people holding up a banner she had made with two simple words: ‘Occupy United’.

“New Year’s morning, I was arrested. In 2012 I started off my new year in jail,” she says, reliving memories of the NYPD slapping the cuffs on her slender wrists in Zuccotti Park. No fireworks, no midnight kiss, so not such a great way to enter a New Year, one would think.

“It went great. I was held till about 7am, but it was actually really fun because I was in the Paddy Wagon for a couple of hours with a bunch of other Occupy women and, with teamwork, we were able to hook up our live stream to text message whoever the hell we wanted to and we just did not feel limited. So actually it was a lot of fun.”

Athena spoke while snapping away, then abruptly asked for my card. My card? I’ve been in America for one day and have had a phone for about an hour. I made my apologies on the card front and made a mental note that calling yourself a journalist in this country and not having a wad of shiny cardboard slips on your person is akin to calling yourself a snow remover who carries only a miniature bucket and spade. You may as well not turn up. Even people with McJobs probably have cards. Junior vice-burger flipper supervisor.

This is Occupy Congress, a one-day extension of the Occupy movement whose focal point is Occupy Wall Street. That’s three Occupies in one sentence, and why not? The word is everywhere here, just a couple of hundred feet from one of the most iconic buildings in the world on the day Congress reconvenes. Congress, with its 11 per cent approval rating; that’s like if the population of California all said ‘they’re doing an okay job’ and every single other person across the other 49 states said ‘they’re doing a terrible job.’

So does Occupy have a political aim? “Oh it has a political aim,” states Athena, emphatically.

“I don’t think the Occupy movement should have any political aim and in itself will never support any political candidate,” states Mike, with equal fervour. He’s a fresh-faced man, no more than maybe 23 years old, who sat on a train for 60 hours to get here from Reno, Nevada. I didn’t seek him out, he just came up to me and said “you’re awesome.”

The disparity between Mike and Athena, between East and West, between urban and rural, perhaps even between male and female, reveals what many commentators believe to be the fundamental weakness of the movement – it doesn’t know what it is. But that could also be its strength. It’s an open shop as long as you obey one commandment – the perceived cuddliness of politicians and corporations is fundamentally wrong and needs to be done away with. If you agree with that, you’re in.

Wildebeest, a Bostonian, is one of those loud, serial high-fiving types who could only be from this continent. At first I assumed he was using a pseudonym, but then remembered that this is a place where two men called Mitt and Newt are vying to becoming President. “Mama took one look and said this boy is gonna be trouble,” he declared when asked about his name.

As Wildebeest roamed across the lawn, his large Stars and Stripes flag waving upside-down from a pole, he started shouting and pointing “party on that lawn right there.” Why there? “The cop told me to get off the sidewalk and on the lawn so that’s exactly where I’m going.” Touché.

He did have one relevant question to raise though: “You know what I’m distressed about with the police? It’s that they’re gonna die in the same tax bracket as all of us. And the fact that they don’t believe that is a joke. They need to wake up.” This is a far more salient point than merely having a party. If American history has revealed anything, it’s the consistent use of police by lawmakers within divide and conquer politics. The paradox of how Occupy is developing is that the police seem to be helping to wind it down while also providing the fuel that keeps people angry enough to continue turning up.

Sam, a Floridian living in South Carolina, is one of those who has loitered within the movement in spite of a lack interest where he lives. Occupy Columbia, the capital of the Palmetto state, has had – at most – 12 people. They could have just had a game of six-a-side, but instead got the bus up to Washington for this rally, so commitment is not an issue here. He was not here to party, but to make some rather strident points: “You look at all these laws that are being put into effect – the only ones that are being put in effect are the ones being paid for by the corporations. You look at any other bills, they get lost for months at a time in limbo because nobody’s paying the congressmen to bother voting on them.

“There’s so many things that I just can’t understand why people didn’t even just look at it for a second and go ‘wait, no! No! That’s not how it’s supposed to be!’” What Sam exposes here is that the issues are probably far too big to be resolved by simply occupying public spaces. What he said also happens to be the basic mantra of the Tea Party movement, Occupy’s supposed ideological opposite.

After sunset, Athena, Sam, Wildebeest, and Mike joined about 1,000 others around a stage in front of the Congress building. A rather terrible comedian somehow managed to lose the crowd as a chorus of “March! March March!” rang out. And so they did march, some to the Supreme Court, some to the White House, some to the Capitol – all to reconvene later back where they started. This could be seen as speaking volumes about Occupy in general; people meet, people splinter off, people meet again back at the starting point. Movements ought to move, but this one is close to walking, quite literally, around in circles.

 

GrannyKiller

January 30th, 2012

I have become involved with a new project with three journalists with whom I worked with on Scope magazine called GrannyKiller. It will be an online magazine of sorts, with interactive feature articles, live blogs and the like. We’re temporarily hosting some stuff on a tumblr site. I have one piece up there about Occupy Congress, but expect some more developments soon. Peace!


Reflections on the GOP debate

January 17th, 2012

Things that were cheered at tonight’s GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, SC: urinating on dead people, execution without trial, killing native indians (implied), making 9 year-olds scrub urinals for one-thirtieth of the average industrial wage instead of being in school (opportunity cost).

Things that were booed: “Golden Rule” ethics, the fact that a candidate’s father was born in Mexico.

Michelle, my belle (and Romney, Paul, Gingrich, Perry . . .)

January 4th, 2012

It looks like Michelle Bachmann is about to leave the Republican race, and with it goes the final – the only – female candidate. Like Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin four years ago, Bachmann is viewed by an overwhelmingly male media as a female politician, rather than just as a politician who happens to be female. Her nails, her hair, the amount of cleavage on show, her eyes, her build – all of these are often deemed more important than offshore drilling or income tax brackets when it comes to profiling female candidates.

So let’s look at the men in the same way. It’s only fair, no?

It is said, and very often believed, that Mitt Romney is 64 years old. Of course, this is ridiculous; how could a man look so . . . clean? He looks like he has been made out of plasticine or carved from marble. I want to see his birth certificate, and not just the short form one but the big long one. Until then I will continue to believe that Mitt Romney was made from a bunch of cells in a Petri dish by RINOs to piss off uber-conservatives. When we saw Romney make his stump speech in Iowa this week, he was flanked by a small army of sons (who may or may not have also come from Petri dishes) who look so like him it’s scary. I’m convinced that he keeps them with him on the road for spare parts.

And Newt Gingrich looks so like a teddy bear that this ‘Newt 12’ teddy bear won a Newt Gingrich lookalike competition in his hometown of Hummelstown, PA. The bear beat off stiff competition from Ted Kennedy, Wade Phillips, and the grey-haired Lego man. Newt himself came in fifth place.

They grey-haired Lego man, however, does not win the award for Lego person who looks most like a Presidential candidate. That coveted prize was won by this guy, who looks just like January flavour of the month Rick Santorum, who himself won the award for funniest surname to look up on Google.

If ever a candidate appeared more and more every day like a caricature of himself, then that person must be Rick Perry. The gun-toting, agency-forgetting, electric chair-loving man who accidentally became Governor of Texas is so completely ridiculous that to make stuff up about him would make him seem less ridiculous.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who looks like he might fall over at any moment. If you put Ron Paul in an empty room and locked the door, he would still rant for hours about everything. Scientists, after years of research, now believe that college-aged capitalists and users of illegal drugs are attracted to Ron Paul’s voice in much the same way as whales and dolphins call each other during mating season. Unfortunately for Paul, the voice that proves so irresistible for some is also a major turn-off for everyone else.

Fair thee well, Mrs Bachmann.

 

Feminism and women in the GOP and CNN

December 31st, 2011

‘As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover  material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan (1963)

It is now four decades since Betty Friedan wrote these simple words. Since then there have been 12 Presidential elections — we are now on number 13 — and as a cast of relatively well-to-do, senior, white men (Michele Bachman aside) line up to present their candidacy, we must ask ourselves: what has changed?

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed Republican front-runner Mitt Romney and his wife Ann this week (the US is surely the only place where men called Wolf and Mitt can have a conversation and nobody questions how ridiculous their names are). This is what Ann had to say (skip to 8.00 in that link);

“It was also Mitt that got me through those really tough years raising five really quite rambunctious and at times quite naughty boys, where he would call home and remind me when I was quite exasperated while he was travelling that what I was doing was more important than what he was doing. My job, in his eyes, was more valuable than his.”

The first three questions asked of Ann by Wolf were:

‘Do you ever think about being First Lady of the United States?’

‘You haven’t said I’d like to be like X or Y, like Hilary Clinton or Laura Bush?’

‘Did you like being First Lady of Massachusetts?’

With opening questions such as these, we are not far beyond Cindarella- or Jane Eyre-esque aspirations whereby a woman’s goals cannot be much more than to find the right man. The training of passivity in women is a continuing process, one in which acquiescence to male domination is often done unconsciously. For Michele Bachmann, such submission is both conscious and good:

“My husband said, now you need to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law. Tax law? I hate taxes. Why should I go and do something like that?

But the Lord said, ‘Be submissive. Wives you are to be submissive to your husband.’ And so we moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and I went to William and Mary Law School there, for a post-doctorate degree in tax law. And I pursued this course of study.

“Never had a tax course in my background, never had a desire for it, but by faith, I was going to be faithful to what I felt God was calling me to do through my husband.”

The image of the woman as mother, as wife, living through her husband and their offspring, through her children, possibly even giving up her own dreams for that – is something that is often portrayed as a noble act. Blind selflessness is seen as a virtue. A strong independent streak is also lauded, but only because the woman is independent yet female, instead of independent and female, or just independent. The independent woman who does not also conform to societal expectations is viewed as dangerous.

The most obvious extreme example of this, at least in the popular imagination, must be Diana, whose efforts to feign a real loving interest in her husband were ultimately abandoned. Jackie Kennedy described her own marriage to JFK as “Victorian or Asiatic”, meaning that independence was neither expected nor sought.

There is no overt anti-feminism in society, not because sex equality has been achieved, but because there is practically no feminist spark left, at least not in the mainstream. Of course, if it ever happens that we have a potential First Man in the White House, he’ll no doubt have to be portrayed as uber-masculine with a sort of comic book macho quality. On the campaign he will be shown going rock climbing and lifting heavy things for no apparent reason before kicking back with a bottle of beer and playing catch with his son. There’s a sort of inevitability about it.

 

Why America? (Turn Left at Greenland)

December 2nd, 2011

Why would someone move to a place that doesn’t know how to make tea? In the United States, one is usually presented with a cup, pot or glass of tepid water with a tea bag lying apologetically on a cold side plate. Then comes the ludicrous business of pouring the water, squeezing the bag to within an inch of its life while waiting for some change in colour before discarding the lifeless tampon surrogate. Why would someone do this to themselves? Why would I, a near addict, do this to myself?

The tea ritual shows, in one instance, America’s stubbornness and artistry. ‘You want tea? You’ll drink it our way!’ It’s like a child coming home from school with a painting of a “tree” that closer resembles a wall, but the family sticks it on the wall for years anyway because it was how the child interpreted the tree. The painting then remains on the wall for so long that to take it down would be to remove a tiny piece of the family.

What else is America? At one moment in time, it is one, some or all of the following: charming, outrageous, lovable, free, sickening, ostentatious, confident, scared, daring, conservative, revolutionary, dynamic, proud, ingenious, stupid, showy, private, avaricious, charitable, humane, merciless, stubborn, revisionist, religious, secular, heroic, cowardly, affluent, indebted, lazy, energetic, sexy, prudish, popular, disliked, focused, flamboyant, imaginative and frustrating.

It is a country with an address in the new world but with a founding population largely drawn from the old one, a sort of perfect storm for paranoia. It is a country of seemingly incongruous contradictions. It contains some of the most religious people in the world living under a stridently secular constitution. It is a country that has managed to make two close political cousins – liberalism and conservatism – appear as opposites in the popular imagination. It is the land that brought the world much technological advancement over the past century but simultaneously had to be dragged kicking and screaming into granting much of its own population some of the most basic human rights.

America displays, and often celebrates, a certain fuzziness about the world outside. It is as if the nation was in a contemporary pre-Galileo state of existence, only it is not the Earth that is the at centre of the Universe, but America that is at the centre of the Earth and, in order to prove this point, America strives to make it so.

America is the three or four year-old with the short attention span who ends up impressing everyone at the family gathering with some adorable party piece. It is the cocky adolescent doing one handed push-ups. It is the perpetual beauty pageant contestant, doing herself up differently as years and competitions go by. It is the partner that cheats and yet you always want to go back because it holds something irresistible. And I’m going back.

 

The One After 9-9-9: Herman Cain and Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

November 25th, 2011

A friend once confessed an anecdote to me while we were discussing the subject of job interviews. A potential employer asked him a moderately tricky question that, according to him, he answered so dreadfully that he got up, shook the interviewer’s hand and said ‘sorry, I know I won’t get the job now’ and walked out of the room. Arrogance and ignorance were swiftly followed by humility.

Whatever my friend said, however, cannot possibly have been as utterly atrocious and mortifying (in the strictest sense of the word) as Herman Cain’s effort to respond to a basic, yet moderately tricky, question about President Obama’s handling of the Libya situation this year. Cain should have just said ‘sorry for wasting your time’ and walked away from pursuing the job as most powerful person in the world.

Jon Stewart described the skin-crawlingly bad answer as “it’s like he’s trying to download the answer but it’s just the little ball is spinning and he’s just buffering.” The Cain camp blamed his slow reply on his busy schedule and lack of sleep, and assured us that the potentially most powerful man in the world is well up to date on international affairs.

Let us grant Cain and his team that and give him the benefit of doubt. His unease under pressure? His lack of basic knowledge on the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi? The way his only aim throughout the humming and hawing is to position himself on the opposite side of the President? Take all that, and put it down to having a bad day and a poor night’s rest, for Cain had already proven that it is not a lack of knowledge that makes him unworthy of Presidential status, but rather an open celebration of said lack of knowledge.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network a few weeks prior to the Libya question, CBN host David Brody asked:

“Are you ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions that are coming from the media and others on foreign policy? Like, who’s the president of Ubekistan (sic)?

Cain replied:

“I’m ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions and they’re already starting to come. And when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?

Cain followed this by saying his priority – his only priority – is to create jobs. What he effectively seems to be saying is ‘I don’t want to talk about foreign policy; I want to talk about jobs.’ Well, perhaps it ought to be pointed out to Cain that he doesn’t really get to decide when someone asks him questions on foreign policy.

The addition of multiple extra syllables into the country’s name seems to show that Cain is annoyed by its very existence and reveals a flippant attitude towards the world. This might play well among a minority within the American electorate who give the impression that they admire lethargy in international relations, but is in reality incredibly condescending towards a very large number of Americans who do want a well-rounded, knowledgeable and creative president, willing to learn more about the world both at home and abroad.

What is important in this interview is that Cain is quite proud of his lack of knowledge. The interviewer didn’t even ask him who the president of Uzbekistan was, yet Cain was happy to tell us that he didn’t know. It wasn’t even close to being a ‘gotcha’ question, yet Cain was very much got.

As I said in an article recently published in Trinity News, American exceptionalism or ‘manifest destiny’ is alive more than ever within the GOP. Christopher Hitchens recently penned a good article on this subject, only weeks after I had made the same argument (are you watching me, Hitch?). The two most recent debates – on foreign policy and national security respectively – have shown this to be the case.

The basic rule among the candidates (with one or two exceptions) seems to be: if you are struggling to answer a question, just praise the United States and label it exceptional and all will be well. The audience claps, you smile, and we move on.

Some of the words uttered by these ostensibly serious candidates are outright bizarre. Michelle Bachmann, perhaps the most vocal exponent of American exceptionalism, labelled Pakistan “too nuclear to fail”. Rick Santorum called Africa a country before praising US aid efforts to fight AIDS because it helps curb Islamism — would fighting AIDS not be a worthy end in itself? Rick Perry appears to be in the Cain camp of not really giving a damn about foreign affairs; rather, he tows the ‘exceptional’ line and maintains the policies held by almost every other establishment Republican. Ron Paul is different; his foreign policy seems to be not to have one at all. Jon Huntsman, erstwhile Ambassador to China and speaker of Mandarin, is consistently ignored. Perhaps he doesn’t shout loud enough. Mitt Romney said US aid could “bring Pakistan into the 21st century, or the 20th century for that matter.” The new tactic to win over wavering allies is to patronise them, or so it would seem.

Newt Gingrich was almost lynched for suggesting that “church-going” illegal immigrants with families who have been in the country for a quarter of a century ought to have a path to citizenship available. Church-going? It would seem Newt wants to perform a merry dance on the corpse of the First Amendment. The superficially domestic issue of illegal immigration spills across the Venn diagram into foreign affairs because what is being mooted by the majority of candidates is mass repatriation of people and families to other states. The favoured policy du jour is ‘root ‘em out and send ‘em home’. That’s right; a forced migration of perhaps 12 million people. It’s like the Trail of Tears never happened. Or rather, that it never mattered.

Very few of these candidates are prepared to have any nuance, creativity or imagination on international matters; everything is black and white. If this stakes were not so high, this might even be funny. But the stakes are that high.