F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

I can’t help but feel sad reading THIS article. I understand they were attempting to be funny-giving guidelines if a costume is too racy-except they didn’t say "racy", they said "slutty". which has a completely different connotation. It is also limited to women.

It should be noted that one of the contributors to this piece is the "parenting expert" that writes family centred articles for the paper. I guess I find it surprising that an editor didn’t reign them in. Isn’t that what editors do? Did they sack all the competent editors with their last remaining decent journalists? I’d say it reads like a High School newspaper, but honestly, that would be insulting to High School papers.

Our local newspaper has a columnist that is known for dreadful, one sentence paragraphs. She’s a pretty awful writer, but at least she’s concise. No one could ever accuse Cindy Lange Kubick of overwriting a paragraph. We can’t say the same for Lynne Ireland.

Before you pen off angry posts calling me a pretentious ass, keep in mind that I am not collecting a salary to write the rubbish I publish here. What’s more, I could never, on my worst day write a paragraph that included both, "Bee’s beneficence", and "salubrious stickiness". I couldn’t. Really.

You should read the whole thing (OK you probably can’t get through the whole thing, but go have a look anyway-you don’t want to miss out on the "tawny translucence" and "ambrosial nectar."), if only to reinforce the sense that we are, as a society, completely doomed.  

The joke around here is that I don’t need to spank because hearing me scold is a million times worse to endure. I can probably count on one hand the actual number of times I’ve raised my voice into anything approaching a scream, but I do think I manage to get my point across well. Still, a well-timed yell can emphasize a point in a way not soon forgotten.

Well everyone, here’s some bad news: the er…experts have decided that isn’t OK. No screaming, no spanking and we’re not supposed to lie to them either.

Believe me, I’m not some superior parent, but I also don’t need to scream at my child to get him to do what’s expected. He’s had exactly two tantrums in four years and still remembers having all of his toys taken away. I didn’t scream, I didn’t stand there negotiating-I grabbed a roll of garbage bags and started dumping toys into them. It was a good month before he saw many of them again. You know, the silent treatment and a very stern look work well if you’re consistent.

I’m not sure what these articles hope to accomplish other than make parents feel even more inadequate than they already do. How awful that parents are being made to feel guilty for disciplining their children. For heaven’s sake, that’s nothing to feel guilty about. Letting them run wild and do whatever the hell they want should elicit guilt. What an incredibly screwed-up world we live in. Look, I’ve seen some amazingly bad parenting over the years that is deserving of scorn. My mother used to tell my sister she was supposed to be an abortion. That’s bad parenting. I seem to remember a fair amount of door slamming, though that kind of slacked off after we moved to the new house with the less well constructed doors/walls/etc. Coming from solid plaster, who knew you could actually kick through drywall…? The best was when my parents got a second phone line put in so they could call us on the phone, in the next room, to scream at us. That was sort of the precursor to emailing the person sitting next to you.   Screaming at your kid to pick up their shit kind of pales in comparison, no?

I don’t want to extrapolate based on my own experiences, so I won’t. I will say that I have to seriously wonder if something else is going on with people who spend so much time thinking about how they were yelled at/spanked/punished as children. Wouldn’t this sort of thing be cumulative? I mean, if you get treated fairly decently but mummy completely loses it because the linen closet isn’t colour coordinated the way she likes it-well, isn’t there room for that sort of thing over the course of twenty years? Honestly, all joking aside, sometimes we really did deserve to be punished. We were terrible children. Oh goodness, if Danny ever pulled half the crap I did at his age, I don’t know what I’d do. Seriously. These articles never acknowledge that children can be horrendous little beasts.

At some point we started expecting perfection of ourselves in respect to parenting. I wonder what that teaches the little ones?

THIS is funny, in an unintentional way. Are people really so clueless that they don’t understand they are writing themselves into the punchline of a joke?

"I don’t send my child to school to be indoctrinated."

Uhhhhhhhh….

I’d feel better if this were just the local idiots, but I hear this is taking place across the country. Weren’t these the same troglodytes screaming "treason" at people for criticising President Bush because he was "Commander and chief during wartime."

Quick, someone try to red bait me in the comment section!

Police were out in the middle of the day looking for a nine year old girl who decided to walk downtown-in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Police? Two in the afternoon? Oh my god! I’m surprised they didn’t call out an Amber alert.

I hate to say it, but when I was nine years old I was taking trains and busses alone, into a much more dangerous city than Lincoln. Nine years old is a little to old to be calling out the cops because she wandered away from the house. I have to wonder how much of this is because the parents were concerned they’d be cited with neglect if anyone saw her alone? Unless the girl is somehow mentally disabled, or handicapped, it does not strike me as unreasonable to walk downtown on a summer afternoon (though that’s a hell of a walk from where she lived).

(Imagine me using my "old lady reminiscing voice" here) Why, when I was nine I got on my little yellow Schwinn bicycle and pedaled it all the way to Evanston. And back. And no one called the cops to report me missing. 

(Still staying with the "old lady reminiscing voice") In fact, on a summer afternoon, my mother would have expected me to get away from the house, and if I didn’t, odds were pretty good she’d tell me to get lost. That’s what children did. They got on their bikes and left the house in the morning, came home for lunch, and then stayed out until dinner. The only restriction I remember was that I needed to be home by the time the street lights came on, which was pretty late.

Of course, I never carried a bible with me on my adventures. Sometimes, I took comic books.

"Oh noooo, something could have happened!"  Really people, something can happen anywhere, anytime. At some point, you have to teach children some basic street smarts without resorting to the scary idea that there is danger lurking five steps away from your front yard.

Oh never mind, just teach them to be terrified, it’s easier.

The next time a journalist sneers about "bloggers" and their lack of credibility, just give them THIS link, penned by a gen-u-ine, degreed, capital "J" journalist at the Lincoln Journal Star. I can believe someone wrote it, but I have a more difficult time understanding how this dreck made it past an editor.

In eight years of living in Nebraska I can honestly say I’ve met a total of two individuals I could describe as having any degree of intellectual curiosity. One is a Fundamentalist and the other (I’m pretty sure) is autistic. I might be wrong, but I’ll go out on a limb and assume neither would stay home to watch Nebraska’s favourite son, Larry the Cable Guy, who filled 50,000 seats at Memorial Stadium last weekend for a 4th of July show. I know, that’s a broad brush-but in a city of 250,000 people 50,000 isn’t statistically insignificant. Again, I’m not being a snob-I used to watch Hee Haw, and found it amusing, but I didn’t embrace Hee Haw as a way of life. I didn’t find in Minnie Pearl some sort of role model. Sometime between the 70’s and today we lost the ability to grasp parody. The fact that Bush was elected in 2000 based on his appeal as "A guy you’d have a beer with", should serve as a frightening example of where this sort of lacking intellectual curiosity can lead us. 

The anti-intellectualism everyone found so shocking during the election seemed only more of the same from my daily existence here. Thankfully, the population is sparse, and I live on a farm so my dealings with people are mercifully limited. Lest you think I’m taking a cheap shot at those without degrees, let me assure you I am not. There are plenty of degreed idiots walking around, or sitting in newsrooms publishing rubbish like what is linked above. You don’t need a degree to crack a book, or give something more than ten seconds of consideration before forming an opinion-or better admitting that you can’t form an opinion. When was the last time you heard someone admit they didn’t have an answer or a conclusion to be reached? I swear, people treat it like they will lose points or something for saying: "I don’t know."

No, I’m talking about people who, when engaged in conversation respond with gems such as:

"Carter? Was he like a president or something?"

I don’t know, maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy but I think that someone in their thirties with a university degree ought to know that Carter was president. I don’t think that’s setting standards too high. I’ll bet he knows what time Larry the Cable Guy comes on the telly.

I don’t know why the elitist smear works, as it ends up being cast at unlikely "elitists" like union organisers, and Catholic Workers. Perhaps it is simply a convenient, all-purpose insult like "Pinko" designed to marginalise anyone that might question whether they are as content as they’ve been told they are. I’m not convinced it has to do with money, or social status, or educational level. I do however worry that it is dangerous, if only because time and again we can see examples of how the mentality turns into witchunts. Elitist mobs might be irritating, but they don’t tend to get violent and burn crosses on people’s lawns, or beat them up because they feel threatened by their sexual orientation.

Obviously, it was a business decision to begin running stories like the one above in newspapers. These stories wouldn’t run if they didn’t generate page views. I clicked on it too, so I bear a good deal of responsibility in keeping the beast alive. The difference is that I don’t take the content seriously, and can still be mortified that the journalist treated the subject as though it had merit. If that makes me an elitist, I won’t shy from the label.

So now the Oxy-Clean guy is dead too? How much more celebrity loss can the world stand?

I’m sure Michael Jackson made some sort of cultural contribution beyond ugly leather jackets with strange little wing-y things on them, and far too many snaps and flaps that served no purpose-but hell if I know what it was. I know that my mother went out and bought one of those stupid jackets, and not satisfied to look like an idiot alone, went out and bought me one in a blazing, bright white (just perfect for a smoker!). I believe it had a sort of rubber trim along with stiffened canvas (to keep the shoulders standing out so straight). And grommets. Someone at the Michael- Jackson- inspired- clothing factory had one hell of a time with the grommet maker.

I’ve always lacked the grasping-pop-culture gene. No, really. One of the most surreal experiences of my life was the day Elvis died. Somehow, the news managed to break while I was walking half a mile to the bakery to buy a loaf of rye bread. The bakery was attached to a Jewish delicatessen-one side was meats, the other bakery. So I get over there, grab my ticket and sit down (they had long benches by the front window) to wait my turn and only then, noticed all these middle aged housewives bawling their eyes out. I mean, from the carrying on, you’d have thought someone important had died. I walked home with my rye bread (eating the heel of the bread, with the baker’s union paper label still stuck to it-how much paper had I consumed off loaves of rye bread before leaving Chicago, I wonder?) and found my mother looking pretty much the same as I’d left her. I mentioned the scene at Kaufman’s to which she shrugged and said, "I never liked him." I gave her the rye bread and her change and went upstairs to listen to the radio tributes pouring in. I still didn’t get it. I still don’t.

When John Lennon was killed, my best friend wanted to drag me off to a vigil and I think I might have upset her by suggesting that holding a vigil for a rather public atheist was kind of stupid.

I made more enemies after Christopher Reeves died by posting something to the effect of, "Geez, it isn’t like he was Orson Welles or something."

The wall-to-wall coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral was kind of nutty as well.

But the oxy-clean dude, that’s just so wrong for him to be dead. Why does God take all the good ones so young? And why couldn’t it have been the Sham-Wow guy instead?