Five Before Chaos

One thing I often hear, when talking to even nominally religious people about my nonbelief, is “you have to believe in something”. Now, aside from the fact that they never go on to explain exactly why I need to believe in something, there’s always the non-spoken but achingly obvious implication that I must believe in something crazy; It’s not enough to believe in the potential goodness of mankind, or in the process of how rain happens, it has to be something completely unsubstantiated and superstitious. Matt Taibbi’s latest, These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache, is primarily about the latest attack on reason from Eagleton and Fish. His closing paragraph speaks volumes to me…

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

Unbelief is a lot easier than people think, it doesn’t really require much more than a little critical thinking and some attention to detail.  For me, I’m much more comfortable not knowing (and I don’t think there’s a “why”) than to make up or believe ridiculous stupid shit, much of which created when people were even more staggeringly ignorant than they are today. It’s hardly a “concerted intellectual effort”. I’d find it excruciatingly difficult to believe in some sort of deity, as it would require me to ignore way too much reality. For others, it seems to be very easy.

Seriously, I haven’t beat a subject to death like this since the whole racist VT secessionist movement story 2 years ago. It’s just the gift that keeps on giving, like looking at a car wreck. But I must move on. Most of the thinking persons in this country have figured out she’s an idiot. In fact, “Sarah Palin + idiot” is giving me tons of Google action lately.

Two more things, and I’ll try to move on (but I make no promises). First, one of the best comments about last night’s debate comes from one of the commenters over at Boiling Mad:

If Obama resorted to leaning on Ebonics the way Palin leaned on the redneck dialect, conservatives would be calling him the n-word.

Indeed, and you betcha! (wink wink)

Second, there’s some seriously must-read Matt Taibbi out there right now, Mad Dog Palin. There’s just too much quote-worthy stuff in it, so go read the whole thing. A sampling:

All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out…

Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

If I don’t talk to you before Monday, have a good weekend.

Matt Taibbi’s got another good one out now, on “Full Metal McCain”. In this we see the utter mental vapidity of McCain supporters (with quotes!), as well as Taibbi’s acute observation that McCain is now nothing more than your typical mouthbreathing GOP hack:

But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.

It’s basically reiterating that anyone paying attention has known for a long time: McCain is no ‘maverick”, moreso just another GOP corporate asshole, and a particularly unhinged and nasty one at that. But you probably already knew that. And he provides some valid insight into how both McCain and Clinton lost a good deal of the scorn heaped on them by the rightwing nutjobs:

The reasons McCain and Clinton were villains of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity crowd in the first place had nothing to do with their policy positions or votes in the Senate or anything like that. Their real crimes were their arrogant insistence on exercising their intellectual independence, as well as their stubborn refusal to indulge in drooling-caveman demagoguery. The instant both of them crossed into the hater column and began feverishly jacking off the toothless racists of the Deep South with broadsides against the America-hating socialist menace Obama, all was instantly forgiven.

That, and the fact that the right wing tends to have a very short memory and attention span, and a very selective one at that, in particular one that forgets “facts”. I’ve always thought it’d be fun to get a room full of ‘em together and get one of those laser pointers I tease my cats with.. they’d surely be entertained for hours.

The only decent reason for Rolling Stone magazine’s continued existence is the fact that Matt Taibbi writes for it. His latest is a real hoot: he goes undercover on a batshit insane fundie retreat: Jesus Made Me Puke.  He joins a megachurch and actually gets on a bus to go to one of those crazy “Encounter Weekends” in which the truly pathetic listen to a bunch of nonsense, cry a lot, and come away even more braindead and suggestible than when they went in there. But first he had to look the part:

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

But I don’t think he was prepared for what he was going to experience. He even had to make up some sort of story, his being that his dad was an alcoholic circus clown that used to beat him with his oversized shoes. And they bought it. The crazy part was the ‘deliverance’ part at the end, which involved the usual nonsense of puking in paper bags, speaking in tongues and casting out of all sorts of demons:

“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”

It was a rather eye-opening experience, in that it showed the deep psychological underpinnings that go with this kind of territory that makes believers willing suckers impervious to fact. It’s a fantastic and entertaining smartass read, classic Taibbi, and he really picks up on how so many of these suckers do indeed fit the stereoetypes we have of them.

Don’t construe my posting of this as letting Taibbi off the hook for crossing the picket line. He’s still a great writer.

He’s recently posted over at Alternet his experiences out on the road witnessing the circus known as the election, more specifically on reporting on the election. On Clinton:

In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking “hope” amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. “Hope,” after all, is Barack Obama’s own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow’s sports headline.

He does a fantastic job at pointing out the ridiculousness of this constant reality-show horeserace narrative:

When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. Shit, even Rollingstone.com got into the act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).

The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn’t a crabby old battle-ax in private.

The line that really sums up for me how the media has made the election into a farce of sorts,”We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.” It’s a great read.

Some of you who follow politics are probably familiar with journalist Matt Taibbi, whose gonzo journalism I admire quite a bit. I’ve written before about his takedowns of 9-11 conspiracy theorists and John McCain. Now, although I’m not following the WGA strike as much as others do, I’m a pretty strong supporter of the labor movement. So, naturally, I was a bit bugged by the news that Taibbi’s crossed the picket line to appear on the Colbert Report. From Scholars and Rogues:

For Taibbi, a guy who has made his career slaughtering sacred cows and speaking truth to power, to cross the line is a serious jab in the eye to the writers and their supporters. It doesn’t bother me if some no-name actor or D-list celeb does it, because these people are about nothing but promoting themselves and hawking whatever crappy movie they’ve got going anyway. But someone like Taibbi should know better. He may not care about it, but to every writer that’s refusing to play the game any longer and doesn’t have the spotlight like he does, his appearances say “Yeah, I don’t give a fuck about you and what you’re doing. I got mine, and that’s all I care about.”

Harsh, indeed, and perhaps it’s not as big of a deal as S & R makes it out to be to some, but it bothers me a little. But you know, there was something in the comments of that post that was quite spot-on:

Dear Entertainment Writers on Strike: Recently returned to so-called civilization from the canyons of Utah, I had the opportunity, after long hiatus, to enjoy the product of some of your writing as it gets shoveled into the American maw via television (no TV in my house). What a feat, this writing. It evidenced so much that was stale, false, crass, violent, foolish, salacious, gimmicky, irrelevant, sycophantic, complacent, compliant -it was, in short, the perfect distraction in a dying republic fast on its way to tyranny, the gift that keeps on giving to a government that would hope to turn the screw on free-thinking citizens. In other words, writers-you keep on striking!

Behold: The entertainment will grow cold and grey as the corpse that it already is, with no new cadavers to puppeteer for the newness of each season, where nothing is as new as the recycled dead from the last season. Like Plato’s chained slaves in the cave of shadows, let the viewers wake up, walk into the light, starved for reality-oh writers, let no new entertainments issue from your minds! You may just save the Republic.