Ogre-oids, 20 Aug 2010

Maastricht coffeeshops: In its latest obsession with cultural amnesia and xenophobic fundamentalism, the Dutch are taking legal steps to deny access to the 13 coffeeshops (which sell marijuana products) in the border town to any non-Dutch citizen. Since European borders are porous, and Maastricht sits at the boundary of Germany, France, and Belgium, local government frowns on the heavy traffic and loud music of young foreigners who come into town to smoke weed. I've been to Maastricht and have gone out of my way to find the traffic jams and trouble makers ruining life for the locals. There are no problems in Maastricht that don't exist in any other city in the world. How stupid is all of this going to get? You can't de facto legalize weed and then suddenly say, "That's it, no more."  If the people of Maastricht think they have problems now, wait until they start telling everyone who is not Dutch that they can't go into a shop that is still open for locals to blaze up. Like that will work. "Hey man, here's 50 euro if you'll go into that shop over there and score me some hash." Locals will simply stock up and find bars, clubs, or other outlets to sell to tourists.

Stopping people from smoking weed will not stop Islamic fundamentalists from trying to wreck Western culture and it will not bring Theo van Gogh back to life. The next time some xenophobic Dutch jackass scapegoats the coffeeshops, someone should remind them of Ciudad Juarez, Exhibit A for the dystopia that the forlorn and miserable war on drugs creates:  Car bombings. Random murders and kidnappings. Sounds like a fun place to visit, doesn't it? Drug use is not out of control; it's the war on drugs that's out of control. In the name of order and public safety, the war on drugs turns places like Ciudad Juarez into a cauldron of bloodshed and anarchy. Yet we live in such hopeless and visionless times that no one ever gets tired of the violence and chaos that somehow are equated with morality and order. Mayors of Mexican cities get kidnapped by their own police force. Cartels set up roadblocks by car-jacking people in broad daylight and paralysing the traffic. Everyone is killing everyone else, the flow of drugs does not stop, the money and the weapons remain there for the taking.

Meanwhile, rather than indict the CEO of BP and the other psychopaths who blew up an oil rig and killed eleven people last April, a federal grand jury has indicted former pitching great Roger Clemens on charges of perjury for allegedly lying to Congress about steroid use. As usual, the mentality that justifies the indictment is fundamentalist: he lied to Congress, he must be indicted. If I lie to congress about eating donuts at Sunday school when I was eight years old, I guess I get indicted too, right? Clemens, like many pro athletes, probably used some performing-enhancing drugs, but maybe not. My question is: who gives a shit? If you think American society will fall apart because a jock lied about taking steroids then you probably also think pubic hair will soak up all the oil still in the Gulf. Speaking of, predictably mainstream media are now telling us that the Gulf is safe, the oil is all gone, it's OK to eat the shrimp, and that the environmental nightmare forecast by wacko-paranoid America-hating scientists has not happened. As always, the qualifier is we still don't know what the "long term effect" of the so-called "spill" will be. That's just it: scientists understand the importance of a forensic grasp of the long-term consequences of human interaction with the planet.

The same thing goes for climate change. Russia has record heat and burning wheat fields, an ice island four times the size of Manhatten (yet only a tenth of the size of Michael Bloomberg's ego) has broken off from Greenland (that happened because Greenland is melting, e.g. global warming, climate change, get it?), Iowa and Pakistan are underwater, and many parts of the U.S. have experienced record-breaking heat waves. The typical American response: "well, it's summer, it's supposed to get hot! When summer's over, it'll cool down! These academics don't know anything about the real world! What do they think happens in the summer? Is it supposed to snow? They say all that conspiracy stuff so they can get grant money from tax payers so that they don't have to get a real job and do real work in the real world!" Climate change is real. That giant chunk of ice on a collision course with the eastern coast of Canada is real. It's not an ice cube in a cocktail and it's not a videogame.

But I'm sure as long as we keep paying sports coaches 50 million times what we pay college professors, there's nothing to worry about. Why? Because we have people like Nick Saban and John Calipari who can remind us of how important a player's "basketball IQ" is or how critical it is for a player "to read" the defense. Calipari just got done guiding his latest collection of one-and-dones through a three-game exhibition against Canadian teams. The games were a joke, a bore, and a waste of time. If I want to take my students to Prague so they can learn more about Czech literature and culture, what will the taxpayers say to that? Yet a three-day jock tour of Canada to play against teams that couldn't beat a parapalegic wellchair team if they were playing five against three is apparently a great investment of time and money. These coaches are ego-manical con artists who have less integrity than pimps and the whole enterprise of "university" sports is a complete fraud.

UK football coach Joker Phillips dressed up in an Army uniform to look tough and remind us that playing football is a lot like war. It isn't. Children don't get blown up when the running back fumbles. People don't get their arms and legs blown off because the quarterback throws an interception. Yet the brilliant minds of the coaches keep making the parallels, as Saban did three years ago when he equated losing a home game to some nobody team to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yes, he apologized for his "inappopriate remarks" but that's not the point. For a country that has zero respect for college professors to worship sports coaches who make such blatantly vapid comments illustrates how determined we are as a nation to sabatoge anything of virtue or vital importance to keeping our culture and our minds alive.

Finally, America's obsession with the mutilated body continues, as the Aug. 9 cover of Time features a picture of an Afghan woman who had her nose cut off by the Taliban, with the question, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan?" as though if we stay and continue the war no one will get mutilated or killed. Please help me out here: who wants to look at a picture of someone with their nose cut off? who wants to look at Iraq vets who have no arms or legs? It's some kind of sick obsession that reinforces and normalizes a world where humanity is so alienated from itself that it takes pride in circulating the image of its own bodily mutilation.

Hey, at least it's not as bad as LeBron James ruining the lives of everyone in NE Ohio by signing with the Miami Heat, or the prospect that one day Brett Favre actually will retire from football. In the meantime, Joker Phillips can hunt down Osama bin Ladin. Should be an easy job for the coach of a football program so pathetic it hasn't beaten Tennessee in a quarter-century. Here's a wacked-out abstract theory from a dreaded liberal geek: football coaches are supposed to win football games (which UK coaches chronically cannot do), not pose as military heros. I'm against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but I do respect the people in the military. People who put their lives on the line even if it's for a cause I don't agree with have a better chance of beating Tennessee in football than any sports coach has of contributing anything of any worth to society.

Oh yeah, one last thing: Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is a fucking idiot.

4th of July continues America's obsession with the mutilated body

In reviewing recent editions of the NY Times, I was struck by the July 4th edition, the front page of which is graced by a centered, in-color picture of one Brendan Marrocco, 23, who lost all four limbs in Iraq. I can't think of a better illustration of America's obsession with mutilated bodies than this choice for a front-page picture to commemorate the nation's birth. Not families in the park having a picnic, or attractive young ladies in bikinis soaking up summer rays, but a human being reduced to a head and torso. And I can hear mainstream America's sugar-coated spin on Mr. Marrocco's "situation:" "The young man is lucky that he lives at a time when we have the medical technology to get him on the mend. With perserverance and faith in the Lord, he'll be able to get back on his feet . . . er, I mean abdomen cartiledge. If he were living in another part of the world, there wouldn't be any hope for him!" Gee, maybe if America weren't a war-mongering shithole, the guy would still live in an intact human body and it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. I'm not sure that losing all four limbs is any better if you're an American than if you're not. After all, the guy can't even drive a car! Personally, I feel bad for Mr. Marrocco, but I don't see the point of putting his picture on the front page of the Times. I see it as an unconscious expression of a national pathology wherein humans accept the destruction of the human body as a necessary part of human life. What do people think happens in war? How many burnt, bloodied, mangled bodies does one have to see before one gets a point that is pointless? What difference does all this information and communication about the human cost of war matter when the wars never end? As always, Americans have better things to do and think about like . . .

. . . buy and wear circle lenses--colored contacts imported from Asia that make one's eyes appear larger because they cover part of the whites of the eyes, not just the iris. It would be bad enough if it were just braces-wearing teens sticking these things into their eyeballs, but even women in their thirties are caught up in the puerile, vapid craze. The FDA has warned that these lenses can deprive the eye of oxygen and result in blindness, you know, like when the eye--which is there to provide the human with sight--can't see. But the obsessive trend has caught on with women even in their thirties, like Joyce Kim, who says wearing circle lenses is just like "wearing mascara or eyeliner." I can't think of a more shallow perspective on one's own body than to regard one's own eyeballs as nothing more than an ornament. How alienated from one's own body does one have to get to equate putting a potentially-blinding lens on one's own eyeball with using makeup? How does this person think she is able to have vision? Does she think she is just a digital link or projection screen or something? Are her eyes there for her to be able to see or just for other people's aesthetics? As always, the obsession with circle lenses is fueled by the extreme conformity that typifies the digital age. Originally, Ms. Nina Nguyen, a student at Rutgers, resisted wearing the circle lenses, not wanting to risk her eyesight. But because everyone else at Rutgers was wearing them, she decided she had to also, and now she is a self-professed "circle lens addict." Since everyone else is doing it, that makes Ms. Nguyen think it's OK. Boy, the internet really has improved communication hasn't it? Now people conform and do things because they see everyone else doing it. Now how's that for the independent thinking online communication promotes! Clearly a step forward, no doubt. And also an encouraging sign that American universities promote an atmosphere of critical thought that resists blindly following whatever is popular at the time. For me, the circle lens is just another form of bodily mutilation: it poses a risk to one's eyesight that is completely pointless. Some advice for the females: if you're attractive, you don't need circle lenses. If you're not attractive, potentially ruining your eyesight will not change your bland physical appearance. The only thing worse than a physically unexciting woman is a physically unexciting woman who is so fucking stupid she is voluntarily blinding herself so she can look like everyone else. "Hey, meet my unattractive girlfriend-wife. Our relationship was kind of dull, until she went blind and now I have to do everything for her and we can't do things like go to museums or sight-seeing. Next month she's going to have an operation to have her body covered with tree moss, apparently that's a big hit in Mongolia." Whether they are pretty or not, your eyes are there for you to be able to see, not to be seen. You have objectified yourself to the point of turning your own eyes into the opposite of what they are obviously meant to be. Women who wear circle lenses are conformists with mundane perspectives on beauty and the meaning of their own human existence. The circle lens craze reinforces American's obsession with the mutilated body and illustrates how the digital era promotes stupidity as much as anything else.