 "They think they have done me no injury,/ And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,/ Who make up a heaven of our misery." The Republican race is the gift that keeps on giving. It is a foul and reeking gift, and what it gives is cause for appalled disgust and amazed and appalled disbelief, but by God is it ever productive and persistent.There was Michele Bachmann and her "baby girls are being poisoned and made retarded by big-government torture medicine"; there was Rick Perry doing anything; there was Herman Cain being accused of sexual harassment and trying to remember having opinions about Libya; there was Mitt Romney being ignored in favour of people who believed in government poisoning and forgetting Libya.Now, once again, there is Newt Gingrich, who is being re-appreciated by Republicans because he has continued to not be Mormon. He has, of course, cheated on three wives, one of whom had cancer, but Democrats do that too, sometimes, so it doesn't work against him like being Mormon would. Recently, Newt indicated that if Newt gets his way, America's workforce would be changed significantly, in that it would be de-unionized and made up, at least in part, of children. While speaking at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Gingrich courted the lazy-child-hating vote by saying that the "core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization" were "crippling" children, in that they make it possible for grown-ups to have unionized jobs and for children to focus on school instead of working to make money to support their parents who no longer have unionized jobs."It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighbourhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid," he said. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they'd have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."Newt is right: the real tragedy of America's poorest neighbourhoods is that poor young people are not allowed to work for minimum wage cleaning their underfunded schools. His plan, however, might result in one small (child-sized!) negative consequence: children introduced to the rewards of honest work might turn resentful when they grow up and find the grown-up jobs they've been "rising" up to have been snatched away and offered to a new, fresh-faced crop of precocious fourteen-year-olds. Fourteen-year-olds, after all, can be paid less, have less need of the health insurance they won't be offered, and they're just the right size for chimneys. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
 The Self is often misunderstood in Society. It's been an exciting week for disapproving of things. Many of the things offered up by the world for my disapproval were offered up at the CNN Tea Party GOP Presidential debate. When Wolf Blitzer, who always asks my favourite hypothetical-comatose-patient questions, asked the candidates who should pay for the care of an uninsured coma victim, and responded to Ron Paul's response with "Are you saying that society should just let him die?" a number of audience members I would very much like to meet and date cheered and someone yelled "yeah!"Michele Bachmann spoke piercingly about "little girls" (11 and 12 year-olds; still young, sure, but not the pig-tailed, thumb-sucking cuties she piercingly evoked) being given "government injections" (HPV vaccinations) and yesterday managed to up the ante on her own stupidness and lyingness by indicating that the vaccine might cause mental retardation (which it doesn't). When various people, among them quite an unsurprising number of doctors, told her she was wrong, she said, "I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I am not a physician. All I was doing was reporting what a woman told me last night at the debate." She's referring to a random member of the public who came up to after the debate and told her the vaccine had harmed her daughter.So one is apparently allowed to report ignorant, unfounded claims about something as long as one has oneself no knowledge or expertise related to the subject. Except when that's not the case. There's an astonishingly discouraging story out of York University this week, for once not related to a faculty strike. Cameron Johnston, a York prof, was teaching a Social Science class ("Self, Culture and Society" - a staggeringly descriptive title) and stated that not everyone was entitled to have and express an opinion. "All Jews should be sterilized", he said, was the kind of opinion that was egregious and inexcusable. At that point, a student stormed out. I assumed it was some kind of free-speech defender, rushing out to fetch Noam Chomsky (who waits out in the car for just such an eventuality), but, no - it was a student convinced that Johnston had just asserted that Jews should be sterilized. Sarah Grunfeld immediately contacted a campus Israel advocacy group, and it immediately sent out news releases calling for his prompt dismissal. The best part of this whole story isn't that some poor man who'd really rather be thinking about your Self and its Culture and Society was plunged into controversy by way of a complete misunderstanding, but Grunfeld's response to being told that it was a complete misunderstanding: "The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”Actually, Bachmann and Grunfeld have at least one thing in common: both failed to consider the larger context surrounding the words they heard (i.e. some stranger at a public event with an unsubstantiated story not supported by science in the first case, and quotation marks and total condemnation in the second). What's so wonderful and inspiring is that it's the listener who decides whether something should be believed in with no cause or denounced for no reason. I'm so inspired, I might just ambush Hudak after a debate and tell him cuts to social services cause Muskoka cottages to spontaneously burn down. After all, there's a good chance he's no smarter than a potential presidential candidate or York university undergraduate. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 "I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty the Press, her editors and reporters, regardless of the law. So help me God." Canada is not very good at scandals. Not very good at all. There was the time Brian Mulroney went for a helicopter ride with a German (or something like that), and the time the Liberals gave a lot of other Liberals money, and the time that Stephen Harper became prime minister, but other than that, we've got nothing. Politicians don't tend to get caught doing anything interesting with prostitutes and the worst thing the Canadian media has done is to repeatedly employ Peter Mansbridge. The U.S. gets a lot of credit for its explosive and tawdry goings-on. They've had adulterous presidential fellatio, and all kinds of secret wars, and congressional boxer shorts running amok on the internet. But now the Brits, always a dark horse in the race as they sporadically come through with rich gentlemen getting caught in Nazi fetish scenarios, are really pulling ahead and putting the Yanks to shame with their near-unprecedented levels of shamefulness.The News of the World violated the privacy rights of royals and celebrities, and hacked into the voice mail of a murder victim. Staffers seem to have made a habit of paying off the police and alternately terrorizing and attending the weddings of politicians. The relationship between the media and the political elite appears to have been exceptionally incestuous, corrupt, and mutually rewarding. Indeed, David Cameron's former communications chief, Andy Coulson, was once editor of the News of the World, and he is now the subject of a police investigation. So what could add a touch of the surreal to this stunningly repulsive situation? Why, an axe murder, of course. One of the private investigators who rustled up material for the paper was recently acquitted of the murder of another P.I. who was found in a pub parking lot back in 1987 with an axe through his head. He was acquitted, it seems, only through of a murky mixture of police corruption and incompetence. He did spend time in prison for trying to plant cocaine on someone, although Andy Coulson happily rehired him after he was released.
Greed, graft, moral bankruptcy, and now a good, old-fashioned axe murder. Britain's currently leaving the rest of us in the dust. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
We all know higher education is inherently left-wing. Professors drive Volvos and subscribe to the New Statesman, and students flirt with homosexuality while performing in experimental theatre productions put on in their friends' loft spaces.Or so I always thought.
I spent much of the day reading articles about Michele Bachmann, the Republican presidential candidate with the plasticized face and unshakeable Christian values. Much is made of the fact that she is a lawyer, and so must be marginally more intelligent than a shoe-horn. I wondered whether law school had obliged her to at least feign the appearance of critical thought. And then I discovered what I should already have realized: if you're Christian and don't want to mix with heathens or Volvos or women's studies majors, you don't have to. You can, like Bachmann, attend Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University, an "interdenominational, Bible-based, and Holy Spirit-led" institution in Oklahoma. Or, like her husband, a Christian counselor, you can attend Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson) and become educated and insightful enough to say things like this when discussing homosexuality: "Barbarians need to be educated, they need to be disciplined, and just because someone feels it or thinks it, doesn't mean we need to go down that road."Bachmann was profoundly influenced by a Presbyterian minister named Francis Schaeffer, who argued, according to journalist Michelle Goldberg, that "our entire perception of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things". Which is sad, when you think about it, because that means people with the wrong worldview will find it difficult to adopt the right one, because what they see will always be skewed by their wrongness. And people with the right one can always discount the opinions of those who disagree with them because they are grounded in a flawed worldview.
Of course, that's what I do with Michele Bachmann's opinions. I can only conclude that the habit of smug self-assurance can also be learned at godless institutions of higher learning. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 And the difference is in the paycheck. I might not know very much about U.S. law, but ignorance has never before stopped me from commenting authoritatively and at length about anything, so I find myself with a number of things to say about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to throw out a huge sex-discrimination lawsuit against Walmart.First of all (and most importantly): is Walmart single? I know that corporations are treated as people under the law. I know that they are now allowed to make unlimited campaign contributions because of how free speech is and how much democracy flourishes, so it's not crazy to think they're entitled to a romantic life.And what upstanding, self-respecting, feminine woman would not want to go steady with Walmart? Walmart was being taking to court by seemingly billions and billions of women upset only because they were being treated like ladies. Sure, says journalist Liza Featherstone, women "earn less than their male counterparts in nearly every position at the company", and female supervisors often make less money than the male employees they're being paid not very much to supervise, but that's just because, as one store manager explained, men "are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working." I couldn't have put it better! Women work to have extra money to buy lipstick and decorative baubles. As another Walmart employee stated, men "are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money." How true, on both counts! I certainly associate Walmart with men hungry for career advancement and women not desperate for money to feed their families. So it's pretty clear that Walmart would make a good boyfriend, the kind of boyfriend who would let me work to buy myself some handbags and potted plants, but count on me mostly for my home-building, hearth-tending skills.
Antonin Scalia, though, has placed an obstacle in my romantic path. Although generally I think of him as both fair-minded and good-looking, he has made a serious misstep in this case. He claims that Walmart has not instituted any discriminatory practices, and that the company should not be blamed for allowing their managers the freedom to behave in a discriminatory fashion. So a corporation is a person, and yet it is not one bit like a person. It has the right to speak freely as though it is a person, but is suddenly not a person with agency and accountability when its employees rush about insulting and mistreating people. I mean, I'd like to hook up with Walmart because it wouldn't expect me take on unladylike responsibilities, or at least would not pay me an unladylike amount to take them on, but I wouldn't be comfortable knowing that every time we had a fight, Walmart could just say that it wasn't at fault and some semi-autonomous network of middle-managers was to blame. So I'll have to set my sights on some other promising potential beau. I'm looking at you, Scalia. I'm willing to become incorporated if that's what it will take to get your attention.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 "What a coincidence! I, too, am a lesbian blogger." I was shocked and saddened when it came out that Eliot Spitzer had been keeping condom-less company with a young prostitute. Not so much because I find it difficult to believe that people who are politically like-minded pay young women for sex, but because I have always liked to believe that awkward, nerdy people don't pay women for sex. It's one thing when overgrown frat boys or smooth-haired reverends turn out to be secret perverts, but when vaguely unfortunate, intelligent men who look like ungainly flightless birds turn out to be secret perverts, I find it disappointing.Then the Weiner dropped, and I found myself nostalgic for the wholesomeness of the Spitzer scandal. Spitzer had sex. With a professional. And at least tried to do so discreetly. An old-timey, old-fashioned kind of scandal. Weiner, another funny-looking, articulate Democrat, was pathologically and self-destructively devoted to showing strange women his penis via The Twitter, and The Facebook. The whole thing was disconcerting and unpleasant.And then the Gay Girl from Damascus was both un-gayed and un-girled, and I found myself nostalgic for Weiner. Amina Arraf, who claimed to be Syrian-American, lesbian, and real, turned out to be a Medieval Studies grad student from Georgia named Tom MacMaster. When it was reported that Amina had been kidnapped by the government, people started to look into her and to not be able to find her and MacMaster was unmasked. Even more bizarrely, one of MacMaster's "victims", Paula Brooks, founding editor of lesbian news site Lez Get Real, then turned out to be a male construction worker from Ohio. NPR's headline summarizes the situation admirably: "Another Supposedly Lesbian Blogger Turns Out to Be a Man."
It's the sympathetic teen girls trying to convince other teen girls they meet online to meet for real in deserted parking lots who are supposed to turn out to be older men in disguise, not the lesbian bloggers.When Weiner weinered, I missed the innocent, straightforward salaciousness of the Spitzer scandal. But when Amina and Paula turned out to be Tom and Bill, I found myself missing the innocent, straightforwardly compulsive, exhibitionist perviness of Weiner. He's dishonest, manipulative, messed-up and free with his privates, but sexual misbehaviour is reassuringly familiar. I am apparently more confounded by men wanting to represent and speak for communities of women who love other women by pretending to be women who love other women than by men who want to show strangers what's inside their pants.I'm sure something will now happen that will make me yearn for the days when straight men just pretended to be lesbians. Maybe Spitzer and Weiner will turn out to be lesbian bloggers in disguise. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Some exciting news about women's rights and women's issues from around the world! Egypt
The Egyptian military is now conceding that "virginity checks" were conducted on women rounded up after a March 9 protest in Tahrir Square (a month after Mubarak stepped down). They continue to deny that the female protestors were beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and strip-searched (as is alleged by Amnesty International), but acknowledge that virginity checks were carried out so that those rounded up could not later claim to have been raped by the security forces. RussiaConservative politicians in Russia are trying to introduce legislation that would restrict access to abortions. The legislation would put a stop to free abortions at government-run clinics and require women to have a prescription in order to get the morning-after pill. Most encouragingly, women wanting abortions would have to get the permission of their spouses, or, if they are underage, from their parents. More on how encouraging this is later.United StatesLest you think it's only women in foreign countries who are fortunate enough to have thoughtful decision-makers thinking and making decisions about their rights...Kansas State Representative Pete DeGraaf recently made some innovative suggestions about how women should go about planning for future rapes.DeGraaf doesn't think insurance companies should cover abortion in their general plans even in cases of rape or incest. Instead, he thinks women should be able to buy "abortion-only" policies. When Rep. Barbara Bollier unaccountably raised some objections to this suggestion, the House was treated to the following exchange: DeGraaf: "We do need to plan ahead, don't we, in life?"Bollier: "And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with pregnancy?"
DeGraaf: "I have a spare tire on my car. I also have life insurance. I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for."DeGraaf later claimed his comments were taken out of context, and added that people wouldn't need the coverage if they weren't predisposed to killing their children, which certainly suggests that whatever context he's actually using, it's even worse than the one his earlier comments were taken out of. Don't be alarmed!These news items might make you feel depressed, or discouraged, or extremely angry. But all of them also suggest ways in which women can grow and improve, if we're prepared to learn from their example.Egypt: teaches women that they should be demure, modest, and virginal, just in case they're ripped out of a political demonstration and violated.Russia: teaches women that marriages should be built on a strong foundation of open communication, because if they get pregnant, they'll need to get their husband's approval to have an abortion.U.S.A: teaches women to assess future risk and prudently plan for the future. Really, the ultra-religious, right-wing, pro-life lobby is just trying to create a new generation of modest, communicative, farsighted women. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
What have various experts had to say about the now-iconic photograph of all those Important People watching or maybe not watching the take-down of Bin Laden? Obama reveals his humility and profound presidential confidence by not needing to sit on a giant chair. The presence of Clinton and that other woman is visible proof of the increasing visibility of women in photographs of important events. The fact that Clinton is holding her hand to her mouth is visible proof that women are dangerously emotional and should not be allowed to take part in the taking of iconic photographs. Things like that.I myself find the fact that Clinton and that other woman are in the photo profoundly disturbing. Any little girl or boy will now be able to pick up a coffee table book or commemorative plate, see that photo, and think that women can grow up to do things other than shop for small, decorative tables, hug one another, and learn Romance languages. Thank God for the Orthodox Jews.Celebrating the fact that "women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like" and respecting "Jewish laws of modesty", Di Tzeitung, an Orthodox Jewish paper published in Brooklyn, published the following version of the White House photo: I applaud their resourcefulness! If women insist on showing their faces at moments of historical import, simply airbrush them out.
I have only one complaint: shouldn't Biden, Obama, and all those other people whose names I'm not going to bother looking up also be respected for who they are, what they do, and not what they look like? I know I find it hard to focus on the significance of the image because I'm so busy furiously objectifying Joe Biden. So here's a retouched offering I hope will satisfy everyone: Perfect.
Di Tzeitung has also inspired me to release a new photo of Stephen Harper's victory speech.
Before: After: Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Marilyn Davenport, Tea Party activist and elected member of the central committee of the Republican Party of Orange County, has landed herself in hot water by sending a totally harmless, inoffensive, and hilarious email to local Republican officials.
The email included this image: And the words: "Now you know why no birth certificate." As Davenport said when it was suggested the email might just be subtly racist, the whole thing is "much-ado-about-nothing" and she didn't realize it could be considered racist "until one or two other people tried to make this about race". (She has since apologized more apologetically, although no more convincingly.)She's absolutely right. It would take someone aware of history, politics, and other people to realize that this could be seen as profoundly offensive. Her email inspired me to create my own amusing and unobjectionable messages:  Now you know why no brain.  Now you know why no soul. The problem is, these funny jokes aren't nearly as inoffensive because they're about people who belong to a group that hasn't historically been subjugated. So I tried again:  Now you know why so gifted. That is SLIGHTLY more amusing and innocuous. And remember, even if a couple of people "make" my art about anti-conservatism or sexism, I can just say about myself what Marilyn Davenport has said about herself: "I am an imperfect Christian lady who tries her best to live a Christ-honouring life". How better to honour Christ than to send humourous emails that couldn't possibly offend anyone? Who can forget this classic, sent by Christ to his early followers:  Now you know why money-changers at temple so greedy. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Hooray for Stephen Harper! He's finally decided to emulate a politician other than himself. Unfortunately, it's Tim Pawlenty.
Never heard of Tim Pawlenty? You're not alone - most Americans haven't either. A former Republican governor of Minnesota, Pawlenty is right-wing, looks like one of those Mormons who proselytizes on the subway, and is stultifyingly tedious. He is currently not setting the campaign trail on fire while running for president.
Harper's choice of role model may initially seem surprising, in that he is already right-wing, subway Mormon-ish, and stultifyingly tedious. However, he's not trying to imitate the OLD Pawlenty; he's trying to imitate NEW Pawlenty.
Pawlenty recently released a non-campaign campaign ad clearly intended to prove he is VITAL, CHARISTMATIC, and PATRIOTIC. If it had been released in the form of text, it would be all red-white-and-blue capital letters. It features noises, and flashes, and quick cuts, and then more loud noises: It is extremely silly. It took Stephen Colbert no time at all to release his own, slightly less earnest version (his response to the original ad is at 4:53, his own ad starts around 6:58 - because I'm in Canada, I can't access the just-the-bit-I'm-talking-about versions available to Americans).It took Stephen Harper only slightly longer to release his own INSPIRING and PATRIOTIC version:
Hooray again for Harper! He has succeeded in reinventing himself as Canada's Tim Pawlenty, in that he is proving himself to be equally as dull and desperate. He's even one-upped the American, in that he's also managed to add derivativeness to the mix.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
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