300th Post

I'll have to do this at length later on, but here's a quick tip for reading A People's History of the United States: Go outside and pick up a rock. Hit yourself--no, no, actually that should say "bash yourself"--in the head with it. Now read A Peoples' History of the United States. Only someone with a gushing head wound could appreciate Howard Zinn.

People like Zinn do the left no favors when they dredge up the history of liberalism in this country because, mainly, they present it as goo-goo spoon ammo that we need to open up for and obediently swallow. There, now, wasn't that just nummy-nummy? Yes, it was! (pat on the head).

History is about one thing at present (and yeah, I think we ought to be looking real short-term on this question, 'cause we might not have much time left): politics. If you aren't doing politics with your scholarship then you're wasting everybody's time. Zinn and his cohort (or is it an entourage now? Let's see, it is completely shameless, so let's go with entourage...) are trying to be political, in the sense that they're trying to make us all feel good about our situation, but they are just so fucking bad at it that it's worse than useless. For that reason--and because soft-headed lefties can't separate the emotional/personal from the powerful/empirical--we may as well declare, if Zinn and his ilk are to be our avatars (and they are hogging the role, so to appoint someone else would be futile) then we may as well say that left politics as we angry, normal, serious liberals conceive of it is sui generis. Fuck history, in that sense. Fuck Eric Foner. If I want somebody to jerk me off to a leftist fairytale, I'll have a hooker from Gary read me "The Wizard of Oz."

We have a real problem with our past. Namely, it doesn't help us much with respect to certain problems in our present. Labor history? Worse than useless. Identity studies? Look in a mirror, write down what you see on some tissue paper, and give it to me so I can wipe my ass with it. Reclaiming queers, feminists, revolutionaries, etc., ad nauseum? Hold still so I can drive this hammer, claw-end first, into your forehead, you ethically stunted, slow-witted, lazy fucktard.

Anyway, back to Zinn. He was pilloried by Michael Kazin in the journal Dissent last year for his misguided opus, and has fought back (this according to In These Times magazine out of Chicago; another soft-headed left rag but a bad habit I can't seem to shake).

How? you ask. Did Zinn come out, both barrels blazin', with a rock-solid volume of analysis of the foundations of American liberalism, proving better than anyone yet that its compassion, economic foresight, and political sensibility are the inheritance of our nation and need revisiting now more than ever?

Um, in a word, no. No, he just recycled the same horseshit he has been shovelling all this time and took it one big step closer to irrelevancy while at the same time dumbing it down even further so as to give it even less impact than it already would have had. You see, he has put together a document reader to accompany the People's History. A 600 page document reader, to be exact. Hooray, as faggy liberals from Oregon to California say.

Is there anything more useless than oral history? I would say no, but then I saw this document collection and hallelujah! I've changed my mind! Who wants to know what Columbus' diary said? Well, since I can't think of how it could possibly be relevant to anything going on in America today, I guess I do! The book is filled with, to quote the ITT reviewer (who reviewed less and fawned more, embarrassingly--and shockingly!--enough), "heartbreaking and uplifting stories of American history." Oh, gee, I guess now we ought to ask students if they had a good time in class, too? I wonder if I've just been missing out on that personal connection all these years and that's why I'm pissed? Should I care, I mean, really care, what one person said about one day in one life in one group in one town in one state in one country on earth? Where the fuck is the POINT, Howard?!

How about a horrible and horribly graphic section on slavery that scrapes the scab so (so, so) many have worried at before? Done! Gee, you'd think someone like Zinn, our living God of History, would be going somewhere with this, but no, he just wants to remind you that, like, hey man, slavery was terrible. If you aren't emotionally affected by the selection then, godammit, you're a fucking monster--even though you've read dozens and dozens of other document readers just like it. The point, you ask? Beats me. Beats Zinn, too, since he gives minimal introduction to each selection and is just putting it out there, after all. You, the reader, can take what you want and puzzle it through--kind of like being given a box of mechanical parts without tools or directions and being told that it should all fit together to make a chair. Or maybe a ceiling fan. Or is it a carbeurator? Hmmmmm...

And, finally, as lefties we must say a word about the obligatory section on labor, done in the same cheesy, touchy-feely-sucky-sucky way. Can't you just see their faces, hear their voices, feel their anguish, boys and girls? I know I can. Shhh! Listen! There...faint, but I can just make it out...they're saying..."holy shit did we fuck up! And look what you shitheads have done with our legacy! Change to Win? Are you fucking kidding me?!?" Really, in the present situation, where we are watching the total disintegration of American labor, what the Christ is Howard Zinn doing pointing to union labor as a viable ideal for the left? Is he drunk?

If I had to guess, I'd wager that no, he isn't drunk. Like so many academics, he's just stupid.

Stock. stone. stupid.

Now where's that rock...?

Are You On Drugs?!...Well then, Gimme Some!!

Via Fagistan, a nice article for all the drug warriors out there regarding the myth of a meth abuse epidemic. Your lies cannot be tolerated, bitches.

Interestingly, the author doesn't fully explore the true origins of the mythology of the drug "epidemic": the fascination with the glitterati. In this case, people believe that meth is a scourge of immense proportion, when in fact it is fairly limited, because magazines (like Newsweek, but more often Entertainment Weekly) and online glam rags (like Slate) do too much navel-gazing and reporting on the famous, pretty hosebags who use coke, meth, or, in a recent weird bit of slumming-cum-trendsetting, crack. Face it: what the pretty people do, we believe. Voila! A public primed for an epidemic.

The article is probably right about the hysteria component: it only enters the scene when brown people become visible actors.

But I for one am growing weary of "journalists" whose "scoops" consist of revealing their own connections to the very problems and behaviors they are supposedly writing to condemn (e.g., "I was at a chic Oscars party--strictly for the A-list--and I saw Colin Farrell snorting heroin off a crack baby's ass; isn't that terrible? What does this say about our society?"). Invariably, these projects become snapshots of the grotesque, with jaded, too-cool writers pulling back their lizard skins to reveal their roiling consciences. It just won't work: you can either be a poseur or a human being. You can't be both or pick your moments.

Wasn't there a Question You Wanted to Ask...?

Over on Smirking Chimp, you can read a delightfully wretched little puff piece on GW Bush the Cowboy President--a fucking juvenile and retarded moniker, but hey, retards name themselves all sorts of fucked-up things.

Anyhow, the part that caught my eye was this section:

The Bushes bought Prairie Chapel Ranch from the Engelbrecht family for a reported $1.3 million in 1999, shortly after earning a $14-million profit from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise and a year before George Bush's first run for president.

He and Mrs. Bush immediately began transforming it into their Texas home, building a 4,000-square-foot, limestone-walled, passive-solar living quarters; adding an 11-acre pond stocked with bass and other fish; and planting native grasses, flowers, and a tree farm that might go commercial after Bush leaves Washington.

Bush prefers bicycles to horses and never claimed to be a cattleman. He has described himself as a "windshield rancher" who likes to escort such visitors as Russian President Vladimir Putin around his property in a pickup.

He once told a visiting journalist he had become an avid amateur arborist."I am," he said. "Tree man."

Now, is it just me, or did Bush not score a point (perhaps his only point) during the debates with Kerry when he responded to the very TRUE and wholly ACCURATE assertion that he and Cheney and their slimy friends had taken tax breaks as small business owners even while claiming multi-million dollar incomes? When his opponent leveled the accusation that Bush the millionaire claimed a small business credit for his stake in a lumber company, what did Bush say again? Oh, yeah: he said, "News to me! I don't own a lumber company...first I've heard about it. Want some wood?" At which point the audience laughed, the point was lost, and Bush went back to being a drooling moron.

Naturally, Bush's tax return is available to every person with a computer in the world; all you have to do is look it up on Google and you will see that, in fact, Bush did take a small business deduction for a lumber company. No one has any excuse for missing that little nugget. And, in fact, Kerry's people did a bright and potentially effective thing when they included that statement of fact in his remarks for the debate against the Working Man's Millionaire. But Kerry got ridiculed and had his truthfulness cast into doubt, while Chimpy got away with being a clown who doesn't even know what's in his tax return. As we might ask of all the President's pronouncements, "Is he the commander-in-chief, or not, goddammit?!"

And today, lo and behold, come to find out that people at the LA Times are perfectly aware of the lumber interests of the Bush family and the man himself has aspirations of being in the timber business. I suppose it's too much to ask that a reporter (whose job, last I looked, was to verify information for the public) would think back in time a whole fucking ten months and recall Bush's amazement that anybody would even imagine him being interested in trees or lumber, and that the same reporter would point out the obvious lie.

Nope. In America, a good one-liner beats the truth every time.

When did God become an Arrogant Prick?

I saw a billboard this weekend that said

"One nation, under me"

--God

If the Almighty is a self-centered cocksucker, then I'd rather not spend eternity with him. Ever think of that, dumb country fuck who paid for the ad?

I Died in "Operation Horrible Lie" and All I got was a Pentagon Ad on My Gravestone...

The Pentagon, which pays for headstones of dead troops (which are installed after the furtive, after-dark burials are performed), has begun putting things like "Operation Enduring Freedom" on the markers so that everyone in future decades will know that the men and women buried under said stones died...oh, they died in THAT fucked-up illegal war! OK! Jesus, for a second there I thought they died in Bosnia or some other non-criminal, justified action. Phew! Nice to know that's cleared up.

Actually, though, there's a problem with the government just going around and engraving whatever the fuck it feels like on dead kids' tombstones: those commie-loving, probably gay, certainly leftist FAMILIES that keep saying they don't want their offspring to have graves that continue the lie that this whole debacle is about operations "Iraqi Freedom" or "Vengeful Liberty" or "Bloody Expiation of Brown People's Innate Sinfulness". OK, I made that one up.

Imagine, though, if the press was still as interested in the President's sex life as it was six years ago: we'd have thousands of gravestones for people who died in "Operation Suppress Evidence of Jeff Gannon's Sloppy Blowjob".

The Agony of Being a Drone

Do you have Netflix? If you live in a large city, get it. Turnaround time is about 2 days. If you live in a smaller place, it can take 4-5 days. Sucks for you, but maybe small towns shouldn't exist, eh? For more on that, try the research of University of Chicago policy professor Robert Lalonde.

Anyway, go to netflix.com and look at the Top 100 list, which is a scroll of the most requested movies. The list updates daily. I have already rated every movie on the list, based either on actual viewing or my guess as to how much I would like it if I ever were to see it (some tripe, like The Notebook, I will never allow my eyes to waste precious retina-time on).

The point is that the list has been unchanged for months. What can this say about this country and its movie-watching habits? We watch the same bad movies over and over again? Is Hitch or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (yeah, it's on there!) that earth-shattering?

How depressing.

Bad Media--No White House Sleepover for You!

News of the Weird (link to the right) occasionally comes up with some tale of the absurd so odd that you think it can't be real. But then, the story invariably turns out to be about a Republican, and you reconsider your first impression. The one I'm about to relay offers a nice window into the workings of state governments when they're controlled by one party with close ties to the White House, and the deed described is even more believable because of which state and which official are involved.

Anyway, here it is:

"For a six-month period four years ago, government scientists in Florida studied a "miracle" liquid called "Celestial Drops" as a cure for the canker menace that ravages the state's citrus crops. According to a July report by the Orlando Sentinel, the research was recommended by then-secretary of state Katherine Harris, who later said she had learned of Celestial Drops from New York rabbi Abe Hardoon, who is associated with the popularized version of Kabbalah, whose organizers sell its followers ordinary water that is supposedly "blessed" by being stored in a room with sacred texts. Celestial Drops, which was promoted as having "improved fractal design," "infinite levels of order" and "high energy and low entropy," was ultimately revealed by the scientists to also be water."

But, on top of its plain asininity, this story represents a great missed chance. The reporter who broke it in the Orlando Sentinel (7/5/05)--on the front page, no less--could have used it as an interpretive lens for the dystopia we have come to inhabit in the last 5 years. You know, like this: "Katherine Harris, continuing to prove she's the dumbest and most venal state official in Florida history, has wasted thousands of public dollars on phony holy water recommended to her by a charlatan rabbi who helped popularize Kabbalah. Both Harris and the rabbi blame Florida state scientists for the failure of "celestial drops" (or, tap water) to cure the canker worm blight. Both these people, Republicans and friends of the President, clearly represent a political movement that has gone so far towards complete psychotic denial that one wonders how they came to hold the reigns of power in the first place. Perhaps the media and the public share in the blame?" But, instead, the reporter just did a straight, "balanced" article, thus relegating the story to just another low-end " aw' shucks! gub'mint done misbehaved ag'in" story. Fag.

Pleistocene Rewilding, or Ecological Foolishness?

National Geographic reports a proposal by conservation biologists at Cornell to reintroduce large mammals to the Great Plains - elephants, cheetahs, lions, etc. What the hell are they thinking? We have enough PR problems trying to preserve the large mammals already there - grizzlies and wolves, for instance. If you're going to sell the public on introducing African lions on Western lands, you better have a damn good argument.

What argument do they have? It would preserve the "evolutionary potential" of large mammals. What the hell is that supposed to mean? It sounds exciting - yeah, let's all sit back and watch mammals evolve - better pack a lunch, and a big one. I'm all for conservation, but these animals went extinct for a reason - humans being the main reason. Attaching the name "Pleistocene rewilding" might mask the impracticality of the idea for some, but overall this serves only to make conservationists look like retards - and we admittedly don't need any help there.

The one upshot is, should this project come to fruition, we might hear of reports of ultra right-wing gun nuts getting eaten by lions or trampled by elephant herds. That might be kinda funny.

It's Gonna Be a Long Semester

First day of class, and my geology teacher asks how old the Earth is. I answer "4.5 billion years." The student behind me, in a defensive tone only a true believer could muster, "6000 years! The fossil record proves it!" I burst, out of character, into cacaphonous laughter, thinking she's being sarcastic. Shit, she wasn't (bangs head on desk). This is only surprising in that it occured during that same lecture about scientific method you get in every science class - the first chapter in every sci text. And really, all science classes could stop there and you've gotten your money's worth. But just as in biology and anthropology, here comes the flaccid - I shudder to criticize my teachers - response, "you don't have to believe this, but you have to know it for the class." Yeah, science is not a process, you know, it's just rote memorization and some latin words. If literary critics and social theorists can defend their sometimes (often?) caca doo-doo pet theories to the death, why can't science teachers defend their discipline? Poking in the dark, that question is. We're not talking Deconstruction here - this is rocks, real fucking old rocks, for jebus sake!

Colleges require placements tests for maths, reading, and writing. Oddly, they don't require science placement tests (save for said maths, if you're taking chem or phys). Tonight's little scenario makes me think we need a science placement test. And it's an easy one. In fact, being that I love my school, in spite of its retardness and low academic standards, I'll write it for them, and make it brief to save them some administrative costs. In fact, let's make it one question, and multiple choice even, so a computer can grade it.

Science Placement Test
Question: What is science?
A. A reliable, self-correcting, elegant yet rigorous and unforgiving way of knowing which seeks naturalistic answers to natural phenomenon, which has proven its worth in advancing human thought for three hundred years, clinging only to well-proven and researched ideas which are testable, verifiable, and falsifiable, and which holds said ideas tentatively in light of new evidence.
B. Something my priest warned me against before he touched my . . . uh, soul, yeah, my soul, just before he put his pe . . . nevermind
C. A communist plot invented to destroy family values, introduce relativism, and turn maleable young unsuspecting freshmen into puppy-grinding, pig-fucking atheists.
D. Uh, are we gonna learn how to grow pot or make lysergic acid diethalymide in this class?
E. I dunno, I just need this class to graduate, and I heard the teacher was hot.

If you answered A, come on in and celebrate this great world of ours in all its nekkid beauty. Any other answers - give your head that one last push into your ass so you asphyxiate. Some poor kid from the ghetto needs your seat in the lab. Or become a marketing major.

And teachers, science is worth defending. In fact, it's your job to do so. Use a British accent if need be - seems to help on the documentaries. The Universe is old. Evolution occurred. It's not something to be ashamed of. Defend the theories - the theories of science are the FUN part! We're here to get less stupid, please oblige us.

If only I can exercise enough self-control not to take myself to the old as hell New River this weekend to get a really old rock for a little show and tell next week. As in, I'll show you what this old chunk of gneiss does to your head if you tell me the Earth is 6000 years young again.

You Want Punk? Fuck You

Good article from the NY Times, although the author, one Jon Pareles (a man of a certain fame within high-end journalism), completely abandons his premise by the end of the article. Too lazy to click the link? Then I'll just tell you: he wants CBGB to be closed, immolated, and the bones ground into dust, in order that punk might be saved from self-mockery either through the commercialization of the club of its birth--already done, bud--or through the franchising of "CBGB, the Restaurant"-type joints in Vegas and elsewhere. His original point, which, as I say, he forgets by the end of the article, is that punk rockers don't do nostalgia. We ain't hippies; we don't keep photo albums and autographs and we don't get misty over a place. Punk is an idea--and one rooted in frustration and self-sustaining anger, not physical location. If punk has a lesson to impart, it is that we can reject all conventions, norms, possessions, and people--in short, we can be entirely inner-directed--and still make it. It's like the angry Buddhism of music. It's all a lie, of course, and a selfish, Republican lie at that; but that's the original intent. Oh, besides the desire to get on stage despite a complete lack of talent (see: Ramones, Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, all others).

As regards Pareles' point, I agree completely. I have, for years, taken this position to its logical conclusion and I am the proud owner and wearer of a shirt I made in the off-hours of my first job out of college, that of a night shift supervisor in a printing shop. The shirt, a simple black ink-on-a-white-tee affair, says simply "I'm Glad Joey Ramone is Dead." That's it.

I have received innumerable innocent queries about the shirt (and I actually have six of them; I made one for all my punk friends but for some reason they didn't want them), dirty looks from "punks" too scared to actually say anything (did it take all your courage to go outside with that hair, kid?), and even a few mumbled condemnations. Most of the latter have come, not from vengeful punkers, but from ordinary adults who have no idea who Joey Ramone was but don't think it's appropriate to celebrate anyone's death. You should have seen his haircut, lady. And Jesus H. Christ, has there ever been an uglier East Side Dago than him? Think of all the groupies who came out of a stupor to find that grizzled countenance hovering over them...

The point of the shirt, which is quite the same as Pareles' article but gets it across in about 500 fewer words, is that you ain't punk if you care about Joey Ramone's hard death from cancer. If you weep over a dead guy--and especially if you get punchy over a T-shirt mocking that death--then you ain't punk. Observing respect for the dead is conventional, and punk is about spitting in the face of convention. If you are going to stand there, looking like a skinny idiot in your leather and Doc Martens, and tell me that marriage, the church, family, school, employment, and very damn near all of society is one big deathtrap; if you are going to scorn every human connection and become one with the punk rock postmodern, then you can't tear up over the death of the head blasphemer. It would be like praying for Aleister Crowley, or hoping that Ike and Tina will get remarried and live happily in the suburbs. Some shit just doesn't work, and you can't party, fight, and fuck for twenty years and then turn on a dime and say, "hey man, don't disrespect my icons."

You want punk, fuck you. Memorize it, live by it; that's the punk mantra. Better yet, get a silk-screening kit and make some T-shirts...

H3

I am officially sick and goddamn tired of the Hummer advertising campaigns. I recall vividly the first commercial I ever saw for the fucking behemoth, it was the stop-motion one with the school bus-sized "car" moving over a desert and then it panned out to the Earth from space. Lights, curtain. The point was, clearly, that the Hummer is not really the threat to the whole planet that you might think a vehicle that gets 6 miles to the gallon would be; instead, it is part of the Earth itself, organic, if you will.

I, for one, will not.

Then came the ads in the Chicago subway that featured the same jerky-ass pictures and the planet emblem--talk about not knowing your audience. Hey, General Motors: if I can only afford $1.75 to commute to work, what makes you think I have the $50,000 to spend on a loaded Hummer? Is it for the days I spend at my country estate out in Barrington? Stupid fucks. No wonder you're bankrupt.

Now, I have seen the H3 ads that show the "car" darting in between trees in the forest, like wildlife you always just barely catch out of the corner of your eye. I'm sorry, I must have missed something: are you trying to say, GM, that the H3 is both somehow natural and unobtrusive? Having just walked by one of the monstrosities a few days ago (the dumb shit behind the wheel was frantically trying to parallel park in downtown Chicago...hilarious!), I can say that it is a good deal smaller than its even more obnoxious predecessor, in the way that a backhoe is smaller than a bulldozer. You wouldn't drive either one, and you damn sure wouldn't pay for that much gas, but yes: technically, one is actually smaller than the other. Way to go, American motorcar companies. THAT's why Japan is still kicking your ass.

Here is my new solution: I am going to get a paint marker and a screwdriver and I am going to scrawl "I am a bad person" on the side of every Hummer I come across. Then, I'm going to steal its license plates and replace them with other plates I took off of other cars. That way, after the piece of shit who owns the Hummer pays for a new paint job, he can also have the time-release fun of getting pulled over by a CPD cop and explaining why his vehicle has stolen plates. A run-in with the law is inevitable for certain morons, especially the kind who buy vehicles that require double parking. There will be a lot of H2's and H3's getting impounded in this city, I believe.

In the meantime, I hope everyone who pays more than $50 a week for gasoline by choice dies in a horrific way, in front of children and extended family, while being videotaped as a cautionary tale to teenagers who might be tempted to grow up into similarly bad people.

This is My Hometown

OK, Jamie, you have convinced me that the origin of all evil, the epicenter of mindless hate, the cathedral of banal viciousness--in short, the place of my birth, Charlotte, NC--is worth taking on in print. It isn't enough just to survive to 20 and then move far, far away. The place itself goes on, like a fifty-story tire fire, and its existence serves as an affront to every decent person who has ever been exposed to the disease-ridden corpse of the New South.

So what's the matter with Charlotte (to borrow a title from notable nitwit Tom Frank)?

The place is and always was meant to be a manor of sorts. Originally dreamt up by Daniel Tompkins, a cotton mill baron whose fortune was made--or wrung, rather--ruthlessly, inhumanly from the scorched earth of the postbellum South and who later founded and ran the Charlotte Observer, a booster's paper if ever there was one. His father had owned a plantation, I recall, in upstate South Carolina, and after the war Tompkins was very much a man of the industrial New South while also quite determined to see the faith of his father(s) raised again. Tompkins' cotton mill (and cottonseed oil) empire allowed him the financial means to look beyond his own acreage to the epitome of hateful Yankee conceit: the metropolis. He, more than anyone else, raised at the crossroads of Trade and Tryon streets--no old Indian trading paths, damn you, but incidentally useful intersecting lines--a great city that would burn bright with the vulgar appetites of a vengeful new class of capitalists. The new men were political and severe; there was no wild spending in early Charlotte, but rather a pathological thrift that promised to build the city's wealth beyond compare, until the day when the city fathers might look upon Northern capital and laugh.

And hence Charlotte has become a city of banks. Not of people, but banks. Vaults and time-locks, paperwork and promises of greatness. Repressed? You answer that (of course). If you live there and do not have a hand in the financial institutions, you are chaff and get out of the wheat's way as it gets carted towards the grindstone. How many people know that Bank of America is headquartered there? That, save for New York City and Chase Manhattan (and goddamn even that venerable institution; it can be bought!), Charlotte would be the pre-eminent financial center in the world? No one knows, or very few, because it isn't yet time for them to know. Whether the schemes and best laid plans of the cavaliers our fathers can come to fruition is an open question--after all, no one foresaw the international corporation. Does it mean anything to BofA or Wachovia/First Union to be a "world-class city"? Is regionalism dead? Whither the chain-dragging ghosts of WJ Cash and Lewis Mumford?

Charlotte-town is as old as North Carolina, or almost. Founded, most likely, by Scotch-Irish Protestants in the mid-1700s, it played an interesting, if inconsequential, role in the Revolution. It would have been immortalized, however, if General Cornwallis, resting there with the ague, had only died but, alas! he lived and made it to Yorktown and everlasting humiliation. The town--or village, really--had few residents in 1775 when the unofficial census was taken, but the number may be something like 200. When the British army arrived for rest and provisions after being bushwhacked all through North Carolina, and particularly at Guilford Courthouse, following the landing at Wilmington in 1780, it is said that townspeople (who until then had been quite suspiciously loyal to the crown, calling the place "Charlotte" after George III's Hapsburg queen and even naming the main street after the royal governor, Lord Tryon) took umbrage to the looting and sporting of the redcoats and began a series of skirmishes. The biggest one happened at a farm north of the village, and it is said that the building still showed the holes from musket balls almost one hundred years later. Naturally, being the proud sons of history that they are, the Charlotte city council allowed that structure to be demolished in the 1970's to make way for a factory. Isn't the ironing delicious?

Back to Cornwallis. At the skirmish at McIntyre's farm, as it was called, a beehive was upended and, of course, so-called historians, like UNCC's Dan Morrill, and others who value a good story over a true one have asserted for years that this incident 1. involved a strange, now unknown type of bee that only stung British soldiers 2. was later called the "battle of the bees" by damn near everyone in the whole fucking country and 3. that this may be the start of the hornets' nest myth. The aforementioned "historians" and others don't call it a myth, though. They call it a fact. See, what happened is this: Cornwallis, apparently too sick to lead his troops but aware and alert enough to make quips, supposedly called Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is) a "hornets' nest of rebellion" because his men, being used to fighting, killing, battle, roughing it, rape, pillage, and murder, were scared by the feeble protests of 200 toothless retards in a loyalist village. And there you have it: Charlotte, NC, gave the British all they could handle. Case closed. And it is a powerful myth: the town boasts a Hornet's Nest Park, a hornet's nest plaque to designate historic sites (though the oldest, by my count, is from 1905--everything else got the wrecking ball); policemen's badges are shaped like beehives, the NBA team bestowed upon us in 1989 was the Hornets--and on, and on, and on.

Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the described events of the Revolutionary era actually occurred (and there are even crazier versions of the Cornwallis story that insist, among other things, that a young Andrew Jackson--native of Waxhaw, NC to the west of Charlotte--insulted Cornwallis as he left the region). Cornwallis' memoirs don't mention a word about it, though they do contain an after-the-fact account of his time in Charlotte full of memorable witticisms (he was, after all, a lord and a scholar). Nor are such things contained in the accounts of his dandy second-in-command, Dragoon commander Banastre Tarleton--he of the inaccurate portrayal in Mel Gibson's "The Patriot"; Gibson's character kills Tarleton at the end of the film, but Banastre lived many years after the war as a drunken libertine in England. Huh. To ice the cupcake, George Washington, who visited the burg after the war, was wined and dined by the best families in town but recorded in his diary that it was no more than a "trifling place".

So, who made this story up? Why? What has this to do with the rest of Charlotte lore, like the absurd claim that city fathers authored the Declaration of Independence only days before the real Constitutional Convention? Oddly enough, both stories are best known through the writings of one man: the original city booster, Hezekiah Alexander, who wrote in his memoirs that he recalls both the hornets' nest quote AND the "Meck Dec" as it is called. He reproduced the declaration from memory, by the way, after the "original" copy had burned in a desk drawer in his home twenty years prior. This is no joke; people actually believe this. Alexander also implied (because Southerners don't accuse, they imply) that Jefferson stole large parts of the US Declaration from the Mecklenburg Declaration--and then he hid the evidence and denied everything. To my knowledge, there is no document anywhere in which Jefferson even admits being aware of the town of Charlotte or the existence of Mecklenburg County.

What kind of city continues to thrust itself into the spotlight despite an utter absence of memorable traits? What sort of a place raises its young to remember and spout such drivel--and with such cocksure arrogance? What kind of place inspires such love amongst surburban-dreaming shit-eaters and such revulsion among human beings? This is a community driving itself, positively suicidally, into the maw of class, race, and political war--and all for the Foundational Myth--which may or may not still have meaning.

Charlotte does these things, and more. And again, I ask: what's wrong with Charlotte?

Unintelligent Design Theory

Our President, who is not a scientist, has endorsed Intelligent Design Creationism, which isn't science. But Americans like a straight-shooter, right? Hence, Bush's repeated use of the word "resolve." What is resolve? Apparently, it means that when the 55,000 members of the National Science Teachers Association say ID isn't science, when 43,000 members of the American Geophysical Union say ID isn't science, when the National Center for Science Education says ID isn't science, when 577 scientists named Steve say ID isn't science, when the NIH, NSF, and DOE say ID isn't science, resolve is saying, despite the fact that you were a C-student who only got into Yale through legacy admissions, and are not a scientist, that ID should be taught in schools. That's resolve, and therefore, resolve is a likely indicator of willful ignorance.

Responding to this request by a fellow North Carolinian who is a scientist, I'm linking to this, to manipulate Google's search engine so anyone whose interest about this has been piqued will see the fact and theory of evolution, and it's importance to modern thought and the U.S. economy.

New. South. My. Ass.

A massuh Doug Hanks has withdrawn from the City Council at Large race here in Charlotte, due to a little problem of about 4000 posts he made to a white supremacist website. Psst: he was running as a Republican, imagine that. Hanks' formidable defense is he was doing "research" for a novel. Jebus fucking H fucking christ, that's not a scholarly way to do research. If you're Hunter S. Thompson writing a shitty novel about the Hell's Angels maybe, but dealing with race, no and hell no. And as should be expected, he played the "heritage, not hate" card.

To which I say, if you want to research our Southern heritage, you gawd damn better have some Genovese under your belt, some Du Bois, and some Booker T. Washington. If all you know about Southern history is something you gleaned from a southern rock record, shut the fuck up. You don't give two flying shits about heritage, and you're full of ignorance and concomitant hate. Begin your discussion of "heritage" by at least acknowledging that after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, rape of black women by their owners to produce new laborers/ human commodities became a cornerstone of the Southern economy, not by waving your little flag behind the gun rack which you widdled for your monster truck.

But that is not my point here. Hanks' fellow Republicans demanded his withdrawal from the race after this came out. But wait. We already have hate-mongering, gay-bashing, radical pseudo-Christian Bill James holding a seat here. Why aren't the South Charlotte Repubs demanding James to resign? James has spewed forth perennial hatred and unfounded arguments against poor children, black children, and GLBT's with no empirical evidence whatsoever to back his claims, yet he goes largely unchecked. Perhaps it's a matter of media framing after all, to which I say, Charlotte Observer - you are a pusillanimous collection of conciliatory infidel weenies (giving host to Op-Eds by Walter Williams' bullshit grants you a hot spot in Hell*). If this is the New South, send me back to 19 65. Apparently we missed the point somewhere.
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Of course, and in this case unfortunately, there is no Hell. But whatever

No-brainer

Who can afford a $30,000 motorcycle? The answer to this question holds the end of the biker myth inside it. Don't you know there are still motorcycle gangs roaming our country, terrorizing good folks like you and me, and disrespecting the law wherever it shows its pudgy, pasty face? What are they rebelling against? Whaddaya got?

Yeah, right. Find a guy on a bike and ask him what he does for a living. 10-to-1 he holds a 40-hour job doing something completely mundane. Some kind of work, in fact, that threatens his masculinity so much that he had to purchase and display a Harley-Davidson, a bike that is not, has not been since the 1980s, and never again will be cheap to own. So the question is, who can afford a $30,000 motorcycle?

The usual suspects can, of course! Bankers. Lawyers. Brokers. Managers. Real dangerous fellows, you'll agree. But once you rip the fountain pen from between their flabby fingers, they're really pussycats. Put 'em on a bike, and they're true comedy.

My uncle Richard, who is lost somewhere in New York City and may never resurface, calls those guys the Heck's Angels. I like to imagine them trying to call themselves "Hell's Angels" in front of friends but being shushed by their wives because the kids are nearby. Remember the motto of the Heck's Angel: Live to Ride, Ride to Old Navy.

One More Time (or until you get it)

The story that hasn't died continues to cause Democrats anger and liberals, well, whiny guilt. That story is, of course (thanks for paying attention), the theft of the 2004 election. It's a strange dialogue happening--or not happening, depending--on the left: one group, apparently led by me since only I care about this topic, is mad as hell about obvious voter fraud and the rigging of a national election--especially the fact that said rigging was done and announced far in advance and yet nobody raised an outcry. The other faction seems to believe that calling an election "unfair" is the same as being a "sore loser" (yeah, buddy: those people who sue after being wrongly imprisoned for twenty years on phony rape charges are some VERY sore losers. Why don't you go talk to them?). The "sore loser left" used to just be the "loser left," but now that some liberals don't want to get their asses handed to them by Republicans anymore; now that some of us have grown tired of taking a kick from the right and saying "thank you, may I have another?" well, the "sore loser left" finally has someone to fight that doesn't scare the living shit out of it: other Democrats. And that's precisely what is happening. The election case is airtight: there WAS fraud, it WAS done by and for the president and his people. But, scared of its own shadow, as usual, the "sore loser left" will spend valuable time and energy not accusing the president of being a thief and a liar, but attempting to drum the angry left back into the whipping line.
How's that fantasy world working out for you, anyway? Are you guys in charge of even one branch of government yet?