Being the best at something is not always worthwhile. It depends upon the environment. If one works with error-prone individuals and one’s own eagle-eye for typos and copy-writing mistakes always catches their errors — and the environment is such where there is no checking of work before it is purveyed to the public, making every citation of each error an event in itself — it promotes a culture of resentment.

In sum, the error-prone take umbrage with the person devoted to maintaining a high standard of quality. If this does not evince a dysfunctional relationship, I cannot imagine an example that would.

However, if one’s great skill at recalling the proper spelling of names and English-language words in general is appreciated and employed at a stage prior to the dissemination of mistake-riddled product to the public, this defense against errors would be welcome and appreciated, and the defender might even be rewarded for their good, invaluable work.

(more…)

I love it when a bit of comedy crosses my path.

A Democratic party representative from Virginia is petitioning to remove advertisements for erectile dysfunction drugs from daytime and prime-time TV.

Honestly, I won’t miss the ads; they are bloody annoying. I couldn’t care less if your dick doesn’t work and if you need help getting the old boy to do his job. It is YOUR problem that you’re not virile, so why must I hear about it? Get off your ass in front of the TV and do something proactive instead of waiting for a pharmaceutical company to hawk the cure to what ails you, you dumbfuck.

Also, here’s an aside: bald men are not typically known to suffer from “E.D.” (as they call it in the commercials) because their baldness is a side-effect of the abundance of the testosterone that makes their dicks work. Bald men are more virile because they have an abundance of Dihydrotestosterone, which is the most potent of the three types and is essential in combating the feminizing effects of estrogen (less chance for man-boobs, too. Bonus!).

So, ladies, the next time you see an older guy with a great head of hair, you can probably put money down that his dick won’t go up. I think the odds are about 1:1.

The congressman, Jim Moran, is quoted by CNN, saying: “A number of people have come up, including colleagues, and said, ‘I’m fed up, I don’t want my 3- or 4-year-old grandkid asking me what erectile dysfunction is all about,’ ”

To which, if my kid asked me, I could say: “Son, your daddy is bald because his mommy’s brothers and their daddy were bald and so on down the line. And your mommy’s brothers are going bald, so — one day — you too will be bald.”

“But, daddy, what does that have to do with erectile dysfunction?” my hypothetical boy might say.

“Kiddo, it means you’ll never have to worry about it.”

Still, I see where Moran is coming from. While he’s at it, he should pass legislation that would prevent me from having to see ads about “feminine hygiene,” tampons and “feminine personal lubrication” — you know … for when you’re a little dry “down there” (*hurl*).

I’ll start with an unattributed remark:

“Fucking a single, never-wed mother is akin to picking up a used condom off the ground and putting it on your dick.”

And this segues nicely into my desire to talk about a single mother who, at 2 a.m. on Mother’s Day, took her three-year-old for a drive. To make it interesting, the mother was both high on pot and drunk on alcohol. She was driving with some man, ten years her senior and not her baby’s father, in the passenger seat (or, depending on the source, the man was driving but, since the woman was brought up on DWI charges, it would imply she was operating the vehicle).

Regardless of the facts, let us assume this drug-addled, unwed mother was driving and is directly responsible in crashing her vehicle of the severe head trauma done to her little girl, who may not survive. The girl has swelling in her brain.

Let us assume the mother is not terribly bright. Let us also assume the baby’s male progenitor was no savant, either. Is it then safe to assume this young girl, however innocent, does not have a lot of intellectual potential? Even less so now that mommy mashed her brains. I know it is callous to say so, but I think dying might be this child’s best hope.

This woman should have never had a child. She is obviously unfit to be a mother, even if one only weighs her lack of judgment in drinking AND smoking pot and then driving WITH her child in the car. Add to that argument the flagrant stupidity of this woman and it raises the question of whether people who fail to meet a certain intellectual threshold should be permitted to breed.

Personally, I think Aldous Huxley’s illustration of eugenics at work is the most practical solution. I think people like this woman should only be allowed to breed in a regulated manner. Perhaps it’s draconian and intrusive, but I think procreation should be as regulated as anything else, if not more so. Why can we tell people what they can and cannot drink and at what age, what they can and cannot smoke and at what age, when they can drive, where to legally sleep, urinate, defecate, and so on and so forth, et cetera, etc.

I don’t think a race of “supermen” is the answer. No way. Stupid and dangerous that would be. If everyone were brilliant and beautiful and talented, none of those things would have any worth. There need to be degrees of intelligence, beauty and talent. An economic view is essential when considering the implementation of a caste system. Let’s face it, if everyone were of the same ilk at the current 99th percentile, we would have no garbage men, carpenters, electricians, road workers or anyone to do any essential, infrastructural work of any kind.

To return to Mr. Huxley’s position, society requires Deltas just as much as it does Alphas and Betas. Gammas, too, would be necessary at the very least to fill in that degree in the scale, to say nothing of the important functions they would fulfill.

However, in an unregulated society like ours, a woman like this baby-mangling drug user, is free to copulate with whichever lackluster genetic candidate that is available and make — scientifically speaking — progeny with traits most likely of the Huxley Delta variety. She then either damages this progeny as she’s done or, as in myriad other cases, this progeny grows up having a life devoid of direction, purpose, good parenting and quality training / education and becomes exactly what the mother and father had each been: a societal drain.

This woman is to be blamed for her lack of personal responsibility and her dearth of mothering skills, but so too is society to be blamed — and perhaps more so than the mother — for this travesty. There is a paradoxical disconnect caused by the rhetoric of freedom AND the “sanctity of life” posited by America’s inexorable religious underpinning. It underlies many of the social mores in this country. This paradox is responsible for letting human tragedies like this unfit mother have children to damage with her poor judgment.

Subsequently, Americans wring their hands at the horror and the sadness of this crime, the harm done to the innocent and defenseless child that depends so heavily on the care of her mother and is irrevocably harmed by its absence. This aggrieved response is just that, a response. A reaction. Reactionary and, as such, too little and far too late.

A proactive approach needs to be taken to prevent things like this from happening.

People should not be free to run amok and procreate like animals if we are all to subscribe to the lie that humans are something better than upright walking primates. Mandatory — and temporary — sterilization should be considered for young men and women. People found to be carrying a communicable sexual disease should be quarantined and barred from spreading that disease. Only if active steps are taken to eliminate the undesirable elements from a situation can the situation be improved.

Let’s not totally disregard the other option, which is to cop to that we are all just upright walking primates and there should be no laws. Give in to entropy. Let everyone run amok. The laws of nature will take care of everything just as, in the case of the drug-addled woman and her little girl, it did in mitigating the damage done to the human race by the woman having bred.

The other day, a friend of mine posted a story about a St. Louis Cardinals fan wearing a shirt. The shirt said something about Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano that was deemed to be not just offensive, but “racist.”

Gasp.

The shirt said: “Zambrano mows my lawn” and had a silhouette of a sombrero and poncho-wearing man pushing a lawn mower. Ai, Dios mio.

Maybe I’m just insensitive, but the last time I looked, the landscapers I saw were Hispanic. I’ve noticed too that the guy who makes my egg sandwich at the deli is Hispanic. It seems that a lot of the Bodega workers in Spanish Harlem are Hispanic, too. I’ve taken note of these things. Does that make me racist?

If the shirt said “Zambrano sells bottles of Tropical Fantasy” would that have been a problem? Probably. Everyone knows that the man is a professional ball player who throws a baseball and makes millions doing so. Obviously he’s NOT selling Tropical freaking Fantasy soda at the local bodega. I guess what’s offensive is that someone has pointed out the correlation between Hispanics who mow lawns and that Zambrano himself is Venezuelan.

Do people really get upset when Irish and drunk are used synonymously? Is it racist to say that Italians eat pasta? I’m sure there are Irish who aren’t drunk and Italians who don’t eat pasta. Just like there are Chinese who don’t own a laundry and Arabs who don’t run a dukkan. Just like there are West Indian people who aren’t selling jerk chicken and low-budget movies with all-black casts. But in all of those cases, there are many who do. I may be wrong, but I think there’s a difference between stereotyping and racism.

Is it fair to lump someone in with a group of other people simply because of their appearance or their lineage? Of course not. Is it harmful? I really don’t think so. Humans, as a species, are not terribly bright. They tend to economize when it comes to thinking … that is to say that they do it as little as possible. It is much easier to make associations and to generalize than it is to look at every instance critically as a unique event.

There are fine lines between organization and stereotyping and racism. Just classifying someone can be an offense. People like to identify themselves as different from some group and the same as another. Take Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. They’re both Hispanic but, in my experience, neither wants to be confused for the other.

I don’t really care if someone confuses me for a Swede instead of a Dane because, let’s face it, I’m only part of the latter and that came from people who emigrated 140 years ago. But if someone confused me for a Canadian, I wouldn’t mind. A Briton? Who cares? Maybe that’s because white people have no “race” in our society.

White people are often the exception when it comes to race, unless it’s some neo-Nazi shit about the “white race” and bullshit supremacy arguments, or it’s the so-called “people of color” railing against whitey for the wrongs that “albino race” has perpetrated against them.

“People of color” is a term that annoys me because it’s exclusive. I’m not a huge fan of exclusivity. I’m not a proponent of dividing people up by class, culture and color. I don’t like seeing it put into practice by oppressor or oppressee and I absolutely despise being lumped together with “white people” who care as little for me as they do for “people of color.”

The point is that there are real issues and then there are contrivances. I’ve been told by many that my worst flaw is that I have no sense of humor when it comes to myself. I take myself too seriously, in other words. I’ve gotten better at getting looser about it, but sometimes I still take umbrage with shit I should let slide or laugh off. I don’t get upset about stereotypes, though. If someone doesn’t want to take the time to see past their preconceived notion of me, that’s their issue. It doesn’t affect my life and I don’t need someone to step in and stand up for me and rail against how unfair it is.

Yet that’s what people have seen fit to do with the Zambrano shirt. Big deal. So Hispanic people do a lot of landscaping work. So someone decided to make a, perhaps, tasteless joke about a rival team’s pitcher using a stereotype. I bet Carlos is wiping his tears with his millions. The only people who tend to care about this shit are white people who’ve decided to be indignant over every racial affront due to their own overwhelming guilt for their privileged lives and opportunist INSERT-RACE-HEREs who want to hear themselves speak, grandstand and be on display.

I saw too a shirt that said “Horry Kow!” with a Cubs logo that has slanted eyes. It was supposed to be a reference to a Japanese Cubs player named Fukudome (to whom I like refer to as “Fuck you, do me”) … lampooning the difficulty many Asians have shown to have with the letters L and R in Engrish. I mean English. God, forgive me.

I thought the “Horry Kow!” thing was funny. I also think “Fa-rah-rah-rah-rah” from “A Christmas Story” is funny. I also had to see the Fukudome joke shirt to get that it was supposed to represent an Asian person saying “Holy Cow!” … reading it in plain text made me go: “What the fuck is a horry kow?”

I speak Spanish and I’ve encountered people from countries where my dialect seems strange and accented who thought what I said was funny. Did it make me mad? No. It WAS funny. These idiomatic quirks are endearing. In my experience, people almost universally love accents; they’re interesting and entertaining. Yet some people see fit to get angry when someone points out a difference in another person’s speech.

It often seems like society is heading towards a place where no one is allowed to be parodied or made fun of because, god forbid, someone’s feelings might get hurt. Boo-fucking-hoo. Yeah, I want to live in a world where everyone is such an oversensitive pussy that the slightest criticism elicits suicide. Wouldn’t that be grand. Fuck you. Grow a pair.

Americans in general are complacent, stagnant-minded pieces of shit. They are willing to embrace the status quo because their fear of things getting worse is far greater than their desire for things to be better. Ambition is a word so foreign here, the only reason it’s in our vocabulary is because our language is borrowed from the English.

Has anyone ever actually defined the “American Way” … because I would argue that — aside from being an utterly meaningless, rhetorical catch-phrase meant to incite patriotism (particularly the ethnocentric / xenophobic brand thereof) — it simply means “complacency” … the latest wrong to incite my rage against people too stupid and lazy to help themselves is a local one: the MTA is on the verge of raising our fares again and New York’s municipal leaders’ are sheerly too incompetent and greedy to protect their constituents from such gross abuse.

The MTA is an “authority” run by appointees of the Governor, elite people of the good old American values of “wealth” and “class” who rub elbows and hobnob with the political elite and are rewarded with lucrative positions running the aforesaid “authority.” The head of the MTA makes hundreds of thousands of dollars each year … a handsome reward for consistently reporting a deficit and budget shortfalls. People are fired from $10/hr jobs for incompetence yet someone who makes in the realm of $300,000 per year is not dismissed despite having a $300,000,000 deficit to his credit. That sounds like gross incompetence to me. Isn’t it bad business?

Well, it may be from a logical, outside perspective … but it isn’t bad business when you’re pulling down money hand over fist in salary and there is no personal consequence for your actions because people who largely make less than $50,000 a year will be the ones who foot the bill for your incompetence.

See, there is no incentive for any of these MTA appointees to do a better job because they are currently handsomely rewarded for being utterly inept. Why work hard and do well when you can not work at all and do horribly and still make a mint?

There needs to be a penalty for treating the general public so shabbily. Personally, I advocate the slow and painful murder of anyone involved in the executive operations of the MTA — after a thorough public humiliation. Sadly, the likelihood of such retribution is very little, so what the public should do is exercise its rights as members of a supposedly democratic society and demand change.

Boycotting the subways and buses would be a phenomenal step towards proving a point. If the public says “You’ve made it too expensive and now I won’t use it.” the MTA would have no choice but to submit because they could not sustain the system on no revenue. However, because of people’s aforesaid laziness and complacency, they will continue to ride the subway regardless of how expensive it gets because they refuse to walk, bike, run, carpool or otherwise. The MTA knows this. The MTA is taking advantage of the public’s lethargy.

Individually, I could never make a dent in such a corrupt machine. If I were to file and injunction and have to argue before court, I could do it … but publicly I would be attacked, dirt would be dug, I’d be outed as an offensively opinionated misanthrope and people would rather be financially fucked by someone who seems benign that helped by someone who is not.

However, if everyone who rides the subway would bind together and take unified action, the resistance would require no more than a few days to drive the MTA to a grinding halt and force them to re-evaluate fairer, more transparent practices.

My disgust for people in general arises from the knowledge that my idealist hope — for a revolutionary response to something that affects every poor and lower-class New Yorker — is a fucking pipe dream.

For the love of god, people can’t even take care of themselves judging by all the morbidly obese individuals I see on the subway every day, taking up two or more seats … it would be foolish to even entertain the belief that these lazy slobs could be motivated to anything but stuff their faces with crap.

Yes, I admit it: I’m a fool for even wishing that people would fight for something better. Those days are long gone.

I long for the days (which I could admittedly be romanticizing because I don’t personally ever remember them) where newspapers were advocates of the people who expressed the voice of the people and incited people to change things believed to be unjust and unfair.

This fucking country was founded because a bunch of rich guys didn’t want to pay a three-cent tax. Now we won’t even fight to save hundreds a year. Pathetic.

I’m really fucking disappointed.

That statement alone is objectionable. Why? Fuck. That’s why.

Fuck.

To cut to the chase, though, I’m disappointed because — keep in mind that it’s the 21st Century — it’s still not possible to be freely expressive without fear of recrimination.

I can’t speak for any other society, but American society is the antithesis of progressive. Proposition 8 passed in California. That should be enough of an indication, and then consider that we’ve only now elected our first black president, we’ve never had a female head of state, sodomy is still illegal in many states and I get the impression being gay is probably illegal, too. Illegal. That’s right. As in “you’ll go to jail for being what you are or doing what you and another consenting adult like to do.” Home of the free, my ass. Home of the fearful of retribution, maybe.

A friend of mine posted a link (in the comments of my Personae post) to a New York TImes story from yesterday, which highlights two points in an application for work in the Obama adminstration. These two points effectively state that if you’ve ever masturbated, had sex outdoors, engaged in a threesome — not for the purposes of golf, of course — and so forth (use your imagination to compile a longer list of licentious and scandalous activities), then you’d better divulge all your dirty secrets if you want to work for President-elect Obama. So much for progressive, there, too. Gestapo shit from the bastion of Change, himself. Maybe we’ll all get a little cloth badge to sew to our clothes that illustrates our “misdeeds” to the good people of America.

I could never be President, I could never be a politician. Not only because I couldn’t tolerate the two-, three- and four-faced bullshit, but because I’ve already done too many damnable things, by the standards of our Puritanical society. Luckily, I have no desire to hold public office. But, going back to my Personae post, what about when it comes to needing a job? I don’t want to have to apologize for how I’ve acted and what I’ve thought. When it comes to one’s financial well-being, though, it’s hard to be bold if the consequence is destitution.

The most disgusting part of the need to be virtuous, in order to placate the Puritan views of greater society, is that it isn’t actually that one needs to be virtuous, they need merely appear to be so. It’s the hypocrisy that sickens me. The dishonesty. That someone fucking around on his wife will leap at the first opportunity to expose someone else as a philandering cheater while continuing to maintain over their own misdeeds the illusion of virtue.

I, at least, put it all out there. I’ve done my best to employ a modicum of tact and politeness because, without them, society would crumble into the wild kingdom, but I always try to be honest. Unfortunately, honesty is not the best policy if it doesn’t jibe with the lily white, squeaky clean image one must portray to be well regarded by an unfairly judgmental populace.

The blog title’s been a misnomer for a while, now, so I haven’t had any inclination to write along the theme of being downtrodden and fighting against the endless barrage of adversity. That’s not to say I’m not still downtrodden and fighting against [...] adversity, but that’s not going to stop until I’m a rich, white man … no matter how much it may actually subside.

I’m going to cross to Mason-Dixon line for the first time in ages and add a whole new state to my list of places visited. I haven’t left the confines of the Greater City of New York in so long, I can barely remember. Aside from occasional forays out east, I’ve been stuck here. Haven’t crossed the Hudson in nearly three years excepting a couple of hockey games I saw in Newark.

It’s my own doing that I haven’t left here. I don’t have (nor do I want) a car. And I haven’t had anywhere to be with pull enough to drag me out of my Brooklyn-and-Manhattan existence. But I’ll be going to New Orleans in a couple of weeks and it will be nice as hell to get the hell out of Dodge.

There’s an election coming, if you weren’t aware … potential for big things, particularly that whole “only rich, white men can be president” thing getting the kibosh. I’m excited that someone without a Christian name who doesn’t fit the honky-bloodline criterion could be this racist-ass nation’s head of state. It’s absurd to me that misogynist places like Pakistan and Indonesia have had female heads of state and we’ve not had one, nor have we had a man of any shade darker than a fluorescent light bulb.

Still, whether it’s BHO getting elected or cracker-ass McCain, it’ll be more of the same in this country. More stagnant, bipartisan bullshit.  More historic than a black man becoming president would be someone who isn’t a Democrat or a Republican getting elected. Fuck, would I love for that to happen. Every four years it’s a Hobson’s choice. I vote on abortion rights and keeping the government out of people’s bedrooms, and since I’m not rolling in dough, Democratic tax policies tend to benefit me a little more than GOP ones. I wish there was a candidate who represented me along the gamut of issues, but that just isn’t so in a system where both sides are identical except that one openly hates anyone who isn’t an arrow-straight, church-going, xenophobic, ignorant, war-mongering misanthrope while the other side is slightly more tolerant.

Blech. On a national level, it’s still a beatdown. Locally, though, things are looking up.