Universal coverage? Praise be to Allah!

Happy Easter Week, you infidel Christian bastards.  I know I haven’t addressed you much since the troop surge…I’ve been really busy savoring this wonderful democracy you brought over.  Great work there.  I’m confident your imposed, wannabe, puppet government will stand the test of time, provided the test of time is less than two years, you imperialist, swine-eating asshats.

Life has never been easier for me, and that includes when I was a rich kid in Saudi Arabia.  And it’s only going to get better, now that we all have universal health coverage.  We all have the coverage, yes?

Of course I kid, America, you rotten camel’s pubis of a nation.  You and I both know that the proposed plan will further drive your laughable debt into even greater extremes.  At this rate, I’ll be attacking China by the end of the next decade.  But all is not lost, America, you diseased-Lindsay-Lohan-vagina of the world.  All is not lost.

You see, here at Al Qaeda, we offer a much better universal health insurance plan.  The only requirements are that you completely submit your complete and total being to the will of Allah, embrace the creation of a Wahhabi Muslim caliphate stretching for thousands of miles from North Africa to Southeast Asia, and continue to fund our cause with your funny-if-it-weren’t-so-pathetic oil and gas consumption.

But you’re probably saying to yourself, “Mr. bin Laden, how do you provide universal coverage to such a wide array of people throughout the world?”  I’ll tell you, you mentally challenged buckets of man goo.  Our policy clearly states that if you make it to the age of 45, you will martyr yourself in the name of Allah.  Over 90% of health complications occur after that age.  By simply skirting the issue altogether and having you blow yourself into millions of fat, greasy pieces of American stink flesh upon reaching that age barrier, we save all the long-term care for myself and Ayman’s escalating medical costs.  I can’t even begin to tell you how expensive it can be to get a quality dialysis machine into Waziristan.  Not that you quasi-illiterate inbred American cocks understand math.

I also saw today that your black President announced plans to drill offshore.  I want to state, unequivocally, for the record, that I do not condone this action one bit.  Not because there is any risk of you greedy, consumptive urine stains freeing yourself from the bonds of oppression that is Middle Eastern oil.  Not at all…it will take far greater measures than that to satisfy your Oprah-at-her-biggest gluttonous desire for liquid gold.

Count me among those who value all of God’s creatures, with the probable exception of you filthy heathen assfaces in America.  I simply cannot bear the thought of your offshore drilling compromising the lives of Allah’s precious sea creatures.  Look, if there were a catastrophic oil spill that could somehow cover the wretched human citizens of your abominable shithole of a country, I would be all for it.

But seals?  Fish?  Birds?  The thought burdens my soul.  I urge you to reconsider, America, you Twilight-enjoying scumbags.  Do it for the treasures of the sea.

Until next time, I bid you nothing but the worst for your empty, black hearts.  Death to America.  Praise be to Allah.  Where are my Planet Earth DVDs?

YAY for everyone ever!

With the passage of the seemingly historic bill providing “universal” health care to all American citizens, (and who knows, maybe some folks who aren’t?) the wailing and gnashing of teeth has commenced in full force by anyone and everyone with a sign, a bullhorn, or legs with which to stand.  This momentous piece of legislation stands to sweep in new reforms on a par with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, provide medical insurance to children and low income persons, bankrupt us within 10 years, or mark the first giant leap towards a Tsarist government takeover of our minds.  OUR VERY MINDS!  It all depends on who you ask.

Of course, you can ask anyone, and they will have an opinion.  Fortunately no one actually knows what the hell is even in the bill, what is going to happen, or if Obama looks good with a robust mustache and a fur trader’s hat.  If they did, we’d have to take them seriously, and you and I both know we don’t want to do that.

St. Augustine said, “patience is the companion of wisdom.”  Anyone who has a feast day celebrated in his honor is worth listening to.  Maybe we ought to wait and see what happens before we fasten the belt around our necks and remove our pants (join me for Michael Hutchence/David Carradine Feast Day this Saturday at 2 pm!).  But if you just can’t wait to end it all, take comfort in the fact that you apparently have health insurance.

This article from Malcolm Gladwell gives some very fascinating insights into the conceptual model for health care and why universal care can, in fact, be a good idea.  I just wanted to post it because Gladwell is amazing and the points contained within are salient:

The Moral Hazard Myth

In the meantime, let’s hold our horses.  We can’t risk falling and getting paralyzed, or we can, or both.  Who knows?

Len Bias & Hans Rott

There is something in the mindset of most of us that leads us to fill in the blanks in another person based on our perceptions.  If someone is smart, but also shy and reserved, we tend to associate them with words like “standoffish” or “snobby,” even though for all we know they could be the patron saint of cool.  If someone has a lot of tattoos and piercings and wears “Misfits” T-shirts, we think of them as “alternative” and “unique” even though there may be more people that look like them than there are people wearing jeans and a polo.

And these assignations of character and talent and personality run wild when we get our hands on someone who dies early, especially if the circumstances take on a certain sense of tragedy.

Recently, my friend Ken Woods has been writing about the Mahler symphonies as the official blog of the Mahler in Manchester series across the pond.  In the course of these posts (which have been informative and interesting on a level I can’t even begin to describe), the subject of Mahler’s friend and fellow composer Hans Rott has come to the fore, with some fascinating insights and revelations.

The case of Hans Rott is a sad one, filled with fragile confidence, depression, mental breakdown, and handguns.  A promising student at the Vienna Conservatory who received acclaim both from his one-time roommate Mahler and his organ instructor Bruckner, Rott submitted a movement of his Symphony in E major for a composition competition, and later offered the completed manuscript to Hans Richter and Brahms, resulting in Brahms telling him he should give up music (musicologists maintain that Brahms was clearly the Simon of the panel, or that Simon is the Brahms of American Idol).

Fast forward a few months, and Rott is pulling guns on a train, claiming that Brahms loaded the cars with dynamite.  Rott was committed to a sanitarium, and eventually died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.  Mahler said of Rott:

[he is] a musician of genius … who died unrecognized and in want on the very threshold of his career. … What music has lost in him cannot be estimated. Such is the height to which his genius soars in … [his] Symphony [in E major], which he wrote as 20-year-old youth and makes him … the Founder of the New Symphony as I see it. To be sure, what he wanted is not quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music.

Listen to Rott’s Symphony, and you will indeed hear many elements to be found in Mahler, as well as hints of Bruckner, Brahms, and Wagner (not a bad group to coalesce into your sound).

But something happened between the words of Mahler and more recent goings on; Rott has attained a kind of mythical cult status as the great lost symphonist of musical history.  The Symphony in E major has morphed from a rescued work of art to a clarion call of “what if?!” from the great beyond.  It is receiving more and more performances worldwide, and with it comes the effusive and hyperbolic praise along the lines of “this is Mahler BEFORE Mahler!”

But, wait.  Rott’s Symphony, the precocious announcement of something POTENTIALLY great, is still the deeply flawed work of a 20-year-old finding his voice.  It is filled with all sorts of promise.

That promise was unfulfilled.  So in place of this unfulfilled promise, we have attempted to fulfill it with an inflated sense of Rott’s legacy.  A singular student work of substantial impact has created a mythological creative output that doesn’t actually exist.

Ask any NBA fan, and especially any Boston Celtics fan, about Len Bias, and you would swear that he was one of the greatest players of his generation.  The Tale of Len Bias regales us with stories of his hypothetical exploits: the answer to Michael Jordan, the player to extend Larry Bird’s career, the keeper of the Celtics dynasty, and on and on and on.  Where is my hyperbole cup?  Wherever it is, it runneth over.

Bias died of a cocaine overdose just two days after being drafted by the Celtics.  He had completed a captivating collegiate career at the University of Maryland, and was POISED for NBA stardom.

That stardom fizzled in a powdery white minute.  So we filled in the stardom for him.  He became one of his generations’ greatest players having played in exactly zero professional games.

Why do we feel compelled to complete these false legacies?  Why can’t we simply accept these figures for what they were?  Rott’s Symphony is a startling debut effort, and worthy of being lauded on its own merit.  Bias was one of the great amateur basketball players of his or any other generation.  What’s wrong with that?

Furthermore, what about history gives us any reason to think that these prodigies that were taken in tragedy would have revolutionized anything?

Imagine if Michael Jackson had died in 1991, just weeks before the release of Dangerous.  Based on his career to that point, with the Jackson 5 and a string of albums from Off the Wall to Dangerous that sold a Biblical number of copies, he would have towered over every aspect of modern life.  What happened?  He lived another 18 years, probably molested some kids, acted like a coked out Peter Pan, and somehow made the transition from having one of the great Jheri Curls of the early 1980′s to being whiter than Jerry Seinfeld.

Look at Whitney Houston, who went from being my generation’s answer to Aretha Franklin to being my generation’s answer to the question, “who got high with Bobby Brown for 15 years?”  Look at Macaulay Culkin, who went from starring in Home Alone to literally being home alone because nobody gives a shit about him.  Look at the fat kid from Stand By Me, who I think might still be on TV somewhere, but would have been best served as only being the awesome fat ass from Stand By Me.  Look at Emilio Estevez.  Can you?  Where the fuck is Emilio Estevez?

There is nothing to suggest that history would be any kinder to those taken at an early age.  But we press on, secure in the knowledge that Heath Ledger would have been one of our finest actors, that Tupac would have been the unquestioned and undisputed king of hip hop, that Clifford Brown was the equal of Miles Davis, that Mozart would have done God knows what had he lived another 20 years.

What should be secure is their legacies in and of themselves, brief as they may be.  Heath Ledger was in two of the most acclaimed movies of all-time, and was an Academy Award winner.  Tupac left some incredible albums behind (and seems to keep leaving them behind with each passing year).  Clifford Brown’s short career was still filled with all manner of awards, and dozens of tributes have been made in his honor (including the beautiful I Remember Clifford).  What more could we possibly want out of Mozart, who already gave us some of the greatest works in history across a litany of styles and forms?

The Symphony in E major of Hans Rott will and should continue to receive interest, performance, and scholarship.  But I see no reason to abandon the context in which the work lies: as the profound declaration of a voice arrested by misfortune and heartbreak.

No more.  No less.

Oh noez.

And tonight’s “Meltdown” is brought to you by the D.C. snow storm, you know, the storm that dumped about two feet of snow on the Washington area over the weekend causing thousands of power outages and keeping many people home from work today. And it’s the most severe winter storm in years, which would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.

- Sean Hannity

Having just finished reading Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, I’ve been thinking about global climate change a lot recently.  Having re-read Sean Hannity’s above comments about global climate change, I’ve been thinking about how I could possibly put a pox on all his houses.  The entire climate change affair is truly sad for a variety of reasons, but the biggest of all is how it is viewed as a political, and by extension, partisan issue.

How in the world is “global warming” Al Gore’s theory?  I know he invented the internet, but he isn’t THAT smart.  Gore is simply the person with enough notoriety and public service credibility to disseminate the scientific evidence to a wide audience.  But because of his role in politics, it morphed into yet another issue for pending Red state/Blue state civil war to argue about.  It has taken the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” to it’s extreme opposite, and it has come at quite a cost to our environment, our standing in the world, and the most primal and ape-like patience I may yet possess.  Using this logic, Joan of Arc is responsible for the Hundred Years War that started approximately 75 years before she was born.  Damn you, Arc!

Like most other “political” issues, climate change illustrates a classic failure to capture the essence of a situation.  Rather than view our environmental policy through the lens of possible solutions, or better yet, opportunities, we instead argue about the validity of the science or the scientists to suit whatever party ax we wish to grind.  As if any of us actually understands the science behind the climate change research…

Think of climate change as this photo of a shirtless Matthew McConaughey:

Oh my.

Sure, you may think of Matthew McConaughey as the dude who always gets high and plays bongos and is a dreadful, dreadful actor (is climate change simply cyclical or has mankind impacted global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution?).  But if you’ll just pay attention, you’ll notice the amazing pecs and slicked-back hair, and the subtle HINT of an assuredly rock hard six-pack lying just out of our view (it doesn’t really matter if mankind did anything…let’s use this as an opportunity to secure our future!).

Whether or not “global warming” is real, caused by man, or anything else is irrelevant.  Does anyone dispute that transitioning to a system of energy that relies less on a finite resource like oil that predominantly comes from a part of the globe that Jesus Christ himself couldn’t settle down is a good idea?  We get almost 1 million barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia…you know, the country that bred 15 of 19 guys who committed the single greatest terrorist attack in the history of the United States?  I guess if you’re going to buy a noose, you might as well hang yourself with it.

Furthermore, with continued emphasis on renewable energy sources in countries throughout Europe and the growing need for China and India to move away from an unsustainable energy model (a model they totally copied from the United States) because of the sheer size of their respective populations, the country that gets out in front of an emerging “green” energy industry stands to make what every economic expert from here to there agrees is a “shitload of loot.”

In short…why not just fucking pretend that man-made global warming is real? The benefits to the kind of changes that would be necessary to live “greener” range from gaining a brand new foothold of dominance in the worldwide markets to less dependence on people who would just as soon see Jessica Biel in a burqa.  You make the change because it makes sense…use the reason as a convenient excuse, whether it’s legit or not.  To say America needs a change is like saying Tiger Woods has access to a plethora of vaginas…in that both are true.

All of this is why it kills me to hear people dismiss climate change with stupid shit like “it’s 20 degrees below normal temperatures here in Kansas City, so how can the Earth be getting warmer?”  ”Totally, man.  I don’t know what everyone is bitching about with this economy, either, because my job is going great.  Those unemployment figures must be rigged.”  ”Yep, and since I have a black sister and niece, all that business about racism and discrimination must be some kind of hoax…hello!  I’m white and they’re black and we’re family!”  What a wonderful world this would be if it operated exactly as it does within our own tiny, meaningless sphere, yeah?

At the end of the day, the work of overhauling our energy infrastructure is a monumental task.  It would require all sorts of sacrifices on the part of everybody, and the benefits may never be truly reaped by those who have sown the costs.  But for anyone who actually cares about America maintaining its position as the leader of the world, it makes way too much sense to move forward and secure that position for decades to come.

Or we could just let China do it.  Try Googling “lesbian midget donkey gangbang” if they become the world’s dominant society.  YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO!  And that clearly means that lesbian midget donkey gangbangs wouldn’t exist anywhere, ever, I think.

Climate change.  Providing America with an opportunity to save lesbian midget donkey gangbangs.

Our time is now.  Pass the lube.

"Then Joe Six-Pack did something folksy like putting the government back on the side of the people and not bigwig backroom political deals lipstick cronies jobs main street..."

Beginning in the summer of 2009, widespread fears of an epidemic unlike any we’ve seen in recent memory came to fruition.  The signs appeared as if from nowhere as far back as 2008, sweeping down from the north and claiming at least one elderly victim (although he quite literally asked for it).  It was temporarily repelled and sent back from whence it came, but it was only a matter of time before it evolved and descended again upon the mainland.  It returned without a title, or a specific purpose for that matter, but it returned nevertheless.  My God, did it return.  And now?  No vaccination could have possibly prepared us…

Also, remember when people were freaked out about swine flu?  Whatever happened there?

Of course, I’m talking about Sarah Palin, the estranged former governor of Alaska, possible author, raconteur, Fox News pundit, palm reader, and satire champion.  Lately, however, Palin’s star turn has come by way of her appearance at the National Tea Party convention and her willingness to take a stand against the use of the word “retard” as a derisive term in certain situations (offer does not apply to residents of Florida?).

The scene at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville earlier this month seemed like a perfect mix of a Toby Keith concert and a birthday party at Bob Evans.  I haven’t seen that many white people since the infamous and tragic Nazi Gangbang of 1940 at the Berghof (“it’s very difficult to fornicate to Die Meistersinger, Mein Fuhrer!”).  I desperately scanned the ballroom for minorities, even seeking out the Guest Services staff hoping to see some pigment, and it never came.

What’s the point of my fruitless search for color at the Tea Party Party?  Simply to point out that the noti0n that Sarah Palin is “one of us” applies only those of “us” who are “them.”

It isn’t a race issue.  It isn’t a class issue.  It is a culture issue.  And if the culture that Palin represents is somehow universally American, I am, and I assure you I mean this in the most satirical and sarcastic way you can imagine, effing retarded.

I interrupt this runaway train of thought to mention that Palin counts among her supporters people very close to me: friends, family, loved ones.  They are not simple-minded or misguided…they’re a hell of a lot smarter than me, in fact.  This is not some pedantic rant about how Sarah Palin is stupid; lots of politicians are stupid (Barack Obama once said there are 57 states, Dan Quayle spelled ‘potato’ with an ‘e’ on the end).  This is not partisan rancor aimed at a politician both immensely popular and immensely polarizing (I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t care much for the members of our government).

What this is is a criticism of woefully disingenuous behavior and speech.  A few cases in point:

1) Calling for Rahm Emanuel to be fired for using the word retard, but claiming that fellow Republican Rush Limbaugh’s statement,

“Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards..I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House.”

was satire, therefore kosher.  Palin ably played her role as “someone outside the circle of Washington politics” in the sense that she demonstrated a complete incapacity to hide her glaring hypocrisy the way the “insiders” do.

2) Criticizing the (oh my God don’t make me use it…) “lamestream” (fuck!) media for mocking her and her supporters while levying the accusation that those who voted for President Obama (that would be me) got brainwashed by “hopey changey stuff.”  Statistically, those who supported Obama were more educated and more diverse.  That can only mean one thing to Sarah Palin, and it brings us the third and final case…

3)  She is the representative of “real Americans.”  What is a real American?  I’m American in that I was born in America and have lived here my entire life.  Plus, I keeps it real.  I don’t feel like Palin represents me in any way.  Is that unreal?

Palin represents and appeals to a unique and particular set of Americans.  So does Barack Obama.  So does John McCain.  So does Joe Biden.  And all of those people that they represent are real.  Education, income, race, nor lifestyle take away any of their realness.

America is a melting pot, or a mixed salad, or a minestrone soup, or some other thing with many different ingredients.  To even attempt to claim that you represent those elements that are real is to denigrate those elements that do not feel you as their political avatar.  The lettuce leaves of YOUR followers may be very real, but your salad isn’t going to taste like much if you don’t add some bacon bits and dressing.

Palin’s appeal to the conservative base of the Republican Party and the Tea Party is undeniable, and that’s a good thing.  But for those of us who are not a member of either of those groups, Palin represents nothing more than another politician.

Now if we could ever get her to admit that that’s what she is.  Just another politician.