If You Come, They Will Build It... Sort Of

The line was instant movie history when the seminal moment of Field of Dreams flickered across the screen. "If you build it, they will come." The removal of air from the room was palpable as hopes and dreams were distilled into seven syllables. Today, Kansas City teeters between slack-jawed horror and that giddiness that comes with waiting for an explosive to do its thing. The National Right To Life Committee has sanctified the local Hyatt for a few days. Liquor sales are reported to be up 30% over a year ago.

This group of Stop Right There thinkers has converged upon our middle-of-nowhere serenity with their unique brand of half-baked assumptions and half-assed conclusions. And less than half of the Republican candidates for president bothered to book a flight for the event. We call this progress.

The basis of the Know Nothing wing of the party - they are to American Politics what snake parts are to a can of green beans - is the conviction that caring at all the wrong times exempts you from giving a damn at all the right times. In a delightful display of insanity, they contend just the opposite. That's why we haven't gone out of our way to make a big deal over their presence. If the circus wants to set up down the street, who can argue with the convenience of a decent show on the block - elephant shit notwithstanding? We spent long minutes wondering whether the Committee believes itself to be furthering the Nation, Rights or Life. The conclusion? Like most committees, it now simply exists to announce its existence. Committees all go that direction eventually.

To understand these well-dressed lunatics requires a basic knowledge of tactics more than platforms. First, they speak a language that sounds like English but isn't. They take words from the language but use them in a way so that they mean the opposite of what the casual listener might assume. We dated a guy like that. It's where we got familiar with the term "Congenital Liar". They are so convinced in their misuse of the language that they forget just when and where they made the decision to lie in he first place.

The right to life is a sure thing. It's right there in the Declaration of Indepedence next to liberty and the ever-popular pursuit of happiness. But these wing nuts don't mean life like you mean life. They don't mean breathing. They mean the obligation to breed. You think a right to life means a right to be alive. They think the same right means you may get to the starting line, but you're on your own from there. From conception through the frying of the placenta at your family gathering, they insist you finish what you started. Once it cries, their job is done. They have no plans or desire to feed, clothe, care, or otherwise give a good goddamn about that hideous creature until they congratulate it in heaven some years hence.

This Right To Life bunch is anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-gun, anti-welfare, and generally anti-bothering them with any of the details of a life they insisted be commenced. They are notoriously opposed to the idea that everyone should have simple health care. Keep your eye on the dashboard Jesus: This is about getting life started, which has nothing to do with keeping it going. Look at their complete abstinence in the last 25 years on AIDS: If you got it domestically, shame on you; if you got it internationally, they'll pray for you. One of our favorite Ann Richards quotes refers to the elder Bush's identical position on all of the above: "Spoken like a true fisherman: Throw 'em back and kill 'em when they're grown." If that doesn't sum it up, we may need to have the Good Lord send Ann back for an encore.

The Right To Life bunch is thrilled to see your fryable ass in an electric chair, your veins popping with poison at your final moment of a death sentence, or your neck snapping from a good hanging. The Right To Life bunch doesn't acknowledge anything between vaginal birth and funeral rites as worthy of their attention. They have one goal and one goal only.

Make sure the sperm takes.

That's it. Nothing else. Once the orgasm hits, you are on the hook, in their book. Better you should aim for a tree than a fertile womb, although when Dr. Joycelyn Elders (nominated by President Clinton as Surgeon General) suggested that masturbation was a pretty good contraceptive measure, these same nut bags went berserk. They subscribe to the Loaded Gun Theory of the penis. You're not supposed to use it except in emergencies. If it's not an emergency, you don't have any business even touching it. Funny people, this bunch. They should get a sitcom. They already have a news network.

Mitt Romney showed up to kiss their ass as did the local yahoo, Sen. Sam Brownback - the only Kansan we could find who makes Bob Dole look chipper. Our favorite crazy person du jour: Rep. Ron Paul of Texas - the Libertarian who can't seem to find the exit door of the Republican Party - also showed up. The delegates had to be told as much after he spoke. They barely noticed. You can imagine the popularity of a Libertarian message ("Hey...what are you doing legislating in my womb?") among this crowd. It is lost on the Know Nothings that Rep. Paul is the only one of the bunch to ever deliver a baby (he's a 70 year-old retired obstetrician). The man who has really delivered (forgive the pun) on their only issue is the one they can't seem to find in the crowd. This, too, gives us hope.

We have a "Fuck 'Em Award" for Rep. Duncan Hunter, with whom our grandmother is running even in early presidential polls. He said he would come and then didn't. We appreciate that sort of a thumb in they eye. We have nothing else nice to say about Duncan Hunter, but would be remiss to let this good deed go unnoticed. The others? Please. This is 2007. The Christian Right has been revealed as neither. Nobody with a serious chance of being President will go near these people. T.B. boy has more high-profile visitors than this bunch can muster.

Giuliani, McCain, Gilmore, The Reverend Governor Huckabee(!), Tommy Thompson and the other nameless, hopeless few Republican candidates had the entire Midwest declared a No Fly Zone just so no one thought they were headed in the direction of this conference. The top two candidates have spent the last few days walking with their backs to Kansas City just to be sure no photo op would show them facing in Missouri's general direction. We hate that they're wising up. But we love seeing loathsome philosophies marginalized in publicly humiliating ways. It makes us all tingly.

In case you were wondering, Brownback was the hit of the show. If that doesn't give you hope for our future, you may just need to go take pills and lie down.

It's Your Ovaries, Stupid

Barrel collusion, refining costs, hurricanes most inopportune, demand in China, SUV-mania, higher speed limits, Venezuela's thumb on the scale, our general lack of charisma throughout the Middle East...how many reasons do you need for today's gasoline prices? Just two, if you think about it. But most people won't. Think about it, that is.

What we have here is a heterosexual entitlement problem. Not just any heterosexual, either, but a middle-to-upper class heterosexual privilege problem that promises to turn Ohio into the Atlantic's newest ocean side hot-spot in the next lifetime or so. Po' Straight Folk (PSF's) aren't in on this gig, so we get to throw this gauntlet down in what we fully intend to be the first major salvo in unabashed class warfare.

It takes my family of one approximately 1,000 gallons or less of water per month to perform all the household duties.. My sibling's family of four in the same town uses roughly 4,000 gallons. This is easy math. I love my niece and nephew as though they were my own....niece and nephew...which they are. But they are expensive little buggers. When their parents drive an hour each way in the over sized vehicle to watch them flail at over sized balls with over sized bats to over sized applause for their undersized results, their cost goes up. Children should be born with a Times Square-style ticker between their shoulder blades so we can keep track just how much each human costs to keep alive annually. When they croak - as we tend to do - we can rapidly gather all the data and decide whether we are headed in the right - or wrong - direction when it comes to managing the viability of the Only Planet That Will Sustain Us.

Al Gore calls this sort of awareness "Knowing One's Carbon Footprint". I think he'd get more press if he called it "The Real Cost of Pussy". I have clear memories of gasping in horror at the draconian Chinese limit of one kid per household. Should you lose count, we have an unfortunate, but highly reliable back-up Abacus. Even these third-world, isolated, communist, freedom squelching tyrants had a plan to deal with the cost and effect of living on this Big Blue Ball. They weren't thinking of holes in the Ozone Layer or melting glacial ice caps or erasing Australia from the World Map. They just saw widespread hunger and an unacceptable lack of toilet paper peeking around the corner.

Meanwhile, Fox News, Every Republican (don't lie -you know that is no generalization), Talk Radio, and paid shills from Reagan to Bush to Bush mocked the concerns as Junk Science and turned our attention to the horror of abortion and forced child abandonment and away from the reality that our resources are finite. They fiddled. The arctic burned - melted, really, The antarctic cracked. Oceans rose, temps inflated - everything junk scientists said they would. But, in the spirit of Republican Logic, we were introduced to the very first of the Bush Doctrines: Just Because Something Turns Out To Be True Doesn't Make It True.

We repeated that thought because Shawn Hannity told us to. We opened up to more improbable Bush doctrines - at the risk of permanently suspending disbelief. "Gay Marriage is a threat to The Family." Whose family? None we can name. We walked around the cul-de-sac - prime heterosexual nesting ground just casually wondering: If you could marry someone of the same gender tomorrow, which one of you would dump the other first? We got appropriate belly laughs from people who had already voted GW once and weren't even considering an alternative when given a second shot. We started developing some heterosexual theories of our own.

We spent a day at the largest university in the state a couple years back. We stopped average-looking people and the highly intelligent alike (Asians or white people with long hair and a doob stuck over their ear): If I hypothesized that lighting my clothes on fire would cause my clothes to burn, and then they did, in fact burn, would that make me right? Or wrong? I was amazed at the consistency of the responses I got. Even these sweet, fresh-faced, chain-smoking children were qualifying their answers with, "Depends...are you a Republican or a Democrat?" When I pointed to the Democrat tattoo on my forehead, they said, "OH. That would make you wrong."

So when I'm right, I'm wrong because I'm a Democrat? "You got it! " They lit up like they had broken the code on the final strand of the human genome. But wait. I had to know. Can I assume that if I were a Republican, I would be right under identical circumstances? "YES! YES! YES!," they shouted as they danced with Baptist modesty. And why would that be, I wondered? "Because you would be on the Lord's side!"

Let me get this straight, I said. 2+2=4.
"Not necessarily," the tall one said.
When is it not four?
"If you're a Democrat. Or if you have a purple heart."
What's a purple heart got to do with it?
"Absolutely nothing. But did you see what we got away with in '04?"
But those were bald faced lies. Isn't one of the Big Ten No No's
"Thou Shalt Not Lie"?
"That only applies to Democrats," I was informed. "Lying to keep
the Lord in power is never a sin."

I had to admit, this shit was starting to make a little too much sense. I had to pull out the ace from my hole. "If each child born marches us that much faster toward the inevitable destruction of our entire existence, which has the greater sway: The several billion lives already here or the sanctity of the one that is still breathing amniotic fluid?"

I heard jack-booted footsteps coming up the stairs of the tenement we had squatted in for our session. Somehow I knew I had crossed that line that revealed me as immediately expendable. Not even John Walsh would take note of my sudden disappearance. I high-tailed it for the Gay Pride Parade where I bathed myself in the filth of reason turned upside down in the most logical of ways. A paradox that made sense on a genetic level. Bring me a garter, some spritz, and a dab of body butter. I had to wash off the heterosexuality before it started to fester like some bacterially-resistant strain of e-coli.

And bartender... don't be coy about that martini.

An Open Letter To Canada

We were tickled by a characterization of us as "pseudo-liberal" in an anonymous Canadian comment to the preceding post. We hauled out the After Therapy copy of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary to make sure we understood the insult before we issued a thorough response. Our apology to Anonymous In Quebec for not alternating paragraphs between French and English, even though we have a degree in the former.

Neither Merriam nor Webster defined the term for us, so we tried the hip online version. Again, no luck. We were asked whether we had meant to define the following: sodium chlorate, Saudi Arabian (!), saddlebred (only once), saddlebreds, sidereal hour, sidi bel abbes (wasn't she the mother on Dallas?), sidi barrani, soda bread or stilbestrol. We were also offered "spelling help". The very nurve.

Cambridge's various dictionaries were equally unhelpful. So we turned to the Web, thinking perhaps this was a more recent term of art with which we were simply unfamiliar. From the quick view of our googled results, we got: "Liberal is the New Conservative", "Pseudo Liberal = Socialist/Statist", "Pseudo-liberal (JEW!)..." etc. Only then did we realize we'd been nut-kicked by the KKK.

Never one to take it lying down, Feeling it important to respond, we decided to clarify the editorial/political posture of our organization:

1. We believe that people should have sex with whoever and whatever gives them pleasure and does no harm to the environment, the family farm, or unconsenting people.

2. We believe that conservatism is the logical extension of repression and spanking the slow erosion of straight, white, male privilege. As such, said erosion should be encouraged by mocking as many straight, white males per sentence as is grammatically possible.

3. We believe that people who cannot laugh at themselves may as well go ahead and die. Life is going to be one long, plodding, cruel, unenjoyable root canal of a ride.

4. We believe that people who cannot laugh at others are boring do not have their eyes/ears open. People are funny. Admit it.

5. We believe in God, but not the people who associate themselves with Him. We also believe He is a Him because we have trouble remembering to call Him a Her. We admit to not having seen God's gonads, so it's a pure guess, but it's one to which we've become accustomed.

6. We believe anyone who is anonymously gutless pseudo-anything lacks commitment to everything. We, therefore, disabuse everyone of the notion that we are Pseudo-Liberal and proudly admit that we are Card-Carrying Members of The Jihad Wing Of Liberalism.

7. We are non-commital when it comes to Gay Marriage unless you're asking us, and you happen to be over 6'2, male, and willing to listen until your ears bleed. If others want to do it, we don't understand why anyone would care.

8. We don't give a shit about abortion. Have one. Don't have one. We believe, on the one hand, that more abortions means a decent chance that the next Conservative Asshole may be headed off at the womb's pass. On the other hand, we think all surgery entails pain. And we are decidedly Anti-Pain. We also believe that people who don't have a uterus should speak much more quietly on this topic than those who do.

9. We like the environment. We're not giving up Central Heat and Air over it, but we do like it. We also live sufficiently inland as not to be immediately threatened by rising tides. We hope that whoever buys the house upon our death goes completely "green" and replaces it with a tent.

10. We are unabashedly giddy over the acid reflux Nancy Pelosi must give The Other Side. Finally, a better-than-even chance that The Only Speaker Of The House may ride in the S.F Gay Pride Parade behind the 40-mile procession of Dykes on Bykes. We fully expect to take over the White House in another 18 months and restore sexuality and intelligence to The Office Of The Presidency. We also believe that Canadians should generally keep their mouths shut when it comes to our culture or we will be forced to point out that they don't have one.