Sleepycatz

Happy Festivus

Tomorrow, December 23rd, marks the traditional celebration of Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us. However, as we are going to be on the road all day, I am celebrating this evening. Tonight’s Festivus dinner consists of a barbecued chicken, homemade brownies, and a bottle of Samuel Smiith’s Oatmeal Stout.

As dinner is being prepared, I will begin with the traditional Festivus Airing of Grievances. The number of grievances this year is long, but I will parse it down to the fewest possible:

• Mainstream Media: When I was young, the press was much admired — they had exposed the lies of the Nixon administration, they ferreted out corruption in government, and placed more emphasis on truth then politics. Today the mainstream press has completely abandoned even the facade of fairness or accuracy. It is little wonder that newspaper circulation and news ratings are dropping. If the American news media ever wishes to regain any credibility they have to move towards informing the public, instead of trying to intimidate them with stories of ever present terrorists, pedophiles, and evil black men.Cable news has disappointed me from its inception. It re-runs the same stories every hour without providing any historical context. CNN, if you are going to talk about insurgence and factions in Iraq what’s wrong with historical context? Hell, the British complained about the Iraqi insurgency 80+ years ago. Anyone who knew jackshit about the middle east prior to 2002, could have told you that Iraq was the primary secular state in a region being pressured by Islamists. But you people have no desire to provide any substantive information; you have traded any intellectual honesty for ratings and hair stylists. When you create your news product without regard to truth or context it will be eventually identified as propaganda, and I, for one, am looking forward to continued decline and eventual extinction of big media.
• Conservative Christians: I have no real problems with conservatives — though I may disagree with them at times — and I have no problems with Christians — this country was founded on the belief of religious freedom. However, when you argue that government policy which doesn’t agree with your religious belief is either evil, or discriminatory; that’s tantamount to forcing your religious beliefs on others. The government does not discriminate against Christians, or a Christian sect, by allowing any consensual adult couple to marry. Recognizing gays and lesbians and full and equal citizens of our country does not constitute discrimination of Christianity. Christians, Jews, Muslims, &c, are free to believe whatever they want. There are large religious sects which believe dancing is sinful; does the government discriminate against them because it doesn’t ban dancing? No! The government remains neutral, and allows individual religious organizations to minister in any way they see fit. If the government takes the position that gays and lesbians are unequal because a large religious sect say they’re sinful; is it not taking a position against religious sects who believe otherwise? But those bits of logic are lost on the Christian Conservatives, who proselytize that their belief is the only one which should be recognize and pandered to by our government.Another thing, Christian Conservatives: stop trying to re-write our history. Every day I hear some whacked preacher going on about how are country was founded on Christian principles and how there is ‘No separation of Church and State in the Constitution’. Bullshit. Our country was founded by men with Christian backgrounds, who were primarily deists. Hell, Jefferson wrote his own Bible, because he disliked the irrationality of KJV. I suggest that all of you actually read the Constitution — is there any mention of Jesus, or God? No. Is there any mention of Jesus in the Declaration of Independence? No — do you believe that when Jefferson penned the document he forgot how to spell Jesus and left it out — maybe he put Jeebus and then scratched it out in a draft? NO! There is mention of a ‘Creator’ — but it does no reference the Christian God of today — it simply says ‘Creator’ — You can read your own beliefs into that as I can read mine; that was the point. If you want to go back to the original colonists, then Conservative Christians, your beliefs would have been labeled blasphemous. It was illegal in the early days of the colony to question the Holy Trinity, the Church of England, and celebrating Christmas was highly discouraged. You have every right to believe what you want, but stop trying to run our foreign policy, and make everyone else obey your God’s laws. You are suppose to have faith in God — thus if he wants something big done, won’t he do it himself?
• Pres. Bush & His Chorus: The overall incompetency and mendacity of this president has been so well documented that is requires little further explanation. However, this year he and his cackling chorus of fear mongers reached new low in the yammering spin. In suggesting and stating that any American who holds any opinion which disagrees with theirs is at worst a traitor to their country and at best a fellow traveler, or dupe, they have done more to undermine and destroy reasonable political and social debate in this country than any terrorist or foreign enemy could have possibly hoped for. Shortly after 911, we were all unified as a people, we all felt the pain of those who lost loved ones in the towers, we all grieved for the police and firemen who dies trying to save lives — we were travelers in our common grief. But this president, who claim to be the uniter, used our outrage and our grief to divide us; he imperially made one bad decree after another. And when we started to question him, he decreed that we somehow sympathized with those who brought about our grief and horror. For the President of the United States of America to claim that his political opponents are against capturing terrorists, or are inspiring our enemies is either the ultimate height of fear mongering cynicism or the despotic ramblings of a paranoid. In either case, Mr. Bush and his protectors have shown themselves to be opposed to the very notion of a United States. They have successfully divided us among those who are too afraid to question their president and those who have been betrayed by him. In their bloviations, the president’s supporters have called for the incarceration of political opponents, the suspension of the first amendment, the expulsion if the irreligious, and the replacement of rule of law with executive whim. In other words this chorus has called for the destruction of the United States of America. The result of all of this is that President Bush, and his aids, have shown themselves unworthy of their positions and of any high office. They have taken our unity and broken it with their fearful rhetoric into bickering, impotent, dialogue. The people should not simply be impeached, they should be run out on a rail.

That’s all for the official Airing of Grievances. I will now go off to perform in the Feats of Strength:

Back — Kind Of

I am back again — I am not sure how much at this point. My mother passed just over two weeks ago. Though we didn’t always agree, she was a beautiful, generous, intelligent, and strong woman, and I will miss her till my passing comes.

Remember

Today, we remember pain and anguish of that Tuesday, five years ago today. We remember the terrified victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and the incredible bravery of the Men and Women who risked their own safety to save a few.

It has been said, so many times, that this changed everything. It has, more then I could could have imagined at the time. Five years later, I find I have lost all trust in the press — an institution I grew up respecting and lauding. I have lost faith in my government, as an intuition of reasoned compromise and rational debate. I have found that cynicism has become truth in our country. We all have lost a great deal since the barbaric events of that sunny Tuesday. May God have mercy on us.