I know you ladies can’t get enough of these photos of garden tools with deer cavorting in the background.
Spinster aunt has red wheelbarrow
Published December 3rd, 2008 in Art is my LIFE and Varmint Center. 1 CommentSpinster aunt likes deer
Published December 3rd, 2008 in Mind-blowing, Varmint Center and El Rancho Deluxe. 28 Comments
Run, Bambi’s mom, run!
No deer were harmed in the making of this photograph. My dog Bert was chasing her, though. He does this all the time, but so far the only mammal he has successfully run to earth is a skunk, and needless to say the skunk had the advantage in that stand-off.
I awaken on Saturday mornings to the dulcet tones of gunshots echoing through the valley. It’s deer hunting season here in the Texas Hill Country. Manly men from Austin and San Antonio buy hunting leases in my hood. They get a gang of bloodthirsty pals together, outfit themselves in dudely camo drag from Cabela’s, ditch the missus, and infest the hills with their guns’n'ammo for the weekend.
The usual procedure, as I understand it, is for them to hide in small structures called deer blinds. They throw corn around in front of the deer blind. They swig bourbon from hip flasks and suppress homosexual yearnings until some hapless ungulate wanders by and starts eating the corn. Then they blow its fucking brains out.
Years ago, before it came into the Faster family, El Rancho Deluxe was used for hunting. “It’s almost certain,” said the ranch seller guy, “that LBJ once hunted here.” No doubt! That LBJ was pretty ubiquitous. According to people around here who tell you stuff, there is not a centimeter of Central Texas that was not personally trodden upon, owned, sold, lost in a poker game, or peed on by LBJ.
Anyway, on the oaky knoll behind my house lies a relic from those good old gun-totin’ times: an ancient deer blind. It’s got a hell of a view. I call it LBJ’s Vacation Lodge. Spinster aunts are typically expert archaeologists, so it was for me but the work of a moment to unearth the rusting remnants of the barbed wire death trap that used to surround this deer blind on 3 sides. The deer, one surmises, were lured in by the corn, trapped by the barbed wire, and murdered like gangsters. Boo-ya.
A guy I know who is in the process of leaving his wife of 20 years (he “loves” her, but she’s really let herself go, so sayonara fat old wife!) takes solace, in this troubled time, by absconding to the Hill Country to shoot deer on weekends. He offered me some venison. He has “more than he knows what to do with.”
I declined with curled lip. We went back and forth with the whole conservation argument, which basically says that hunting is good for deer because it keeps their population in check.
Oh, please. Hunting is good for hunters because it gives them something to shoot when they can’t shoot their fat old wives, and for corporations who sell guns and camouflage beer coozies, and for taxidermists. However, I happen to know that the deer don’t appreciate it one bit.
Through my trusty binoculars, I’ve gotten to know quite a few deer since moving out here. Because nobody at El Rancho Deluxe is psychotic enough to shoot at’em all weekend, the joint is more or less crammed to the canopy with refugees from the bloodbath. They’re pleasant, harmless little things who, take it from me, vastly prefer being deer to being more venison than some dude knows what to do with.
I’m no weepy sentimentalist — OK, yes I am, bite me — but bloodsport? Come the fuck on.
Spinster aunt thinks two things at once
Published December 2nd, 2008 in Patriarchy, my patriarchy and Art is my LIFE. 54 CommentsLots of the ideas put forth by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex intrigue the fuck out of spinster aunts, but none intrigues the fuck out of them like this one: that in a post-patriarchal society, culture (inclusive, I am happy to say, of art) will become irrelevant and extrinsic and die a long-overdue death, whereupon humans, freed from the prison of domination, will transmogrify into giant intellects pretty much throbbing with contentment.
I mention Firestone’s enchanting speculations for two reasons, both of which originate with blamer comments.
Blamer madeleine wonders how any revolution can be accomplished without violence, and how any society, including a post-patriarchal one, could “function without (voluntary) dominance and submission, in view of the fact that some people know or do some things better than others? And how can you raise children for example, without same?”
For an answer, the obstreperal lobe turns fondly to Firestone and her cultural revolution, which predicts, along with a golden age of “communistic anarchy” and self-determination, the “disappearance of cultural sex, age, and race distinction and of the psychology of power.”
We’ve progressed enough since Firestone’s book was published (1970) to grasp that bagging race distinction would be a good idea, but out with childhood? Out with age? Out with the psychology of power? Is she wack? Won’t human society implode without a hierarchy based on who knows and does stuff “better” than whoever else?
What about the children?
These are legitimate concerns for persons whose experience is confined to the intellectual suffocation demanded by life in a primitive, violent dystopia. Which is just about everybody.
Certainly we couldn’t, at this point in human evolution, just start turning the kids loose in the world. It is unthinkable that they should not spend their idyllic first years in thrall to one or two adults who will educate (socialize) them according to the adults’ personal “values,” meaning, of course, the DNA necessary to replicate patriarchy. This indoctrination period is known as “raising” children, and differs from raising tomatoes chiefly in that tomatoes are given quite a bit more freedom to be themselves.
Raising children is thought to be both a moral obligation and a deeply fulfilling endeavor. When people, especially women, reproduce and fail to take sufficient interest in the deeply fulfilling endeavor of hammering patriarchal ideology into their kids, they are described by people who do do this (i.e. “good” parents) as “bad” parents.
Naturally this is sour grapes on the part of the “good” parents, who, if they are women (and they probably are), have become footnotes to their children’s lives, subsumed by the great drudging melodrama of motherhood at the expense of their own identities. I’d be bitter, too.
But I digress.
The point I set out to make — and let’s face it, when do I ever get it in the first pass? I’m sure there’ll be a post tomorrow stating in clear, concise English whatever it is I’m so abstrusely trying to say today — is that it would be great if we could at least imagine a social order free of dominance and submission. Imagining it isn’t, contrary to what John Lennon asserted, easy, but for fuck’s sake, isn’t it necessary?
So I urge the reader to give it a whirl. I’ll start. Say, for example, that because of changes engendered by the feminist revolution, kids wouldn’t need to be raised at all. They could flit about the countryside according to whim, just like anybody else. Why not? They wouldn’t be kidnaped or raped or sold into sex slavery because, remember? dominance and submission is a thing of the past. They wouldn’t be run over by cars, because future-topia vehicles are accident-proof. They won’t skip school because there isn’t any school to skip. They won’t join roving gangs of thugs because crime doesn’t exist, either. The kids would choose the people they wish to hang out with, which people may or may not include their biological parents. The parents would be relieved of their neurotic, self-absorbed obsession with their own offspring, the kids would be free from enslavement as low-status sub-beings in a nuclear family to which they belong only as an accident of birth.
Firestone asserts that after the feminist/proletarian revolt, humans, unfettered by class and culture and power differentials, will be free to “realize the conceivable in the actual.” We’d become giant pulsating globs of happiness.
Thus would art take a powder! Hallelujah! At least, art as we know it — that ponderous, self-absorbed, interpretation, or anti-interpretation (whatever!), of reality, with an audience manipulated by a creator — would cease to be. Which brings me to my second thought.
This thought popped into my head when I began leafing through a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, through which seminal 20th-century anti-war novel I was leafing because several blamers had recently alluded to the phrase “poo-tee-weet.” I happened to read a passage that made me bust out weeping.
Here is the passage.
When he was gone, Lazzaro promised Billy and poor old Edgar Derby that he was going to have revenge, and that revenge was sweet.
“It’s the sweetest thing there is,” said Lazzaro. “People fuck with me,” he said, “and Jesus Christ are they ever fucking sorry. I laugh like hell. I don’t care if it’s a guy or a dame. If the President of the United States fucked around with me, I’d fix him good. You should have seen what I did to a dog one time.”
“A dog?” said Billy.
“Son of a bitch bit me. So I got me some steak, and I got me the spring out of a clock. I cut that spring up into little pieces. I put points on the ends of the pieces. They were sharp as razor blades. I stuck’em into the steak — way inside. And I went past where they had the dog tied up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, ‘Come on doggie — let’s be friends. Let’s not be enemies any more. I’m not mad.’ He believed me.”
“He did?”
“I threw him the steak. He swallowed it down in one big gulp. I waited around for ten minutes.” Now Lazzaro’s eyes twinkled. “Blood started coming out of his mouth. He started crying, and he rolled on the ground, as though the knives were on the outside of him instead of on the inside of him. Then he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed, and I said to him, ‘You got the right idea now. Tear your own guts out, boy. That’s me in there will all those knives.’” So it goes.
“Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is –” said Lazzaro, “it’s revenge.”
I thought about Firestone’s art-free utopia as soon as I finished bawling my eyes out. I had a sudden desperate yearning for an existence where such a passage could never have been conceived. Because that passage is pretty much the definition of patriarchy. So is the whole of Slaughterhouse Five, for that matter, down to Vonnegut’s lone, one-dimensional female character.
Imagine: oppression of children, gone! Imagine: war, gone! Imagine: art, gone! All made irrelevant by human evolution into pulsating, contented geniuses. Gone is the power differential between parent and offspring, homeland and enemy, audience and creator. Blamm! Revolution fixes everything.
Culture is nothing but the realization of patriarchal fantasy.
Spinster aunt forgoes spider safari in selfless service of greater good
Published December 1st, 2008 in Patriarchy, my patriarchy, Blogulation, Godbagism and Varmint Center. 37 Comments
Of the Hill Country thrushes, the Eastern bluebird, a species commonly thought to exist exclusively in Disney cartoons, infests El Rancho Deluxe with the least compunction. You can scarcely poke your head out the door around here without about 137 of’em swarming in to perch on you, radiating happiness. In a tribute to Western godbagosity, the noise it makes has been interpreted by certain melodramatic English-speaking poets as “purity, purity.” S. sialis, Blanco County, TX, December 2008.
Dang it, I was going to stake out a funnel-web spider’s lair this morning, but early reports from commentary on yesterday’s post reveals that come clarification is in order. Blaming before spider lairs, that’s the Faster family motto. So you’ll have to put up with this photo of a bluebird I took ten minutes ago. It’s supercute and all, but it’s no spider.
Yes, I’m afraid this is going to be one of those posts where I try to explain what I meant by my last post, the thesis of which, I perceive upon reading comments which appear to respond to another post entirely, was put forth with more than my usual degree of ineptitude.
I have examined the essay in question with fresh, limpid eyes, and believe that I have detected the nub of the problem. It lies in my careless flinging about of the word “guilt.”
It is difficult to get away with this word in these troubled times. For one thing, it has been co-opted by psychology, rendering it destitute of useful qualities. But what’s worse, guilt as a concept has been steeping for centuries in moldy holy water. It’s a key element in the whole good vs evil, sin vs virtue, black vs white system of simpletonian godbagious mind control. Without guilt there can be no innocence. The importance of this dichotomy in the Biblical myths, and its repercussions in modern social policy, cannot be overestimated. From Adam’n'Eve directly proceeds today’s popular misogyny. From the virgin birth you get a whole plethora of vile conventions, such as 21st century fetus-worship. To take but two repellent examples.
In yesterday’s post I attempted, like I do in every post, to show, by describing its inexorability, how patriarchy has debased the entire species.
Unfortunately, I used the word “guilt” where I should have used “unavoidable complicity.” Unable to leave it at that, I then effected a clumsy tie-in with Thanksgiving, the holiday where everybody complains self-indulgently about excess in a manner consistent with “white guilt.” You know white guilt? The practice whereby honkys trumpet their repudiation of racism by purporting to assume responsibility for the wrongs of their entire race? When I used the word “guilt” in conjunction with “honky excess,” many blamers reacted to what was understandably perceived as another boring Thanksgiving allusion to this white guilt crap.
But, as I tried (and failed) to explain, I may be boring, but I’m not talking about white guilt. I’m talking about the inescapable intrusion of patriarchal horror into everybody’s lives. By “everybody” I mean the haves, the have-nots, the have-somes, the what-have-yous. What I mean is not that — as one blamer jested — you should eat your Brussel’s sprouts because of “starving Armenians.” What I mean is not that you should feel bad because you have enough food to stay alive another day. It’s not a matter of “feeling” anything. I mean merely that, the way the system is set up, no one can opt out of exercising privilege, no matter how pure their soul or how unproductive they deem the practice of pointing this out. That our complicity in global violence is unavoidable is one of the defining characteristics of the whole social order, and is why revolution is so urgently needed.
I try to make this point often, because one of the most common obstacles to grasping the concept of patriarchy in all its gruesome enormity is the mistaken idea that it is merely theory, or that women are mostly equal now, or that it only affects people in Saudi Arabia or Ohio. Women as a class are the most obvious casualties of patriarchal ideology, but in praxis we’re perps, too, just like everybody else. What we call “patriarchy” is a social order based not just on misogyny, but in a broader sense on dominance and submission. Because of this set-up, nobody can avoid membership in some group or class that dominates some and submits to some other. Thus is your existence predicated on some oppression which benefits you and harms someone else. I offer this as a statement of fact. You can feel guilty about it or not; that’s on you.
Oh, in case you were wondering, the funnel-web spider I’d intended to spy on today has now vanished. Please, don’t feel bad that my duty to the blametariat prevented me from realizing a cherished personal goal. I live to serve.
Thanks for nothing 2008
Published November 30th, 2008 in The megatheocorporatocracy and Morsel Institute. 34 Comments
With all the patriarchy I’ve been blaming over the past few years, I’ve somehow drifted away from my roots. That is, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a photograph of my lunch.
Who among us right-thinking honky Americans is not conflicted (”conflicted” meaning the discomfiture experienced when it becomes necessary to juggle opposing concepts in order to avoid rocking the boat. It is a funny word the use of which I cannot advocate, but which has nevertheless crept via some sinister psychotic impulse into the spinster vernacular. But what preposition to use? Is one conflicted with, by, or over a thing? Stupid ungrammatical word) on accounta Thanksgiving? Like all holidays, it is riddled with horrors. Smallpox blankets. The spurious Squanto mythology. Genocide. The expectation that one manifest a hearty, convivial mood in the bosom of the fam despite the fact that the whole binge is (a) quasi-godbagious, (b) a shitload of extra work for the womenfolk, and (c) poultry-based.
Regale me not with sanctimonious tales of your tofurkey, by the way. It’s not like the soybean industrial complex isn’t a major player in the megatheocorporatocracy.
And you know? All the vegan Thanksgiving feasts the details of which many of you will not be able to resist posting in the comments section? Still no good. That’s right. Because feasting of any kind, while fun-filled on the surface of it, cannot, in this culture, be accomplished without guilt.
I don’t mean pop-psychology “white” guilt; without question millions of Americans are perfectly capable of greasing their colons with the traditional 37.8 pounds of fat without giving the the American honky’s role in world hunger the flicker of a thought. I also don’t mean the self-imposed I-shouldn’t-be-eating-this-delicious-fatty-meal-
because-of-social-pressures-to-be-thin-and-”healthy”- type guilt. Maybe gluttony isn’t of the highest philosophic importance, but capitulation to patriarchal beauty mandates is the worst possible reason to modify your relationship with the feed-trough.
When I say you can’t feast without guilt, I mean actual guiltiness. It’s the privilege principle. When the stuffing of the maw at Thanksgiving is experienced as oppression by Native Americans and atheists and factory turkeys and the millions of humans globally who are screwed by honky American excess, it is irrelevant that your intent is innocent, or that you are a “good” person, or that a nice dinner party with good food and good friends is what makes life worth living and who am I to cast aspersions, or that if you’d blown off Thanksgiving dinner your mom would’ve been pissed. None of this shit matters. The reason we are able to exist the way we do is that somebody else isn’t able to.
Not that anything will fix it.
Well, revolution maybe.
This complaint is not specific to Thanksgiving feasts, of course. Guilt obtains twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s like the Eyes of Texas. You cannot get away.* I blame the patriarchy for the whole lousy set-up.
Thus, my leftover stuffing and ativan lunch.
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* The University of Texas fight song is a creepy stalker’s anthem.
Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye upon stupid product
Published November 21st, 2008 in The megatheocorporatocracy and Keep your bias off my gender. 83 CommentsAmerican culture is infested with a great many pernicious social constructs the abolition of which the Twistolution would celebrate with a yacht party in Bali. Drinks on me! Sarongs optional!
There are so many pernicious social constructs, in fact, that without a little help from the megatheocorporatocracy, it would be impossible to focus my full blaming powers on any single one. Fortunately, this morning I was aided by the Bayer drug company.
The Bayer drug company, you will recall from the Drugs and Society course you took sophomore year, did not invent heroin, but they were the first to market the heck out of it. Not, as is popularly thought, as a cure for morphine addiction, but as a cough syrup. Because heroin is just a quick-acting morphine, it really took off. After it was criminalized in the US in 1914 — kicking off one of patriarchy’s most beloved and enduring class wars, the War on Drugs — a sub-facet of addict culture was to scavenge scrap metal to finance one’s skag habit: hence, junkie.
Bayer quit selling heroin a hundred years ago, but they have been far from idle when it comes to producing pharmaceuticals of questionable efficacy intended for human ingestion. In the 80’s, they sold stuff called Factor VIII to hemophiliacs. Come to find out, Factor VIII contained the AIDS virus! Thousands died! So they developed a safer version to sell in the US. But they kept selling the old one in Asia and Latin America. It wouldn’t have been profitable to just throw the tainted stuff away.
But I digress.
Bayer blipped the Twisty radar this morning when it aired a television commercial for vitamin capsules. The capsules are called One-A-Day Teen Advantage. They come in two versions. That’s right. “For Him” and “For Her.”
Thus pointing at two highly celebrated pernicious social constructs with one spinster claw-finger.
I allude, of course, to the revolting concepts of gender and of teenagerdom.
It will not knock the regular reader off her recliner when I say again that I am revolted by the phony socialization bullshit that accompanies the arbitrary establishment of two — not one, not thirteen, but two — officially recognized genders, the differences between which are supposedly so extreme and whose interests are supposedly so diametrically opposed that an entire global paradigm of domination is necessary to control the vast, unknowable forces unleashed by this volatile boy-girl narrative.
But I haven’t touched on the bogosity of teenagerness much. So just let me say how revolted I am by the phony socialization bullshit that accompanies the arbitrary establishment of a bogus phase of the human life cycle devoted entirely to drunk driving, moping, responsibility-shirking, and JD Salinger novels. Teenagers are a marketing concept created to sell acne cream.
And now to sell vitamins, apparently. Bayer’s new Teen Advantage pill focuses on the “top health concerns of moms and teens” (dads, it is well documented, are oblivious to their children’s health; their top health concern is erectile dysfunction). The “For Him” vitamins address the critical dude issue of “healthy muscle function.” Girl-teen vitamins, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with “healthy skin.”
Seriously. This shit just writes itself.
So I don’t need to spell out the multi-faceted celebration of patriarchal ideology, binary genderism, and sexist bullshit encrapsulated by this asinine product. Hey, Bayer Product Development Guy! The 50’s called, and they want their male chauvinist pig jibbajabba back!
If, back when I was still a captive rebelling against the stifling stewardship of my nuclear family, my mother had induced me to take dork-ass pills called “Teen Advantage,” I would have written 8 pages in my journal about her smothering suburban uncoolness and how I couldn’t wait until I was 18, whereupon I would move to Manhattan, wear black, and become a fixture at the most prestigious literary salons.
Zippy, still hearing the call of the wild at age 16, does not need a wine fridge to survive.
Goddammit, it’s been months since the initiation of my relocation to the Texas Hill Country. The move has not yet been completed. This is because the house, which has been under construction for three years, remains adamantly opposed to my occupation.
For example, the cistern water is of a highly questionable character (I’m being generous here. If I described accurately the semi-liquid substance emitted by my spigots you would have to stop reading and hurl. See The Magic Christian for more information). Windows leak, doors freak, faucets overshoot sinks and soak people square in the crotch (funny until it happens to you), flipping on a porch light causes a county-wide blackout, etc.
Even still yet now today a hora, as years drag into decades and I begin to wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, there remain holes to be drilled, filters ordered, bondo applied, Bobcats rented, seeds sewn, seams caulked, snakes removed, water samples sent off to labs, messages left on sub-contractors’ cell phones so they can leave messages on my cell phone placing the blame for their fuckups on other sub-contractors, and, naturally, bills to be paid.
In the meantime I’m camping out in the new house, come hell or high water. Fortunately the wine fridge — an anomaly, it’s the only non-German appliance in the joint, and consequently the only one that works — has been properly installed and is humming along like a vintage Bentley. At some point in the distant past, when my obstreperal lobe was running on all eight cylinders, I cleverly stocked this excellent fridge with a bunch of snazzy boutique wines my father left me. I hate to think to what abysmal depths of despair I would have sunk had I not seen to this critical detail.
I allude in particular to an episode of telephonal infamy. In this episode, the phone company — a vile entity known as Verizon — put me on permahold for about 86 and a half hours. This permahold was necessary so that I might experience the maximum degree of angry frustration when they at last informed me that it would be three months before they would get around to installing a land line. Bright young auntie that I am, it began to dawn on me that this delay would leave me to fend off the creeping discomfiture of boondockian isolation with nothing but my wits and my cell phone. The ruralized performance of which cell phone I can only characterize as shitty.
I won’t comment on my wits.
You’d be surprised at the frequency with which a phone can come in handy when you’re living in a half-built internetless house out in the middle of West Rattlesnake. It turns out that, out here, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the degree of phone call urgency and the ineffectuality of your cell phone. Your mom calls to jaw about Erica Kane getting booted off Dancing With The Stars? No problem! You got 5 bars. But the minute a pack of rabid wild hogs corners you on the precipice of a 60-foot bluff, forget about it. You’re goin’ down, and no one’s gonna find your vulture-pecked corpse for weeks. Thanks, AT&T!
Cell phones: at or near the top of my list of things that people cling to desperately despite the fact that they don’t fucking work. Also on that list: wrinkle cream, Jesus, and anything that purports to get the skunk out of a skunked dog.
Seriously. You can mix up hydrogen peroxide, lemony-fresh dish soap, baking soda, white vinegar and tomato juice, and soak that mutt all day long, but take it from me; if you think the dog smells even an iota better after all that, you’re delusional. Nothing but time gets the skunk out of a skunked dog. At least, nothing that won’t kill the dog.
So if it weren’t for that wine fridge — and the fact that it’s fucking excellent out here — I would have pulled my own head off by now.
Internet connection, why hast thou forsaken me?
Published November 14th, 2008 in Keep your bias off my gender, Godbagism and El Rancho Deluxe. 16 Comments
Who am I to thwart the public’s inexhaustible fascination for photographs of my radio tower?
As I merge my bony old biomass with the Arcadian rhythms of the Texas Hill Country, two truths emerge.
One: one of my slippers will contain a scorpion in the morning.
Two: radio tower or no radio tower, one’s rural high-speed internet connection is an evanescent figment. It vanishes into a fugitive fog, it shivers away from a puffy cloud, it drifts off with wayward microwaves from the neighbors’ tower, it stays out all night partying, it returns at dawn with an armful of flowers, chocolate croissants, and a print edition of the New York Times.
So my Software Updater won’t update my software, my email won’t mail my e’s, and my Vonage phone won’t von. Poor podcastless me.
Meanwhile, during a brief moment of connectivity, I note a trend toward blaming “minorities” for the wild success of recent gay marriage bans. I would suggest (again) that those most concerned with penis placement are godbags first and “minorities” second. My suspicions about the structure of Hetero-American culture are threefold.
Fold number one: Godbags — and their non-proselytizing but higher-power-believin’ brethren, the godbag-lites — regardless of race, creed, or color, are the majority in the US.* Fold number two: even if they weren’t the majority, godbags like to vote more than truthbags. Fold number three: Heterosexual honkys, as a general category, hate homos as much as the next guy.
You know, the megatheocorporatocracy of today, through millennia of evolution, is an intricate but brainless mega-organism that exists only to replicate its reactionary self ad infinitum.
______________________________
*See this June 2008 article in the Washington Post, which reports on a poll finding that 80% of Americans think angels flit around on sunbeams curing cancer and reward the faithful with “resources.”
“For many Americans, God is a vivid presence. About one-third of the people surveyed said they receive answers to their prayer requests at least once a month and say they have experienced or witnessed a divine healing of an illness or injury.”
Can’t have a bunch of fags queering the deal
Published November 10th, 2008 in Mind-blowing, Keep your bias off my gender, Politics, Godbagism and Men Hate You. 82 CommentsHow, one asks, wiping a drip of spittle from lips slackened in disbelief, do American voters simultaneously elect a black dude president and ban gay marriage in a single swipe of the always-reliable electronic voting machine? Well, I am the world’s foremost authority, so I’ve got a couple of theories.
The Dawning of a New Post-Patriarchal Tomorrow
The New Obam-A-Merica is young, happy, hopey, changey. We’ll ban gay marriage, OK? but only to pave the way for the inevitable ban on straight marriage, whereupon we liberate millions from the stifling, dimensionless, heteronormative purgatory of the nuclear family, and from movies where beautiful brides claw each other’s eyes out under whimsical comedic circumstances.
Not buying that one? Well, how about
Mass Delusion
Bizarre as it may seem, many Americans mistake for truth certain fanciful narratives the central figure of which is an invisible, immortal male superdude who lives in a cloud palace and who is as obsessed with human reproductive material as he is with smiting infidels. Quite a large chunk of the populus are so besotted by this fantasy, they think the invisible superdude is actually real. They chit-chat with him, bargain with him, build fancy castles for him, use special gang signs with him, seek to appease his wrath, cajole him into intervening on their personal behalf, sacrifice the lives of the less fortunate in exchange for such filthy lucre as he sees fit to confer upon them, announce to the world that they believe in him so their peers won’t mistake them for amoral atheists, and reinterpret his myths in whatever manner will most benefit their own status in this super-fubar set-up.
As a result of the surprisingly widespread belief that this or any other fictional character ought to be given carte blanche in matters of social policy, quite a few inconsistencies plague the American socio-political scene. One such inconsistency is the dissonance between “liberty and justice for all” — a quaint story Americans tell themselves about themselves — and liberty and justice the godbag way — which puts into practice the immortal cloud-abiding superdude’s ideology that certain folks are more equal than others.
The fundamental irrationality of professional political godbagism makes things danged awkward for people like women, who in reality are human beings, but who are confined by the godly narrative to the humiliating role of meatsocks. It’s also awkward for queer women, who are not enough like traditional meatsocks, and for queer men, who are too much like traditional meatsocks. We don’t get to chillax and be ourselfs. Somebody is always threating to rape us or kick our ass or suddenly come down with Gay Panic Disorder.
The mass delusion known as homophobia is a sub-species of misogyny.
A black dude can get elected president, but a woman? When swine defy gravity. Racism flourishes, all righty, but it’s covert, on the DL, the embarrassing private luxury of elderly honkys and parochial-minded nincompoops, an imp of the perverse the public indulgence of which is becoming increasingly difficult both to justify and to legislate[1]. It seems safe to say that if the majority of Americans wished to cling to racism as a defining aspect of their cult, last week’s election would have had rather a different outcome.
Misogyny, on the other hand, is bullet-proof. It’s not merely tolerated, it’s openly celebrated in the American street, the American courtroom, the American bedroom, the American internet. Except for a puny consortium of bruised and contused blamers calling blindly to the Vaginatariat through mists of dime store cologne, even the victims of this oppression embrace it. Thus is it possible for American voters to view straight male Barack Obama as a human being, but to view the queers seeking some of that liberty and justice as a bunch of deviant meatsock mutations to throw under the bus.
As mentioned earlier, heterosexual marriage is the primary unit of patriarchy. It’s how dudely power is transferred from generation to generation, and must not fall into enemy hands. Homos, apparently, are not equal enough to perform the sacred ritual of the white-veiled pussy presentation.
____________________
1. Excepting, of course, the hysteria over “illegal aliens” — the screamingly deprecatory name given to that group of people who do America’s shit work for shit pay — which hysteria has climaxed with citizen militias — many of them, I am sad to say, Texans — patrolling the borders with flame-throwers and nukular bombs to keep our country free of suspicious swarthy types.
The new radio tower at El Rancho Deluxe enables me to log back into the abuse. Yay internet.
Just so you won’t think I was blowing fumes through my snoot yesterday when I resurfaced to announce that I am back from hiatus, I am posting this here thing. This post will largely consist of nothing. It is mostly to reacquaint my claw-like hands with the rigors of typing, and my obstreperal lobe with the smell of the dominant culture’s putrid off-gassing.
Much has gone down in the life of the spinster aunt since last we spoke, but it was nothing I cared to interpret through the jaundiced lens of blame, which is why I didn’t feel too bad taking a blogular powder on yall. Mostly what have befallen me are events of a rural and therefore — because I had overestimated my boondocksian chops — a comical nature. Assorted hijinxes have involved, against a backdrop of prickly pears and Polled Hereford excrement: snakes, rogue cattle, sheriff’s deputies, a wild horse, two dudes from the ranch up the road who spoke such thick Texan I could not understand’em, feral burros, turkeys, deer, skunks, funnel-web spiders, jack rabbits, coyotes, scorpions and dogs.
My particular favorite was the dog/skunk/feral burro combo. Ah, what a wingding that was.
So. I went to considerable trouble to get some internet up in this mug, and now I am asking myself: “Why, why, why?”
For two months I enjoyed frolicking in meadows, eating Brussel’s sprout tacos morning noon and night, shoveling cow pies and 8-inch centipedes out of my garage, etc. Then today I finally check the blog’s moderation queue and it’s full of the same old mean, misogynist, racist, asinine crap as before. Apparently 7 or 8 more nascent teen unabombers have discovered just how hilarious it is to cut and paste the word “cunt” eight million times. Also, as before, I just don’t “get” BDSM; in case I’d never had explained to me the roguish feminist iconoclasm of the dominance-and-submission system of het sex, several readers thoughtfully provided graphic descriptions of how great it is, and of how stupid I am. One moron reminded me that if I didn’t publish his remarks he would spread it all around the internet that I censor readers and am a feminazi, which I guess would ruin my life forever.
Seriously? Blowing out to the middle of some inaccessible ranchette doesn’t actually eradicate world suffering, injustice, imbecility, and anti-Twistarianism?
I may turn this thing off again after all.
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