I’ve just found organic aerosol waffle batter, and I’m telling everyone! Just heat up the old waffle iron, point, and squirt! Try it with a glob of organic aerosol whipped cream for a virtuous-yet-space-age breakfast experience that can’t be beat. Waffle-hatas in your breakfast nook? Let’em do the whippet!
While I absorb my organic aerosol waffle, my thoughts drift ahead, as they always do at breakfast, to dinner. There is asparagus in my fridge. A brilliant plan begins to erupt in my brain’s molten core: organic aerosol Hollandaise sauce. Why has nobody thought of this?
Because I cannot focus on anything for more than 42 seconds, my thoughts also drift back to yesterday. Yesterday I found myself on the receiving end of a few media broadcasts, all of which caused my obstreperal lobe to sort of seize up. Fortunately, owing to the merciful proto-dementia of chemo-brain, today I remember only two of them vividly enough to recap them for the blametariat.
One was an episode of “Leave It To Beaver.” The other was a story on the public radio show All Things Considered By Honky Liberal Intellectuals. Just as the horrible specter of aerosol Hollandaise dawned on me, it has dawned on climate scientist Susan Solomon, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that global warming is irreversible.
That’s right. Irreversible.
Quoth Solomon:
“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,”
Guilty! I’m one of those people who has imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal. But no, it turns out that in a few decades the Texas Hill Country will be permanently transformed into a fucking dustbowl.
Already Central Texas is in the middle of the worst drought in about 568 years. Everywhere you look are skeletor cattle standing on barren dirt. They just fall down and die (this has a lot to do with the stupid beef industry pressuring ranchers to plant non-native GMO hybrid grasses that fatten cattle up fast but can’t survive a drought, and it’s fucking criminal that people are just letting these animals keel over, but that’s another story, as well as an excellent argument for vegetarianism).
Everyone likes to blame global warming on those stupid urban Texans driving Hummers, but shockingly, it’s not entirely their fault. Auto emissions, not to mention emissions from organic aerosol waffle batter, are a drop in the bucket when compared to, say, Asian industrial pollution.
Well, I guess that’s it, then. So long, world as we know it.
Wait a minute. The world as we know it has been preserved on film, and, horribly, is broadcast daily on cable! The episode of “Leave It To Beaver” to which I allude above well and truly made my skin crawl, but in a totally different direction than did the NPR report. Synopsis:
Beaver is invited to a girl’s birthday party. He refuses to go. Ward and June force him to attend against his will. We know what they don’t know: that the Beave is the only boy invited to the party. Our hearts bleed for poor Beaver, being made to socialize with icky girls.
Cut to Beaver sitting in a chair looking miserable while little girls in crinolines scream hysterically. Beaver wins a prize: it’s a dolly. He couldn’t be any more horrified.
Meanwhile, back home, Wally hips Ward and June to the godawful emasculation to which they have unwittingly subjected their kid. Ward and June couldn’t be any more horrified.
Meanwhile, back at the party, Beaver sneaks away and ends up in Mr. Man’s study. Mr Man lowers his newspaper. He has been expecting Beaver. The kid is safe in here. Mr Man always hides here when there are too many women in the house. No squealing harpies would dare cross the line of demarcation into his private sanctum. Sensing that Beaver is suffering dangerously high levels of nellification, Mr Man shows Beaver his gun collection. The day is saved, the natural order restored; the masculine act of fondling weaponry has reversed Beaver’s impotence, as is made clear when he happily raises a rifle to his shoulder and goes “Pow! Pow!” Back at home, Ward makes some homophobic joke about Beaver’s having enjoyed himself at a girl-party.
I could write a doctoral thesis on this one episode. I won’t, though, because I’m not in graduate school. But Jesus in a jetpack, the whole of honky American civilization could be recreated by aliens using this one 22-minute show; it’s an effing blueprint for mid-century American patriarchy.
It blows my mind that shit like this — and by “shit like this” I mean pretty much every goddam thing on TV — is still being broadcast with a straight face. I’m not saying “Leave It To Beaver” should be taken off the air. I’m saying that every episode should have subtitles, like that newsflash thing at the bottom of the screen on CNN, pointing out each instance of hate speech, sexism, racism, stereotyping, misogyny, homophobia, honky dudelionormativity, and child abuse. There should also be a sound effect — say, the “blast of a trumpet”? — to accompany each infraction.
Radical Feminist Closed Captioning and Descriptive Video Service for everything! Who’s with me?
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