Month: February 2015

Confederate Echoes: The Ugly History Behind Questioning Obama’s Patriotism

JarretR 37 Comments
Former Republican Mayor of New York City thinks that there colored boy is only three-fifths "Murican.

Rudy Giuliani, the Former Republican Mayor of New York City, apparently thinks that thar colored boy don’t love ‘Murica.

Remember when everyone liked Rudolph Giuliani? The former “Mayor of the World” was, after all, Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Yeah, I remember that too. But Giuliani is also a right-wing dunce.

Case in point: he recently stirred the endlessly bubbling American political chamber pot when, at a private gathering of like-minded conservative Oompa Loompas held for Wisconsin Koch Brothers organ-grinder monkey Scott Walker, he questioned President Barack Obama’s patriotism. “I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani babbled, “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” Translation: Obama’s black different; we’re not; Anti-Americanism follows. But questioning a political rival’s love of country is an old American political tactic, and it hasn’t gotten any less vile over time.  Continue Reading →

Alabama, Gay Marriage, and Roy Moore’s Christian America

JarretR 3 Comments
Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore once told God that He wasn't religious enough. True story.

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore once told God that He wasn’t religious enough. True story.

In the 1998 Cohen brothers cult-classic film The Big Lebowski, the mustachioed narrator (played by Sam Elliot) ruminates on how some people truly are authentic products of the age in which they live. “Sometimes there’s a man…I won’t say hero, ’cause, what’s a hero? Sometimes, there’s a man well, he’s the man for his time and place,” the narrator notes. In the film, this narration refers to The Dude (Jeff Bridges), a doobie-smokin,’ former hippy turned middle-aged slacker who is thrust into a series of events of that give the impression that he’s more important than he actually is.

In 2015, there’s another man who is indeed “the man for his time and place.” His name is Roy Moore. He’s the current (and former) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. And while Judge Moore couldn’t be more different from the Cohen Brothers’ fictional “Dude” character, he’s nonetheless a man thrust into a series of events that have overly magnified his own importance and rendered him a symbol of a particular American subculture that is taking its last gasps in a very public manner. Continue Reading →

Christianity, Islam, and the American Aversion to Nuance

JarretR 57 Comments
President Barack Obama does prayer stuff at the National Prayer Breakfast, an event that shouldn't even exist.

President Barack Obama does prayer stuff at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Americans don’t do nuance. The basic dictionary definition of nuance is “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound,” and boy does this ever go against the American predilection for dualistic thinking in absolutely everything. From the highest level political “masterminds,” to the status-anxiety wracked petite bourgeoisie, to the common blue-collar Bubba, Americans prefer simplistic approaches to a very complicated world. They therefore derive thought-free comfort in the notions that black and white long ago teamed up to gag the numerous shades of grey with a balled-up American flag; that there is only good (America) and evil (everything that isn’t America), and that might ALWAYS equals right — at lease when America uses might.

And no U.S. subculture better exemplifies this inoculation-proof allergy to nuance better than the conservative hive-mind. Yes, if Americans in general prefer simple answers to complex problems, the Right Wing goes a step further: they deny that complex problems even exist. Thus, we have the dunder-headed conservative reaction to President Barack Obama’s invocation at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast. Continue Reading →

Why Americans Really, Really, REALLY Love Football

JarretR 18 Comments
Football fans, even those dedictaed to the lowley Cleveland Browns, bring sports enthusiasm to bizzarre new levels.

Football fans, even those dedicated to the lowly Cleveland Browns, bring sports enthusiasm to bizarre new levels.

Football is the most red-blooded, über-masculine, über –American thing on planet earth. That’s right: FOOTBALL. No, I’m not talking about that ridiculous spectacle in which namby-pamby, ethnically ambiguous European men in short shorts traverse across a sprawling, artificially constructed field trying to catapult a checkered spherule into a large trawling net without using their hands as millions of highly inebriated spectators look on from tax-payer-subsidized coliseum stands. Americans have a word for that: it’s called soccer, and we use it to keep our 2.5 suburban children occupied after school on weekdays.

No, the football I’m talking about puts those European pantywaists to shame. REAL football — AMERICAN football — is a completely non-ridiculous, unquestionably heterosexual sporting spectacle in which gargantuan men in tight pants traverse across a sprawling, artificially constructed field while trying to tackle each other with the ultimate goal of carrying a prolate spheroid far enough to win the right to kneel down and praise their sky-dwelling prime mover — all as millions of highly inebriated spectators look on from tax-payer-subsidized coliseum stands. Continue Reading →