Soapbox

The classics are great, aren't they? Probably why they're called classics…. Anyway, I was listening to this song yesterday and a new last line popped into my head and stayed there. This is the result. And I figure, it's probably what Paul Simon was trying to say, anyway.

Dear America-

    2+2 = 4.
    Additionally, 4 > 2.
    We're all on the same page so far, yes?

    Ok, great. And just to refresh your memory: the Republicans and their incestuous cousins, the Tea Party, ran the 2010 campaign largely on a platform of reducing the deficit. That's reducing, as in "making smaller", as in that is what they said they would do: make America's debt smaller. Not bigger- less than.  Right?  2<4

    And if your boat is already leaking too much water, pouring more water into your boat will not help. If a store wants to charge you too much for a product, the best response is not to  hand them your wallet and say "Here, take even more", don't you agree?

    I know- why am I telling you this? You've known that since the second grade! Well here's the thing. Your boys in congress, with the ink not even dry on the ballots, have declared that their first priority in 2011 is to increase the deficit! They won't call it that, but that is exactly what they are going to do.  Forget all of us without jobs, the unfair foreclosures on our homes, the record demandat food pantries and homeless shelters- those problems are way down on their list. Their stated #1 goal is to increase our deficit by $700 billion dollars.
    And too much plus 700 billion is, well, way too much, don't you agree?

    Oh, and by the way, they're going to get you to not only go along with this, they're gonna have you demanding this, standing out in the rain waving your misspelled signs insisting that they increase the deficit. Which is the very thing you were waving signs in October insisting you wanted to reduce.

    See, they're going to call it a tax cut.

   To the unthinking among us, that's like calling it "Happy puppies and a rainbow". Tax cut. What a nice term. How can it be anything but good?

    "It's unconscionable to increase taxes during economic hard times" the once and future Speaker of the House, John "Spray Tan" Boehner says. He's talking about the democratic plan not to extend the Bush tax cuts on the very wealthiest Americans (in other words- NOT your tax cut, buddy.)
    Once upon a surplus, Bush cut taxes for the rich and doubled the debt. He screwed this country  into a big black hole and no, we're not seeing daylight yet. But when the tax cuts expire, as they were designed to do, that additional $700 billion dollars would be a nice step up.
   
    So why in hell would you insist on giving a tax cut to the (not you) richest of the rich? The GOP congressmembers and their media mouthpieces (many of them among the richest of the rich) will tell you that it will "boost the American economy" to spend money on rich people.
    That's bullshit.

    Remember when Obama was spending money on regular people: on cash for clunkers, and repairing the roads we all drive on, and helping states to keep teachers and police officers and firemen on the job? Remember how red in the face you all got- how dare he spend money on teachers? After all- they have unions, so they must be socialists!
    Well we're about to spend $700 billion dollars more, and not on teachers. We're spending it on yachts, and vacation homes in the Cayman Islands, and gambling junkets to Monte Carlo. Because that is what the richest of the rich will spend their tax cut for.
     They won't spend it at Krogers or Target, keeping your son or daughter employed, the way  you or I would. The majority of them will either save it, hide it or invest it overseas. As in you never see a penny of benefit from it.   Unless just knowing that the Koch brothers and Rush Limbaugh have an extra nest egg socked away helps you feel better while you're working at McDonalds wondering how you'll pay the mortgage.

   Cast your mind back and ask yourself- why are these cuts going to expire any way? Because that was the promise the Republicans made to sell us this bill of goods: lets cut taxes now, for a few years, and then we'll re-evaluate and see if they have helped the economy or if we really need that income.

    Well you've been screaming all year that we really need the income. You're prepared to defund education and health care and renewable energy projects, to let our roads and bridges collapse under us just to get more money. Well here's  a $700 billion infusion, and all congress has to do to get it is to do nothing. Yet your party can't wait to go to battle for the right to increase the debt! That thing you do NOT want to do!! I know, right? It's crazy!

   So, here's the great part. You can stop them, and don't have to change your political stripes. You don't have to suddenly become a progressive and start giving a damn about the unemployed or Muslims or global warming or evolution or any of that. All you have to do is MEAN WHAT YOU SAID.  That's it. Live up to your word, and hold your leaders to theirs.

    You said you wanted to reduce the deficit. Well here you go. Call that Republican asshat you voted for last week and tell him or her that reducing the deficit does NOT mean increasing the deficit by $700 billion, just so their rich-as-sin friends and benefactors can have more money to hide, and to donate to their re-election campaigns next time. More does not equal less, not even in magic Republican land!

     Tell them that too much plus 700 billion equals  WAY too much. Tell them that if tax cuts for the rich helped middle America you wouldn't be getting acid indigestion every time you hear the boss mention a budget meeting.

    Whatever else we do or do not about this economic crisis, we must refuse buy the bullshit that the core problem is that the rich people just don't have enough money.  I think we can all agree that this is not the case.

    So, just to recap: bad + bad = worse.

    Thanks for listening. We now return you to your regularly scheduled dose of FOX propaganda.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/tea-party-leader-defends-attack-lawmaker-muslim/

Dear members of the Tea "We want to defend the constitution against you liberals" Party:

      Since you're so fond of the constitution, you might want to investigate a little thing called the first amendment. Oh, I know, you just LOVE the first amendment when you've said some horribly racist or homophobic thing  or are encouraging people to instigate armed insurrection against the duly elected government and don't want to get nailed for it. Freedom of speech! Only Nazis believe in political correctness! 
      But even if you insist on believing that the Establishment clause of the first amendment was not intended to create a "separation of church and state" (after all, what does that commie Thomas Jefferson know about the Constitution?) it does say that there can be NO religious litmus test for public office.

    In other words, despite what Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation says, you cannot remove congressman Keith Ellison from office simply because he's a Muslim. I know, I know, 9/11, hate our freedoms, kill the infidel, blah blah blah I repeat, you cannot remove him from office simply for being a member of a religion that you don't like.  
    This is actually a good thing. No, really. This is part of what makes America great. I bet. Because, you know what, out of the billions and billions of Christians in the world, there are a LOT out there that I don't like, and you probably don't either! The ones who use God as a shield to hide behind while they are hating, oppressing, attacking and even killing innocent people, just for starters. How about the KKK and Christian Identity folks who thinks God made blacks as "mud people"? How about the ones who say that God killed all those innocent people with Hurricane Katrina because Mardi Gras is too gay?! I really hate that.

     Never would I suggest that a person who is Catholic is unfit for public office because some Catholic priests attack children like wolves and some Catholic bishops and cardinals keep throwing those wolves back in the lambs' pen. Never would I say that all Baptists are evil just because Fred Phelps is a pustulant boil on the face of humanity.

      So tell this guy he is wrong. Tell him he does not speak for you. Tell him that it is a violation of everything America stands for, and that this intolerance is damaging to this nation and far more dangerous than a person who calls God by a different name.
     Use that free speech and speak up! Make one of your famous signs and refuse to accept the idea that only members of certain religions- and only the right members of that religion ('cause I"m pretty sure my kind of Christianity would get me kicked out of Judson Phillips' America!) are capable of serving in a secular, civil government.

    Look, I understand that both the democratic and Republican parties have you frustrated and angry. Me too.  And it was fun, wasn't it? All the rallies and signs, all the excuses to shout and let out your frustrations? But the party's over. It's time to stop and think before the election. Don't wait until the morning after when you'll have to look in the mirror, see your rumpled hair and bleary eyes and wonder what in the hell you did to yourself and your reputation last night.
    Ask yourself- is this who you want to be- the party that wants to create a rich, white male theocracy where evolution is taught as a "fringe theory" and we judge people on how straight they are, how white they are and how many guns they own? You want to be the party that believes the civil rights act went too far, the party that throws people in handcuffs because they ask inconvenient questions? Were you really out there marching to create a party that demands budget restraint while writing blank checks and belligerently asserts their right to offend and demean everyone who doesn't look like them?

     We already have the Republican party for that. Please, offer us something new.
    
      Thanks.
     Sincerely, your friend,

                   Rational America

   A few months ago a young woman "friended" me on Facebook. She has an obviously made up poetry "street" name and I have never met her, but we had a common friend in my poetry group, so I said "yes". All she ever seems to post is the occasional poem. They are very, very different from the stuff I write- but that's cool, right? It's good do stretch. Mostly based on the Bible and sex- which there is plenty of in the Bible. And once in a while they were kind of interesting. (I never read the comments though, because she and her friends all talk in letters, like texters, and usually, in effect, just make silly noises at each other)

     About a week ago, for the first time, she "tagged" me in a poem she wrote, like she particularly wanted me to read it. So I did. It was a rather crude piece about how women are only supposed to have sex with men, and vice versa, because asses are just for pooping and what is your "eden" for if you don't let a man stick his thing in it? So don't believe that crap about gay being the way people are born because there's a reason men are born with Jimmies and women with Edens.

    Yeah, really erudite stuff.

    And I thought "You little bitch. You read the stuff I post. You may not know that I have close and beloved  family members who are gay, but you know my position on gay rights. You've seen my posts about Coming Out Day, etc. And you didn't just write this, you specifically sent your crude little "4th graders playing doctor behind the gym" piece of trash to ME to try to make a statement!"

    But I just didn't have the time or the need to get upset about it. Hell, I don't even know her! I thought for about 5 seconds before I blocked her ass. Gone baby gone, in 60 seconds. And I didn't think much more about it.

     Then today- I got a friend request from her. "XYZ wants to be your friend on Facebook"
      Are you kidding me? Are you f**king kidding me?
      First of all, I was told that once you blocked someone they couldn't find you, even if they did a search for you. Clearly that was wrong information. Second-  are you kidding me? Does she think I accidentaly blocked her? Of course not. So why in the world would I re-friend her ass, if I blocked her once? Does she really feel that strong a need to tell me the purpose behind God giving me an Eden? She's like the street front preacher who, not content with your rejecting their "Repent- the end is near!" crap on the street, follows you home!

     I considered sending her a message saying "Not in a million years. Not if you won a Pulitzer prize for your crude little poetic turds. Not if Oprah personally called and begged me to friend you. "
     There was no "Reject with extreme prejudice" option to the request, so I hid it. It seemed insufficent, but  it was the only option other than accepting it. All I can say is, she'd better not try again. Right now, I just don't have the time to worry about some crazy woman I've never met, but if she keeps bugging me, I could find the time. Oh yeah.

    It's slow right now in custom framing, so today I spent 5 hours in the warehouse, unpacking Christmas decorations. I unboxed and sorted onto carts santa-this and snowman-that and angel-the other things until I thought my brain would bleed.
    It was a little bit surreal, too, listening to halloween muzak and unpacking boxes of Christmas items that were made in China. I finished my shift covered with more glitter than a drag queen. This year almost everything is either sequined or glittered. I unpacked a box of 16 inch high nutcrackers covered in gold sequins. Never saw anything so  tacky in my life.  Started calling them "the Pimp-crackers" for obvious reasons. But you know what? they will probably fly off the shelves. Why, America? Why?

     While opening and unwrapping dozens and dozens and dozens of assorted Christmas cookie tins, I had a flash back to last year, spending hours on the floor putting dozens and dozens and dozens of Christmas tins in shelves, thinking "Enough already!"  But then we'd sell them all, and put out more the next week.
     It is my belief that enough Christmas tins have been manufactured just in the last 5 years that every person on earth should have one by now. Hell, every person in America could have one just from the ones JoAnns has sold. I think peasants in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan probably keep things in old Christmas tins from the USA.
    Our biggest sellers are a set in assorted sizes that say "Peace" "Love" and "Joy". It would be nice to have a set that say "Reduce", "Reuse" and "Recycle" because I"m pretty sure people  just throw these damn things out every year to make room for next years' tins.

      "How are you doing back here?" Rachelle asked when she came back to get something that was on hold.
     "If Santa Claus walked in here right now, I would kick him in the nuts" I said as I ripped open yet another box of stuffed Santa doorknob hangers.
     Now in my entire life I believe the only thing I have ever felt the need to hang from my doorknob was the occasional sweater  that I was too lazy to open the closet for, and yet apparently we anticipate that at least 100 people in Columbus are going to feel that their house is bare and Christmas is not complete without a Santa or a snowman to hang from their doorknob. Go figure.
      I loaded an entire cart with outdoor decorations: Santas and snowmen and reindeers in cute little hats with sticks up their asses so you can jam them in the front yard. Most  of them say pithy things like "Christmas is almost here!" apparently for people whose neighbors do not have calendars, I guess.  
     Whatever. I shouldn't complain. Yes, it's junk and most of it is ugly. Yes, if people gave half the money they normally spend on useless junk like this to charities there wouldn't be hungry children at Christmas… but I should just go with the flow. Who am I to begrudge the world a little decoration during the cold, dark months of the year, right?

    Then I found the 8 boxes of "wreaths" made entirely out of neon colored, glitter-sprinkled bells.

     Yeah, I'm pretty sure the human race is doomed.