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Dead Baby Unicorns

With thanks to the Jon, Ed, Harold and Dave whose snarking helped me write this yesterday. In some states, that's called "aiding and abetting"
 
I head it said on the TeeVee box
that it is perfectly understandable
that Bible folks think President Obama 
is NOT Christian,
because he has never officially renounced Lucifer.
I am so glad this was brought to my attention
because I was unaware that anything a person has not publicly renounced,
it's fair to consider them in favor of.
 
So in the interests of clearing up any mis-conceptions out there,
I would like to go on record as renouncing Lucifer.
I also renounce Lex Luthor.
And to cover all my bases, I also renounce Satan… and  Santa,
(because if you re-arrange the letters, they're really the same guy.)
 
While I'm at it I'll also just say "No" to Voldemort, Sauron and Saruman,
syphilis, demons, black magic and mean people- because they suck.
I hearby forever abjure all hurricanes and earthquakes, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps,
and anyone who preaches love with a brimstone smile,
holocaust deniers, truthers, birthers, death-panels, zombies, terrorists, and tourists in black socks and sandals.
 
I repudiate Sara Palin, sarin gas, FOX News, reality TV,
Lindsay Lohan and her plea bargains
and gossip, innuendo and tweets being passed off as news.
 
Let it be known that I disavow homelessness, heartlessness and donkey porn,
mosque-haters, mosquitoes, people who bitch but don't vote, people who talk but don't think, cat-stranglers, prison-breaks, air pollution, water pollution and water boarding.

I forever eschew homophobia, xenophobia, and arachnophobia
because without spiders, we'd all be covered in flies,
I am against misspelled signs, closed minds, closeted racists and any religion that calls itself science.

I forswear oppression, depression, false promises and false prophets, comb-overs,
breast implants on 16 year old girls, testicle implants for neutered dogs
eugenics, misogyny and deep-fried Oreos on a stick.

 

I denounce all land mines, land slides and land wars in Asia,
the false celebrity of sensationalism, corporate welfare when children are going hungry
and people who put clothes on their dog when it isn't Hallowe'en.

I am taking a stand against crusades, witch burnings,
book burnings, sunburn and spray tans,
alien abduction and asthma medications
that increase the chances of asthma-related death.

 

Be it known that I am totally against cancer, AIDS and identity theft,
child abuse, flat tires, rain delays and the infield fly rule,
people who think they own the definition of "love"
people who think they own the definition of God
and people who cut me off on the highway.

I renounce global warming, "your" instead of "you're"
those darn little ants that get in my kitchen sometimes
and dead baby unicorns.
 
This list should in no way be considered complete
but I would be remiss if I did not add that I officially and for all time
renounce people who pull s**t out of their ass
and call it the truth.
 
As for the president, while he has not yet mentioned Lucifer,
he has renounced Dick Cheney,
so really, he's got this one covered.

Posted by Tracy on Sep 23rd 2010 | Filed in Poetry,The Daily Rant | Comments (0)

Credit Where Credit is Due

    Tonight President Obama made a brief address regarding the withdrawl of combat forces from Iraq. A Facebook "friend" of mine posted a reminder that Obama had voted against the surge and Bush had done all the real work.
    Obama had better give George Bush credit where credit is due!
she said.
    Yeah…. some relationships you just know at the beginning are doomed.

   When this former elementary school classmate was suggested to me as a friend a few weeks ago, I went to her profile page and read what information was available.
Political affiliation: Republican. Religion: Baptist. Residence: Texas.
    Don't think so. Not that any of this information means she isn't a perfectly nice person. I don't like putting people in boxes based on labels,  but clearly, other than our first names, we have absolutely nothing in common. So I did not "friend" her.
     But then she "friended" me.  I hate ignoring friend requests, even when deep inside, I know I probably should. I have had enough experiences recently to have learned that it's not possible to be friends with everybody, and not good for my blood pressure to try.  But I felt put on the spot- what excuse could I give? Sorry, but I'm probably not Jesus-y enough for you tastes?  Way to stereotype! So I said yes.

   To her credit, she has not made a peep about any of the politically and culturally liberal things I have posted recently, like believing that "those people" wanting to build a Muslim cultural center are actually Americans, or thinking a high school should treat a gay student like a human being. You know, wacko-liberal stuff like that. (Of  course, it's possible that she hid me the second day of our "friendship" and hasn't seen most of it. Hmmm….)
So I decided that I would just ignore her posts, and her friends comments that, indeed, Obama is just an idiot who does not know right from wrong.  They are entitled to their opinions and sure as hell wouldn't be swayed by anything I might say. Better to say nothing at all.

    But if I were to comment….it might go something like this:

     You want Obama to give George W. Bush credit for Iraq? You mean for starting this hideous, illegal monstrosity to begin with, in the absence of any evidence that war was called for and against the opinion of  much of the international community?  Absolutely! Let's do it!
    Let's give him credit for the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the billions of dollars wasted! Let's give George Bush his due credit for the lies that killed babies and shattered lives, causing such devastation in Iraq- and also in Afghanistan! That poor mis-begotten nation might well not be in such dire circumstances today had the U.S. not diverted its attention and resources over  to that stupid excuse for a war in Iraq.
    You remember Iraq: it's the war we started to stop the weapons of mass destruction, which Bush joked might be under his desk while our children were being maimed and killed in pursuit of them-  yeah yeah the weapons  we helped Sadaam build when we thought he'd use them against Iran, the ones Bush knew weren't really there any more. Ha ha, yeah, that was a good one, George! Funny as a crutch on a 19 year old with one leg!
    Iraq, the war that, when the first lie fell apart, Bush tried to justify by saying it was "liberating" the Iraqi people…  those Muslim people… who,over  in  America apparently do not have the liberty to worship around "regular" "decent" people. Liberation. Well, he liberated millions from their homes, and liberated a lot of their heads from the rest of their bodies, so…ok. Credit for that kind of  liberation, at least.

     But wait- don't forget to credit Bush with the Clinton budget surplus that, with the help of two preposterous wars, he turned into such a deep, life-sucking black hole of debt that the repercussions have made families jobless and homeless and put us in a position to be unable to help when it is most needed.
You remember, the debt: it's that thing you didn't give a s**t about 2 years ago and suddenly is all important- that thing you treat as if it just sprang like Athena, fully grown, from Obama's pointy, socialist head.

    Absolutely! Let's give George W. Bush the credit he is due for the FINE job he did in Iraq! In fact, let's give him complete and utter credit for the clusterf**k that has been- and will continue to be- Iraq!  Hear hear!!
 

     Yeah, it's definitely best that I not say any of those things. Jumping on this woman and her right-wing friends is not going to undo the war, unspeak the lies or bring back the dead. So I"m not.
    But I am not good at holding my tongue… it makes my fingers all spitty.

Posted by Tracy on Aug 31st 2010 | Filed in The Daily Rant | Comments (0)

A Little Light Reading

 
    I was just perusing the ILA's list of challenged and banned books for 2009-2010.
    The list contains the usual foul-mouthed, society-destroying filth: Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Anne Frank ( Really? Anne Frank? Man, that still blows me away) Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou, Barbara Kingsolver. However, I did not see that miscreant  Mark Twain on the list this year. Huh. Poor guy is probably rolling over in grave from shame at being thought "tame" enough for school boards in Kansas and Kentucky.
And no one tried to get Barack Obama's books banned either, which surprises me, given that he's a Nazi Muslim.
 
     But those damn gay penguins are still pissing people off!
 
   ~The book Nickled and Dimed , which is about economics, by the way, was challenged in Pennsylvania because it presents "socialist ideas" and belittles Christians. Wow! Well, we can't have that. It might make the baby Jesus cry, and we all know he was a free market capitalist..
    ~ The Twilight series was removed from school libraries in one district in Australia and parents were asked not to let their kids even bring the book to school. Now I have plenty of objections to "Twilight", coming more from a feminist frustration with its oh rescue me you big strong boys! attitude, but puh-leese!  They'll just watch the movie on their computer!
     ~Another vampire series, Vampire Academy  was banned from school libraries in Texas. All the books. The series is still ongoing…  which means the school board has banned books they haven't read yet because they haven't even been written. Way to go, guys!
     ~Paint Like Me,  an anthology of poems by teenagers, had 2 pages cut out of the library's copy  by the school principal in order to remove an offending 31 line poem about an abusive father. 
The principal.  Cut pages out of a book. Yeah. Great example for the kiddies! This must be why they pay you the big bucks.
     ~In Idaho, someone tried to censor a book about an 8th grader learning about censorship. Which proves that irony is alive and well in Iowa.
 
But these two are my favorite stories, by which I mean, they freaked me out.
 
     ~In Manifee, California the school  removed (and I am not making this up) The Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary from the shelves because a kid found the term "oral sex" in it. At this time school officials are "considering a permenant classroom ban of this book."
This book. Yes. The fucking dictionary, excuse my french, but my point is that the kid can find more about oral sex on Facebook than he can in the dictionary!! What in the hell, America? 
 
     ~In Wisconsin, 2 men, on behalf of the Christian Civil Liberties Union, (and don't you just love the name of that group?!)  filed a lawsuit against the public library because of the emotional damages inflicted on them just from seeing a certain book on display. The book is by Francesca Lia Block and is called Baby Be Bop, and I don't know about you but I immediately went to Amazon.com to try to see the cover of this book that damaged these men so irreparably!!  Right?! Inquiring minds want to know!
     Guess what? Amazon has "no cover art available for this title". I kid you not!! The synopis says the book is about a teenager realizing that he is homosexual, which sounds pretty darn run-of-the-mill to me. (And then they tried to sell me a book about Barney and his stupid little friend Baby Bop, whom we've also been told are gay, but whatever. )
      So I'm on a mission now, aren't you? Stay with me!
 
      At Barnes and Noble I only found the book as part of a two story set, and the cover picture was of a teenaged boy with jeans and no shirt, sporting wings and looking a little like a carved angel in a cemetery only, well… hot. I don't know if this is a cover dreamed up especially for this anthology or if it might, in fact, be THE Medusa-like, emotionally damaging cover!! The not-knowing is driving me crazy! Have I, in fact, survived the book cover, or not?  So anyone out there who has seen this endangered, Ivory-billed woodpecker of a book, please drop me a line, ok?
     But wait!  Just like in a Sham-wow ad- there's more !
      In addition to their poor psyches burning from seeing the book, the men further allege that the books' content is "slanderous to all males" and (again, not making this up) can put people's lives in danger.
     Oh. My. God.
     It's like a book, and a bomb, and looking at an eclipse, all in one little package with a hot gay angel boy (maybe) on the cover!!!  What's not to love?!
(Side note: I am clearly going to hell.)
 
     All of this word-banning, frankly, is just hard for me to wrap my head around in the land of "Free Speech", you know? What ever happened to "don't read it if you don't like it"?
And as a general observation, Montgomery Co. Kentucky needs to get a grip. They removed a LOT of books from the reading curriculum because they felt that sex, abuse, suicide and drugs were" not suitable topics for discussion in a co-ed high school classroom."
Right. No, they're much more suitable for discussionamong drunk kids at a football party, or while texting on the school bus, you morons.
 
     The ILA estimates that up to 85% of the books challenged or removed from shelves never get reported, so this is just a tip of the freak-out iceberg.
    Now I confess that some of these books I have not read, and in fairness, when it comes to school reading lists,  I cannot swear that I would not find them inappropriate for my child to read at the grade level they might have been suggested for, although I'm definitely not the "don't read that book!" type.
     But the idea that parents or a school board thinks, in the electronic age, that removing a book from a school library means kids won't read it, or that not having a subject presented in  book for discussion in school with an adult mediator means that kids won't just talk about those things without  having someone sensible present- is moronic.
Oh but wait- we live in a day when people believe that terrorists are sending pregnant women to America to "drop their anchor babies"  so they can return a quarter century later as citizen terrorists!! So…. yeah.
 
     And what is the objection to those poor penguins? How can you possibly hate on the two-daddy penguins??

 

 

Posted by Tracy on Aug 23rd 2010 | Filed in The Daily Rant | Comments (3)

Rules of the Road

     Driving home from the store today I saw a bumper sticker that said:
"Put America Back in God's Hands."
     Idling in traffic behind the pick-up truck which sported this sentiment, I found myself drumming my nails on the steering wheel and considering what this might mean.

    “Back” in God's hands implies that once, in some golden age of America’s past, we were in God's hands. I wonder when that was.

     Was America in God's Hands in the 50's when blacks could only shop in the white grocery stores if they had on a maid's uniform, when they were allowed to give their lives for this country- but not good enough to do it along side white soldiers? Was it the golden age when a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock was ostracized and debased as a sinner but the boy often got away with no sanction because he was “sewing his wild oats”?

     Maybe it's been longer than that since America was under the direction of God.  Perhaps the truck driver is thinking of the good old days around the turn of the century, when women  couldn’t vote and were the legal property of their husbands, to abuse as they saw fit- because God says the man is the head of the family.  
    Back when rich business owners locked their poor workers in dangerous factories and beat or killed anyone who tried to organize for safe working conditions… and then went to church. Was that when God was in charge?

    Could be he's looking even farther into American's past to find the days when  the Big Guy was running the show and everything was as it should be. Maybe he's thinking of the time when blacks were property- because the Bible says slavery is OK.
     Or perhaps it was when we were deliberately exterminating the native Americans with lies and guns and small pox, because they were in our way, hogging all the good land and they were just a bunch of heathens anyway. Maybe that's when we were truly a Godly nation.

   As a country I believe that America is no more f**ked up than some and much less than others. But I grow tired of the boast and swagger, as if we have some God-given right to tell others how to live their lives.

   “Put the carpenter in the White House” in another sentiment I”ve seen driving around town. Please! As if he’d want such a shitty job!!
   The first time Jesus suggested that we talk to our enemies instead of bombing them, the first time he pulled that “rich man through the eye of a needle” crap on congress when they wanted to cut taxes for the rich and make the poor pay for it- they’d crucify him! Metaphorically, of course:  
    “Socialist!” “Nazi!”  “Terrorist lover!” 
   Why they’d probably accuse him of being a closet Muslim and suddenly remember that ~gasp!   He wasn't even born in this country!!!

     People don’t want Jesus, or even someone truly Christ-like, to run the country. What they want some ayatollah (excuse me- preacher) in an expensive suit with a gold-trimmed Bible agreeing that their weirdo, different-thinking neighbors are going to hell and are responsible for everything that goes wrong. They want their personal beliefs and faith turned into civil code so that everyone has to live as if they share that same religion. That's their idea of living like a "Christian Nation" even though Christ never wanted any such place.
    The folks who talk about turning the country over to God, who see the separation of church and state as a personal assault on poor, oppressed Christians, don’t want more faith- they want more of their faith.
    It’s that whole validation thing. They want their “God in charge” because if you are forced to make the same choices they make,  then they’ll know they made the right choice. They want everyone to follow the rules that they believe in. Which is understandable.
     But it’s not about God.
 
     I do not believe that bumper sticker has anything to do with faith. If you really have faith, you aren’t threatened by people around you who make different choices. Because you have faith- see? 
    You know that God doesn’t want to lead, he wants to lift.
    And not lift the nation- you . Just you.
    With faith, you don't set up foundations and think tanks to try to take over the government. You concentrate on turning yourself over to God, and you let the nation run as it was designed to do.
   Whatever God you pray to, you'll find a message that is remarkably similar: Look inside your heart. Make the choices that the voice within you says are right, and let others do the same for themselves.
    Which makes a lot more sense. Because if it’s not a free choice, it’s not faith, is it?

Posted by Tracy on Aug 22nd 2010 | Filed in The Daily Rant | Comments (0)

Memorial Service

Man never kills so gleefully, so without remorse
as when he plans to frame God for the murder.
If the Devil is truly at work in the land
then he wears the hard hat and work boots
of just another dedicated believer building God's kingdom,
meeting out divine justice on the wicked.

God does not fly planes into buildings,
any more than he plants bombs in Belfast.
God is not responsible for the torture and murder of the Spanish Inquisition
or the Christians in Africa today who stone little children as witches.
Allah had nothing to do with what happened on September 11th
except as he might have been in the whispered prayers of the Muslims
who died that day.

Depraved humans commit monstrous acts
and they wrap their murder in a prayer shawl and call it a gift for their god
like a cat dropping a mutilated robin at your feet-

"See the infidel / heretic / abortion doctor I killed for you!"
something no divine creator ever asked for.

Hate fell from the sky on September 11th. 
It was a hate that masqueraded as religion,
called itself patriotism, pretended to be strength
but make no mistake, it was hate-
born of fear of things and people that are different,
Hate refuses to see the common bonds of humanity.
It's a weakness that is threatened by other choices.
It is small and mean, and there is nothing holy about it.

Hate is easy. Anger is a cheap high.
Pointing out differences,  closing hearts and locking gates-
that’s simple stuff.
And this is not some WWE steel cage wrestling match:
"The Amazing God versus the Incredible Allah!
Which awesome God is awesomer? Who has the best beard?"
God does not need you to jump into the ring with a sharp object
or a chair, to hit the other guy over the head
and help him cheat to win the title belt.
Really.
 
If you want to  pay tribute to victims of  hate,
you can only do it through love.  
Anger is no fitting memorial.
Walls just give hate a safe, dark  place to hide and grow. 
All the monuments and the speeches and waving flags cannot defeat hate
the way a simple outstretched hand can.
So if you want to prove that the 9/11 hijackers were wrong,
not just theologically or politically
but wrong in a fundamentally human way…
you can only do it through acts of tolerance and compassion,
by building bridges and accepting differences.
Nature shows us that diversity is strength.
God tells us that love is the only way.
Walk the path of love and you keep the flame alive
and make America the society they didn’t believe it is,
but which we know it can be:
the home of the free and the brave.

See, any old coward can close their fist and hate somebody. 
It takes a truly brave soul to open your arms…
 but it sets you free.

Posted by Tracy on Aug 17th 2010 | Filed in Poetry,The Daily Rant | Comments (0)

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