I confess! I Gave A Rusty Trombone To A Communist!

             Now that I have your attention, it is safe to say that if this was still the 50s, marrying a communist either naively or defiantly was the ultimate act of betrayal in the prevailing paranoia of that epoch. Adding an act as modern and perverted as a rusty trombone to the equation, not only requires a recherché connoisseurship and a taste for the piquant, but the embouchure of a J. J. Johnson as well!

             The editors of 50s tell-all rags such as Whisper, Dare, Suppressed, The Lowdown, Hush-Hush, Uncensored and Confidential as gossipy and back stabbing as any before or since never had to concern themselves with the darker recesses of the human psyche let alone those of the human body so petrified were Americans that Commie Reds would somehow successfully infiltrate the sulci of this country and destroy the cherished American way of life, the consuming and making of garbage.

            What was sensational 60 years ago is a yawn today. Ron Galella’s famous photograph of Sophia Lauren contemplating the bust of Jayne Mansfield was about as brazen as it got in the 60’s. Granted, hippies would cavort nude or topless in the gloaming when the music and the drugs were right, but that behavior was looked at by academia more from a socio-political perspective than a form of cheap titillation. Gossip and sensation were still controlled by corporations who doled it out only as they saw fit making sure that it never affected the bottom line.

            However, we are 60 years down the road from those frosty times and marrying a communist does not move the needle of indignation as it once did. The Internet, blogging, Twitter, Facebook and social networking in general have leveled the playing field so much that in order to illicit any attention from information’s gatekeepers outrageous behavior has to be commensurate to the spirit of the times.

            Public nudity, public drunkenness, serial philandering, nature defying plastic surgery, in your face, stone cold, narcissistic preening, sex tape production and distribution are the conduits today as no self respecting ingénue with a movie deal and zero acting chops would ever think of attempting to master that craft through study and hard work thereby legitimately advancing a career when getting out of a limo with her lint trap in full display completely shorn of evolution’s prefernce does the same service at a fraction of the cost.

            Miley Cyrus’ recent foray into the world of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing evidenced by her adumbrated adoration of a very impersonal sexual style, is a great example to what extremes celebrities will go to never be forgotten. In my view she didn’t go nearly far enough. Nothing short of sexual congress was what the crowd deep down really wanted to see. With porn having gone mainstream, when Dame Judy Dench and Jenna Jameson are mentioned in the same conversation, what’s the rumpus? Robin Thicke, no shrinking violet himself, might have obliged Miss Cyrus’ cottage cheese if his manager could guarantee him that by hiding his salami a few more units would be moved.

            When insignificance, more than money, is intensified by the gargantuan explosion of a world wide soapbox and any self proclaimed genius/god (Kanye West is just another genius/god who likes white women with big asses) can declare the truth to the satisfaction of their lonely disciples, it is no longer any wonder that now it’s the surface that garners the platitudes.

            Quality and artistry is no longer a consideration in the public discourse. We are more interested in side boob, baby bumps, box office returns, and red carpet. The faux has become real. The culture’s soundtrack has officially been auto tuned.

            Today, if you make one porn film you’re automatically a porn star. What happened to just being a good porn actor? I mean, didn’t it used to be about the work?

Self-Inflicted Facials By Untalented Narcissists

             A guy called to tell me that he wanted to remain anonymous. He also said not to mention this to anyone.

            How would it be if humbleness and anonymity were the precedence of the day, quiet contemplation naturally sought out by the masses? Instead we prefer the gush of imbecilic declarations that rain 25/8 from the bilges of Facebook and Twitter. Proclamations so bereft of substance and meaning it’s as if the world of social networking was in fact an insane asylum inhabited 50/50 by patients either suffering from logorrhea or echolalia.

            Why can’t man ever be quiet? Why does he need to constantly crow about insipid inconsequence when deep down he knows that it is just that? Are there forces beyond his control that prohibit him from remaining so?

            It is certainly safe to say that I don’t know shit from Shinola as past experiments by greater men than I have proven, but come on, is this the best we can do with our idle time, posting the sleep from our eyes as if was shouted from Mount Olympus? Not every dried up pebble of quotidian toe jam that rises out from the deep fissures of our gray matter is meaningful or in anyway thoughtful or can be misconstrued as a meditation on the vagaries of existence, but is pure bullshit that only in the end does a huge disservice to existence itself as it tries in vain to get its own meaningful face time with the public.

            Granted, I do not have to participate in either empty experience, Facebook or Twitter, but the feeling of insignificance is a powerful thing, ask anyone who has ever sat in the audience of “Ellen” where the Stockholm syndrome is happily played out everyday. Squealing and screaming has replaced applause. The performer/audience dynamic has become interactive. Whistling, whooping and caterwauling are de rigueur at today’s live tapings. Audience members do not want to miss an opportunity to prove to the world that they in fact do exist. And what better way to prove it than acting out in a situation that will be recorded for posterity?

            Watch any golf tournament on television. When a player takes a shot you will are greeted by an assortment of assholes screaming, “You da man!”, “Bababooey!” or Get in the hole!”, DVRs at home recording all of it so future generations have proof (future generations to mean the spawn and grandspawns of each of these particles of dust) that these drunken sots were participants in the surface show and not more accurately described as merely carbon based matter in the cosmos.

            Every human being has to battle this feeling from time to time. It is not easy putting your pants on everyday and convincing yourself that if I follow the script I will be duly rewarded. Still, your mewling about your cat or some pithy epigram cadged from a website that traffics in such does not make you insightful. That shit just jams up the roads to communication even more. 

            Instead of getting down to the nitty-gritty, social networking is a canard, an illusion that any of it has meaning. Serious discourse need not apply. The Real Housewives are the touchstones now and Andy Cohen is the MC of this circus with the tertiary stage syphilis.

            My advice? Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! Fuck your lowbrow political views and your poorly nuanced diatribes excoriating filmmakers for poor casting choices. Take your hand out of your goddamn pants for a while. No one wants your opinion because it is most likely not even yours just something assigned to you along the way on your long, slow, steady, fade to oblivion.

            However, If you still feel the need to exculpate yourself on Facebook or Twitter try posting something transcendent, by doing so maybe a dent might begin to appear in the iron mask of indifference. If this is beyond your ken please, please, post nothing at all. As Mr. T made so manifestly clear, “I’m tired of yo jibba jabba!”

           

            I will leave you now with something hopefully transcendent, a little ditty I composed while ripping a chimp this morning and it goes like this: The world only ends when there is no more money left to be made.

...that's a piece of shit with a band around it!

             Martin Short was on Letterman the other night and for my money still delivers the goods in a hilarious and very cool way. He's in his 60's now and is still hipper and vital than most of the current breed of hipper than thou slackers who rip and riff on the vox populi when in many ways they are in similar lock down too. Martin Short is one of the last descendants from Jack Benny and Bob Hope carrying on a comedy tradition that will disappear when he is laid to rest. Short can do it all, sing, dance, tell jokes, sketch act with such a high degree of talent and youthful exuberance that you begin to wonder how far entertaining in the classic sense has fallen in the last 30 years.

            First, there is very little physical comedy anymore. Pratfalling once a staple in a performer’s arsenal doesn’t exist. Instead we are treated to high-energy jibber jabber from stationary stand ups who for the most part never venture very far from the anchor of the mic stand.

            Secondly, comedy is completely niche now. Fan demographics are reduced to slivers as many comics draw audiences to live shows more by the heft of their social networking skills then by their abilities as stand up comics.

            While the demographics have splintered so finely, the types of comedy practiced has exploded exponentially too.  Today there are comedians who only do angry, or awkward, or nerd, or Goth, or confessional, or gay, or sports oriented comedy, never concerning themselves with narrowing down the comedy experience. No universal truths are told to the widest swath, just knowing chuckles from special interests. When I was young, comedians had the ability to span generations making laugh any and all that would watch. These performers had the skills to entertain disparate audiences. They could work clean or dirty with equal aplomb, do impressions, sing or dance in a pinch and were happy to employ any and all of their abilities to entertain an audience. Crowd pleasing, a term anathema to today's artist/comedian, is the dirtiest word as if there is something wrong with a crowd leaving a show pleased.

            What Martin Short does is universal. It will never, not be funny. This is an incredibly hard thing to achieve. If you listen to an old Sam Kinison CD or even a Richard Pryor CD, in my opinion, the shit doesn’t hold up. It is not the fault of either comedian. The fault lies with the evanescence of the medium itself. The laughs you hear on the recordings are laughs representative of the times in which they were recorded. This is the case for a very high majority of comedians both famous and unknown. The laughs don’t make it out of the times in which they were first heard.

            How many comedy records can you name that stand the test of time? Records that do not sound dated that transcend shifts in their own respective zeitgeists? Exactly two...Woody Allen's the Nightclub Years and Rodney Dangerfield's No Respect. I know there are probably a few more, but you get my point. The rest languish untouched in that giant "any CD for a dollar" bin at Wal-Mart. Even a giant like Bill Cosby suffers under close scrutiny. His “Noah” bit that was so loved in the mid sixties is excruciating to listen to today. Lenny Bruce, a face that would grace most comedy Mount Rushmore’s, if you’ve ever listened to any of his material, (I suggest the famous Palladium bit, 17 minutes long and so hip it can seem like drudgery getting through it) there are very few big yocks, because Lenny, like most comedians, was only specific to his times.

            In today's fractured comedy landscape if you are not confessing deep personal anecdotes, heightened and intensified for maximum impact, something perhaps about the unsolicited Rolfing you received by an overly affectionate uncle, or how you hilariously shit the bed when you were positive it was a fart, it is not comedy. What’s wrong with just being funny for funny’s sake? What about humor that is not embedded with the bitterness of failed dreams, but is funny for the very reason it is not…

            At the end of my run as a comedy club owner I remember how disheartened I felt watching the shows I was booking. These comics were getting the laughs they were hired to get. The audiences seemed to enjoy the product, but after 30 years the times were dictating the comedy subject matter more than ever. Most comedians were happy satisfying the crowd in the most basic ways imaginable. Unique styles were few and far between and as a result a shroud of homogenization descended. The comedians knew the laughs were easy now all you had to do was reference the sad meltdowns of marginal celebrities or reality show freaks.

            At a show one night I recall thinking to myself, "Man, I would kill right now for one good mother-in-law joke!”  By that I meant a joke that was funny 50 years ago, funny now and funny 50 years from now.

            Some comic on a cable stand up show recently was talking about women with big pussies and was wondering how great it would be if you could wear them as hats in the winter time when that jones for little old school began to itch. You know, some glistening one liner that wasn’t a slave to the times, a joke that was so well conceived, disguised and written no one was immune, a little confection so perfectly crafted its simplicity defies description, but the result of which is as resounding and total as anything any real comedian could ever hoped for, appeared in my mind's eye. I originally heard this jewel told by Milton Berle; In 1972 I was in Miami Beach during college spring break. All of my pals were in Fort Lauderdale chasing girls, as is the accepted practice during this particular week, but not me.  Uncle Miltie was performing at the Deauville Hotel. Jerry Lewis was opening the show. The girls can wait. I was hooked on stand up.

            Not a natural stand up Lewis was just OK. It was more about seeing a a star than the actual result, but Berle was a revelation especially at the end when he unleashed this perfect example of everything you’d ever need to know about the perfect joke. At the end of his set Berle pulls out a cigar from the inside of his tuxedo jacket pocket. He begins to unwrap the cellophane from this particular cheroot and as he does begins, “People always ask me what kind of cigars do I like to smoke. Well actually my favorite is this one right here. It’s called a Lawrence Welk* cigar...you know what a Lawrence Welk cigar is...? That's a piece of shit with a band around it!"

I rest my case.

* Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American bandleader who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982. Welk was a purveyor of mostly uninspired, satiny arranged musical treacle catering to a predominantly white musical taste that came to be known to his large number of fans (and critics) as "champagne music".

Alas, And Yet...

            There’s a particularly nasty stretch of road I drive almost everyday that puts into perspective what lack of imagination and complete disregard commercial man has for his environment and certainly the times he lives in. This 5 mile excursion is hardly one, but more like a journey to hell and back with some painful root canal thrown in for good measure just to make sure you know that any redemption for man’s abdication of his reason to be is not on the truck scheduled for delivery.

            Low slung, corrugated, metal buildings, strip malls, bail bondsmen, muffler shops, fast food emporiums and an endless run of telephone poles and jury-rigged power lines dot this corridor. Continuously shaking my head back and forth everyday as I drive is the only way I can make sure that I will never allow my self to accept this dearth of creativity as normal…which it is not.

            This bust out of a boulevard is a synecdoche representing all that is wrong with the world at the surface and to not bring it to justice is tantamount to permitting NAMBLA the North American Man Boy Love Association manifest destiny. Perhaps not as grave as that since these pederasts are not that ambitious otherwise there'd be CAMBLA in Central America and SAMBLA in South America, but you get the point.

            This result of such low derivation is not limited to my particular slice of shit, but is a virus that stretches from coast to coast. Travel to Anytown, USA and you will be greeted by the same low grade symptoms, bad architecture, whored out commercial grabs, rickety infrastructure, poor traffic flow and no one seems care. The only thing municipalities care about is the tax base they receive from these poorly designed projects, monies that keeps their particular turd afloat for a few more decades.

            The first ring of suburban expansion 60 years ago is now a ghetto. In some megalopolis’ (LA/ San Diego, New York City/Washington DC, Atlanta) suburban enclaves are out to the 5^th ring of expansion since WW2 with commuters willing to drive up to 2 hours each way to escape the encroaching decrepitude of the last poorly designed ring.

            The mind reels when thinking about how much bullshit the average suburban grunt is willing to negotiate on a daily basis. There is virtually no ease of movement or convenience in most large cosmopolitan cities. Environmental considerations are given short shrift or in some cases no shrift at all. New developments are designed strictly for commerce, humans are only considered in the equation on a cursory level. It is depressing beyond words that the sane response is to become inured to it. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Keep your eyes on the road where they should be. It is not your job to wonder. Leave that to the ivy covered eggheads wherever they do their advanced figurin’.

            What’s the alternative? Is there a better way to live even in this mess? Most would say that it is what it is and you can’t fight these giant Leviathans. They have the money and influence to do what ever they’d like and if Wal-mart is what they like Wal-mart is what you get. This is exactly what corporate America counts on the customer giving up on earth for a chance at the grand prize an all expenses paid trip to heaven.

            Our expectations are so low. Casinos, stadiums, convention centers, lifestyle villages, Mega-churches while public libraries are desperate to keep their doors open. If this is the best we can do, what is the endgame?

            Maybe the endgame is already upon us and heaven for eternity is the grand prize while mortal life is merely a speed bump on the way.

Alas, and yet...

The Social Contract As Gangster

"Don't chu get it, you prick? You got a home, car, businesses, family, n' I own

the paper on your whole fuckin' life."  From the film Thief - Leo speaking to Frank

            In Michael Mann’s film Thief there is a scene where James Caan’s character Frank, a career thief of high end merchandise (diamonds, jewelry etc…) has been working for Leo played with percolating menace by the late Robert Prosky. Frank is meeting with Leo to get what he thinks is the 900K cut he is due for a job he has just successfully pulled off. Leo hands him a paper bag, but upon a cursory glance knows there’s far less than the agreed upon amount inside:

Frank: Where's the rest?

Leo: Don't worry about it.

Frank: What is this?

Leo: This is the cash part.

Frank: Well, you're light. 's supposed be here, and l count, what…         .

Leo: Cos l put you into the Jacksonville, Fort Worth and Davenport shopping centers. I

take care of my people. You can ask these guys. Papers are at your house. It's a

limited partnership with a subchapter S corporation. You've got equity with me in

that.

Frank: Well, count me out.

Leo: I thought we had this good thing. Plus we got a  major score in Palm Beach for

you in six weeks.

Frank: You talkin' to me, or somebody else walk in this room?

Leo: What's that supposed to mean?

Frank: It means you are dreaming. This is payday. It is over.

Leo: You know, when you have trouble with the cops, you pay 'em off like everybody

else because that's the way things are done. But not you, huh?

Frank: No. They don't run me and you don't run me.

Leo: I give you houses. I give you a car. You're family. I thought you'd come around.

What the hell is this? Where is gratitude?

Frank: Where is my end?

Leo: You can't see day for night.

Frank: I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.

What gratitude?  You're making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat.

But that is OK, because l elected it to make that deal. But now the deal is over.

I want my end, and l am out.

Leo: Why don't you join a labor union?

Frank: I am wearing it.

            Even the gangster world is not immune to the social contract. Leo, despite his

Ill-gotten gains, still believes in the eminently American traditions of dedication to family, real estate investment and consumerism. He can’t fathom why Frank has no interest in signing the same contract and instead wants to remain independent. Granted Frank was a thief and that the gangster life is fraught with perils of a different order, but think about how that same concept, accepting the social contract plays into our own lives everyday.

            The social contract we sign in many ways could easily have been written up and executed down at the crossroads with the devil as notary. True from an evolutionary/business standpoint it makes better sense to behave and conform to a set of standards. Things run smoother. Chaos doesn’t reign. Agreements on how to behave in a society are the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keeps the culture from jumping the rail.

But at what cost to humanity?

            Think how it would it be to spend a lifetime toeing the line. You cross every T, you dot every I and never, ever question the status quo. Well, most of us do not have to think very hard about it as we are already many years into this scenario. Worshipping, belonging to clubs, attending funerals, celebrating holidays, rooting for sports teams, each act is prescribed by the culture as a rewarded behavior, the reward receiving designation as a card carrying person in good stead, accepted and validated by all of the other actors in the play.

            Well, I surely don’t feel this way. I never have. I will admit that I’m in the show, but still have no interest in its outcome.

            If you spend anytime contemplating the environment in which you live, it is safe to say that in many ways we are trapped like rats. Automobile traffic is worse by the day. Retail expansion chokes out nature. Technology divides instead of uniting. All of this devolution is in plain view, yet we accept it as if it is in our best interests because we haven’t a clue what our best interests are.

            According to Michel Foucault mental illness really exploded after the start of the Industrial Revolution as humans were reduced to widgets in a machine that produced widgets, willingly renouncing their own humanity in exchange for the comfort of a weekly paycheck.

            For capital, a human 3^rd dimension was no longer desirable or needed. Unbridled creativity became anathema to the growth of the machine and was soon replaced by automatons prized for their rote thinking and obeisance.

            In the end all Frank wanted was the money that was the yield from his labor. Leo as capital wasn’t interested in paying an independent contractor. Capital needs to control the vertical and horizontal at all costs even if that means excising any and all that will not sign the contract.

            What’s the problem? It’s a simple matter really. Sign the contract! Join the party! Forget about your dreams! Watch the game! Eat some nachos! Sign the contract! Forget about your dreams! Watch the game! Eat some nachos! Rinse and repeat…

           

To All The Credentialed Assholes In The World And Especially Mine!

With apologies to Charles Bukowski

 “Short Is My Date, But Deathless My Renown.” – Homer

            If you’ve ever spent any time in the halls of academia then you know laughs are very often in short supply. Dip into any treatise by any of the greatest philosophical minds in recorded history and the thing you notice first is that there are no jokes! There is nary a simile or metaphor with the ultimate goal of a punchline in sight, lest these mavens risk being labeled a second banana by the hooded poobahs in their own particular fields. Laughs or lightness of being is verboten, these slingers of syllogistic Silly Putty prefer instead to plow an arid field of obtuseness that is only accessible to homosexual geniuses and consumptive Danes. The work is brilliant by any standard, but often badly written allowing the reader to ultimately query, why doesn’t somebody punch this shit up?

            I have spent some time with a few academics and to a man blunted affect would be a step up so desperate are their personalities for a 3^rd dimension. Forget about regaling them with a joke like The Aristocrats. Academics don’t like jokes and wouldn’t get it even if the part where the whole family closes its audition by sucking each other off in a tumbling daisy chain was performed by the stock company of the Old Vic.

            Humor is to academia what oil is to a brick. Academia never gets near the deep end of dark humorous perversity unless we are talking about an assortment of Danish offered by a Richard von Krafft-Ebbing. Academics like to keep it tight and lofty. For all of their pronouncements of wanting to change the world with their theorems and postulations deep down it is the elitist posture they truly enjoy, as for the masses, let them revolt.

            It is the sheepskin that separates the intellectually divine from the mere intellectually omnivorous in the minds of the state and ivory towers. However, there are few academics I would hasten to go toe to toe with so confident am I in the depth and breadth of what I have been studying and contemplating the past 20 years. I know this sounds like some cockamamie bullshit, but I assure you professor with the pipe, serious goatee and tweed jacket it is not.

            Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade and philosopher by avocation, miraculously axed out a place for himself in the pantheon with a book in 1951 titled The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements. Today, the non-credentialed thinker fights a Sisyphean battle for recognition in the academic world because of the way the tentacles of capitalism have kept a chokehold on university accreditation. You are not saleable without a degree.

            Add a little matter of basic transference to the equation and its no wonder that some of the best and brightest minds do their work in badly paneled basements, ululating brilliant observations into the soundproof void of indifference, either by circumstance or choice, will never be anointed by corporate academia.

            It’s not academia, the university as universe, all-inclusive, open to experience, champion of the common good, it is in corporate academia where the stars shine, tenured academes with multiple degrees who strut there stuff like they are on a intellectual catwalk. Other great minds, wherever they are, must stay wherever they are because in a capitalist system it is the corporation that defines and maintains the paradigm of any industry including higher education.

            Academics are the ones who concern themselves most with Homer’s epigram. The rest of us ponder the imponderable like poets, laying on the grass on a warm summer day, hands behind our heads, gazing up into the cosmos where the real show is and not nose deep in some ancient dusty tome, alone in a dark, marbled, echo-ey hall peering over a pair of half glasses thinking that you and only you have got the secret to the sauce.

            As for my own non-credentialed academic life, but eminently credentialed asshole, I’ll take my asshole any old day because it produces pure 100% grade A shit with no filler and no bi-products.

Death Will Be My Santa Claus

When will it all end this great congestion, this constipation, this low hum that is daily life? 24/7 we are bombarded with a meringue of insignificance. Where is it all heading, the consuming, the making of garbage? Where is the time to lollygag or to think great thoughts or not so great thoughts? Can’t I spend a few hours not giving a shit? Can’t I just jack off for the sake of jacking off? Must it all have consequences?

Are you as sick of it as I am the never-ending din that threatens to choke out truth and beauty? Where is the silence that is never heard? Daily life is the constant preparation for all of the traditions and holidays that keep our noses to the cultural grindstone.

New Year’s Day

Martin Luther King’s birthday

Groundhog’s Day

Super bowl Sunday

Ash Wednesday

Valentine’s Day

President’s day

St. Patrick’s Day

Palm Sunday

Good Friday

Easter

Passover

Opening Day

April Fools day

Earth Day

Arbor Day

Cinco de Mayo

Flag Day

Mother’s Day

Memorial Day

Father’s Day

4^th of July

Ramadan

Labor Day

Rosh Hoshana

Yom Kippur

Columbus Day

Halloween

Veteran’s Day

Thanksgiving

Pearl Harbor Day

Hanukkah

Christmas Eve

Christmas Day

Kwanzaa

In addition to all of the shit above we willingly double down:

Weekly visits to church/temple

Bar Mitzvahs

Confirmations

Births

Funerals

Christenings

Weddings

Birthday celebrations

Anniversary celebrations

College basketball

March Madness

Triple Crown of Horse Racing

Opening Day of Major League Baseball

NFL Draft

The Masters/US Open/British Open/PGA

The Australian/French/Wimbledon/US Open in tennis

The NFL season

The NBA season

The HHL season

NBA/NHL/MLB playoffs simultaneously

The NFL playoffs

That is quite a list. Modern culture is a Gordian knot of wish fulfillment. We so look forward to the events that the pleasure becomes anticipatory. The event itself never lives up to the thrill of the dream. Our culture spends so much time getting in the mood for events deep down it would 86 if had the balls. In all my adult years, there has never been a tradition or holiday that I’ve ever looked forward to…ever! To me, it is all intrusive. I never feel romantic on Valentines Day or generous during the holidays. Do I give thanks on Thanksgiving? Hardly! Mother’s day is a motherfucker. Super Bowl Sunday is almost a national holiday. To me these culturally sanctioned moments are just another way to blow a few sawbucks.

I’m a goddamn curmudgeon to be sure in the commercial/industrial complex. The game called modern life is a rigged one. The winners are the ones who are willing to embrace the warm treacle of this surface. I make no apology for my feelings on the matter. I just wish sometimes that the white noise would stop and I didn’t have an opinion on the Kardshians.

Americans are a forgetful lot. Give them a case of beer, some dip and a football game to watch and all is right in America and the world. After all, America is the world. I’m just thoroughly amazed that these citizens do not crave any more sustenance than what their loyalty to the strange force that keeps the train on the track provides?

Americans are always in their seats at game time ready to live their lives through the effort of others. Does humankind really believe that by buying in to the illusion is the ticket out of Palookaville? Visit Darfur the Palookaville of The Sudan. Ask the Sudanese about their March Madness or April madness or May madness. It’s always madness in the Sudan. Do you understand? I’m talking to you, yeah you, the yutz in the Ben Roethlisberger jersey with the nacho stains…