Yee And/Or Haw

Oh, goodie, it looks like all the algorithms are agreeing that I’m interested in the lasted skirmish in the “culture wars”.

See, there’s this country song that is, somewhat unsurprisingly, violent and racist. And as the song gained traction, people pointed out that the violent, racist song was violent and racist.

So the singer responded that the song just represented small-town values, and everyone was like, “yes, we know, small town values like violence and racism.”

And then the singer said the song was about how small town people have each others backs, and everyone else was like “yes, we know, by violently beating up anyone with a different skin color than you on the mistakes belief that they’re going to do crimes and/or burn your town down like you think they did to all the cities during the George Floyd protests except that didn’t happen either.”

And then the argument somehow keeps going, because the bar for plausible deniability for America’s Nazi and Nazi-adjacent communities is so low that even wearing a swastika or quoting Hitler and getting applause for it somehow isn’t enough to settle the “are they a bad person” argument. Because making a reasonable judgment based on blatantly obvious evidence wouldn’t be “balanced”. Or drive engagement metrics.

Pointy-Headed Racist

This is super-obvious, but it bears repeating that one week ago, Scott Adams was an unhinged dingus that no publication with any of the values or principles they claimed to have THIS weekend should have been supporting in the first place  

You can be plenty awful in today’s society and still keep your core career and livelihood. You can, in fact, be MORE awful now and get away with it than you could have been at any point in the last 30 years, and the constant vilification and complaining about cancel culture (FKA political correctness) exists for the sole purpose of letting awful people get away with being awful to a degree that was formerly unacceptable.

Now, in order to suffer consequences, you have to be VERY racist in a way that gets publicly noticed to a degree that a few big players feel compelled to take public action, which creates the environment in which other, more timid big players realize that the disadvantages of not replacing Dilbert with some other bullshit the people who still read the funny pages will glance over out of habit outweigh the brief onslaught of right-wing How Dare You’s who swarm when one of Their Own is threatened.

The degree to which you have to fuck up is roughly proportional to how much money you make for other people. You make a LOT of money for other people, and you have to publicly say you like Hitler in order for capitalism to jettison you. Scott Adams makes SOME money for other people, but it’s mostly out of habit at this point, so he only had to be very, very racist on a podcast whose contents got widely publicized for him to finally be cast off.

I assume, as is traditional, that Martyr Syndrome will kick in shortly and offers to speak at a plethora of low-standard wingnut gatherings will pour in for a couple of years, since nothing Adams said falls that far outside the boundaries of mainstream conservative thought. But if this finally removes Dilbert from the public consciousness two decades after it stopped being even remotely relevant, , I’ll take it.

Tennessee Conclusion*

Memo to Tennessee: ONCE MORE IN OH FOUR!

I really thought they were going to make it through the rest of the year. I did. But the official Dumbest State in the Union could not settle with its accomplishments to date. Being the home of the class action lawsuit against Janet Jackson's right tit was not enough. Trying to ban gays from living in an entire county wasn't enough. Launching the national tour of Roy Moore's Ten Commandments and almost lynching an atheist wasn't enough.

You simply weren't racist enough, were you? Not backwards enough. Not homophobic enough. Not xenophobic enough. You won't settle for the gold medal in the Pigfucker Olympics, you've gotta set a world record. You demand more from yourselves. You give one hundred and ten percent. You are the MARK FUCKING SPITZ OF HICKDOM.

If you want to see some of the worst humanity has to offer, look no farther than Somerville, Tennessee. Somerville, which is 20 miles east of Memphis. So it's not some isolated Brigadoon. It's a half-hour at most from Graceland. Yet, when the Memphis Muslim community wanted to use a five-acre plot in Somerville for a cemetery, guess what happened?

If you guessed "they opened their arms to their fellow Americans in the spirit of goodwill that makes this country great", you haven't been reading this column for hte past year. And you may not even be reading it now. I believe it's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We don't need bin Laden's cousins in our neighborhood!" - An unidentified woman, shouting from an angry mob during a planning meeting on the cemetery proposal. FUN FACT: Tennessee is one of only three states to include "unidentified individuals shouting from an angry mob" as a recognized branch of state and local government.

Luckily, there are some Somerville residents who are only a little tiny bit ignorant and hateful. Providing this mitigating force, we turn to Herbert Howell for his insightful take on why his opposition to the plan was justified:

"We are not at war with all the Islamics. I have no problem with who they are or what they are. If it was a filling station, I wouldn't want that either." I'd like to thank Mr. Howell for keeping his racism almost entirely confined to subtext, and as a result, qualifying for membership in the Tennessee Progressives Club.

Between Howell and the Lynch Lady, opposition to the cemetery included the fear that the cemetery would become a staging ground for terrorism. Really. Apparently, in Tennessee, many people believe that Muslims set dirty bombs by gravesites instead of the more traditional bouquet of gas-station flowers.

"We know for a fact that Muslim mosques have been used as terrorist hideouts and centers for terrorist activities. Ladies and gentlemen, you may think this is far-fetched, but that is what the Jewish people thought when the Nazis started taking a small foothold, a little at a time, in their community. I don't think anyone who has read the newspaper or seen what investigations have gone on about other mosques would not have those kinds of concerns." - Farmer John "Farmer John" Wilson.

That's the kind of quote that makes you wonder if there isn't something larger at work here. What could make anyone, even someone from Tennessee, think that it's perfectly reasonable to compare your neighbors wanting to bury their dead family members to the early days of the fucking HOLOCAUST? They were building a cemetery, not a gas chamber, you stupid fuck. But maybe there is an explanation. And maybe that explanation can be found in the OTHER objection to the cemetery - that Muslims, traditionally, do not embalm their dead.

Yes, in Tennessee, it's apparently a problem when NOT ENOUGH FORMALDEHYDE leaks into the environment. embalming doesn't stop decomposition. It doesn't stop corpse molecules from making it into your tap water. But let's face it. Without all those extra chemicals, how can Tennessee retain its history, culture, and traditional way of life? By depriving Somerville residents of one of their major dietary sorces of wood alcohol, future generations of Tennesseans might have to settle for being not quite as dumb as Alabama. And we cannot let that happen.

Embalming fluid. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

*You will not get this joke. This joke is intended for 0.33% of any given day's readership.

Remembering Reggie

It's not polite to speak ill of the dead.

I mean, hell, most people didn't even speak ill of Richard Nixon after he died, which extends beyond politeness to the kind of delusional, overwrought, complex system of manners and etiquette you read about in books that get turned into Merchant-Ivory movies. You know, the stuff with the calling cards and such. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if Emily Post had OCD and managed to inflict it on an entire nation.

In the spirit of that tradition, I offer the following quotes without comment, in the interests of remembering NFL star Reggie White. YAD and Reggie only co-existed for a short time, which I think is a damn shame.

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON HOMOSEXUALITY:

"As America has permitted homosexuality to establish itself as an alternate lifestyle, it is also reeling from the frightening spread of sexually transmitted disease. Sin begets its own consequence, both on individuals and nations."

"I've often had people ask me, would you allow a homosexual to be your friend. Yes, I will. And the reason I will is because I know that that person has problems, and if I can minister to those problems, I will."

"I'm offended that homosexuals will say that homosexuals deserve rights. Any man in America deserves rights, but homosexuals are trying to compare their plight with the plight of black men or black people. In the process of history, homosexuals have never been castrated, millions of them never died. Homosexuality is a decision. It's not a race. And when you look at it, people from all different ethnic backgrounds are living this lifestyle, but people from all different ethnic backgrounds are also liars and cheaters and malicious and backstabbers."

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY GOD MADE THE RACES DIFFERENT:

"Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure."

"When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality."

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY ROME KICKED ASS:

"Rome had strong families when they first started out. It was founded on high moral standards. Each father was respected as the head of the family. In the early republic, the father had legal authority to discipline rebellious members of his family.

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY ROME STOPPED KICKING ASS:

"Number five, there was an infiltration of a lie. As Roman families prospered, it became fashionable to hire educated Greeks to care for the children. Greek philosophies, with its humanistic and garish base, was soon passed on to the Roman families.

Reggie White. Packer* Sacker**. Minister. Amateur historian. He will be missed, both by football fans and the millions of homosexuals he never got the chance to save from themselves.

---

Here's a fun little game we can play. The media helped spread two interesting ideas in the week or two before Christmas. This would be the liberal media, of course, chock full of leftists and Communists seeking to impose their ideology on Mainstream America. As a result, one of these fact should be common knowledge by know, and the other will have been almost completely ignored by the general population. Can you tell which one is which?

1 - The American Civil Liberties Union is part of an orchestrated campaign to destroy Christmas and oppress Christians by completely removing Christianity from the public sphere.

2 - The American Civil LIberties Union has, through exhaustive Freedom of Information Act requests, uncovered FBI e-mails that refer to an executive order, from the President, authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics (a.k.a. abuse and torture) for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I have to say, it's funny the way the right-wing keeps lucking out like that. I mean, a bunch of them just happened to start making the ACLU look bad over the Christmas thing, which they coincidentally happened to mostly invent in the same exact way, right before the ACLU gets ahold of documents implicating Bush in prisoner abuse. You almost can't MAKE a break that good.

---

*Strictly in a football sense.
*Also strictly in a football sense.

Peace On White Earth, Good Will Toward White Men

At this joyous time of year, as you spend time with your friends, loved ones, and family, it's important to spend a few minutes, at least, thinking about your fellow man. Boy, they sure suck, don't they?.

Or, at least 44% of your fellow man sucks. That's the number that's being widely reported as supporting the curtailing of civil liberties for America's Muslims, thanks to a recent Cornell University study. Happy Holidays, except for Ramadan! While you're breaking your month-long fasting period, we'll be hanging lights, trimming the tree, and reporting you to the authorities for being brown!

Now, with any survey like this, it's important to define terms, and not get caught up in the oversimplification inherent in the reporting. For example, "restrictions on civil liberties". Only 27% of Americans actually think that Muslims should be required to register where they live with the federal government, for example. So we can take comfort in the fact that... um... only a smidge more than a quarter of the population of the so-called "leader of the free world" support something that is COMPLETELY FUCKING APPALLING and reminiscent of Nazi Germany.*

Another tricky term to define is "Muslims", because while dictionaries agree that "Muslim" refers to someone who follows the religion of Islam, it's important to remember that many Americans define the Muslim community as "brown", "bearded", "wearing towels on their heads", or "anyone speaking a foreign language that doesn't sound like Spanish".

Twenty two percent supported "racial profiling" to identify potential terrorist threats. None of the news stories were clear about whether the 22% for profiling and the 27% for registering with the government had any overlap, but I can't imagine they would. I mean, I have a tough time imagining who that 7% of the population would be - the ones that think it's OK to make every member of a religion register with the government, but don't think they should be stopped by police every time they're seen in a car or try to get on a plane. Although if they can be proven to exist, the mythical Compassionate Conservatives may have been found at last.

Another vaguely-delineated 29% thought undercover agents should be able to infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep an eye on them. Because, you know, that worked so well in the 60's, where we defeated Communism by sneaking into civil rights groups, bugging Martin Luther King Jr., and having FBI agents grow their hair long and pretend to be hippies.

I blame Ann Coulter. Well, not specifically Ann Coulter, although anytime anything goes wrong, it's a good idea to blame Ann Coulter at least a little. Last time I broke a bowl, I blamed Ann Coulter, and it made me feel better. But the survey found a "surprising" correlation between willingness to lock up our innocent Islamic brethren and two other items - religion and television news. And who sits at the intersection of Religion Drive and CNN Lane? Ann Coulter. Ann and her ilk have coined the stupid and inaccurate word "Islamofascists", in one of the great plausible-deniability neologisms of the modern era. When a conservative says "Islamofascist", what he means is "Listen to the first two syllables, as the remaining three are just so the liberals can't call us bigots".

James Shanahan, one of the Cornell study's organizers, said"We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding." I hope that Shanahan, an associate professor at a prodigious university, was just being polite, because if he thinks we need to "explore" why both religion and TV news are spreading fear, then he needs to get an office with a window and cable.

Religion has ALWAYS used fear. For every nice congregation that talks about love and joy and the fellowship of man, there's another nutjob down the street telling you you're gonna go to hell if you voted for John Kerry. And TV news uses fear because the public are monkeys. When presented with a thing, they don't want to understand it. They just want to know whether they should eat it, run away from it, or have sex with it. TV news understands its audience, and thus feeds it stuff from all three of those categories. Mostly stuff they should run away from.

And for three-plus years, they've been told they should run away from swarthy people with beards. And now 44% of the country are more than willing to abandon fundamental principles to make sure the swarthy people with beards stay away. Not surprising, but still disappointing.

* The commonly understood, and incorrect, version of Godwin's Law states that a discussion on the Internerd end immediately when the Nazi's invoked. Luckily for me, this isn't a discussion.

Sticker Shock

Memo to Racist Hicks: YOU NEED BETTER EXCUSES.

Seriously, pigfuckers. Work on your plausible deniability. I know that you wouldn't be dipshit racist rural hicks if you had a brain in your thick, meaty heads in the first place, but where's your supposed work ethic? It may take you ten times longer to come up with an excuse for your racism that doesn't sound completely implausible, but it'll pay off in the end.

Remember the Kentucky senator's race? Where they called the senile senator's opponent "limp-wristed", a "switch hitter", and someone for whom the word "man" may not apply? It worked, and Bunning won in a squeaker. But the people who did it actually had the gall to come out and say, in their defense, that they meant none of it in a sexual way.

That's an awful excuse. Nobody believed that excuse. It was just embarassing. They didn't put any effort at all into it. Not in coming up with a slur, and not in coming up with an excuse to get out of the slur. Bunning was a major league PITCHER, for fucksake. If you can't work some gay innuendo off of THAT, you probably... live in Kentucky, actually.

Of course, even here in the northern wastes of Minnesota, we have a spiritual South. Some of it, true to its backwards nature, is actually situated way to the north. And some of it is in Mankato, south of the Olsen-Olsen line.

In Mankato, there is a mall. The River Hills mall. A for-real mall and everything, with a Sears AND a Penney's. And recruitment centers for all four branches of the military. Shockingly, no Hot Topic. Oh, and a little store called "Custom Now"*.

"Custom Now" is not, as you may think, a slightly archaic demand for people to shop there. No, it's a place that sells stuff with words on it. Presumably the usual array of Big Johnson Sex Wax shirts, local sports jerseys, and Jack Daniels labels. Maybe some of those Calvin-pissing-on-an-automaker-logo stickers. One thing Custom Now doesn't sell anymore, though, after being told to stop by the River Hills Mall management, is a certain bumper sticker.

The text of the sticker - I kid you fucking not - is as follows: "SAVE A HUNTER - SHOOT A MUNG".

Now, since half a dozen hunters were recently shot and killed in Wisconsin by a Hmong hunter from St. Paul in an incident that received national media exposure, it would be understandable for you to think that perhaps the proprietors of Custom Now decided to (a) cash in on tragedy, (b) express redneck outrage, (c) do so in a patently racist and violent way as is their wont, and (d) misspell the name of the ethnic group they were trying to slur. This is how a reasoned, rational mind takes new facts and combines them with history and experience to reach a conclusion.

If you're feeling particularly generous, you may think that the misspelling was deliberate, so that, when questioned by the media or the mall managers about why you are selling a bumper sticker full of classic American pigfuckery, you could claim in all innocence that it was a reference to the mung bean, and since beans are easier to shoot than deer, you are "saving a hunter" a great deal of frustration and a fortune in expensive deer urine. This would not be a GREAT excuse, but it would at least show a bit of initiative.

And it would be better than what Custom Now came up with. Owner Michael Baumann claims the stickers were a half-dozen leftovers from a customer's order that got put out for sale by accident. Normally, the store wouldn't even print anything racist in the first place, but the customer explained that "MUNG" stood for "Miniscule Unseen Naughty Gnat", and thus, the sticker was OK.

Credit where credit is due - whichever racist fuck came up with the sticker not only knew the word "miniscule", he knew that it meant "small". Perhaps he has had it shouted at him frequently by a series of disappointed, moderately erudite girlfriends over the years. And I can see "Gnat". After all, you live in Mankato, you need something bad that starts with the letter "G", and you know you'll get in trouble if you say "gay".

But that leaves "UN". Now, you know the United Nations is bad, after all, Norm Coleman said so, but Miniscule United Nations Gnat doesn't work. Gnats are hard to see, and hard to see is kind of like invisible... so there's Unseen! Miniscule Unseen N... Gnat. And that's when you get up to the counter and you need an "N". And you panic. Because you did not plan ahead.

And that's assuming you believe Baumann. Which is tough to do, because he's REALLY dumb. It's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"If I'd known that would have turned into a racial slur, I would never have taken the order. Our store is not a racist store. Half of our store is minority." That's a lot of stupidity in three sentences. It didn't "turn into" a racist slur when people started complaining, Baumann. It was a racist slur the instant a guy asked for a bumper sticker that joked about shooting Asian immigrants. Second, by definition, nothing can be HALF MINORITY. Learn math. And third, how large a payroll does a shitty Mankato mall printing place have? Two? Four? Giving minimum wage jobs to a whopping PAIR of Mankato's non-white community does not make you Enlightened Whitey or get you off the hook. Not the pigfucker hook, and not the DUMB hook. Next time you pull something like this, make your excuse to the press part of your plan.

In the most informative news article, the shop is named as "Custom Zone", but "Custom Now" makes for a joke you're about to read, so I'm sticking with it.

Come For The Racism, Stay For The Gay-Bashing

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Have I Mentioned We're Safer?

Memo to America: YOU ARE SAFER.

Your government is protecting you. I know I've harshed on the War on Terror in the past, but three incidents of recent diligence by America's airlines and Homeland Security forces have convinced me that... AMERICA IS SAFER.

America is safer, because middle-aged special ed teachers with bookmarks are prevented from flying.

Yes, Kathryn Harrington, a 52-year-old special education teacher from Florida, was handcuffed, placed in a holding cell, charged with posession of a banned weapon, and faced up to a $10,000 fine before the charges were, after several weeks, dropped. All because she brought a bookmark with her. A fabric, weighted bookmark. That she'd flown with before. Several times. Through the same airport.

You see, in our new, safer America, a "prohibited item" is defined as any item on a list of items not allowed on planes, plus any other item that any other minimum-wage baggage screener decides is dangerous. To keep America safe, we must prevent people who didn't realize they were terrorists from bringing items they didn't know were prohibited on planes they didn't know were incredibly vulnerable to attack by bookmarks.

As Transportation Security Agency spokesperson Lauren Stover explained, "They probably felt that this item looked fairly dangerous. It looked like a bludgeoning type of weapon that could potentially harm someone." I would like to thank Ms. Stover for clarifying what I mistakenly thought was a vague policy that could treat any item not made specifically of Nerf as a potential terrorist threat, but I see now that they've thought this through, and as a result, AMERICA IS SAFER.

America is safer, because prayers are no longer tolerated on America's airplanes.

Well, at least if they're written in a language that looks like Arabic. A Midwest Airlines flight from Milwaukee to San Francisco was grounded on Sunday because a passenger found some Arabic-looking writing in an in-flight magazine. And I'm very glad that this passenger, and the in-flight crew, were alert and on the ball, because it's a common terrorist tactic to leave little notes in obscure places on objects they plan to blow up. It's like a party game, really. Makes the terrorism seem a bit more fun, like a scavenger hunt.

The passenger, who reports say was probably not Anne "Eek! There's A Terrorist On Your Shoulder!" Jacobsen, discovered the writing as the plane pulled away from the gate. Unable to confirm through DNA sampling that everyone on the plane was, in fact, white, the trip was cancelled, and passengers were delayed by a day. The message, which was written in Farsi, which is a different language than Arabic, said... well, we don't know. Something innocuous. It was reported in the press as "something like a prayer", and "something of a contemplative nature"*. That's OK. It's not like what the message actually said was important to the story. What's important is the terrorists were stopped, and AMERICA IS SAFER.

America is safer because Cat Stevens is not allowed in this country.

You think it's bad when a contemplative Islamic message is found in an in-flight magazine? Imagine how unsafe America would be if contemplative Islamic messengers were allowed to HOLD in-flight magazines? We'd all die in a nuclear holocaust accompanied by the gentle strumming of a guitar. Yes, Yusuf "Cat Stevens" Islam, the singer and songwriter who caused a big ruckus about ten years ago when everyone thought he said things about Salman Rushdie that he didn't actually say, was flying to Washington when his plane from London was diverted to Maine, where Islam was deported and returned to Britain "because of concerns about activities that could potentially be related to terrorism." This administration is really on top of the whole "people who might have wanted to do things" problem.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Muslim convert folk singers are so dangerous, they must not be allowed into the country, except for brief stopovers in Bangor, Maine, where a bunch of fucking hippies live in anyway, so when Islam nee Stevens blows himself up with an improvised nuclear device, as so many folk singers have done before him, he won't take out anything important.

AMERICA IS SAFER. We have learned the lessons of the past, we are alert and aware, and if those crazy Muslims want to attack us, they're going to have to find something better than bookmarks, pens, and folk singers to do it with. WE'RE ON TO YOU, TERRORISTS! Watch out!

*In my own more contemplative moments, I like to think that this description could describe the phrase "Oh God, this seat makes my balls itch, but if I get up to go to the bathroom to scratch them, Anne Jacobsen will tackle me in the aisle and beat me to death with her bookmark."

BAD CALL

Today, we inaugurate the latest in a seemingly endless string of Friday gimmicks designed to ease the tired brain of your weary columnist: BAD CALL FRIDAY. Where I go through and single out individuals in the world who have, perhaps, shown poor judgment, or made a... BAD CALL.

Like whoever lets Dubya out of his fucking cage and allows him to open his mouth. While signing into law the spending of four. Hundred. Billion. Dollars, ol' cottonmouth told Pentagon officials: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." This is the guy that gets to sign the four hundred billion dollar checks, folks.

It's not even a traditional Dubya fuckup! Look at the sentence... it's deliberately employing that politician-speak rhetorical device where rhythms are repeated. The ending with "and so are we" twice is a classic speech thing. It's just horrendously misapplied. A professional speechwriter would have caught that, which means a professional writer didn't script Bush's speech, which means they're letting him make up his own words. During an election year, no less. What were they thinking? Putting Bush in charge of his own mouth is always a... BAD CALL.

Moving to the other end of the political spectrum, we look at sex columnist Dan Savage. I like Dan Savage, I really do, but he's been doing this long enough to know not to submit a paragraph like the following, from this past Wednesday's column, to his editor:

"But there's always a catch: I've never actually seen an extremely beautiful goth girl myself--most of them seem to have weight problems, which has always struck me as strangely contradictory. From the neck up, the look cultivated by goth girls seems to say, 'Oh, we despair of this world and long for the sweet embrace of death!' From the neck down, their look seems to say, 'I'll take the bacon cheeseburger, two orders of fries, and a Diet Coke, please.'"

Dan, Dan, Dan. Why would you do this? Are you feeling tired? About to go on vacation? Trying to fill your next two columns with angry e-mails denouncing you for being an insensitive prick? You gotta know you're gonna get letters when you say something like that. You always get letters when you say something like that. I know this, and I -never- get letters.

Plus, fat jokes? Making fun of goth chicks for being fat is like making fun of Dubya for his receding hairline. It may be technically true in certain cases, but come on. That's not where you go. You make fun of goths for treating unhappiness like a lifestyle choice. You make fun of goths for being in front of you in line at Hot Topic when all you want is a goddamn Brak T-shirt. You make fun of goths for still thinking Trent Reznor had something to say. You make fun of goth nerds who do live-action vampire roleplaying and then tell you about everything that happened to their characters the next day. Making fun of goths for being overweight is just a... BAD CALL.

Of course, as bad calls go, you can't get much worse than Joe Brown, city council chairman, Memphis, Tennessee. Hey, look! It's Tennessee again! Didn't you just try to lynch an atheist a few days ago, Tennessee? You've got to pace yourself. At this rate, you'll be too stupided out to do anything retarded in November and December. You don't sprint during a marathon, son.

Joe Brown was in City Hall a few days ago when seven Iraqis came to visit. They had an appointment with a city councilman. They'd been brought in by the United States government, and were touring the country to learn how our form of government works. And, to be fair, they got an accurate picture from Joe Brown, who, in a triumph of local control over federal mandates, refused to let those damn dirty Iraqis in the building.

In fact, in a move that I think really exemplifies the concept of "Southern Hospitality", he threatened to evacuate the building and call the bomb squad if they set foot in City Hall, and said, "We don't know exactly what's going on. Who knows about the delegation, and has the FBI been informed? We must secure and protect all the employees in that building." It's ironic, really, that someone named Joe Brown would have an irrational fear and hatred of people who share the trait embodied by his OWN FUCKING LAST NAME.

And that, my friends, is why Memphis is famous for GRACEland. What better way to show graciousness and willingness to help the people we've allegedly liberated than to have a screaming, Anne Jacobsen-style panic fit when they come for a visit. Brown has since been forced to apologize, but even by the lower standards I set for Tennessee in general, I'm afraid Joe Brown made a.... BAD CALL.

And Cracker McCracker As... The Racist

Memo To Texas: HERE WE GO AGAIN.

All right. Time to stop picking on poor Halle Berry, even though she's dumb and crazy and runs into things a lot with her car. It's time for a good old round of one of You Are Dumb Dot Net's favorite pastimes, KICK THE REDNECKS.

Since my plan to incorporate a sterility-inducing quantity of radium into the pressing process for the "Blue Collar Comics" DVD ended in dismal failure in no small part due to having thought of it after the stupid thing came out, I am forced, once again, to use this column as my sole vehicle for revenge against the mostly white, mostly southern, mostly male, mostly NASCAR-watching, mostly hootenannying hordes that embrace racism, stupidity, and pleistocine culture as their inalienable heritage. Plus, they keep giving Jeff Foxworthy money, and that's just fucking inexcusable.

Today, our ire returns to Texas, where the famed Yellow Rose is apparently made that way with an excess of chromium-laced paint, and where the natives then apparently gobble the roses down like White Castle sliders. Specifically, scenic Beaumont, Texas. Named after Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward "Lord Of All Repressed White Males" Cleaver, Beaumont is home to an astonishing array of beauty and culture.

Well, OK. They've got "Ford Park Entertainment Complex", which at first glance seems to be a pickups-instead-of-chocolate version of Hershey Park, but instead is just some form of low-rent arena where you can go hear Aaron Carter sing on August 14. They also have (and this is all going off the official Beaumont website, which is startlingly difficult to glean actual information from) a giant fire-hydrant-shaped building or silo painted like a cow; the Beaumont Drillers, which is either a sports team or a live sex show; the Texas Wildcatters, which is again either a sports team or a live sex show; and an active natural hazard mitigation plan of some sort.

Oh, and Jap Road. But if you want to see historic Jap Road, you'd better get down to Beaumont fast, because this piece of local history is about to be wiped off the map, literally, by a bunch of pinko commie P.C. liberals who don't understand how important Jap Road is.

Jap Road is a small country lane in Beaumont, allegedly taking its colorful name in honor of Yoshio Mayumi, who introduced rice farming to the region. No, really. It comes from a quaint time in Beaumont's past when you could honor someone simply by referring to their ancestry in a derogatory manner. This time is referred to by locals as "Last Tuesday".

But finally, after a ten-year fight, in a FOUR TO THREE DECISION, the local county commissioners decided they should change the name to something less offensive. Popular suggestions by locals include Yellowman Ave, Slanteye Lane, Pokemon Plaza, and We'llkickyourassifyoubuyatoyota Boulevard. But no new name can salve the loss from locals who, when Jap Road vanishes, will take a part of their history with it.

"It's our history, it's our heritage. I can remember when it was a dirt road, now it's being portrayed as a racial divide between us and the Japanese-Americans," said Jap Road resident Earl Callahan. Some say Callahan, who's lived on Jap Road all his life, was incensed because he'd just ordered four reams of custom "wacky" stationery with his address on it from Abercrombie and Fitch.

But the County Commission, apparently having read my previous statements on the South, decided that even though none of the residents of Beaumont, TX would ever consider even thinking about being racist, especially to those nice Japanese people, they should probably change the name to keep them from looking like complete and utter redneck hicks. But Jason Marshbum, whose last name sounds like a British euphemism for diarrhea, didn't get that particular memo.

"It feels like we're in the middle of a George Orwell novel. It's like me suing Keebler or Nabisco because the word 'cracker' is offensive to us white people." Yes, it's exactly like that, except for there being no actual food product named "Jap" that the road was really named for, you fucking cracker. If you're going to name-drop George Orwell in an attempt to distract people from the pig attached to your crotch, you should have someone read one of his books to you first.

Stanek-Whiners

Memo to the Stanek-whiners: YOU ARE DUMB.

But first, some housekeeping. I skipped a day yesterday. Depending on how long you have been reading YAD, you may have found this strange or abnormal, but it's simply one of the side effects of the You Are Dumb Dot Net Pledge Of Internet Anger Quality, by which you, the reader, deserve a minimum standard of a half-assed column.

Unlike many Internet content providers, I understand the complex balancing act that comes from both wanting content that doesn't suck too, too badly, and the desire to read something, ANYTHING, you haven't read before instead of working. And that's why I promise you, my loyal readers, who stopped by multiple times yesterday to see if I'd managed to pull something out of my butt yet, that if I can't even half-ass 500 words of anger, profanity, and neologisms, then it's best for everyone that I just let it be. You deserve better. You deserve at least the bare minimum of motivation and effort that I can scrape up. I can only bitch about game reviews so many times before you all turn on me and set me on fire, after all.

And anyway, I skipped a Wednesday. Wednesday is New Onion Day. So it's not like you didn't have options.

With that out of the way, we turn to the delicate issue of the Stanek-whiners. Which, for non-Minnesotans and locals who don't follow the news, requires a bit of an explanation.

Rich Stanek was Gov. Pawlenty's choice to become Commissioner of Public Safety. Gov. Pawlenty, for those who may not know, is an asshole. Seriously. You all made fun of us for picking Jesse Ventura, but at least he was the kind of asshole you could respect. Pawlenty's just a classic "fuck all y'all" Modern Republican cronyist fuckwad. Jesse did a lot of stuff I didn't like, but there's no way in hell he'd be running around scraping up money for stadiums, attacking gay marriage, screwing over the poor... as much, and appointing racist cops.

Rich Stanek was a racist cop, you see. Twelve years ago, in a police brutality suit which alleged that Stanek beat the living hell out of a melatonin-rich individual who hit his car, Stanek gave a deposition. And in that deposition, he admitted to telling racist jokes and throwing the n-word around like it was confetti at the Macy's parade. Oh, and this was the second time he'd been sued for beating up someone he'd stopped for DWB.

So this came out. Again. And all the people who should have cared each of the FIVE TIMES he won elections to the state House and this came up finally got their act together, and it got some play in the media, and he resigned. And then the fucking whiners came out of the woodwork.

Biggest whiner of all, of course, was Pawlenty, who started off talking about how concerned he was, and how problematic this was, and the public trust, and how he just found out about this horrible thing when it hit big. A few days later, seeing the whining take hold, he changed his tone. He didn't accept the resignation of his racist cop because he was a racist cop, you see. It's just that people get so upset by racist cops that it would have been difficult for him to get confirmed by the legislature.

"He's changed." "That was 12 years ago." "Watch what you say!" "Political correctness ruining people's lives!" "Partisan warfare!" WHINERS. Stick a plunger in it. Stanek is not some kind of horrible victim here. He gets his old job back (although people are making a bit of a stink about that now, too, so who knows?) A guy who fails to secure a high-paid, high-profile government job merely he beat up a couple of black people and called them names in the 90's is not a CAUSE. This is a bit of karmic payback. You think the $55,000 needed to settle the two brutality suits came out of HIS pocket? No, it came out of the department budget. Which means it came out of OUR POCKETS. And then, for a decade, he got to help make the laws of the state.

Do you hear that? I believe it's an iPod Mini, taken to the lab from Fantastic Voyage, and shrunk down to the size of a red blood cell. And through the tiny, tiny headphones plugged into it, you can hear a low-bitrate MP3 file in which they recorded the world's smallest violin playing the saddest song in the universe. Poor Rich Stanek.

"He's changed." "That was a long time ago." "What about redemption?" Fuck that noise. Even if he's a completely changed man, he was a RACIST COP. On the big list of things that keep us from glorious Utopia, racist cops are easily in the top ten. Racist cops ruin lives permanently. It's taken TWELVE YEARS for this to catch up with Stanek, for him to finally start seeing some consequences, and you whining bastards think he should get a pass now, too? YOU ARE DUMB.

Details

Memo to Details Magazine: YOU ARE DUMB.

Today's article requires a visual aid, in the form of a whopping big JPG of a page scanned from the most recent issue of Details, one of those mens' magazines for insecure fuckheads. So click on the link below and have it open for reference.

Gay or Asian?

Ah, where to begin. There's so very much to hate, so very much that is stupid on this page that it's difficult know how to start. So we'll have to rely on standard conventions - top to bottom, left to right.

"Anthropology". That's precisely the kind of faux-ironic dressing up of your comedy as science that gives dressing up your comedy as science a bad name. Right off the bat, they're ruining it for the rest of us who use the power for good. Assholes. This also gives us our first hint of the "OH GOD AREN'T WE CLEVER" attitude that will become more important as we move down the page.

Since we're dealing with an Asian dude, the first stereotype out of the box is... yes, Chinese food. And the second stereotype out of the box is... YES, CHINESE FOOD. This page commits many crimes and sins as it is. Was it really a good idea to compound it with repetition right out of the gate? I think not.

The men's magazine then takes its first shot at the scary homosexuals with "shaved balls". It's funny, but every time I've seen an article this year about the increasing trend of male pube-trimming, it's always been straight guys hopping on the bandwagon. I guess I'm not nearly as in touch with the culture as Details.

"...entering the dragon requires imperial tastes." I don't even get this. I mean, OK, vague connection between Bruce Lee movie (Martial Arts! A totally unexpected turn!) title and some form of penetration, but the whole thing doesn't actually match up to any standards of comedy (or, really English) logic.

"Choke up on your chopsticks, and make sure your labels are showing." So we have a baseball term for gripping a long, hard shaft, a THIRD reference to Chinese food, and some kind of dig at designer-fetishism. Obviously, Ms. Mcnally feels she's on a roll, and decides to hit for the bleachers with...

YES! The fortune cookie sage aphorism, complete with David Carradine overtones, ending with a dick joke! To use my own sports analogy here, this is the comedy equivalent of Greg Louganis hitting his head on the diving board on the way down. Complete with the horrified splash as the joke makes its final impact with the pool.

Now we turn to the poor model, who probably had no idea he'd be used for something like this, and whose clothes are then made fun of by Whitmey. One would assume, being in the magazine business, Whitney would be aware that models never actually pick out their own clothes, but whatever.

Let's just run down the offense tallies on both sides of the aisle to save time.

Asian: Inscrutable. Check. Obsession with American stars. Check. Accent-mocking. Check. Asian food references four and five. Karate Kid, Last Samurai, Pink Lady namedrops - check, check, and check. And don't forget the bonsai!

Gay: Reference to fringe sexual practice - check. Fashion references two through seven inclusive - check. Dick joke #2. Check. Mentioning the ass at least once... almost didn't get that in there, but YES. Checklist complete.

Sweet fuck, that's trite. I mean, essentially, there are FOUR jokes on the entire page: "Asians make Asian food.", "Asians know kung fu.", "Gay guys like clothes.", and "Gay guys like dick." That's what the whole thing boils down to. I mean, if you're going to incur the wrath of two entire communities, and they did, wouldn't you at least want it to be from something daring? Something bold? Something even remotely... funny?

Here, by the way, is apparently how they plan to "apologize".

"The "Gay or Asian?" item in our April issue was part of a continuing feature that is intended as a humorous swipe at social stereotypes. Details has a wide readership?male, female, straight, gay?from all cultures, and we value all of them. We appreciate the substantial feedback on this item that we have received, and we will certainly keep those concerns in mind as we move forward. We regret that anyone was offended by the article, as that was not our intention."

TRANSLATION: Um, we were making fun OF stereotypes, really, not making fun USING them. We love everyone who gives us money! It wasn't our fault, and why are you so damn sensitive, anyway? Oh, and we're gonna keep doing it.

Dumb or smart? You make the call. Oh, wait. That's my job. DUMB.