Love is a Battlefield

He hasn’t met Flying Chainsaw, has he?

Evolutionary Biologist are testing the hypothesis that culture is actually a protective factor that develops to protect us from extinction.

All I care to know about this book is to look at the other authors selling books on Amazon to the same people who buy this one. Ann Coulter. Dick Morris. Bill O’Reilly. You know, all of the most even-handed and fair-minded giants of literature in the world.

Thank you Mr. Goldberg for giving me another reason to stop listening to the well-dressed people on television talking about the Sports. I must admit that Onion article from a week ago hit me pretty hard.

I think I’ve figured out what we need to do.

We need to somehow convince France, Belgium and Switzerland to get together with Canada and then invade the US. Given the reaction to, you should pardon the expression, 9/11, it shouldn’t take long to subjugate the country. Then the Pentagon and CIA can be disbanded, a properly functioning government can be installed, K Street can be burned to the ground, Football can be banned as merely being war games for sissies, a rational progressive tax system can be imposed as well as health care for all along the lines of the French system, and WalMart nationalized. The Canadians can teach us manners and the Franch can teach us how to cook. It could work out very well. We can pay a percentage from what was the war budget to the occupying force to thank them for their trouble. And all the arms factories can start making useful things like garden gnomes and high-speed trains. There would be a minimum of two years compulsory college and drugs would be decriminalized. Oh and all boys would take at least two years ballet in high school.

In this way the economy can be saved and our once proud nation put back on track.

@Benedick: Agreed, except for the part about the NFL. No. Way.

And that video is 9 minutes and 35 second of my life I’ll never have back. Goldberg is a tool.

@blogenfreude: Honey, once the Franch get involved – backed by the might of Canada – it’s their way or no way, monsieur. You’ll watch futbol and like it.

ADD. I’ve purposely picked the nations who would most likely provide the nicest occupiers. You can add Italians if you go for the darker look. We don’t want Russians, for God’s sake. They’d be much too rough. I know the Franch can be fierce but at least they look good.

@Benedick: What would the Belgians do in your new world?

@SanFranLefty: Some have said that Belgium serves as a place where Britain and Germany can work out their differences.

@SanFranLefty: @blogenfreude: Right. They’d add a much-needed voice of reason. They’d be tasked (!) with going south and talking to the indigenous wingnuts and Jeebusers. They can provide delicious cigarettes and fries and put in place elaborate bureaucracies to protect us from Republican fiscal policy.

@SanFranLefty: make delicious waffles. I for one would welcome our Eurotrash overlords.

The only problem I can see with Benedick’s proposal is this: All these people are people. What to do? Also I abhor garden gnomes and prefer Italian cuisine to French. Otherwise, I admit the proposal looks very appealing (especially banning American football).

@Benedick: oooh, moules frites! yes!!!

@Benedick: Mmm, Belgian fries. And the Swiss would run our banks?

@lynnlightfoot: If we approach Prada and Missoni to offer low-cost labor in Indiana, say, I think we could get them to join the coalition and provide the required culinary balance. Garden gnomes are markers: insert your own useful artifact here. Of course the work-force will need to be retrained but with a certain amount of good-will and patience on the part of the invaders we could work something out. The point is to get what money we have left out of armaments and into footwear and public works.

I do believe that we can teach Americans of the 21st century to behave like human beings. Seeing San Francisco has given me Hope. The occupying force can start with a few beachheads from which they can spread freedom and democracy and lavish spending on the arts.

@Benedick:
Brilliant, but It’ll take too long to get their act together and mass their forces on the border.

After reading this, the “cannibalistic anarchy” threads, and a few surprisingly similar “we’ve got to get out of here before the collapse” threads on some wingnut blogs, I have arrived at a realistic solution.

The cold hard fact is that between nationalizing most of the economy and centralizing authority, the Bush administration took us a long way down the road to socialism – or- national socialism – pick your poison. Now Barry is going to finish the job. The problem is that we are really bad at Socialism here. It takes a while to figure it out and get it right. Why should I hang around while we repeatedly fuck this up over the next few decades? If I have no choice but to live in a socialist paradise anyway, why wouldn’t I go somewhere where they are good at it, or at least competent?

France is the answer. Subsidized artisan cheese and wine. Great working nukes with free electricity for all. Subsidized wine. Free health care. Subsidized wine. Great food everywhere all the time. Subsidized wine. Fast trains. Subsidized wine. The wine is the key. If I can go into any grocery store and find some really great wines for a few euros (like in France or their colonies and ex-colonies) I can pretty much deal with everything else. Once I get settled, I’ll see if I can help get the invasion force organized to rescue you guys.

I must go make the world safe for comedy.

@Benedick: Given the way these things work out, it would be the French teaching us manners and the Canadians teaching us how to cook.

@Benedick:
teach americans to act like human beings?
human beings of this planet are a mistake of nature.
that, or our reptillian brain stems have not evolved yet.

TJ: Mann Coulter under investigation for voter fraud in Connecticut.

@SanFranLefty: Hang her now and try the corpse later.

@nojo:
It doesn’t matter. The whole invasion thing will fall apart unless you go to Paris and teach them how to run Norton Anti-Virus so they can get their air force off the ground.

@Hose Manikin: Guess the aliens were watching “Independence Day”.

Hey, have you heard about New Mexico’s submarine? It’s made out of adobe and has screen doors.

I was going to shoot some early spring foliage for the jam but the weather turned to absolute shit with an incredible hail storm in the last half hour. My sat tv just got knocked offline. Must be French.

@redmanlaw:
You’ve probably got a dish full of hail on the roof. How about hail pics?

I admit, I helped pay Bernie G’s mortgage. I bought one of his books on Jesse Jackson.

D’oh.

I have since regretted the purchase and scratched this guy off my Amazon watch list.

Just got back from a winter cottage weekend. Got drunk two nights in a row and I’m kind of exhausted.

Feels good to be “connected” again.

@Hose Manikin: But see the whole incompetent Franch thing is good. We want an air force that can shrug and drink pastis when things go wrong instead of making all the new recruits accept Jeebus as their personal savior. The Franch will be gracious invaders. And if you’re concerned they’re not butch enough let’s face it: anyone arrives in Ohio, for example, and goes boo! the locals will run for the nearest TGIFs to hide under the buffet. Plus the Franch and Belgians and indeed the Italians have had their countries blasted apart at least once in the last 50 years so they’d be excellent at rebuilding the devastation of New Orleans and Detroit. Especially if we could get the Dutch involved. They’d build awesome dikes while they institute was crimes trials so we could kill two birds with one stone.

@Benedick: Plus, legalized hash and hookers! Also, I fell in love with a Dutch girl some years ago, totally un-acted upon and if my overlords all spoke with that sexy Dutch inflected English I would gladly go down in the mines each day.

@Hose Manikin: France, we should just fucking move there. My favorite things about France:

1. Poor people have the legal right to glean the fields.
2. They sell wine, in the southern wine-producing areas, from pumps like gas pumps, you take your big plastic wine cans, like gas cans, and they fill them from the pump and charge you by the liter. So totally awesome, this is a society awash in wine.
3. They are not lawyer-ridden, and as a result, have more freedom, if you want to parachute off a bridge, they don’t care, go ahead, good for you. No nanny-police-state. You can walk down the street drinking a glass of wine, noone will blink.
4. As you said, the preservation of artisanal, and orgasmic, produce and food products.
5. Health care.
6. Technical competence. Stories of french ineptitude are all British propaganda, the French know what they are about. Their system allows people of whatever station, whatever their job, some measure of self-respect, and as a result, you have people who are professional about what they do, even if their job is what we in the US would consider a low-status job. Youur waiter, in france, is not someone who is hating his job and regards it as a waystation until he gets somewhere else, he is professional about it because it is an honorable trade. This extends to most all jobs there.

@nabisco: The dutch are the tallest, blondest, people on earth, they are laid back, they are as pretty as the pretty germans, but without the german-ness that is so off-putting. The anglo-part of the “anglo saxon” is basically dutch, the “anglo” element in the english language is descended, roughly, from the dutch, the early angle invasions of Britain were from areas near and in holland. I have heard that for non-english and non-dutch speakers, english and dutch sound very similar, they way we might think Russian and Polish sound similar. Much as I love the French, I think I would want to live in a country similar to holland.

As a descendant of a Huguenot, I am happy to see the Franch not shat on for a change. Benedick, your plan is simply brilliant, and I have been enjoying you expand and shape it into something I would enjoy.

@nabisco: I love Holland, and the legal hash and pot are the least of the reasons why. Some of the nicest, smartest, most level-headed and down-to-earth people I’ve ever met, and they seem to all be fluent in like six languages and have traveled to a bunch of countries and realize that they are just a small cog in a big world.

Though the Theo Van Gogh murder aftermath was fucked up. Lots of existential soul-searching for my Dutch friends.

Glad to see my little plan is gaining traction. Wondering who to approach first. Perhaps set up some kind of Welcome to our Liberators committee. Pointless contacting Sarko, he’ll merely shrug and drink pastis while chasing hot wife. Perhaps the Swiss. They can be bossy without becoming comical. Whatever we do we keep the Brits out of it: the English will just complain about everybody’s accent while the Scots and Irish will get drunk and start fights. We want this to be a non-fighting invasion. I should think Manhattanites will welcome them with flowers and dancing in the streets. Anything to be free of Paterson and Albany. Ditto LA. We could all start dressing well while enjoying 6 weeks vacation a year. Plus wine. And pot.

I still harbor ill-will towards the Dutch because of the huge part they played in the African slave trade. (Yes, I can harbor a centuries-old grudge. Only recently have the Quakers been removed from my shit list because they too once owned slaves. They stopped the practice pretty early, but they were part of the system, too. So, yeah. They did a lot of good abolitionist work and were instrumental in the underground railroad, but they did profit from slavery, quite a bit.)

I have to give a shout-out to the Germans. California state and national parks are overrun with German tourists. It’s almost a running joke akin to the one about the Zonie Snowbirds fleeing AZ for San Diego each winter. But my life was saved by a German tourist.

I was in the Sequoia National Forest, and I was hiking to Morro Rock. My kid was about four or five at the time, and he started on the trail (it’s practically vertical, and steps have been carved into the rocky mountain at the trailhead), and my kid was like, nope. I want to stay in the car and listen to music. It’s not a long hike, so I let him stay into the car listening to Seal (that album with “Prayer for the Dying” on it — my kid loved that CD).

So, up I go, I’m hiking along and I get to the final stage of the trail. You could see the Continental Divide and (I think) The Western Divide, and all you had to do to get to the final part, which was a precipice piece of rock clinging to the mountain, was cross what I’d describe as a narrow land bridge. There were aluminum hand rails, but if you lost your footing, you were fucked because there were sheer drops on the left and right of the land bridge.

I never knew I had a fear of heights until I hit that section. Out of nowhere I had a physiological response — pure vertigo. I was dizzy, I was nauseous. I had to squat and put my head between my knees to keep from passing out. Meanwhile, people are traipsing by, jogging the trail, acting like there was nothing odd about being up so high unprotected and completely ignoring me and my plight.

My mind started racing. I was like, “Shit. How the hell am I going to get down from here, because I am stuck. Will they send a helicopter for me and hoist me in a basket or something? If they do, will I be able to even get into the basket? I’m so close to the end, why can’t I pull it together enough to finish this hike? Damn, I’m screwed. I’m going to have to live the rest of my life right here in this spot. I wonder if people will bring me food. And what about Jr? He’s down there in the car. How long will he stay there? Will he be forced to forage for food after he’s essentially orphaned cuz I’m stuck on this goddamned mountain? When did I become afraid of heights? This totally blows.”

Then a German guy asked me if I was okay. I told him I wasn’t — that I felt like I was going to pass out, and he told me to follow him but to only look at the backs of his shoes until we made it to the bottom. So, that’s what I did, and had it not been for that kind man, I’d still be up there on that mountain, the fool on the hill.

@JNOV: Here is a topic for a great little documentary, something that would get some notice, not a mass market thing, but its interesting.

A documentary that would explore the german fascination with Cape Kennedy and the US space program.

If you want to be surrounded by germans, in the US, if you want to be a minority english speaker among a crowd of germans, go to Cape Canaveral, to NASA, and tour the parts that focus on the Apollo moon program.

What the Germans know, and most americans don’t, is that its the Germans who got to the moon in 1969, not the US. Von Braun designed the Saturn Five in 1945, while still working for Hitler. If we had just thrown money at him immediately that we had him, in 1945, and given him free reign, he probably would have had us on Mars by 1969.

And there are tons of very straightbacked, stern older German gentlemen of a certain age, lets say old enough to remember der fuhrer, at Cape Canaveral, and thats why every tour-bus audio presentation is given in German and English, same with every exhibit and film.

Its an interesting phenomenon, an interesting example of where the official history hits the road, as it were.

@Promnight: My parents just spent a week at Cape Canaveral, I shit thee not. I was like, “How many days does it take to see rockets?”

My mom is quarter German and my dad is half German Jew and a quarter Polish. Maybe that’s the explanation.

@Benedick: Bring on the Swiss. I’ll have my SIG 550 delivered to the office.

@Promnight: The Luftwaffe maintains a training center at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. I read something over the past year about the reality of our Nazi space program.

Re: the Grammys – Metallica is gonna kick Coldplay’s ass in the parking lot for stealing the Best Rock Record from them. Wait ’til my son hears that Slipknot beat Metallica for Best Hard Rock record, though.

@SanFranLefty: Really, and I mean this, a day is enough, no kidding, its not the fucking louvre. There’s the saturn five we will have to recomission if there is ever an asteroid headed our way, because sadly, we haven’t even kept at the tech level of Nazi Germany in 1945, and there is the distant view of the now-dismantled moon launching pad, and some video presentations, and thats it. I think they were lieing to you, they must have spent the majority of their time pestorking.

And another thing about our Franche occupation force: just had nice Italian food (well cooked frozen stuff) only marred by huge portions. When Juliette Binoche becomes Special Cultural Attachee she can institute strict portion control and teach us all how to eat so we don’t end up trolling the local Pricechopper with muffin-tops hanging over the sweats which are the last articles of clothing which can encompass our gut.

It will be the Marshall Plan in reverse. Europe will save the US from itself.

@Benedick: Who do you contact first??? Um, ME.

How did I miss this fucking conversation? DAMN YOU, FREELANCE CLIENTS!! *shakes fist*

Well, y’all have a place to crash when you get here. And you know, if there’s enough of you, they will just get confused and surrender and let you take over.

Also, they will only invade 35 hours a week. And go on strike, too.

I’ll leave the keys under the mat, since I’ll probably be in Italy. I can’t stand it here anymore.

@RomeGirl: We don’t want to end up there we want them to end up here.

I’ve been thinking; if Chalbi could talk the US into invading Iraq surely we could do the same. Perhaps if I could convince the Swiss envoy to the UN that Rush Limbaugh is fronting the Cato Institute, or any other of those wingnut ‘think’ tanks, that they’ve achieved nukular capability and are preparing to invade Europe. Maybe I could could talk them into making a pre-emptive strike. Even if one is not dealing with the credulous buffoons who run this country we could perhaps gain some traction. Perhaps I should start with the Franch since they might be easier to manipulate in an emotional manner. Tell them that Robert Mondavi has a plot to contaminate the vineyards so that American wine can achieve world dominance.

All they’d really have to do is make a small but stylish threat and leave us to do the rest. Look how well Bin Laden did with the economy. Our leaders could all start bloviating in congress and appearing on Meet the Press. Two weeks later things would be at a complete standstill.

35 hour weeks. Let my people take naps!

@Benedick:
Yeah, having five weeks of paid vacation is just plain awful…

@Benedick: Ever seen Mondovino, about Mondavi’s efforts to buy up land in France, and the fierce local opposition? We just have Rome Girl drop the words “phylloxera…Californian…Mondavi into conversation in a few select cafes, and bob’s your uncle.

@Mistress Cynica: And remind them that Franch vines grow on American rootstock so that, technically, Chateau Neuf du Pape is actually Pinot Noir. Which should cause such indignation that the fumes of garlic, Gauloise, stale wine and scent will engulf the Eastern seaboard and paralyze air traffic.

This could work!

@Promnight: Yes, that would make a nice documentary. I am a documentary addict. My fave big production documentary (that I actually paid $ to see) is Capturing the Friedmans. I also watch Independent Lens a lot. I’ve been missing it recently since my TiVo went on the fritz. Who knew I’d become so dependent on a gadget.

@JNOV: We have the Documentary Channel on our Dish Network plan. I got to asee one on the Bauhaus movement while working out one night and waiting for the X-Files to come on at midnight. (And I wonder why I’m tired all the time.)