A Darkness, Revealed.

If you do one thing and do it well enough, eventually people stop asking questions.

This is no secret to any eight year old who’s been bullied by the same kid more than twice. There is no point in asking why; it serves no purpose. It will not edify you and will likely earn you another meaty punch to the head.

Eventually, people stop asking questions.

Like all of you, I have a few stupid people in my life. Some are friends, but most are circumstantial and accidental beings who have fallen into my life through the carelessness of others. Now that I think of it, had I not allowed someone I knew in high school to talk me into going to a specific party, I’d never even have met three of them. If I refused to speak to my in-laws the number would also drop like a stone, but that’s neither here nor there.

It must be noted that dumb guys are generally all right people. In some respects, a good group of dumb guys is even preferable to a group of your peers. Your peers will question you incessantly as they try to whip out their own intellectual credentials. You’ll all twist and thrust to sound like Chris Hitchens or Noam Chomsky and come off like the Alpha Brain.

On the other hand, dumb guys will be genuinely appreciative when you explain the way that lasers work, or that socialism doesn’t. Years later, a dumb guy will thank you for telling him not only that Jupiter has rings, but also for explaining why those rings do not fall inward and kill the Jovian Blimp People.

But as will so often happen in Star Wars, The Matrix or those really bad Tolkien rip-offs by Robert Jordan, there will be a Chosen One who will rise up from amongst the Dumb Guys.

Obviously, I’m making reference to Bill O’Reily.

I could unoriginally recount that O’Reilly is a megalomaniacal fraud who is disingenuous, paranoid, volatile, menacing, threatening, insecure and ridiculously wealthy. But I won’t do this since there’s a far greater issue here that needs to be uncovered. It needs to be made known that Bill O’Reily is the first comic book super villain to cross over into our world.

Up until quite recently, I was content to pigeon-hole Mr. O’Reily as described in the paragraph above and think no more of him. I saw him on David Letterman’s show where he was sadly one-upped by a largely indifferent comedian for ranting like a loon about the war on Christmas. I was lulled by O’Reily and his Dumb Guy manifesto.

We were, all of us, deceived.

Here’s my proof;

1. Big Head – True both in metaphor and in actual volume, O’Reily has a huge, almost monstrous head. This has been the idiom of villains from the original Braniac all the way forward to the newer version of Braniac. He also wears a lot of makeup, far more than you would need to if you weren’t disguising your freaky alien melon as the braincase of a human.

2. Secret Lair – In addition to keeping his private residence a secret of the highest order, O’Reily also has nearly military security around the studios for both his radio and television platforms. It’s rumored that Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo were both beaten senseless by these goons, but I’m actually with Bill on that one. The only thing worse than an actual O’Reily is someone jealous of him.

3. Nemesis/Love interest – Apparently, after doing battle, O’Reily and Katrina Vanden Heuvel have really hot grudge sex.

4. Charisma – He’s better than everyone else. Bill is a natural leader. You suck.

5. Henchmen – In a recent spat with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (motto: “Yes, we’re still on…”), O’Reily claimed to be able to command the forces of FOX security to go and mete out punishment to those who dared to even mention Olbermann’s name. If none of the other points I’ve outlined here convince you (and lord knows they shouldn’t) then this one is still impossible to ignore. This is really only one step away from having chairs at the conference table that dump underlings into a pool of electric eels for speaking out of turn.

O’Reily has the power to have you whacked by the unitard-clad legions of FOX Security for merely mentioning the name of an adversary. In regards to one such caller – a man named Mike – Bill openly had the guy murdered.

“Mike,” Bill said “is a done guy.”

Chilling stuff.

But since this is ultimately a Dumb Guy, we underestimated Bill and stopped asking questions. Even now that he’s sending out minions a la Goldfinger, we just sit back and joke around. He killed poor Mike and we did nothing.

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and warm up the Bat Signal.

Canada, Triumphant!

In November of 2004, the CBC married a series of documentaries to a viewer vote-in to determine the identity of The Greatest Canadian. While I was not on the edge of my seat to see who The Greatest Canadian would be, the series held my attention to the end. I was certainly not disappointed when they announced Tommy Douglas as the winner.

Tommy Douglas was probably born in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or possibly Nova Scotia before its admittance into the Canadian Federation by the Queen in 1967 (this event led to the naming of the Washington Nationals baseball team). There seems to be considerable evidence that Tommy Douglas was either a 1930s Prairie Socialist or a country singer who performed old Nashville standards in a poorly-constructed set that bore little resemblance to the ‘down home’ kitchen that it purported to be. Tommy Douglas may have worn glasses, but this seems odd given that according to some, Tommy Douglas also managed to serve as an ace airman during the First World War.

Tommy Douglas clearly is The Greatest Canadian and quite multi-talented to boot. It’s not hard to see how he won.

In the same week, the Dan Rather/CBS News scandal broke in the US when it was confirmed that a bunch of people probably lied about some papers that really didn’t matter to an electorate who had already voted. Lamentably, more Canadians could tell me the details of Rathergate than could tell me that Tommy Douglas was the father of the Canadian Medicare system.

It turns out that next to Douglas’ Medicare, the most universal thing in Canada is television from America. We are steeped in it as a nation and its pop culture has become our own. Most of us have watched enough Law & Order that we could not only pass the New York State Bar exam without cracking a textbook, but we could probably empanel our own grand jury to indict whoever it was who abducted that pretty white girl on CNN. I know people who will argue about whether or not the pigeon-like Jack McCoy correctly applied the rules of evidence discovery but think that the Court of Queen’s Bench is a place for gay guys to hang out.

We may not be sure who our Governor-General is, but half of us know the name of the chef who screams ‘Bam!’ on the Food Network.

As you may have guessed, this is central to our ongoing attempt to find some form of representative government here in Soviet Canuckistan.

Really.

Around mid-December the American ambassador to Canada complained that some candidates in this federal election, and most regrettably our Prime Minister were using public animus towards the United States to curry electoral favor with the Canadian people. Earlier, a member of the Canadian Cabinet commented, “I hate those bastards” in reference to our American pals. I’m genuinely pro-American as a rule, but I can see how this kind of thing happens. Other than telling our political leaders to shut up, the American ambassador has been sending us gift cards from Hallmark telling us that we are jerks for not sending troops to Iraq and bad neighbors who actively encourage terrorists to cross our borders. The complaints of our politicians and general populace seem fairly forgivable in that light. In one respect this is much like blaming a bear for fertilizing the forest. If asked, the bear would very likely inform that such is the reason that the trees are there in the first place.

This story even got some coverage on the American news channels, so this way we can be guaranteed that some Canadians have actually seen it. More importantly, it gave American commentators like Tucker “fading fast” Carlson another reason to call us “retarded and pointless.” Ann Coulter, that cornerstone of wisdom has previously reasoned that “Canada is lucky that we (the US) allow them to exist…”

Thanks, Ann. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Which side of this equation is more depressing, though: a nation at war whose pundits take the time to belittle us or a nation in the midst of an election that needs to pile on the American President to unify its base? Since Carlson and Coulter are paid to go around and give the rest of us the intellectual equivalent of pinkeye, I am saddened to say that it might be us.

Canada suffered through an election about a year and a half ago when the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada was making a serious run at forming at least a minority government. It never came to pass and the Liberals moved into their second decade of uninterrupted power. This time we are reviewing many of the same issues, a slightly varied bunch of bribes to the electorate (perennial loser Jack Layton is offering every Canadian a hot-oil massage) and a scandal that doesn’t really blame anyone who’s still in office. The CPC has surged recently in the polls, but everyone recognizes that this is a function of Liberal implosion rather than new-found love of the party led by the autonomic Stephen Harper.

With twenty percent of our electoral seats tied up by the lazy threat of separatism, it’s hard to imagine the rule-set that will allow either side to definitively win this game in the foreseeable future. Certainly, if they do the other side will be reduced to such national penury that they will cease to function as an effective opposition party. This is our new dynamic; we are plagued by ineffective coalitions or saddled with an unchallenged majority. Given the lethargy of Canadian governments free from an impending vote and the desperate, middle-child earnestness of the short-lived coalitions I can’t say that any of our prospects are very good.

The energy has been sucked out of the process and we are left with the unsightly scrum of a Prime Minister desperate to win his own mandate, and a challenger painfully aware that the two previous iterations of his party failed to become a legitimate national entity. Both are then blocked from electoral transcendence by a gaggle of Parliamentarians who will never hold power, but throw untold spanners into the works in the name of representing a constituency that is either nation-wide but ethereal or rock-solid and entirely regional.

Assuming that Ann Coulter and her army of undead McCarthyites don’t take us over first, whoever serves as the lightning rod to raise us up from this puddle will get my vote as The Greatest Canadian on the next ballot.

Take the Mullah and Run.

There are some things that happen that are not disastrous by themselves, but manage to remind us all of the elephant in the room.

Around the same time that my wife and I got married one of her high school friends moved to the town where we lived. The friend was also married to my brother in law. She’s gruff, single-minded and apparently quite relentless when angered. She was the kind of woman who could easily have been found to have killed former paramours for use as chili meat. He on the other hand was the ultimate beta male; quiet, submissive, and accepting, accommodating and fairly sickening. We both glibly predicted marital fallout that would make the basis for a fine episode of Law & Order.

I think that they suspected the collective predictions, sadly. The entire dynamic created a zany bonanza of awkward silences and a legion of rainchecks for social appointments.

The couple undertook a PR campaign to rival the enthusiasm and sincerity of Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch; they were desperate to validate their relationship’s viability through us. One such attempt involved inviting us to dinner whereupon a single cat hair was found to be resting on top of the risotto.

She apologized with ferocious and unsettling honesty while my wife and I really couldn’t bring ourselves to care. In our house, the five second rule of food on the floor still being edible has been abused to a criminal extent and I’ve been known to regularly snack on old gravy stains. The warnings regarding spoilage in our home are viewed as nothing more than a loose commitment to not eating brown dairy products. An entire litter of kittens could have been resting atop the cheesy goodness of the Arborio rice and I’d have been content to eat around them. Regardless, the two of them left us to sit at the dinner table while they went off to another room to fight and marinade each other in guilt. We clumsily arranged our departure when they returned.

They are now divorced and it turns out that rice was not their core issue.

Such (miraculously) is the lesson that the United States can take from the Case of the Sprinting Allawi.

The former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was forced to flee from a mosque this weekend where he was supposed to meet with local religious leaders. Allawi is seeking election to the proposed Iraqi Parliament. What should have been no more noticeable than George Bush waving to the press on his way to church turned into a full media moment when Allawi was chased out of the mosque and pelted with shoes.

Allawi is a moderate, secular Shiite who has become representative of the US reformation of the Iraqi government - exactly the kind of guy you don’t want to see running from sandal-flinging malcontents. It should be noted that while the malcontents attacked with shoes they were apparently wearing machetes and pistols to church…to church.

Although, if the Iraqis were to stick to just using shoes the mortality rate in the present conflict would go way, way down. I think more than they need a US-brokered election the people of Iraq need a footwear-only wartime policy by the 15th of December. No one has ever had their Hummer blown apart by a box of Doc Martens on the side of the highway.

What’s telling in all of this is that Allawi is exactly the type of Iraqi that the US-led invasion was hoping to produce as a leader. He is the vision of moderation in a malformed nation jammed between Baathist fascism and religious autocracy. He is very much a standard for the democratizing of the Arab world that the United States hopes to domino with a successful campaign in Iraq. When the hawks were touting the success of the elections that created the interim government, a great deal of the praise centered on the moderate and modern Prime Minister. Ayad Allawi was the proof in the American pudding. Now, thugs working for the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr chased Allawi away from a mosque and generated video where the former Prime Minister looks like a chubby kid dodging a snowball fight.

I won’t torture this sad metaphor much further but Allawi’s flight is the hair on the risotto. It bears no real impact on anyone save for Allawi himself and probably holds more omens of doom for his chances at election than anything else.

But there are those who are saying and have said all along that the democratic template being placed over Iraq simply will not take. While some find the notion of incompatible cultures offensive and even racist one cannot deny that secular moderates are finding very little secure ground in Iraq. Al-Sadr, who may have orchestrated the shoe-fight and ruined dinner has more popular support despite being an almost perfect antithesis to the pedigree the US hopes will end up leading Iraq.

It may end in divorce.

I Hate You.

When you have a blog and a lot of spare time, you can probably crank out a whole whack of these things. Since your time is far from scarce, the tiniest little thought or semblance of a thought makes it to your page. In your landscape as a baseless slacker, little ideas seem big and its not like your going to spend much time editing your own content because if you don’t like one entry, you certainly have enough time to cram another one in there later in the day.

Because you are who you are, you can write six different entries on the gravity gun in Half-Life 2 and still be able to fit a few paragraphs in on why Food Network should have more recipes that involve Pizza Pops, and why that girl in that movie with that guy in it is really hot.

Although, to be fair, the gravity gun is pretty neat.

Not that I need a point, but it seems that I was getting at something; the issues of importance that I might write about seem to have come and gone by the time that I might get to them. This is extremely frustrating since I find that buzzing cloud of punditry to be painfully obvious – it is not without some merit for Anderson Cooper (gosh, he’s adorable) to note that a hurricane is bad because people have died and that politicians should therefore act with an appropriate degree of solemnity. It is almost without parallel in the annals of intellectual atrocity to assume that this pronouncement is good journalism. Similarly, my daughter can point at our cat and scream ‘KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYCAAAAAAAAAAAATT!!’ with air-raid warning intensity, but this does not make her a zoologist, let alone a good one to be lauded across the rich tapestry of teh internets.

I started this blog back in February with the full intention of writing a column a week and hopefully giving it a little more substance and content that the average intellectual gash in the space-time continuum that shows up in LiveJournal when the 16 year-old girls discovers that a) her boyfriend only likes her in hopes of having sex, and b) she is too homely to want to have sex with more than once. Sadly, I’m guessing that my written output is less interesting than the journal of a single mom who cosplays some silly vampire RP. At least there’s a chance that the undead single mom might web-cam you her boobs. Fortunately for the world at large, I do not have this option. So when I read this;

“The placid, almost complicit enablers of 24-hour cable news media will now need to sit up and take notice when tragedy faces them. It’s not just enough to seem serious in the face of political disaster profiteering, sometimes a person with a bit of a chip on their shoulder needs to look us in our collective apathy and say, “KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYCAAAAAAAAAAAAATT!!”.

I’m not there with an editorial bitch-slap.

My problem is that while the neck-bearders of the world are trying to think of a page that really gets the sublime and nearly transcendental coolness of getting goon-faced on absinthe, I can’t even manage a good screed on the comfortable topic of hating CNN.

Why? Because I got here too late. When I was in the age of surplus time, the blog did not exist. If you wanted to whip up a web page full of your own musings you pretty much had to do it yourself, and that required some native technical skills back in the mid 17th century. Also, the blog has offered us some camouflage; if the ever-expanding canopy of unsolicited opinion had not been created this way, then we would all be seen for the naked, self absorbed flesh puddles that we all are.

Who wants that?

So now that I can blend in by railing on about fictional pastries and even less interesting topics I find myself too firmly glued up in the world of being busy and responsible. Now that the formatting is nice and it takes no discernible skills to create a blog, I’m barren of the leisure time needed to create one that is equal in volume to the estimate of my own intelligence.

So this, ultimately is why I really hate you a lot. You have the time and the access to fiddle your sticks in a world that is more technologically indulgent than mine was and in doing so you have illuminated that I have just become old enough to become bitter about the growing gap between what I could do and what can now be done.

A curmudgeonly seed has been planted. Congratulations.

I’m going to try and write more, but if I can’t you’re gonna get it.

KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYCAAAAAAAAAAAATT!!