Filibastards.

If you have a TV or a radio or an open conduit to the internet or a perch near a bus station or if you have taken Anderson Cooper hostage (kill him!), you have probably heard the term filibuster in the last few weeks.

Filibuster comes from the Greek “Phyllo” and the archaic English “Bustard”. The Phyllobustard was a Mediterranean desert that was stuffed to capacity with kidney meat and Sultana raisins.

After the 1841 elections in Great Britain, the newly elected Lord Robert Peel was eating a Phyllobustard while waiting for Parliament to meet. In one of those odd moments that define the future through absurd happenstance, Peel refused to begin the session until he had finished his snack. Astoundingly he then decided to send his adjutant to find the street vendor who had sold him the first Phyllobustard and order a second.

Unknown to Peel, a bill was to be brought before Parliament that would have caused him considerable difficulty. The bill was a personal assault on Peel. Lord Peel was instrumental in forming the modern British police and even went so far as to design their hats. In recognition of his service, many London constables were referred to loosely as ‘Bobbies’.

It was the plan of the Leader of the Opposition and some angry members of Peel’s own party to sneak in a bill that would replace the Bobbies with Scottish Dragoons (called Dragons but for the illiteracy of the Scots).

But as the enemies of the Prime Minister languished, Peel ate his way through the bill’s supporters as he munched through the second Phyllobustard. Unnerved by the wait, the members of Peel’s party relented and the Dragoon Bill died.

A Welsh MP noted that he had never expected to be outdone by a Phyllobustard, but his accent mauled the word. From a snack and an inaudible Welshman the filibuster was born.

In the last few days, the Senate of the United States faced a filibuster battle of its own. The Republicans, who have nominated some controversial judges sought to use Senate rules to quash the filibuster in order to gain unfettered access to a straight vote in front of the full Senate. They pursued this option not because they sought to take advantage of their numerical superiority, but because they dearly love freedom and democracy.

They love freedom and democracy carnally. Right now, somewhere a pantless conservative is sockin’ it to freedom and/or democracy in most intimate ways.

The Democrats, the party of loosing all the Presidential elections of the 21st century have a different view.

The Democrats in the Senate are attempting to block a few of these nominees from being voted because they are too dangerous and too radical. Some of these nominees have ruled in favor of Hitler and several went on a camping trip with the physical incarnation of Genghis Khan. Or possibly that horrible French woman who invented herpes, I really can’t remember.

But these nominees are that bad.

Really.

So standing up for America, which you can only do when Americans do not vote for you in large enough numbers to win, the Democrats have decided to fight.

The Democrats too are holding on only because they love America more than anyone. It has nothing to do with trying to raise the profile of a party that has failed so badly in the last four election cycles that they have marginalized themselves.

If you doubt the Republicans, then you hate religion and probably work for Al Quaeda.

If you doubt the Democrats, you hate the rights of women and are probably a homophobe too.

Start your engines, take your places and shoot yourself in the head.

On the upside, a group of Centrists who are lead by the Batman of the Senate, John McCain, have struck upon a truce. The deal really just presses the pause button, but it avoids a filibuster and keeps the Senate rules where they are.

On the up side, the Centrist Deal has done a wonderful job of pissing up the leg of the card-carrying Right and the card-carrying Left. If it makes MoveOn.org and National Review mad at the same time, it’s good with me.

However, there is a nonsense clause. Both sides have staked out the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ clause that allows for this whole partisan pee-match to eek out again. So in other words, as soon as the Democrats hear who the nominee is the circumstances will be extraordinary and the filibuster will be on again. The Republicans, in a desperate attempt to save from Afghanistan will have no choice but to change the procedural rules of the Senate.

What else could they possibly do?

If all this sounds reasonable to you send me 50$ and I’ll send you Lord Peel’s favorite snack!

Boldly Done.

May 13th marked the final broadcast of Star Trek: Enterprise. This was a good thing as the show was awful. It was not just awful, it was aggressively awful. It was not just aggressively awful; it was passionately, creatively and aggressively awful. Where awful was concerned, Enterprise had a terrific, almost Protestant work ethic. I’ve been a fan of science fiction both good and bad – I will freely admit that I sat through entire episodes of Babylon 5 without so much as twitching. I watched it on purpose and cackled with glee whenever Bruce Boxleitner – my personal Lord and Savior – would strain himself by looking concerned. This was a man whose singular achievement as a thespian was growing a full beard.

But still, I watched so I will not blame Boxleitner’s beard. I’m tempted to capitalize that.

Boxleitner’s Beard.

So while it was truly awful to watch, I was a little sad to see Enterprise go.

As most TV commentators with access to a window were able to discover, this will mark the first time since about 1979 that someone, somewhere is not in some stage of producing Star Trek for either television or a theatrical release.

In about 26 years, they produced 10 movies, or maybe eleven. There were three complete series that each ran for 7 years and then there were the sad four years of Enterprise. That works out to about 660 hours of Star Trek, or about 28 seasons of the average hour long drama. In that time a lot happened – some things blew up, the female crew got really, really attractive, many people got older and fatter and the special effects (and I’m including Jeri Ryan in this) got progressively better.

I’ve watched most, if not all of the Star Trek that got produced and I have one piece of blasphemy I’d like to propose.

Gene Roddenberry was an idiot.

For the week prior to and after the end of this last wretched turd of Trek, everyone and their washed up second cousin was praising the vision of Gene Roddenberry, how it was revolutionary and ground-breaking and…uh, well, really, really groundbreaking.

I’m sure that this was true – in 1967.

The truth is that is was a good and wise message. You will get no argument out of me that we should have fewer racists and less poverty. The Great Bird of the Galaxy was an atheist and adhered to an economic system that was half a ruble away from communism. I have no trouble with either of these really, I’m an atheist myself but not one who sees organized religion as an inherent evil. I like the appeal of universal human solidarity but to be fair, applied communism has otherwise been the bloodiest and most expensive experiment in human history.

The world is less racist than it was in 1967 – at very least it is less appeasing of it. We have less poverty, we have largely moved beyond the threat of nuclear apocalypse and we have generally raised the quality of life.

But it happened the wrong way for the Roddenberry vision.

The world has more capitalists now and not less. There are more people who claim to be adherents of a religion now. The country that produced Star Trek is more conservative today, not less. So we appear to be going in the right direction, but through different means.

Like most people who dreamt about the future, Roddenberry had the right idea but had no clue as to the means. He also wasn’t very good at doing TV and movies, if you think about it.

Roddenberry came up with a pretty lame idea for a TV show that happened to pan out in spite of him. It panned out because of other writers and not because of his work. When the TV show ended, he made a movie – and it was awful. So Paramount handed it over to someone else and they made some okay popcorn flicks. Then he came back to TV and that was awful until Roddenberry got sick and could no longer work each episode.

It eventually became awful again, but the best part of Star Trek was never Gene Roddenberry. People say that Roddenberry’s message will always be relevant; I would argue that it was almost instantly irrelevant. It was not philosophy that made Star Trek work and it was not fatigue that killed it. It was writers that made it work and it was the inability of writers to keep the stories compelling that made it go away.

Sadly, the most important real-world effect of Star Trek; the real exploration of space (the Space Shuttle Enterprise) has been lost in public ennui, conservative budgets and the fibers of Boxleitner’s Beard.

The Value of Your Breath.

A person I hardly know walks up to me with a distinct look of urgency about them. With a concerned, sincere and almost parental level of credibility they want to warn me of something very dire.

“The first Pope of the third millennium has died, and the Holy land is still divided. This is a sure sign of the end of days. The Apocalypse is upon us.”

A few things will happen at this point, I will attempt to remove myself from the conversation as quickly as I can. It’s not urgent, I’m not compelled to get away from the Armageddonist with the same need that would motivate me to get away from an amorous professional wrestler named Lumpy, but I’m still going to leave. I will be civil, and I may even thank him.

What I will not do is sprint home (as this would make the thick, rich fat in my veins boil causing me to burst) and consult my copy of the King James Bible. I will not double check the contents of the Book of Revelations. I will not worry and I will not fret. I could turn this into a poem, I bet.

Sorry.

The reason that I will not become anxious over this warning is not because I am not religious. As a “soft” atheist I am not inclined to believe in any god right now, but I also don’t think that I’m smart enough to rule the whole thing out. So my disinclination toward godliness will not be what tips the scale. Upon final consideration, what will throw this piece of eschatological prudentia into the garbage heap is that I can honestly say that while the Days End scenario was presented with a chain of evidence and a process of cause and effect, it is one with which I am sufficiently familiar and can therefore comfortably ignore. If I am relatively secure in my belief that such assertions are flawed from within, I’m not going to bother with it.

But say what I want about his evidence, his premise and his conclusion, I must at least concede this; at least he had these things in his message. Most people do not.

The very sad fact is that people who speak about far more mundane, but more verifiable things do so with little or no evidence at all. As for linkage between their premise and their conclusion, most aren’t even aware of the meaning of those terms. Given that I am a snooze-inducing centrist (Ignore La Revolution!) my next point will not come as a surprise. This is not a lefty problem; this is not a righty problem. This is a stupid problem.

It is a problem of stupid people, by stupid people and for stupid people.

There are people (my best guess is that there are two of them) who might read this and say, “Hey, this is about me.” My reply is that, if you think so, it probably is.

People I know will discuss religion, sports, politics, philosophy and a million other things. Some will have well-constructed arguments, some will be making crap up as they go along and still others will be belching out oily clouds of partisan hackery that they memorized from some horrid fecal engine like Michael Moore or Sean Hannity.

But even these people have linkage and something resembling a logical chain of cause and effect. It may be a weak and evil chain like the one that Moore has about those villains who stand between him and cheeseburgers, or the cheese-and-meat-head claims of Hannity as he seeks to prove that he almost certainly drinks from unflushed toilets.

They are vile and horrid Sophists and propagandists, but at least they have a point. While they conclude to awful things, at least they conclude.

What I am referring to is the intellectual bankruptcy of relativism; the pimply faced, shrill ugly child of the philosophical family. Fact does not matter because, well they just don’t. Facts are stupid and mean and don’t allow me to make unsupported claims at random about varying subjects such as how Chef Boyardee is out to get me and why the government stole my copy of Johnny Get Your Gun or whatever piece of indulgent crap you were reading.

If the only thing you showed up to say is that none of these assertions matter because they are all just opinion, well that’s just your opinion. As such, rather than bother me with your hollow and vacuous statements of intellectual surrender, go to your dermatologist buy some degreaser and be quiet. I have no use for you.

If you are a radical or a fool, I can argue with you. If you are a relativist, you are the intellectual equivalent of dandruff. You are the detritus of real discourse, a foul byproduct.

Go away

I Marched Out.

I lost the entire month of March. One moment I was punching through the annual doldrums of February, and the next thing you know it’s the middle of April. This is troublesome for a lot of reasons. Had I missed every March since I was a wee little condescending egoist, then that would be one thing.

But this was the first March that I have missed.

March is the month of my birth, so I’ve attached a lot of me-centered importance to it that it really doesn’t warrant. Nothing really happens in March anyway, St Patrick’s day only makes sense if you’re not Irish and need an excuse to get drunk. Through the magic calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, Easter sometimes falls in March, but these are really the lame Easters. Had the first Easter happened in March, Jesus would have just shifted a little on the burial stone.

“Did you hear that?” The first Roman guard would say.

“Yeah, the body shifts, it’s just gases moving around.” The second would reply.

“But we kind of stabbed him right in the guts.”

“Shut up.”

You only get resurrection in April. In March you might get your second wind.

The problem with this March is that entirely so much happened that the expanse of time went unrecognized. The month was so full of events that the acts and action of these 30 days completely stripped away the meaning of the label we use to contain them. This March was like a very tight bra on a very pretty woman.

This month I turned 34, which was of little or no consequence. I bought a house, mostly. I traveled on business, my daughter moved into her 17th month of post-uterus existence and my cats continued their ongoing quest to find out what it is that is making that awful noise that no one else can hear at four in the morning.

The Pope had not yet died in March; the war in Iraq did not stop or get ramped up in March. A Space Shuttle did not blow up, China did not invade Taiwan and Iran probably hadn’t yet gone nuclear by the time March had breathed its last and the pages of the calendar turned. The NFL still remained mournfully in the off-season without even good rumors about the draft to keep me going.

Baseball still sucked throughout all of March, but only became embarrassing toward the end of it. My signal provider stopped the free preview of Fox News in March, now demanding that I pay an additional 99 cents per month to continue viewing it. This is an offer that perplexes me, as I cannot decide whether or not I am insulted.

It makes sense to me that I should have to pay to watch Fox news. It’s not regular programming, its certainly not regular news and it is almost axiomatically one of the best examples of agenda programming you can find. Part of me is slightly insulted that someone would think that I would want to pay a dollar a month to see the dreamy, Saint Bernard eyes of Brit Hume. Conversely, I would want to pay a dollar to spend more time observing that unholy monstrosity Sheppard “Shep” Smith as he has serial killer eyes and is quite obviously an android.

What then occurred to me is that I should have to pay the same amount for CNN. They have curiously received a pass on being outside of the basic package. MSNBC is not free, but that is because with so few viewers the satellite people have assumed that it must be some kind of Eskimo porn specialty channel. Plus they have Don Imus on most mornings for an epic three hours of mumbling, ass-kissing and droning on about what his trophy wife tells him to be interested in. Based on this they should therefore be lumped in with the History Channel or whatever other network covers dinosaurs that have an unhealthy admiration for Delbert McClinton.

CNN should not get a pass; they aren’t fair and balanced either. But CNN must spend a lot of money trying to make Paula Zahn’s neck look less like the trunk of an old tree. Wrap that thing up in nylons; her legs still look surprisingly good…

March went by because it was full of actual life events. It’s one of the first periods of time that I’ve lost like that. Everyone looses a few days here and there. If you’re having a horrible crisis or a really, really good bender you may even loose a few weeks. But I lost an entire month to normalcy. What once would have required an epic interruption of the status quo has been replaced by the seamless application of it.

Good job, March