Note: The video I had of O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo was removed from YouTube, so I’ve substituted this segment about the same exact thing where he makes the exact same stupid argument.
So, Bill O’Reilly is miffed because President Obama refused to spend thousands of dollars to fire up a few jet fighters to do a flyover at some “God & Country Festival” in Idaho. Big deal. What have those freeloading Idahoans ever done for the rest of the country, anyway? As one astute observer has commented, Idaho blows. Like most Red States, Idaho gets more money from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes. Idaho gets about $1.21 for every $1 it pays to the federal government. Compare that to my state—a BlueState—which gets about $0.82 for each tax dollar we pay. Red States, for all their complaints about federal spending, are actually financial parasites on the backs of more prosperous (and mostly Democratic) states, leeching money so they can dick around with statues of the Ten Commandments and teach Bronze Age mythology in science classrooms. But I digress.
O’Reilly says, “There is no specific religion in play at that festival.” Having known nothing about this festival, I still knew O’Reilly’s claim had to be bullshit. I was right, per usual. If he had taken five seconds to do an internet search, he would’ve found that the festival’s own website declares, “Our mission is primarily about spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. We believe this Festival, started in 1967, is an incredible tool to share this Good News…” It also states that the festival “is an unashamedly Christian event.” Now unless O’Reilly doesn’t consider Christianity a “specific religion,” he is either lying or hasn’t done his homework. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell because he has such a long and storied history of misinformation that one often doesn’t know where O’Reilly’s incompetence ends and his deception begins.
The festival itself aside, Bill-O is pissed because unlike his predecessors, Obama actually decided to heed the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by refusing government resources to some Bible thumpers on Planet Idaho. O’Reilly likes to throw around the word “secular” like it’s an insult instead of a word for people who ascribe to Jeffersonian principles in matters of church and state. Obama’s a “secular guy.” Oh no, he wants to keep religion out of government, and government out of religion. Cry me a fucking river. Can’t these slaves of Jesus just be happy for their own goddamn servitude without using money from the rest of us to promote their abhorrent and backward beliefs? Be a slave on your own dime. Don’t use my tax dollars to perpetuate your morally and intellectually bankrupt fairy tale of vicarious salvation.
O’Reilly also says that “to diminish spiritually by denying the good folks of Idaho a flyover is simply stupid.” Is he really saying that the spirituality of the festival attendees will be diminished because they won’t get to see some very expensive instruments of destruction fly over their heads? Bill-O and I must have very different definitions of spirituality. And I love how O’Reilly says that secularists are being disrespectful to people of faith. We’re not disrespectful to people of faith, but faith itself because it’s ridiculous and often harmful. Several times I’ve had people of faith tell me that I’m going to burn in hell for eternity because of my unbelieving ways. Now that’s disrespectful.
Then, in a remark against secularism, O’Reilly states, “The secular culture, which President Obama embraces, is mainly concerned with things of this world, like global warming.” Think about that statement for a second. The secular culture is mainly concerned with things of this world. Well what world should we be concerned with? Does O’Reilly think we should be worrying about tax policy on fucking Neptune? Or what the seating arrangements will be in a nonexistent afterlife? Literally, Earth to O’Reilly, bring it in, Bill. Then in a bullshit non sequitur, he asks where this is getting us and starts talking about the reluctance of China and India to take preventative measures on global warming. Bill says they’re not going to help on global warming, so he basically suggests we pray for the problem to go away instead of doing our part, even if others won’t. Seriously, I do not understand the Right’s feverish opposition on this issue. Even if you think global warming is a complete myth, is it really such a bad idea to want to curb emissions and cut back on pollution? This should be a bipartisan issue just like murder and child rape. Then again, one should never underestimate the ability of business interests to corrupt public discussion by lining the pockets of their favorite politicians who are all too happy to repeat canned industry lines about the evils of regulation.
Finally from Bill, the classic demented refrain of the delusional Religious Right: “The U.S.A. has become the strongest, most prosperous country on this earth largely because of its Judeo-Christian traditions.” Bitch, please. Few claims are more revolting than the idea that we would be without moral sense had the hallucinating Moses not promulgated the Ten Commandments to the filthy, illiterate and credulous fools at the foot of Mount Sinai. Those who insist that our laws are based on the commandments simply don’t give humans enough credit to be able to figure out important things on their own, like how the prohibition of murder and theft would be conducive to the perpetuation of any society. Or maybe it’s because the Christians who try to impose the commandments cannot understand themselves why allowing murder is a bad idea. This would explain their continued insistence that the Ten Commandments be displayed everywhere except in Paris Hilton’s vagina, even though there’s enough room for two stone tablets.
Secularism is railed against by ignorant thugs as some kind of subversive ideological force permeating American culture. In reality, secularism is not an ideology, but a safeguard against (religious) ideological encroachments on our society. It is a fine complement to America’s republican form of government, whereby the potentially dangerous and violent passions of the people are diluted through the channels of representation. In a similar fashion, secularism is an insurance policy against religious zealots—Christian or otherwise—who would endeavor to mix religion and government, or worse: impose theocracy in America where God and Jesus would be the chief policymakers in what would be a most nightmarish scenario. We often take it for granted that the Religious Right is not allowed to advance its wretched agenda in wholesale on the rest of the country because of the First Amendment. But we can easily imagine how matters might be otherwise. Secularism is the only thing standing between America as it is now, and a Christianized version of Iran. If America were to become a theocracy, it would perhaps begin with the most minor of religious infractions on free society, and gradually grow until it has rotted the roots of our government, toppling the tree of democracy and sending it crashing earthward to the dirt and filth from which it had managed to ascend to the heavens.
Cover of Glenn Beck’s shitty book, the title of which suggests that he thinks there also exists a “Fake America,” fueling speculation that he’s certifiable.
Barack Obama hasn’t been president for six months and already the Republican shit factory is pumping out high-grade, persecution-complex BS at full capacity. One of the most efficient workers in this impressive operation is Glenn Beck of Faux News. Each time he goes on air, Beck somehow manages to outdo himself in the paranoid delusions department. Although I assume Beck is a jackass in real life just as he is on television, I cannot—I repeat, cannot—imagine that Beck actually believes half the shit he says on the air. Why? Because if Beck went around in his everyday off-air life saying what he says on the airwaves, he certainly would’ve been committed by now. I am not exaggerating and this isn’t a joke. I mean it 100%. If Glenn Beck really and truly is the man he plays on television, then my friends, he is man suffering from serious psychosis with secondary paranoid delusions.
Behold,
Beck’s ready willingness to shed crocodile tears over 9/11 was genuinely vile, to use the favorite word of Beck cohort Bill O’Reilly. I would also use O’Reilly’s term “smear merchant” to describe Beck, but for some reason whenever I hear this phrase I always picture some guy selling used underwear. In any event, Beck is doing great in the ratings as you might expect. You see, since about two seconds after Obama was sworn in, the electorally repudiated conservatives started to revert to their tried-and-true Clinton-era strategy of telling everyone “We’re fucked!” now that the Democrats have retaken the White House. This position rests in stark contrast to their strategy when they’re in power, which is “Fuck you.”
Virtually every culture has adopted its own creation myth ever since human consciousness evolved the faculty of language. Remarkably, many of these myths continue to be taken literally by a vast herd of sheep that have been blessed with the absence of a critical-thinking instinct. Any person who chooses to believe one elaborate creation fairytale over another is surely one who holds contempt for logic. God created the earth in seven days (Judeo-Christian); a celestial cat got shitfaced just enough to help it create human beings by breathing life into clay figures (some African culture); the dark overlord Xenu came down to earth, dumped a bunch of demonic aliens in all the volcanoes and attempted to destroy them via nuclear weapons (Scientology). Each myth is just as plausible or implausible (unverifiable) as the next. Some years ago, while contemplating the absurdity of having faith in such creation myths, I decided to produce my own original theory about how life as we know it came to be. Keep in mind that my story is just as credible as any other. Enjoy!
Gallzak, a member of the most evolved intergalactic species in the universe (the Remulonics), began experiencing sudden, unprovoked ejaculations on a regular basis. He (the pronoun “he” is used hereafter for convenience despite the fact that Gallzak’s entire species is gender neutral and asexual) would randomly cream in his space shorts without the aid of any physical stimulation or even the slightest mental-image lubricant. His strange predicament managed to perplex everyone that he dared to confide in. In order to soothe his feelings of insecurity and shame, Gallzak soon decided to chase the tranquilizing high that could only be derived from playing what was known as the ‘God game.’
The Remulonics had been the first species of life to find a complete answer to the God question, a final solution that explained what had formerly been the mysteries of the cosmos. Their advanced intellect enabled them to easily conceptualize, and even to viscerally feel the highest mathematical formula that revealed creation in all its splendid wonders. Intelligent design and chaos (randomness) theories were seen as one in the same. There was never any need to debate or question the formula. Remulonics understood and honored the remarkable capacity to create inherent in most sentient beings. In fact, creating (playing the ‘God game’) was considered one of the highest arts within Remulonic society. Gallzak had often fantasized about producing magnificent artwork of his own and he began growing increasingly eager to get down to this business of creating.
Gallzak and his fellow Remulonics typically reproduced asexually through ejaculating onto a special candy bar, which served as an incubator for the new life-form. Remulonic semen (colloquially referred to as gooze) had amazing special properties, and, whenever discharged onto a surface other than the special candy bar, was capable of producing life all the same. This life, however, always consisted of brand new life forms that were all vastly different and typically much less evolved than the Remulonics. Gallzak’s intuition was telling him that the spontaneous orgasms recently plaguing his existence were producing gooze of a very special variety. He subsequently decided to do everything possible in order to capture his essence upon the next unexpected shudder of orgasmic delight.
Upon waking early the next morning, Gallzak quickly got dressed and went to the nearby science store to buy a sterile petri-dish. He held that little clear container all day, patiently waiting for the chance to collect his own specimen. Surprisingly, he went the whole day and evening without having his, now routine spontaneous orgasm. Discouraged, but still faithfully clutching the dish in hand, Gallzak climbed into bed and prepared to sleep. Fortunately, just after he put the blanket over his body, he began to feel the familiar waves of pleasure pulsating throughout his core; he knew a big sample was fixing to spew. He exploded with magnum force, but was still able to discharge most of the product into the petri-dish as intended. “Something special will come from that,” he said to himself quietly as he wiped the excess gooze from his chin.
The next day, Gallzak rounded up all of his friends to celebrate his splendid act of creation. He set up a microscope-type instrument with a projector, which enabled all of his guests to view the new life-forms in magnified, stunning high-definition. Since the Remulonics existed in a state of non-linear time, they were able to view, in one sitting, all that had occurred within thousands, or even millions of years of linear time as we know it. Gallzak and his audience watched in awe as life on earth evolved; from amoebas to dinosaurs all the way to human beings. Special snacks were being passed around as Gallzak’s friends kicked back and watched the entire history of mankind unfold for their viewing pleasure. It was like watching a blockbuster movie. Human life was the most entertaining drama that Remulonics had witnessed in some time. Gallzak’s intuition had not misled him. His uncontrollable ejaculations were indeed guided by a purpose (the creative principle).
Gallzak’s masterpiece brought him considerable notoriety within the community, and the dramatic feature film, “Humanity,” would long be hailed as a classic by Remulonics far and wide. A feature film, however, was all that was to remain of his magnificent creation. The spontaneous ejaculations never bothered Gallzak again after that fateful night when he jizzed the milky-way and humanity into existence.
“Art,” Marshall McLuhan once said, “Is anything you can get away with.” Sixty years ago this would have been a very cynical take, but today his maxim is elementary. Given the kind of crazy senseless shit that has passed as art in recent decades, a lot of contemporary art is indeed something that must be gotten away with, unlike the painting above.
Two people who have been particularly adept at getting away in this manner are the married wastrels Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This Bulgarian Boondoggler and his scandalously ugly wife are considered by many to be the preeminent avant-garde artists of our time. Last week, they received critical support from Colorado’s congressional delegation for a proposed 2012 project that would suspend six miles of fabric above the Arkansas River. This project would continue the couple’s tradition of defiling public property with their mind-blowingly ostentatious projects constructed under the guise of fine art. Recall their 2005 project The Gates, in New York City’s Central Park. Over 7,500 vinyl gates lined twenty-three miles of path in a venture that cost them $21 million. At the grand opening, Jeanne-Claude declared in typical haut monde fashion, “Let them eat gates,” in what was the runaway winner for Pompous Statement of the Year.
The charitable benevolence of Christo and Jeanne-Claude on display
Gee, it sure was nice of the Bulgarian Boondoggler and his potato-head spouse to conceive such a grandiose project for us unwashed masses to enjoy. Like the time they wrapped the coast of Little Bay in Sydney with erosion control fabric in 1969; or when they ensconced Berlin’s Reichstag in polypropylene fabric in 1995; or several other wealthy bourgeois endeavors that would be unachievable by artists of moderate means who could nonetheless conceive of such gaudy enterprises. The irony in all of this is that aside from the couple’s initial drawings and the orders they bark to their proletarian laborers during the building of these monstrosities, they don’t do any constructing themselves. They’re like a pair of glorified architects whose projects are both temporary and useless. Christo described his work this way:
“Do you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”
Wow. Christo is deep. And I think he just made me appreciate the legendary character of Seattle’s bygone Kingdome—the former home of the Mariners and Seahawks. I’m sure the Kingdome’s architect knew it would come down at some point since nothing lasts forever, so imagine the courage he had to have in order design such an impermanent structure.
Powerful stuff. Of course, I fully admit that the Kingdome was hardly on par with a project such as The Gates. I mean after all, the Kingdome was utilitarian, it had a function. What silliness.
Naturally, Christo and Jeanne-Claude aren’t the only hucksters ever to hit the art world. Recall that, in the 1960s, the art community popped a collective boner over the works of a charlatan from Pennsylvania named Andy Warhol. Warhol, as you know, painted iconic images of Campbell’s Soup cans, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy, among other familiar objects as part of the pop art movement. He did this during the advent of the mass media age and at a time when mass production and distribution were being perfected by an increasingly mechanized and soulless society. If the works of Warhol serve as an ironic and damning Marxist indictment of American capitalism and consumer culture, it is only by accident and not by intention, and Warhol himself said as much. By depicting universally recognizable Main Street objects, Warhol vulgarized art, and became what you might call an anti-artist.
Subsequently, anti-iconography was taken much further by the abstract expressionists. While abstract expressionism was extreme almost to the point of revulsion, it made good fodder for a vivid imagination. Furthermore, it was legitimized by its inherently emotional aspect. In the case of the ever-troubled Pollock, for example, he managed to scream from his canvasses so convincingly that it is hard to doubt the authenticity of the emotionally charged nature of his work.
“Am I high or is this a painting of just a bunch of soup cans?”
After pop art came all kinds of other weirdo artwork, such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), which is a photo of a plastic Christ on a crucifix in a glass of the artist’s urine. Now, as a godless heathen, I find Piss Christ to be a first rate work of blasphemy. However, its value as a work of art depends almost entirely on its shock value because as far as I can tell, Serrano didn’t have to put a lot of effort into this one. Beyond shock, there is nothing to feel when viewing this work. A far more aesthetically meritorious work would have been a painting or sculpture showing Peter giving Jesus a blowjob. In this case, the work would artistically be more valuable and historically accurate, and would embody the blasphemous shock value that comes with portraying an apostle giving his messiah a hummer. (Pun intended.) There it is, art community. I just wrote a huge check. All you have to do is cash it.
At this point I cannot help but ask, “What will they think of next?” It’s a scary question, but an inevitable one. I do not mean to imply that the artwork of our day is junk, but it seems a goodly number of people are quite ready to accept all sorts of strange art as great art simply because it is unusual. But just because a work ventures into uncharted territory does not mean it carries an inherent artistic value. Value resides in a work’s aesthetic qualities and its engageability. Indeed, the alien is not necessarily artistic, and the artistic need not always be alien.
The Gospels may have taken some liberties in describing the “miraculous” powers of Jesus.
Over the weekend, yours truly happened to leave a frighteningly prophetic comment on the website Totally-Useless in response to a post alleging the existence of miracles. The post highlighted the recent story of a baby who got a pencil stuck in its throat mere millimeters from the carotid artery. Subsequently, this was deemed a miracle because the child suffered no serious injury. In my comment, I wondered why the alleged miracle-maker didn’t prevent the pencil from getting jammed in the kid’s throat in the first place and at one point I made the following remark:
“All this talk reminds of people who, for example, point to the sole survivor of a plane crash as proof positive of the existence of miracles, while at the same time they ignore the other 300 people who weren’t so fortunate. What was wrong with them? Were they not miracle-worthy?”
At the time, I hesitated to posit this scenario since I couldn’t recall any major plane crash in which there was just a single survivor. After all, usually everyone dies in a plane crash, unless it’s a crash on a runway or some such thing and there are several survivors and fatalities alike. So even though my statement made its point, I wasn’t sure how realistic it was. That was until this morning when I read that a Yemenia Airbus had gone down near the islands of Comoros in the Indian Ocean. You may have guessed where I’m going with this. That’s right, rescue crews pulled a single fourteen year-old survivor from the water. As expected, the media has been using the word “miracle” ad nauseum to describe this improbable outcome, but the truth is, calling this a miracle is downright sick. Here’s a sampling of headlines about this disaster:
Miracle at Sea: One Person Rescued from Deadly Jet Crash (ABC News)
“Miracle child” rescued after plane crashes into Indian Ocean (Associated Press)
Miracle: Child found alive after Indian Ocean plane crash (CBS News)
Imagine the lack of cognitive dissonance required to believe this garbage. And yet, in the coming days we will hear all kinds of crazy pontificating in the media about the heartwarming tale of a plane crash that sent 152 people to their untimely deaths while one person somehow defied the odds and lived. That's a death rate of 99.3%. I love a happy ending, don’t you?
If the people who toss around the word “miracle” so readily stopped to think about the implications of what they’re saying, we might be on our way to ridding ourselves of this useless term. To be sure, the concept of a miracle falls completely apart upon even superficial analysis.
As far as I can tell, “miracle” is used in two senses. First, there’s the Humean sense. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume wrote, “A miracle may be accurately defined as a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” (Chapter X) Philosophically, this definition is far from perfect, but it will suffice for our purposes at the moment. There has never in the history of humanity been a documented, proven instance of a law of nature being suspended or altered in any way. (Sorry Christians, the magic tricks of your snake-oil salesman messiah don’t count. See above.) While credulous, weak-minded individuals are all too happy to attribute this fourteen year-old’s survival to divine intervention, rationalists know better. Although the details are unclear, reasonable people logically assume that for starters, there was probably something about the position of the girl’s seat inside the plane that insulated her against the undoubtedly violent impact, making her less vulnerable than her fellow passengers. Also, perhaps she happened to situate her body in a way that was somehow favorable to survival under the circumstances. Furthermore, it is almost certain that she had a relatively easy way out of the fuselage so she could escape before it sank. While these are just guesses, they are totally plausible. And as investigators gather more information, we will have a more accurate picture of what happened to the plane and how this girl was able to live through it.
Even if we were unable to develop a satisfactory explanation for an unlikely outcome such as this, this does not mean that the causes are divine. Indeed, which is more likely given a mysterious and improbable event: A supernatural divinity intervened in human affairs for some reason? Or there is a perfectly natural reason, but one which we have yet to ascertain? If you chose the former, stop reading this immediately and get yourself sterilized.
The second sense in which people use the word “miracle” is to describe not a suspension of natural law, but an event that while physically possible, is so unlikely and improbable that they nonetheless regard it as evidence of the intervening of a deity or “some invisible agent.” But notice how “miracle” is used only to describe improbable outcomes that are regarded as favorable. No one says that a miracle has occurred when some unlucky son of a bitch gets struck by lightning, not even people who believe in miracles. Why not? It was extremely improbable, wasn’t it?
You see, in ascribing such improbable positive outcomes to the handiwork of a deity, believers in miracles must ignore the lightning strikes, car wrecks, bear attacks, autoerotic asphyxiations gone wrong, and other freak incidents in which people are said to have been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Although miracles are always invoked as evidence of some benign deity or force, one can just as easily point to all kinds of improbable and crazy and horrible shit to advance the opposite case for a god who’s a total asshole.
Also notice that “miracles” almost always arise out of calamity. The plane crash. The man who survives a lightning strike. The woman who’s diagnosed with cancer and is given a 5% chance of beating it and does. A child who gets a pencil lodged in its throat millimeters from a major artery and recovers just fine. If these are indeed actual examples of miracles directed by a benign force, then why doesn’t the benign force just prevent the calamities from happening in the first place? That would seem a lot more benign to me. Why go through all that trouble? Does the deity want to show off? I hope that someday some miracle-believing mental invalid will be able to explain all of this to me because clearly I just don’t get it.
Until that day comes, I will define “miracle” as I always have: a word gullible people use to describe a highly improbable outcome which they happen to like.
Billy Mays may be dead, but this dude from Magic Hugs is more than capable of filling the void left by the legendary pitchman. Plus he puts the ShamWow guy to shame. Get yourself some paper towels!
