Open Letter to Two Truckers

I’ve been sitting here listening to you guys for close to half an hour, while you go on and on about how President Obama hates America but loves the Muslim Brotherhood, about how he is turning the country into a socialist dictatorship (those two words don’t play well in the same sentence, by the by), and how he is going to use the murders in Connecticut to justify sending his stormtroopers into your homes to take away your guns. I have listened politely while you explained how he has it all wrong, that the surest way to keep what happened at that school from happening again is to arm the teachers. I’ve listened to everything you’ve said, and now I wanna talk for a little while, because I have a few questions for you, and a few observations.

First of all, let’s talk about the Second Amendment. The one you’re all twitterpated about. It says you have the right to bear arms period, right? Actually, not so much. Here’s the Amendment as it reads—the entire Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Now, since you are so very familiar with these cherished words, perhaps you could answer a few questions for me?

Great. Here goes…

Can I see your Militia ID cards, please? Also, which federal, state or local entity is sponsoring your Militia activities? Is it that same entity that provides your funding? And if so, I’d like to see your tax and payroll files (unless you are doing your “patriotic” duty gratis), as well as a copy of your leadership structure. Oh, and what are your mission parameters? Do you have the necessary permissions to cross state boundaries in pursuit of your…um…duties? And could I please get the names and contact information for your liaisons with local law enforcement, the US military, the White House, Homeland Security, the CIA the FBI and—dare I say it—the BATF?

While you’re getting all that material together, I’ll just press on if that’s all right.

Let’s chat a little bit about your central thesis—arming teachers. According to you two (and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Wayne LaPierre, and other thoughtful, reasoned—and don’t forget frightened and paranoid—members of your tribe) issuing sidearms to America’s teachers will bring a halt to atrocities like the one that happened in Connecticut, because the minute some whack-job opens fire on the students, Nice Teacher Lady will whip out her trusty Glock 19 and wax the perp before he can fire so much as one round from his high-capacity magazine. Does that about sum up your position?

I’m wondering if you’ve considered a few things.

For instance, you do realize that you’re talking about one of those dreaded Federal Programs you hate so much, right? If the government issues a weapon to every teacher in the country (there are about 3.3 million teachers in public schools alone) someone is going to have to oversee it—budgets, certifications, re-certifications, ongoing monitoring, etc. Estimating conservatively (boy, ya gotta love that word, right?) we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars every year. And that, boy howdy, is simply a huge fucking burden on the national ledgers. Or the States ledgers, if the Feds pass the, so to speak, buck. Or maybe you intend to have the teachers foot the bill for their own weapons? Bet’cha a dollar the National Education Association will have a few choice words for you about that idea, and I bet you can’t say most of those words on prime-time TV. In fact, I bet those words rhyme with Yuck and Poo.

Moving along, are you going to force these teachers to carry sidearms? What if they don’t want to? And wouldn’t it worry you, just a tiny little bit, about a teacher who really, really wanted to go in amongst a bunch of first graders armed?

Which brings me to another couple of things. What happens when one of your armed teachers loses his sidearm? This happened in Lapeer, MI, just last month, except it was the school’s rent-a-cop who left his weapon in a bathroom. And furthermore, what is your response going to be when one of your armed educators loses his shit and turns his pistol on little Jimmy? Maybe even your little Jimmy? Because such a terrifying happenstance isn’t a might, it’s an ugly certainty.

Oh, but wait. If that happens, one of the other armed teachers will leap in, just like John McClane, and save the day, right? Sure. Sure. I mean, that’s what always happens in the movies, right?

And, hey: have you ever been a teacher? No, I thought not. I have, however, and I’m here to tell ya this. It’s fucking hard—kids with over-developed senses of entitlement, ungrateful parents, grateful parents who think of you first as day-care, and second as an educator, the bafflingly ridiculous menace of standardized testing etc., etc., etc. And now you want to add crisis management to their list of responsibilties? On top of everything, you want them trained in the same manner as police officers? I haven’t seen that movie yet, but I bet Mel Gibson is in it.

To sum it all up, you are in favor of massive governmental programs that won’t work (there was an armed guard at Columbine, remember, and that sure worked out exactly according to your plan), and at the same time you are in favor of letting criminals enjoy the same armed freedoms they enjoy today? Wow. You must also be in favor of cognitive dissonance, boys, cuz you got it in spades.

The only sensible solution is to get rid of assault-style weapons. Nobody needs them. You don’t need them for home protection, unless there has been a sudden uptick in paramilitary gangs commando-raiding suburban homes to steal Blu-Ray players and Keurig coffee makers. Which there hasn’t been. Nor will there ever be. And you don’t need assault-style weapons to hunt with. I get along just fine with a regular ol’single-shot Ruger. If you need 30 rounds to bring down Bambi’s mom, find a different fucking hobby, before you hurt somebody—because you obviously can’t shoot. I recommend continuing with what is apparently your other favorite pastime: cranial self-colonoscopy.

See, since your head is already up your ass, you might as well learn a few things about yourself while it’s in there.

I gotta go. It’s been a pleasure meeting you both.

Cheers.

Un-Killable

On January 10^th, I was in Kansas City on business and got knocked around pretty good in a car wreck. I don’t remember much of the accident itself, mostly because I was unconscious for most of it, but I do recall—pristinely, actually—the words of the cops and the EMTs, when they informed me, in that calm jaded way they have, that had the other car hit mine on the driver’s side I would not be sitting here writing this, or in the “best case scenario,” would now be walking around without any legs.

Long story short, the whole thing got me thinking—largely about the various other times, over the course of my life, that the world has attempted to do me grievous harm, or to force my acquaintance upon the Black Rabbit of Inlé.

Let’s see…

I once half-rolled, half-fell, about 30 feet, through a cottonwood tree and into a dry river bed when the embankment I was standing on collapsed out from under me. I’ve wrecked twice on motorcycles and once on a freaking scooter, and the scooter mishap messed me up worse than the other two combined. When I was in college I fell off the extension of an A-frame ladder and sliced the back of my head open. Also in college, I fell through a plate-glass window. Not counting this most recent journey into la-la land, I’ve knocked myself unconscious, or been knocked unconscious by other means, on four other occasions. I’ve been bitten twice by rattlesnakes (once on a boot, but once on my hand), once by a black widow spider, and three times by scorpions. I’ve been nose to nose with a black bear, about as far from a zoo as you can get. In junior high I got hit in the face with a baseball bat, breaking my nose and cracking the orbit around my left eye. I got through a cancer scare unscathed a couple of years back. At a theater in New York an inexperienced stagehand dropped a 30-pound cable bundle on my head from the loading bridge. When I was a cook at a Japanese restaurant, I got bit by a 220v plug with a short in it. I dislocated my shoulder and broke both collar bones while mud diving one night in a rain storm. I’ve been in three other car wrecks, killing two other cars. Four Hells Angels backed me into a corner in a bar, but I talked my way out of it. One very stupid night I tried to break up a dog fight and got half my right thumb bitten off. Over the years I’ve ingested enough drugs and alcohol to open my own clinic. I’ve been held up at knife-point once. I’ve been robbed at gun-point three times—on the last occasion the robbers had a very casual conversation about whether they should just take off or tie me up in the cooler and cut my throat. I’ve been shot at once, by an angry farmer with a shotgun who didn’t like trespassers. (I was eight years old.) And I’ve had my heart broken three times.

I thought all about all these things, but I thought about something else, too.

When I was 13 I went on a sort of fieldtrip to the Soviet Union (long story). One of the first things I did upon arrival was buy one of those pill-boxy beaver-fur caps with the ear flaps that tie over the top. It was February, and Russia in February is witch-tit cold, so I wore the flaps down a lot, tying them under my chin. Kept tying them in knots, though, and couldn’t get the damn hat off half the time.

All of us students were walking around Gorky Park late one afternoon. I was waiting on line for a merry-go-round, and was worrying about my hat flying off during the ride. Once again, though, the strings were knotted. I let lots of people go ahead of me while I fumbled, and the ride guy was getting impatient.

Then there was a girl standing in front of me. She was on the trip with the rest of us, but I hadn’t talked with her much because she was an older kid—a ninth grader. She asked if I needed help, and I said that I did. She started picking at the knot with her little cold-pink fingers, but couldn’t get it to loosen. So she leaned into me and went after the thing with her teeth. A couple of nibbles and the knot came undone. When she pulled back she looked me in the eyes and giggled.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if people thought we were kissing?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

And then she just did it. Her soft lips touched mine. She smelled like bubble gum.

It was my first kiss. The whole thing lasted about five seconds.

But for those five seconds I saw infinity.

So, I’ve been thinking about that.

Cheers.

The Best & Worst Movies of 2012

Time once again for me to offer opinions that nobody cares about. In no particular order, here are the Best and Worst movies of last year.

THE BEST

The Avengers

It’s the best comic book movie ever made. ‘Nuff said.

The Central Park Five

Ken Burns’ documentary is one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. And it made me damn mad, too. What the State of New York did to those five kids in 1989 is truly horrifying. And the fact that the detectives, reporters and attorneys who perpetrated the outrage continue to stick by their stories is despicable. Shame on them all.

Prometheus

Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel is exactly what good science fiction should be: thoughtful, slick, exciting and well-acted. Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace are fantastic (though Noomi always is: check out The Monitor if you haven’t already). Scott’s direction, as it was on his 1979 classic, is calm and avoids most genre clichés. Prometheus doesn’t have quite the claustrophobic menace as the original, but then it’s a movie with a different scope.

The Master

This is, hands down, the best movie I saw this year, and is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best work to date. As a meditation on male psychology, and the psychology of a cult and its followers, it resists easy categorization, which is probably why it received so little in the way of advertising, and underperformed at the box office. Philip Seymour Hoffman proves once again that he is one of our finest actors. And Mihai Malaimare’s cinematography is gorgeous.

Zero Dark Thirty

Osama bin-Laden was a very bad guy, but this is not, as some critics have labeled it, a rah-rah, kill-the-bad-guy movie. It’s about as far from that as you can get. Jessica Chastain gives her best performance so far as a CIA operative looking into the abyss. Kathryn Bigelow’s direction is tight. The moral ambiguity of the thing leaves your mind spinning, even as you want to take a long shower.

Margaret

On the surface, this is a movie about a lie, and a young woman’s attempt to atone for that lie. But it is also a thoughtful, smart examination of a young woman fending for herself in a world she isn’t experienced enough to grapple with. Kenneth Lonergan’s script is intelligent, emotionally complex, and genuine. I wasn’t sure Anna Paquin could pull off a high-school aged character, but she does it with honesty and élan. Mark Ruffalo shines in a small role, and Jeannie Berlin (daughter of Elaine May) is absolutely terrific.

Safety Not Guaranteed

A quirky hermit places an ad in the paper for someone to join him for a trip back in time. A journalistic intern is sent out to cover the story by posing as a candidate to join the expedition. Of course there is a love story involved, a very fun love story, that takes on true emotional resonance when it becomes clear why the man wishes to go back in time. Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza as the hermit and the intern are a joy to watch.

The Beasts of the Southern Wild

Some critics has called it a fantasy set in the real world, but I think it’s more a vision of the real world channeled through the mind of a child. There is something almost other-worldly about Quvenzhané Wallis’ performance as Hushpuppy. She was only five when the movie was filmed, so watching her isn’t like watching an actor, but something more present than that. She’s a thirty-pound force of nature and you can’t take your eyes off of her, or off this fine, fine movie.

Lincoln

This is easily Spielberg’s best work since Saving Private Ryan. His direction is so gentle and so confident. Daniel Day-Lewis gives his usual remarkable performance, but he is aided by marvelous work from Sally Field and James Spader (of all people), both of whom should get some Academy attention. The real star of the movie, though, is Tony Kushner’s screenplay. It’s a marvel of language.

The Cabin in the Woods

I have a weird love for horror movies that are laced with humor, as apparently does writer Joss Whedon, and his team of Sitterson and Hadley, as played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, bring out the demented laughs with gusto. Wonderful, twisted fun, that turns the slasher genre on its head, then makes it breakdance.

Honorable Mention

Moonrise Kingdom

You heard it here first. Wes Anderson managed to rid himself, for one movie at least, of his usual middle-class pretensions. A cute, clever little movie.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

A low-key love story where the kids actually feel like kids. Emma Watson knocks it out of the park.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I love movies that aren’t afraid of big romantic gestures, and nobody does them better than Lasse Hallström.

AND THE WORST…

Dark Shadows

OK, Tim Burton is officially becoming an embarrassment. To himself and perhaps even to the entire history of film.

Rock of Ages

Is it possible to actually be oppressed by a movie, to be held down and incessantly beaten about the face and throat with awfulness? Yes. It is.

Battleship

This movie is so bad it actually caused the capillaries in my eyeballs to voluntarily burst in an effort to save themselves, and my brain, from seeing any more of it.

The Hunger Games

Go rent Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale instead. The books and the movie are rip-offs of that much better movie and the much better book by Koushun Takami.

Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah was one of our best directors, and this tepid, badly acted remake of his classic should’ve been put out of its misery before it ever hit the screen. You simply cannot replace Dustin Hoffman with James Marsden and think that anything good will come of it.

This Means War

I like Chris Pine. I really like Tom Hardy. And I really, really like Reese Witherspoon. But this movie really, really, really sucked. Not funny. Not exciting. Not sexy. Not much of anything, really. Really.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Bad acting, tedious direction, and an absurd plot. Kristen Stewart’s performance consists of a painful series of facial tics, intended, apparently, to convey emotion, but instead cause her to look like she has some kind of neurological malady.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

Sweet shit. Are they done with this series yet? And if not, is there a vaccination available?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Tolkien’s book is shitty, and Peter Jackson somehow managed to make it shittier. The movie is a bloated CGI-fest, and commits the one unforgivable sin for an adventure movie: it’s boring.

Mansome

Morgan Spurlock’s documentaries have all been tiresome exercises in promoting Morgan Spurlock, but this awful thing about male grooming habits hits a new low. He provides no interesting information. He makes no discernible point.

And that’s all she wrote, folks.

Cheers.

Letting Go of Texas

So, I was traveling through Texas, doing my job, when, at about six in the evening I found myself loading up on coffee at a truck stop. This was about a week ago, in the scenic hamlet of Midlothian. I was splashing a little milk in my jitter juice when I saw this woman approaching the condiment counter. She was of average height, but probably weighed four bills. I mean, I’m no spindleshanks, but this lady…damn. She was huge. She was Trucker the Hutt. And she was carrying six little snack-sized bags of Cheetos. As I looked on, she systematically opened the bags and filled each about half-way with liquid nacho cheese from the machine. Then she rolled the tops shut and trundled over to the checkout line.

Standing in line behind her, I thought about several things, first among them being to wonder how she planned on eating her vile nosh. Or, more specifically, how she planned on eating her vile nosh while simultaneously piloting a tractor-trailer. And then I thought about how fast she might be going when all that cheese affixed itself around her heart like bath-tub grout and she went screaming across eight lanes of traffic.

In the end, I decided not to waste any more thought on the subject, and headed out to my car. Sometime between when I entered the truck stop and when I exited, the space next to mine had been filled with the obnoxious bulk of a shiny-black Hummer H3. I hadn’t seen one in a while. I mean, I’d been operating under the assumption that penis implants had largely done away with the need to purchase one, but there it was. As I backed out, I was able to get a look at its rear end, where a pair of bumper stickers offered the world the following information:

MY OTHER TWO CARS ARE ALSO GAS GUZZLERS

And:

SCREW TIBET!

FREE TEXAS!

SECEDE!

I’d been keeping up with my reading on the nascent secessionist movement in this country, but these two stickers really drove it home for me: the close to 900,000 Americans (some 115,000 from Texas alone) who have signed secessionist petitions are among the most ignorant—of history and economics, to name but two of the more vital departments of the project—people who have ever slouched about in the spotlight of the American stage. It might sound appealing to take your ball and go home, but the adult world is, oh, a tad more complicated than that.

I wanted to pull back in, wait for the Hummer Head to come out, and engage him in a little furious debate, but resisted the temptation. My only weapons would have been facts, and I suspected (without reason, I know) that presenting facts to someone who believed what this doofus apparently believed would be a little bit like presenting an iPad to an infant—the kid might look at it for a minute, especially if there’s something sparkly on the screen, but will inevitably go back to sucking its toes. So I drove away, but my brain continued to roil, sort of cataloging the array of potentialities the secessionists haven’t assimilated into their sulky political posturing.

Take, for example, the billions of Federal dollars they get fed every year—after Louisiana, Texas gets the second-highest pile of government cheese in the country. All that dough would vanish instantaneously. Or how about the immediate closure of all military bases in the state? There are 15 major bases in Texas, and all those troops (along with their money-spending families) would be reassigned to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico to guard against any funny business from the Lone Star Nation. And where would they find trading partners? The EU? They have troubles of their own. China? Right. How about Cuba? Texas would be screwed from the get-go and would be left to watch with slack-jawed impotence as their economy collapsed like flour down a chute.

But then… But then, yes, something occurred to me which might make it possible for the citizens of the new nation to keep their heads above the ever-deepening lake of shit they created through their own machinations.

See, while lots of Texans claim a belief in the Christian god, the true religion of the place is football.

Secession would be fucking perfect for football people, and their favorite saint, Jerry Jones. Jerry could own the whole TFL. He could name every team after himself. You’d have the Dallas Jerries, the Houston Jerries, the San Antonio Jerries, and right on down the line. Jerry would also be the general manager and starting quarterback for every team. And he would get quite a workout every February when he played for both teams in the Jerry Bowl.

I know, I know. Pretty Stupid.

And so is the idea of seceding from the Union.

The two people I encountered that night in Midlothian, if you wadded them up together, would coagulate into the perfect secessionist brain: an unhealthy mass of air-inflated, deep-fried, lard blisters swimming in an inorganic orange slurry, and powered by an admixture of delirious paranoia and self-satisfied stupidity.

But if the Texans really want to go, I say this. Let ‘em.

Then in a few years, just for a goof, we can invade and steal their oil.

Cheers.