Oh my God, not again

 What do we do to protect our schools?  Is this one of those questions that have no real answer or at least not one definite answer? What can we propose that does more than give in to the predictable shouts and demands of the irrational and angry and fearful and uninformed?  What can we do that isn't something that has already failed to have any effect or that we're already doing?  What can we do to calm the irrational, the ill informed, the hysterical and fear ridden?

Certainly none of the solutions we've so passionately offered and instituted and defended against criticism have done anything we can point to as having helped: the three day waiting period, the background checks, the late "assault weapon" ban, the ban on "Saturday Night Specials," the ban on sending guns through the mail without a Federal license, the ban on automatic weapons that's been here since 1937, the restrictions on how many guns you can buy in a year, how much ammunition. . . the need for criminal background checks and fingerprinting -- how short a barrel can be and even whether a sporting  gun can legally be made to look like a military weapon --   Sure, the overall rate of violent crime may continue to decline and perhaps some of that is due to these measures or to more people being in jail, but there will be more incidents as there are in countries with draconian gun control laws. At every one we can be sure there will be calls to make murder even more illegal, to somehow confiscate all guns from the 175 million people who own them -- and the same mouldy arguments will be trotted out again and discussion of whether experience anywhere has given us a reason to be hopeful, will not be heard.  Still I have a good idea what will happen.

The media will chew on this for days striving to raise the discussion to the point of mania, because it's good for ratings. As I watch, the network nitwits are prattling about whether we should go back to that fraudulent "Assault Weapon Ban" which really only banned newly made fake assault weapons made overseas and left millions already in circulation. It made us liberals feel good.  It made nothing better.

People will be afraid to send their kids to school.  When heads begin to cool, there will be a search for heroes and the folk psychoanalysis of perpetrators by the usual hired opinionators.   The same old axes will be ground.

There will be more earnest insistence that banning things make them go away, even if there are 200 million in the country, perhaps much more. More idiocy about making psychotics "just say no" by passing a ban, a restriction, a law.  

What we should be asking is what I asked just now -- how do we protect the innocent, the helpless without increasing helplessness? How do we protect our schools? How do we keep the dangerously insane off the streets and how do we keep them from acquiring bombs, guns, crossbows, knives and yes, airplanes?  How do we do this without harming those people who need guns: farmers, for instance and people who use them to feed their families.  Do we need to argue for weapons with smaller magazines?  Shorter barrels, longer barrels, longer waiting periods, sanity checks?  All I can say is that we'll argue and in a fashion no more or less likely to produce an answer then in the past. There will be all or nothing parties and neither will make any sense.  The NRA will act as though Obama is going to take all our guns,  Fox will imply that he already has.  Bumper stickers will appear on cars and trucks.

Will anyone ask that we calmly assess how much danger must be seen as unavoidable in a free society and how much authoritarian control and how much less liberty we will or can accept in the interests of safety.  One side will say arm the kids and blame Obama, the other will insist that the theoretical saving of one life justifies anything at all.  Anyone in the middle won't be heard and the extremes won't listen.

I've always thought that the outcomes of a policy are the necessary test of it's effectiveness, but we're talking about America the hysterical and ill informed.  It's about believing in a policy and if it doesn't work, it's because you didn't believe or didn't make it authoritarian or even Draconian enough.  And so I have to ask again -- what can we do to protect the weak, the helpless, the innocent that works and doesn't unnecessarily tread on the rights of all?  I fear, given the way we are, that the answer is nothing.

Lawyers, Guns and Money

Is the title of the song and as the song goes, the shit has hit the fan, at least for John Hammar, an ex-Marine from Ft. Pierce, Florida, a town just a few miles north of me.  I'm sure you've heard that he's been jailed under one of Mexico's tough and comically ineffective gun control laws.  Of course your sense of comedy may differ on this point.

Seems Hammer and his friend had planned to drive across the Mexican border near Matamoros in a Winnebago filled with surfboards and camping gear -- and an old shotgun he'd inherited from his great grandfather which, as purchased from Sears, has a 24" barrel -- an inch too short for Mexico, although just fine in Florida.  US officials  told him that all he had to do was to file some papers with the Mexican authorities and it would be legal, but they were wrong and Mr. Hammar now sits chained to a cot in a Mexican jail cell hoping at least for Lawyers and money.  No more guns please.

Fox News of course is running around screaming and yelling about "trumped up charges" which seems strange, US laws about barrel length being just as arbitrary as Mexico's and carry punishments at least as severe.  In fact US laws require gun owners to know more than you'd expect the average lawyer knows and are just as arbitrary as concerns lengths and dates of manufacture and type of stock. It's possible in fact for a gun to be quite legal to send through the mail and an identical one with a one digit serial number difference to be felonious.  It's possible to own a handgun to which fitting a folding stock can put you in jail for being below a certain arbitrary barrel length.  Mexican law, unbeknownst to Hammar and his advisors, classifies a nearly antique relic from Sears Roebuck as a military weapon, a practice quite akin to the US classification of an ordinary rifle as being an assault rifle because of the shape of the stock or the country of manufacture.

But I digress.  Our Republican friends and faithful defenders of chaotic reasoning are hinting that this is all Obama's doing and that were he a real 100% American President like John Wayne, he'd be down in Matamoros waving a pair of six guns and displaying a pair of something even less attractive.  Life being somewhat less of a vintage cowboy movie than Fox would like us to think, he isn't.  He's in Washington being the president; a task that requires him to deal with more serious things like North Korea playing with ICBMs and trying to prevent the Middle East from once again dragging us into a war. Traducing Obama --  that's what Fox does.  That's what Fox is for.

I'm sure that if we still carry enough clout with Mexico, we might, or rather the Executive branch might be able to get the man released, even though pleas from Mexico to have mercy on their citizens have been rudely and routinely snubbed.  We are as you know, God's own chosen "leaders of the Free World" and fuck you very much.  I do hope we can because it looks like the man never intended to break any laws, just as so many Americans run afoul of so many counter-intuitive legal niceties of our crazy quilt of emotionally driven crime bills, bans and statutes.

Mexico, as I said, is a nice example of the failure to prevent people from  causing  problems by controlling and banning objects or substances.  That, low tax, business friendly, country with a weak government has become a slaughterhouse despite it's tough, restrictive gun laws and the even tougher gun laws in China have produced a flood of  mass school stabbings and that country is now considering registering kitchen knives and cleavers.  Meanwhile, despite stringent gun control measures, and because of its drug laws, the drug cartels have made Matamoros one of the most dangerous places in the hemisphere. The jail in question recently lost 20 inmates  in a single gang related fight despite the illegality of weapons in a prison.

Is there a lesson we even need to consider thinking about?  Is tough talk and tough law the best solution to systemic failures of a society, or are such policies the result of  parsimony and a distaste for looking for the roots of problems?  Is the prohibition of  Marijuana and "get tough" drug laws the root failure here? Oh but we're Americans so why consider what happens abroad as being a lesson?  We're unique!

Michigan: Trickle Down Neo-Fascism

Here is the story:

WASHINGTON -- Gov. Rick Snyder (R) officially made Michigan a "right-to-work" state on Tuesday, signing into law two bills that significantly diminish the power of unions.  

"I have signed these bills into law. ... We are moving forward on the topic of workplace fairness and equality," he said at a press conference on Tuesday evening, just hours after the state House passed the bills. Right-to-work laws forbid contracts between companies and unions that require all workers to pay the union for bargaining on their behalf. 

Although business groups and conservatives cast the issue in terms of workplace freedom, unions note that the laws allow workers to opt out of supporting the union although they reap the benefits of the collective bargaining … 

Michigan, however, has one of the highest rates of unionization in the country, is the birthplace of the modern automotive industry, and is consistently a swing state in elections and went for Obama in 2012.

Let’s put this assault on unions into perspective: Citizens United. In 2010, the Supreme Court removed the ban on corporations that prevented them in the past from using treasury funds for direct advocacy. Overnight, the decision created a new era of dark money, secret money, and super PACs to endorse candidates and push legislation that had previously been closed to them.

If Citizens United opened corporate treasuries, the intent of a so-called Right-to-Work bill is to dry up union coffers – creating an unprecedented imbalance in public advocacy financing.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens argued: "[Citizens United] threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution. A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."

Justice Stevens could not possibly anticipate how Citizens United in combination with Right-to-Work would alter the political landscape. On March 19, 2011, I posted this commentary, Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road:

Consider the asymmetry between union busting and the Citizens United decision. If Citizens United opened the door to unlimited corporate funding of political speech, events in Wisconsin have closed the door on union funding for Democrats. All told, union busting, Gonzo Gate, voter caging, voter ID cards, and the smear of Acorn are manifestations of a GOP master plan to eliminate traditional bases of Democratic support. 

In theory, true democracy is predicated on choice, and choice connotes a policy debate between rivals. If one party, however, employs ruthless tactics to cripple the opposition beyond viability, what we have left is essentially a one party system with only token opposition.  In other words: Democracy in name only.  Wisconsin is where the GOP changed the dynamics of democratic engagement from contest to conquest. Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road to fascism.

This is no coincidence: The overwhelming majority of Right-to-Work states are Red States.  This is no coincidence: The decision to pass a Right-to-Work bill in Michigan has nothing to do with job creation or alleged union abuses or overreach.  What happened in Michigan is a ruthless response to a recent election loss that shocked the GOP, which they are determined not to repeat again.  It is a direct assault against a traditional funding source for Democrats, against the middle class - against democracy itself.

The Holy Boast

See this guy?  He tells us he's a Christian, but like virtually everyone who does, he's not likely to have any meaningful understanding of what that might mean, other than to tell his troglodyte audience he'd like to punch me in the disbelieving mouth. A theologian?  A historian concentrating on First Century middle eastern and Roman political history? A disciple of Jesus of Nazareth?   A miserable worm who doesn't have the brains or ambition to have a real job and has to make a living raising the rabble to a frenzy of tribal brutality?

Oh,  I think you know where I'm going with this: the War on Christmas.  It's the Sport of Idiots, by idiots and for idiots.  It's  cheap con men and their war on freedom and as the days grow shorter and darker the crawling Christmas warriors come out of the woodwork like roaches, using their Fox fed fraud to attack our constitutional right to a secular government.  Want to know why I defend the second amendment so firmly?  Read on.

Matt Barber, professional troll and anger monger on Christian Hate Radio says that people who don't want his cheap plastic sheep and donkeys in their face and on their public property, should be punched in the mouth.  I'm sure the illuminated plastic idols people like him worship would agree because you know that Jesus loved idolatry.  That's the reason he was so fond of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, their pagan idols, their Son-o-God, virgin mothered emperors and the corruption of the Temple. He was also very fond of people who set themselves up as authorities to administer punishment on the basis of their own self-defined piety. Just ask Matt, he's a scholar, you know -- the right hand of the Son of Yahweh and the lord high executioner for the Holy Ghost.  The Gospel according to Barber would have you punch infidels like me in the mouth if we don't want our tax money paying for his pagan rituals and plastic holy inaction figures Made in China and planted on the town square. And yes, it's a pagan celebration with no basis in either the Bible or history.  Just ask the Pope.

 Dare we ask Matt how he feels about how his tax money is used -- to teach geology or history or cosmology or physics or other things that reduce his dimwitted delusional dogmas and dreams of power to the level of  idiocy?  Let's not bother.  You can't argue with drunks, madmen or idiots so where are we going to get with all three in one bloated, Bible babbling shitbag?

 So here we are with the seasonal smokescreen, that sleazy haze, that slick, sick pretense that seeks to cover the war on freedom that has for centuries soaked the Earth with the blood of men who would be free and think free.   My religious freedom is not subject to Christian approval  or disapproval and that freedom does not include the right to abuse others - even for real Christians, so if I suggest, for the purposes of argument, that we erect a huge, brass Yamataka on the courthouse lawn, a neon Kali, an effigy of Cthulhu, rubber tentacles wiggling or a bright electric blue Krishna seducing the bare breasted milkmaids in the bushes, I'm subject to the same constitutional proscription as the practitioners and celebrants of any other nonsense no matter how much faith they have.

My right to defend myself  from cowards and bullies and the peasant crusades they attempt to launch is real however, no matter how firmly some believe it isn't and I trust Messrs. Remington and Kalashnikov will represent me well and loudly should Mr. Barber or his rabid, unwashed, vermin hoard of zombies follow his bloody flag into battle.











 

Nehil Novus Sub Solis

I had to laugh at a recent CNN.com article about the alleged 20th anniversary of the "text message."  Why? because it points out the trouble we English language speakers make for ourselves by having made English the product of journalistic shorthand babble and public ignorance.  Obviously what the eager to be hip, slightly older than young CNN journalist meant was an electronic message sent by mobile phone and not a written or typed or inscribed on a clay tablet message -- nor even a telegram or radiogram or Telex or teletype or Telefax or any of the relatively (in youth culture terms) ancient ways of  delivering text to a distant recipient. I mean really, we still have messages in text written in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Isn't there some sort of  axiom that would show that messages in text are text messages?  Sure as hell should be, even if it's not what the hipsters are saying this week.

The article includes the traditional chuckle about LOL and OMG, but has already forgotten the  little shorthands of the ASCII message age back in the 1990's: and all the emoticons used to prevent hostile misunderstandings e-mail brought us. Forgotten by nearly all of us are the hundreds of devices of the telegraph age like QSL? or 73, meaning "did you understand" or "best regards" or even ARL46 -- Happy Birthday. Times change and most everything you think is brand new is older than that. An Egyptian scribe might add a symbol to the word "mut" so you'd know he was talking about a vulture and not your mother -- rather an important distinction.

Yes, technological confusion and ignorance of the history of technology is overwhelming amongst our born in the 1980's  "tech savvy" population, many of whom couldn't reproduce or accurately describe an early 19th century telegraph system,  but  that medieval scribes were "texting" and the Marquis du Sade was "Sexting" sould seem obvious to those not primed to think only in the ephemeral and vague terms of teen jargon:  people who think the world is very new -- people otherwise known as Americans.  

KEEPING THE “CHRIST” IN CHRISTMAS

The other night I was channel flipping when I came across a nice Christmas program, it may have been from Rockefeller Center.  Trace Adkins was singing and so I stopped to listen and watch.  I’m a sucker for Christmas programs.

Then Trace turned his head and my stomach turned with him. There he was singing songs of praise to the person who all Christians claim to follow but seems Trace may have forgotten the message Jesus brought the world. Jesus instructed all to love one another. 

But Trace chose the low road and appeared with an earpiece that had the Confederate flag emblazoned across it.  The camera came in for a close up and Trace turned his head at just the right moment. He was called out on it but, of course, claimed it was not meant as an offense to anyone, just his way of celebrating his Southern heritage.

Really? So the camera just happened to zoom in and he just happened to turn his head so that he could send his message of bigotry and racism across the country, thus politicizing what should have been a joyous celebration for all.

A vulgar public display such as that inflicted on unsuspecting viewers should never have made it to the airwaves.  I blame the network as much as Adkins for this inappropriate display. How much did Trace pay the cameraman to be in collusion with him?  Why did the network let him go on with that revolting piece of filth in his ear?

To those complaining, “they are taking the Christ out of Christmas” I suggest you look no further than your own back yard in order to identify “they”. They are Trace Adkins singing about a holy night while promoting unholy prejudice and hatred. They are your friends and neighbors choosing to spend Thanksgiving Day lined up to buy piles of stuff to stick under that tree in celebration of the life of their Savior who was born on a bed of hay and died with only the clothes on his back.

The Christmases of my youth were spent in, yes, anticipation, because children love presents and it was always a magical moment to come into the living room and see the empty space beneath the tree from the night before now filled with colorfully wrapped boxes. But we also spent Christmas making gifts for others, visiting the sick and elderly and attending church on Christmas Eve to once again hear the message of peace and love. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was filled with busy preparation for the celebrations of the season. But it was also a time of family devotions and private reflection.

So, if you are wondering where the “Christ” is in Christmas anymore perhaps you should first look within yourself.

Burn more gas for Jesus

It's hard to believe these people actually exist and harder to believe they've managed to worm their way into positions of respect and influence in America -- but that's the kind of country we are, babbling about the bible, scrawling godblather on the walls, rolling on the floor making gargling noises,  respecting and electing people who can't stop using God's names as toilet paper while shilling for the oil cartel.

Take the American Family Association, which in the right wing tradition has named itself innocuously with insidious intent; wrapping itself in God, Gospel and flag and having little to do with the American Family other than to deceive them and exploit their superstitions.

Take Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the AFA who, ostensibly in the interests of American families and their health and welfare, insists that the air isn't getting worse, the ice caps aren't melting at an ever accelerating rate and if we try to reduce our use of petroleum and coal, God will feel like a spoiled kid with a birthday present he doesn't like and probably, if we're lucky, sulk off to his room.  If we're not lucky of course, he'll send us more Katrinas and Sandys and earthquakes and floods and fires to burn us, our families and cuddly kittens to death -- amen.  So much for analyzing that issue, Bryan.  So much for the ironically titled "Conservatives" who see such vermin as allies and use their ravings to justify their rape and pillage of our liberty and our planet.

“You know, God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them” 

said Fisher, who thinks you're stupid enough to think that some supreme being speaks through crooks and liars like him and hopes you'll go right out and buy an even bigger truck or two just to put a smile on God's face. Yes, Oil is God's little surprise and he'll just cry if you don't dig it up, burn it all as quickly as possible and poison us all by doing it.  If we don't do our part to end life on earth, how will all their twaddle about end times seem when it doesn't happen?

But of course, God doesn't give a shit what we do and we go on taking such people seriously and electing them and their representatives to public office and we go on railing and screeching at people who disagree and unfortunately none of them or us will be here in a hundred years or a thousand to defend ourselves when historians argue about how we let things get so bad -- how we let a rich and prosperous and free country turn into what I'm afraid it will become.

To every lie, there is a season

I may have to stop calling him Lyin' Bill because the word lie implies some knowledge of saying something that isn't true.  I think at this point we have to question his sanity. 

True, the need to divide the country with his annual War on Christmas fugue may have some purpose, like keeping the duller class enraged enough to make puppets and pawns out of them and since running in circles screeching Benghazi! Benghazi! doesn't seem to be quite enough to rally the demoralized dimwits Fox needs to keep in the GOP barnyard, they need something.  But of course dropping such a mindless, bullshit based annual exercise might make it seem as though they were giving up, like maggots leaving a rotting corpse.  So we're back to the War on Christmas season and if you were looking forward to some seasonal good cheer now that the economy is turning a corner, forget it. They're not giving up. Like Allen West, they're not conceding the loss. Old Bill is at it again: the 'Fascist' Atheists are stealing Christmas.  And the evidence of this is that some guy said. . . and of course what one unbeliever says is binding on all who don't believe in God or all the detritus that clings to every description of it.

Blind rage against some liberal minority has been a substitute for blind rage against the failed specter of World Communism and the dishonest conflation with socialism the batshit Right has been selling for a lifetime  It continues to weaken,  but there always has to be the rage, and a donkey to pin all those tails on. Secularism, Liberal thought and even some aspects of Capitalism being sold as something entirely different -- taxation as Communism, for instance; just to have something to keep the rabble roused.  But with the obvious and manifest movement of Western thought away from the traditional nastiness and paranoia, Fox and O'Reilly and Rove and all the mad hatters at the Tea Party have a need for scapegoats that far exceeds the supply and no matter how pathetic and flimsy and obviously contrived the stories may be, fear and anger must be maintained.  Terrify and enrage or perish.

So yes, the Fascist Atheists (they'd add Jews if they thought they could get away with it) and of course the Muslims are trying to make Christmas illegal, raves O'Reilly with a blindness to irony that can only come from stupidity and derangement.  Capitalist, consumerist culture that's made the Holiday one of the supporting pillars of retail isn't the reason behind the season. Madness. A slap in the face to Capitalism and blindness to the fact that Christmas doesn't need to be, must not be supported or sold or paid for by public funds and government rules. Besides Christmas is bigger than ever and that's a good sign.

But backing themselves into the crooked corner of madness and mendacity, the fictions begin to become so absurd and obviously contrived that I'm waiting for the explosion that must certainly come -- and waiting.  Can Bill O'Reilly really bail himself out by insisting that Christianity isn't a religion, but a Philosophy?    Sorry, the idea that God, mating with a young girl and producing a hybrid offspring that needs to be killed so that this almighty and forgiving God can now, after thousands of years forgive mankind ( but only those who believe the story) for the sin they inherited of acquiring moral knowledge and the stray sexual thoughts one has from time to time is not a philosophy, it's a religion. Unlike a philosophy, it has no internal logic, it's self contradictory and has the necessity of creating endless entities to smooth over those contradictions.  A philosophy does not depend on faith to be true or false. It's a religion. It not only isn't dependent on facts, it can't allow itself to be tested against observable reality.  Kinda like every goddamn thing that comes out of Bill O'Reilly's mouth.

Rally the religious.  Tell them their God is under attack, is in personal danger or will be so angered by differences in gullibility that he will kill us all.  It works for the Taliban, and the Ayatollahs, but it doesn't work with and isn't compatible with a free society and it's not a philosophy, it's a religion.  God save us from it and God damn Bill O'Reilly and the Fox he rode in on.

A few thoughts on religious extremists

Anybody who meets me will slowly come to realize that I have no time for religious extremism. Adding even more stupidity to an already illogical belief system is just compounding the brain damage.

On a (potentially unrelated) side note, I like to say that I use Facebook much in the way most people use their refrigerator door: as a place to hang things I find interesting/funny/unbelievable. I think it's a better idea than sticking things to my computer with refrigerator magnets.

(This is not a non-sequiter - it just looks like one. I once worked with an older woman, and one day I caught her using a magnet to put a picture of her grandkids on her hard drive. And just to make it better, she was putting it over her air vents. She didn't appreciate my input on the subject.)

My sister, the Episcopalian priestess, gets a little cranky with my lack of respect for her chosen profession. (By the way, she really dislikes the term "priestess." Just so you know...) She even wrote me, on Facebook, to ask why I kept putting down Christianity, and no other religion. You can probably insert a little "why do you hate god?" into that, too, if you'd like. Entirely subtext, of course.

My answer included the fact that there were plenty of other people out there bashing Islam, so they don't need any help on that front.

But overall, my opinion of religion is pretty much like the somewhat-overused joke:

Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.

There's a thousand variations on that one, but there it is.

With all that being said, I came across the following video clip, which is worth the ten minutes out of your day that it will take to see it. It's a bit from Russell Brand's talk show, where, inexplicably, two members of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed to appear.

For any of you that are unaware, Westboro Baptist is a cult dedicated to the idea that the Prince of Peace wants them to picket funerals and sporting events holding up colorful signs saying that "God hates fags" and explaining that you're all going to hell.

There's a lot of people out there, who've spent a lot of time and venom talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, so I'll let you look them up on your own. (At this point, all you need to google is "Westboro," so it isn't like the material is difficult to find.)


So, a couple of takeaways from this.

1. Russell Brand has a talk show? I mean, admittedly it's on FX, so how many people actually see it? But still... really?

2. Nobody should be surprised about them appearing on this show. The Westboro Baptists have made a life out of putting themselves on display, so this is just a logical extension of their standard behavior.

3. The guy with the hair, Steve Drain, can at least fake having some kind of charisma. The head-shaver, Timothy Phelps, can hardly hide his disdain for this crowd of heathens. Even when he tries for a crappy joke, his hatred for everyone and everything peeks out: "Well put. Other than the accent, very well put."

3a. Really? You dislike the fact that he's British? When there's so much else to hate there?

4. That being said, Russell Brand definitely came out on top here. (There's no double entendre there. Trust me.) He was polite, kept his audience in line, and, although he was in full Tease mode, he managed to keep it friendly and avoid most of the snark. But he didn't really take it easy on them, either.

Brand: "Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a specific litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings? The Bible wasn't literally written by a cosmic entity. It was written by people."

Drain: "It was written by the holy spirit."

Brand: "The holy spirit ain't got a pen!"

And really, that's the only way to deal with people like that. Point and laugh.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

Indications are that the Mayans were right and that 2012 is indeed the end of an era, not because of  some change in politics or religion and not because of anything cosmic or tectonic, but because a piece of America as we knew it has died. An America, exuberant in itself, proud, forward looking, confident.  Hostess bakeries died this week and not because of mismanagement but because of what America has become: timorous, ashamed of what it loves and afraid of being provincial.  Our sweet land of phony authenticity.  Of thee I sing.

The Twinkie, the Ho-Ho, the Snowball are gone now, along with the Oldsmobile and the Mercury; with Buddy Holly and the independent hamburger stand. You can't buy a Hostess cupcake any more for much the same reason you can't find anything like Hopper's Nighthawks any more. Your cupcakes have to be 'artisinal,' gluten free, in season, free range and come from a 'cupcakery' just as that cup of Joe is now an 'Americano' and served (artisinally) by a 'Barista.'  You're not à la mode enough though, unless you order something that sounds like Mississippi camp-meeting glossolalia and costs forty bucks for a "venti."  Good God, don't ask for a "large." America's rites of self detestation and the industries that thrive on it the way a tapeworm thrives on weakening it's host have us all scrambling for the plastic, made in Taiwan, European panache that we attribute to lands  that we otherwise pretend to loathe because, of course, they're 'authentic' and we're not. American means fake and we flee from it toward an imported synthetic authenticity.

The Authenticity industry with it's vast smoking factories churning out the local and seasonal and artisinal synthetic-reality products we crave and the flim-flam pseudo-scientist diet doctors selling us low 'carb' gluten free and without fructose and for heaven's sake, not 'processed' foods: we zumba and carb-count our way to South Beach to be fleeced.  In an age most noteworthy for the triumph of scientific method over superstition and fallacious conjecture, we have come more to trust 'alternative' information that comes from movie actors, comedians and people who get rich by insisting, contrary to all evidence, that gluten is poison, that miracle berries and magic beans will let you live forever, that cooking your food is bad and the fructose you get from corn is full of bad and fattening juju unlike the identical Furanose Sugars found in (organically grown, artisinally picked, local and seasonal ) strawberries.

Studies show. . .  I cringe when I see that and nearly always it means that tendentious conjecture based on selected facts might fool you into thinking. . . It nearly always means that there was no real study.  Large scale, double blind and randomized scientific studies that are repeatable and published in peer-reviewed journals don't have a chance against diet doctors, Oprah-backed pundits or miracle food and fake science purveyors, not in a country trained to favor faith over fact, trained to celebrate the notions of celebrities and mistrust scientists; trained to patronize diet doctors who tell us that studies show.

Twinkies have anti-oxidant  "preservatives" which everyone knows are bad because studies show. They contain things like gluten and fructose that everyone knows are bad because studies show.  Twinkies may be authentic, but they're authentic American and that doesn't count. We long for something Tuscan, even if we're not sure where that is -- something from Tuscany where it's all artisinal.  Hostess Snowballs -- they didn't stand a snowball's chance in the new America. Maybe if you called them gluten free Palle di Neve or Boules de Neige and opened chic little sidewalk places in Boca Raton and Park Slope and South Beach and had them served by Ballistas for ten bucks each. . .
Ah well, one can only dream now of  temps perdue.  Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.