About the secret musicological link between (a) the Supremes, and (b) contemporary techno (or as I prefer to call it, “homosexual ethnic”) music, I present for you:

Exhibit A: Tainted Love by Gloria Jones

Exhibit B: Tainted Love by Soft Cell

Re: the latter.  Wow, that is some fucked-up shit.  Whatever people may say about decadent American culture, nothing beats the perviness of the Brits when they put their minds to it.

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So I read in the New York Times this morning that President Bush believes “History will be kind” to him.

Yes, because as we all know, Clio is a nice sort of town crier — a paid PR hack even — simply proclaiming the deeds of famous men.  She’s no relation at all that awful angel Walter Benjamin described, his face turned away from Paradise, watching impassively as the tragic wreckage blown apart by the windforce of his own clumsy wings piles up at his feet.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Mr. Bush said. “When it’s all said and done, when Laura and I head back home — which at this moment will be Crawford, Tex. — I will get there and look in the mirror, and I will say, ‘I came with a set of principles and I didn’t try to change my principles to make me popular.’ ”*

I love — in a perverse and addictive manner, to be sure — trying to parse the dadaistic ramblings of this man.  It’s become my favorite parlor game, actually, which I liken to drinking absinthe and seeing which particular green dragons pop out of the bottle this time, while all the while the little crystals of insanity build up in mind and slowly drive me batshit crazy. 

So where do we go with this particular rambling, my friends?  Where do we go indeed…

First, some background.  I just graded a whole passle of essays for a class, on the topic “what should we do about HIV/AIDS as a social problem?”  I gave them two options as too how to answer that question: (a) in order to address the problem of HIV/AIDS, inasmuch as it intersects with pre-existing social cleavages (race or class), we must come up with a solution that addresses one or more underlying social conflicts; or (b) inasmuch as the problem of HIV/AIDS stems from the accumulated decisions of individuals, we must look at (and address) the values (and social structures) that lead to behaviors that put people at risk for contracting HIV.

Basically, no-one did paper topic #A.  Surprise!  Because even the mere thought is too threatening that HIV continues its unabated maelstrom of destruction through America’s communities of the dispossesed because along about 1995 everybody started figuring out — oh, wait! — that pretty little straight boys and girls with such perfectly WASP-y names as “Ryan White” weren’t actually at risk anymore.  Not once we took care of protecting innocent children and hemophiliacs.  And since the people that were still at risk — teh gays, teh colored folk, teh poor — are never worth worrying about, we stopped doing much of anything for those people except devising ever more fabulously expensive drug regimens by which we could extract every last dime of profit from their sorry emaciated selves. 

No, can’t even contemplate that for one blessed second.

Instead, they turned to everybody’s favorite argument: it’s “values” that’s behind it all!  And the problem isn’t even that negros, and homahseckshuls, and drug addicts have bad values (ooh, can’t say that outloud, noo…. it might be “politically incorrect” — somebody inform the Young Conservatives of America, stat!).  No, it’s that — wait for it — they don’t have sturdy values, values that never change, it’s that they don’t hold fast to what they believe.

I want to shake these little buggers like a nanny with a screaming child, until I can see their goddamn brains finally become unstuck from all the horseshit that’s been packed into their pathetic heads from 18 years of living in this asylum of heretics.  How can anyone honestly believe that the reason why gay people contract HIV is because they “don’t have values?”  That the reason why African-Americans comprise something approaching 50% of new infections is because they “don’t have values?”

No, I’m serious, will someone please explain to me how this makes sense in any universe?

Apparently it makes sense in a Baptist universe.  And this is where we get back to Mistuh Preznit.

According to Our Dear Leader, History will judge Bush according to his own principles, the ultimately religious principles he derives from “who he is” as a person, principles that contain no external referant other than the empty and bottomless vessel into which he ceaselessly (and profitlessly) attempts to pour meaning.  A vessel which ostensibly should be a source of living water for the thirsty (John 4:10), a vessel which pours out light, refreshing meaning for all those who would simply take the time and trouble to ask for guidance, dialogue, and direction, but which instead, through his own perversity of heart he treats as the sign-to-end-all-signs, the ultimate semoisis of vacuity, an always-undefined set of principles which “never change,” especially not for the petty demands of “popularity,” and never for such earthly concerns as competence, logic, and a demonstrable relationship between means and ends.  No, sir, History will judge you merely on the imagined and asserted “fact” that you acted upon some set of principles that you refuse to alter, change, reassess, or even for that matter explain in a coherent framework subject to potential debate.

For this I must thank you, sir, for taking to its (il)logical, reductio ad absurdum conclusion the central heresy of Baptist individualism.  And all the worse for me — who cherishes an affection for the church we ostensibly share — that you spout this foul tripe under the label of your Methodism, wiping your greasy lips eagerly with the pure linen neckerchief of Wesley’s heritage of reason.  Thank you for rejecting utterly all the accumulated architecture of the Enlightenment.  Thank you for carving into a grotesque bauble this particular nugget of orthodox Protestantism, and then displaying it whorishly for all to see, pinned proudly to that puffed-up-peacock chest of yours.  Thank you for taking a central tenet of Texas culture, the core of this place’s poisonous sterility, and turning that particular “value” into the operating principle of our nation’s foreign and domestic policies.  Thank you for showing once-and-for-fucking-all just what utter horseshit this is, how it cannot now nor ever lead to a decent civic culture, organizational stability, or even the ability to get shit done. 

Unfortunately, my students have yet to take heed of this particular lesson.  Though I still hold out hope that they will, and someday soon, take their eyes for one second off of American Idol and behold the wreckage piling up at the feet of this flailing buffoon. 

*I will analyze in only a passing manner the delicious ambiguity built into this statement.  Will he or won’t he retire to Crawford?  It’s unclear — or drive the point home, apparently his position on that is unsturdy, changeable, subject to the whim of the moment.  I, for one, will be relieved when and if he and Laura make up their fucking minds as to which community will bear the burden of their pestilential presence.

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When the orchestra for the annual honors convocation is in fact a steel drum band, 90% white, playing calypso covers of Spin Doctors and Dave Matthews…

Something is deeply, profoundly wrong with this situation.

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I, for one, can now finally sleep through the night without wondering who Dannielynn’s daddy is.

Sheesh.  What a sad, sorry, saga.  Can we please return to our regular programming now?  Thanks.

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So the partner and I had a house inspection (or rather, someone asked for an inspection for, um, well, certain reasons).  Some things came up that we expected, such as:

a.) there are two electrical meters.  Well, yeah.  The house used to be a duplex.  You want to change it?  Fine, we’ll build that in to, you know, that thing we’re discussing — fair enough.

b.) a bunch of the outlets aren’t grounded, have wires crossed, or otherwise don’t work.  Well, duh.  The house is like 90 years old.  If it makes a dif to you, we’ll take care of it — done.

c.) the back porch is starting to fall apart.  See (b).  If it concerns you that much, we’ll tear it down. 

Then there’s the things you don’t expect.  Like…

So apparently the downstairs tub doesn’t have a drain.

I’m sorry.  A-what-a-what-a-what?

Yeah.  You remember the end of that novel The Jungle?  The bit right before the main character finds his personal salvation in the form of joining the Communist Party?  The bit where they finally figure out why his entire family died of cholera, and it’s because the house was sitting on top of a cesspool?

Yeah, that bit. 

Our house isn’t quite that bad — at least the toilet was hooked up to the sewage lines — but it does explain why our crawlspace has always been a bit damp.

Thank God we’ve usually used the other bathroom.  But dammit if it we haven’t been using the downstairs one for three months now while we renovate the upstairs.  

I frankly don’t know whether to blame myself (for not going over my own house with a fine-toothed comb), the previous owners (who left us with all kinds of nice surprises), the owner before that (a woman openly referred to in the neighborhood as “Crazy C____”), whatever plumber was so damned mean as to do this to the owners, or the general fecklessness of this accursed place, where no one has a conscience, no one has character, and people will mess with you just for the pleasure of it.

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Texas: Kelly, or as I like to call her, “that Baptist bitch from Burleson.”

California: Kelly, or as I like to call him, “that fucking genius from Tarzana.”

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That Alanis is by far the best of that class of singers I like to call “whiny white women.”

Ah, irony.  It’s good for the soul.

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Kermit sings Hurt.

‘Nuf said.

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