I Don't Know If You Heard This One... But There Was This Guy (January 23, 2016)

     His name was Job.  He thought he was a pious man.  No, not that one.  I'm taking about Job Merle.  His parents were decent folk, hard working, salt of the earth farmers from a semi-rural state.  They believed in freedom and equality and all the things that made America a great place.  They never achieved great wealth, but they were comfortable, partly thanks to farm subsidies that kept their farm profitable and their overhead down.

     Now, there are some people who are born to be geniuses, they excel at everything they attempt and can intuitively grasp concepts like economics and empathy.  You can have children born of decent, upstanding, hard working people who grow up to be excellent human beings that love their neighbors and support others and do unto others and all that great Christian stuff.  But Job wasn't one of those people. Job wasn't a psychopath, exactly. No, Job believed that the color of his skin, the fact that he had a penis, the fact that he was attracted to women, and the fact that he believed some fairy tales about a man nailed to a stick made him special.  Those things meant that he should be given preference above other people that didn't fit all those criteria. Job also had no grasp of history or basic economic theory.  In his mind, that kind of Ivory Tower mumbo jumbo was just the government's way of manipulating the people and oppressing them. Of course, Job was a libertarian tea partier.  Job's idea of "patriotism" was to encourage people to hate the government, which most people would define as "sedition," but Job didn't know that word.  That's because Job, well, he wasn't the best reader.  In fact, he wasn't really that smart at all.  This didn't stop him from writing a newsletter called "Hearth And Home" that he somehow got local businesses to fund.

     Job used his freedom of speech to do some truly heinous things.  He disparaged minorities, belittled women, and encouraged people to take up arms against their duly elected government.  Not directly, of course, but he implied as much in many articles.  Job loved to rant and rave about President Obama, and how he was the worst president in the history of the United States.  But more than anything, Job complained about those damn welfare queens.  He hated people that got money from the government more than just about anything, except radical Muslims.  It just made him so gosh darn angry that his tax money was being used to help other people!  How dare the government provide people with food, clothing and shelter using his taxes when he worked so hard to make that money, all by himself with absolutely no assistance whatsoever!  That's not what Job paid  taxes for (or didn't). He wanted his tax dollars to go toward bombing people in Middle Eastern countries because they had the audacity to not believe in the same deity as him!

     If only there were something Job could do about this.  He wrote his editorial, week after week, and despite the fact that Job could feel his readership growing (there's really no way to know if people were reading his claptrap or just using it to line their bird cages.  After all, it's a complimentary newspaper, and Job really hated free things), nobody was out there stopping the Obama phones and HUD subsidized housing and keeping people from using food stamps to buy fancy things like coffee.  It was just so unfair, that Job and his parents worked so hard for everything he had, yet these people were mooching off him!  Why can't he get something from the system?  Why isn't the government paying for his phone, or his house, or his food?  He works hard tending his farm, putting his crops on trucks that go down the road to markets, trying to figure out this newfangled interweb thing to grow his business.  If it weren't for those checks from the Department of Agriculture, why, he might have to actually sell his farm.  And these lazy, no good, worthless welfare queens are drinking Caramel Macchiatos and playing the lottery! The nerve! Why can't they pull themselves up by their bootstraps like he did and earn their place in society? 

    Then, one day, Job hit it big.  Job's phone rang and the voice said those magical words he'd been waiting lo so many years to hear: "Is this Job Berle?  I represent the Will O'Hurley Element.  Will has been reading your papers, he'd like to meet with you."  Job was over the moon!  Finally, he would be recognized! People will hear him and the revolution will begin in earnest! He didn't even hear the rest of the discussion, just a date when they wanted him in New York.  He hung up the phone, kissed his wife Debbie, and they and their children went out to the Steak and Shake to celebrate.  Job even had two desserts, he was that excited!

    The next day, Job received an email from the O'Hurley people confirming his meeting.  He purchased two plane tickets for him and Debbie and a hotel room in New York City.  It was more expensive than he expected, but soon the money wouldn't matter.  "Gosh," Job thought, "I've finally pulled myself up by my bootstraps.  I've really earned everything.  We should go see a Broadway show while we're there! It would be a great treat for Debbie.  Nothing too filthy though, those homosexuals have completely ruined American entertainment.  Let's see... Book of Mormon, that sounds like a good Christian play!"  So Job also bought two tickets to that.

     Soon, the appointed day arrived, and Job and Debbie flew to New York. At the hotel, Job put on his best Sunday suit, Debbie wore the dress she bought for their son's wedding last year.  When they arrived at the Faux News building, they were escorted to a conference room that was all glass and chrome, overlooking Radio City Music Hall. Job and Debbie had never seen anything like it.  At the table sat not only Will O'Hurley, but three more men who had influenced his every belief: Mush Limburgh, Len Bock, and Job's idol, Shmalex Shmones.  Job couldn't believe he was meeting the four people he admired most in the world, in one day!

     He stood there, staring, jaw agape, when one of the other men in the room addressed him: "You must be Bob.  Hello, you spoke with my secretary on the phone.  I'm Chaim Goldfarbsteinberg, and I'll get right to the point: I represent these four men." He handed Job a letter, it was on really nice paper, but Job couldn't understand what it said.  There were lots of big words. About this time, Job realized that there were a dozen other people in the room. "This is a cease and desist letter," said Goldfarbsteinberg.  "My clients are outraged that you've stolen their intellectual property and appropriated it as your own." (so many big words, Job thought, what do they mean?) "If you do not stop publishing 'Hearth And Home,' we will be forced to bring a lawsuit against you, and, let me tell you, you will lose."

     What? Job thought, This can't be! These men are my idols, I've patterned my life on them!  "What kind of Jew crap is this?" Job spouted.  "Are you really telling me that I can't say whatever I want?  I'll have you know this is America, and I have a right to Freedom of Speech protected by the Constitution!  I can say whatever I want!" Job was getting furious.  Didn't this Jew know that he was a white Christian heteronormative man and he had rights?

     "Regardless of any of that," Goldfarbsteinberg said, "I assure you that we have everything we need.  Either cease your publication or we will take everything you have.  Thanks to the Republican Congress, restrictions on lawsuits have been loosened, and we can pretty much sue you for whatever we want.  That's what happens when you de-regulate and strip government of all it's power."  At that, he motioned to the guards outside and Job and Debbie were escorted out of the building.

     Well, Job wasn't going to take this lying down!  No sir! He knew his rights, and he knew he had a right to a lawyer.  So he and Debbie skipped Book of Mormon and headed straight back home, where Job enlisted the finest legal minds in his county.  They told him exactly the same thing that Chaim Goldfarbsteinberg did: he was screwed.  Government regulators had stripped protections against frivolous lawsuits so far back that there was literally nothing that people could not bring a civil suit about.  Fair use in copyright was a thing of the past, and besides, Job's newsletter didn't fall under those meager protections anyway.  And the First Amendment didn't apply here because it wasn't the government, the people that Job had been so paranoid about all along, that was trying to shut him down.  It was a private enterprise.

     Job was distraught.  He did not know what to do now.  It seemed like a perfect subject for one of his trademark editorials, but he didn't dare risk publishing.  Maybe he'd join that Facespace all the kids were talking about.  Surely they can't shut him down for that.  And he can reach a much larger audience, a world wide audience.  People will have to listen, and the white, middle class, heteronormative Christian male will finally have a place to voice his opinions and have his struggle heard!

     Wow! What an amazing story! And it's totally not about a real person or anyone we know! I'm so inspired by it, to go and pull myself up by the bootstraps and make my fortune all by myself with no help from the government or the rest of society, at all, whatsoever! There has to be a moral in here somewhere, but who knows what it is? No, seriously, this is so rambling and incoherent, I'm not really sure there was even a plot.  That's what happens when you mimic Bob's creative insights.

  Honestly, the best part of Bob's whole rant this month is the end, where after spending a good 1000 words attacking "liberals" and stereotyping them as lazy, entitled, and pretentious, he talks about not judging people until you've walked a mile in their shoes.  No, really, he did that.  He literally says those words, then, in the same paragraph, writes "ninety-nine percenters are nothing more than a bunch of bottom feeding, lazy ass, no good loafers who want to stick their hands in the pockets of hard working people and take from them all that they worked hard for, because ninety-nine percenters never worked hard at anything their entire lives and think that just because they breathe air the world owes them an existence." I guess Bob doesn't think he's part of the 99%, or that he should take his own advice. The cognitive dissonance here is so great, I need to go lie down now. 

A Lesson in Free Speech (January 8, 2016)

     It's been 9 months since my last post, and what an interesting 9 months it's been (on a side note, I really hope Bob didn't think that I'd given up.  Life's been pretty busy this last year, so I had to eliminate some things. Doesn't mean I wasn't watching...) Looking at that last post, it amazes and saddens me how widespread the sort of extremist ignorance I've been writing about since 2011 has become.  I don't know this for certain, but I'm willing to bet that Mr. Robert Beierle of the erroneously named Creative Insight LLC is driving around with a Trump 2016 bumper sticker on his car.  He, and the alleged half a million people who "read" his magazine (side note: just because you print half a million copies doesn't mean half a million people are reading, much less agreeing with, your lunacy), are exactly the kinds of people that Donald J Trump has been aiming for.  It's gotten embarrassing, as an American who travels internationally, that this is the level of national discourse we're having, as well as scary that it's not just tolerated but seemingly encouraged by so many people.  More on that in a bit, first let's dive into what we've missed on my hiatus:

     In May we've got a wonderful little essay (and I use the term loosely) canonizing the Founding Fathers as saints of America, the men (and only men) who had the love, understanding, and faith (the right faith) to create this perfect country called America.  Who would choose any modern politician over them?  They were gods (ok, not gods, because that's blashpemy and we all know that Bob is a good Christian, but, you know, gods) who could do nothing wrong and had no foibles or compunctions or other shortcomings, especially when it came to writing that most sacred of texts, The Constitution!  Bob is trying so hard to defend The Constitution, and he just can't believe how the media and the government are allowed to shred the sacred text and nobody is doing anything.  Apparently, countries that seek America's destruction are making nuclear bombs (I'd love to know which.  North Korea? Seriously? Iran?) but our politicians are too worried about things that don't matter, like global warming and women's rights. ISIS is coming to destroy us and install Sharia Law because we've stopped acknowledging Bob's god in our government.  Apparently we're on the brink of disaster, and the only way to fix it is to bring back a true conservative like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.  Don't think too hard on this, or you'll wind up with mad cow disease like Bob.

     In June we get some nonsense about the light at the end of the tunnel.  First Bob blames the government for screwing up the economy (never mind that it was government deregulation, something he really, really likes, that lead to that.  Those pesky facts...) so they could steal our money and resources for themselves (I really wonder what part of "Republic" Bob doesn't understand? Is it the "Government of the people" part?) and the media is selling you a bunch of lies so you'll stay compliant.  As usual, Bob's here with the truth, the one Rush or Glenn or Alex or Rupert found up his ass somewhere and Bob just can't understand why nobody will believe it.  So, apprently, ISIS is off somewhere raping children and killing women and radicalizing our pets or whatever Bob's twisted imagination has thought up and our government is giving them HDTVs to watch and his son's dog is howling and Obama (personally) has spent trillions of our dollars to flush America down the drain and why should some illegal immigrant welfare queen get free food and a phone and an apartment and a Cadillac and all we get is screwed, huh?  This is so disjointed and rambling only a meth addict could have written it.

     July brings us Cowboys and Indians (yes, really).  What ever happened to the good ol' days, when you could play Cowboys and Injuns without some mamby pamby PC know it all telling you that's culturally insensitive?  Well what about BOB'S CULTURE, HUH?  After all, he's a white, Cristian, heteronormative man and he pays his taxes (maybe?) and he'll be racist if he damn well pleases because FIRST AMENDMENT, BITCH!  What happened to the days when kids could run around their neighborhoods with toy guns pretending to shoot each other? Life was so much simpler then, and if a kid got shot by a cop because he thought the kid had a real gun and was about to shoot him, well, that's just Freedom.  It's ok when children want to play pretend, though (not that they do in Bob's world, anymore, because TV and video games and that scary Interwebs), the problem is when adults do.  Like Al Sharpton or Rachel Dolezal or Bruce Jenner or that horrible liar Hillary Clinton (boo, hiss!). Yes, too many adults today are pretending to be something they're not, and dammit Bob is not going to go along with it! He refuses to accept Al Sharpton as a minister, he refuses to accept Bruce Jenner as a woman, and he refuses to accept that Hillary Clinton might have actually served her country, but we must accept him because he has rights and his white, Christian, heteronormative male beliefs (i.e. the only ones that matter) will not be infringed upon dammit!

     In August, we got some rambling claptrap about how the government are "magicians," spinning false narratives about global warming, marriage rights, the "war on Christmas," illegal immigrants "takin' ar' jerbs'" and all kinds of other tea party bogey men.  As usual, Bob shows us that he has no understanding of any of these topics, just anger, hate, and jingoistic propaganda that he has misappropriated from his usual sources. He goes on to deify (again) the founders of America, calling the media and our current government unpatriotic and evil for having the gall to point out that our founding fathers did things like own slaves or have sex out of wedlock or be human, all so they can take your freedoms away!  Bob must have been pretty worked up at being called a homophobe or a racist or a misogynist or something because he babbles about how butt hurt he is over being called those things just because he loves 'Murica so much that he viciously and ignorantly attacks anyone who dares question his twisted, ignorant version of it.   That's right, we've all been sold a false history of America so that the government can destroy the Constitution, but Bob's here to educate us on the true meaning of Christm- er, the real history of 'Murica, i.e. the white, Christian, heteronormative, male version of the history of 'Murica.

     I missed September and October, (well, maybe not missed, exactly) but November came roaring back!  It's Heerre!! is classic Creative Insight, by which I mean neither creative nor insightful.  Bob wants us all to know that the holiday season is starting, and he's setting up a branch in Texas! How exciting! After all, where better to find the kind of fools, imbeciles, and racists that buy into Bob's insanity than Texas?  Even people in mental hospitals get guns in Texas, Bob will feel right at home.  So Bob goes on to talk about our American Christian traditions (because none of the others matter).  Apparently Hanukkah is a Christian tradition in Bob's world, BTW, as is Halloween, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and the 4th of July.  Because, you know, nobody but Christians ever died in service of America; they were all baptized after the fact and become Christians by giving their lives for Bob's America.  And isn't it great that we don't live under Sharia Law?  But if you're hurting this holiday season, if you haven't reached that level of success you think you're entitled to, well, Bob wants to remind you that it's all the government's fault.  That's right, it's government's fault when you fail and if you succeed it's because you picked yourself up by your bootstraps and did all the hard work yourself and got no help from anybody, got that?  Ok.



     Which brings us to December, and Looking for Christmas.  Honestly, I probably would have ignored this if January's issue didn't make such a big deal about it, so I'm going to roll both into one.  Apparently, one of Bob's franchisees was "pressured" into putting a sticker on Bob's "creative insights" warning people that what Bob says is offensive.  Good for her, BTW.  This was apparently motivated by complaints about Looking for Christmas, and I just can't figure out why.  Just kidding, of course I can.  It's not because Looking for Christmas is exactly what you think it is: oh, woe is us, the white Christian heteronormative men of America, our burden is so great and our lot is so low that we can't even get more than 90% of the country to recognize that Christmas is mostest specialist day of the year! We are so oppressed in our own country because we have to not only acknowledge other religions and races and sexes and sexualities, but actually tolerate them and let them have their own beliefs! Woe!  It's not because Bob rants and raves about Black Friday and people being greedy and disrespectful.  No, it's because Bob goes full on racist.  Maybe go easy on the eggnogg next year, huh Bob?

    First, he talks about the BLM protesters chanting about "roasting pork" and that all the other people didn't want to be called "racists" for standing up to them.  He also notes how a group of black men confronted these protesters, and some "black on black violence" ensued, disrupting the day of the "Caucasian and Latino" shoppers.  Oh, and he manages to get a jab in at the police as well, talking about how the police must be showing up because there's a donut sale, not because of the riot he just described. But this is chump change compared to the obligatory attack on Muslims, complaining about "ninja people" and assuming they came here illegally through Mexico because that's how all Muslims get into Bob's 'Murica.  In fact, I'm just going to quote the whole thing, because it's truly beyond belief that not only did a supposedly thinking, feeling, rational human being write and publish this, but people paid him to do it.

There was an orchestral version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and I thought to myself, as I let out a nice deep breath and a light sigh, ahhh, surely I will find the Christmas spirit here.  But that was kind of short lived too when I was knocked around by a half a dozen short female ninjas. You know, the karate people dressed from head to toe in black robes with only their eyes showing.  They were yelling something. And once again a tidal wave of people ended up pushing me towards where all the screaming ninjas were going... which was to a cash register where a very sweet young girl with dark hair and green eyes, who was terrified and was being surrounded by these ninjas as they were chanting something, raising their arms and calling out something to ollie [sic] or olive .. or something ... I don't know what. But I was quick to find out that they weren't ninjas.  They were refugees from some small obscure Middle Eastern country who came to our country illegally though our Southern border and these women who were dressed in burkas had no understanding of our culture or our traditions.  They could not speak a work of English, but knew enough to become totally offended and incensed if somebody in this country wished them a Merry Christmas.  Yes, that's right.  The refugee women in the burkas fresh from some small obscure Middle Eastern country were all up in arms, screaming jihad and caliphate and were all upset because that sweet little dark haired girl with the green eyes behind the counter happened to wish one of them a "Merry Christmas."  And the next thing you knew the ninjas were protesting to the store manager who was now firing the cashier to appease the screaming ninjas whose piercing screams could only resemble what I might imagine a barnyard animal would make if it was being assaulted form behind.  Perhaps it was a sound that they were familiar with in their native country.

    Yup.  That is a direct quote from Mr. Robert Beierle of Creative Insight LLC, written not in the 1950s or the 1920s or the 1850s but in 2015.  Just remember this man legally owns guns.  Not a gun, but guns, plural. This is the kind of racist mindset that we are allowing in our community.  Note that not only does Bob's racism include ignorance and religious intolerance, it also includes a healthy dose of misogyny.  He never says that the "sweet little dark haired girl with green eyes" was white, but we are meant to assume she was, and get really angry when she got "fired" (because that happened). Hey Bob, before you press that speed dial button for your lawyer, it's called "fair use," look it up.

     There's a theme that hasn't appeared in Bob's writing in a while, but it's the theme that  started this blog: namely, that Bob's right to free speech and equal protection under the law is sacrosanct, but yours is bullshit unless you agree with him.  Bob actually has the balls to complain about a group of people exercising their right to peaceful assembly during Black Friday.  He complains that people supporting Black Lives Matter actually have the audacity to assemble and protest in a place where hundreds of people simply want to beat up the person next to them so they can save $5 on a toy their kid is going to play with twice and break.  How dare these people bring their politics into this most sacred of capitalist holidays? He attacks people because they have a different belief than him, stereotyping and belittling them for their culture while complaining about how his is "under attack." 

     In January, Bob reiterates his assertion that his Free Speech is sacrosanct and the rest of you can just STFU.  Obviously, Bob's knowledge of the Constitution is extremely limited.  Even a 5th grader knows, though, that the Constitution only covers what government can and cannot do, and if other people want to shut down your seditious, racist, misogynist, homophobic publication by protesting to the people who sponsor it, they have every right to do so.  Bob is so ignorant, so tone deaf, so absolutely clueless that he doubles down on the hate speech with a story about a woman in a burka at the beach.  He complains about how persecuted he is because in some countries he wouldn't be able to publish a story about his family on Christmas. He compares people complaining about his hate speech to religious fundamentalists who will kill anyone who disagrees with them, then goes on to say that he's shut down someone who has done exactly that.  He actually thinks he's speaking "the truth" about the world and America's culture.   It's unbelievable how totally and completely oblivious Bob is.

     So here's your lesson in Free Speech, Bob: hate speech like yours may be protected by the First Amendment, but so is my speech that says I will not tolerate your hate.  It's good to know that I'm not alone, and it's good to know that some of your distributors and sponsors are actually reading the hate you publish and taking action.  I'm going to keep emailing and calling and talking to them, whether you like it or not.  I know others will join me. You want to stand up for free speech Bob?  Then you have to stand up for all free speech, not just the kind you agree with, not just the kind that supports your beliefs and your prejudices, but all of it.  Including the "ninja people" and the BLM supporters. I support that you have a right to say and publish the idiotic hate that you do, but I do not have to listen to it, I do not have to shop at the businesses that support you, and I will make sure that everyone that can hear me knows that what you are saying is wrong, it's not American values, and they should not support you either.