Ahh. Hadn’t heard this in a while. Found that I remembered it almost word for word.

“Alright! Show us your arms!”

(In a few weeks, you can look forward to Billy’s “A Junkie’s Christmas,” if I can dig it up.)

——–

I don’t presume to criticize the reaction of those who have suffered the effects of racism and who object to Richards and what he said.

But the rest of you could do with some introspection, which is exactly what Mr. Zorn’s article is trying to prod you into. Attacks on Mr. Zorn as a supposed racist for offering an alternative explanation are not only silly and mindless, but also undermine whatever constructive dialogue can be started by this incident.

I am inclined to think that Richards crossed a line that should not be crossed, but I find Mr. Zorn’s theory nevertheless more plausible than the knee-jerk cries of “racist.”

1) Richards was clearly enraged.

2) Richards clearly wanted to lash out because of his rage.

3) Richards, as he said on Letterman, has an improvisational style onstage. Combined with rage, this could easily lead to ill-advised attempts to “push the envelope,” as Richards described it on Letterman.

4) Even after he had clearly offended the audience by his poorly considered words, he continued in the same vein. Think about this. Is Richards a complete idiot who has no idea that the n-word is offensive? Is he incapable of noticing that people are leaving? Why would he continue using the word, knowing that it made him look racist, unless he was trying to go for something, which he intended as “pushing the envelope?” Why would he continue to do damage to his public image like that unless he thought there was some point to it? What I mean is, if Richards were a closet racist, as many (who apparently have graduated with honors from the Bill Frist School of Video Diagnosis) have declared, wouldn’t you expect something more like a “slip,” followed by an attempt to deflect the unintended consequences? Why would a “closet racist” keep pushing the audience like that? Do you think he believed the audience was secretly “with” him, and the world had somehow flashed back to 1953? It makes a lot more sense to me that Richards went down a path he shouldn’t have, but had some point in mind. He seriously misjudged the value and effectiveness of that point, but that doesn’t mean he’s racist. Witness his lines about “you see what’s underneath you stupid motherf***ers,” and “there are those words, those words, those words.” This seems to me like a kind of second-hand Lenny Bruce thing. As we all know, plenty of racists love Lenny Bruce, right?

5) The guy’s Jewish. That doesn’t disqualify him from being racist, of course, but that’s a different dynamic from a WASP making the same remarks. How many Jews were in on lynchings, anyway?

So, anyway, think what you want. But actually think first.

thote is like-a-little-bwote upon the sea

eppeness a-rruns, eppeness a-rrruns

eppeness a-rruns, eppeness a-rrruns

why-all?  Bee-o-koss.

why-all?  bee-o-koss.

I hadn’t heard this Donovan ditty before I heard it on a new Cheerios commercial.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a kind of safe-as-milk hallucination, in which several small children cavort on oversized fruit Cheerios (aren’t those called “Froot Loops?”—a little late to be horning in on that market, isn’t it?) in a giant bowl of milk.  A gigantic mother observes from over the rim of the bowl, smiling of course.  (Now that the children have ingested the Flintstones Children’s LSD™, she is free to go meet up with the guy she met last night at the biker bar, where she is known as Leather Lucy.)

The reason why this commercial bores into my skull like a blunt drill is kind of interesting to me.  I hate a lot of commercials, and since I am a 4-minutes’-hating kind of person, and since my irrational rage feeds my brain like a mushroom in the dark, sucking up fetidity from what I see and hear, I spend more time than is healthy thinking about the particular reasons why I hate particular commercials.  This one falls into a particular class of hatable commercials: those that fuse image and sound at a conceptual level that is absolutely cloying.

To put it more simply: words and image match TOO well in this commercial.  “Happiness runs in a circular motion,” the lyrics (supposedly) go.  And we have kids, who are, in their junior lysergic bliss, outlandishly happy to be jumping from Cheerio to Cheerio, with each Cheerio, of course, round.  “Thought is like a little boat upon the sea” (again, these are the “official” words—I maintain that my above transcription is more accurate).  And the kids upon the Cheerios float upon the “sea” (really more like a pond, but oh well) of milk. 

On top of that, there is the gratingly childlike tone of the song in general.  Before I searched the lyrics to the song, I didn’t know it was Donovan.  I assumed it was some kind of Raffi-like monstrosity spouting a hokey tune for kiddies to dance in a circle to.  I could see some clean-cut, earnest eyed dude in a loud shirt stroking his acoustic guitar from the seat of a chair in the Children’s Room of a library. 

Then you have the “Why? Because/Why? Because.”  That, of course, is the predominant dialogue held between adults and children.  And that’s around the time when Leather Lucy—I mean, Mom—peers over the rim of the bowl. 

It all fits together so perfectly that it’s like a concentrated blow, a psychological karate-chop to my sensibilities.  Repeat ad infinitum (thanks, TV Land; your Star Trek marathon exacts a terrible price), and I get the urge to run in a circular motion, much like an inmate in a padded cell.

My four minutes is up.

This is the inaugural post in a series of brief (for me) rants on the things that keep me in a constant low-level displaced rage.  The difference between 4 Minutes’ Hate and other, more run-of-the-mill rants is that I use humor to mask the disturbing depth of my unreasonable fury.  You read this stuff and think, boy Spiro’s really piling it on this time, what a talent for exaggeration.  No, sadly, this is my best stab at understatement.

Why “4 Minutes’ Hate?”  Well, hopefully you have already heard of the 2 Minutes’ Hate, from the immortal novel 1984, by George Orwell–a work of “fiction” that our dear president seems to have misinterpreted as a how-to manual.  If not, you don’t need to know it for the purposes of this blog.  But, for the love of all that’s holy, read the book.  Seriously.

So, yeah, I’m twice as hateful, twice as unreasonable.  Got it?  Good.

—————

Anyway, on to today’s target: Human Plaque.  What is human plaque?  Human plaque is the clump of idiots standing in the middle of the sidewalk or hallway, as if it were their personal social lounge.  Like the deadly plaque that gathers in your arteries, they clog up the pathways you walk.  Human plaque is oblivious to the remote and insignificant possibility that anyone else exists in the surrounding area.  Far from their “minds” is the ludicrous idea that they might be creating any kind of inconvenience to other sidewalk-users.  Say, by forcing them to walk in the mud and/or traffic.

Human plaque clogs up the hallways while you’re hurrying to your next class.  Why, what could possibly be the trouble with getting together with three random fellow idiots to join hands like paper dolls and completely block the stairs?  Why would anyone need to use stairs?  And if they did, well,  surely even such unworthy deluded creatures can sense the far more important use of the human plaque-members: discussing how drunk they plan to get in a few days.

Human plaque is not content to simply get in the way and stay in the way.  Human plaque is created with a sense of entitlement, and will cast a look of exquisite disgust at you as you dare to pretend you have a valid reason to disrupt their gathering.  The truly amazing thing is that this look of disgust is visible even though their faces remain as slack-jawed as ever, and their eyes as vacant as Bush’s bookshelf.

Human plaque have no purpose to their existence but to annoy me.  They gather in a room and practice getting in each other’s way, the better to infuriate me with new techniques of subnormal blockage behavior.  They devise plays, draw them up on whiteboards like basketball diagrams–The Pick and Stall, The Wedge, The Roving Clot.  I think they meet on Wednesdays, actually.  They are like a flash mob with the collective brain of a single cow.  They give each other awards, based on the level of frustration they can induce in me as I try to hurry along (thanks, I’m late again!).  They maintain a Blockage Hall of Fame.  Its hallways are gloriously narrow.

I daydream about having a cow-catcher mounted on two poles to push out in front of me as I go.  Just take off on a dead run and plow the bastards to both sides, like snow to the side of the road.  Lying there in a pile, mourning their failure to block my progress.  Ha, fuckers!  You never expected the cow-catcher!

Don’t tell them, but imagining that, and knowing it will never happen, just makes me more frustrated.  Feh.

My four minutes is up.

Okay, as everyone paying any attention for the last few years has noticed, Bush has been treating the U.S. Constitution like Godzilla treated Tokyo. Gitmo, torture, wiretapping, signing statements, secrecy, “extraordinary renditions,” “free speech zones,” etc. It’s been a bad few years for the Big C. That 3.0 earthquake on the East Coast nobody noticed was actually the ground vibration caused by the founding fathers spinning in their graves at speeds normally requiring the use of superconductors.

So, how is that good for the Constitution? Well, it’s like this.

You and I, and many of our elected leaders–maybe even G.W.–have been aware for quite some time that we have a Constitution in this country. You and I, and many of our elected leaders–maybe G.W.–have been rather proud of the protections it affords us. You and I, a few of our elected leaders–I doubt G.W.–have read the thing, and thought about it, and felt secure, knowing that those protections have been in place for centuries now, and not even the worst people to come along have managed to do much to erode them. And, after all, we’ve been through a Civil War, two world wars, and a Cold War. Yet the protections are still there. It’s enough to make you take it for granted.

And that’s where my point here begins. You went through grade school, junior high, high school, learning little by little what the Constitution and this country’s history were all about, and it always seemed like an accomplished fact, a done deal. Some people shot muskets at some other people, got together in wigs and breeches, hammered out a document, and things were set from then on. It was as it had to be, and it is as it must be still.

But the Constitution is only as strong as our support of it. By living our lives taking it for granted, we supported it, sure–by assuming its truth and power. But along comes a challenge to that seeming permanence of the Constitution, and now instead of supporting it silently by the way we live, we have to voice our support. We have to act on it outwardly. We have to declare to those who are testing its limits that there are consequences for what they’re trying to pull. And in doing those things, we reaffirm our belief in the truth and power of the Constitution. It’s not, after all, something to be taken for granted. It’s something to be fought for.

So, faced with the most serious threat to the Constitution in our culture’s memory, we are forced to face up to why we need it, why we insist on it, why it is worth defending even with the greatest of sacrifices. The answers to those questions were only vague and abstract, something to be recited from a textbook, until G.W. came along. Now the answers come from the gut. We have to start from the very basics, and even defend why free speech, transparent government are good, why torture, for chrissakes, is something that we shouldn’t put up with under the Constitution. It makes us understand what we believe in and why.

And in the end, that makes us believe in it more strongly than we ever could have if the threat, in the person of George W. Bush, had never come along. The next “unitary executive” won’t even get out of the starting gate. Thanks, G.W.