Least Loved Bedtime Stories v. 2.0

Via Charles G. Hill comes this call to opine:

Give us ten of your quirky, opinionated, perhaps socially-unacceptable or politically incorrect opinions. They can be esoteric, generic, unpopular, or obvious. Just write down ten of them.

Well, so far the offerings have been disappointing, to say the least. So far I have read the astonishing, controversial, amazingly un-pc notions that HP inkjet cartridges are made in such a way that you have to buy more ink cartridges (no!), that people drive badly and farmer’s market vegetables taste better than cheaper supermarket vegetables (staggers back against the wall and claps her hand to her forehead in astonishment), and that the “three Abrahamic religions” are “flawed” (wow, someone’s gonna burn at the stake — or be the toast of the cocktail set, I can never remember — for that!). Yup, there’s some real, cross-the-street-when-you-see-these-people, gasp-of-horror controversial opinionmaking there. Well, he did say “obvious” was okay, but so far all I see is “obvious.”

Please allow me to rectify this sad situation. Click if you want to really know what I think about things. (Yes, there are some things I haven’t told you I believe.)

The number is supposed to be ten. So few? Oh well, you can’t make an omelette, etc. Here we go:

1. The private passenger airline industry should be allowed — nay, encouraged, to die its long overdue and well-deserved death. There is no reason for so many people to be taking planes everywhere. There are way too many people travelling who should keep their asses at home. These are the people who, for a four-day trip, try to pack the entire contents of their closet into a couple of “small” carry-on suitcases that can’t be lifted without the help of a crane, and then bitch and moan because they can’t fit their personal Rocks of Gibraltar into the overhead bins. The increase in the number of people taking a plane somewhere so they can “enjoy more of their vacation” squatting in front of the tv in their hotel room instead of squatting in front of the one in their own living room is the reason plane trips have become snappish, snarling, tension-filled, high-blood-pressure-causing annoyances, and has also contributed to the barmaid/diner-waitress look and attitude of today’s crop of stewardesses, and to the Greyhound-bus feel of most airports. People need to be re-taught (or as I am sure it is in most cases now, taught) that the journey is supposed to be part of the fun, as in “half the fun is getting there”). My fondest memories of vacations as a child were of the car trips to the various relatives’ homes and camp grounds and other destinations. In fact, I can’t really remember many of the actual destinations, since most of them ended, for me, in sleep, and having to talk to relatives, which was as boring as being at home.

As for the need to visit far-flung relatives, if your family members really liked each other all that much they wouldn’t have followed career tracks that moved them all over the hemisphere if not completely to the other side of the world. As for the need to travel for business, I am willing to concede that some business travel is necessary, but not as much as there is today. There is no need to ship employees hither and yon for weeklong meetings that are nothing but empty company boosterism, excuses to get drunk on the company tab at the bar hotels, and wastes of money that could be spent giving employees raises so they could afford to stay at home instead of moving away from their families.

People used to make do just fine with trains, buses, and automobiles. Forcing the population of America to actually have to cross America by land will force them to come to terms with a number of things, and will also make the term “flyover country” obsolete. Sure, this will slow the economy down some, but I’ll bet you not as much as you think.

As for travel to foreign countries — well, if you really must… this will give the cruise ship industry a needed boost, and really separate the serious travellers from the If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium set, who really should stay at home and read National Geographic instead of clogging up Europe. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and at least three-quarters of Europe’s poor image of Americans (and vice-versa) exists because planeloads of our should-stay-at-homes keep heading over there.

2. I am sick of youth culture. It should be banned, and Stuffy Old Person Culture needs to take over. There was once a time when young college men dreamed of becoming old and respected, or at the least they dreamed of becoming Fred Astaire, who was at least urbane and could dance — real dancing, not that that bonobo-monkeylike humping and gyrating “young people” do now. Once men wore hats. Now the only head covering in general use is the backwards baseball cap, which looks thuggish and low class. Once women dreamed of becoming — not old, but wives and mothers, which implied maturity and responsibility. Women who had no intention of becoming wives and mothers dreamed of becoming bluestockings — formidable spinster scholars with severe taste in dress, unbeatable intellects, and forbidding manners that made men clear their throats and shuffle their feet. Women did not “dream” of becoming some man’s “girlfriend” — or as it was more truthfully known in the old days, “kept woman.” Women who held on to “youth” — or as it was more truthfully known in the old days, “romantic and unrealistic nonsense” — were the ones who ended up that way, and their names were not spoken aloud in polite company.

So-called “youth” culture took the country over years ago, and it’s contributed to the demise of, among other things, dignity, civility, and taste. These three items do not blossom naturally in people, but are formed in the character by experience and a respect for the accomplishments of one’s elders. Unfortunately, there aren’t any elders to have respect for — today’s “elders” are aging Baby Boomers, merely older “young people” in denial of their agedness, and who were the ones who made the Youth Culture destruction of American society possible. A young person today looking to previous generations for guidance sees Grandma (whom he’s always called “Starwing” because “grandma” makes her feel “old” and the name her parents gave her — Ellen — she discarded in 1968 as an outmoded and sexist label of an unenlightened, oppressive era) dressed in a tie-dye broomstick skirt, ancient denim peasant blouse embroidered with peace signs and flowers, her long, straggly gray hair getting into her macrobiotic tea as she leans over the kitchen table making a poster for her latest protest march that reads “Bush=Hitler!” with a painting of the president with fangs drooling blood underneath. Grandpa (aka “that Bastard”) left his spouse ten years before to run off with his boyfriend. No wonder there is so much drug abuse, binge drinking, and West Wing watching among young people today, and no wonder they have no idea how to dress, speak, or act.

Young people have another fault: because they are at the peak of their sexual neediness, they are sociable, and this has fooled us into thinking that young people “need” to be together, so we have taken it into our head that it’s good to force people to go to school not just long enough to learn how to read and do math, but for years and years and years, well past the age that in previous, more sensible times we would have been put into either prep school (for a very small elite), trade (for most of the rest of the males) or domestic service and/or marriage (for most of the females). This has produced a nation that simultaneously hates school and is obsessed with memories of school and moreover has made high school (with its cliques, its boring and repetitive tasks, its obsession with “teams” and “teamwork,” its discouragement of true individuality and encouragement of conformity, its petty hatreds, and its sheer pointlessness) the model for the way the entire country is run.

3. It’s time to revive the fun old practice of identifying, prosecuting, and then executing — preferably by hanging — traitors. A number of people have engaged in activities lately that would have resulted, back in the Bad Old Days, of them spending their last moments jerking at the end of a rope around their necks. We could start with poor widdle Johnny Taliban — I forget his real name, the hippy’s kid from Cali who went off to Afghanistan to join our enemies’ army. Then we could take care of some people in the media currently engaged in open destruction of American morale, barely bothering to disguise their treasonous propaganda as “questioning” and “understanding root causes.” I’m thinking of any number of the smarm-voiced commentators on NPR, that Cindy woman (well, she’s always wailing about how much she misses her dead baby son, so why not arrange the meeting she obviously really wants? Heck, if I were her I’d pick my dead son over the president any day; but I am presuming I’d actually really love my son, not just what his death has done for my celebrity status cause), and Michael Moore — though if his trip to the fat farm in Aventura doesn’t shave off some of that lard of his we might have to use a suspension bridge cable or something for his last necktie.

Then again, most anti-American leftists seem to be fabulously rich, and everyone knows that taking a rich person’s money hurts worse than killing them, so maybe we should just confiscate their bank accounts.

4. It’s time to close Hollywood. The last movie I really enjoyed was made on the other side of the globe from Tinseltown. All the Hollywood movie industry seems able to put out these days are tired remakes of older, better films, even more tired remakes of older films that were lousy then and aren’t any better with visible nipples on the female leads, and movies made out of awful seventies television shows. The Governator should move the California National Guard in, clear the people out, and then the Army Corps of Engineers should level the place and make a parking lot for Orange County out of it. Or, they could just throw up a big wall around the entire place and stuff all the actors and actresses in there, lock the gates, and destroy the key. Lord knows those people don’t think anything exists outside of Hollywood anyway. How will they survive? Search me, you won’t find the caring.

5. Bring back censorship, and let’s get rid of the sex books first. Presumably restricted access to tomes like Lady Chatterly’s Lover, translations of the Kama Sutra, and whatever it was the Marquis de Sade wrote led to a horribly repressed society where women were oppressed by men, crime was rampant, girls ended up on the street unmarried and pregnant because they didn’t know anything about sex and their parents threw them out for “shaming” them, and so on. As opposed to our paradisical society where husbands never beat their wives and there is no crime… I don’t know one way or the other whether or not repressing the publication of porn is good or bad for society, but I sense that in the days when you couldn’t get your book published if you were too blunt about certain things people were forced to actually write well in order to get their “racy” scenes through. Now we are free to write “he fucked her and she sucked him.” Ah, the flowers of romance.

6. Any woman who strips naked in public in order to “protest” something she doesn’t like should be forced to go about naked everywhere for a period of at least once month, no matter the season. Why not men? Well, for one thing, men don’t really care. Most men, told that they’d have to go around naked for a month or more, would shrug their shoulders, say “sure,” and spend the month naked in front of the tv eating Doritos and drinking beer. I’m thinking that some fiercer penalty, guaranteed to get the attention of males, will be needed. How about this: any man who joins a naked protest — whether he did it to actually protest, or because he simply enjoys walking around naked — should have his scrotum artificially enlarged with saline solution like Scrotum Guy, and have to keep his sac that way for a period of no less than one month. (Scrotum Guy, on the other hand, should simply be shot and fed to the local killer whales. Christ, what a deranged idiot.)

7. I went to the mall today. Hordes of mothers were there, pushing strollers decked out like cruise ships with every single possible item baby could want — holders for sippy cups, dangly bars for mobile toys to dangle from, 5-cd changers, iPods… Most of these behemoths, the SUVs of the infant-care set, contained one cranky, screechy, flopping and wriggling creature. There’s a message in there somewhere, but mostly I wondered just how much time and trouble it took to load all that equipment into the family vehicle, especially since all cars transporting children have to have the kid strapped in like an astronaut in the space shuttle, and whether it was worth it just to tramp around the crowded, noisy mall. From the looks on the mothers’ faces, it didn’t seem to have been.

8. Hard plastic seats on buses may be less comfortable to sit on (when I lived in Miami many of the buses still had these types of seats, and they tended to be slippery as well as uncomfortable) but they don’t hold the stench of hundreds of passengers’ asses like the cloth ones do. This is something that the people manufacturing buses to send to places like Florida really should think about.

9. If I were the president, I would:

a. Abolish the federal income tax, and
b. Raise the price of gas to ten dollars a gallon at the pumps nationwide.

Then I would state that every single dollar (minus the individual gas stations’ profit margins) made from this price increase would be spent on 1) printing the money, 2) maintaining the country’s roads, and 3) go to the military for the war effort.

I’d also abolish several useless departments such as the Department of Education, HUD, the Department of Transportation, etc. Sure this would leave a lot of people out of work, but are people who work for entities like the Department of Education still human? It’s debatable. We could put them in a pen for a while and study them to make sure before letting them loose — wouldn’t want them to devour small children or something in their rage at getting their cushy SFL government jobs yanked out from under them.

As for the reaction such an increase in the price of gas would cause… well, it certainly would be entertaining, in a “look at all the ants run around when you hold a magifying glass in the sun above their hill” way. Let’s just say if I hear or read one more whine about the horrible expensive gas that we are somehow entitled to have for cheap because we’re Americans! and we didn’t all vote for that Chimpler Bush and his war for oil! it won’t be too soon. I say this as someone who plans to buy a car in the next month or two. What the hell, it would be worth paying over a hundred dollars to fill my tank just to see the heads of these entitlement babies explode.

And finally, we have

10. Actually, most people drive pretty well, considering what they have to work with. Think about it: each person is driving a machine that weighs anywhere from a few to several tons, powered by explosively flammable fuel, and often containing many attention distracting devices (cd players, children), and these machines are not only capable of going as fast as a cheetah can run, but in many instances twice as fast. Yet most people manage to get through their lives and not die or kill anyone in a car crash. Considering the mentally-challenged state of the majority of people on earth, this isn’t so much due to skill or luck as it is a goddamn freaking miracle. But whatever is causing it, we should quit bitching so much about the lousy other drivers and count our blessings.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 27th, 2005 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.