Another Place The Shoe Fits

The country is being ripped apart by hatred, so Republican strategists have rolled out a new initiative: I Know You Are, But What Am I? And that is why we Democrats and liberals are now being called racists. Because we persist in calling everybody racist.

Except, Sugar? It's not true. We only call racists racists. It just seems like everybody, these days. Believe me, we're not happy about that. Nobody's "playing the race card." Even though it's, ah, a trump card. Our problem is that our whole deck is full of those shitty cards. We would be so happy if the pit boss would come along and swap out that deck, but we can only play with what we got. And what we got here living among us is a shit-ton of racists.

And a lot of them are accusing us liberals of trying to sow division and hatred by calling our President and his supporters hateful names. Why, they even say we want a civil war!

Yeah, no. No we the hell don't. We aren't even armed. What are we going to do, whack you with our Talking Stick? (Because that is an improper use of a Talking Stick.)

Yes. We're scared of you. Because you're scared of everyone else. Y'all are frankly terrifying in all your fear. We're not inclined to violence and we got nothing in our tool bucket to make you go away, but if something were to happen and you were gone, we'd be relieved. Some quick, tidy, painless thing. Maybe the Rapture. Oh praise the Lord, let it come, so the rest of us Americans, in all our splendid variety, can continue on in peace without you.

The only bright spot in all of this is that apparently, at this writing, people still consider it a bad thing to be called a racist. Ain't that quaint? They have no problem being racist but they don't want to wear the T-shirt. Despite a nearly complete inability among many white people to imagine a person of color, other than Morgan Freeman, as entirely human, they do not want to be called racists. They're fine with people of color existing as long as they do it quietly and far away.

We're not racists, they say. It's not racist to call out people who knock over liquor stores and break into houses and sit around all day drinking Colt 45 and collect welfare checks and food stamps, and it's not our fault if all of those people happen to be black. They're either guilty or they look just like someone who is, so it's no wonder the police give 'em an extra thump just to make sure. You can't blame the police for that. And it's not our fault so many of those people are in prison, because they wouldn't be there if they didn't deserve to be.

And Muslims. There is no reason to wear the hijab if you're not trying to hide a bomb. Those people are dedicated to enshrining Sharia law in America and outlawing Christianity, and our own God and Constitution are not strong enough to withstand a threat like that. It's not racist to sound the alarm about those people if it's true. It's just standing up for what we believe in. You know. Freedom.

And don't tell us those "refugees" at the border aren't a threat. A good parent feeds and clothes her child and makes sure she goes to school. You sure as hell don't march your little kid across a thousand miles of desert to sneak into a better country and steal someone else's job. What kind of monster would be that cruel? Fix your own damn country, that's what a good parent would do. My God. So obvious. These are not good people. It's not racist to say so, if it's a fact.

Thieves and terrorists and drug dealers don't belong here. It's not our fault that we can tell who they are just by looking.

Well bless my buttons. What happened to the Home of the Brave? I don't understand much of this. I don't know why folks who are proud to sling rifles over their fat butts in the town square are so damned afraid of so many powerless people.

But I did just think of a good place to store my Talking Stick.

As this post rolls out at 3am PST, Portland is, reluctantly, about to host a swarm of right-wing provocateurs from across the nation. Many of them haven't been laid in a long time and they're very interested in exercising themselves violently. They are likely to find willing foils on the left here, and they know it. Ordinarily, I like to attend these events to witness and to point and laugh (as appropriate). I'm skipping this one. I don't actually want to die yet. Wish us luck.

The Poop On Joe The Plumber

You know, if it weren't for the occasional meme that gets tracked into my Facebook page on a right-wing shoe, I wouldn't know that Denver has just legalized pooping on the sidewalk in order to protect illegal immigrants from deportation at the behest of Democrats who need their votes in order to continue their march toward socialism and the destruction of freedom as we know it. I had been unaware of this, but it makes sense.

Liberals are rightly concerned because it is well known that homeless illegal immigrants are particularly drawn to city sidewalks for their defecation activities, in many cases passing up clean heated restrooms for the opportunity to drop their drawers in public. This is a long-standing tradition among peoples who are expected to clean other people's toilets but not use them personally. It would be culturally insensitive to force them to use the public toilet facilities most American cities don't have any of.

In fact there are credible reports that illegal aliens, like dogs, have scaled the border wall just to drop a deuce in our yard, and be back home in time for din-din.

But even we liberals believe they should clean up after themselves, so we are pressing for legislation to provide Baggies & Ballots in street dispensers along with absorbent American flags to wipe with.

Illegal immigrant homeless poop is considered more of a public health threat because it takes the jobs of regular homeless poop. Worse, evidently there is a thousand-foot-long turd oozing toward our southern border. Much if not most of the illegal drugs passing into the United States have been shown to be passed first through illegal immigrant rectums. Pooping on the sidewalk does make the cocaine retrieval a lot easier.

Wait a minute. A quick fact check revealed that Denver did not in fact just make sidewalk pooping legal but instead lowered the penalties to sixty days in jail per turd, and they did it two years ago.

So why is this meme making the rounds now? This particular story has been brought to us on an annual basis (or as needs of rage require) courtesy Joe The Plumber, who was never a plumber and cannot be expected to help with the waste management situation. In fact, he puts out a lot of shit himself.

I don't know. Poop is a problem. I think we need to build a stall. A big, beautiful stall.

The Lowdown On The Showdown

Democrats!

Doggone! We liberals almost pulled it off.

We almost got a whole new group of Democrats into the country in time to kick some electoral ass. Next time! Just goes to show we, like Charles Koch, are capable of playing the long game. We had to start way back in the 1970s and totally screw up Latin American citizens by propping up dictators, flooding the countries with arms for anyone willing to drop a Commie, and bankrolling any murderous soul who was willing to sell off his country's public wealth to private corporations. The War on Drugs was just a bonus. In order to deprive Americans of their party drugs, we were able to destroy entire villages with herbicides to prevent farmers from growing the only crop they could make any money on, after Walmart undercut them on all the rest.

Visigoths! I mean Democrats!

Admittedly, we liberals didn't do most of that stuff ourselves--we haven't historically been CIA fans--but like conservatives, we're perfectly willing to make hay with any chaos that presents itself. It was a lot of work and a lot of money over a long period of time, but we finally got a bunch of desperately poor, frightened people to trudge thousands of miles to our country for a life with a little less death and despair in it, and that's no small thing. Who would want to leave their sunny home for a strange land unless they were in a heap of trouble? No one. But here they come!

Of course, they say most of them were coming here to rape and murder the people we're too lazy to rape and murder. And that is true. Also there were some Muslim extremists in the mix, a smattering of Visigoths, the Sith, and a really nasty new virus. But you've got to work with what the Lord gives you.

Democrats!

So we were all ready for them. We were going to hand out hippie daisies at the border and pamphlets instructing them exactly where to settle, along with a gift bag of food stamps, photo ID, their own personal Social Security number, plus a filled-out ballot. The settlement goals we had in mind coincided neatly with gerrymandered districts, all of which are full of Republicans looking to save big cash under the table on yard work and child care, and by the time they recognized they'd been disgerrymandered, it would all be over.

Where we went wrong was waiting for George Soros to cut loose the cash for transportation when the shiftless suckers couldn't hobble to the border in time on foot. He was too wrapped up in Human Rights Watch and Black Lives Matter and other sissy civil-rights operations and there's no way to get him to focus without him being all, "Oooh, Holocaust survivor," and you have to step back politely and wait for him to finish crying.

More Democrats!

Now this particular election is over, and it's too early to say if the results will change the composition of the migrant caravan. It's possible the caravan will dissolve harmlessly into the ragged and desperate pilgrims they started out as, but it's also possible they'll retain a core group of bad hombres, armed with assault rifles and Kill Whitey tee-shirts and brown sperms, so they'll be along in time for the 2020 election.

That's fine with us. We love criminals as long as they vote correctly, which they will, because we're totally soft on crime. I mean, we officially deplore white-collar crime, but we don't do much about it. We're a little troubled that they're going to bring down the hit-man wages, because that's what happens when you don't stick with the union, but perhaps we can get them to organize later.

First things first.

A Rags To Bitches Story

So I found out, and never mind how, there's no reason to get into it on a Sunday, that my fine young friend buys reusable cotton flannel menstrual pads, which I didn't even know were a thing, but they are. And I was grateful yet again for being a post-menopausal liberal.

Because if I were a liberal woman still in the throes of unasked-for fertility, I would then have to go purchase these myself, and use them and wash them out in order to keep yet another single-use throwaway item out of the landfill, because that is the curse of a liberal, to worry about such things, and because it's not as if the throwaway kind ever saved much on laundry anyway, since there wasn't a single month in forty years in which I did not manage to doody on something I shouldn't have, even if I wore two corks and a pad so large it has a tag on it that says DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

If I were a pre-menopausal conservative I wouldn't have to give this a second thought. I would be worried about some colored person breaking into my house or being blown up by a Muslim war refugee or raped by a Mexican or the fact that God is both all-powerful and somehow kept out of the schools or that some liberal is going to force me to use curly light bulbs or some stinking Socialist is going to steal my Medicare or someone is going to call me a racist just for having the guts to call a spade a spade or, and this is the very worst thing, my own husband might some day be accused of something he didn't do, something that totally never happened on account of there being no witnesses except that one really drunk dude who hasn't remembered anything he's done in thirty years. Any woman could accuse him of such a thing at any time and then go cash her check from the First National Bank Of Libtards and it wouldn't matter how many creative explanations my husband made up to explain the naughty bits in his yearbook. And his life would be ruined unless he makes it to the Supreme Court and is right back on top. As it were.

As a conservative woman I would be able to assume that life began when I was born, and being able to wear sweaters inside in the summer and drive my Ford Extortion to the corner store and throw away a plastic pod every time I make coffee is just what the world owes me. Certainly I would assert there was no life before pads and tampons. Just because women survived for a million years without them until a hundred years ago does not mean that we could survive without them today.

They did, though. Admittedly, history has not been overly interested in the concerns of women. Hypatia is an exception. That 5th-century mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher once discouraged an unwanted suitor by smacking him with her menstrual rags, although some scholars dispute this account, pointing out that she could have just waved them around and he'd have dropped dead of his own accord. Unfortunately, Hypatia was a woman of great and beguiling beauty, otherwise known as Satanic wiles. She and her big brain and beauty got into a nest of early Christians and that was pretty much that, for soon enough she was murdered, sliced up, dragged in pieces through the street, and burned.

And for this alone I might have donned the cotton rag in Hypatia's name. But now I don't have to, thank God. Or whoever's in charge.

Go For A Ride?

They set up a traveling amusement park on the waterfront for the Rose Festival season. After it's broken down and packed away, the city crews have to spend several months trying to resuscitate the turf, but this is considered a worthwhile public expense for the peace of mind of having had all those scary teenagers and smelly people penned inside a cyclone fence for a few weeks. We walked by it the other day. Dave looked wistfully at The Big Sling. It's an expensive ride for a two-minute thrill but it's probably quite the thrill. It's the one where they slingshot you straight up into the stratosphere at three times the speed of projectile vomiting. I'd try it with Dave but I have an aversion to sustained really loud noises, and it doesn't help if they're coming from me. I still don't like them.

When I think about it, I can't remember a single time I have been flooded with adrenaline that I enjoyed.  I don't even like to be dampened with adrenaline. Every last experience from singing solo to being followed in a dark alley to roller coasters has been a horror. But Dave has recently expressed an interest in doing an amusement-park tour in California. In fact, he wants to go to Disneyland.

Already there's a little adrenaline spike involved here. Disney was not allowed in our home when I was growing up. My father had a thing about Walt Disney and when the Wonderful World of Disney came on the TV, even though it was in living color, not that that mattered on our TV, we couldn't watch it. I didn't know why at the time, but as an adult I read that old Waltster was appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, calling out people for being Communists, and that, right there, would have been enough to keep Mickey Mouse out of our house. As far as I knew, our television didn't even work on Sunday nights until Ed Sullivan came on. Ratting on people to Joe McCarthy? For an unrepentant liberal man raising a family, that was plenty enough to get you the boot. No Disney; No Mission Impossible (covert interference in other country's affairs is repugnant); no Hogan's Heroes (Nazis aren't funny). So even though Daddy has been dead for 35 years, there's a little illicit thrill to be had by even thinking of going to the Happiest Place On Earth.

But that's enough thrill for me. Dave likes the kind of rides that get your viscera going hard in one direction, and their contents in another altogether. The kind that repeatedly lead you to believe YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE but ha ha! you don't. Does the Little Mermaid run a waterboarding concession? I'm not interested, so Dave thinks I'll be a sorry amusement-park companion for him. I don't see why he can't flip  himself silly on the Diarrheaton while I cling carefully to the edge of a slowly-spinning teacup, and we go have a beer afterwards and compare notes. But evidently there is great joy to be had in terrifying me right out of clean underpants, and I would be denying him that joy. "Just try it," he's going to wheedle, for hours, and eventually I will cave, and I will hate every blasted second of it, and he will be unable to stop smiling.

Meanwhile Disney has just hit the news by firing a bunch of their higher-tech employees. They were eased out as a squadron of workers from India was eased in, under a government program that awards visas to foreigners that are more skilled than our own workforce. Of course, the replaced workers had to spend three months training their replacements to make sure they could do their jobs at least as well, so there's some question about whether their skills were really lacking, but my goodness, the immigrants work a lot cheaper, and it turns out you can put a price tag on that.

"I guess your dad was right," Dave said, after I showed him the article. We're liberals too, so we'll probably have to settle for the second happiest place on earth. As long as it has a roller coaster, please sweet Jesus a teacup ride, and beer, we'll make do.

Dispatch From A Blue State

Thank you for your interest in Portland, Oregon. Due to the increase in inquiries generated by the documentary series "Portlandia," which has introduced our quirks and foibles to the world at large, we regret that our response time has lengthened. Those of you requiring immediate attention should direct your questions to any of the citizens who have rolled to a stop in the middle of the street to wave you across.

Visitors are gently reminded that stereotypes lack nuance, and the careful observer of the native population will note that we are each adorable in slightly different ways. As an official at the Quirks and Foibles Registry puts it: "Portlanders believe strongly that our identical shared values represent a triumph of

consensus over compulsion. There is no requirement that we all think alike. A progressive mindset, however desirable, has in no way been codified into law."

That said, it is true that the local tax structure is not based on the standard three-legged stool that includes sales taxes, but rather a barstool design centered on a pillar of property taxes stout enough to send non-civic-minded people screaming over

the northern border. As a consequence, the population consists almost entirely of Democrats with a high earnestness quotient, and the tiny remainder is cowed and sullen. This does not mean there are no wealthy Portlanders, but it does make them harder to distinguish when outside their normal range. In general, the well-heeled are more likely to hand out cookies from a local artisanal bakery at the Occupy camps rather than bake them at home, and less likely to do a twirly dance for no reason in the middle of the street. But exceptions abound.

In order to clear up any misunderstandings, the Office of Civic Suggestions will be holding an informational rally at the waterfront Saturday. A performance by the city pep squad "The Fighting Mildew" will be featured, followed by tastings of bacon-donut beer. An informative guide to the city will be unveiled at that time.

To be continued.

Damn Skippy

Sketchy beige dudes...

When news came of two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, America spent a prim hour hoping it was a gas leak or some other ill-timed infrastructure failure, and then dove straight into speculation. Who would do such a thing, and why? Was this the act of a random psychotic, or an organized one? People were rumored to be "hoping" it was a certain kind of person. And then came the recriminations. It is not proper to hope the perpetrators fit a certain stereotype. We were told this, even though the scolders, without a doubt, had their preferences too.

It's human nature. We pore through the murder stories for clues that will permit us to carry on as usual. Oh, that happened in that part of town where the different people live, so I'm not going to die.  Or, that was a domestic violence situation, and nobody in my family is crazy in that particular way, so I'm not going to die. In that same vein, we might wish that our Boston terrorist is a fatty who has it in for runners. But we know that's unlikely.

...with a backpack

I'm imagining that there are people who watched the plumes rise over Boston, and wished it was a Muslim trying to promote chaos for reasons we do not feel compelled to understand, beyond that they are evil, and we are not. Some people are comforted by being able to assign other people to a slot of some sort, one they've already set up in their heads: the nickels go here, the dimes go over there. And then there are the people who were heard admitting "I hope it's a white guy with a grudge against the government." This also was considered a deplorable statement.

So deplore this. I totally hoped it was a white guy, ideally Donald Trump, but if not him, a good ole American white guy named Joe or Skippy. Looked like I was going to get my wish there, at first, but it emerged it was a pair of guys who were at best whitish, and their names were all wrong, and damned if they didn't turn out to be Muslims too.

Why would I hope it was Skippy? All nuts are the same to me. No one has a good reason to blow

people up. There are parts of the world where people are being blown up routinely, but we tend to think they must be sort of used to it--they're not like us; it's the sort of thing that happens in that other neighborhood, far away from ours. And even if they're being blown up by bombs we're paying for, it doesn't count against us, because we don't mean it: our hearts are pure.

So I thought that if we could pin this on Skippy, we might be able to contain the carnage. There are too many of us who do not feel complete without vengeance, and some of us are well satisfied with anyone's blood. We are majorly put out. We will knock over our own citizens if they're dark enough, or if they dress funny. Or we'll mob up and sanction a war against an entire country. There might be one all ready to go, on the drawing boards, a war motivated by greed or profit or vainglory or a combination, and all it takes is a righteous mob of us to go along with it and it's a done deal. People will die. Ours, and theirs too, whatever that distinction is supposed to mean on this tiny planet.

But if it turns out to be Skippy and his arsenal and his feud with the Department of Motor Vehicles and his itch for power, it will die down. We liberals will mock him over our microbrews, and we'll rig up a scathing, grammatically perfect poster and pass it around on facebook, and we'll shake our heads over him at parties Skippy's friends aren't invited to.

But we won't bomb Idaho.

What's That In Your Pants?

I hate bananas. There, I said it.

I didn't used to hate bananas. They weren't anything special, but they were easy to peel and dispatch, and easy goes a long way in my book. They're high in potassium. You jam one in the top end, and you ward off foot cramps at the bottom. As long as they stayed out of Jell-O, they were okay. But after a few decades of bananas, I began to realize I didn't like them very much. It took another decade to realize I could just stop eating them. Same thing happened with pot; I'm a slow study.

Then I heard a couple things on NPR that really sealed the deal for me. They said the bananas of my youth had given way to an inferior variety, mealier, drier, and less tasty, because the original kind got buggy or blighty or hard to box up or something. So I wasn't making it up: bananas are worse than they used to be. The second thing was a statement made to the effect that enlightened American consumers don't buy bananas. This is because bananas have to be shipped from somewhere else in the world, and thus incur a cost to the planet of fossil-fuel use. Thoughtful consumers try to buy closer to home.

That meant I could now embrace my bananaban with a light heart and a sweet whiff of righteousness. Here was a policy that felt right to my core, in a way that taking short showers with a puny water flow just doesn't.

This is the sort of thing liberals are required to think about. We can't stop thinking about it. Even carnivorous liberals have to think about their hamburgers at the picnic: was the cow contented? Was she fed antibiotics that get into the ecosystem and lower their effectiveness against emerging bacteria that will now rampage through our population with newer and deadlier infections we will be helpless to thwart? Was the bun made from wheat from a farm using unnatural fertilizers that seep into the Mississippi and create a massive dead zone at the delta that will not recover in a zillion years? This is why liberals are no fun at parties. This, and the tofu dip. And this is why liberals wear loud shirts and sandals and assemble their remaining hairs in ponytails the size of noodles, because they want to feel like children, since they can't stop thinking like adults. And conservatives show up at the picnic dressed like adults, with their minds as delightfully uncluttered as a child's, survey the situation and think: cool. More hamburgers for me.

I got to thinking about bananas the other day because I read somewhere that they are an effective remedy for  hemorrhoids, and glad to hear it. That's pretty close to my best-case scenario for banana placement anyway. I guess you're supposed to apply just the peeled skin to the afflicted tissues, however. It wasn't what I was visualizing, but at least this way it doesn't ruin the trouser line.

Thud Thud Thud

There was this ominous thudding sound. It was rhythmic; it shook the house. I wondered if we were finally gearing up for our 9.0 earthquake. Then I figured it was pile-driving somewhere nearby. Finally I realized it had to be Godzilla. Thud. Thud. Thud.

I was right the third time. Says here in the paper that Walmart wants to jam in seventeen new stores near here and wipe out all the other grocery stores. No, I'm not making that up--they admit it right up front. It's the kind of thing you can do when you're city-stompin' size.

As a liberal, I protest. That's what liberals do: we protest. We'd be so much better off if we just started packing like everyone else, made up shit and blasted it through the internet. Not us. We mass together politely like large outdoor book groups and we yell "What do we want?" Fair trade clothing, a living wage for all, sustainable agriculture and universal health care! "When do we want it?" We'd like it now if it's not too much trouble! We're pathetic.

Why do liberals hate Walmart? No matter what you've heard, it has nothing to do with arugula. That's the line: liberals are such snobs that they only want to patronize stores with arugula and wouldn't be caught dead in a Walmart. We think we're better than everyone else. We're elite.

By "elite" they mean "effete." The subtext is that arugula is an effeminate form of iceberg lettuce. And that drives us liberals nuts, because then we have to counter that it has nothing to do with arugula, and even if it did, we don't think there's anything wrong with being effeminate, if that's the way we roll, and now you've got us talking about that, and before you know it they've got us so worked up we end up calling someone a Philistine, and that's it, game over, Walmart wins. Thud. Thud. Thud.

So that's the narrative. Liberals hate Walmart because they're snobby arugula-eaters and they don't really give a damn about poor people who might appreciate always low prices, always. It's a deliberate smear and there's plenty of money behind thinking it up. It's propaganda, and it works, as propaganda is meant to do. But it isn't any more truthful than the Democrats' idea that there is a Republican War On Women. That is total hyperbole. Plenty of Republicans like women just fine, either one at a time or several on the side, and the ones who don't are willing to maintain one as a spousal avatar. War On Women, indeed. At worst they might be getting a little woody, thinking about bunching up the attractive ones in an internment camp, but war? No.

Liberals hate Walmart because it got way too big and powerful, big enough to re-write the rules in their favor, bigger than entire countries, and they had most of the economic marbles. And instead of trading them, they set them rolling until they'd all reached the lowest point on the planet. They found a bunch of people who would work for practically nothing and didn't need insurance and scoffed at environmental controls and bingo, that's where they got things made cheap. Then they brought all that back to America and sold it real cheap to this huge market of people who weren't doing as well as they used to because their jobs, directly or indirectly, went to China. It's a genius move, really. You shear the sheep and then you sell them cheap wool sweaters. If they're cold enough, they'll even be grateful.

A good liberal pays attention to the true cost of things, and adds up the environmental cost, and the social cost, and the cost of war, and spends his money accordingly even if it means he doesn't get as much stuff; and the rest of us at least aspire to doing that much of the time. And we won't pay Godzilla to stomp our town. Not even if he starts selling cheap arugula.