Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
I’ve been saying over and over again how worried I am about this problem, but of course that does nothing to actually solve the problem. The problem is this…waitaminnit…before I get into that, all the women and girls leave the room. Just get out. For a little bit. Okay? Okay. I’ll wait.
Dum de dum de dum…
Okay, are they gone? Alright, gentlemen, here’s the situation. It’s not good for us at all. There’s this uppity woman Sarah Palin, you know…and the problem that arises is that, Sarah Palin is awesome in so many ways. And that wouldn’t be a problem at all — except, and I think I speak for many, I’ve been actually noticing it.
And that wouldn’t be a problem either. Except I’ve been saying so out loud. Many times. I’m not the only one. In fact, since she was named as McCain’s running mate last week, I haven’t seen any conservatives anywhere express a wish to support her ideas, coupled with grudging recalcitrance about doing so, on account of the fact that she’s a woman. I haven’t seen anyone on the right wing actually discriminate against her.
In short, we’ve been given this gift of a smart, competent, effective politician who isn’t even a politician…someone who believes in our values and demonstrates an effective ability to promote them…who happens to be a chick. And we’re actually being open-minded about it.
The problem this creates is that it violates Morgan Rule #1. And this is a hard-and-fast rule. I do not violate this rule, ever — it is a primary directive — until the few days since this last Friday morning, at which time, I have busted it repeatedly. That rule is:
If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.
Got it? It means do not pander. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, at all, at any time, try to disprove things about you someone just got done announcing they believe about you. There is a good reason for this. First of all, when people accuse you of being something you aren’t, and doing something you didn’t do, usually they had their puny little minds made up since long before they said anything about it and nothing — NOTHING — will ever motivate them to question it. That’s the way people are. Secondly: Since Roman times, and centuries before that, accusing people of being things and doing things has been a political tool. You ask someone to do something, he says no; you accuse him of something he hasn’t done, and suddenly he’ll do it. It works even better than what the Corleone family did to Sen. Pat Geary. Oldest story in politics. On whether he really is what you say he is, you don’t give a rat’s ass. (We covered this when we invented the word bullcuse last year.)
So the Morgan Rule #1 says, you do not play to this by trying to earn an exoneration that will not be forthcoming. If your energy goes into anything, it goes into doing the opposite of exonerating yourself. In fact, the Morgan Rule #1 says you go right ahead. Your accuser already has his or her mind made up. So you prove ’em right. Because, to be realistic about it, you might as well.
You accuse me of breaking something I didn’t break, I’ll make sure it’s broke.
You marry me and accuse me of forgetting our anniversary, I’ll make sure I never remember it again.
You’re missing something, you accuse me of hiding it, I find out where you put it before you forgot you put it there, I throw it out the window.
Because I hate being falsely accused of things. We-ell…we’re conservative Republicans. Regularly accused of being sexist pigs because we happen to be straight men. And we have this awesomeness that is in Sarah Palin…some of us have been pointing it out, making nary a hint about her gender, save to occasionally observe this is the kind of woman all women should be. We have been seeing positive things about her. We have been saying them out loud. We have been envisioning her, seriously, as a candidate for our future leader, with the potential to make that happen, and the personal attributes that would contribute toward being a good one. Some of us have even been using our own words, excluding it as a possibility that we might have been reciting the words of others just to masquerade in phony notions of equal opportunity. Simply put, by recognizing Palin’s decency and her leadership qualities, we’ve proven that we have the capacity to do this. THAT is what creates the problem. That is what violates Morgan Rule #1.
So the time has come to restore our sexist credentials. If you’re like me, and you’ve been noticing the things that I’ve been noticing, pointing out the things that I’ve been pointing out — you need to worry about this. You’ve managed to build up an identity attached to being a sexist pig, and for the last six days you haven’t been pulling your load.
So I was racking my brains trying to figure out how to solve this, and I came up with an idea. Actually, I stole the idea. Stole it from Al Gore, I did.
Here it is. Print and cut.
It works like this: You pay me some money. Or not…maybe you do me a nice favor, link to The Blog That Nobody Reads with some glittery prose. What really works for me is something like this: I was sure Freeberg was wrong and I was right, then I realized he’s right and I’m wrong. That works best of all — but there are other things that work just as well.
And then — on your behalf — I’ll do some sexist pig stuff. It’ll probably involve yammering at my sweetheart of a girlfriend to get me some beer without saying “please.” Or, I’ll just generally act like a creep. Maybe do some discriminatin’. Peel off a slur here and there. I’ll find a way to do these things, as your proxy.
And by my doing this, I’ll earn for you a license to genuflect before this long drink of cold water after weeks of wandering in the desert, that is Gov. Sarah Palin, to your hearts’ content. Or, at least, to the limits granted by your “purchase” of these vouchers. If you buy a big enough stack of these sexist offsets, maybe you can even use that horrid and threadbare catchphrase (makes me cringe just scribbling this down) “YOU GO, GIRLFRIEND!” Our identities will remain intact, we’ll keep this apocryphal epidemic of societal misogyny alive and well. And we can still support this female-type-person who champions our passions better than any male politician in recent memory.
It’s a completely capitalist exchange of sexist offsets. Solves all the problems. Everybody’s happy.
Like Han Solo, sometimes I amaze even myself.
Update: I’m going to buy the very first one — er, from myself…wait…does that work? It’s supposed to be a proxy thing, isn’t it? Oh well, Al Gore buys his carbon vouchers from himself, so I figure I can buy sexist vouchers from myself. Okay then. I buy the first one from myself, so I can point out what an awesome bundle of awesomeness is blogger friend Cassy Fiano — who, in fact, is Sarah Palin.
And see? Here I am putting a dollar in the cookie jar…here I am taking the sexist offset voucher from one tray, moving it to another tray, then moving it back again. Sexist heritage preserved. Now those uppity women won’t get all full of themselves as we notice out loud that some of them are…how do those young squirts say it…Da Bomb.
Now, leftists don’t have to buy any of these. There aren’t that many people accusing them of sexism, and so they don’t have to follow Morgan Rule #1; and besides they’ve demonstrated over the last few days that they’re plenty sexist enough.
When I want to be reminded what mean-spirted, small-minded, nasty, toxic, insulting sexism really looks like, I’m making a bee-line straight toward them. I think, over the last week, anybody who hadn’t already figured that out has learned it pretty well.
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Ah, Morgan. Call me silly if you like… but I’m beginning to think you’re running under a False Flag. As in: you really LIKE women. REAL women… not the screeching, ranting, raving sorts. Just a feelin’, ya know. No evidence to the contrary, of course. 😉
- Buck | 09/04/2008 @ 16:57Men are not inherently better than women, and women are not superior to men. But a woman who’ll bring you a cold beer, is much better than a woman who won’t.
- mkfreeberg | 09/04/2008 @ 18:27Just a second my friend, TWICE you’ve seem to have forgotten the stranded energy tax, the title transfer tax, (was that a tray originally designed for managing food?) there’s the value added tax and the rooms and meals tax.
Since you seem to have skirted using a union labor contract in moving a dollar, TWICE,
without stevedores you’ve apparently gained these offsets for a song.
The Live entertainment tax will be applied of course.
remove 49 cents from the second tray and send it to me or I’ll be FORCED to make you defend yourself in court.
Postage is deductible at 2.45% of the Actual Cash Value per annum, just like a $25,000 Certificate of Deposit. You may also deduct the travel distance between the two trays @2X $0.51 per mile.
Damned slacker;-)
- CaptDMO | 09/04/2008 @ 18:34