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July 9, 2009 - Thursday 16:48
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Category: Life
..
Michael Jackson vs. the news
There's meaningful, there's epic and there's revolutionary.
What about all three?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
You already know which kind of event, which sort of dramatic happening, which kind of ill-fated death and historic melodrama we as a culture value far, far more than any other. You already know which will hold us in thrall for days and months on end, which causes more tears and heartbreak and which kind of event will spawn books and movies and tributes and earnest memories by the million until we ourselves pass on to the hereafter, smiling and dancing and humming a desperately catchy tune.
Hint: it's not the new Iran revolution. It's not, say, the young and idealistic Neda Agha Soltan, that iconic Iranian protester shot to death by militiamen on the streets of Tehran and then made into a near-perfect martyr, mostly because she was beautiful and photogenic and light-skinned and her horrific death was caught on video and spread all over YouTube, and therefore makes ideal, bloodstained copy for news agencies and political movements worldwide.
It's not President Obama's historic push for health care reform, currently being beaten to death in various congressional back rooms. It's certainly not yet another aging white Republican politician weeping to the TV cameras about his love of God and family and irresistible Argentinean vaginas. Like that ever truly matters.
Who the hell cares about any of that? Who needs it right now? Pop culture just died. Didn't you hear?
First, it was the beauty. How many countless millions of feverish boyhood fantasies were spawned by 1970's Farrah Fawcett? How many of our admittedly vapid and slightly sexist, yet somehow also wondrous and utterly divine ideas of lust and desire and perfect all-American prettiness were inspired by her uncomplicated sparkle, that Barbie-doll hair?
I am unashamed to say, I had that poster on my wall. Most every male I know of that generation had that poster on his wall. It was some sort of boyhood law, a requirement, a key to the Kingdom of Testosterone. Chances are you don't even need to click that link to know which poster I'm talking about. Chances are you can close your eyes and see it in a split second, and sigh. Sex and beauty and Americana and teeth and sex and hope and hairdryers and carefree love and bathing suits and shimmer and sex. Farrah made it all possible.
But even that glorious, soft-focus icon is no match for the King of Pop. There is no contest.
It's nearly impossible to grasp, really. Michael Jackson's impact on the popular culture at large cannot really be measured, though many will try, using every gauge of success and influence we can think of: record sales, money earned, global reach, hit singles, controversy, tabloid coverage, endless comparisons to Elvis and The Beatles, you name it.
But it's all sort of futile. After all, the raw data of Michael Jackson pales in comparison to the truly significant numbers, like how many countless millions of people worldwide have danced and sung along and found pleasure in an MJ tune in their lives, can recite lyrics and mimic the dance moves and tell you exactly where they were when they first witnessed the moonwalk, the glove, "Billie Jean," the "Thriller" video.
How many millions rushed home on hearing the news of his sudden death and put on "Off the Wall" and cranked it full volume, and swam in the memories, and are still doing so, right this moment? They say pop culture is generally meaningless and transitory and has no lasting effect, lowers the bar of discourse and poisons the intellect, is the junk food of the human soul. All very true. Mostly.
Let us pose the impossible question: How do we measure what's truly important? How do we parse and separate and decide? There is bloodshed and death and revolution happening, right now, in the streets of a fiery foreign country. More than one, actually. There is meltdown and oppression and disease and countless huge-hearted people working against impossible odds to improve the lives of others in immeasurably honest, profound ways.
And yet over here is someone like Michael Jackson, his music, his dancing, his genius, his odd persona, well, it's like it's some different realm entirely. Strip away the cheese and the tabloid and the bizarre, freakish spectacle of his rather tragic life, and what's left?
Well, you might say it's a kind of sheer happiness, a kind of freedom like you can't even speak about because it's not really an intellectual thing. It's just a simple joy. It's also fairly essential to our survival.
You are left with the image, the feeling, of hundreds of millions of humans laughing and smiling and dancing with friends and lovers, all to one person's gift of music. Put it this way: billions of humans disagree about the nature of God. But everyone knows what the moonwalk is.
One final, tiny example: As I was writing this column, I received, in my in-box, a mere handful of hours after the news of MJ's death hit the newswires and just before every radio station, music blog, music fan, music television in the known universe switched gears in an instant and started playing MJ nonstop in memoriam, with sequined flags at half-mast, I received a very strange invitation.
It's to something called the "Scandinavian Mid-Summer Party" in New York. It is, apparently, "a night of upscale networking, partying and bowling (!) with professionals and businessmen eager to enjoy this traditional Scandinavian celebration; members of the Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and Estonian business and social community in the Tri-state area will join us for the night."
Well gosh, thanks for thinking of me, I thought.
There are images of idyllic smiling blond Danish girls in pigtails and scarves and perfect IKEA teeth. They say "Mid-Summer is the most popular time of the year in Scandinavia. Houses in Scandinavia are decorated with hearths and flower garlands; people then dance while listening to traditional folk songs known to all." It says some other stuff too, but my eyes had already glazed over.
Well, almost. Just as my finger hovered over the Delete key, something caught my eye.
The invitation had been altered. The organizers had apparently changed the description of the evening's events. No more Scandinavian folk music. Along with the billiards and bowling and drunk Estonian businessmen, they will now "pay our respects to the King of Pop by playing his amazing music all night." They asked all guests to bring an iPod with favorite MJ songs. You know, just like they did in the old country of Scandinavia. Just like they're doing across the entire planet, as you read these words, right now.
Now that's revolutionary.
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June 25, 2009 - Thursday 23:16
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Category: Life
.. In defense of PETA's total stupidity
Who, pray who, will save the houseflies? And our sanity?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
How easy it is to point at extremist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as they come out and admit, in public, to an actual reporter, that they wish President Obama had not killed that fly, that tiny little hunk of bacteria and regurgitated food bits and death, but had instead taken a moment to capture it gently between his loving presidential palms like it was universal health care reform and then set it free outside, so it could go spread germs and fecal matter and disease to various flowers and small children and Republicans.
How delightful it is to point out how this group is, once again, so laughably insane and out of touch, how they have jumped the shark once again, which they seem to do with delightful, if obnoxious, frequency.
But hang on a sec. Maybe there was something in that hilarious little story that gave you pause. Maybe you decided to drill down into the idea for just a moment, just to see, and then perhaps realized, well, yes, OK fine, there is an actual point to be made in there, somewhere, just behind the roaring ludicrousness of it all.
It goes something like this: If you're going to truly revere life, if you're going to come out and claim that there is sanctity and divinity to all God's creatures, be they gleaming sex-crazed dolphins and sweet slobbering puppies, on down to gnats and sea slugs and giant hairy bird-eating tarantulas, then yes, you're sort of forced to admit that even houseflies deserve a hint of respect, a touch of empathy, the reluctant admission that even they don't actually deserve to die, per se.
You also know this is a rather extreme and lopsided perspective, totally unfeasible in daily, circle-of-life reality. But then again, when you hold it up to the light and turn in around a few times and let the facts of human life refract through it, it's really not all that insane. It sure as hell reveals more than a few ugly truths.
You have but to ponder: How many millions of living creatures do we slaughter every day on this planet in service of our top-of-the-food-chain gluttonous desires, from cattle to ducks, chickens to horses, pigs and lambs and just about all the rest, and let's not forget raping and pillaging and sucking dry our glorious oceans? Really, is there a living creature we humans have yet to slaughter, skin, eviscerate, consume, commodify, exploit in some relatively obscene way? Nope.
What about our beloved pets? How many millions of dogs and cats are put down in shelters every year because we overbreed and underappreciate and think we own the damn place and yet have really no idea what the hell we're doing?
Truly, it takes only the slightest peeling back of our supposedly noble and good natures to see exactly how staggeringly brutal is our general treatment of the animal kingdom, what level of hypocrisy and denial we all live on, no matter what sort of righteous pro-life group or worldview we claim as our own.
So then perhaps you think, all right fine, flies are sacred or whatever, but give me a break, is there not some sort of moral relativism at play here, some obvious sliding scale of who-really-gives-a-damn, given how a filthy insect is certainly a bit further down the ladder of divine consciousness than, say, a silverback gorilla, or a giraffe, or a blue whale, or Megan Fox?
And really, don't we have to take into account this admittedly warped understanding just to get through the day? Because if we don't, if you stare too long at the entire equation of just how inequitable and absurd this existence really is on a blood-and-guts, who-eats-who level, you will quickly go insane, and fanatical, and likely join a group just like PETA and become entirely insufferable and no one will want to have sex with you ever again? Yes. All true.
So, you flip it over. You toss it around. You examine all angles, including the one that notes how PETA and self-righteous groups of its ilk -- hardcore vegetarian, vegans, raw foodies, animal moralists, et al -- how you can sort of burst their bubble in a split second simply by, well, by pointing at their lunch.
You can inform them about their lovely organic salad, about how the various threshers and mechanical lettuce-picking machinery over at the organic farm casually kill countless rodents and insects and birds every week as they move through the fields, not to mention the animals that were run over on the highway during delivery. In short, no matter what you eat, some animal, somewhere, has suffered and died for your meal.
Not fair? Sorry, totally fair.
You try to parse and balance it all. Maybe you realize, the point here is not to become so extreme in your reverence that you become utterly frozen, paralyzed by the knowledge that no matter what you do, you are going to kill some other living thing -- or rather, many, many of them -- simply by walking around, breathing, existing.
The point is not to become like ancient Jain monks, famous for such extreme reverence for all life that they would literally sweep the ground in front of them as they walked, in order to avoid harming even the smallest insect with their footfalls. Totally ridiculous, you think.
Except, of course, that it's not. It's also terribly beautiful. Luminous. Aiming toward something like purity, enlightenment, higher consciousness, even as it reveals, by contrast and sharp relief, just how violent and destructive life is, quite literally every step of the way.
And so maybe, as you go about your PETA-mocking day, you try to understand that the idea is to minimize harm and impact, to tread a bit more lightly, to see where you fall on the grand spectrum.
Over there, at the far end, is PETA and its ilk, severe to the point of silliness and total impracticality and eye-rolling give-me-a-freaking-break. On the other end ... well, I don't know what, exactly. Some sort of bloated, trophy-hunting imbecile who kills endangered exotic animals on a private game reserve for sport and whose ex-wife has her puppy killed so she can make a belt out if it.
It is the ever-present question we like to bury and try to ignore. Where do you fall along the continuum? How much consciousness do you have at any given moment of the impact you have? What is your true intent? Do you crush the damnable fly? Do you shrug and scoff and move on? Do you offer thanks? Do you dare see through it all?
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June 18, 2009 - Thursday 22:32
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Category: Life
Your wonderful totally bogus freedom
Damn all these rules and regulations!
Damn these incessant edicts and bans and restrictions!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate
It's like you can't swing a dead economy these days without hitting some new decree set up by the ever-prying government, some new commandment ostensibly designed to stop harmful or stupid behavior and make it tougher for good, law-abiding citizens to, say, smoke, stab, scream, urinate in public, kill themselves, pollute, make a mess of things in general.
Don't you hate that? No? You really should.
Don't you feel the outrage? There is outrage. There is always outrage, even over what might seem the most trivial and relatively optimistic advancements and announcements and legislation. It's just how we roll.
Here's a good one: the FDA has just been given sweeping new powers to regulate the nasty tobacco industry, powers it should have had about, oh, 300 years ago, but because the tobacco lobby is so malevolent and because the tobacco industry helps so many politicians make their boat payments and because, well, we love our toxic addictions to death, it often takes awhile before we fully acknowledge how these companies mean us very, very ill indeed.
No matter. Some people are outraged that the FDA might now step in and restrict smoking even further. Some people don't want more crackdowns on the free 'n' happy use of tobacco. Why? Because smoking bans are abusive and invasive. People hate them. Check that: smokers hate them; everyone else thinks they're pretty great and long overdue and hey, check it out, my clothes don't reek anymore after five minutes in a bar. Nice.
Even now, smokers feel they are the last, great persecuted group on the planet. They feel they are unjustly shunned and mocked and made to go far, far away to enjoy their toxin of choice, unless they are shoved inside a sad little glass box at the airport like some sort of exotic animal zoo display from the depths of 1976. Look over there, kids! Sickly, yellowish people who smell awful and enjoy phlegm! Don't stare, Timmy.
I find this kind of outrage both fascinating and very strange, this schizophrenic, Janus-faced stance where we claim to absolutely abhor government restrictions on our God-given right to shoot and eat and waste and kill and smoke and drive whatever the hell we want, while at the same time we essentially welcome and expect and even beg for those impositions and controls, so as to make life easier and better and safer. Hypocrisy? We're soaking in it.
You have but to pause and ponder. Can you name a single aspect of modern urban life, of human existence, that is not, at some level, regulated and controlled by laws, rules, the government?
It ain't easy. From the food you eat to the language you speak, the schools you attend, shows you watch, books you read, the history you learn, the clothes you wear, the computer you're looking at right now -- hell, nearly every physical object in your immediate environment: It is all, at some level, controlled and regulated and overseen by the government, by codified, largely invisible agreements of what it means to live in a functioning society. Deny it at your peril.
This is the hilarious paradox of America, of modern life in general. We do not actually want complete freedom. We don't even understand what the hell such an unfettered beast would entail, really. As Thomas Hobbes so famously said, were mankind to live in a true state of nature, free of structure and laws and our million beloved social contracts, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." And who the hell wants that?
Most of us don't really want government to stop protecting us from the world and ourselves, the FDA to stop making sure our foods aren't poisonous, the EPA to stop checking on the water supply, the myriad agencies to stop making sure we don't die every single day from 1,000 slings and arrows and outrageous growth hormones and insane militant right-wing murderous gun nuts.
How furious we get when something goes wrong because the government failed to regulate! How angry we get that the agency didn't do its job, the law wasn't enforced, the police didn't respond, the rules were not followed, the warning label not clearly displayed, the restaurant not inspected, the meat not real, the doctor not certified, the corporation not ethical, the pothole not filled! Lawsuit city, baby.
No, what we really want is the illusion of freedom, to live in this wondrous, light-filled comfort zone where all these rules and laws collide and collude in sweet, invisible harmony, a perfectly controlled, regulated equilibrium state in which we can splash and flail around and pretend we're exploring the wilds of the open ocean, when it's actually a carefully built, supervised, heavily chlorinated swimming pool of our own design.
Another tangy example: San Francisco just mandated the toughest composting laws in the known universe. All food scraps from your life must now be tossed into the giant green plastic bins supplied by the city. Failing to do so will result in the police breaking down your door and fining you $10,000 and taking away your coffeemaker for a year and making you eat month-old asparagus and forcibly sterilizing your cat.
OK, not really. But that's what some bitter city dwellers like to read into it, furious that our evil Mayor Newsom was once again telling them what to do and how to live. Did it matter that sighing city officials said they would do everything they could not to fine anyone, that it was a last resort, that they would issue multiple warnings first and would only fine the worst offenders, and even then it was no more serious than a parking ticket? Nah.
Far more fun to be blindly outraged, even if the idea of city-mandated composting is actually a very good one, most people are in full support of it, and it's progressive ideas just like this that make San Francisco so desirable in the first place. It's far from perfect, but at least we try.
Do not misunderstand. I am no fan of hissing, hyperactive lawmaking, of more agencies and rules and insidious bureaucracies, of unchecked powers given to our megalomaniacal politicians to probe and peek and control. Far from it. But I'm also not much of a fan of the silly hypocrisy of bogus outrage, the feigned indignation, the puling and ranting about what we ourselves happily agreed to construct.
Freedom doesn't mean wanton wasteful, lawless, screw-'em-all behavior whenever you feel like it because Jesus and your drunken id said it was OK. It means being able to see the nature of that pool we all built together, to dive in deep, sink and spit and maybe sometimes nearly drown, and still come up laughing. Doesn't it?
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June 17, 2009 - Wednesday 22:28
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Category: Life
Give It Up, Smoker
Death, cancer, rotted teeth, emphysema won't do it,
but 62 cents will?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
There is a wail, a cry, a powerful lament rising across the land. Can you hear it? Can you make it out?
It might be a little difficult to recognize. It's that raspy, croaking noise, sort of like an emphysemic chainsaw making out with a bucket of powdered glue. Hear it now?
Yes, it's the gravelly howl of the nation's livid smokers, AKA "the last persecuted group in America" (well, except for the obese. And Catholics, Mormons, dwarves, Hummer owners, gun lovers, vegans, atheists, lawyers, Wall Street execs, lesbians, Mexicans, working moms, single moms, obese single Mexican lesbian moms and a few dozen others, but never mind that now) whose God-given civil rights are now being trampled by our increasingly oppressive, fascist government.
The worst part about this shocking assault? No one seems to even notice, or care. Oh the humanity.
Maybe you haven't heard? How smoking just became quite a bit more expensive? It's true. Not only did the federal government nearly triple the tax on a pack of regular smokes (and more than 10x for those hideous mini-cigar things), but then Big Tobacco itself, in anticipation of the loss in profits from the new tax, went ahead and preemptively jacked up prices as well.
Upshot: a single pack of cigarettes now costs just slightly more than, say, a vente caramel mocha from Starbucks, or a triple cheeseburger and a small fries from Mickey D's, or about half of "Fast & Furious." Imagine.
For many hardcore smokers, the new tax is nothing short of a total fascist apocalypse nightmare, with many convinced the U.S. government is clearly trying to snuff out one of our last constitutional freedoms to kill ourselves as grossly and obviously as we damn well please. Those bastards.
It all spins into an amusing news story about how, immediately after the new tax went into effect, the various stop-smoking 'quitlines' across America -- did you know such things existed? I sure didn't -- lit up like so many flaming Christmas trees, as thousands of fed-up smokers decided, "Well, that's it. Enough's enough. Time to quit smoking."
You read that right. Lung cancer, heart disease, rotted gums, emphysema, reeking clothes, sallow skin, impotence, shriveled lung capacity and the general skull-crushing obviousness of it all, combined with all manner of heart-wrenching ad campaigns for the past 20 years apparently couldn't do what a measly 62-cent tax increase could. WTF indeed.
It is, you could say, a simple regurgitation of the age-old American truism: there is no more powerful stimulant/deterrent in our society than the pocketbook. Not sex, not God, not a plea from your weeping child, not death itself, nothing comes close to changing human behavior faster and more effectively than forcing us to pay a lot for something for which we used to pay very little.
(Notable exceptions: Coffee, jeans, water. OK, follow-up truism: We are nothing if not wildly inconsistent).
As for the "persecuted group" angle, that's almost too childish to entertain, and not merely because every group in America, at one point or another, likes to think their personal gaggle of beliefs and behaviors is the "real" persecuted one. No, the truly amusing thing is how some smokers seem to believe there is something akin to unrestricted freedom in American life. Isn't that cute?
Really, do we not recognize how everything in modern existence, from the clothes you wear to the language you speak to the food you eat to the computer you use to the color you paint you walls is, at some level, regulated and controlled by the government?
And therefore, to attain some silly libertarian vision of "true" freedom means you must haul your Marlboro-loving butt far off the grid and eat wild berries and never bathe or read or speak English again, as you die at 27 from swallowing exactly the wrong weird mushroom growing outside your homemade yurt?
Yes, I know, that's a wild exaggeration. But so is bitching about no longer being allowed to stink up a restaurant.
Also lost amid the outcry: how the same legislation that cranked up the tobacco tax also gives long-overdue powers back to the FDA to regulate Big Tobacco -- powers, by the way, that Bush twice vetoed, in the name of corporate cronyism and general immoral idiocy.
Is that the real smokers' lament? "Damn you, Obama administration, working to regulate the chemicals in my poisons and trying to make me marginally safer! Can't I just get lung cancer and emphysema and be a massive burden on my friends, family and the health care industry in peace, without government meddling?" Wait, that can't be right.
Oh, and one more thing. All those billions in new tax revenue? They go to fund the expansion of the SCHIP, also known as basic health care for millions of uninsured children.
And there you have it, your choice in a nutshell: Keep on smoking, and improve a kids' life. Or quit smoking, and improve your own. Sounds like a pretty fair deal either way.
But on to the larger, more pertinent question: Will it work? Will millions, or even thousands, of smokers actually quit as a result of the tax increase? Or does such legislation do nothing to address the deeper issues and problems at play, such as what it means to have true health, to respect and honor and take even basic care of your own body, and to begin to earn a basic understanding of root causes, the true sources of our addictions and habits? I already know my answer.
By the way, I wrote a column a few years back about the insidious myth of quitting smoking, about how Big Tobacco is in reprehensible, borderline Satanic collusion with Big Pharma and the health insurance biz in general to convince victim-happy Americans that quitting smoking is just insanely difficult and incredibly stressful and you're probably not strong enough to handle it and will probably fail a hundred times and maybe you shouldn't even try.
Here is the great, blasphemous secret: Quitting smoking is not insanely difficult. Nor must it be insanely painful. For most, quitting does not require inhuman amounts of willpower, drugs, patches, gum, therapy, straightjackets, begging, or a swell hospital video of surgeons ripping out one of your black and desiccated lungs.
The fact that we have been so aggressively convinced otherwise, that we've been taught for ages that we are pathetic and powerless in the face of these noxious products, that we are all weak, bewildered victims of our own impossibly complicated, insurmountable addictions, well, I hereby nominate that insidious BS as the real violation, the true attack on your intellectual and spiritual freedom. Really, where is the outrage?
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May 29, 2009 - Friday 20:59
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Category: Life
Apologies from California
Wow, did we ever botch the gay marriage thing! Sorry, world
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 29, 2009
I know, we're supposed to be the vanguard. We're supposed to lead the way, set the agenda, be at the forefront on exactly this kind of delightfully blistering, divisive, sticky cultural issue, especially given our world-renowned reputation for flying our fearlessly flamboyant freak flag as high as the Transamerica Pyramid dancing on ecstasy at Burning Man.
I know, we're supposed to be this unswerving bastion of progressive liberalthink, the frothing epicenter of just about every wild/weird/wonderful sociocultural movement and civil right in America. After all, we're the birthplace of hippie culture and gay culture and New Age culture and roughly 10,000 other progressive beliefs and revolutions and soul-fellatings you can name and many you can't, because they have yet to be concocted in one of our genius inventor/scientist/poet's feverish peyote dreams. I know.
In other words, we're supposed to know better. We're supposed to get it right, particularly about something as obvious and relatively, uh, straightforward as gay marriage, exactly the kind of issue about which the world expects California not merely to have our godless, revolutionary sh-t together, but to know how to follow through. After all, in terms of blue-state, damn-the-fundamentalists street cred, we gotta represent.
This is why the truth is so very difficult to admit: we failed. Choked. Dropped the ball. Botched it completely. Gay marriage, that is. Prop 8. The whole gay rights shebang. What a shame. And how utterly embarrassing.
What can we say? I'm not quite sure what happened. Somewhere between a slick 'n' cocky SF mayor Gavin Newsom speechifying in front of City Hall on one of the most electrifying days in the state's history a few years back, making us all unexpectedly, shockingly proud to live here, and "holy crap where the hell did all these panicky Mormons and old conservatives come from with their checkbooks and their fear," we lost our footing.
What's worse, we lost our soul, our center, our identity. Then again, to be perfectly honest, we don't really have the slightest clue as to what the hell that is, exactly. And we never really did.
Look, we're a big state. Massive. Unimaginably so. You ever been here? You ever driven around for more than a few hours, tried to navigate the 110/405/101/I-5 interchange without missing the I-10 split to get you to the 760 without crashing into Stockton or Pasadena or (shudder) Fresno? Good luck.
Hell, you can drive for a solid day and a half from parts far north aiming southward, and feel like you just drove through eight separate countries and 10 major climates and six distinct socioeconomic systems, four time zones and 15 languages and a dozen religious denominations because, well, you sort of did -- and you haven't even hit Santa Barbara yet. It's that big.
Hey, our coastline alone is nearly 850 miles long. We have volcanoes. We have geysers. Caverns. Mount Whitney. Death Valley. Epic fog and floods and fires, Tahoe and Disneyland and Hollywood and Porn Valley, avocados and raisins and water parks the size of the devil's last wine-cooler nightmare. We have towering redwoods and scorching deserts and a seashore to melt the heart of every photographer in the world, not to mention one of the strangest, most surreal seas you have ever smelled in your lifetime.
We have the Sierra and Sacramento and Slab City and San Diego. We are where surfer dudes perpetually baked on some of the world's finest home-grown ganja meet vintners perpetually buzzed on some of the galaxy's finest home-grown grape, and often you can't even tell which guy is which.
Did you know one-eighth of all U.S. residents lives here? I didn't. I had to look it up. That's how big we are. Stuff you think you know vanishes in the vortex of our madhouse schizophrenic bigness. Amazing.
Truly, we have more Nobel laureates, writers, poets, chefs, yoga teachers, PhDs, artists, mad scientists, healers and world-class academics per capita than Atlantis, with every attendant freak and exploiter and nutjob criminal jackass circus sideshow to match. The iPod was born here. The Internet. French Laundry. UC Berkeley. And yet, our governor starred in "Kindergarten Cop." You'll understand if we're just a little bit insane.
One more dirty secret that requires mentioning, given how heavily it stabs at the heart of our gay rights woes of late: We're also home to some of the most unfortunately inbred, socially conservative, spiritually malformed, sexually stunted religious leaders and megachurches in the nation. Yes, guys like Rick Warren and his Saddleback Church are here, and we are ashamed. Then again, we also have Glide Memorial. God is all like, WTF?
I could go on, but it's really just a big pile of lukewarm excuses. What we really owe you, the justifiably disappointed progressives and liberals and gay rights orgs of the world -- but also you over in the salivating right-wing nutball Limbaugh/Glenn Beck homophobe core, all you gun-hoardin' sodomy-fearin' paranoids who adore California for our endless supply of Things You Do Not Understand and Therefore Must Fear and Despise Even as You Secretly Desire to Lick Them All For a Month -- is a sincere apology. We let you down. All of you.
Fear not, however. We shall regroup. We shall try again. In fact, we already are. Know this for certain: We aren't the kind of state to let a perfect opportunity to pinch the lazy ass of the human experiment slip by for long.
But for now, we shall eat our humble pie and hang our heads in shame as we hand off the baton of delirious change to places like Massachusetts and Canada and Iowa -- Iowa! -- and be deeply grateful to let them all show us how it's done, at least as far as gay marriage is concerned. Yes, it's a bit humiliating. But you know what? In a strange way, it's also sort of refreshing. And a bit of a relief.
I have to admit, it's a bit exhausting being at the vanguard of all this progressive stuff all the time. We can use a break from being everyone's alarmist headline. Let the dour conservatives and shrill pundits stomp their little feet and stab their pitchforks of meek hysteria into a few other states for awhile. We've got enough going on.
Have you seen our budget lately? Our water issues? Our endless sunshine and our abundant wine supply and our sly, knowing grin? I mean, oh my God.
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