You Have to Bend Over to Get It Both Ways

Here's a shocker: Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too.

I wish it didn't snow so much in Canada, because I'm seriously considering getting the fuck out of here. Apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the slippery slope, many Americans are willing to leverage their civil liberties in order to escape the "threat" of terrorism. Yeah, those pesky inalienable rights just keep getting in the way of our ability to properly police this country.

Seriously, why can't we go back to the good old days, when the CIA and the FBI just illegally wiretapped suspected terrorists. What was wrong with that? If you find an actual terrorist cell, something tells me due process goes right out the goddamn window anyway. Spies are going to spy whether it's legal or not. That's why they're effing spies! You do your job, and we'll pretend we don't know that the Feds spy on Americans. Everybody wins. But writing this shit into law is only going to hurt the rest of us non-terrorists. Allowing the Bush administration (or any administration) legal carte blanche on wiretaps and surveillance is a big step on the road to further eroding our tenuous hold on the Bill of Rights.

Call it hyperbole if you must, but GEORGE BUSH IS A SERIOUSLY EVIL FUCKING NIGHTMARE. Why does America keep bending over?? Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us... you... you can't get fooled again.

**UPDATE** I'm pulling Patrick's Ben Franklin quotation up from the comments because it pretty much says it all:

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"

Heavy Metal Hip Replacement

Axl Rose (Yep, that's him!) is still working on his "long-awaited" comeback album, Chinese Democracy. An entire nation quietly declines to care. Mötley Crüe gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (across the street from the Erotica Museum and Frederick's of Hollywood, natch) in the wake of yet another "comeback." Not even the PMRC feels threatened.

Is there anything more depressing than the rapid aging of America's hair-metal megastars? Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City was an entertaining trip down Nostalgia Lane... until I woke up and noticed that the leather-clad, Krell-fueled penis demons of my childhood were now getting hip replacements (Eddie Van Halen); losing the use of their limbs (Mick Mars); losing their hair/minds (David Lee Roth); burning their fans alive with sad pyrotechics (Great White); naming their kids stuff like London Siddhartha Halford Bach (Sebastian Bach); getting lots of regrettable plastic surgery (Axl Rose; Vince Neil); and doing basically anything Ozzy Osbourne has done in the last decade. In other words, the bad boys of cock rock are turning into Joan Rivers. Which in turn makes me feel old. Which is bad because I'm obsessed with youth. Which means I'm like ten years away from a hip replacement and a bunch of regrettable plastic surgery.

My only hope is that, as I didn't spend my twenties snorting [as much] Bolivian marching powder, drinking [as many] metric tons of Jack Daniels, and fucking [as many] acid-washed, clap-ridden, Aqua-Netted groupies, I may not have done quite as much harm to my future appearance and ability to feel/move my extremities.

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK, WE RECOMMEND CENTRUM SILVER!!

AOL Embraces Pink Power!

Fellow Secret Square (We're on hiatus!) M. Tye Comer has almost singlehandedly dragged America Online into the twenty-first century by launching "G-Sides, Music for the GLBT Community" through AOL Music. It's not a strictly "gay music" portal... it's more like a targeted-marketing subsite. But it's a fairly big deal if you look at it in terms of the cultural development of the country over the past decade. Unfortunately, Reuters beat me to the scoop. Hmmmm.... and mutual friend Bill Werde wrote the article... go figure. Anyway, it's a huge milestone for AOL, Tye, and (of course) Madonna. Congrats, dude.

**UPDATE** The WB and UPN networks are combining into one massive not-so-super network called the CW. What are the chances that "CW" stands for "coloreds and wrestling?" I kid. Seriously, it is nice that all professional wrestling, Star Trek spinoffs, and Black sitcoms will now be available in one convenient location.

Just in Case You Live in a Cave

Kobe Bryant scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors last night. 81 points!! As in, second-highest point total ever, behind Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 way back in 1962... before things like the 24-second clock and the 3-second lane violation.

That's the single greatest athletic achievment you'll see this decade, kids. And arguably the greatest single-game basketball performance ever.

Like a Rolling Stone

Read The Onion AV Club review of Guitar Hero.

And speaking of "rock," William Shatner's kidney stone is for sale. Oh relax... it's for charity!

**UPDATES**

"Yo, anybody puts Baby in da corner, I bust a cap in they ass." (Thanks, Patrick)

Captain Kirk Sez: "Have a Far-Out Weekend"

Just some amusing randoms for your holiday weekend...

Apparently you're supposed to paint the Ghostface doll yourself?

The Governator hits a splif (please notice the t-shirt).

Jack Black is so sexy.

Um... this is the best idea for a video game EVER. (Thx Luna!) I may have to drop real money on this.

Happy birthday, MLK! (Check out a clip from his final speech, delivered the night before his assassination.)

Americans: Slack-Jawed Idiots Who'll Eat Whatever You Feed Them? Well, Yeah.

So I finally saw Supersize Me (well, about half of it... had to turn it off when I started to feel ill). This is the kind of movie that makes one wonder about the general stupidity of the American populace. I'm often startled by my non-liberal reactions to things like this, but at some point you just have to stop blaming corporations for how ignorant, reactionary, and downright disgusting Americans have become. And you know what? This isn't one of those "America used to be a better place before all the jews and liberals and darkies" bullshit revisionist-history rants. I mean, did you see the winners of last night's People's Choice Awards? If those are the people's choices, the people have lost their fucking minds. We're getting fatter, our tastes are degrading, we're reverting to a political climate that is quickly destroying the advances of science and secular humanism, and reality television is actually starting to inform our perception of reality.

We're totally fucked.

BUT we've heard this all before, haven't we?

The philosopher Hannah Arendt developed this brilliant notion of "crisis," referring to the manner in which the political discourse of each epoch or generation tends to consider itself as existing in a time of genuine crisis. In other words, from a sociopolitical standpoint, mankind is always viewing the present as a major turning point in human affairs; as the time in which the advances of modernity and the disintegration of culture are finally coming to a head. But that alarmism is a universal condition (historically speaking), and its very universality belies the central claim. The World Wars certainly gave rise to this kind of thinking (for obvious reasons), but so did the global revolutions of the 1960s, the nuclear war fears of the Reagan era, the Internet, etc. If every era is characterized by the claim that this time the shit is really gonna hit the fan, then why do we keep making (and believing) the same claim?

Anyway, I bring this up because, as we ushered out another year, I've been reading so much about the end of this and the death of that. Anthony Lane's new article in the New Yorker makes the (utterly defensible and yet totally fucking useless) claim that American movies are shot; *bitter defeat*'s intrepid Legal Counsel sent an article about the "death" of independent record stores (an article whose central thesis he then pointedly kicked the crap out of); I frequently bitch about iTunes and the "death" of the music geek and the mix tape; documetaries have McDonald's and Wal*Mart blindly tearing the fabric of Middle America asunder; Iran and North Korea are nuclear pressure-cookers; global warming is giving rise to an era of super storms; and so on.

In other words, we're all totally fucked.

But we were all totally fucked last year. And the year before that. And in 1984. And in 1945.

The moral? It's hard to argue against these claims. They all seem incontrovertible. But think about this: if all the doom and cultural erosion and tastelessness and stupidity and depravity we've been forcasting for centuries was accurate, we'd all be living under a mushroom-cloud sky beating the shit out of each other with clubs and Monster In Law would win Best Picture this year. And we're not there. Yet.

So have a beer, supersize that Big Mac, tune in to Celebrity Skating, and stop worrying. The end is nigh. Long live the end.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Okay, so... day-job award promotion time. Good friend and sometime *bitter defeat* link contributor Shannon did the principal design on "Gods, Griffins, and Cowboy Boots," an online feature wherein a bunch of teenagers interview the artist Shahzia Sikander. It's part of MoMA's teen site, Red Studio. (Who edits the site, you ask? Why, it's me!) Anyway, the site is up for a Flashforward People's Choice Award. So please vote for it. We need your support to win this meaningless popularity contest so we can put it on our résumés! Just scroll down to the Educational category and click away.

THANK YOU FOR HELPING TO WRITE US TICKETS OUT OF OUR SHITTY JOBS AND INTO LESS SHITTY/HIGHER PAYING JOBS!

True Drinking Tales

Good friend and future AA sponsor Patrick tells a classic drunken tale (a 100% true story).

Monkey News

Download every episode of The Ricky Gervais Show on Guardian Unlimited. It is incredible. You only have four weeks after each episode is first posted, and it looks like Episode 1 is gone already. Better hurry.