Post by Deleted on Jan 3, 2013 16:36:43 GMT 10
The good, hard spanking of 2012
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 3:46PM - Tuesday, January 1st, 2013
It’s OK to love it.
WHAT a year it was. Did we learn anything? How about…
Bet on the Nazi socialist Kenyan
Is it not refreshing? Is it not all kinds of wonderful to be reminded that all the spittle-flecked hate and hissing resentment in the world still can’t defeat intelligence, wisdom, flawed but honest integrity?
Behold: The GOP’s relentless, shameless four-year onslaught of racism, birtherism, isolationism and gross antipathy, during which they called the president everything from a communist to a Nazi to a fundamentalist Muslim, failed to rally sufficient numbers of the undereducated and the paranoid to nosedive the nation back into a sinkhole of conservative bile. It was easily the most methodical, coldblooded personal attack in modern political history, and it failed ugly. Hugs all around.
White men can’t jump
Did you feel it? The tipping point? The grand flip from white male-dominated, paranoid n’ reactionary cultural stasis to female-empowered, minority-voiced, messier-than-thou, barely controlled chaos? The 2012 election ushered in nothing short of a new phase, era, chapter in the increasingly weird American experiment, one in which the old, scared white guys of the world, while far from being completely sidelined, are at least no longer assured of their unimpeded dominance and political authority. Not only do the Mitt Romneys of America no longer hold all the reins, they never will again. A wobbly, rainbow-coalition future beats an uptight, monochromatic past any day.
Global warming gives you the finger
The adorably ignorant cluster of global-warming deniers is now even tinier, more ignorant, and less worth giving a moment’s irritated glance than ever. Hurricane Sandy wasn’t a wake-up call, she was a mission statement, an attack plan, an overt strategy for Mother Nature’s violent reclamation of our despoiled world, given how we apparently can’t seem to take care of her properly. Since we’ve waited far too long to take major action to heal the planet, Mother Nature will do what she does best: devastate our overblown egos and rinse the place clean. No one is actually ready.
Guns hate everyone
We are the most violence-obsessed first-world nation on earth. We are the most paranoid, fearful, excessively armed, drowning in insidious cultural images of firearms and gun fetishism, endless bogus cowboy mythology, the notion that guns are somehow noble or worthy of anything but revulsion and sadness. Gun lovers and hunters can argue to their heart’s content that weapons designed solely to kill other living things can be used safely and for fun, and usually are. This is like saying that most of the time, land mines don’t explode and mutilate/kill countless innocents. Until they do. Enough of this.
Apocalypse now or never
Keep your snide, anti New-Age quips to yourself. No one of any real mystical intelligence believed the world was going to end in a fiery zombie cataclysm on December 21st. But a new era of reinvigorated thought and radical spirit? A more ripe moment than we’ve ever encountered before to witness and fully honor/celebrate our shared humanity? The feeling that a drastically accelerated culture and endlessly magical technologies are conspiring with a decline in the heartless institutions of the past — military, church, corporation — to make it more possible than ever to leap into a new and self-defined consciousness? Now that’s an apocalypse worth caring about. Don’t believe any of it? Your loss.
50 shades of horrible writing
The big lesson of the worst-written, most mega bestselling soft-core S&M porn books of all time? Nope, not that we’re a kinkier bunch than anyone imagined. It’s that a huge majority of middle-aged American housewives are dramatically undersexed and apparently suffer horribly insufficient access to quality porn (not to mention quality literature), so awful that they’re willing to suffer the most abominable sentences and cheesiest smut scenes since your mom fantasized that Fabio was giving her a shuddering orgasm in the laundry room with a large vacuum cleaner attachment. Somewhere, Anais Nin is cringing.
Each speck is a vast galaxy. This photo is just a fragment. Discuss.
Deep space has got your back
Think you have a basic grip on reality? On the scale and scope of life, more or less and with sufficient whisky and sex and sleep? Think again, tiny biped. Allow 2012’s finest and most jaw-dropping astronomy photos to whip your tremulous cranium into a frothy frappucino of awe and disbelief, as you realize, to the best of your meek ability, just how remote, humbling and yet awesomely grand it all is. Gaze into the wonder that is the Hubble Extreme Deep Field and watch your precious ego shatter like a tiny porcelain doll against the vast, pulsing slab of cosmic consciousness. Upshot: You do not know what you think you know. Isn’t that wonderful?
You do not know what you think you know
Behold, the most timeless and overarching lesson of all, same as it ever was but in 2012 somehow louder, more potent, more insistent.
No way could a calm, deeply intelligent black man win the presidency — twice — under the worst economic and most politically acidic conditions in a lifetime. No way could global warming already be so dangerous that it wipes out large swaths of New York City for a month. No way could rich white males fail to maintain their clenched, terrified grip on everyone else’s reality. No way could a single mentally ill kid massacre 22 children in an elementary school with weapons he swiped from his gun-hoarding mom, and still have people suggest we need more guns to protect us from all the guns.
No way could obesity rates still be skyrocketing, when awareness of organic foods and healthy eating are (supposedly) higher than ever. It’s impossible that in 2012 any serious candidate for high office could still believe evolution is a theory, climate change is a hoax, rapist babies are a gift from God, or the president is really a Kenyan-born Muslim. No way could love not prevail, finally and once and for all, despite our bizarre, tragic inclination to hate what we do not understand and believe we are somehow separate from God.
We know everything and nothing. Our deepest space probes have travelled the equivalent of a single millimeter in a room five trillion miles wide. We still don’t know why whales sing. We have no idea what the dolphins know, how the brain functions, what love actually is, or why anyone likes Adam Sandler movies. Every mystery solved launches five intriguing new questions. Every wonderful leap in technology invites more serious inquiries about our lost humanity. We are either on the cusp of total madness or total illumination. The Great Ascension and the Great Collapse are one and the same, depending on what you’re wearing. Please dress accordingly.
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blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/01/01/the-good-hard-spanking-of-2012
