Nealism Defined

On Sunday, May 18^th, 2008, I began writing this blog about my beliefs, modestly titled “Nealism.” Since then I’ve shared my views, with less or even less regularity, on a variety of subjects, though I’m sure the diversity of my opinions in reality isn’t nearly as broad as I convince myself it is. Yet despite the hours I spend—or used to spend—expressing those beliefs, I’ve never really defined what Nealism is.

I’ve now been asked, quite inadvertently, to do so.

Nealism is a philosophy with delusions of relevance. So far it has exactly one adherent (of whom I am aware): me. I dream that Neil Diamond, Neil Peart, Neil Young, Neil Patrick Harris, and Neil Gaiman, and Zora Neale Hurston will become converts, even though they spell their names incorrectly (and the last of whom is dead), as will Patricia Neal and Neal Stephenson, who do spell it properly. However, I have no illusions, or few of them anyway. I know of three people who actually read Nealism, none of whom are named “Neal” in any of its accepted or inferior forms, and I’m pretty sure they stopped when I stopped writing it. If they didn’t, they need help that I am unqualified to provide.

Nealism is, at its core, a belief in the importance of curiosity. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So said William Shakespeare through his most famous mouth (and the original Emo), Prince Hamlet. This quote is often used to attack non-believers (which is oddly only used to describe those who don’t believe in things without evidence), suggesting that if you don’t believe in God/Heaven/Elvis/What-Have-You, then Willy the Shakes thinks you closed-minded and short-sighted. Nealism reads that differently. Nealism sees Hamlet’s admonition of his best friend as both acceptance of and wonder at the fact that there are still many mysteries to be solved, and as the bright snicker-snack of a vorpal and caustic wit. We don’t know all the answers—we don’t even know all the questions—and that is a beautiful thing.

That’s not to say that Nealists are about the journey, not the destination. Journeys are great (so is Journey, at least when Steve Perry was with them), but destinations frequently rock too.

“Nihilists! Fuck me. Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos..”—The Big Lebowski

While having existential tendencies, Nealism is not nihilism. While human existence is inarguably absurd, there is just as assuredly a point to it all, even to the absurdity.

Nealism believes that cheesecake and irony make life worth living, that Han shot first, that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42, that “with great power comes great responsibility” should have been the First Commandment (since by the Bible’s account, God could have used some reminding in following that one). Nealism believes that writing is art, the quality of which can no more be measured with a rubric than can a sunset or an ice cream sundae.

Nealism loves personification.

Nealism believes that music is the great unifier, and that all music has merit and beauty and value. Except country.

Nealism believes that sarcasm is verbal irony and should be part of all high school English curricula.

Nealism believes that morality based on the promise of heaven or the threat of hell is not morality at all, but evidence that the person in question can be bribed or extorted into doing what someone else said was right. True morality is doing what’s right regardless of any cost or benefit to oneself.

Nealism believes that No Child Left Behind is heinous fuckery most foul, and that “heinous fuckery most foul” is the greatest expression of distaste ever written or spoken.

Nealism values procrastination and the importance of being fashionably late, though not fashionable.

But most importantly of all, Nealism is a pun, and puns are all anyone really needs to find true happiness.

"It's clearly a budget. It's got a . . . lack . . . of numbers in it?"

I never imagined that anyone, even the members of the Republican Party, would ever look back with longing to the economic skills of Former President (how I love saying that!) George W. Bush, but here we are.

In one of his all too frequent dumbass statements, The Dubster once said, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Wow. Yeah. That guy was the leader of the Free World for eight years. I suppose in some sense we shouldn't complain about how screwed up the country is right now, and should just be thankful that we still have a country at all.

Amazingly enough, though, Bush seems to have been the economic genius of these chuckleheads. As Keith Olbermann reports below, the GOP has released a so-called "budget" . . . only they failed even President Bush's pathetic criterion: there are no numbers in it!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

But don't take that pinko-commie Keith Olbermann's word for it. Go to this lefty website to see the actual document.

Not only is it seriously lacking in those pesky "numbers," but I've gotta say, I've seen better projects produced by ninth graders with learning disabilities. Their "roadmap" looks like one of those economics boardgames kids make for social studies classes: simple circles connected by lines. I kept expecting to see "Inherit Fortune from Hotel-Magnate Parents and Pay No Death Tax: Advance 1 Social Class" in one of the circles.

Republicans kill me. Check out their graphs, especially the one from page 16. Even though the graph is titled "Deficit Under Democratic Budgets," and even though it distinguishes between Democratic and Republican budgets, the only budgets listed were exclusively from two administrations: Bush's and Obama's, and only half of Bush's budgets (2004-2007; 2008 is mysteriously between the cracks) at that. In fact, while Bush was in office for eight years, they only include four years of his budgets, while Obama, who has been president for seventy days is inexplicably represented by twelve years of budgets (man, that guy works hard!).

This is likely due to the fact that, as anyone can see here, over the last seventy years debt and deficits have generally decreased under Democratic presidents and increased under Republicans. Not the message the "fiscal conservatives" want the American public to get, I'm guessing.

The exit of George W. Bush was a bittersweet joy for me. As a patriot, I was glad to see him go, but as an amateur satirist, I feared that I would miss him dearly. I needn't have worried. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and their congressional mooks in the Notorious GOP are filling the void nicely.

I can't wait to see what numbers make it into the next installment of the GOP's "budgetty" proposal, released tomorrow. It's just a shot in the dark, but I'm guessing "Number 1" isn't going to be one of them.

One of the Great Things about America . . .

. . . is the fact that any idiot is free to speak whatever idiocy he wants.

I ran into this head-first this weekend. I stopped into a music store I frequent, an "Exchange" run by a guy named "Steve," to get some patch cords and cables for my studio. The store had moved, unbeknownst to me, and it was sheer luck that I happened upon the new location. That is where the serendipity ended--or began, depending on how you look at it.

Just after I arrived, a man the owner identified as "Uncle Tom" came in and started talking to the owner and his girlfriend. Tom asked about an item he wanted ordered. What followed from Steve was a lengthy rant on the difficulties of relocating a business to a new building, one he apparently purchased. He went on about plumbers and carpet layers (heh, I'm such a child sometimes) demanding payment in cash, leaving him no capital with which to purchase new inventory, etc.

At this point I noticed an Ovation ukulele, like the one above, only red. Now, I have no real interest in a ukulele, but I love musical instruments, I don't have a uke, and it looked just like a miniature version of a couple of my Ovation guitars, so the little sucker appealed to my senses of symmetry and brand loyalty, as well as to my inner collector and musician. Plus, it was a really good price. So, with a fresh paycheck and a payment from a client impending, I decided to do my bit to help a struggling small businessman. I took the uke, gathered the cords I needed, and went to look at some songbooks. In all, I had some $200 in merchandise and a debit card in hand.

You know how our brains are wired to filter irrelevant information, only processing things that interest us? It's the wiring that unfortunately leaves me to hear the most uncomfortable facts from my teenage students, even when I'm not listening and don't want to know. A few things from the conversation in the room sifted through.

The owner explained to his "uncle" that, if he ordered the item that day, it wouldn't be in until Tuesday due to the impending holiday. Uncle Tom said something that didn't register for a moment: "they should be happy they got their guy in the White House." Hunh? Who was this "they?" Democrats? Senators? Americans with college degrees? To which of the many demographic groups Barack Obama represents could they have possibly been referring? Maybe they had something against comic book nerds.

Alas, no. The conversation devolved rapidly. References to "White House bar-b-cues" (did they not know who'd been there for the past eight years?), complete with "chicken" and "watermelon," insued. Then, the cherry on the sundae, as it were: "I can't wait to see his dance. I wonder if he'll do a spearchucker dance."

"Spearchucker." In the 21st century. Really. (A troubling side note, Firefox's spell-checker doesn't recognize "Barack Obama" as correctly spelled words, but it does recognize "spearchucker"--not sure what I think about that.)

I understand that small business owners have to be careful about contradicting or rebuking customers--I've certainly tutored enough Republicans to have learned when to keep quiet--but Steve didn't just give Imus-like faux shock, or even nod politely. He contributed to the conversation.

I returned the ukulele and the cords and, still sporting the Obama '08 sweatshirt I'd entered wearing, I headed for the door. Having ignored me up until then, they fell all over themselves to be polite. I smiled, said "good luck with your business," and left.

One of the great things about America is the fact that any idiot is free to speak whatever idiocy he wants. Even better is the fact that I'm free to never give racist peckerwoods my business ever again.

Jesus IS Black!

If you haven't seen "Prop 8: The Musical" yet, you really should watch it here:





Setting aside the joy of seeing Jack Black play Joshua ben Joseph (aka Jesus of Nazareth), to say nothing of "West Wing's" Allison Janney as "Prop 8 Leader's #1 Wife," this is a brilliant little piece of art and rhetoric. In spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that I was raised a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, it has always irked me that Christians so blindly pick and choose what portions of the Bible are to be "read literally" and what portions are not, a point nicely made here. But P8tM makes another point I've not considered: when it comes to gay marriage, there's money to be made.

Yes, gay marriage will save the economy, indeed!

When I looked this video up on YouTube to embed it, another, similar link popped up: Faux News' response to Prop 8: The Musical. Trust the Faux Guys to put their requisite spin on it.






Gotta love the vitriolic contempt with which Brian Kilmeade says the names "Neil Patrick Harris" and "Jack Black."

Their thesis (which, since this is Faux News, comes in the form of a question, because that makes them Fair and Balanced!): "Is this video Hollywood's attempt at poking a little fun or is it an outright insult [to some Christians]?" Yeah. Like those are the only possibilities.

Some of their premises:

* It's stupid to do this before Christmas
* The video "mocks Jesus Christ and belittles the Bible for political points"
* The content is "anti-religious"
* "The majority [of America] doesn't find this funny"
* There's a disconnect between the people in Hollywood and the rest of the country

Apparently, "shrimp cocktail" puts the News Clown Brian Kilmeade "on edge," and casting Jack Black holding shrimp cocktail as Jesus Christ is "obviously offensive." Really? That's obvious? Wait, which is the obviously offensive part, Jack Black or the shrimp cocktail?

What really slays me is James Hirsen's evident irony deficiency. One, he condemns Mark Shaiman for helping to "get some guy to resign his position as a head of a theater in Sacramento," claiming that means Shaiman doesn't "seem to be practicing much in the way of tolerance or sensitivity." (For the record, the theater director in question was Scott Eckern. Shaiman was one of thousands of gay Californians who protested Eckern's financial support of Prop 8, given the fact that so much of his success directing a theater that puts on musicals depends so heavily on the gay community, for patrons, actors, artists, stage workers, etc.)

What's far more astounding is Hirsen's assertion that the gays "bring these tired, old attacks on the Old Testament" against People of the Book, willfully oblivious of the fact that that was exactly P8tM's point, that the Old Testament is tired and old and no more relevant to such a modern issue than the Judaic proscription on haircuts for men or sex with menstruating women (Leviticus 19:27 and 15:19-24, respectively). Would that the Christo-Fascist Zombie Brigade would stop using these tired, old attacks from the Old Testament against the rest of us.

Petty correction time: Brian Kilmeade claimed that P8tM was trying to change the minds of "people who have voted against Proposition 8." Ummm . . . no. Okay, it was probably just an honest mistake, but they make them a lot on Faux, and never seem to correct them when they do, which leads me to believe that they are fine with perpetuating the confusion about whether voting for or against Prop 8 was a vote for or against civil rights. This casual relationship with the facts is compounded by the identification of Hirsen as the author of "Hollywood Nation" (sic), but the failure to disclose his association with the right-wing lunatic fringe (and frequently factually challenged) magazine NewsMax. This would be like using L. Ron Hubbard as an "authority" on military history, identifying him as the author of Battlefield Earth without also noting that he's the nutjob who thinks humans were dumped on earth from DC8s at the command of intergalactic tyrant Xenu. Yeah.

The funniest part is, given the number of television shows featuring LGBT characters on Fox and its affiliated networks, clearly Fox knows there's money to be made from the gay community.

See ya later, Sinners!

"Who Throws a Shoe? Honestly!"

They say you can judge a man by his enemies, and George W. Bush has strange enemies indeed. Remember that this was the man who was almost killed by a pretzel (and supposedly there was no beer involved). Now, he's been attacked by a shoe-throwing assailant.



Seriously, there can't be many jobs worse than working for the Secret Service to protect this man.

Vote!

'Nuff said.

Are You Kidding Me!!?

"To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning... No, this election is not about race. It's not about the economy. It's about obeying God... Obey Him in the voting booth and out of it. If not, do us all a favor and quit calling yourself a Christian."
-- radio host and commentator Janet Porter

You know, the Third Commandment (Second if you're Catholic) is often misinterpreted (I know, right?). "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God," or "taking the Lord's name in vain," was always explained to me as saying "Oh, God!" or "Jesus Christ!" as an interjection.

I recently heard another interpretation (sorry, I don't remember where) of this commandment: God doesn't want people speaking for him. This makes so much more sense to me. Were I an omnipotent god (working on it), why would I care if someone shouted my name after stubbing his toe? On the other hand, I would have a real problem with some schmuck claiming that I agreed with him. I don't care if she's claiming that we should find a cure for cancer, she doesn't get to speak for Omnipotent Me.

These people go too far. Who the fuck does this Janet Porter think she is, speaking for Jesus? If Jesus really wanted to influence this election in favor of John McCain (or Ralph Nader, for that matter--omnipotence is omnipotence), I'm pretty sure he could manage it without this asshole.

That said, I truly don't get how they can possibly justify this position. What is it about the modern conservative movement that has dick to do with the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth? Tax cuts for the rich? Umm, no. Strong defense? Not remotely. Gutting help for the poor? Absolutely not.

In fact, with the possible exception of abortion, there's not one single platform position with which there is a shred of evidence that Jesus would have supported, and there is direct evidence that he would have opposed almost everything these fascists claim in his name.

This is way too big a topic for the moment, but I'll be addressing it in more detail later. For the moment, let's just talk about universal health care. The Right (including the Christian Right) attacks the concept of health care for everyone as "socialized medicine," and on that, at least, they're right. Full coverage would be socialized medicine, just like free public education, public police and fire safety, and a tax-funded public military are "socialized." Is this really an insult anymore?

Do you know who believed in socialized medicine? Jesus. All the times he and his apostles healed people, they never once took a single dinar for the service.

I actually agree with these words from Ms. Porter: it's about time that Republicans do us all a favor and quit calling themselves Christians.