Miami Student

Issue date: 4/8/05 Section: OpEd Page

My major beef with being a newspaper columnist is that there is just so much in this world that pisses me off, I sometimes find it difficult to focus on just one issue of mass cowardice and stupidity. In some cases I end up ignoring the larger world completely and writing perverse creeds about getting drunk and urinating on people's things.Not this week, though. This week, I'd really like to use this space for constructive social criticism. But then I turn on the news and see that House majority leader and all-around ass-tool, Tom Delay, wants to impeach judges who wouldn't stop Terri Schiavo's tube from being pulled and think, "Well, screw that."Week to week, it's always a question of what upsets me the most. One week it might be the asinine cartoon the editors have dumped next to my column (see right), the next it could be that state legislators want to pass bills saying professors can't be too "liberal" while at the same time defining as "liberal" pretty much any scientific theory with a mountain of evidence behind it (global warming, evolution). Pretty soon the only acceptable scientific theory allowed in our schools will be the postulation that Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ swept through the universe 6,000 years ago bringing flowers, sunshine and heterosexuals to populate the world with His earthly embodiment, George W. Bush, to lead them through the rapture.For instance, this past week I had plenty to spark my ire. I'm talking about the non-stop, round-the-clock coverage of a dead guy. Oh, but he ain't just any dead guy. He's a dead guy who thought gays were doomed sinners, who praised subservience as a feminine virtue, and who preached the evils of contraception to the starving masses of the third world.Poor Johnny Cochran didn't stand a chance in the headlines against the Pope. Now I'm all worried about my own demise, not because I fear the eternal wrath of an angry deity I've been mocking in print for several years but because someone famous might croak on the same day I accidentally auto-erotically asphyxiate myself. How will my friends focus on saying nice things about me when they have to mourn Kevin Bacon?What blows my mind is how people act as if the Pope actually was the single infallible human being on the planet and not a semi-delusional old man in a silly hat who happens to have risen to the top of what amounts to the grandest tree-house club the world has ever known (the only difference is that no one takes it seriously when little Jimmy Dougal makes his official decrees like "girls smell poopy").The only media event that was worse than this was watching the 24-hour masturbatory feeding frenzy that followed Ronald Reagan's death. Many presidents also employed fumbling, feeble-minded foreign policy, yet no one seems to be lobbying for any of their faces to appear on the 10-dollar bill, (which, by the way, if I ever live to see that, toilet paper will become very inconvenient for me, as I'll have to get change for a twenty after every bowel movement).I remember the good old days when all I had to worry about was the crippling teenage angst of being the only kid on the basketball team who had yet to grow his first pubic hair (I was 17). However, then I began to think to myself, what would I do if I didn't have all this stuff to freak out about? What if all Americans did have universal health care and decent jobs and chances to attend college? What if we had never invaded Iraq and instead President Bill Bradley was sending troops into Darfur to stop a genocide before it began? What if Bush was where he belonged - placing calls as the president of the Skull and Bones alumni association to a certain Massachusetts Senator to solicit contributions for the intricate homo-erotic initiation ritual they would perform on the incoming class next fall? You know what would happen to me then? I'd be so bored. I would sit around watching CNN and say, "Well, another good call by IMF president Springsteen to cancel all that third-world debt." God, what a dull world.So I say thank you to my leaders and politicians for setting a greedy and dismal course for the future. I say thank you to the media for being the spineless profiteers they are. I even say thank you to local disappointments-in-humanity for bringing Coulterific speakers to campus.Thank you to you all. You give me something to write about.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools