Daily Archives: March 1, 2011

Bristol Palin to Write the Book of Her Life…I Can’t Wait….

Memoirs, Writing, , , ,

Nothing depresses me more than to see that a woman who is 20 years old, who has done nothing special with her life other than live in the shadow of her overexposed mother who is writing her life story. As someone who has done a “little” more than the young girl who was on Dancing With the Stars, bought a house in Arizona and got pregnant during her mother’s vice-presidential bid, I’m constantly amazed that a company like Harper Collins is willing to shell out real money to fund a “book” from someone who is no more special than any teen girl across the planet. Probably much less significant, to be honest.

Yet, big book companies constantly churn out this drivel to us, as if this is what we want to read. The other part that bothers me is that somewhere, somehow, there are people who are actually going to buy what she writes, being almost as excited as someone rushing out to buy Snooki’s next bestselling book.

As a writer, this is one of the things that has depressed me like pretty much nothing else can. I’ve lived most of my life in a Jack London-ish belief that you don’t really start writing great life stories until you’ve at least lived a few of them. So I spent my life trying to do just that, and now that I’m on the winding down part of that life, my writing feels great, but the writing industry passed me by, contracting books with White House party crashers instead of actual novelists and people who tried to go the old route of living and then writing, rather than doing something sensationalist and then thinking that was the groundwork for a great writing career.

I know I’ve complained about this sort of thing before, but is this what writing in America has come down to? Are we so foolish in our pursuit of stardom that this is what we’re going to pretend is important enough for us to buy and read?

I’d write a book about it, but considering I haven’t pulled any Charlie Sheen shenanigans lately, I can’t guarantee anyone would want to read it.

A Conversation with Conservatives About that Whole Midterm Thing that Just Happened

Politics, , , , ,

Hey, Conservatives. I just thought I would take a moment to talk to you about the midterm elections, because for some reason you’re getting the idea that events happened for reasons completely absent of reality. Therefore, as I know that you always listen to rational people explaining rational theories, I thought I would chime in with a little rationality.

There are some things you got right and some things you’re getting wrong. Let’s start with what you got right because everyone likes to hear good things about themselves. First, you are right that America was angry, pissed off and frustrated with politics as usual. In droves, people went to the polls and voted to “throw the bums out”. That anger was their way to show that they were angry, and if Washington wasn’t going to listen, they were going to make them listen, or at least stop paying for their hearing aids.

Lots of Democrats were thrown out of office, and lots of Republicans were given a chance to run the government. Okay, we’re on the same wavelength here.

Unfortunately, this is where reality sort of spins off on its own axle and falls apart. While the American people were angry, we need to kind of revist exactly what they were angry about.

First, Americans weren’t angry about social programs in America. Republicans tend to always be angry about these things. But it wasn’t Republicans that really voted the Democrats out of office. It was both Democrats and Republicans, meaning average Americans. The average American wasn’t upset that people were getting health care and the opportunity to survive through the Winter. They also weren’t upset that the government was spending money to get people back to work.

No, Americans were pisses off at government because government was helping out the wrong people. Who are these wrong people? The rich, the selfish, the people who don’t care one iota about the common folk of America. Americans saw the government spend a lot of money to bail out Wall Street, to help out banks and to rescue multi-millionaires from losing more money than they were already losing. The fact that almost none of the stimulus money actually went to help out the average American, other than through the usual trickle down crap theories, that upset Americans a lot. While the average American was trying to find a job, government was spending weeks arguing over how much money to protect from millionaires and billionaires with expiring tax cuts. The government seems willing to go into shut down just to make sure that the rich are taken care of, and the poor really don’t mean much to those who occupy office. Except in conversation, which doesn’t mean a lot when people have to actually pay their bills.

When the midterm elections came along, the American people were pissed that government was catering to the rich only. Yes, both Democrats and Republicans were bending over backwards to make sure the rich weren’t inconvenienced in any way, shape or form. The poor, well, they needed to fend for themselves because that’s generally how government feels they should have to handle their own affairs.

Most people didn’t even recognize what was going wrong with the Democrats in office when they had control of the entire government. Not once did they even act like Democrats, being almost indistinguishable from Republicans. THAT is what pissed off the American population that went through a previous election putting every Democrat they could find into office. When the American people discovered that it didn’t matter which party was in office, they kind of revolted and threw those people out, figuring the Republicans weren’t probably any worse.

Well, the Republicans need to figure out that the American people didn’t send them into office with a mandate to do things Republicans tend to do when they aren’t discussing politics. You know, the kinds of things they do surreptitiously behind the backs of everyone else, like reward the rich and screw over the poor. No, the American people sent the Republicans to Washington to remind the Democrats who they were supposed to be working for. That’s really it. The mandate the Republicans received from the American people was “do something different, but if you piss us off, too, expect to be accepting your own unemployment check.”

And the way things are going, there’s going to be a lot more unemployed politicians in 2012. Unfortunately, this will cause the Democrats to pull a Sally Field, thinking people like them, when in fact the people are still pissed off. The only difference is, they’ll realize they have nowhere else to turn.

And a pissed off electorate that has given up on both sides is a very dangerous animal. Once you give up on your government, there’s really not much else to do. Just ask all those Middle Eastern countries right now that are throwing out their leaders. They might have something interesting to say about it, if you could stop them long enough while they’re rioting in the streets.