By Allan Uthman

Man. It’s been years that I’ve forced myself to observe, with muted horror, the degeneration of political discourse in America. Occasionally, I’ve even had the pleasure of taking part in it. But it seems I’m never quite cynical enough to predict the depths we’re willing to plumb as a nation.

I thought I was going to write a piece about how stupid it is that the right argues a public option is unfair because private insurance companies can’t compete against it. I mean, it really is an insane position, that we can’t have a public insurance option because it would provide better service for less money. And it’s equally insane to assert that private insurance companies need to make money more than Americans need access to health care.

But things have spiraled ever downward from there. It’s pointless to even attempt a cogent argument on this subject, when the other side of the debate are running around with their hair on fire, their leaders promoting obvious, absurd lies about “death panels” and… I don’t know, something about Hitler? Shamelessness does have its advantages, apparently. Certainly, no one has to ask Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich if they have any shame, as was asked old Joe McCarthy, because the answer is obviously no. In a saner country, this “death panel” madness would be the end of Palin’s political ambitions forever. But then, a saner country would have tossed her into the ocean a year ago.

Anyway, it’s a foregone conclusion that whatever the hell gets through the Senate will be labeled Health Care Reform, or Health Insurance Reform, or just Health Reform as they’ve been calling it lately. And it’s equally clear that it will be pretty much useless, maybe even worse than useless. At best, it might solve the problem of impossible prices the same way Bush solved high drug prices: by making the government pay private businesses top dollar for it.

That’s how we compromise with industry now. As much as the Democrats are vilifying the insurance companies (and yes, they are villains in this story), the insurance companies will support the horribly mutilated bill that emerges for Obama to sign. Why? Because they will make more money than ever. Instead of a public option, people who can’t afford health insurance will be forced to buy private insurance, the poorest of us subsidized by the government. I suppose, if you have no insurance, that’s better than nothing. But it sure as hell isn’t much good.

To be fair, there are other good points, supposedly: A ban on rejecting people for preexisting conditions, for instance. But the public option, itself a paltry shadow of what a single-payer system could do for the country, is pretty much dead. It probably won’t survive the Senate process, even in a hollowed-out, meaningless form. Why? Because it would work. It would provide better service for lower costs. And the insurance people can’t have that.

The problem isn’t that the Democrats are spineless compromise fetishists, as many seem to think. Any smart negotiator knows that you start from a position your opponent deems unacceptable—in this case, a UK-style single-payer system, which would actually reduce costs dramatically and provide decent care for everyone.

Say Obama had started there. First of all, polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans support a single-payer system, as well as a majority of doctors. When politicians argue it’s not politically viable, they’re referring to staunch corporate opposition, not voter opposition, regardless of a few hundred aged, bewildered Glenn Beck drones shouting “keep your government hands off my Medicare” (actual quote). Secondly, even if it isn’t viable, starting from a single-payer position would ensure that any eventual compromise would be closer to a decent plan than what we’re going to wind up with, now that the Obama administration has started negotiating from an initial position of compromise. Instead, they’re compromising the compromise.

Why is this? No, it’s not that Democrats are wimps. They’re dive artists. Obama promised health care reform, but do he and his DLC inner circle actually want to weaken the stranglehold medical profiteers have on the public? Or do they just want to make a good show of losing the struggle?

The case for a single-payer system is rock solid and easy to explain. A single payer bill could be short enough to read in a few minutes—in fact, there is a single-payer bill floating around (doomed by the “too-liberal” names Kucinich-Conyers), and it’s a little over 4,000 words long.  Instead, we have a bill that’s over 1,000 pages long, written in typically inscrutable legalese, so dense and obscurantist that Republicans can assert nearly anything about it, from death panels to forcible sterilization, and say “read the bill!” with full knowledge that nobody will, nor could they understand it if they did.

Perhaps this explains Obama’s complete failure to actually describe the plan, aside from painfully vague references to “reform”. It’s suspicious that a group of people with the kind of supernatural message discipline they exhibited during the presidential campaign can’t muster any kind of reasonable explanation of what the plan is. Why is opposition to the health care bill rising? Not because conservatives don’t want it; they never did. It’s because liberals are starting to smell the bullshit, and recognize that what they’re trying to foist on us is not reform, but a massive boondoggle, just another way to funnel cash to donors. And make no mistake, all of the interested parties in this disgusting extortion racket we call a health care system have thrown mountains of cash at all of the important Democrats involved. Why, after all have pharmaceutical companies committed to spend hundreds of millions promoting the bill in a disturbing backroom deal with the White House, if it isn’t a simple boondoggle? Why has the AMA, a longstanding opponent of any form of socialized medicine, come out in favor of it?  Because, unfortunately, and despite the constant refrain from the paranoid rednecks, there’s nothing socialist about it. And it might be baffling, if you don’t understand where the real power is in the Party.

Put it this way: After eight years solid of Republicans proving themselves to be dishonest, corrupt and incompetent, what if the Democrats provided universal health coverage and paid for it by taxing the rich? I’ll tell you what: They wouldn’t lose another election for decades. It is actually in the party’s self-interest to do these things. And yet, they don’t. Why? Because there’s one thing even more important to politicians than votes, and that’s money.  Hell, even if Max Baucus loses his next election, his income level will skyrocket, thanks to the profiteers he’s protecting now.

Less than a year ago, Republicans were handed their walking papers, and the national consensus was that they were worse than worthless. And yet they are controlling this debate? With transparent lies and spooky stories—about the kind of health care system that the entire first world enjoys, and nobody seems to regret? Bullshit. Even with the help of Frank Luntz, the GOP’s talking points suck, and could be effectively rebutted—even by Harry Reid, let alone Obama. Health care rationing? Bureaucrats between you and your doctor? Life-saving procedures denied or delayed? All of these are already rampant in the private system. For every isolated horror story the Right can find in Canada or England, there are hundreds in your own neighborhood. And national health care never leaves individuals destitute or with impossible debt.

The Democrats seem to be throwing this thing on purpose. The public option is DOA and was probably always meant to be. And it’s not because they’re wussy or incompetent. It’s because they’re corrupt. It’s because all they are is the sock puppet on the left hand of corporate hegemony. Bribery is legal in this country—we call it campaign finance. That’s why we can’t have a single-payer system, and that’s why this bill devolving into yet another massive theft of taxpayer money was a foregone conclusion. In the end, maybe some poor people will be able to get treatment when they couldn’t before, but only in the weakest, most costly and corrupt way conceivable. And if that’s the only way we can do it, then I guess I’m for it.

For further endorsements of mass Grandmacide, check out our friends at The Buffalo Beast.

Step 1) Cultivate shame/self-disgust

A lot of girls think they can just start binging and
purging, but without the proper mental framework, they’ll never
last. The amount of shame and guilt you feel should be directly proportional
to your weight. The fatter, the more shame! Bulimia Bonus Tip: Look for
cues in fashion magazines, for the appropriate amount of disgust you should
feel.

Step 2) Distort your body image

Listen to what no one says regarding your weight. They
don’t know! Only you can see the numerous and cellulite encrusted
flaws that you obviously posses. Your acute perception will come in handy
when you actually lose a few pounds. Without it, you may be inclined to
stop punishing your body before becoming dangerously and beautifully thin.
No pain no gain!

Step
3) Binge!

We know, fatty, the bulimia method can seem tough at
first, but this part should be easy. You’ll take to it like a whale
to the chocolate sea, cramming and jamming insane varieties and quantities
of unhealthy food down your throat. This is the easy part, and likely,
you’ve already had a lot of practice.

Step 4) Purge!

Insert a finger, spoon, pencil or wooden dowel down your
throat to trigger the gag reflex and watch those unsightly pounds pour
forth in an undigested river—like magic! You’ll need to do
this immediately after eating, before the evil food has a chance to nourish
your hideous body and turn you back into a fat cow. If you’re going
out to dinner, bring some breath mints!

Step 5) Home puking

Mostly, you’re going to want to be alone for steps
3 & 4. This ensures maximum binging and unhindered purging. If you
have roommates or live with your parents, keep empty pickle jars and Tupperware
on hand at all times—under your bed or in a closet will do. And
don’t forget trash day!

Repeat steps 1 – 5 until you wake up in a hospital
somewhere, weak, disoriented, thin and gorgeous. It’s that easy!

The
BEAST Abridged Guide to Black History

It’s
hard to identify all the “black” history amongst all the regular
American history, especially if it’s nighttime—all you can
see is teeth and eyes. The very notion that “black” history
occupies a separate—but unequal—space in our national consciousness
exemplifies the institutionalized racism in our society. By setting aside
the coldest and shortest month of the year to “celebrate diversity,”
and talk about the advent of peanut butter, we do a disservice to history
itself.

In a society obsessed—for good reason—with
race, we approach the subject with cowardice and shame, if at all. Our
national conversation pertaining to race is, well, um, skin-deep, and
in the media, boils down to semantic controversies. For this reason, The
BEAST has compiled the following list of lesser-known “black”
American history. Enjoy!

1619: The first ship carrying approximately
20 African slaves docked for trade in Jamestown, Virginia, creating a
general disregard for sailing in the African American community, which
continues to this day; the new found slaves begin cultivating a fondness
for menthols and hot sauce—and millions of tons of cotton.

1625: Blacks invent “soul.”

1712: The New York Slave Revolt. 23
blacks and 9 honkies set fire to a building near the city’s center.
27 slaves were captured and killed for the fiery insurrection, reinforcing
the stereotype that white people aren’t very good at counting, but
their killing skills are unparalleled.

1739: South Carolina slaves meet at
the Stono River and march for freedom toward Spanish Florida, burning
plantations, freeing other slaves, gathering munitions and killing whitey
along the way. Eventually, the rebellion is quashed, the slaves are decapitated
and their head placed on pikes.

1742: “Reading Rainbow’s”
Levar Burton is taken prisoner aboard the slave ship USS Enterprise and
forced to adopt the name Toby Laforge, according to Alex Haley.

1789: George Washington becomes the
first American president of African descent. With false teeth constructed
from ivory, and held together with gold wiring, Washington was also the
first guy to sport an “icy grill.”

1822: The American Colonization Society
literally sets about bringing freed slaves back to Africa, where they
establish the country of Liberia. In the ultimate irony, today, many Liberian
descendants of American blacks work in slave-like conditions on Firestone-owned
rubber plantations. There’s nothing funny about this.

1840: Amistad slave ship revolt is directed
by Steven Spielberg.

1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground
Railroad.

1850: General Motors buys out the Underground
Railroad and closes it down, bribing congress into building the Underground
Thruway.

1857:The Dred Scott case holds that
Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore,
that slaves are not citizens.

1861: The south secedes and the confederacy
is born. The event is memorialized in custom paint jobs on muscle cars
to this day.

1863: President Lincoln issues the emancipation
proclamation, declaring that all slaves would henceforth be free. It only
took a century to enforce!

1865: The Ku Klux Klan is formed, in
a scam perpetrated by the white sheet industry.

1879: The Black Exodus takes place,
in which tens of thousands of African Americans migrated from southern
states to Kansas. Kansas laughs nervously and draws curtains.

1911: Al Jolson becomes first man of
color to break through the Vaudeville Ceiling.

1920: The Harlem Renaissance flourishes
in the 1920s and 1930s. This literary, artistic, and intellectual movement
fosters a new black cultural identity, and makes stunning advances in
the development of flamboyant hats.

1922: Douglas Johnson becomes the first
black man to be ignored by a horseless cab driver.

1923: Johnson continues innovating,
becoming the first black man to yell at a movie screen. Scholars vary
in their reportage of this milestone, but all agree he said something
along the lines of, “I wouldn’t go in there!”

1937: Bill Cosby is born.

1947: Jackie Robinson begins the process
of taking over professional sports. White athletes find some protection
in their ability to afford ice skates.

1955: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing
to give up her bus seat to a white man. Seriously, what a dick that guy
must have been, right?

1963: Bill Cosby releases his debut
comedy album, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, Right! including
the groundbreaking “Noah” bit. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” advocating non-violent civil
disobedience. While Cosby’s routines become classics of comedy,
non-violence proves to be a passing fad.

1964: President Johnson signs the Civil
Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination. A 3-year-old Barack Obama
is troubled by this slight against Dr. King’s legacy.

1965: Bill Cosby’s debut in interracial
espionage show “I Spy,” triggering passage of the Voting Rights
Act. However, Malcolm X is assassinated.

1966: Shamicka Jones becomes the first
black woman to have a weird, made up name.

1968: Martin Luther King, Jr. dies in
an act of violent resistance.

1969: Cosby launches “The Bill
Cosby Show,” a situation comedy that aired for only two years, due
mainly to racism among Nielsen families. Clearly, the nation is not yet
ready for Cosby.

1972: “Fat Albert & the Cosby
Kids” debuts and achieves major success, finally ending the horrific
Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

1975: Black people officially begin
to feel self-conscious when eating watermelon.

1979: CIA introduces crack into the
black community, because assassinating black leaders and shutting down
Black Panther free breakfast programs for children just wasn’t twisted
enough.

1984: The dream comes true: “The
Cosby Show” debuts, soon becoming the highest rated show in primetime.

1987: In a setback for race relations,
Cosby stars in Leonard Part 6.

1990: Spinning hubcaps are invented
by David Fowlkes, Jr., but are suppressed by the forces of inequality
for another decade.

1992: “The Cosby Show” goes
off the air; Race riots break out in Los Angeles.

1994: Cosby continues to stumble with
“The Cosby Mysteries,” but strikes another blow against the
powers of hate with “Kids Say the Darnedest Things.”

1997: The Sprewell rebellion occurs,
when NBA star Latrell Sprewell attacks and chokes Warriors coach P. J.
Carlesimo.

2007: Cosby enters “cranky old
man” phase with release of Come on People.

2008: Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy
shows America that a black man can be a viable presidential candidate,
as long as he speaks well, is a Democrat and doesn’t refer to his
race. Cosby is pleased.

In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans were called to meet abstractions with metaphors in a series of gaudy figurations popularly called “The War On . . .” Intended to be wholly symbolic, rhetorical frameworks that loosely invoked the legendary national unity that accompanied America’s good wars, whichever those were, our Wars On various and sundry Things that Are Bad proved the power of language to mold behavior, for often the martial tone spilled into martial practice, and so we find heavily armed SWAT units kicking down doors like soldiers in Baghdad. More recently, Wars On have spilled into the private sector, where you’ll principally find inexplicably aggrieved majorities crying that they and their dearly held beliefs are under siege from the ravenous forces of queers or atheists or $3-an-hour day laborers from Chavezistan. For this new year, we might look back at the five worst of our Wars On whatever, and reconsider this, ahem, tortured metaphor.

1. The War on Poverty

Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth and that the poor are blessed, but his contemporary followers are fairly convinced that he was bullshitting on that one, worn out from miracle-making and winding up for a good punchline which history failed to record. America’s preference has always been to pretend that there are no poor people, and if there are, it’s probably their fault anyway. But in the sixties, with the Great Depression still in living memory, and with a slowly awakening awareness that rural blacks and whites alike often lived in grinding poverty, it was briefly in vogue to “consider the neediest,” as the odd tag line inexplicably reads after certain articles in the New York Times. This was less out of a true sense of charity, one suspects, than it was out of the era’s misplaced competitiveness with the Soviet bogeyman, which was way ahead of America in its own efforts to combat poverty. The Soviets had simply renamed it the Proletariat, praised it to the sky, and increased its numbers. Lyndon Johnson called America to wage a War on Poverty, but poverty is a hard thing to get your arms around, and that war swiftly and inexorably changed into something more like a war on poor people. Johnsonian efforts at redistributionist economics matched early on with a generally strong economy, but as those fortunes went south, so too did the idea that anything could be done about the poor, who quickly went from noble, if hardscrabble, folk characters to dangerous black people lurking around every city corner. By the time Ronald Reagan first said the words “welfare queen,” the fix was in. The poor had transmogrified into a legion of flashy pimps. Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it,” and Democrats decided that it wasn’t the poor they wanted to help, but the “working class,” a transparent and hoary neologism designed solely to prevent White America from associating anti-poverty programs with crackheads and other mythical varieties of blacks.

2. The War on Cancer

Wars on Diseases are a perennial favorite, and the War on Cancer was the daddy to them all. Dreamed up by Richard Nixon, it was a curious appendage to the War on Vietnam: a doomed, unwinnable slog against a tenacious and irrepressible foe. As Susan Sontag famously noted in her seminal “Illness as Metaphor,” loose talk of making war on a sickness had the deleterious effect of obscuring what sickness actually was. The body itself became enemy-occupied territory, and cancer not merely a disease, but a stigma. Since the time of that essay, cancer patients are less stigmatized, and the disease is no longer anathema to polite conversation. That’s a good thing. Yet the military end of the metaphor continues, and one can’t help but note that our treatments for many kinds of cancer are essentially torture. The mania for endlessly prolonging life has eclipsed the humbler offerings of palliative care. There are virtually no means that our medicine will not undertake to rid the body of malignancy: pumping it full of poison, shooting it up with radiation, and slicing bits of it clear off. It is a macrocosm of the horrors of 20th-century war, practiced on the body and offered as medicine. We might start by questioning whether or not it’s always worth it.

3. The War on Christmas

Who could fight a war on Christmas when Christmas is so fucking cute? You, that’s who. A hilarious, ginned-up controversy used by the put-upon millionaires of right wing broadcasting to beat down any aspirations in their slack-jawed audience of Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men, the War on Christmas is the latest in a long series of efforts to convince white, Protestant Americans that they are beset on all sides by powerful interests with guns aimed square at the ineffable heart of the Baby Jesus and all His works. Businesses and politicians who embrace the ecumenical balm of “Holidays” are the supposed generals in this war, and you, you bastards, with your “Seasons Greetings,” and your Jew and Nigger holidays that so inconsiderately fall in the same month, you are all to blame. It’s supremely unlikely that you’ll find any infamous O’Reillys kneeling at midnight to receive the Host, and yet to hear him howl, you’d think that the big guy-in-the-sky suffers from inapposite and non-denominational greeting cards the way he once suffered on the cross itself. Everyone from Charles Shultz to your cranky Catholic grandmother has long since noted that if anything has undermined Christmas in our so-called culture, it’s the still-expanding crassness of its commercialization, the idea that the birth of the supposed savior and redeemer of all mankind shall best be celebrated at the Sharper Image.

4. The War on Drugs

Mencken once wrote that George Washington would never be elected now because he loved whiskey and made his own, enjoyed a good dirty joke, and knew more swear words than scripture. He was writing from the depths of Prohibition, but the spirit of those remarks is truer now than ever. America is a tippler that pretends to be a teetotaler—the world’s largest consumer of porn and loudest extoller of its own moral virtue; the world’s greatest user of drugs and harshest prosecutor of that use. Even more than the War on Terror, it’s the Drug War that shepherded the militarization of our police, the surveillance of our society, and the creation of the world’s largest internal prison population. The fact that we put people in jail for possessing marijuana is one of the great jurisprudential jokes of all time. The iniquity in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine offenses, a 15-year-plus surcharge for getting high while black, is outdone as an injustice only by the fact that any of those sentences exist at all. It is sometimes argued by those moderates who advocate for more “humane” drug laws but who nevertheless believe that it would be irresponsible to enact broad legalization, that legalizing would lead to more addicts. It would. But better to have more addicts than more prisoners, and the black-market derangements of the drug trade cannot be rectified by half-hearted efforts to decriminalize only those drugs deemed morally acceptable. Each man’s body is his temple, and if he wants to shit on the altar and spray-paint the walls, he can. A nation of pot-smokers doesn’t kill grandmothers in no-knock midnight raids at the wrong street address, nor does it spend billions a year arming South American brownshirts and spraying the only crops that their rural poor can produce that hasn’t already been rendered unprofitable and unsustainable by American and European agribusiness and subsidies.

5. The War on Terror

Do I even need to tell you? In a spectacular bit of luck and timing borne on the fruits of American incompetence, a group of men successfully carried out several vicious acts of terrorism against America. Now you can’t carry a bottle of water onto an airplane. It is the strangest series of causes and effects ever foisted upon the poor people of the planet Earth. The self-described capo of our Nazislamo enemies stated in the plainest terms that his beef was with America’s constant meddling in the Middle East, our wars and oil-lust and sanctions and tyrannical client governments. How do we respond? By invading the Middle East, meddling in their politics, and setting up more corrupt, useless governments. Our need to “hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world,” in Tom Friedman’s immortally bloodthirsty formulation, was so immediate and disproportionate that it would be parody, but for all the bodies it left and is leaving in its wake. America went from being a mere back room practitioner of torture to its loudest global advocate, and the imperialism we’d always practiced abroad, which we formerly weren’t supposed to talk about, became a point of national pride. At home we rushed to disregard the old Franklinian aphorism about those who sacrifice liberty for security deserving neither, and the very same people who once (rightly) complained about Janet Reno’s ham-fisted massacre of the Branch Davidians and Bill Clinton’s relatively subtle efforts to undermine our privacy now shouted that the government must tap every phone, open every letter, and dump every toiletry bag onto the conveyor belt at the airport. The War on Terror is a bipartisan nightmare, a hideous outgrowth of the governing consensus, and Democratic congresscreatures and presidential aspirants are by and large just as willing to speak in bellicose absurdities about the necessity of its prosecution as their cross-aisle counterparts.

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Why does Michael Moore support Al Gore? Moore’s movies bravely take on the media establishment, piercing false assumptions and telling unpopular stories that need to be told. Predictably, he is vilified for doing so. Nevertheless, he attacks when given a chance, as when he recently laid it on the line with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, asking, “Why don’t you tell the truth to the American people? I mean, I wish that CNN and the other mainstream media would just for once tell the truth about what’s going on in this country, whether it’s with health care — I don’t care what it is. I mean, you guys have such a poor track record. And I’m just curious when are you going to just stand there and apologize to the American people for not bringing the truth to them that isn’t sponsored by some major corporation?” Right on, Mike!

But then Moore starts blabbering about how he hopes Al Gore will get in the 2008 presidential race. “Of course, Moore said, “there’s one candidate who isn’t even in the race yet. I don’t know if he will be. But he was right about the war before it began, and he’s right about global warming, and he’s right on this (health-care) issue, too.”

Does Gore deserve the kind of respect he’s been getting from the left, or is he more deserving of the contempt that Moore leveled at Wolf Blitzer?

Aside from being the victim of an electoral tragedy in 2000, Gore’s global-warming platform gives him instant credibility with the left. Should it? He’s supposed to have been talking about the environment for a long time (30 years, he has said), but has he been walking the walk? Will Al Gore, like his supporter Moore, attack when given the chance? The answer is no, he won’t. Eric Pooley’s homage to Gore in Time magazine, “The Last Temptation of Al Gore,” points out that it wasn’t until after the 2000 election disaster that Gore got back into the environment:

“It has been five years since Tipper first urged her husband to dust off his slideshow. The couple was still climbing from the wreckage of 2000, and she was convinced that his survival depended on reconnecting with his core beliefs. He assembled the earliest slide show in 1989, while writing Earth in the Balance — carrying an easel to a dinner party at David Brinkley’s house, standing on a chair to show CO₂ emissions heading off the charts. She wanted him to find that passion again. They were living in Virginia, and the Kodak slides were gathering dust in the basement. So he pulled them out, arranged them in the carousel and gave his first show with the images mostly backward and upside down.”

So what happened to Gore’s “core beliefs” and “passion” when he was fucking right next to the sanctified bully pulpit in the White House? He went AWOL on climate change while he was vice president, and as much as tells why in a recent Associated Press article, “On Board the Acela Express.” The piece notes that “Gore, whose slideshow on global warming was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ said the presidency alone can’t necessarily bring about the changes he’s calling for.” The story quotes Gore: “I was in the White House for eight years, and I saw the limitations of even the power of the executive branch when the people and their elected representatives in the Congress were not ready to contemplate the big changes that are necessary.” So exactly what are those limitations, and what was Al Gore doing to overcome them? Did a corporate fat cat get your tongue, Al?

It should be noted that Gore is himself a corporate fat cat. He is currently a senior advisor at Google (and apparently owns a large chunk of its stock), is on the board of directors at Apple and is co-founder of an investment company called Generation Investment Management. The investment company has holdings in the Johnson & Johnson health insurer AFLAC and General Electric. And take a peek at the corporate sponsorship list for the Live Earth concerts if you want to see who Al hangs with in the corporate world.

So Gore may have been talking about the environment for years, but while he was VP, he kept his mouth shut. Why didn’t he use his position to get out in front on the issue? Isn’t it a bit hypocritical now to chide the political class for not being able to get the message out about climate change when he failed so miserably in doing so? No, you see, it wasn’t Al’s fault; it was the system. But hey, now he’s authored a new book to explain that, too. His new bestseller carries a title as mighty as it is derivative of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason; it’s called The Assault on Reason.

“This book bubbled up because of my growing concern that in order to solve the climate crisis, we are going to have to address the problems in the foundations of our democracy that have kept us from acting on the basis of clear evidence that this crisis is real,” Gore told Larry King on the same channel. “And when I was out talking so much about the climate crisis, and trying to get what I thought was the appropriate response, the country had a discussion, not really a debate, about the invasion of Iraq, a country that did not attack us. And what the climate crisis and the invasion of Iraq have in common, Larry, is in both cases the policies are badly mistaken, and in both cases, the evidence is available, overwhelming evidence to convince any reasonable person ahead of time that we should have done the opposite of what we did. And so this book addresses the question, what is it that so many millions of Americans feel has gone wrong with our country? How can we fix it? How can we bring the people back into our democracy and start making better decisions on the basis of the evidence at hand?”

So Gore’s book not only tells us of the failure of the country to seriously assess the truth about Iraq or global warming but implies that the failure of Al Gore to open his trap while he was vice president wasn’t his fault. The flawed people responsible for our democracy made him do it, or not do it as the case may be. Our democracy is broken, and Al Gore wants to fix it by getting people to tell the truth. Wonderful.

So when King asks about the Democrats’ failure to force a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq, you’d think as a newfound critic of politics as usual Gore would comment on how they chickened out politically — that they could have defunded the war. You’d have thought wrong. In defense of the Dems, Gore said, “You know, the tools that are available to the legislative branch of government are not always very precise. They are often blunt instruments. And they passed a measure that would have required a timetable. The president vetoed it. They were not able to override the veto. So their options have been sharply limited.” Sure, limited to refusing to pass the appropriations bill, which would have required backbone.

Gore continued, “I have a lot of confidence in Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and rest of the leadership in the House and Senate now. And I’m sure that they have made some good decisions here.” Gore can scold his readers about failing to get the truth out, but when asked a question on national television, when he had an opportunity to be the role model for unintimitated reason we desperately need, someone to be honest about what is going on and what is not, he defaults to the tried and true talk of a party operative. Gore is so wedded to the political buddy system that when King asked if he was “disappointed” that his former running mate Joe Lieberman supported a war that Gore found so blatantly dumb and wrong, Gore said, “Well, why would you use a word like that where a friend is concerned? We have had our disagreements, and I have stated them. But I would not apply that to a friend.”

Take that, all people who think Gore gives a shit. What’s a little Middle East war among friends? Hey, Gore’s such a good friend that you can senselessly wipe out almost a million people, and the word “disappointed” is too strong for him.

So when Gore has to tell Larry King what is really wrong with the system, it’s not the fault of the people involved; it is that system that is corrupting them. He panders to King and the mainstream media in general, saying, “I think that both politicians and journalists are now the best educated, the best prepared of any prior generation with the exception of the generation of our founders, which was just an extraordinary collection of individuals that were true geniuses. But I think that there are among the politicians today a lot of good people trapped in a bad system. And what they find is the necessity to rely on these 30-second television commercials and the manipulative emotion-based messages instead of a reasoned argument. And when you combine that with the media’s emphasis on things like the horse race and how somebody combs his hair or whether some word was used in an awkward way, the net result is that the American people don’t have a chance to join the conversation and what they get thrown at them is trivialities and banalities.” While the idea that the American public is obsessed with the trivialities that the entertainment industry shits daily, Gore should recognize the chicken-and-egg dynamic of this hypothesis. Yet the idea of the public being duped into this media fog is absent. He seems completely unable to conceive that our system of selling consumers a lifestyle that is directly linked to corporate America is at all complicit in the loss of a democratic forum. I find especially odious Gore’s fawning worship of our founding fathers as “extraordinary” and “geniuses.” What kind of intellect could make that argument with a straight face? It’s a fucking childish vision of infallible parental love.

The bottom line is that when asked on television to challenge the status quo, Gore can’t. He may write some challenging things in a book, but big fucking deal! What book has had an impact in the last 20 years? This is America. What is a book going to do that years of living in this society and just seeing what is in front of your face every day in every aspect of your life not been able to change? What counts is what he does on TV. What’s he going to do in the media ring of public approval?

Then there was is Live Earth concerts — now that’s supposed to mean something. I could only stomach watching bits and pieces, like The Police doing a god-awful “Message in a Bottle” with overrated brat John Mayer making it sound worse. Then Lenny Kravitz running through the crowd while playing “Let Love Rule” (or something) making a spectacle for no apparent reason other than to stroke Lenny Kravitz’s fat ego. The whole thing was a pathetic display of feel good activism and spoiled narcissism.

The bottom line is that Al Gore is still playing the political game. He might be complaining about global warming and the lack of logic in the political system, but he is still sucking up to the people that run the world and that means he thinks more about his career, his pocketbook and possibly his place in history that he does speaking truth to power. He’s nothing more than a self-promoting preacher trying desperately to justify some favorable assessment from the court of public opinion. Gore is no doubt a fan of the “greed is good” ethic afflicting the masters of the universe, who he aspires to be in league with. I bet he has conceived of posters for a distant election when he runs for president of the world.

I’ve despised Al Gore since before he bailed after the 2000 election and failed to demand that the disenfranchising of African American voters in Florida in the 2000 election was a crime that needed to be investigated and prosecuted. The fact that he comes off as an annoying dufus might be a problem for some but it isn’t really relevant. The fact is that he is a fucking humongous hypocrite (figuratively and literally). So what if he thinks he is a lot smarter than he is, most of us, especially politicians, suffer from that delusion. At this stage in his political career, however, he should be pissed off and act the part. Instead he seems to be little more than a suckup to the status quo even if his issues are slightly more appealing to the left of the political spectrum.

From a particularly gag-inducing section of the Time magazine feature, there is one more bit of damning evidence:

“Al Gore and I settle down on the patio, near the swimming pool and the barbecue. ‘Did some grilling last night with my friend Jon Bon Jovi,’ he says. ‘His new record is great.’ He props his black cowboy boots on a brightly painted folk-art coffee table, scratches his mutt Bojangles behind the ears and talks about The Assault on Reason.”

A guy who likes Bon Jovi cannot be trusted. Al Gore likes to play it safe, even with rock and roll. It’s fine to play it safe with the environment, but he seems more concerned with Al Gore than any environment. And in times like these, we need somebody willing to take real tough action: and put himself in a position that will truly get the attention of the public that means kicking ass and taking names, not kissing ass and dropping names.

by Ian Murphy

“THREE-O-NINE! THREE-O-NINE!” I crudely affected like an overgrown toddler, exuberantly waving the hotel room key card overhead, and cradling a small, foam-rubber Tyrannosaurus Rex. I adjusted the thick, foreign prescription bifocals strapped to my head, and steamrolled to the front of the line—purblind and unconcerned with normal etiquette. I wasn’t about to wait around in the Godforsaken lobby of a Cincinnati EconoLodge while the biggest story since creation started without us.

“Checking out?” slowly enunciated the helpless clerk, abruptly disregarding another traveler’s outstretched fistful of credit. She was obliged to immediately reckon with the obtrusive fashion anomaly before her—I was clad in Velcro fastened sneakers, a long sleeve polo shirt, and sweatpants up to my nipples, which were cinched awkwardly at my waist by a sporty fanny-pack. A slightly askew “JUST TRY TO BURN THIS ONE!” American flag trucker hat was my idiot crown.

“Hiiiii!” I brayed, thrusting the card into her mitts. “THREE-O-NINE!” I incorrectly counted the numbers off with my fingers, so the poor girl would understand what was happening. The other hotel patrons silently endured my rudeness. I was clearly some sort of mental defective, an innocent of the highest order. They wouldn’t dare.

“Hiiiii!” I individually greeted the members of a women’s college basketball team on the brisk waddle over to the continental breakfast.

“Holy crap,” whispered my fellow BEAST operative Josh Bunting. “We didn’t know that was you for a second,” he said, giggling like a schoolboy and hiding his face. He spoke for himself and our glossy-eyed cameraman, who, during the previous night’s 90-mph dash through Ohio’s monotonous and heavily policed landscape, woke periodically to warn me about getting tagged by radar:

“I might have some warrants out on me,” he’d hedged groggily from the plush back seat of our loaner BMW 740il sedan, dipping into a large bag of unspecified pills. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I briefly caught my blurred, clownish reflection in the lobby’s swinging glass door. Behind me, Bunting hovered over a tray of stale muffins, struggling to stifle a nervous chortle. Our cameraman, a possible felon, was pouring us three complimentary cups of lukewarm coffee and grinning like the devil. The lady-hoopsters scrutinized my every move with morbid fascination.

It was then that the distinct possibility this trip might go badly first occurred to me.

The event we were covering was a quick shot across the Kentucky state line, the grand unveiling of a 60,000 square foot bellwether of our culture’s sheepish intellectually depravity: The Creation Museum. The poured concrete brainchild of Ken Ham, world-renowned creationist douche and president of the Christian apologetics ministry “Answers in Genesis,” this “museum” aims to depict biblical narrative as historic reality. 27 million donated dollars worth of animatronic dinosaurs and humans palling around in the Garden of Eden—madness. Like the slaves of narcotic bliss, we felt physically compelled to participate in this insanity, adding to it whatever we could. Our drug was adrenaline, our bliss: messing with uppity religious primates.

After topping off the tank with ninety dollars of premium, Bunting set the 282-horse Nazi sleigh careening south down I-275. I turned on the radio—the military has announced the deaths of 8 U.S. soldiers and a Marine—and turned it off. Bunting quoted scripture from memory. It was a sunny Memorial Day weekend in the heartland. We were about to bear witness to a magnificent abortion of reason—and we were late. I’ve never felt more American in my life.

At the museum gate, an armed guard in big mirror shades waved us to the curb to verify our press credentials.

“Uh-Oh!” I howled as Bunting applied the brakes and lowered the driver’s side window. “Uh-Oh! Uh-Oh!” I rocked in my seat and hugged my toy dinosaur for emotional support.

“Calm down, Dougie,” chided Bunting, sternly grabbing my sleeve. “Not now, Dougie!” he growled, flashing me a panicked expression. A nervous man by nature, Bunting’s motives for engaging in such twisted, anxiety-heightening deceptions are mysterious. It’s like he’s playing chicken with himself.

“My name is… uh… Roy Lapost,” Bunting told the guard, “and we’re with the Special Times.” My comrade’s face reddened. His voice trembled. The guard scanned his clipboard.

Through the bifocals, I could make out only vague shapes of what I’d read earlier was a protest camp being set up across the street—a tame placard and bullhorn assault by the dwindling forces of reason; a futile volley over the frontlines of the American Culture War. On the other side was God’s Army—fortified by a million-dollar wrought iron fence, packing heat, and totally impervious to reason. Blurry uniformed men and their blurrier German Shepherds patrolled the museum perimeter, exuding authority and smelling things. Big-brimmed troopers with shotguns zipped in and out of the gate in their vicious little golf carts. A small airplane circled high overhead, towing a banner.

“What does dat plane say, Roy?” I asked timidly, pointing to the heavens.

“It says ‘thou shalt not lie,’ Dougie,” Bunting replied wistfully through a clenched smile, craning his neck through the open window. “You remember, Dougie,” he said, bringing his head back into the car, and nonchalantly raising the power window, “it’s in the Bible!”

He snapped his sweaty head around. “Are you sure we’re on the list?” he asked, his eyes as big as saucers.

“Absolutely,” I said, spying the guard safely from our soundproof, air-conditioned bunker. “Don’t worry. I talked to our media contact and everything’s been taken care…”

Knock knock knock! We weren’t on the list.

Bunting and I looked at each other with mounting trepidation as the guard radioed in our false identities. We were both sure that we’d been exposed as frauds while on the road. How could we not have been? I thought to myself while flailing about wildly against the seat belt. We had, in the spirit of sportsmanship, given our prey ample opportunity to evade danger. We were hunting with a crossbow, not an M-16, so to speak. We may be vicious liars, but we were gentlemen after all.

***

With the assistance of BEAST Editor-in-Chief Al Uthman, we had set up a website for our sham newspaper, the Special Times, “a Christian lifestyle journal for and by the developmentally disabled” (www.thespecialtimes.com). Our logo was glorious, rendered in the New York Times font, with a crucifix substituting for the “T” in times. A picture of me sitting in a wheelchair with my belly exposed, giving a thumbs-up, with the caption “Dougie and his trusty notebook,” dared anyone visiting the site to view it as transparent satire.

“WELCOME TO THE SPECIAL TIMES!1!!” it read next to my picture. The number one, squeezed in amidst the exclamation points, was a stroke of pure retarded genius, I thought. We promised the paper would be “just super to read,” and would feature “top-notch stories relevant to developmentally disabled people of faith.”

The homepage was believable enough. The “About Us” page, by contrast, was particularly absurd, featuring a fictitious and preposterously named medical condition:

The Special Times came about from the hard work and dedication of our founding members Dougie Johnston and Roy LaPost.

Dougie’s a special guy with a love for our Savior Jesus Christ, wrestling, cookies, and investigative reporting. Dougie was diagnosed at birth with Asperger’s Syndrome by Proxy, an exceedingly rare disorder which has no known cure. After festering in the public care system for 15 years, Dougie was introduced to the Christian caregiver who would change his life and save his eternal soul.

Roy LaPost was an ambitious journalist disenchanted with the absence of our Lord Jesus Christ in the hearts of his editors and publishers. He then rededicated his life to caring for the least among us, for he knew that the meek would inherit the newsroom. The two warriors of Christ were introduced through divine providence when LaPost hit Dougie with his car. Knowing what the Lord wanted from him, LaPost became Dougie’s caregiver, journalistic mentor and lifelong friend in Christ.

I pray for Jesus and The Sabres to win!
I pray for me to find my keys that I lost.
I pray for scientists to stop hurting God’s feelings and making God cry all the time.
I pray for the troops to win the wars and the president.
I pray for The Special Times to be good.
I pray for Roy to be happy.
I pray for my dog to come back to life.
I pray for the summer to be awesome!