I'm a little afraid of what I might do tonight.
Two days ago on my way home from work I passed a sign that had been put up in a neighbor's yard: "Meeting Friday Night about [Our Common Road]"
This winter this guy took about 30 acres of open pasture -- a Civil War battlefield -- and subdivided it and put up about 10 Hummer-Houses. (You can actually see part of it in this post.) People are starting to move into the houses now. Traffic on the little dirt road has tripled, quadrupled, since he did this.
I know what this guy wants to do: He wants to agitate to get our road paved.
He claims his house -- the first to be built on that pasture -- is dusty from the road. Damned right his house is dusty -- he plunked it down in a peninsula of pasture, surrounded on three sides by the road, and not a tree or shrub has he planted to shield the house. A spectacularly stupid bit of home-siting. A boy of five could have told him not to put his house there. (Several boys of five, lined up on their tricycles, shook their heads sadly and looked chopfallen as the bulldozers broke ground.)
But here's what's got me worried. In my interior monologue I am making this guy a scapegoat for every goddamned avaricious, mendacious, soul-destroying crime against sanity perpetrated by beauty-hating, know-nothing, land-raping, Iraq-invading, home-schooling, Christ-insulting, religion-perverting, Kerry-slandering, Abu-Ghraib-denying, history-mangling, language-destroying, WMD-inventing, plutocrat-tax-relieving, wingnut-judge-appointing ASSHOLE in the last five years.
Do you know, this morning a woman drove past me with a personalized license plate that said GOP GIRL and some frother bumperstickers -- and I flipped her the finger?
That's what I'm afraid of. I'm losing my mind. Civility gets harder and harder to fake.
17 comments:
I don't blame you Neddie...I feel the same way. Anybody who supports the lying weasly mothereffin asshole war criminal
sleazebags and their unholy insane criminal war on arabs iraquis muslims and the poor like gopgirl should get a finger.
How's that?
Why not go there and do a deadpan parody of these jokers, get yourself elected Deputy Shitbag and then do nothing. Keep coming to the meetings angrier than the last time shaking your head and your fists, blaming Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson.
Either that or show up wearing a Michael Moore T-Shirt, tell them to fuckthemselves into the rapture and then start singing "Gimme Three Steps" as you're headin' out for the door.
As far as the vanity plates and bumperstickers go, I for one am thankful they have them. They save us all a lot of time and trouble by clearly labeling themselves.
"Warning - I have determined that I am a chucklehead, and conversing with me may be hazardous to your sanity."
The Viscountess told me last night that she never thought the death of anyone could make her rejoice, but she knows in her heart that she would rejoice in the death of Rush Limbaugh. She said "Osama Bin Laden killed a few thousand people. Rush Limbaugh more than any single person helped to turn us into a nation of selfish boors reveling in our own stupidity."
I hate them for making us hate them.
My recent reading online has made it clear that we've turned some kind of corner. (By "we" I mean those of us with brains and heart - not the MFs your post is about.) I see more posts like yours and more comments like those on this page and I realize: We're sick and tired of these assholes and we're simply not going to put up with it anymore. They've proven that they're wrong, have no idea what they're talking about, and have no concern for others. So - screw it. Let 'em have it.
I rekon they get one chance to be human, to be smart, to be considerate when I'm dealing with them. After that, might as well let them know what I think of them. It's not like I'll be losing a friend!
aneurysm imminent.... simmer down.
McMansion aside, how exactly does the paving of a road become a Republican crime?
Oh, Lordy, how I relate!
You wanna talk scary? Lately, I've found myself slowing down behind any car festooned with rightie bumperstickers ...so there'll be enough room for me to achieve terminal velocity before I smash into their f*cking rear ends!
So far, I've caught myself in time...
Even scarier: the books fate has led me to since 11/02/04. I pick one up at random in the library the other day -- and its premise is how the assassination of Wm. McKinley jumpstarted the Progressive movement by scaring the shit out of the Robber Barons...!
Must...stop...caring... about...anything...un-American Idol...related...
Fuck it- odds are good he's an appropriate target.
Two thoughts:
1. We bleeders got ourselves into this predicament exactly by trying to be nice while these ferrets took over most neferretiously. The right has used anything remotely contrueable as a weapon to get into power, especially playing on the fears and prejudices of the God-lovin'.
We haven't been willing to fight as dirty as they certainly are. So fuck 'em.
Um, maybe a burning cross on his lawn? I dunno- just thinking out loud.
2. Here's a dandy tip from an ex-Angelino- Don't flip 'em off because they're crazy. You gotta be watching the right hand for the 9 mm.-in-the-glovebox-crawl. What you do is follow them to their destination and then just slash all their tires. Viva La Raza, motherfuckers. A good one too is you turn the nozzles of your windshield fluid things so they point to the front or sides and fill the reservoir with piss. That way you're always ready in case of a sneak attack.
It's a civil war startin', man. We just have to decide if we want to win or lose. And nobody said it'd be easy out here on the front lines, brother. Fella's going to have to make some sacrifices for what's right.
GOP in this context is actually a little-known shortening of "Gobbles Only Penis". I've seen those bumper stickers. You're supposed to get their attention and pull over at a rest stop.
It's usually like 25-30 bucks. Some of them have snacks and cigarettes too.
My stomach is still wanting to hurl after seeing this bumper sticker a couple of hours ago:
"You can thank me. I voted for President Bush"
Here's what amuses me: you describe the objects of your ire as:
"...goddamned avaricious, mendacious, soul-destroying crime against sanity perpetrated by beauty-hating, know-nothing, land-raping, Iraq-invading, home-schooling, Christ-insulting, religion-perverting, Kerry-slandering, Abu-Ghraib-denying, history-mangling, language-destroying, WMD-inventing, plutocrat-tax-relieving, wingnut-judge-appointing ASSHOLE(s)"
However, you never called them Republican. Anonymous identified them FOR you, hence we can all assume, thanks to Anonymous' definition, that everybody, right or left, pretty much knows who you're talking about when you use those modifiers.
PEPSI
MONSANTO
VICTORIA'S SECRET
(Sorry, man- just tryin' to get paid.)
>> McMansion aside, how exactly does
>> the paving of a road become a
>> Republican crime?
Fair question.
Which political party is a tireless advocate that someone's right to make money invariably supercedes another's right to enjoy tranquility?
You'd have to have been a resident of Northern Virginia to understand how thoroughly the place has been raped, sodomized, tortured, beaten and thrown aside by developers. While nobody's had much luck standing up to them, I'll give you three guesses which political party has been their reliable ally at all times.
Paving the road would make Hummer Boy's unsold houses more valuable. Why should the rural character of the place I live suffer yet one more in a long series of blows so that can happen?
Another tactic, to build on the suggestions from Pere and Bobby G, among others:
When I see a car like that, I always make sure I get in front of them. Then, at the next traffic light/stop sign/whatever, they can read my bumperstickers ("Liberal = Jesus, Conservative = Mussolini"; "(W = Mass Destruction"; "Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and you don't either"). Sometimes, if I'm feeling frisky, I'll slam on my brakes, hoping that they'll rear-end me, so I can cost them a lot of money ("Oh ... my neck.")
As Kevin says, we have to show that we're not going to take it anymore. Conservatives have no problem telling other people how they should live their lives. Because they so happily wear their POS POVs on their sleeves (as opposed to those who are more, say, liberal in their approach to others' lives), they make their numbers seem greater than they actually are. So, for each one of them, there has to be at least one of us, countering them in whatever way we can.
In other words, I'm filling my windshield wiper reservoirs with piss tonight, baby.
Ned, unfortunately, paving the road is not a crime. The only thing you can do is use the power of democracy. Get more people behind you than Hummer Boy, and you'll win. Unfortunately, to do this, you'll probably have to appeal to your neighbors' self-interest, rather than trying to convince them that it's simply the right thing to do. Remember, plenty of your neighbors might actually want a paved road ... your job is to find a motivation for them that overcomes their desire for a smooth ride, less dust, the need to replace their shocks less frequently, etc.
Don't you know it's bad luck to flip off a prostitute? If you piss her off, she might be compelled to retort and when they open their mouths, you could be sucked right into the vacuum.
Lucky Ducky Neddie, I believe you're situated in one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places designated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Getting anything done about the sprawl may be a futile as Arthur Dent's efforts against the bulldozer, but the site has some pretty graphics.
I grew up near Bailey's Crossroads in Falls Church, VA, when it still had some remnants of the rural. There was a farm right next to our brand new townhouses, although it didn't seem to be a working farm. When I was in high school, it was finally bulldozed for an even newer set of townhouses.
And this on a piece of land that had once been a no-man's land between Union and Confederate forces (the Union at Bailey's Crossroads, the Confederates at Munson Hill). Bailey's Crossroads got its name because it was the winter quartering grounds of the Circus. (There's a book with a history of the region called "Elephants and Quaker Guns.")
My point? Yeah, Northern Virginia has been on one long slide into a giant, undifferentiated urban zone for a long time, with tendrils reaching out west past Dulles Airport.
Go meet with the dude. But I say stay unpaved.
If they "win" insist on SPEED BUMPS as you are afraid of exessives speeds in your neighborhood.
I know whereof you speak... I was barely able to contain myself this past weekend in the midst of further millenialist, evangelical provocations. I bit my tongue when people were murmuring about how the soldiers need our support, but when I heard someone say that we needed to be in Irag because Saddam had caused 9/11 and still had the WMD stashed somewhere in the desert ready to unleash against our poor, besieged christendom, well...
let's just say that I slept less well that night than I might have, knowing that decorum was maintained only by allowing to pass unchallenged such utter pin-headed blather.
and now Rummy takes the Chinese to task for unnecessary military adventurism... yikes...
There is nothing that causes more inner conflict for me than the invasion of the Hummerites. I am a libertarian and am bound to respect property rights, but I would be crushed if Kiyawana farms took away his herds of belted galloways and put in a crop of McMansions. I hate the state in principle, but I am glad that the water supply authority owns about half the land on my road and buys up every parcel it can get its hands on.
The county is steadily being taken over by one high end subdivision after another with refugeees from Westchester County who view our already exorbitant tax rates as a bargain and who stand ready to tax us to oblivion to educate their Tylers and Justins and whatever names are popular these days.
Worst of all, I know some of the denizens of these subdivisions from church, and they are pretty nice people. I want to dislike them, but I can't. They want a pleasant environment for their families and a comfortable home and respectability, and they stress themselves incredibly to achieve this. They don't necessarily subscribe to right wing politics, either. They realize on some level the dilemma of wanting the benefits of rural Dutchess County while destroying its rural nature by their very presence.
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