On Bullshit

[Pharyngulistas, Oracularistas, Kung Fu Monkoids et al., welcome! I know you've come to listen to Al Swearengen turn the air blue, and blue enough it shall turn presently, but after the show I'd like to invite you to visit my main page, where Mr. Wu supplies a measured counterpoint. Recently I've reviewed a Rickie Lee Jones concert, celebrated the straw boater adorning every male head attending the Scopes Monkey Trial, and examined, slack-jawed with wonder, a schoolboy's notebook from 1840 a neighbor lent me.]

Program Note: While The Jingo heads off to parts unknown to recover from the Recent Unpleasantness, the Management has invited friends of The Jingo to stand in.

Today's Guest Blogger: Al Swearengen

What the fuck are you looking at?

Just what do you find so goddamned arresting in my visage that makes you stare until I start to smell cat-piss and I want to take a fuckin' tick-bath in whiskey and lye soap to take the edge off the cocksucking discomfort?

I'm Al Swearengen and this is my joint -- who the fuck are you?

Ah, you're the cocksuckers Jingo said would be along. That's all right, then. Tickles my taint to meet you, have a snort -- on the fuckin' house. Well met, as the cocksucker once said.

Where's Jingo, you ask? The fuckin' hooplehead came in here last night, looking like death warmed the fuck over, telling dark and troublesome tales of abscesses where a Christian man shouldn't have fuckin' abscesses. I sent him upstairs with a ball of dope, some free and gratis pussy, and my assurance I'd summon Doc Cochrane if things got dire. Sometime in the middle of the night we heard a banshee scream -- like as not a regular occurrence here at the Gem -- and since then the emanations from Room Four have been as peaceful as the grave. He may be alive and pestering Trixie till she kicks him in the giblets to achieve some relief -- or he may have shuffled off this mortal coil in a transport of fuckin' lubricity. None of my business if he has. More fodder for Wu's pigs, unless you'd like to claim the body for decent burial back East. Talk to Dan. We can preserve the body in the creek until you make a fucking decision.

But he did ask me to pass along a few observations before he took up his deathbed, and as a man of my word I'll discharge my fucking duty.

First, he asked me to let you in on a sure bet, to line your pockets and feed the hungry mouths that plague your household:

Should the opportunity arise to place a wager in a contest of wits -- a timed competition that consists of naming the ordinal numbers between one and ten, and consigning each one into its rightful category of Odd or Even -- between a large box of greasy carpet-fluff coagulated around a wad of half-chewed pig's-knuckle on the one hand, and the current cocksucking President of the United States of America on the other, you'd be a gibbering fool if you didn't take the dust-bunnies and the point spread.

What else, Neddie asks, are we to make of the intelligence eructed in Monday's Washington Post, wherein Hooplehead Bush declares -- more or less accidentally, just off-the-cuff like -- the equal intellectual standing of Darwinian science and cocksucking Creationism -- that the two should be presented side-by-side, let the student decide the relative merits. Thus in one fell (and I do mean fell!) swoop, 150 years of science, during which enormous exquisitely balanced, peer-reviewed and battle-tested biological wedding-cakes of scintillating scientific discovery were erected to the wonder and admiration of educated people everywhere, are placed, willy-fucking-nilly, in direct competition with a retrograde piss-take of a brain-dead idea that was laughed at by serious thinkers a hundred years before Darwin ever heard the word Beagle! By means of this casual off-the-cuff remark, it's to be noted, huge swaths of perfervid cretins, whose intellectual Parnassus is occupied by the sniggering (and very rich) carney Tim LaHaye, are further encouraged to sway and jibber hosannahs to the righteousness of a theological movement of the intellectual credibility of a cocksucking Mother Goose rhyme.

You drown in a sea of Rank Bullshit. It shrieks at you every day from field and fountain, moor and mountain. And it pains me to say it, but the longer we humans live, the greater the reservoir of accumulated knowledge, the easier it becomes for Bullshit to hold sway. You know the phrase, the cocksucker "knows just fuckin' enough to be dangerous"? That's humanity's fuckin' epitaph, boys. That's what the the cockroaches will carve on your tombstone when it's time to plow under the blackened subdivisions and the crusted industrial parks and let the cocksucking cupboard pests take over.

Stupid people like you -- who know just enough to dislike your jibbering idiot President and nothing at all about how to play rough to rid yourselves of him -- have allowed clever cocksuckers like, well, like me, I suppose, to impose a New Order on you. Here's the New Social Contract, in a nutshell:

We, the Party of the First Part, will tell You, the Party of Whatever the Fuck We Want to Call You, whatever the fuck we need to, to convince you to buy enough of some fucking useless shiny crap to keep this hustle going so we can relieve you of pretty much all the fucking scratch you possess. You, honoring your half of this inviolable contract, will buy the all of the fucking useless shiny crap we supply. You will not ask questions.

Signed, Al Swearengen.

This -- not the Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, not the fuckin' Port Huron Statement or Chairman Mao's Little Red Book -- is the Law of the Land: You will fuckin' buy what you are goddamned told to buy, and if you don't you will answer immediately to the Highest Authority. You will spend extra on Christmas, and if you fail to display prominently on your person the multifarious cocksucking logos of the producers of the shiny crap you are contractually obligated to buy, you will be ostracized with prejudice.

And you, you sucker of suckers, you hooplehead to rule all hoopleheads, continue to service this contract without stringing people like me up by the balls.

Amazing.

Well, enjoy your whiskey and pussy. I'm off to see a man about a pig.