#also the way your ask reeked of American entitlement

[hahafucksewingmachines]

the way that i’m not even american LMFAO it’s ok you can go on being a bitch about ur canadian shows <3

at least I have the nerve to attach my name to what I say and not hide on anon 😘

[dyedcomrade]

Dark! Jack Krauser headcanons

i think after operation Javier he'd be so broken mentally and emotionally that at first for a long time he shuts off all human connections

but after some time he will latch onto anyone who shows him kindness and will want to get fullfillment by that one person he chooses as his darling - no other people, only his loved one

you can be a nurse or another kind of healthcare worker he met while going back for checkups. a shop assistant who was very helpful, a pizza delivery person who smiled at him. it will be just an everyday human interaction - but to him it will be so new after decades in the military. even on his free days he did mercenary work, because he tought he was a brute and did so many horrible things that noone would ever accept him back into society. he reeked of the blood he shed, it's just natural to isolate someone who is this violent, this dangerous.

but not you. you treated him like you would any other person. maybe even better? you had a good day or he was just an especially chill patient/customer/etc. and you were happy that for at least once someone isn't trying to make your work harder than it should be.

he is no stranger to covert tactics. means he will manage your kidnap smoothly. there will be no signs pointing to that it even happened. he will also take any personal item he thinks you will need in the first two weeks of your stay with him. that time is crucial in his mind for you to settle in.

he only recently bought his house after getting discharged. it's very bittersweet to him, as he always wanted the american dream, a white picket fence, suburban life - all his life unknowinlgy maybe, but he fought for it, physically and mentally as well. and he deserves it. after sacrificing everything he had, it's the least. he doesn't feel entitled to it, but he will be very confused and sad if you fight back.

at first you will be bound and in his basement - him with you almost the entire time. the place is very clean and polished. he tried to make it comfortable with a new matress, a portable heater and several pillows and blankets for you. you also have a little basket with food he tought you'd like. he talks to you every day. about his life so far, his interests and his intentions with you. even if you seem accepting at first he won't let his guard down. he makes sure you can no way hurt him or yourself or escape. he'd love for you to talk with him, but it's not always necessary. he understands it's a tough time for you.

if you are especially unruly he will forcefeed you sedatives.

while in this position he baths you every day himself and you really only have to call for him and every of your needs are taken care of. he will make you any food you ask for - for that time he brings you up to the kitchen, but don't expect to be able to move an inch he is kind of experienced in securing stronger and bigger people than you. also if he finds you can't be trusted with utensils he will feed you as well. he may just get used to it and want to do this for you after you get familiar with your new life and doesn't wanna push him away the moment your hands are free.

he is very sweet in all the things he does for you. after all he knows he has to kill this one with kindness. and he is in for the long game, the results are just simply better if he is patient and doesn't punish you yet for acting out.

if you take an especially long time to accept your fate he will get a breakdown. not an angry one, though. not many people have seen him cry, but you will get an exclusive version. ugly crying for hours. not to make you pity him, no strain of toughts like this ever crossed his mind. it's genuine and a lot. life is treating him so poorly and the only one he thoght could trust is treating him like a monster! is that all he really is? were you playing a cruel joke on him formerly? he will hold you close while trying to calm himself down. he still has someone he can protect, you are alive and he has a chance for normalcy. just like he dreamt of as a kid.

by this time it's impossible your stockholm syndrome, pity or compassion havent struck. and he will see it. the little signs of acceptance, the way you start to care for him. if you behave he will unbind you and lead you up to the living area, show you around his house. it's very tidy and cozy. clean as well aside from one room he just uses as storage. you can't go there though. it's locked tight too, even more securely than all the windows and doors that could possibly serve you as an escape.

he may show you once his old photos, medals and the dogtags of his fallen comrades if you ask. but please be understanding it's hard for him. you should reassure and comfort him after. the rest of that day he will spend cradled in your arms.

he put cameras in everywhere - not like his days aren't free to spend with you, just in case.

with the new freedom you have comes the possibility for you to have some entertainment. Jack will probably be in the middle of trying to find a new hobby and will be glad to try out yours. only indoor ones of course. you can also watch tv with him or play video games. he doesn't have a strong preference for anything, will watch anything with you - with the exception of any movies or games about aoldiers, and he would be nice if you played shooting games on mute. don't want to trigger anything in him.

he may get a cat or a dog if you like the idea too and aren't allergic. if you go with the dog option, his backyard is big enough for them to play in, but he'd love for the three of you to go on long walks as well.

full freedom can be achieved with him, as he wants to be somewhat delusional with his darling and the level of devotion you have for him.

but you don't want to leave him. he is a broken man with noone left to love. why would you be so cruel?

if he is sure you won't try to pull anything on him, he may let you back to your job and he will try to find one as well. staying for so long at home is boring. he may go back to mercenary work and at this point he may have contacted Wesker as well about his condition. although you can be a very big inhibiting force for him turning to terrorism. he doesn't want to lose you by getting involved in anything, and for sure doesn't want to get too far from the place you live in.

other headcanons, that may be too specific for some

he has an ambiguous feeling about kids. he would love some, but if you can't get pregnant or don't want to he will let it go. if anything would happen during the pregnancy to you or the kid that sure would be the last straw.

the first time he would mention sex is after you gain his trust and he lets you out to roam the house. he can arrange a marriage if it's something you feel is necessary before laying with him. he makes sure that he wears protection - he doesn't really know after fighting b.o.w.s what he may carry that he may be immune to but you aren't and he doesn't want to infect you. if you are a virgin and trust him with your first time, let alone first relationship, he will be stunned and nervous a bit. that is the only time he will be doubting this relationship. is he sure the guy to introduce you to intimacy? is he even good at it? he didn't have any long term relationship ever. he will, however, be very gentle and attentive the first time. it won't be forced and will encourage you to tell him everything on your mind, even if you think it sounds stupid.

[woeismyhoe]

You know it’s just a small part of the fandom that has issue with it? Most of the stans are white and could care less about the rep. Showing genuine concern about our lack of rep is not harassing the show writers. You’re being dense on purpose. Bye.

Ah.... your western mindset now somehow thinks ATLA isn’t popular in Asia. Also that almost 18k notes tumblr post is a pretty considerable amount of people who have issues with ATLA being called progressive because they think like you do. I’ve met several stans who aren’t white over the years btw. Again, you’d realize how many POCs make up the fandom if you bothered to look outside of the west instead of making baseless accusations. The west influences Asia pretty consistently, with the few exceptions of actual homogenous countries. Anything that becomes a trend over there, automatically makes its way here. Either way, how is this relevant exactly to ATLA supposedly being fundamentally ignorant and insensitive to cultures? All of your asks is just reeking with hatred against white people. Ironically I’ve also met white people who share the same opinions as you. Ignorance and entitlement obviously doesn’t discriminate color.

So by your definition, East Asians are bad people, South Asians are bad people and Native Americans are also bad people because there are villains who’s ethnically based on one of those races, despite having Good Guys based on those races as well. Good to know! Somehow, you think that evil doesn’t exist in South Asians but only in white people and other Asians, oh wow :o

Showing genuine concern about our lack of rep is not harassing the show writers.

Oh don’t worry. I know you’re not respectful enough to appreciate the fictional world of Avatar and appreciate the research the team did. Despite proclaiming yourself to be someone who cares about culture (or at this point you just seem to care about literal representation and not culture), you’re ironically indirectly harassing other cultures instead by gatekeeping it.

I’m still waiting for you to counter my argument by the way, instead of just ignoring them and getting offended over everything.

and just to let you know how ridiculous you’re being, if you are ethnically South Asian, native South Asians over here have called people like you lame for getting mad at Avatar since there was nothing offensive to be mad about. True story.

[greatfay]

controversial opinions?

Cold pizza actually not good. Tastes like angry bacteria.

There’s a completely separate class of gay men who are in a different, rainbow-tinted plane of reality from the rest of us and I don’t like them. They push for “acceptance” via commercialization of the Pride movement, assimilation through over-exposure, and focus on sexualizing the movement to be “provocative” and writing annoying articles that reek of class privilege instead of something actually important like lgbtqa youth homelessness, job discrimination, and mental health awareness.

Coleslaw is good. You guys just suck in the kitchen.

Generational divides ARE real: a 16-year-old and a 60-year-old right now in 2021 could agree on every hot button sociopolitical topic and yet not even realize it because they communicate in entirely different ways.

Sam Wilson is a power bottom. No I will not elaborate.

Allison’s makeover in The Breakfast Club good, not bad. She kept literally and metaphorically dumping her trash out onto the table and it’s clearly a cry for help. Having the attention and affection of a smart, pretty girl doing her makeup for her was sweet and helped her open up to new experiences. Not every loner wants to BE a loner (see: Bender, who is fine being a lone wolf).

Movie/show recommendations that start with a detailed “representation” list read like status-effecting gear in an RPG and it’s actually a turn-off for me. I have to force myself to give something a try in spite of it.

Yelling at people to just “learn a new language” because clearly everyone who isn’t you and your immediate vicinity of friends must be a lazy ignorant white American is so fucking stupid, like I get it, you’re mad someone doesn’t immediately know how to pronounce your name or what something means. But I know 2 languages and am struggling with a 3rd when I can between 2 jobs and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to just absorb the entire kanji system into my brain to learn Japanese by tomorrow night, or suddenly learn Arabic or Welsh. There are 6500 recorded languages in the world, what’s the chance that one of 3 I’ve learn(ed?) is the one you’re yelling at me about. Yes this is referring to that post yelling at people for not knowing how to pronounce obscure Irish names and words. Sometimes just explaining something instead of admonishing people for not knowing something inherently in the belief that everyone must be lazy entitled privileged people is uh... better?

Stop fucking yelling at people. I despise feeling like someone is yelling at me or scolding me, it triggers my Violence Mode, you don’t run me, you are not God, fuck off. Worst fucking way to "educate” people, it just feels good in the moment to say or write and doesn’t help. Yes I’ve done it before.

Violence is good actually.

Characters doing bad things ≠ an endorsement of bad things. Characters doing bad things that are unquestioned by the entire rest of the cast = endorsement of bad things, or at the least, a power fantasy by the creator. See: Glee, in which Sue’s awfulness is constantly called out, while Mr. Shue’s awfulness rarely is because he’s “the hero.” See also: the Lightbringer series, in which the protagonist is a violent manipulator who is praised as clever, charming, diplomatic, and genius by every supporting character (enemies included), despite the text never demonstrating such.

Euphoria is good, actually. It falls into this niche of the past decade of “dark gritty teen shows” but actually has substance behind it, but the general vibe I get from passive-aggressive tumblr posts from casual viewers is that this show is The Devil, and the criticism of its racier content screams pearl-clutching “what about the children??” to me.

Describing all diagnosed psychopaths as violent criminals is a damaging slippery slope, sure. But I won’t be mad at anyone for inherently distrusting another human who does not have the ability to feel guilt and remorse, empathy, is a pathological liar, or proves to be cunning and manipulative.

It’s actually not easy to unconditionally support and love everyone everywhere when you’ve actually experienced the World. Your perspective and values will be challenged as you encounter difficult people, experience hardship, are torn between conflicting ideas and commitments, and fail. My vow to never ever call the cops on another black person was challenged when an employee’s boyfriend marched into the kitchen OF AN ESTABLISHMENT to scream at her, in a BUSINESS I MANAGED, and threaten to BEAT the SHIT out of her. Turns out I can hate cops and hate that motherfucker equally, I am more than capable of both.

Defending makeup culture bad, actually. Enjoy it, experiment, master it, but don’t paint it as something other than upholding exactly what they want from you. Even using makeup to “defy the heteropatriarchal oppressors!” is still putting cash in their pockets, no matter how camp...

Not every villain needs to be redeemed, some of you just never outgrew projecting yourself onto monsters and killers.

Writing teams and networks queerbaiting is not the same as individuals queerbaiting. Nick Jonas performing exclusively at gay clubs to generate an audience really isn’t criminal; if they paid to go see him, that’s on them, he didn’t promise anyone anything other than music and a show. Do not paint this as similar to wealthy, bigoted executives and writing teams trying to snatch up the LGBTQA demographic with vague ass marketing and manipulative screenplays, only to cop out so as not to alienate their conservative audiences. And ESPECIALLY when the artists/actors/creators accused of queerbaiting or lezploitation then come out as queer in some form later on.

Queer is not a bad word, and I’ve no clue how that remains one of few words hurled at LGBTQA people that can’t be reclaimed. It’s so archaic and underused at this point that I don’t get the reaction to it compared to others.

People who defend grown-woman Lorelai Gilmore’s childish actions and in the same breath heavily criticize teenage religious abuse victim Lane Kim’s actions are not to be trusted. Also Lane deserved better.

Keep your realism out of my media, or at least make it tonally consistent. Tired of shows and movies and books where some gritty, dark shit comes out of nowhere when the narrative was relatively Romantic beforehand.

Actually people should be writing characters different from themselves, this new wave in the past year of “If you aren’t [X] you shouldn’t be writing [X]” is a complete leap backward from the 2010s media diversity movement. And if [X] has to do with an invisible minority status (not immediately visible disabilities, or diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, persecuted religious affiliations, mental illness) it’s actually quite fucked up to assume the creator can’t be whatever [X] is or to demand receipts or details of someone’s personal life to then grant them “permission” to create something. I know, we’re upset an actual gay actor wasn’t casted to play this gay character, so let’s give them shit about it: and not lose a wink of sleep when 2 years later, this very actor comes out and gives a detailed account of the pressure to stay closeted if they wanted success in Hollywood.

Projecting an actor’s personal romantic life and gender identity onto the characters they play is actually many levels of fucked up, and not cute or funny. See: reinterpreting every character Elliot Page has played through a sapphic lens, and insulting his ability to play straight characters while straight actors play actual caricatures of us (See also: Jared Leto. Fuck him).

I’m fucking sick of DaBaby, he sucks. “I shot somebody, she suck my peepee” that’s 90% of whatever he raps about.

“Political Correctness” is not new. It was, at one point, unacceptable to walk into a fine establishment and inform the proprietor that you love a nice firm pair of tits in your face. 60 years ago, such a statement would get you throw out and possibly arrested under suspicion of public intoxication. But then something happened and I blame Woodstock and Nixon. And now I have to explain to a man 40 years my senior that no, you can’t casually mention to the staff here, many of whom are children, how you haven’t had a good fuck in a while. And then rant about the “Chinese who gave us the virus.” Can’t be that upset with them if you then refused to wear your mask for 20 minutes.

Triggering content should not have a blanket ban; trigger warnings are enough, and those who campaign otherwise need to understand the difference between helping people and taking away their agency. 13 Reasons Why inspired this one. Absolutely shitty show, sure, but it’s a choice to watch it knowing exactly what it contains.

Sasuke’s not a fucking INTJ, he’s an ISFP whose every decision is based off in-the-moment feelings and proves incapable of detailed and logical planning to accomplish his larger goals.

MCU critique manages to be both spot-on and pointless. Amazing stories have been told with these characters over the course of decades; but most of it is toilet paper. Expecting a Marvel movie to be a deeply detailed examination of American nationalism and imperialism painted with a colorful gauze of avant-garde film technique is like expecting filet mignon from McDonalds. Scarf down your quarter pounder or gtfo.

Disparagingly comparing the popularity and (marginal) success of BLM to another movement is anti-black. It is not only possible but also easy to ask for people’s support without throwing in “you all supported BLM for black people but won’t show support for [insert group]” how about you keep our name out your mouth? Black people owe the rest of the world nothing tbh until yall root out the anti-blackness in your own communities.

It is the personal demon/tragic flaw of every cis gay/bi/pan man to externalize and exorcize Shame: I’m talking about the innate compulsion to Shame, especially in the name of Pride and Progress. Shame for socioeconomic “success,” shame for status of outness, shame for fitness and health, shame for looks, shame for style and dress, shame for how one fits into the gender binary, shame for sexual positions and intimacy preferences, shame for fucking music tastes. Put down the weapon that They used to beat you. Becoming the Beater is not growth, it’s the worst-case scenario.

Works by minorities do not have to be focused on their marginalized identities. Some ladies want to ride dragons AND other ladies. The pressure on minorities to create the Next Great Minority Character Study that will inevitably get snuffed at the Oscars/Peabody Awards is some bullshit when straight white dudes walk around shitting out mediocre screenplays and books.

Canadians can stfu about how the US is handling COVID-19 actually. Love most of yall, but the number of Canadian snowbirds on vacation (VACATION??? VA.CAT.ION.) in the supposed “hotbed” of my region that I’ve had to inform our mask policies and social distancing to is ASTOUNDING. Incroyable! I guess your country has a sizable population of entitled, privileged, inconsiderate, wealthy, and ignorant people making things difficult for everyone, just like mine :)

No trick to eliminate glasses fog while wearing my mask has worked, not a single one, it actually has affected my job and work speed and is incredibly frustrating, and I have to deal with it and pretend it’s not a problem while still encouraging others to follow the rules for everyone’s safety and the cognitive dissonance is driving me insane.

It’s really really really not anti-Japanese... to be uncomfortable with the rampant pedophilia in manga and anime, and voice this. I really can’t compare western animation’s sneakier bullshit with pantyshots of a 12-year-old girl.

Most of the people in the cottagecore aesthetic/tag have zero interest in all the hard work that comes with maintaining an isolated property in the countryside, milking cows and tending crops before sunrise, etc. And that’s okay? They just like flowers and pretty pottery and homemade pastries. Idk where discourse about this came from.

You think mint chip ice-cream tastes like toothpaste because you’re missing a receptor that can distinguish the flavors, and that sucks for you. It’s a sort of “taste-blindness” that can make gum spicy to some while others can eat a ghost pepper without crying.

Being a spectacle for the oppressive class doesn’t make them respect us, it makes them unafraid of us. This means they continue to devour us, but without fear of our retaliation.

Only like 4 people on tumblr dot com are actually prepared for the full ramifications of an actual revolution. The rest of you just really imprinted onto Katniss, or grew up in the suburbs.

Straight crushes are normal. They’re people first, sexual orientation second. Can’t always know.

The road to body positivity is not easy, especially if what you desire is what you aren’t.

You’re actually personally responsible for not voluntarily bringing yourself into an environment that you know is not fit for you unless you have the resolve to manage it. Can’t break a glass ceiling without getting a few cuts. This one’s a shoutout to my homophobic temp coworkers who decided working a venue with a drag show would be a good idea. This is also is a shoutout to people who want to make waves but are surprised when the boat tips. And also a shoutout to people who—wait that’s it’s own controversial opinion hold up.

Straight people can and should stay the fuck out of gay bars and queer spaces. “yoUrE bEInG diVisiVe” go fuck yourself.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

I am greek and anyway i don’t really mind the race bends but i hate when people attack me when i say there is no case i will ever see the gods anything rather greek-mediterranean like looking people. No i wont see them as black,mixed race,asian or looking like nordic european. It isn’t anything personal it’s just how i imagined them since i was a child and i don’t get if I don’t offend anyone why do they get offended?

Hello! I understand that you and I disagree on some matters but maybe we can find some common ground, as I believe our problems have the same root.

The reason they get offended is probably the same reason they do the race bending in the first place. They may think you are racist because you don't "expand your horizons" and see them as other races too. The same way I am supposedly a white supremacist for wanting the Greek gods to express the Greek people (aka looking like the overwhelming majority of Greek people and be depicted like they our ancestors chose to depict them in antiquity). In reality, our concerns don't come from a place of superiority, but from the personal connection we have with our culture.

Also a lot of foreigners think "how dare you seeing them as only white! That's boring because it has no diversity and white people are evil cause they colonized a lot of places and I don't want the Greek gods to be white!"

This way of thinking reeks of foreign entitlement. If you were an Indian and imagined Vishnu as an Indian man, would they tell you the same? If you were a Nigerian and imagined one of the Nigerian Orishas Black, would they accuse you? Of course not, because those races face some discrimination *in the West* and that, in the eyes of foreigners, makes them sacred in a way. ((Let me note that only westerners usually do this, because they only care of what happens in the West. If you ask a Chinese or a Ugandan how the Greek gods should be depicted, they will have the same opinion as most of Greeks.))

It's good that westerners have lots of respect for the aforementioned cultures. I am not saying those cultures don't deserve the respect of not race bending their native gods. I mean that woke Westerners don't extend that courtesy to our own culture cause our skin is light. They accept a homogeneous pantheon when it's full Brown or full Black because then this homogeny seems like diversity to them. (While it isn't because you only have one race in the pantheon. But it is like that for Americans because of their political situation).

I haven't heard any person in this site saying "the Nigerian Orishas are spirits so you can depict them in whatever race you want!" or "The old Mexican gods can be whatever race you like because they don't have an actual human body and everyone can worship them!". The offense they take when they see the Greek gods as only north Mediterranean comes from a purely American-centric point of view. Foreigners who have this pov shouldn't influence how we see our heritage figures or how our heritage figures are shown in the world. When it comes to other cultures they stay in their lane but when it comes to ours "it's free real estate!"

I took some time to explain my position, too, because some new followers may not have seen it. If you want to discuss or add something, feel free to send another ask.

[almasidaliano]

Plot Twist: IT IS A RACE THING

let's rip the bandaid off. it's a race thing. "oh no racism isn't an issue" shut the fuck up. seriously, im disappointed in my people so i'm going to address yall first. my melanated Kings and Queens; darlings what are yall doing? Why are we still taking this? Why are we subjecting ourselves to this kind of disrespect?

are we really just going to sit here and let history repeat itself? going to watch them shackle and kill us all again? what are you afraid of? our ancestors were scared. they were strong in their own way, we are stronger. they kept our culture alive, our roots. they sacrifice their freedom for ours, and look at this. look at us. playing into their game, letting them run the show. have we forgotten about the 1960s? when the civil rights movements picked up? yall forget Martin, Malcolm, Rosa?

if you are African American, meaning black (yes you mixed mfs are black, you can try to tread on the fence but im sorry to tell you, the day will come when you have to pick a side and what's worse is no matter what you pick the world already decided for you.) and born in america; your ancestors are slaves. you can't tell me, your blood, your heritage, your lineage doesn't deserve defending, protection.

we have a constitution. this doctrine is the "LAW OF THE LAND" (still we have individual state laws, hmm). in this document, the rights of people of color, and women were added into the admendments. people of color had to take citizenship tests, though they were never taught to read, and english wasn't even their first language. then there was the segregation. if you skin is pigmented, you are treated differently.

low income areas, "ghettos/hood" areas were designed for the communities to run like crabs in a bucket. they require dependency or rebellion. they isolated and rationed resources, discriminated and interfered with job security, then blamed the citizens of the community for their failures. provided the bare minimum (a bar they set) and do you know why the hate continued? because still we rose.

understand this : WE; ALL PEOPLE, ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE EQUAL, HOWEVER WE ARE NOT THE SAME.

this is why the problem started. human were created in "Gods image" (any god you believe in we will indulge the religious conversation later.) layman's terms? we are all gods.

we are not the same kind of gods though. like ying and yang right? so there is light and dark. society told us we should be afraid of the dark, that bad things happen in the dark, that monsters hide there. what's funny is that life teaches us the opposite; teaches us that monsters can dress nice and wear smiles too. there's the story of Lucifer right? Lucifer is not the Devil. the Devil in my opinion is the "God" of evil. like there is good energy and there is bad energy. the universe is made up of both. so boom right? Lucifer was right hand to God and got big headed wanted to be him couldn't boom gets casted out takes a third of angels and boom hell and allat right? so let's just break it down for a second.

alright so first, B I B L E: basic instructions before leaving earth. the Bible is written in code, one, and two it is allegorical. (all melanated people truly do need to crack open a book and get to reading.) Jesus (Yahshua) is melanated, wooly hair bronze skin? come on now. so the idea they are selling is this all power white man is saving us all. truthfully, who cares what he look like if he's here to save our souls? you would think that would be the thought process, however; for some people the truth does not get them what they want so they opt against it. Good and light became associated with white. "wear all white when you feeling godly" its supposed to holy and clean right? pale faces became the face of faith. hasn't anyone realized how blinding light is? the closer you look the less you see. they guide your focus. the stars light the night sky yet we have all of this light pollution, it is simply a means of distraction. the wind talks, did you know that? the trees whisper. nature is beautiful and most of the world will never know.

they divided us by color. our skin isn't even black, however because they are pale, pasty, white; they made us their opposite. even in their classification of us they revealed the truth. you see, white is the absence of all color. it is empty. whereas, black is compromised of every color.

did you know there are two types of humans? yes seriously. homo sapiens and neanderthals. fun fact: neanderthals are structured more chimp like. homo sapiens were living in Africa albinism was prominent so there were a lot of melanated people without melanin, getting skin cancer and dying. neanderthals came about when homo sapiens migrated to Europe and Eurasia. they mated and began creating all the many races and ethnicities we have today.

melanated people are built structurally different than white people. we are naturally stronger, faster, thicker, humane, etc than they are. this is where the hate comes from.

"jealousy is just love and hate at the same time. - aubrey" pride and envy are dangerous things. when trying to compete, they were met with failure and it manifested hate instead of motivation. look at america. it is built entirely on the ideas of others, the hardwork and manual labor of others. those leading our country have done nothing for us. they simply continue taking all the credit.

white people left Britain, and called it "fleeing from religious persecution". the truth is they were fleeing from classism. they were in their element and they were minnows and not sharks. they decided to find a new pond to swim in. they did just that. the Natives were abused, and disregarded. they pretended to be civil and took damn near everything from them, all of their legacies and memories, their safety.

white people are lazy and greedy. this is why there are so many dividing markers in our life, labels, roles. there is a grave lack of family values for them. there is this morphed idea that the world is here for them, like we are all here to aid them. they reek of entitlement. like success, joy, love and prosperity are guaranteed to them just because. it is not on them all. just like melanated people can't help their environment, neither can they. the rude awakening always comes once you become unsheltered from actuality.

the cards are stacked against us from the jump. due to our enivornments, children grow up in broken homes, homeless, or jumping from home to home. single parents run themselves ragged, over stressed. children end up in the streets trying to take some of the weight off of their parents. the world just see thugs and gangsters though. menaces to society. when the real menace is society.

still we rise. still we smile. still we laugh and we love. and its so disheartening, that those are the things festering their hatred for us. no one is perfect. no one is the worst thing they have ever done either. growth is constant.

all we have to do is decide to be ourselves. decide to impact the world the best way YOU know how. white people have talents, a multitude of gifts. instead of trying to get rid of everyone else's imagination, what about losing the fear and choosing to dream yourself? and maybe asking for help, should you need it.

who you are, is who you've always been. i mean, the you, you were before the world told you who you had to be. who you are, has and will never be dependent on anything out of your control. people use the wrong things to assess the quality of a person. things like religious views, political views, music preference, sexuality. things that do not have shit to do with you. its all more division markers.

trust yourself. fuck what society says. what does society actually know? only what they are told. think about this: pyschological control is basically brainwashing. so boom. then you got your mind, your heart and your gut. that would be logic, emotion, and intuition. your emotion and your intuition are in the same section of your body. your brain however, is all isolated while being the storage container for everything you see experience etc in life. your brain is what gets conditioned. all the preconceived notions you have about things came from somewhere. where? we know what we know because they told us. how do we know its true? the thing about logic is, it makes sense. so when your mind isn't making sense yet your heart and gut in agreement, listen to yourself. they tell you think before you speak because their conditioned processor is in your head. always follow your heart.

people on both sides still to this day suggest segregation. like folks really do not believe we can cohabitate in a productive civil mutually benefical and prosperous way and that without segregation, civil war and/or genocide is in the future. here's the thing.  they had every opportunity, to ship folks back, or even kick us out. now folks could just start up and leaving, yet we don't. we tuck our tails and put up with it. why? i think its due to fear of being a foreigner in your true motherland. fear of not being accepted there either. i also think it's due to the way our ancestors were treated; how they allowed themselves to be treated.

so look: i'm a mutt. both sides of the feud, so i can formulate a well rounded argument; however i am black. when the world sees me and when i see me too. i am black and proud, in a world hell bent on making me believe my genes deem me inferior or unworthy to anyone. i say that to say, nothing will change until we stop fighting each other and start fighting for one another. they misused and abused us. chained and locked us away like animals. beat us like animals. and before they started more actively and carelessly attacking us out loud again, they got smart. gave us rights, gave us "homes" "communities" we were grateful. for this illusion of freedom. we must get uncomfortable with this false freedom. they treated us like animals, then tried to make us the villians, fearful we would retaliate, when all we ever wanted to do was live, joyously in harmony.

they cannot stop hating us, because we will never hate them. its a losing battle for them. still, if we don't stand up and fight we will lose in the end. fear and trauma also sparks compliance in them. bears are not violent creatures. but you don't poke a bear you know? melanated people are bears. currently acting like bears at the zoo. how long are we going to let them poke the bear?

melanated people need to unite. Dr. King tried peace and it worked for a little bit. it was a bandaid fix. now it's time to try Malcolm's approach.

Thanks for listening. -Almasi.

[thorntonkrell-blog-blog]

OH SHIT PART TWO

TERRI AND BILL AND KEN

My wife was telling me about the intoxicating smell that came from the packaging of Barbie dolls and Barbie accessories back in the day. I related that smell to the smell of a pack of baseball cards back in my day.

My father was a smoke eater. Neither the Barbie smell nor the card smell opened his olfactory doors to any extent.

He knew as much about dolls and cards as we knew about hooks and ladders.

Fifty years ago, I was losing the urge for cards. My sister, however, was in the ‘She Loves You’ stage of her Barbie mania.

She wanted/needed a companion for her Barbie. She needed a Ken and Christmas was approaching.

My father was all over it.

Pretty sure he told my Mom “I got this”.

Christmas arrived.

The gifts were under the tree.

One of the packages was a man wrapped rectangle.

Everybody knew what that rectangle contained under the ribbons and bows.

My parents distributed the gifts. Sweaters and shirts and socks came first while anticipation for the ‘good stuff’ built to a crescendo as the packages dwindled.

The good stuff was always at the end and the best thing was the last thing.

Finally, the only package left was the rectangle.

My sister was getting warmed up for that fake cry of surprise that we gave when we got what we wanted although we knew that it was coming.

My Dad, full of confidence and good cheer handed her the rectangle.

Terri opened the package slowly, savoring the moment. All eyes were upon her.

“ oh my God…thank you Sooo much…it’s a …..”

She hesitated to make sure…..the plastic didn’t smell right.

“ a Bill!?”

“You got her a Bill, Vinnie” asked my mother in subdued shock.

“yeah”, answered my Dad. The guy at the store told me Bill was better than Ken”.

He knew he was in hot water. Even though he was used to heat, This heat grew to stifling in a matter of seconds. There were no hoses available.

My sister, to her credit, refrained from dousing the fire with tears.

I’ll never forget the way she said “it’s a Bill.”

The celebration continued although smoke was filling the room.

As I recall the moment today, I can imagine what was going through my father’s mind when he bought the Bill.

To him, a doll was a doll and the fact that one doll looked exactly like the other doll and yet cost half as much made the Bill a much better doll than the Ken.

Hands down.

No doubt.

My sister guessed the inevitable solution so she wisely underplayed her reaction.

She took the Bill upstairs to meet Barbie.

The meeting was awkward, I found out later.

Neither Bill nor Barbie knew quite what to say.

Of course, my mother knew what to do.

The next day, Bill disappeared and Ken had a great first date with Barbie.

Everybody was happy. Including my Dad.

Over the next year. he would ask Terri about Bill.

One day, he walked into her room to watch his beautiful daughter play with her Barbie and her Bill.

My father looking at Ken and mistaking him for Bill said “Bill and Barbie look happy.”

My sister agreed.

So did Ken and Barbie.

FICTION IS THE NEW TRUTH

I'm pretending to be a writer. I'm also pretending to be the narrator in an ongoing story in which I am pretending to be one of the main characters created by the writer that I am pretending to be.

And most of it is true except, of course, for the lies which I tell to the characters that I pretend to create as a fictional writer and whom I pretend are my confidantes.

In return, I realize that the characters that pretend to confide in the character that I pretend to be are also telling the truth most of the time except when they lie to me which sort of defeats the purpose of them pretending to confide in me which is quite an amusing technique for the writer who is pretending to be me and as such is pretending to write about pretending to be amused by a technique that reeks of despair and mistrust.

It all goes back a few years ago to that moment when Jeff Bridges came to town and I pretended to be sitting next to a character who was pretending to be Stingray. Stingray was pretending to agonize over the integrity of taking a picture of Jeff Bridges after he had learned from a character pretending to be a blue haired old bitch that photography of any kind was prohibited.

Very near to that moment, Stingray realized that he was in fact The Dude that Bridges had tried to portray in The Big Lebowski and therefore he was a fictional character looking at the actor who had pretended to play him.

Of course, even that fictional character was me pretending to be him.

When it all became too much for Stingray, he spotted me pretending to be Thornton Krell sitting next to him. I pretended that Sting was perceptive enough to realize that the guy who was pretending to sit next to him was also the guy who was pretending to be the writer that had got Sting into this situation in the first place and who therefore probably knew how to get him the hell out of there.

And that's where fiction started to become the new truth. Remember?

It's all there in black and white if you go back to the beginning.

Or even better

Pretend to go back to the beginning and I'll pretend to believe your lies. I'll believe you understand the back story to all of this illusionary pretension and we'll start all over again.

And that's the truth

CALL ME STINGRAY

Clearly, I’m not as stupid as I appear to be or pretend to be, that wouldn’t be possible although it might be preferable to the marginal state of bliss that I occupy now as I try life with double elephant ears for pockets,while I wander from the concrete concession stand that I call home.

No, I’m not stupid. Ya see it’s a combination of the oversight committees of my internal legislation combined with poor intelligence gathering that is responsible for the current comedy of errors that I laughingly call my so called existence. It’s not Trump’s fault nor Pelosi’s fault that keeps me from dreaming the American dream.

I'm all about the Dream.

Dude is the American dream for me.

Dude is Jeff Bridges.

Big Lebowski.

Dude is my idol.

I love the Dude, man. When I found out the Dude was coming to town, I rubbed a couple of nickels together and headed to the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman house where Mr. Kodak himself screened movies for his guests until he decided that his work was done and he shot himself in the heart at this very house. Somehow, I had another double sawbuck so I took the tour of the house, checked out the elephant head in the lobby overlooking a giant organ and an array of flowers and gingerbread houses. I strolled into the exhibition hall and looked at the photos on display taken by Jeff Bridges.  Next, I bought my ticket for the flick that Dude was going to introduce in the theater.

I’m an hour early. I walk down to the front. Figure for the money I’m paying, I might as well get as much indoor times as I can. Rochester is one cold, dark, dangerous town. So, there I am sitting safely, minding my own business when out of nowhere, a gray hair walks up to me and spying my unhidden camera says in a real snotty voice..“You can’t take pictures in here.”

Wait a minute, I think to myself. I’m in the home of the guy who popularized photograpy, the guy who made the art available to the masses as well as the messes and here’s some drainer telling me I can’t take pictures even though I’m using a Kodak camera loaded with Kodak film and I’m wanting to take a picture of a guy because HIS photographs are on display in the exhibition section of the museum. In other words, I’m a photographer in the birthplace of photography trying to take a picture of a photographer and somebody tells me “no”.

I should be more specific about the drainer. She looked a lot like Barbara Bush in Bar Bar’s days as first lady with the shocking white hair. The imitation was breathtaking. Part of the breathtaking aspect was the “perfume” she was wearing. Imagine the smell of lilacs inside a trash bin, well that was the stench that was taking my breath away. I whiffed her before I saw her and by the time I saw her, she was in my face telling me what not to do.

God I hate that.

I had paid six bucks to get in and six bucks is a whole different ballgame to me than it is to the fake Barbara Bush. Six bucks has bought me four days and four nights of winter warmth at Movies10 which costs a buck to get into the show and once you’re in, if you play your cards right, you can hide out for twelve hours. Six bucks is what I paid to get a picture of Jeff Bridges. Six bucks should entitle me to that.

BarBar stalked away leaving a trail of fetid flower stank residue. The guy sitting next to me, another  early arrival, looked astonished or alarmed or whatever you call an expression that is a combination of thunderstuck bemusement and outrage. I'm no stranger to that expression.  I get and give that kinda look quite often

I had been talking to this guy a few minutes earlier and I can tell you what kind of guy he was. He was the kind of fiftyish guy who looks like he's pretending to be someone else and the person he's pretending to be is a shorter version of a fake Donald Sutherland.

He told me his name was Ice.

I don't need notes to remember stuff like this so I never take 'em.

I would hesitate to call Ice a dude although he was too old to be a nerd, to tall to be a dweeb, too small to be a doofus, too friendly to be a dork and too well informed to be a nimrod. I guess he was just a normal guy . Still, even he didn’t know what to make of the fake BarBar.

I said to Ice, “There ain’t no signs around here that say you can’t take a picture.”

Ice reached into his pocket and pulled out one of those fancy phones.

“I didn’t see any signs either,”  he said with a ‘we’re all in this together but you’re the one who got busted by a fake Barbara Bush as if you were Al Franken on a plane’ kind of wink.

I wondered if the photographic prohibition was posted on my ticket. I looked at the ticket which didn’t look much like a ticket,just a crumpled piece of  green paper featuring a large ADMIT ONE.

Nowhere on this ticket did I see anything about not taking pictures.

I showed Ice my ticket and he pulled out HIS ticket and goes right to the fine print.His ticket cost thirty five bucks and since we were sitting right next to one another the main thing his fancy ass ticket bought him was more writing because his ticket said that photography was prohibited at the request of the artist.

Let’s see…no prohibition on my later cheaper ticket …clear prohibition on Ice’s reserved more expensive ticket.  This pretty much sums up my life. Forget about being reserved. Show up early and the cheaper you live, the more freedom you have.

So me and Ice sat there like twin particles ready to collide at the edge of a black hole. Something was about about to happen but nobody knew exactly what. I wondered if perhaps Ice's last name was Jones.

We both got out our cameras and our contradictory tickets. I’m trying to feature the Dude prohibiting photos in a situation like this and I can’t see it.

One thing we know about the Dude…he abides.

I’m tawkin’ bout the Dude who always adhered to a pretty strict drug regimen to keep his mind, ya know, limber. What kind of limberminded photographer like Jeff Bridges would bar other photographers from taking pictures of El Duderino himself.

Also, I hoped to ask Jeff a few questions. Did he do his own bowling scenes and because of the whole brevity thing did the Dude prefer being called El Duderino, Duder, His Dudeness or simply the Dude or Dude?

Decisions were soon to be made.

Making decisions without accurate intelligence is like applying mathematical theories to non-mathematical facts. It’s like grabbing a pool rack and putting the rack into sink full of swamp water in the hopes of creating a liquid triangle or a fertle delta. It don’t work. I’ve tried versions of that experiment many times if not most of my life.

And once again, at the Dryden, I found myself trying to rack up innocent water although this time I was closer to Ice than to actual water. I’ve also learned that when you subtract mathematical theory from contradiction, you eventually wind up with paradox. Ice, although heavier than water floats upon it. Paradox means you face a crossroads of two clear ,equally balanced, oppositional ideas options that are uncompromisingly win/win or lose/lose in their execution.

Sink or swim

Contradiction also abides

Then, the curtain rustled and out comes the Dude himself in the person of Jeff Bridges. Dude looks exactly like he does on screen except a whole helluvalot smaller. As I decided whether or not to take his picure, at least ten guys ran down the aisle like stealth bombers in hoodies and beards, snapped off several rounds of flashes and then ran back down the aisle, out the door, into the parking lot, into their POS cars and down East Avenue towards Wegman’s before BarBar could even get her panty hose unwadded.

Dude didn’t look like he minded the snapping. I suppose it helped that the stealth crew snapped him before he even had a chance to give two shits.

Dude, as Jeff ,started to speak about how misunderstood his father Lloyd’s career had been as Sea Hunt became a mixed blessing for the Bridges family. The money was the good part. The bad part was that the viewing audience thought that Dude Dad Lloyd actually was a skin diver, actually was Mike Nelson the role his Dad had played on the teevee show. Dude said most of his life somebody has been coming up to him all teary eyed and saying “Thanks to your father, Mike Nelson, I’ve become a skin diver and all my children want to become marine bilogists or harbor masters.”

Imagine, confusing an actor with a role that he played

One of my childhood friends had the same confusion, sort of. I guess that’s why he started calling himself “Mike” and strapping a waste basket on his back, sticking a garden hose in his mouth, putting a pair of underpants over his face and a huge pair of rubber galoshes on his feet, he would “skin dive” by crawling around on his belly in his backyard in the rain until he reached the end of his hose and crawled back before his air ran out remembering all the while to keep the crawl slow as to avoid the bends.

Good thing my friend didn’t see High Noon when he was a kid, otherwise he might have grown up either a craven coward or a “boy not a man” as Katy Jurado had called Dude’s Dad when Dude Dad bailed out upon the return of Frank Miller as the clock ticked real time towards noon.

In real time at the Dryden, Dude was five feet away and looking straight at me, I was coming to a conclusion of my own. It was the flash in his face not the photo itself that the Dude objected to and wanted to minimize with the small print on the fancy ticket. Since my disposable didn’t have a flash, all I had to do was wait until Dude looked away for a second and I could snap his picture as I felt that I had the right to do. In all likelihood, the flashless picture wouldn’t come out anyway. Dude wouldn’t know that I had taken a picture that didn’t come out and everybody would have a win. Paradox confronted and overcome. Slick as snot on a doorknob.

While I waited Dude kept rappin’ and looking right at me while he spoke.

The way he was looking at me, reminded me of the phenomena of paired neurons. You see, when we watch somebody do something that we’ve done, paired neurons fire off in our brain similar to the neurons firing off in the brain of the person who is doing something that we’ve already done. If you play the guitar and then go and watch somebody else play the guitar, you are having a whole different neurological experience than a person who doesn’t play the guitar. And the guy playing the guitar can usually recognize you in the audience because he can feel your neurons firing in synch with his which makes him play the guitar better which makes you get more into his performance and fire more neurons which makes his guitar play even better and refire etc ad infinitum.

Anyways, this is the way that Dude was looking at me.

Certainly, I was firing ‘you are the Dude" neuronic vibes to the Dude but to my amazement he was firing back 'no YOU are the Dude’ neuros back at me.

I wondered if anybody else noticed.

I took a quick look over at Ice who was trying to pair up with the vibe and cop off it but he was unable to but he was taking notes, just as I suspected.

I turned my attention from Ice back to the Dude who took my glance at Ice as a vibe breaker rather than an icebreaker. Dude looked away.

My opportunity arrived.

I snapped my camera.

The camera didn’t flash.

Dude never noticed.

The whole transaction didn’t count.

Like an at bat that takes six pitches; two fouls and four balls.

And just like that, except for reflection and analysis minus thought and regret, it was pretty much over. Dude never looked back. He finished his spiel and took a seat in the middle of the theatre to watch the screening of his Dad's old flick. He didn't take any questions from the audience. Pretty sure he snuck out early.

My job was done as well. I didn't sere any sense in keeping my seat way over to the right of the screen in front of the vacated rostrum.

I went up to the balcony and found some degree of calm along with an opportunity to reflect using my feelings rather than my thoughts to process what my intuition had gathered.

Certainly, paired neurons were firing between the Dude and me. What was he doing that I do? What was he doing that I was going to do in the future? What had I done that he had done? What did he know that  I knew that only we two knew? What did I know that he NEEDED to know and was surprised to find out that I knew it and knew that he knew that he needed to know.

Or vice versa.

First, I  felt that it was the Big Lebowski film that had brought us together but my intuition told me that the neuron firing was too intense for that shallow of a conclusion. There is a big difference between a guy in a movie and a guy who's a fan of that movie, not that Jeff wasn't a fan of the Dude. Even I know that. I recognize the difference between illusion and delusion. Movies themselves are an illusion created by light and dark. Believing that movies are real and not reel is a delusion.

Dude had been in movies, I considered my whole life to be a movie or if not a movie, at least a book and if not a book at least a story and if not my WHOLE life than at least the last three hours of it or maybe my short term life was three hours within which a story could be noted, imagined, located, decided and written by somebody else and that was the purpose of my life and after that I would disappear and exist only in words that stay or in the memories of everyone who read those words.

If this was true, then I was a fictional character.

Now, one thing a movie star knows a lot about is fictional characterization. Stars earn their money playing them. When Jeff looked at me, his realization neurons fired off this message. "the guy in front of me with the crappy camera is LIVING what I do for a living. He's a fictional character in a story and he doesn't understand that a) he's fictional b) he's in a story c) as a fictional character he's got a lot more in common with the Dude than I do and d) this whole realization/connection/ neuron firing thing (myself included) is part of the story that this guy is the only fictional character within but also the unreliable narrator of.

That's exactly the moment that Jeff ricocheted my "you are the Dude" vibes to him with an even more powerful "no dude, you Are the Dude, dude vibe back at me just before I turned away and looked at Ice and snapped my flashless photo.

With that, I realized the truth of my situation. I was fthe fictional part of a factual story.

I was part of a faction.

I was and am a factoid like Thornton Krell.

That's my story folks although I didn't write it.

Ice Rivers wrote it.

He gets the credit or the blame.

GOLF

Golf took a gigantic leap forward with the invention of the hole.

Up to that point, golf was simply a lot of people with sticks and balls walking around some very lovely terrain doing all sorts of things with their sticks and balls.

Most of the people with balls were men who were trying to get the hell outta the house because the "woman's driving me bonkers etc." I'm sure it was all very spontaneous, creative, individualistic, time consuming, non-judgemental; usually comic in its pointlessness but occasionally tragic in its masculine temperamentalism.

Then somebody dug a hole in the middle of the environmental splendor. The idea was to try and use a stick to put the ball into the hole. Since putting the ball in the hole was the final act of each hole, the stick used to put the ball in the hole came to be known as the putter which originally rhymed with footer because sometimes a golfer in frustration would just kick the ball into the hole. Eventually the stick for putting the ball in the hole took on a new rhyme. Putter began to rhyme wiith both nutter and mutter. A lot of nutters muttered about their putters until they just kicked the ball in with the foot which was counted as a put not a putt.

In another example of the beauty and simplicity of our language amidst the wonder of rhyme, the word hole rhymes with the word goal. At first there was only one hole in the whole three mile walk and players counted the number of swings it took to finally put the ball into the hole. Putting was not as essential a skill ren as it is now.

The goal of the hole, although it increased judgmentalism and decreased individuality, proved to be a such a great idea that another goal was eventually dug into the ground and then another and another and another until somebody said "Damn, how many holes we need for this game?"

With our human tendency toward excess, 175 holes were dug before the guy who was digging the holes realized that he had enough of this and decided he would just as soon go home and listen to the troubles of the wife than dig any more of these goddamned holes which were a lot bigger than the  tidy holes that we have today.

The first holes were big enough to bury an eagle in case one of them got killed during the invasion of their air space by the men with sticks. It became a short-lived superfluous tradition because no one ever killed an eagle although many smaller birds were dispatched. Dispatching a small bird was considered a good thing and came to be known as a birdie.

 Eventually the size of the hole was reduced to the height and width of three golf balls which because they were made of wood and were almost impossible to hit into the air was a lot bigger than the golf balls of today.

After playing a couple rounds of 175 hole golf, it was determined that too many goals produced a "game" strikingly similar to no goals at all because everybody quit at different time and in various degrees of rage having long lost the number of swings needewd to reach the breaking point.

It was at this juncture that Lord Ferguson Calloway, came up with his revolutionary idea. " A half dozen isn't enough," thought the good Lord "and neither is a dozen. I got it. Of course, a dozen and a half is ideal."

And thus we arrived at the first course of eighteen holes.

Par is the standard for each hole.

Par is an exemplar representing skillfull reaction to the specific problems presented by each well defined goal/hole.

As each hole developed a standard level of difficulty measured by the number of swings required to put the ball into the hole, someone else came up with the idea of adding all the standards together and coming up with a standard for the entire course.

Shortly after coming up with the standards for each hole and then the entire course, some other wizard...perhaps Lord Bellamy Foxtrot decided to record all of those standards so that each golfer at the beginning of his walk had a clear idea not only of the goals of the "game" but also of the standards of each individual goal and each individual course. Individual holes from different courses could be compared as well as courses themselves.

The longest most difficult holes required five swings of the stick to put the ball into the hole.

Shorter holes required four swings.

The shortest holes required three swings.

Since most courses contain four holes that allow five swings to meet the standard, four holes that allow three swings to meet the standard and 10 holes that require a standard number of swings to be four. Add that all up and most courses have a par of 72 swings to put the ball into eighteen holes.

A score of less than 72 on most courses is considered under par.

Under par is good because it means it took less swings to complete the course than the standard requires.

A score of 72 means, a round of golf played exactly to the standards of the course.

A score of 73 or above means over par which indicates a playing of the eighteen holes with a number of swings more than needed by better players to complete the course.

Each hole is its own measure of standards.

If the goal is achieved on each hole by taking one less swing than the standard, that effort is called a "birdie".

If it takes 4 swing to put the ball into the hole of goal that has been established as needing 4 swings to complete. that effort is known as a "par".

If it takes a swing more than the standard for putting the ball into an individual hole, that effort is known as a "bogey".

Two strokes over is a "double bogey"

Three strokes over is a "triple bogey"

Four strokes over par on a par four is known as a "snowman"

Five strokes above par has no general name but there is a name for anyone who regularly needs more than five extra shots  and there is a term. That name is "duffer" and that term is “pick up the goddamned ball and either get off the course or go on to the next hole.”

Most of us are duffers in this world.

It takes us a lot more time to finish a task than it takes other folks to finish that same task.

We keep reinventing the square wheel.

Not only does it take us more time but the task we completed is a shittier version of the task completed by people who possess what I have come to know as "talent".

This lack of talent however usually doesn't stop us from trying to achieve the impossible while ignoring the possible.

Not too long after the invention of "the hole", another great moment in golf arrived; the invention of the green. The green is the closely mowed area immediately surrounding the hole. If the hole stands for the essential goal then the green stands for the important goal, a more general place to aim. To reach the green predicts looming realization of essential pursuit.

A century or two after the invention of the green, another great moment occurred; the invention of miniature golf. Let's skip the whole driving and fairway thing. We're not as interested in the journey as we are in the destination. We read the last chapter of a mystery novel first so we know who did it all along and who cares about anything else?

Miniature golf is a concentration of essential goal with a diminishing interest in  important goals. As it turned out, many people became activated by the single minded pursuit of the essential and thus the world dicovered a new use for  miniature windmills, aquarioums filled with enamel fish and plaster dinosaurs holding fake candy canes.

Shotrly after the concept of truncated activation peaked with miniature golf, some true star invented yet another form of abbreviation namely the "driving range". This one deals with the other end of the spectrum and once again gets rid of the "hole" as history once again rhymes with itself in a colossal retreat. Here the golfer can exercise a specific strategy, while sacrificing other important activities including the essential goal.

Both of those innovations diminished the concept of "walking" which at one time (before the invention of the hole) was in fact the primary goal of the game. Unless you count the husband's goal of getting the hell out of the house and the wife's goal of getting him the hell out of the house yet keeping him away from the harlots. Everybody used to win.

Miniature golf requires some walking while the driving range requires only getting out of the car and waking to the tee, usually grabbing a beer on the way. This means that the guy gets home before either he or his wife wanted him too or he stretches it out by stopping off somewhere and sometimes with a "golf instructor"

Shortly after the appearance of driving ranges and miniature golf courses, another synthesis reared its head. This manifestation included some walking, some iron driving, an important goal  (The green) and an essential goal (the hole). This innovation became known as par three golf as the fairways were shorter and narrower and the expectation is to be able to reach the essential goal with two swings and a putt..

Even with this myriad of manifestations, golf has remained a non-essential activity. Therefore, people discover or ignore the game based on their own interest and time table. Some folks activate through miniature golf. Others activate through the driving range. Still others activate because of the par threes. It's imposible to choose betweeen the game of golf and these three activators other than for purely personal reasons including the need to go "shopping" by the wife and the need to get the hell out of here by the husband who fully realizes how much his wife cherishes her private time.

I'm going to step away from the history of golf, like a pro who hears a fart in the gallery.

I'll tell you about MY game. Since it's my game, it's my rules. This is why I prefer to play alone.

When I do play with someone else, the game is best ball. My partner and I are playing against the course by co-operating with one another.

Here's how it goes; my partner drives.

His drive is straight and true and right down the middle.

I hit my drive straight into the woods.

Together we go look for my ball.

We find it and we head to HIS ball, the Best ball...hence the name of the game.

We take our second shots.

His shot lands in the trap.

My shot lands on the green.

We retrieve his ball from the sand.

We putt from my ball on the green.

My approach putt is short. He knocks his putt in.

We have a birdie...The hole was a par four and we took three strokes to get it in.

We're pulling for each other on every shot.

Best ball.

When I play alone, I start out with a mulligan.

That means sometime during the round, I won't count a shot that I hit. That non-shot is called a mulligan.

I only allow two putts of the first green.

I'm not warmed up yet so...two's the limit.

When I hit the ball into a trap, I just pick the ball up and underhand it out of the trap.

If I hit the ball into the water, I go to the place where my ball hit BEFORE it went into the water and I hit it from there.

Every horrible shot I hit, I find solace in the reality that no matter how bizarre the shot...I've definitely hit worse.

If  the ball gets lost in the woods, I play as if it went into the water.

I never forget that I'm here to relax and now here to recover.

I usually have my camera with me and I take pictures.

I keep score in my head. If I score five on each hole that's 45 as I only play nine holes at a time.

45 is pretty good.

That night as I go to sleep, I replay all of the forty five shots in my head which usually puts me to sleep.

Sometimes, I'm out on the course all by myself with no one else in sight.

At those moments, baby I'm a rich man.

Today, I'm a richer man. I won't be alone. I'm playing a best ball threesome. Because we have three guys hitting every shot, we'll have a lower score than any of us would have had if we had played alone.

My partners are Deke and Crown.

Deke, Crown and I have done a lot together.

We did the great American road trip in my truck from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We camped out almost every night under the stars down by the river.

We visited the Ponderosa Ranch in Nevada and got drunk in  the saloon where the Cartwrights drank.

We played blackjack every day and learned to count cards only to lose everything one endless night in Lake Tahoe.

We got kicked out of Candlestick Park.

We've been to the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont.

We've chilled with Muhammad Ali.

We've been through births, deaths, wedding, divorces, sickness, health and every stop in between.

We've climbed mountains and worked on Horse farms.

When Crown was an MP, he arrested Jane Fonda.

Deke got married at Graceland

Deke and Crown were there the night that Pete Rose broke the record for all time hits.

Crown and I saw Secretariat win at Belmont.

Deke helped my dying father into the ambulance in which he died.

Crown had a heart attack at the Kentucky Derby and since then has had colon cancer and open heart surgery.

Nobody can plank like Deke.

One thing we had never done before is play golf.

Two years ago, it looked like Crown wasn't going to survive his illnesses.

Last year, I had my moments of doubt.

Deke is the youngest of us and still is in great shape.

He doesn't owe anybody anything. Everything is paid up. His house. His car. His college loans. His credit cards. Everything.

So we've lived this great life together but until yesterday we had never played golf together.

Deke hadn't lifted a club in 10 years.

Crown, like me, played only 27 holes last year.

I can't lift the ball out of the hole anymore which explains why I NEVER miss a five foot putt.

Crown can't get the ball out of the  hole either. At least he thought he couldn't. Yesterday on the third hole, he reached down and plucked it out.

Way to go, Johnny

Now, because Deke is still flexible enough to pick the ball up out of the hole, we had no excuse to take gimmes on any putt. That killed us as we missed one five footer after another over and over and over and over ad museum.

We played amazingly from tee to green and from a distance might have passed as younger men but when we got on the green......fuggedaboudid.

Of course we used carts as this is the reason that God invented them.

And brothers

And friends

The sky was blue, the clouds beautiful. We talked about life. We laughed. We rejoiced. We remembered. We were present with our eyes on the ball.

It was worth the wait.

Golf they say is a sample of sorrow

A walk in the park scarred by frustration

Then we hit THAT shot...come back tomorrow

For more sorrow amidst celebration.

We retain our most ironclad of grips

We visualize keeping elbow tight

We take dead aim and we let er' rip

When we lift our eyes we see ball in flight.

When we lift our head a little too soon

Too anxious to see the ball in the air,

We won't see the sky, the sun or the moon

We'll see our ball on the tee sitting there.

We promise to always keep our head low

Then we strike a beauty and on we go.

SALAMANCA FUNDAMENTALS

My former brother-in-law Tim and I were great friends before both our marriages crashed. Tim was a lumberjack, a master with ax and chain saw.

One afternoon, Tim and I were working on a case behind the cabin that he had literally carved out of the forest for himself and my first wife's sister deep in the hills of Salamanca. Somehow or other after about ten beers apiece, the subject stumbled towards golf, specifically the origin of the game, more specifically the origin of golf clubs and finally the origin of the clubs called woods/ woods called clubs.

I speculated that in its most primitive incarnation, cavemen just used the all purpose clubs they had for survival, courtship and domestic tranquility. These clubs were made of wood.

Tim liked that idea. Next thing I knew Tim had his chain saw fired up and was cutting into a log. Wood chips flew everywhere as  Tim transformed the log into an L shaped object, handed it to me and said "here's a wood."

I held the club in my hand. The "wood" weighed about seven pounds. I told Tim the club was a little too heavy. Tim fired up the chainsaw again and trimmed about two pounds off the club while shaping a bit of a handle on top and leaving most of the weight on the bottom.

He handed me the reshafted club and I took a few swings beteeen a few swigs. The club felt great but what I wondered  was what did the first golfers hit with the first club. As we worked a little deeper into the case, we began to speculate on that problem.

Once again, Tim fired up his chain saw this time transforming another piece of wood into a solid kinda round object about tthe size of a baseball. Tim handed me the object and said "here's your ball."

As I looked at the "ball" I was amazed to observe that an object with so many flat sides could resembles something round. The invention of the ball caused more casework and label laughter.

Here's where I made my only contribution. I went over to the nearby woodpile, found a sturdy splinter, handed it to Tim and said "here's our tee". Tim took out his jack knife and whittled a roundish, flattish hollow at the top of the splinter. We put the "ball" on the 'tee" and returned to the case.

At this point our wives, annoyed by prolonged absence from the cabin , burst upon the scene and were immediately aggravated by what they saw. In the midst of her rage, Tim's wife grabbed the "club" that was leaning against a tree, walked over to the "teed" up "ball" and furiously and unknowingly hit the greatest golf shot I had ever seen with the first and only swing of her life. "The "ball" flew twenty yards, bounced off a couple of rocks, rolled a few feet and disappeared from sight.

Fueled by the combination of apology, concern and amusementthat most men use to confront aggravated spouses, Tim and I went to look for the "ball" as the sisters stormed back into the cabin muttering something about "five more minuted" and "wastes of time".

The ball had somehow found its way into a “hole” dug at some time long ago by some person or something. The "hole" was almost the exact size of the "ball". Up till that point, this was the first hole in one that I had ever seen.

FACTION IS THE NEW FICTION

As our president demonstrates each and every day, alternate truths are just a click away. Trump has already presented more than a thousand versions of the truth and since our country is based and was founded on the concept of a fantasy land, we get to choose how many of these alternatives we will swallow to determine whether or not we are red or blue with white still being a wild card.

Currently, we are trying to interpret the alternate truths that have led to the "invasion" of immigrants. Red is more convinced of invasion than blue. Red folks are even more convinced of invasion by whites and they have the history to prove it which everybody kinda ignores and for which ignorance many a casino has been built and many tobacco products sold.

We don't really know who shot either Kennedy. Even Helter Skelter begins to wobble as yet another alternate reality by Vincent Bugliosi to avert attention from Hollywood. Oh and OJ was not guilty until he was.

As usual, Tarantino got ahead of the game with his altered visions of the past including the death of Hitler (Inglorious Basterds) and the once upon a time cancellation of Helter Skelter by Leo and Brad.

All of this alteration of history can be summed up in the word "faction", Faction is both more and less than fiction and non-fiction. Faction is the intentional fictionalization of non-fiction in order to tell a better story. One of the ways to achieve faction is to have the story itself written by a fictional character If the author isn't real neither is the story no matter how closely it sticks to the facts. If the author is "real" person, she/he can grab the faction mantle by the utilization of an unreliable narrator.

Holden Caulfield admits to being a liar, right off the bat.

The Girl On The Train was drunk.

So faction is reality filled with interesting, conspiratorial lies.

Faction is the new fiction as well as the new non-fiction.

All it takes is a fraction of fiction to turn non-fiction into faction

And a fraction of non-fiction to turn fiction into faction.

Then all you need is some characters and action

And ya know what else helps a lot

Some rudimentary semblance of plot.

And for a dash of innovation

Add some internal motivation.

Who cares about "truth". Truth is 'soo' two years ago and it was shakey  then.

We don't need it.

Fuggedaboudid. We got faction and I know you love it so I'm gonna give you some more.

Because I'm neither real nor reliable although, unfortunately, I'm sober.

MAGIC POISON

Meanwhile, I've been poisoning a patch of innocent pea pods just to see what would happen to the peas.

Other pods, I've left alone just to give those routine peas a chance.

Naturally I've been raising almost as many caterpillars as I've been poisoning pods.

Just to see what might happen to the moths.

Most of the caterpillars that I've raised are immune to the poison that I've been putting in the pods.

They can eat all the poison they want and live to eat more on another day.

God knows that there's enough poison to go around.

The main reason I've been poisoning the pods, besides seeing what might happen to the peas, is to see what might happen to the spiders.

Ya see eventually the caterpillars that eat the poison peas will turn into moths.

These moths will look exactly like the moths that emerge from the caterpillars who ate the unpoisoned peas.

They will look the same and maybe even taste the same but the immune caterpillars who ate the poison peas will have a different truth when they become moths then will the other batch of moths whose pea digestion was restricted to the non-poisonous peas back in their respective caterpillar days.

"Different truth, different consequence" as Aristotle might have whispered to Krell if they had ever met. Of course, the likelihood of fictional meeting non-fictional is always very poor no matter what happens to the spiders, if ya smell what I'm cooking.

And there's a lot cooking in California.

Too bad we couldn't have doused the fires of California with the floods of Katrina and called the whole thing a wash.  

But so much for wishful thinking, even thought it is my favorite defense mechanism ( especially when the perceived threat is emotional rather than physical)

Let's return to the practical and the poisoning of peas.

What will happen to the spider?

Since all the caterpillars looked exactly alike whether or not they had eaten the peas from the poisoned pods, they would eventually grow into identical moths that I could throw into spider webs just to see what the spiders would do.

Moths fly into spider webs all of the time whereas the odds of a caterpillar showing up in a spider web are roughly those of a turtle sitting on a fence post.

I had to make sure that the caterpillars weren’t gonna turn into butterflies. Butterflies are too strong for most webs. I made sure to use the fuzziest of caterpillars. Fuzzy happens to be my nickname because my last name is Fuzzier

Both the turtle and the caterpillar would need help to get to the top of the fencepost or the silk of the web and spiders are a lot smarter than fenceposts.

A fencepost ain't gonna worry about how a turtle got upon it wheras a spider might have some concern about how a caterpillar got into the web. The spider might be a little suspicious.

Since spiders are smarter than fenceposts, suspicion is a form of intelligence.

Nothing breeds suspicion like jealousy.

Nothing breeds jealousy like love.

Love always begins with attraction.

Attraction begins with notice.

On their way to delectable mothhood, two fuzzy little caterpillars noticed one another. The male caterpillar was named Yar. The female was named Asil.

Asil was the more mature of the two which meant she thought more about reproduction than did Yar who was concentrating on chewing and crawling.

How much did Asil think of reproduction?

Let's put it this way, she was jealous of fireflies.

Asil had no idea that the peas she was eating were from the poison pod patch, unlike the peas that Yar was digesting.

Yar's peas came from a totally different patch.

I know this for a fact because I'm the guy who personally poisoned the pods and I'm the guy who determined which caterpillars got the poison peas and which ones didn't.

And I kept em separated.

I'm also the guy who fed the caterpillars.

I'm the guy who bred the caterpillars.

Like most breeders, I'm a feeder.

I knew lots of things that the caterpillars didn't know.

I'm a man for God sake. Let's hope I got more brains than a caterpillar.

Here's what I knew that the caterpillars didn't know.

I knew that they were immune to the poison peas that they didn't know they were eating.

I also knew the purpose of their lives and why they were bred and fed in the first place.......

Just to see what would happen to the spider.

Although Asil was jealous of fireflies, she didn't love fire flies.

A caterpillar loving a firefly would be sick.

Asil wasn't jealous of fireflies because they could fly.  Asil knew that someday, somehow she too would be able to fly.

Asil wasn't jealous of fireflies because of their fire because Asil sensed something that almost everybody senses unless they're sitting around a campfire.

The sparks coming from a campfire are very different than the fireflies flying near the campfire.

What appears to be fire in fireflies is really a mixture of luciferin and luciferase.

The resulting mixture is not a fire.

Fires, like truth, emanate light and heat.

Firefly fire contains no heat, only light.

Sort of like compassion.

Asil wasn't interested in truth or compassion.

Asil was interested in breeding and feeding.

Asil was more developed than Yar who was interested only in feeding.

No, Asil wasn't jealous because she loved fireflies.

Asil was jealous of the way that fireflies loved fireflies.

Fireflies flash when they're hungry or when they want sex. Every flash is a semaphor of desire either to feed or breed.

In this scenario, the female waits in the weeds untl she is luciferinated for a half second by the flash of the male flying above her.

Asil had seen this seductive behavior frequently from fireflies.

She thought it was cool.

Cool as a fire without heat yet hot as a fire without light.

FUZZY’S BLUES

I've watched the caterpillars grow into moths. I've picked out the two moths that look the best. I'm gonna throw them one at a time into a spider web that I've found. In the meantime, I want to sing you folks some blues before we all find out what the spider's gonna do. Maybe I don’t have the voice or the strum of Genesee Johnny but here we go.....

Well, it looks like it's come down to the final two

Yes, it looks like it's come down to the final two

One looks at the other and says "up to me and you".

I don't know if caterpillars have names.

I don't know if caterpillars have names.

If they don't they oughta cause they both look just the same.

I've chosen the spider, I've approved her spinning.

I've chosen that spider, I'm down with her spinning

The game is sudden death, I can't see two moths winning.

Both of the pillars have grown up to be moths.

Both caterpillars have grown up to be moths.

They're gonna get all caught up in a game of webtoss.

The lady caterpillar's chock full of poison peas.

Yeah, the female pillar all fulla poisoned peas

Yet the moth she became ain't suffereing no disease.

The male caterpillar of poison peas is free

The caterpillar man of poison peas is free.

There's a load of silk underneath the apple tree.

I'll conclude my experiment when I'm done with strummin.

I'll end my experiment when I finish this strummin'

Spin on Mona, Your poison trick or treats a comin'.

I'm gonna have some rum and apple cider too

Gonna drink some rum and suck some cider too

Then we'll find out what the spider's gonna do.

EVENTUALLY

Of course, the caterpillars eventually became moths. When they took wing, Asil became Lisa and Yar became Ray.

By the time they became reacquainted, Ray's scent brushes were loaded with alkaloid. Lisa could smell that from ten feet away. Lisa was sitting on a wire perch chemically treated with poison peas. The chemical treatment lured Lisa to the wire and Lisa lured Ray.

Lisa had already lured a dozen others to her in her four days of fertility but there was something about Ray that suggested that his alkaloid package would be the package selected for warrior offspring.

Maybe it was his size. The bigger the moth, the more the alkaloid. The more the alkaloid, the more the male moth advertises his reproductive eligibility.

This is the message Ray was sending to Lisa. 'Look at all the alkaloid I'm carrying. I get this from the flowers. If you want your kids to be able to gather a lot of alkaloid from the flowers make sure that their old man brings a load of alkaloid to the bargain'.

Ray looked big and he smelled big.

Ray was a regular Mothra.

Ray hovered over the wire.

Lisa called to Ray.

Lisa called with her scent.

Although Ray was not a butterfly, he did know how to flutter by. He did just that.

His scent brushes came out when he got in range.

Once, twice, thrice, in less than a second.

Lisa was impressed.

She accepted Ray.

The rest is moth love, too private and exquisite to describe.

Even on a weekend when practically no one is looking.

Except just a few who wonder what the spider's gonna do.

Mona the spider is fastidious. She knows how to use her silk. Her silk will be far less useful if it becomes cluttered so Mona spends most of her visible time cleaning the debris from her web.

The more debris in the web, the less clear the signal becomes when something of value is caught up in the silk.

Mona can not see all of her web so she waits between spinnings and cleanings. She stays out of sight and waits for a signal.

Her web is filled with silk spun of different levels of water content. The more water in the silk, the more elastic. The most elastic silk is in the middle of her web. These are the waterworks. When prey falls into the web, they are confronted with mysterious elasticity far beyond rubber.

Caught in the center of the silk, the prey in its struggles puts very little tension on the web. Every attempt at escape only results in tighter wrapping.

Mona reads the level of tension. She has her escape routes well designed when the tension gets too high. Mona only feeds upon appropriate tension.

All the prey can do is pray.

Mona isn't looking for a fight.

Mona is looking for food.

Even on weekends, when things are so quiet elsewhere.

I know all about Mona but not yet enough.

I'm gonna use Lisa and Ray to find out what the spider is gonna do.

And Lisa will be a momma soon, if she survives the tension.

Moth tossing is a skill. I've had a lot of practice. I'm a professional. I wouldn't try this at home if I were you.

I kept the two moths that I had raised from caterpiilars and poisoned or not poisoned in two separate vials. I took the bigger of the two out first. I knew he was the male. I figured that with his strength, I would have to get him closer to the center of the web. I grabbed him by his wings and tossed him.

My hours of practice paid off. He landed right smack dab in the middle of the web.

I opened the second vial and removed the female. I wanted to get her off to the side of the web, closer to the spider. I grabbed her wings and tossed.

Perfecto.

The female landed off to the right, very close to where I knew the spider was hiding. The male flailed more then the female but the elasticity at the center was greater. He got all wrapped up in the web. His strength and struggle didn't cause much tension on the web. The elastic web was more water than fire.

The female landed on a portion of the web that was more adhesive than elastic. She would have generated more tension on the web if she weren't so tightly stuck to her spot.

I couldn't help but notice that they seemed to glance at one another intermittently as they tried to escape. Each of them had a clear look at the fate of the other. I wondered if they wondered what the spider was going to do.

I wondered if they even knew that spiders existed. I wondered if they were afraid. I wondered if they were sympathetic towards each other.The male got even more wrapped up when he realized the female was in a predicament. Was he trying to rescue her?

Of course the possibility existed that they thought this was play, perhaps even foreplay.

I know I wasn't playing.

I know there is such a thing as spiders.

I wondered what this spider was going to do.

Mona was middle aged.

She was six months old.

Every spider month is equivalent to seven years of human life. In human terms Mona was forty two. The last of her spiderlings had balooned away. Her mate died right after mating with Mona. Such is nature.

If you've seen Spiderman, you know what balooning is. The spiderling projects a single thread of silk which sticks to a nearby object. The spider then swings to that object and baloons again. Depending on how far they want to get away from their mother, the spiderling continues to baloon and baloon.

As a mother, Mona paid attention to the spider parental creed. Make sure the spiderlings get webs and wings. This creed meant that it was important for each spiderling to feel a sense of security so that they would be willing to leave the web and establish a home of their own. The stronger the sense of web the stronger the sense of wing. The more that a spiderling loved his mother's web, the further he would distance himself from it when he finally balooned. The further away he got, the less competition his web would be for the web of his momma.

Mona's spiderlings were far, far away. They had been well raised and they loved their mother.

Mona was an empty webber.

She was acutely aware of the double disturbance in her web as she sat in her den. Her experience had taught her that it was very unlikely for two disturbances to occurr so simultaneously. She figured the commotion could be traced back to one of two possibilities. The disturbances, soon to become prey, then to become liquid then to become food, must have been romantically involved. That's why they were fluttering so near to one another.

And flying blind.

Or else the Giant had delivered them.

The Giant had been feeding Mona since she was a girl, before the mating and the spiderlings and all that jazz. She had grown to trust the Giant.

Most urgent, however, was the hunger.

I should be more specific.

Mona wouldn't take a nibble. Mona would take a suck.

Before sucking, Mona would inject either Ray or Lisa or both with venom that would turn their insides into liquid.

She would go back to her den and wait for the innards of her prey to liquify. Then she would begin to suck. Sometimes, the sucking took place right out in the open. Other times, Mona would take her silk wrapped supper into her den where she could suck in private.

I've tried to imagine what it must be like to feel my insides turning into liquid. I had food poisoning once and that did some serious liquefying.

Maximum diarrhea mixed with technicolor yawning.

I have experienced emotional liquification more frequently than physical liquification over the course of my life. When I am injected with the contempt of another person, my convictions tend to liquify. Contempt is a powerful venom. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Resentment is the natural reaction to contempt.Here's the equation to avoid.

You have contempt for me, I have resentment for you. Or vice versa.

If turning someones insides into liquid can be viewed as a physical manifestation of contempt, then I suppose the prey being liquified must be pretty resentful.

Resentment resembles jealousy and jealousy is the green eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds upon.

Contempt is an eight eyed, eight legged empty webbed widow who injects whatever she has trapped with a poison that turns their convictions into liquid so she can suck them dry and ignore their resentment.

Does contempt poison itself when it inadvertently sucks up poisoned convictions concealed within resentment?

I wondered if I would be able to pick up on any of these emotions or answer any essntial questions as I patiently sat and watched and wondered what the spider might do.

PALP FRICTION

I play the guitar a little bit.

I drink a little bit.

Sometimes I drink a little bit before I play the guitar.

Sometimes people tell me I sound better on the guitar after I've drank a little bit.

I'm pretty sure I don't sound any better but somehow when I play, I make the people who listening to me want to drink.

The more I play, the more they drink.

The more they drink, the better I sound.

So I drink even more so I can sound even better so they can drink more because I sound better which makes me want to drink more so I can sound better which will make them drink more which will make me drink more so that.......

Ya know, the usual.

I've often wished that I could drink while I was playing the guitar not just before or after. I've wondered if that would actually make my guitar playing sound even better to the folks who were listening because unlike me when I play, they are actually drinking whlle they are listening whereas I am playing under the disadvantage of not  drinking at the same instant that I am playing which puts me a little out of synch with the drunks who are listening.

I wish I had a couple of extra hands coming out of my mouth.

If I did, I could pour the beer down my throat while at the same time playing the guitar with my other two hands.

Spiders have two little hands coming out of their mouths.

Those two little hands are called palps. Spiders use those pulps to hold on to whatever they are going to sink their fangs into. Sometimes they use the palps to make changes in the thread of their webs. They grasp the thread with their palps and amend the web with thier mouths.

Spiders don't play the guitar unless of course, they happen to be Spiders from Mars.

The moths are in the web.

I've got a cold beer in my hands.

I'm sipping the beer and wondering what the spider's gonna do.

Let's remember, the moth nearest the spider was the moth who ate the poisoned peas.

I figured that the spider would go to the nearest meal. The spider would nibble on the pregnant moth with the poisoned peas. The spider would realize that something was wrong. The spider would choose one of her escape routes. She would return to her corner.

She would feel weak. She would ascertain from the vibes coming through the silk that the meal furthest away was too strong for her to overwhelm. She would wait until her queasiness subsided. Then she would return to the near meal and nibble a little bit more.

I knew something that she couldn't possibly know. The meal she was nibbling on was poisonous. Every nibble would make her weaker.

I didn't know who would die first, the poisoned spider or the moths struggling in the web.I wondered if it was the silk that killed the moth or was it the spider. If the spider died first, I would free the moths from the web.

I figured the whole deal might take a day after the first taste. This is what I thought the spider might do.

I waited to find out what the spider would actually do.

SIX YEAR DAY

Every day in the life of a moth is like six years in the life of a human.

Lisa was six days old in real time which means thirty six years old in human time.

Lisa had spent the first twenty four years of her life in heat. During those years she had rubbed plenty of abdomens while being embraced by many a clasper.

Twice she had felt threatened during a momentary mating session. Moths are pollinators not fighters. When the choice comes to fight or flight, the moth will choose flight. Lisa and her lover took off as one, the claspers coming off his abdomen holding her close even as they fluttered away, conjoined amorously, from the perceived danger.

Lisa remembered both of those occasions. They were thrilling and embarrasing at the same time. Even though they were memorable, the couplings were meaningless. Lisa and her mate were both distracted while flying away from danger and although they completed their intercourse, lack of purposeful, reproductive concentration assured that neither coupling would be fertile.

In human life, this is known as a flying fuck. Of course humans can not fly and will very often choose fight over flight when threatened. The human term "flying fuckk" refers to not paying proper attention to an endeavor due to a lack of committment in that project.

When Lisa finally met Ray, they both had a chance to concentrate. Ray was a big moth to begin with but he transferred ten percent of his body mass, in the form of spermatazoa, into Lisa.

This transfer proved to be fertile.

Lisa, in the web, was very pregnant.

And loaded with nutrients.

And poison.

Ray had struggled with liquidity and silk before. He didn't think it was such a bad thing. Ray held no resentment for that struggle. As a matter of fact, he saw his situation as another shot at renewal.

Remember, Ray had ben Yar.

Dejavu all over again.

When Yar, the poison free caterpillar, had reached his full size, he had already prepared to complete metamorphosis, the radical change in body form that turns a caterpillar into a moth.  Yar had pupated  himself to a twig.  To anchor himself to his twig, Yar had spun a button of silk from his mouthparts, then grasped the silk button with his cremaster, a clawlike structure at the end of the abdomen. Hanging from the twig, Yar had shed his skin to reveal the pupa underneath. Before becoming a pupa, Yar had spun a cocoon of silk around his body.  The silk of the past had protected Yar from predators and from drying out.

Silk was neither an enemy nor a stranger.

Within the pupa, Yar's tissues and organs had broken  down into a soupy liquid, and then reassembled into the tissues and organs of Ray. Groups of cells known as the imaginal discs remained complete, and Ray's mighty structure took shape as directed by these cells.

When Ray's development was complete, he had split the pupal shell and crawled out. Then he had unfolded his wings which pumped blood into his veins. Ray remembered spreading his wings until they dried and hardened. Ray flew away and eventually mated with Lisa.

And now he found himself in silk once again.

Ray was confident this was just another stage of maturity.

He would emerge from this silk and fly away again.

Ray thought he was turning into a bird.

He looked forward to spreading new wings.

Ray had no idea that spiders even existed so he didn't wonder at all what Mona would do.

Ray had changed a lot since the days of Yar.

Ya might say he matured. He was no longer thinking primarily about crawling and feeding, he was thinking now about flying and breeding. He suspected the web was another form of cocoon which meant it was another stage in development.

Another passage.

Another promotion.

Ray was happy that Lisa was involved in the same passage, the same struggle, the same silk at the same time in the same place.

Ray began to understand love.

He and Lisa would become birds together. They would build a nest on some distant chapparal and have babies. He would become Ayr. Lisa wpould become Sail. Together they would sail through the air until they found the acre or two of brushy teritory which would be their secret homeland.

They would be secure.

They would be mates for life. They would never wander from their nest. Their nest would be a compact cup of grass, fibers and bark bound with silk.

Each day, they would make the rounds of their territory, right up to the river. They would feed, bathe, take care of their young and fend off interlopers. Sail would be Ayr's constant companion. They would take delight in bouts of mutual preening as they took care to inspect and arrange each other's plumage. By night, they'd huddle together against the chill. They'd face in the same direction so near together that they would appear as a single ball of feathers from which tails, wings and feet protruded.

They would always be together.

They would stay out of sight.

They would be heard more than they would be seen but they wouldn't be heard very often.

They'd live in a tree fifteen feet off the ground when they weren't sailing through the air.

Ray was thinking about Ayr and Sail when Mona sank her fang into him.

Love hurts.

After the puncture, while his insides were turning to liquid and just before his final breath Ray, still expecting to become a bird, thought his final thought. This is what he thought:

It could have been worse.

Lisa, on the other hand, continued to be more mature than Ray. Lisa had moved beyond contemplations of breeding and feeding and had moved towards contemplations of death and deliverance but not in that order.

Lisa observed the death of Ray. She felt no sadness.Ray had done his job. She still needed to do hers. She needed to deliver the eggs that she and Ray had created.

She knew she was going to die.

Ray, in his immmaturity, had considered himself immortal with death merely another stage of metamorphasis.

Ray's immaturity prevented him from the fear of death.

Lisa was afraid to die.

Lisa knew that her life was incomplete.

Lisa had learned what a spider is and the part a spider can play in deathmaking.

Lisa knew she was next.

Her eggs would die with her.

It couldn't get any worse.

The spider returned and rappeled down the silk towards the moth that I had raised on poisoned peas.

Poison's a funny thing. Poison consists of chemicals. After we ingest poison, our liver uses enzymes to convert those chemicals into poisons. If we don't have the enzymes that convert the chemicals into poisons than the chemicals within the poison are of no threat to us.

The moth was missing the enzymes that would turn the chemicals from the peas into poison but the spider possessed those enzymes in spades.

If the spider ate the moth whose innards she had already liquified, there would be no problem.

If the spider ate he second moth, there would be a big problem.

Death by poison for Mona

Death by liquidity for Lisa.

Choices, decisions, consequences.

The spider was all fangs and palps.

The moth was all vulnerability except for the wild card of hidden toxicity.

The spider decided that she didn't want the moth. She backed off. She began cutting. She took the thread with her palps and put it in her mouth. She cut a perfect window in the web with her sharp fangs.

The moth fell free from the web.

The moth took flight.

The spider returned to her watch.

I found out what the spider would do.

Lisa delivered.

Spiders will do what Mona did.

They recognize poison when they sense it and hungry is better than dead, especially with delicious Ray a goner in the silk.

After the puncture, while his insides were turning to liquid and just before his final breath Ray, still expecting to become a bird, thought his final thought. This is what he thought:

It could have been worse.

Lisa, on the other hand, continued to be more mature than Ray. Lisa had moved beyond contemplations of breeding and feeding and had moved towards contemplations of death and deliverance but not in that order.

Lisa observed the death of Ray. She felt no sadness.Ray had done his job. She still needed to do hers. She needed to deliver the eggs that she and Ray had created.

She knew she was going to die.

Ray, in his immmaturity, had considered himself immortal with death merely another stage of metamorphasis.

Ray's immaturity prevented him from the fear of death.

Lisa was afraid to die.

Lisa knew that her life was incomplete.

Lisa had learned what a spider is and the part a spider can play in deathmaking.

Lisa knew she was next.

Her eggs would die with her.

It couldn't get any worse.

The spider returned and rappeled down the silk towards the moth that I had raised on poisoned peas.

Poison's a funny thing. Poison consists of chemicals. After we ingest poison, our liver uses enzymes to convert those chemicals into poisons. If we don't have the enzymes that convert the chemicals into poisons than the chemicals within the poison are of no threat to us.

The moth was missing the enzymes that would turn the chemicals from the peas into poison but the spider possessed those enzymes in spades.

If the spider ate the moth whose innards she had already liquified, there would be no problem.

If the spider ate he second moth, there would be a big problem.

Death by poison for Mona

Death by liquidity for Lisa.

Choices, decisions, consequences.

The spider was all fangs and palps.

The moth was all vulnerability except for the wild card of hidden toxicity.

The spider decided that she didn't want the moth. She backed off. She began cutting. She took the thread with her palps and put it in her mouth. She cut a perfect window in the web with her sharp fangs.

The moth fell free from the web.

The moth took flight.

The spider returned to her watch.

I found out what the spider would do.

Lisa delivered.

Spiders will do what Mona did.

They recognize poison when they sense it and hungry is better than dead, especially with delicious Ray a goner in the silk.

I felt pretty good after I found out what the spider did. I didn't know whether or not the spider would be smart enough to avoid the moth who had eaten the poisoned peas. The spider was smart enough to discern the presence of poison in her web. If we were all smart enough to know which moth is poisoned and which one ain't. If we resisted the urge to do what we can do and instead focused on doing what we should do, the world would be a much better place.

Speaking of better places, Lisa's delivery was a better begining. Her offspring, half poison and half not would never have to liquefy in silk and contempt.

As evening fell, I decided to smoke a cigar.

My work was done.

I know I shouldn't smoke but what the hell, I had just learned a great lesson.

The night was still. Fireflies were everywhere. I lit a candle. I stuck the end of my cigar into the flame of the candle. I took a couple of puffs.

I blew three perfect smoke rings.

Perfect smoke rings are possible on a windless night.

As the third smoke ring floated away, a moth flew right through the midddle of it and headed towards the candle flame.

As the moth neared the flame, I noticed threads of silk dangling from the wings of the moth.

The moth didn't get any nearer to the flame than moths always get to a flame but not too many moths are carrying a thread of silk.

It was the silk, not the moth, that kissed the candle. The flame shot right up the silk. The moth burst into fire and headed towards the smoke rings expanding in the distance.

The moth momentarily stood out amidst the fireflies.

The moth had become flying fire.

Then it disappeared from my view forever.

Peace, at last.

[lets-talk-about-politics]

What the Hell is Wrong with the Republican Party?

Table of Contents: 

The State of the Republican Party

The “Southern Strategy” and the “Silent Majority”

The “Religious Right”, the “Prosperity Gospel”, and Religious Crusade

The Rise of Conservative Media

A Radicalized and Obstructionist GOP Congress

Donald Trump and the Populist Rebellion

How Do We Save the Republican Party?

Preface 

This article is a very, very cursory overview of the history that I’m discussing. Each of the sections in this article could be a PhD dissertation. I’m essentially fitting 55 years of history into 4,000 words, and in doing so, I’m simplifying things quite a bit. But I stand by my depiction of the events themselves, as well as my analysis of those events. So give it a read, click on some of the links for further reading, and do some research of your own. The purpose of this article isn’t to demean or to vilify, it’s to instruct. And we’re going to need to sit down, read opposing perspectives, and do some analysis in order to move the country away from illiberalism and towards a more true democracy.

The State of the Republican Party

If you were to ask a Republican today what conservatism is, they would probably give you some version of the Reagan-era doctrine: respect for traditional social values, liberty above all, free trade, free market, private ownership, etc.

But that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Sure, some Republicans pretend that it does. Paul Ryan’s health care bill is an extreme version of Reagan-era conservatism: cut entitlement programs, cut taxes on the rich to stimulate economic growth, etc. But Paul Ryan isn’t the Republican Party. Neither is Mitch McConnell. Neither is Mike Pence. The country doesn’t really want them anymore. They’re desperately holding onto an idea that has been rejected by the American people, even by the base that they’ve tenuously held onto, though that hold has been slipping and continues to slip to this day.

Case in point: 

The AHCA, Paul Ryan’s health care bill, had only 21% approval when it passed. 64% of voters like the Affordable Care Act’s protections for pre-existing conditions, something that many conservatives hate.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 63% of Americans believe upper-income Americans pay too little in taxes, while 67% of Americans believe that corporations pay too little in taxes. Meanwhile, only 14% of Americans believe that lower-income Americans pay too little, down from 24% five years ago. Tax cuts for the rich and increased spending for the poor is a major component of the Republican Party’s agenda, and most Americans want nothing to do with it.

Republicans’ social agenda is, for the most part, widely unpopular as well. According to a recent Gallup poll, 64% of Americans support same-sex marriage being legal, with 47% of Republicans believing that as well. 

It should be noted that all of these numbers are only going to get worse over time. Americans are increasingly adopting the view that things like same-sex marriage should be legal, that rich people should pay more taxes, and that health care should be more comprehensive and more universal.

So, with that in mind, why are Republicans clinging to this dying agenda like their lives depend on it? Why would they be so desperate to push through that agenda that they are willing to support Donald Trump, a sexual predator who is now under investigation for colluding with Russia during the election, a man who has now almost certainly committed obstruction of justice? Do they really believe that lying about their agenda, which they have shamelessly done with the AHCA, will really work once the full effects of their agenda hits their voter base?

What the hell is wrong with them? Let’s take a look. 

The “Southern Strategy” and the “Silent Majority”

The Republican Party wasn’t always like this. It was a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s that really ushered in this modern shift. Barry Goldwater believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional, thought that the federal government shouldn’t have the authority to force states to comply with a definition of racial equality, and with that, he welcomed in southern segregationists where they were previously distanced from the party.

Black voters clearly received the message. Around 60% of black voters were Democrats in 1960; around 90% of black voters were Democrats in 1968. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party completely lost the South after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have never won it back since. A decision to cross the rubicon and let in the violence and the vitriol associated with segregationist attitudes remade the Republican Party because they began to see what they could do with it. Even if Goldwater didn’t believe in the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act because of federal overreach instead of a personal segregationist attitude, it didn’t matter. Playing off of the fear of change and the fear of the “other” has its advantages, namely, that there are more scared white voters than there are black voters.

They continued to capitalize on this strategy with Nixon’s campaign and his famous coining of the phrase “silent majority”. When he used that phrase in his famous 1969 speech, he wasn’t explicitly calling on white voters, but the “silent majority” was the antithesis to the “vocal minority” protesting Vietnam and other Nixon-era policies in the streets. The silent majority were those white people afraid of change, afraid of a future where the women’s rights movement and the Black Panthers and changing social norms made them somehow irrelevant and wrong.

But, of course, he didn’t come out and explicitly say “white people”, just as he didn’t explicitly say that his war on drugs was purposed to target black people and “hippies”. He was able to code racial rhetoric, using “dog whistle” phrases to remain “respectable’ while still winking at the fear and the violent anger of white people horrified at the notion of change.

This tactic has been employed over and over again, with Reagan as shown in Atwater’s infamous interview in 1981, with George H.W. Bush as shown in his Willie Horton campaign ad in 1988, with Ailes and the racist programming of Fox News, and with Donald Trump’s violent nativism and depiction of “inner cities” as eviscerated by “American Carnage”.

The rhetoric has only gotten more and more vicious, more and more violent, and has disconnected the Republican Party further and further from today’s reality. It has seeped into and infected almost every facet of conservatism and the Republican Party. Goldwater’s “Southern Strategy” and its use by Nixon really paved the way for Donald Trump today.

The “Religious Right”, the “Prosperity Gospel”, and Religious Crusade

Both political parties have been infused with Christian rhetoric for a long, long time, but it was Ronald Reagan that supercharged the Republican Party with evangelical Christianity. In the 1980 election, he very publicly aligned himself with the religious right and the Moral Majority, giving members from the Moral Majority speaking spots at the GOP conventions and positions as advisors to his campaign. He drastically modulated his tone as well, advocating “God in the classroom” as he referred to classroom prayer, expressing doubts about the theory of evolution, and asserting that the separation of church and state was unnecessary, as religious values should be allowed in government. He also openly embraced the “Southern Strategy”, beginning his campaign in the heart of Mississippi, declaring that he “believed in states’ rights”, a refrain used to justify regressive policy and a classic falsity about why the Civil War occurred. 

The policy implications of the merger between Reagan and the Moral Majority cut deep into his presidency. His reaction (or non-reaction) to the AIDS crisis was unconscionable, as it reeked of homophobia and essentially let a generation of homosexual men die from disease. He opposed not only LGBTQ rights, but welcomed in the racism of the Southern Strategy by also opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. This kind of racism was clearly evident in his renewed dedication to the War on Drugs, as he signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, where he created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses, paving the way to the mass incarceration of black people and the new Jim Crow.

The prosperity gospel, a strain of Christian thought that taught that God favors those with wealth, bled into conservative ideology, as evidenced by increasingly draconian economic policy (trickle-down economics). The wedding of the prosperity gospel and conservative ideology has deep implications to this day, as some who voted for the AHCA have voiced that poor people should simply live good lives like healthy people, and many conservatives value “personal responsibility” over all else.

The issue with this isn’t just that it produced bad policy, but also that it paved the way for candidates that infused politics and political crises with a deadly amount of religion. George W. Bush considered his doctrine “compassionate conservatism”, and to an extent, that was accurate. His AIDS initiative, where he funneled billions of dollars into helping those suffering from the disease in Africa, was extraordinarily compassionate. But part of what pushed him to commit as heavily as he did to the Iraq War was his born-again, evangelical Christianity.

George W. Bush was a deeply religious man, born again as an evangelical Christian in 1985. He brought that into his presidency, his staff expected to attend daily prayer meetings, religion laced into many of his speeches. After 9/11, he believed that he was undertaking a crusade to rid the world of evil and bring the beauty of democracy to countries that need it. That definition, painting the enemy as a force of evil, an “axis of evil”, paved the way for the atrocities that were committed during the Iraq War, the horrors at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. If religion can be a way to better the lives of others, a way to emphasize “compassionate conservatism”, it can also be a way to justify making others’ lives a living hell, torturing them because they are the embodiment of evil.

And supercharging conservatism with religion as a method of justification, as a method to convince conservatives that some are worthy of humanity while others are not, led to the rise of Donald Trump. 

The Rise of Conservative Media

With Roger Ailes’ death recently, there has been a lot of soul-searching among conservatives, where they pontificate on how Roger Ailes has been revolutionary, but destructive. And that’s true. Roger Ailes’ media empire has created an enormous amount of influence and has transformed conservatism as we know it. But conservative media existed before Roger Ailes, and the conservative media outlets that spawned from the mainstreaming of conservative news have been far more vitriolic and hateful than Fox News.

Magazines and media outlets such as National Review have existed since the 50s, and are still seen as a legitimate authority today. But it was talk radio that pushed the boundary of acceptability, in that it existed outside of the realm of journalism, strictly and unapologetically advocating one point of view, aiming for ratings and profit above substance. Conservative talk ratio found prominence in the 1990s with Rush Limbaugh becoming popular, but didn’t explode until after the 9/11 attack, when people like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham rode the nationalist wave to the radio.

It’s also worth noting that conservative talk radio has bled into mainstream channels like Fox News, with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity having their own very, very popular shows. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity were not moderated by having a presence on a mainstream news network; rather, Fox News was further radicalized by these far-right voices. Just recently, Sean Hannity, host of one of the top-rated shows on cable television, has been pushing an insane conspiracy theory about a DNC staffer who was killed, saying that it is somehow connected to the Trump/Russia scandal and the DNC hacking. Glenn Beck fanned the flames of the Tea Party with his doomsaying, talking about how Obama would bring about the end of democracy with his agenda. Fox News, while still holding onto a couple respectable reporters, has largely become radicalized, and now acts as a sort of state propaganda engine for the Trump administration.

Watching Fox News, as opposed to watching CNN, is like experiencing a completely different reality. MSNBC has tried something similar, infusing their late-night programming (All In with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show) with a liberal edge, but those hosts, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, still have a respectability to them (Rachel Maddow is a Rhodes scholar, Chris Hayes has a BA from Brown). This is likely because the origin story of conservative-leaning news is different from that of liberal-leaning news, where conservative-leaning news is deeply entangled with infotainment talk radio.

This feverish drive for ratings and profit, especially during the Obama era, has created a conservative base that is increasingly entrenched in their own reality, offering something genuinely detached from the reporting of other news sources. It contributed to the radicalization of conservatives, pushing them further right, but more than that, it stirred up a rabid hatred of liberals (“snowflakes”) and liberal values while promoting a nativism and a fear of the “other”. Fox News and conservative media have played a massive role in the denigration of conservative values, tainting them with a ruthless drive for profit that manifested itself in vile fearmongering.

But even Fox News is now fighting for relevance, with far more extreme outlets (Breitbart, InfoWars) taking hold of the conservative base. Breitbart, by far, had the most influence over the conservative media ecosystem during the 2016 election, completely eclipsing Fox News. Breitbart doesn’t even have the whiff of integrity that Fox News has, its sexism and racism even more blatant and more extreme. Even peddlers of conspiracy theories, media outlets like InfoWars, are gaining more popularity despite have no credibility at all. InfoWars even has temporary White House press credentials.

Ailes’ death seems a fitting bookend to an era of increasingly radicalized conservative media, resulting in the birth or mainstreaming of extreme outlets like Breitbart, Daily Caller, and InfoWars, outlets that are detached from fact-based reporting. We now live in the era of “fake news”, where those extreme outlets peddle stories that aren’t based in fact, all while calling respectable reporting from CNN and New York Times fake news.

Modern conservatism has been irreparably damaged by conservative media’s radicalization, and has helped lead to the rise of Donald Trump.

A Radicalized and Obstructionist GOP Congress

It started with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. He made an effort to destroy congressional expertise, making it easier to pass ideological instead of practical legislation. He elevated legislative obstructionism to a level unseen in modern political history. He peddled in conspiracy theories such as the Vince Foster absurdity, vindictively presiding over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Newt Gingrich did more to destroy Congress as an institution than almost anybody else in modern political history, and he paved the way for the obstructionist nightmare that was Congress during the Obama presidency.

When Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican reaction was extreme. John Boehner wanted to stop movement in Congress entirely. Mitch McConnell’s biggest goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Obstructionism reached new heights, with judicial nominees being blocked in unprecedented fashion, budgets turning into vicious battlegrounds, and almost zero cooperation on major votes. Probably the most insane example of Republican obstructionism was the blocking of Merrick Garland as Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. The Senate refused to even hold a hearing on him, essentially keeping him off of the Supreme Court, holding the seat open until maybe a Republican president comes around (which indeed happened). What made this obstructionism so dangerous wasn’t just how it made Congress grind to a halt, but also how it led to the breakdown of political norms.

Congress also became increasingly radicalized. With some voters believing that Obama was going to commit unspeakable atrocities against the country, whether it was a descent into socialism or a coup, they came together into the Tea Party, which spoke of revolution and replacing establishment shills with extremists that would actually change things. The revolution deeply affected the Republican Party, as many were primaried and replaced with these more extreme politicians. One of the most notable primary battles was in 2014, with Eric Cantor vs. Dave Brat, where Cantor (someone that the Republican Party had high hopes for) lost by around 10 percent of the vote. These radicalized members of Congress pushed increasingly radical agendas (the Republican Party platform in 2016 was the most extreme in decades and decades), advocating total and complete resistance while demonizing liberals and peddling paranoid conspiracy theories. Birtherism may not have been born from the Tea Party, but it was enabled by it, with racist rhetoric about the Obamas intensifying as the Tea Party grew in strength.

Their radical agenda of revolution also led to near catastrophes, with the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 creating the most volatile week in financial markets since the 2008 financial crisis. It also led to the government shutdown of 2013, where Ted Cruz tried to push Obama to strip the Affordable Care Act of funding, only to have the government shutdown for 16 days, after which Ted Cruz was largely stripped of credibility (we all remember him reading Green Eggs and Ham during a filibuster). These crises only decreased public trust in Congress, with approval of Congress at a historic low of 9% after the 2013 government shutdown.

If people voted for Trump because of dissatisfaction, positioning Congress as a radical do-nothing entity only pushed the country into his grasp. 

Donald Trump and the Populist Rebellion

We still don’t entirely know why Donald Trump won. The reasons are too numerous to count. Economic anxiety, racial anxiety, misogyny (whether external or internalized), dissatisfaction with “elites”, a polarized and often dissatisfactory fourth estate, fear-mongering rhetoric about immigrants and terrorists, Russian interference, the rise of illiberalism in Europe, the insular nature of social media. We can go on and on about why Donald Trump won, but here, let’s talk about one specific reason: the failure of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party, in 2012, released an RNC Election-Autopsy Report, where they discussed what major changes the Party needed to make in order to change public perception and start winning elections. Their analysis dictated that they should be more open to immigration, that they should advocate for policies that help women, that they should reach out more to college students (who largely see the Republican Party as a joke), and that they should go after corporations that advocate for executives over middle-class workers. It’s a position that they felt would help create longevity for their party, make it so that they’re able to win elections long-term.

So why didn’t they follow that report? Instead of moving in another direction, Tea Party candidates kept winning elections and the GOP candidates for the 2016 presidential election were far-right extremists like Ted Cruz and boring rank-and-file candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. What went wrong? Well, the base for the Republican Party wasn’t a group that advocated for immigration reform, tax cuts for the rich, and deregulation. They were simply angry and wanted something to be different. Everything that had happened for decades and decades up to this point (Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Reagan’s evangelism, the toxicity of conservative media, and a radicalized Congress at a standstill) created a GOP base that peddled dark conspiracy theories, vicious racism and nativism, and a hatred for liberals and Democrats. The RNC Election-Autopsy Report was always going to be a joke because how does a political party with that kind of history just turn on a dime? How does a political party change when it’s unwilling to come to grips with the violence of its history?

And because the Republican Party wasn’t willing to come to grips with its history, because it had created a voter base that was furious and desperate and needed change, they didn’t choose somebody remarkably unlikable like Ted Cruz or bland and still disliked like Marco Rubio. They chose somebody that made them feel good, somebody who wasn’t a political elite or a cultural elite, somebody that carried with him the narrative that he was a winner who cared about the things they cared about: Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has no real policy agenda. He has no depth of understanding of the issues facing the country. He has no experience at leading anything that isn’t his company. But he said what his base had been thinking of years: the world is scary, Mexicans are stealing jobs and are raping our country, China is stealing from us, we need to become tough and strong again and not be wimpy and cowardly like the politicians in Washington. 2016 was the election of fear, and since Donald Trump won, conservatism has become even more toxic and violent, with reporters being harassed and beaten, people like Milo Yiannopolous, Richard Spencer, and Alex Jones becoming household names, and media outlets like Fox News essentially becoming state propaganda. We often hear the narrative that the Democratic Party is dying while the GOP is in complete power, but Trump’s election was the Republican Party killing itself, modern conservatism becoming poisoned beyond repair.

Donald Trump’s administration has been wracked with scandal from Day 1, and the GOP Congress both cannot lead with the scandal around them and don’t know how to lead. The only major piece of legislation passed is the AHCA through the House, and very few Republicans want to touch a bill that unbelievably unpopular and that poorly crafted. So what happens next? Donald Trump will eventually leave office and the Republican Party and modern conservatism will have to move on. But what does that even look like?

How Do We Save the Republican Party?

I don’t write any of this to say that conservatism is moronic and immortal, that Republicans are bad people, and that everybody on the right is racist and stupid. I know that there is a lot of anger and pain on both sides, that many conservatives believe that liberals think poorly of them. But that’s not what I think, and that’s not the point of this article. The point of all of this is to say that a strong Republican Party is necessary to serve as a counterbalance to a strong Democratic Party, that a conservatism divorced from vicious nativism and racism is necessary for a robust political discourse, and that revitalizing the Republican Party and redeeming it should be a priority for every American.

So what can Republicans do to revitalize their party? What lessons do we learn from this history?

First, Donald Trump has to go. Anybody connected to Donald Trump has to go. Desires for politicians to enrich themselves through their office need to be curbed, and curbed hard. Strict punishment needs to be enforced for corruption, as Trump has enabled corruption through his incredibly corrupt practices. Efforts also have to be taken to curb the rhetoric surrounding his campaign and his presidency. The GOP has winked at racists, homophobes, and sexists for decades, and there needs to be an active effort to reform the party to a place where they’re accepting of people who live differently than your average straight white male. But Donald Trump is a huge, huge problem that needs to be fixed before anything else can be done.

Second, the center-right needs to be rebuilt. The center-right is the bulwark against extremism in the party. Politics on the right have become way too extreme, with people like Mike Pence considered normal. Mike Pence is not normal. He is an extreme ideologue who advocates extreme policy, such as torturing young LGBTQ individuals through conversion therapy. The Republican Party needs to make an effort to weed out the extremists and replace them with center-right candidates who actually want to solve problems instead of advocate for policies that match extreme ideology.

Third, the Republican Party needs to become a party of ideas that respects its base. Right now, the Republican Party doesn’t do either of those things. They have remarkably few ideas that will actually produce positive results for the majority of Americans. They peddle conspiracy theories, whether through Fox News, the politicians in Congress, or administration officials. They lie to their base, telling them outright falsehoods about major legislation like the AHCA. All politicians lie, yes, but there needs to still be a level of respect for voters, treating them like people who would care about tax reform if you sold them hard enough on it. This means that the Republican Party needs to denounce media outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars, and even Fox News when they peddle stories that are nonsense. 

Fourth, the level of money in politics needs to decrease, and fast. 80% of all of the dark money in politics goes to Republicans. That is unacceptable. Republicans need to look at Donald Trump’s populist ideas during his campaign and find ways to tailor that approach to policies that will actually help that base and not their donors. If that means finding ways to help alleviate the opioid epidemic, great. If that means finding ways to reform politics to take dark money out, great. If that means loosening their position on market-based health insurance, great. Dark money is a blight on politics and the Republican Party has benefited on it for far too long, poisoning themselves in the process. Stances like climate denial are disgraceful and reek or corruption.

There are numerous other things that the Republican Party can do, but it’s all going to take time, and lots of it. Conservatives that care about the future of the Republican Party need to make an effort to do better, if not for the sake of the liberals on the other side of the aisle, then for the country at large. Because, at this rate, the Republican Party threatens to shred apart the political climate in America, promising things that aren’t true, training their base to be hateful and violent, and enriching themselves through their political donors and their corruption.

This cannot continue. It’s time to do better.

[networkingdefinition]

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Official Website: Cowboy Quotes

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• A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys. And that’s what people pay for – to see the bad guys get beat. – Sonny Liston • A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow. – Edward Abbey • A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured. Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.” “No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker. – Patricia Briggs • A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys – they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys. – Val Kilmer • A lot of the issues of the Dallas Cowboys yesterday having pressure on Tony Romo, came from the outside pressure. – Emmitt Smith • A new cologne is coming out. It’s for cowboys, and it’s made from cow’s manure. That way the women will be on you like flies! – Bill Maher • A second floor window opened, and Kyle stuck his head and shoulders out so he could look down at us. “If you two are finished playing Cowboy and Indian out there, some of us would like to get their beauty sleep.” I looked at Warren. “You heard ‘um Kemo Sabe. Me go to my little wigwam and get ‘um shut-eye.” “How come you always get to play the Indian?” whined Warren, deadpan. “Cause she’s the Indian, white boy,” said Kyle. – Patricia Briggs • According to a British poll, you’ve only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don’t run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers. – Jay Leno • All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York. – Tom Clancy • All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn’t define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that’s fine. – Mark Hoppus • All of you cowboys, fight for your land. – Woody Guthrie • Always have faith in God, Yourself and the Cowboys. – Eddie Sutton • American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn’t happy with that idea. I’d always had pretty long hair back then – in college, particularly – so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie. – Harrison Ford • Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay. – Larry McMurtry • And than suddenly he was there, charging down the hallway like death in a cowboy duster. – Richelle Mead • And what do we have here? A scary monster, cowboy, and a fairy princess! Here’s a hit of ecstasy, run along now. – James St. James • Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends – who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me – trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things. – Jake Gyllenhaal

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• Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow. – Edward Abbey • Cowboys, just like the word says. – John Wayne • Despite what people think of cowboys, they take pride in how they look, and that look is important to them. – Steve Kanaly • Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?’ No,’ I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it’s not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. – Jerry Spinelli • Don’t get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn’t the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. – Tom Johnson • Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. – Craig Thompson • Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons. – Naomi Klein • en you show up to work and put on your undergarments, throw on your suspenders and your cowboy boots, throw some dirt on you, and then get on your spurs, you start to walk a bit different. When you put on your gun belts, you change again. You go through this whole transformation process. All that stuff changes you. Riding a horse changes the way you walk and your demeanor. – James Badge Dale • Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case. – George Friedman • Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did. – Lee Iacocca • For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It’s a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It’s the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that. – Michael Gambon • For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious–or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. – Naomi Wolf • For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness…. The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well. – Edmund White • For some reason cowboy sounds better than cowman. – Demetri Martin • France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. – Adam Michnik • Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. – Rebecca Solnit • Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day.” -Liberty – Lisa Kleypas • He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn’t someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool. – Derek Landy • He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something. – Gena Showalter • Hey. Hands off.” “, ““Please. Please, please, soooo pretty. Lemme just have one little touch.” ““Peabody, isn’t it embarrassing enough you’re wearing pink cowboy boots, again, without standing here drooling on my coat?””, [J.D. Robb, Celebrity In Death] – Nora Roberts • How odd it is that sewing is thought to be ‘women’s work’ when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn’t they make better surgeons too? – Gretel Ehrlich • I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs. – Dick Dale • I always wanted to be a cowboy, and Jedi Knights are basically cowboys in space, right? – Liam Neeson • I always wore cowboy boots and drove a truck, and talked like this. So everywhere I would go in comedy people would say, “Foxworthy, you ain’t nothing but a redneck from Georgia!” It kind of became a formula joke. – Jeff Foxworthy • I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi. – Robert Frost • I came in with my idea of what a cowboy would wear, but then I met some real cowboys and they said that I rode the horses well, shoed the horses, but no good cowboy would be wearing a pair of Levi’s. I had to get a good old pair of Wranglers. – Steve Kanaly • I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. – Michael Stipe • I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow. – Henry Green • I couldn’t do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we’d go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life. – Chris Colfer • I didn’t always know, but I always wanted to. I always wanted to be the very best receiver the Cowboys ever had. That was my goal coming in as a rookie and my goal throughout my career: being the best they ever had, going up in the Ring of Honor. – Michael Irvin • I didn’t come to Nashville to put on a cowboy hat and pretend to be a country singer. My attraction to Nashville as Music City is the variety and flexibility: the fact that there’s so many musicians at your disposal, so many amazing studios and talented people that you can draw from. … I try to be myself, but at the same time I’m learning a lot, and I’m pulling from not only from the well of inspiration that I’m getting from Nashville, but I’m pulling from my roots. – John Oates • I didn’t want to play a rancher. I didn’t want to have a cowboy hat on; I wanted to get away from that in the things I do. But I read the script and fell in love with it. As hard as I tried to say no, I couldn’t. – Tim McGraw • I don’t care about going down in history as a great bull rider or bronc rider. I hope people will remember me as a great cowboy. – Ty Murray • I don’t walk around with a cowboy hat. I did get a tattoo that says ‘cowboy’ that’s a bit of an over-compensation, probably. – Ronnie Dunn • I feel like a real cowboy! Yippi Ki Yay! – Kurt Angle • I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time. – John Sayles • I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere. – James Badge Dale • I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I’m an emotional kind of person anyway. – Josh Holloway • I grew up in Dallas, with cowboys. I was the only guy in sixth grade with long hair and an earring. Let’s just say I got a lot of, er, flak for being different. – Barry Watson • I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life. – Reba McEntire • I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened. – Noam Chomsky • I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films. Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you. – Andrea Arnold • I had done my first picture and I didn’t have anything to do for awhile. I was asked to come back to New York and do Bus Stop in the role of the cowboy opposite Kim Stanley. – Dick York • I had read the Animal House script, and by hook and crook, I finally got an audition. It was a great one. John Landis followed me out into the hallway afterward and said, “I’ve never done this before, but you’ve got the job. Now don’t tell anyone!” I’ve never had a director do that. It was one of those Hollywood-dream-come-true stories. They saw me as a surfer or cowboy, not a preppie, but someone begged and borrowed me an audition, and I went in and got it. – Tim Matheson • I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man. – John Hodgman • I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already. – Orlando Bloom • I hope my music sets up the platform for me to be able to do lots of things – to have a cowboy-boot line, maybe, or do a perfume or makeup deal. – Miranda Lambert • I just fell in love with Thomas McGuane the minute I saw him. He was the handsomest guy I’d ever seen, and gorgeous and sexy, and he had long hair and cowboy boots and tight jeans. So it was truly an act of love, to say the least, and it ended up having a permanent impact on my life, obviously. – Margot Kidder • I knew even if I’m a cowboy, I’m going to be involved in jazz in some way. – Dave Brubeck • I know all the songs that the cowboys know’bout the big corral where the doggies go,’Cause I learned them all on the radio.Yippie yi yo kayah – Johnny Mercer • I laughed at the whole Cannes Film Festival thing because it didn’t feel real. I remember getting off the red-eye when I arrived in France. I had a cowboy had on and some zit medicine, and there were like 15 photographers who jumped over the luggage carousel to take pictures of me. – Liv Tyler • I like crazy shoes or unusual cowboy boots and I collect big belt buckles. – Patricia Cornwell • I like to go to the frat house and drink with my white friends, because anytime you go drinking at the frat house, white boys bring you a drink and hand it to you like it’s a top CIA secret. They’ll hand me my drink, and I’ll go, ‘Man, what the hell is in this?’ ‘Dude, don’t worry. Don’t ask, just drink it. I’ll see you in 20 minutes.’ Next thing you know, I’m buck naked, standing on a coffee table, with a cowboy hat. – Aries Spears • I met this cowboy with a brown paper hat, paper waistcoat and paper trousers. He was wanted for rustling. – Chic Murray • I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. – Clint Eastwood • I remember first seeing Barney Kessel, in the 1940s, standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, in his cowboy boots, sun glasses and hipster threads, holding his guitar case man, you just knew that cat could wail!’ – Anita O’Day • I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn’t want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, “OK, fine.” It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn’t really matter. – Michael J. Fox • I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit. – John Hurt • I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there’s been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations. – Lance Henriksen • I sacrificed for the Dallas Cowboys when most quit. I put in overtime to try to help young players. – Charles Haley • I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat. – Alexander Skarsgard • I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don’t play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy – you just play a person. – Billy Campbell • I think every man should have a pair of boots. They’re really sexy. Leather boots, cowboy boots, it depends. – Kemp Muhl • I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here are a few I would suggest: “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.”; “Drinking will significantly improve your chances of murdering a loved one.”; “If you drink long enough, at some point you will vomit up the lining of your stomach.”; “Use this product and you may wake up in Morocco wearing a cowboy suit and tongue-kissing a transmission salesman.” – George Carlin • I think you’re going to find out that westerns will be coming back. It’s Americana, it’s part of our history, the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice. Justice will always prevail as far as I’m concerned. – Clayton Moore • I thought about telling him the truth: ‘Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom. – Meg Cabot • I thought of telling him that if it wasn’t for Oklahoman cowboys and Mexican whores having a bit of fun, there would’ve been no Texans, but that would be counterproductive. – Ilona Andrews • I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes. – Billy Crystal • I was feeling real good and real manly. Until a real cowboy walked by and told me I had my hat on backwards. So much for my career as a cowboy. – Michael Biehn • I was freaking out when Brooks & Dunn were breaking up. I thought ‘We play a ton of rodeos, and I thought this was such a cowboy deal, and I don’t wear a hat. They might not think I’m a cowboy. That might sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but apparently, it meant something to me. I wound up with a cowboy tattoo from my elbow to my wrist. – Ronnie Dunn • I was going to move back to Dallas, and my goal was to work at Channel 8 and be a sportscaster and cover my Cowboys and live happily ever after. – Chris Harrison • I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father. – Arnold Palmer • I was raised in farm and ranch communities, and my dad wanted me to be a cowboy like him, but I saw how he struggled in life and wanted more than that. – Tom Johnson • I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me. – Cynthia Breazeal • I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don’t want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn’t go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you’d see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, ‘wow, that’s fantastic’, but I could never go there! – Martin Scorsese • I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage – everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to! – Theophilus London • I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I’d changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. – Nathalie Handal • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore hot pants and cowboy boots and I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ – Alek Wek • I would love for someone to offer me a serious part in something. I don’t know if I could even pull it off, but I would like to be the cowboy that rides off and someone shoots him off the horse in the middle of town. Just a serious role. It wouldn’t have to be a big one. – Jeff Foxworthy • I wouldn’t call it [“Wild Bill Hickok”] an urban legend, but I guess I’d call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered. – Keith Carradine • I’d had my whole life to write my first album. I had my No. 1 and my third single out, and they go, ‘Hey, guess what? We need to start recording the next one.’ I’m like, ‘Uh oh, I got to write another album. Well, how am I gonna write ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’ and ‘Ain’t Worth Missing’ and all that again?’ It took me forever to write the first one. – Toby Keith • If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it’s because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope. – Clint Eastwood • If I’m being forgiving of myself, I could say I’m somebody who was really hungry for experiences. The same thing that would make me go try to be a trail cook on a ranch was the same thing that would make me want to have sex with a couple cowboys while I was there. – Elizabeth Gilbert • If I’m playing country, I gotta have my country hat and my cowboy boots. I gotta have a voice, and the third thing, I gotta have I guess a little music to keep me in the right mind, a little pre-show something to get ya going. Lots of AC/DC, or I’ll sit on youtube and find all kinds of stuff before we take the stage to get pumped up. – Hank Williams III • If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed? – Steven Wright • If the Cowboys and Titans ain’t playing, I’m not interested. – Tanya Tucker • I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end – the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate. – Adam Ross • I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow. – Johnny Mercer • I’m content where I am. I know I am going to be a Cowboy for life. – Terrell Owens • I’m just a big boy, I’m still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid. – Bryan Cranston • I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot. – Mark Goddard • I’m scared of snakebites – that’s the origin of cowboy boots, protection – but my toes need to breathe. – Gavin McInnes • I’m the oldest son of a crazy man, I’m in a cowboy band. – Bob Dylan • I’m thrilled, I’m grateful, I’m blessed. I played for the world’s greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy. – Bob Hayes • In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word ‘cowboy’ implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people’s individualism. – Viggo Mortensen • In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the “drugstore cowboy” micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley’s Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. – James T. Farrell • In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you’re down below 14th Street in New York City, that’s bohemian; that’s left-wing. – David Lee Roth • It doesn’t matter the kind of music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don’t care if it’s outer space or pop, the spirit is the same. – David Lee Roth • It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor. – John Ford • It’s a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people. – Magnus • It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. – Chris Hadfield • It’s funny, but when there are dominant teams, there are a number of people who rail about the fact that they’re always seeing the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay either in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl. – Al Michaels • It’s like you said the other day,” said Adam. “You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years. ‘Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion. – Neil Gaiman • I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West. – Cormac McCarthy • I’ve always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy. – Morgan Freeman • I’ve always loved comic books. As a kid, I used to read cowboy stories and historical comics about other worlds, unknown places that would take me out of myself and which helped to develop my imagination. – James Herbert • Jessica Simpson attended boyfriend Tony Romo’s football game. The Cowboys quarterback had the worst game of his career. It’s a bad year for the name Simpson. Even O. J. is pissed – he feels like they’re making his name look bad. – Chelsea Handler • John Wayne never ever disappointed his fans, because he was a cowboy. – Vinnie Jones • Justin Salinger showed up one day with a pink cowboy hat on and everyone else got really annoyed because somehow he’d managed to get the pink cowboy hat. – Alex Cox • Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw. – Garrett Hedlund • Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven and you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers. – Tex Ritter • Living in Dallas, I root for the Mavericks and the Stars and the Cowboys, but I’ve always pulled for the Chicago Cubs. I enjoy watching them play. – Lee Trevino • Monday is President’s Day and former President Bill Clinton is very excited. He is taking George Bush, Sr. to ‘Hooters’. … George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been spending more and more time together. Doesn’t that seem like an unusual couple to you, honestly? Earlier today they went to go see that gay cowboy movie. – David Letterman • My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. – Alan Moore • My father’s a protector. My father’s old-school. He’s a cowboy. – Paul Walker • My favorite teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets. – Bridget Hall • My friend Kathy is the only person who’ll be halfway honest with me. ‘Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?’ she asked.I nodded mutely.’That’s a bit what giving birth is like. – Marian Keyes • My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I’d see him maybe once a year and he’d always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I’d have to learn again. – Austin Butler • My uncle Claude was my favorite uncle he was also my godfather. He and I were really, really close. He used to take me to see cowboy movies all the time when I was a little boy because I loved cowboy movies. He got a cowboy name for me, which was Smokey Joe. So from the time I was three years old if people asked me what my name was I didn’t tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe. – Smokey Robinson • Neiman-Marcus is one thing, and the Dallas Cowboys are another. – Mercedes McCambridge • Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. – Bruce Jay Friedman • Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States! – Mark Hanna • Now, I have to – in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who – many of whom who’ve died of emphysema since we were shooting. – Haskell Wexler • One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. – Adam Hochschild • President Bush recently challenged Iraqi soldiers still fighting U.S. troops like so: … ‘My answer is bring ’em on.’ For those of you who may be criticizing Bush for acting like a movie cowboy, let me remind you. He’s actually acting more like a movie cheerleader. – Jon Stewart • Prior to being mugged I did not feel I had to carry a gun. However, I knew how to shoot a gun very proficiently. As a boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time. – Bernhard Goetz • Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner …deadpan funny …his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of ‘textile genius’ who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope. – Ron Miles • Simple. Pared down. Timeless. The ties were never too thick or too thin; the pants were never too flared or too skinny. In my life with Dad, he wore Western apparel because we went riding – jeans, cowboy boots, the turquoise belt buckle. But it was all very simple, and that classic look is very ‘Ralph Lauren.’ – Jennifer Grant • Some of these bulls are gonna’ spin those cowboys so fast, they’ll look like a frog in a blender. – Wayne White • Someone said DX over here? It was this dipshit with the cowboy hat over here. – Randy Orton • Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway. – Jimi Hendrix • Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That’s why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers. – Charles Marion Russell • Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled. – Edgar Wilson Nye • Tell me again what we’re doing here,” I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings. Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. “We’re here to watch manly men do manly things.” I followed Fang’s line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination. – James Patterson • Thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed and you’re not some loser-but just as importantly-if you do get your dream, you’re not a winner. – Stephen Colbert • That cowboy had heartbreak written all over him and she’d be damned if she knew why every time he blew into town she ended up naked before he ended up gone. Reed always ended up gone. – Cindy Gerard • That’s where I got my start and where I’ll continue to work, but I can’t tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn’t choose me. – Kelly Lynch • The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. – J. Frank Dobie • The cowboy doesn’t need an iron horse, but covers his country on one that eats grass and wears hair. – Charles Marion Russell • The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here’s a horror film. – Robert Englund • The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights. – Jack Kerouac • The Cowboy’s defense has more holes in it than Ronny Milsapp and Jose Feliciano after a game of lawn darts. – Dennis Miller • The fact that I got Drugstore Cowboy at all was a fluke. – Kelly Lynch • The first movie I appeared in was Carry On Cowboy, though not as an actor. I was just riding horses. – Richard O’Brien • The last three movies I’ve done, I played a cowboy, then I played a soldier, and now I play Han Solo. So the little kid in me is having a real joyride. – Alden Ehrenreich • The military offered the opportunity to see the world, and meet other people and learn new customs. Plus, the Army taught soldiers discipline. The life I experienced in the service was an education I could never have obtained as a cowboy. – Tom Johnson • The only negative thing is that I got into acting thinking, “One day I’ll be a cowboy, the next day I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll be a fireman.” It seems that I’m destined to play smart people in suits. I’d rather have that than no niche. – Joshua Malina • The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren – Sarah Vowell • The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There’s certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I’m not a fan of the cowboys. – Merle Haggard • The whites have always had the say in America. White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I’m blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you’re put out of a club, you’re blackballed. Angel’s-food cake is white; devil’s-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats. – Muhammad Ali • There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. – Paul Theroux • There is about to be a big cowboy boot in your ass if you dont shut up. – Jim Ross • There was a photo of me with weird sunglasses on and a green sweatshirt, some striped thing, with tights and cowboy boots…I just saw that photo and thought, ‘God, I look crazy.’ – Mary-Kate Olsen • There was no excuse for Dallas Cowboys to lose to Washington. Rivalry or not, Redskins are a bad team. – Jemele Hill • They gave me the chaps and hat and everything. I looked like a real cowboy. I walked around the rodeo and thought, I am a real cowboy and thought everyone thought I was a real cowboy. – Michael Biehn • Though Geographic didn’t publish that photo in the story that it was done for, “The Life of Charlie Russell,” a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic. – Sam Abell • To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys. – Deborah Kass • To be honest I’m the only one really who’s a cowboy. Like an honest to goodness cowboy. – Tim Rozon • Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. – Steve Earle • Trust me, Joe. You’re not a cowboy. The only cows you ever saw as a kid came under a plastic wrap in the grocery store or in a paper wrapped from McDonald’s. (Tee) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides – Bob Dylan • We are continuing to look for ways that we can do something that’s good for both of us. Good for both of us being the Cowboys relative to relief as to our cap management and good for him that would maybe be some pluses for him on his contract. – Jerry Jones • We have a sense that we should be like the mythical cowboy… able to take on and conquer anything and live in the world without the need for other people. – Morrie Schwartz • We ride and never worry ’bout the fall. Guess that’s just the cowboy in us all. – Tim McGraw • We say it’s a modern American Western – two gunslingers who ride into town, fight the bad guys, kiss the girl and ride out into the sunset again. And we were always talking from the very beginning that if you’re going to have cowboys, they need a trusty horse. —Eric Kripke on the decision to add the Impala – Eric Kripke • We were a really crazy band. This was in ’73. I had my hair real short with a white stripe down the middle of my head. The guitarists had pink hair. We weren’t playing CBGB’s either, we were playing Statesborough, Georgia, for cowboys on penny beer night. We used to keep crowbars onstage when fights would break out. Those were really wild times. – Rex Smith • Well sir, I may not be a for-real cowboy… But I am one hell of a stud! – Jon Voight • Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations – rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette. – Haskell Wexler • Well, Tommy Lee Jones is a little bit more intimidating. He’s definitely a cowboy. He’s from Texas. – Christina Milian • Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. – Brion James • What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. – John le Carre • What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows – almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more au courant. – John Baldessari • When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much. – Olivier Martinez • When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age. – Tim McGraw • When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. – Bruce Dern • When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker. – Robin Williams • With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn’t be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons. – Dan Harmon • Word of advice, kid. This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit. – Caitlin Kittredge • You can do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh, don’t step on my cowboy boots. – Hank Williams, Jr. • You can’t fool me, comrade. You want to put on a cowboy hat and keep lawless bank robbers in line.” “No time. I have enough trouble keeping you in line. – Richelle Mead • You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed … You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. – David Foster Wallace • You might be a redneck if a full-grown ostrich has fewer feathers than your cowboy hat. – Jeff Foxworthy • You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy. – Lyndon B. Johnson • You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much. – Bernadette Peters [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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[equitiesstocks]

Cowboy Quotes

Official Website: Cowboy Quotes

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• A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys. And that’s what people pay for – to see the bad guys get beat. – Sonny Liston • A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow. – Edward Abbey • A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured. Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.” “No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker. – Patricia Briggs • A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys – they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys. – Val Kilmer • A lot of the issues of the Dallas Cowboys yesterday having pressure on Tony Romo, came from the outside pressure. – Emmitt Smith • A new cologne is coming out. It’s for cowboys, and it’s made from cow’s manure. That way the women will be on you like flies! – Bill Maher • A second floor window opened, and Kyle stuck his head and shoulders out so he could look down at us. “If you two are finished playing Cowboy and Indian out there, some of us would like to get their beauty sleep.” I looked at Warren. “You heard ‘um Kemo Sabe. Me go to my little wigwam and get ‘um shut-eye.” “How come you always get to play the Indian?” whined Warren, deadpan. “Cause she’s the Indian, white boy,” said Kyle. – Patricia Briggs • According to a British poll, you’ve only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don’t run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers. – Jay Leno • All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York. – Tom Clancy • All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn’t define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that’s fine. – Mark Hoppus • All of you cowboys, fight for your land. – Woody Guthrie • Always have faith in God, Yourself and the Cowboys. – Eddie Sutton • American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn’t happy with that idea. I’d always had pretty long hair back then – in college, particularly – so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie. – Harrison Ford • Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay. – Larry McMurtry • And than suddenly he was there, charging down the hallway like death in a cowboy duster. – Richelle Mead • And what do we have here? A scary monster, cowboy, and a fairy princess! Here’s a hit of ecstasy, run along now. – James St. James • Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends – who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me – trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things. – Jake Gyllenhaal

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Cowboy', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy. – Jodie Foster • Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn’t remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. “I hate a man that talks rude,” he said. “I won’t tolerate it. – Larry McMurtry • Canada has become trouble recently … It’s always the worst Americans who go there … We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They’re the only good parts of Canada. – Ann Coulter • Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you. – Patton Oswalt • Cowards never lasted long enough to become real cowboys. – Charles Goodnight • Cowboy boots with a suit? You’re a rough, tough businessman. Chaps with a bow tie? You’re in the rough, tough man business. – Dana Gould

• Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow. – Edward Abbey • Cowboys, just like the word says. – John Wayne • Despite what people think of cowboys, they take pride in how they look, and that look is important to them. – Steve Kanaly • Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?’ No,’ I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it’s not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. – Jerry Spinelli • Don’t get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn’t the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. – Tom Johnson • Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. – Craig Thompson • Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons. – Naomi Klein • en you show up to work and put on your undergarments, throw on your suspenders and your cowboy boots, throw some dirt on you, and then get on your spurs, you start to walk a bit different. When you put on your gun belts, you change again. You go through this whole transformation process. All that stuff changes you. Riding a horse changes the way you walk and your demeanor. – James Badge Dale • Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case. – George Friedman • Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did. – Lee Iacocca • For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It’s a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It’s the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that. – Michael Gambon • For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious–or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. – Naomi Wolf • For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness…. The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well. – Edmund White • For some reason cowboy sounds better than cowman. – Demetri Martin • France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. – Adam Michnik • Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. – Rebecca Solnit • Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day.” -Liberty – Lisa Kleypas • He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn’t someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool. – Derek Landy • He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something. – Gena Showalter • Hey. Hands off.” “, ““Please. Please, please, soooo pretty. Lemme just have one little touch.” ““Peabody, isn’t it embarrassing enough you’re wearing pink cowboy boots, again, without standing here drooling on my coat?””, [J.D. Robb, Celebrity In Death] – Nora Roberts • How odd it is that sewing is thought to be ‘women’s work’ when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn’t they make better surgeons too? – Gretel Ehrlich • I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs. – Dick Dale • I always wanted to be a cowboy, and Jedi Knights are basically cowboys in space, right? – Liam Neeson • I always wore cowboy boots and drove a truck, and talked like this. So everywhere I would go in comedy people would say, “Foxworthy, you ain’t nothing but a redneck from Georgia!” It kind of became a formula joke. – Jeff Foxworthy • I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi. – Robert Frost • I came in with my idea of what a cowboy would wear, but then I met some real cowboys and they said that I rode the horses well, shoed the horses, but no good cowboy would be wearing a pair of Levi’s. I had to get a good old pair of Wranglers. – Steve Kanaly • I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. – Michael Stipe • I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow. – Henry Green • I couldn’t do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we’d go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life. – Chris Colfer • I didn’t always know, but I always wanted to. I always wanted to be the very best receiver the Cowboys ever had. That was my goal coming in as a rookie and my goal throughout my career: being the best they ever had, going up in the Ring of Honor. – Michael Irvin • I didn’t come to Nashville to put on a cowboy hat and pretend to be a country singer. My attraction to Nashville as Music City is the variety and flexibility: the fact that there’s so many musicians at your disposal, so many amazing studios and talented people that you can draw from. … I try to be myself, but at the same time I’m learning a lot, and I’m pulling from not only from the well of inspiration that I’m getting from Nashville, but I’m pulling from my roots. – John Oates • I didn’t want to play a rancher. I didn’t want to have a cowboy hat on; I wanted to get away from that in the things I do. But I read the script and fell in love with it. As hard as I tried to say no, I couldn’t. – Tim McGraw • I don’t care about going down in history as a great bull rider or bronc rider. I hope people will remember me as a great cowboy. – Ty Murray • I don’t walk around with a cowboy hat. I did get a tattoo that says ‘cowboy’ that’s a bit of an over-compensation, probably. – Ronnie Dunn • I feel like a real cowboy! Yippi Ki Yay! – Kurt Angle • I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time. – John Sayles • I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere. – James Badge Dale • I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I’m an emotional kind of person anyway. – Josh Holloway • I grew up in Dallas, with cowboys. I was the only guy in sixth grade with long hair and an earring. Let’s just say I got a lot of, er, flak for being different. – Barry Watson • I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life. – Reba McEntire • I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened. – Noam Chomsky • I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films. Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you. – Andrea Arnold • I had done my first picture and I didn’t have anything to do for awhile. I was asked to come back to New York and do Bus Stop in the role of the cowboy opposite Kim Stanley. – Dick York • I had read the Animal House script, and by hook and crook, I finally got an audition. It was a great one. John Landis followed me out into the hallway afterward and said, “I’ve never done this before, but you’ve got the job. Now don’t tell anyone!” I’ve never had a director do that. It was one of those Hollywood-dream-come-true stories. They saw me as a surfer or cowboy, not a preppie, but someone begged and borrowed me an audition, and I went in and got it. – Tim Matheson • I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man. – John Hodgman • I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already. – Orlando Bloom • I hope my music sets up the platform for me to be able to do lots of things – to have a cowboy-boot line, maybe, or do a perfume or makeup deal. – Miranda Lambert • I just fell in love with Thomas McGuane the minute I saw him. He was the handsomest guy I’d ever seen, and gorgeous and sexy, and he had long hair and cowboy boots and tight jeans. So it was truly an act of love, to say the least, and it ended up having a permanent impact on my life, obviously. – Margot Kidder • I knew even if I’m a cowboy, I’m going to be involved in jazz in some way. – Dave Brubeck • I know all the songs that the cowboys know’bout the big corral where the doggies go,’Cause I learned them all on the radio.Yippie yi yo kayah – Johnny Mercer • I laughed at the whole Cannes Film Festival thing because it didn’t feel real. I remember getting off the red-eye when I arrived in France. I had a cowboy had on and some zit medicine, and there were like 15 photographers who jumped over the luggage carousel to take pictures of me. – Liv Tyler • I like crazy shoes or unusual cowboy boots and I collect big belt buckles. – Patricia Cornwell • I like to go to the frat house and drink with my white friends, because anytime you go drinking at the frat house, white boys bring you a drink and hand it to you like it’s a top CIA secret. They’ll hand me my drink, and I’ll go, ‘Man, what the hell is in this?’ ‘Dude, don’t worry. Don’t ask, just drink it. I’ll see you in 20 minutes.’ Next thing you know, I’m buck naked, standing on a coffee table, with a cowboy hat. – Aries Spears • I met this cowboy with a brown paper hat, paper waistcoat and paper trousers. He was wanted for rustling. – Chic Murray • I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. – Clint Eastwood • I remember first seeing Barney Kessel, in the 1940s, standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, in his cowboy boots, sun glasses and hipster threads, holding his guitar case man, you just knew that cat could wail!’ – Anita O’Day • I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn’t want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, “OK, fine.” It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn’t really matter. – Michael J. Fox • I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit. – John Hurt • I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there’s been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations. – Lance Henriksen • I sacrificed for the Dallas Cowboys when most quit. I put in overtime to try to help young players. – Charles Haley • I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat. – Alexander Skarsgard • I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don’t play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy – you just play a person. – Billy Campbell • I think every man should have a pair of boots. They’re really sexy. Leather boots, cowboy boots, it depends. – Kemp Muhl • I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here are a few I would suggest: “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.”; “Drinking will significantly improve your chances of murdering a loved one.”; “If you drink long enough, at some point you will vomit up the lining of your stomach.”; “Use this product and you may wake up in Morocco wearing a cowboy suit and tongue-kissing a transmission salesman.” – George Carlin • I think you’re going to find out that westerns will be coming back. It’s Americana, it’s part of our history, the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice. Justice will always prevail as far as I’m concerned. – Clayton Moore • I thought about telling him the truth: ‘Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom. – Meg Cabot • I thought of telling him that if it wasn’t for Oklahoman cowboys and Mexican whores having a bit of fun, there would’ve been no Texans, but that would be counterproductive. – Ilona Andrews • I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes. – Billy Crystal • I was feeling real good and real manly. Until a real cowboy walked by and told me I had my hat on backwards. So much for my career as a cowboy. – Michael Biehn • I was freaking out when Brooks & Dunn were breaking up. I thought ‘We play a ton of rodeos, and I thought this was such a cowboy deal, and I don’t wear a hat. They might not think I’m a cowboy. That might sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but apparently, it meant something to me. I wound up with a cowboy tattoo from my elbow to my wrist. – Ronnie Dunn • I was going to move back to Dallas, and my goal was to work at Channel 8 and be a sportscaster and cover my Cowboys and live happily ever after. – Chris Harrison • I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father. – Arnold Palmer • I was raised in farm and ranch communities, and my dad wanted me to be a cowboy like him, but I saw how he struggled in life and wanted more than that. – Tom Johnson • I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me. – Cynthia Breazeal • I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don’t want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn’t go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you’d see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, ‘wow, that’s fantastic’, but I could never go there! – Martin Scorsese • I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage – everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to! – Theophilus London • I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I’d changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. – Nathalie Handal • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore hot pants and cowboy boots and I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ – Alek Wek • I would love for someone to offer me a serious part in something. I don’t know if I could even pull it off, but I would like to be the cowboy that rides off and someone shoots him off the horse in the middle of town. Just a serious role. It wouldn’t have to be a big one. – Jeff Foxworthy • I wouldn’t call it [“Wild Bill Hickok”] an urban legend, but I guess I’d call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered. – Keith Carradine • I’d had my whole life to write my first album. I had my No. 1 and my third single out, and they go, ‘Hey, guess what? We need to start recording the next one.’ I’m like, ‘Uh oh, I got to write another album. Well, how am I gonna write ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’ and ‘Ain’t Worth Missing’ and all that again?’ It took me forever to write the first one. – Toby Keith • If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it’s because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope. – Clint Eastwood • If I’m being forgiving of myself, I could say I’m somebody who was really hungry for experiences. The same thing that would make me go try to be a trail cook on a ranch was the same thing that would make me want to have sex with a couple cowboys while I was there. – Elizabeth Gilbert • If I’m playing country, I gotta have my country hat and my cowboy boots. I gotta have a voice, and the third thing, I gotta have I guess a little music to keep me in the right mind, a little pre-show something to get ya going. Lots of AC/DC, or I’ll sit on youtube and find all kinds of stuff before we take the stage to get pumped up. – Hank Williams III • If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed? – Steven Wright • If the Cowboys and Titans ain’t playing, I’m not interested. – Tanya Tucker • I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end – the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate. – Adam Ross • I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow. – Johnny Mercer • I’m content where I am. I know I am going to be a Cowboy for life. – Terrell Owens • I’m just a big boy, I’m still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid. – Bryan Cranston • I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot. – Mark Goddard • I’m scared of snakebites – that’s the origin of cowboy boots, protection – but my toes need to breathe. – Gavin McInnes • I’m the oldest son of a crazy man, I’m in a cowboy band. – Bob Dylan • I’m thrilled, I’m grateful, I’m blessed. I played for the world’s greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy. – Bob Hayes • In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word ‘cowboy’ implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people’s individualism. – Viggo Mortensen • In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the “drugstore cowboy” micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley’s Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. – James T. Farrell • In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you’re down below 14th Street in New York City, that’s bohemian; that’s left-wing. – David Lee Roth • It doesn’t matter the kind of music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don’t care if it’s outer space or pop, the spirit is the same. – David Lee Roth • It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor. – John Ford • It’s a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people. – Magnus • It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. – Chris Hadfield • It’s funny, but when there are dominant teams, there are a number of people who rail about the fact that they’re always seeing the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay either in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl. – Al Michaels • It’s like you said the other day,” said Adam. “You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years. ‘Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion. – Neil Gaiman • I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West. – Cormac McCarthy • I’ve always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy. – Morgan Freeman • I’ve always loved comic books. As a kid, I used to read cowboy stories and historical comics about other worlds, unknown places that would take me out of myself and which helped to develop my imagination. – James Herbert • Jessica Simpson attended boyfriend Tony Romo’s football game. The Cowboys quarterback had the worst game of his career. It’s a bad year for the name Simpson. Even O. J. is pissed – he feels like they’re making his name look bad. – Chelsea Handler • John Wayne never ever disappointed his fans, because he was a cowboy. – Vinnie Jones • Justin Salinger showed up one day with a pink cowboy hat on and everyone else got really annoyed because somehow he’d managed to get the pink cowboy hat. – Alex Cox • Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw. – Garrett Hedlund • Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven and you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers. – Tex Ritter • Living in Dallas, I root for the Mavericks and the Stars and the Cowboys, but I’ve always pulled for the Chicago Cubs. I enjoy watching them play. – Lee Trevino • Monday is President’s Day and former President Bill Clinton is very excited. He is taking George Bush, Sr. to ‘Hooters’. … George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been spending more and more time together. Doesn’t that seem like an unusual couple to you, honestly? Earlier today they went to go see that gay cowboy movie. – David Letterman • My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. – Alan Moore • My father’s a protector. My father’s old-school. He’s a cowboy. – Paul Walker • My favorite teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets. – Bridget Hall • My friend Kathy is the only person who’ll be halfway honest with me. ‘Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?’ she asked.I nodded mutely.’That’s a bit what giving birth is like. – Marian Keyes • My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I’d see him maybe once a year and he’d always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I’d have to learn again. – Austin Butler • My uncle Claude was my favorite uncle he was also my godfather. He and I were really, really close. He used to take me to see cowboy movies all the time when I was a little boy because I loved cowboy movies. He got a cowboy name for me, which was Smokey Joe. So from the time I was three years old if people asked me what my name was I didn’t tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe. – Smokey Robinson • Neiman-Marcus is one thing, and the Dallas Cowboys are another. – Mercedes McCambridge • Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. – Bruce Jay Friedman • Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States! – Mark Hanna • Now, I have to – in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who – many of whom who’ve died of emphysema since we were shooting. – Haskell Wexler • One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. – Adam Hochschild • President Bush recently challenged Iraqi soldiers still fighting U.S. troops like so: … ‘My answer is bring ’em on.’ For those of you who may be criticizing Bush for acting like a movie cowboy, let me remind you. He’s actually acting more like a movie cheerleader. – Jon Stewart • Prior to being mugged I did not feel I had to carry a gun. However, I knew how to shoot a gun very proficiently. As a boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time. – Bernhard Goetz • Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner …deadpan funny …his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of ‘textile genius’ who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope. – Ron Miles • Simple. Pared down. Timeless. The ties were never too thick or too thin; the pants were never too flared or too skinny. In my life with Dad, he wore Western apparel because we went riding – jeans, cowboy boots, the turquoise belt buckle. But it was all very simple, and that classic look is very ‘Ralph Lauren.’ – Jennifer Grant • Some of these bulls are gonna’ spin those cowboys so fast, they’ll look like a frog in a blender. – Wayne White • Someone said DX over here? It was this dipshit with the cowboy hat over here. – Randy Orton • Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway. – Jimi Hendrix • Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That’s why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers. – Charles Marion Russell • Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled. – Edgar Wilson Nye • Tell me again what we’re doing here,” I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings. Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. “We’re here to watch manly men do manly things.” I followed Fang’s line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination. – James Patterson • Thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed and you’re not some loser-but just as importantly-if you do get your dream, you’re not a winner. – Stephen Colbert • That cowboy had heartbreak written all over him and she’d be damned if she knew why every time he blew into town she ended up naked before he ended up gone. Reed always ended up gone. – Cindy Gerard • That’s where I got my start and where I’ll continue to work, but I can’t tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn’t choose me. – Kelly Lynch • The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. – J. Frank Dobie • The cowboy doesn’t need an iron horse, but covers his country on one that eats grass and wears hair. – Charles Marion Russell • The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here’s a horror film. – Robert Englund • The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights. – Jack Kerouac • The Cowboy’s defense has more holes in it than Ronny Milsapp and Jose Feliciano after a game of lawn darts. – Dennis Miller • The fact that I got Drugstore Cowboy at all was a fluke. – Kelly Lynch • The first movie I appeared in was Carry On Cowboy, though not as an actor. I was just riding horses. – Richard O’Brien • The last three movies I’ve done, I played a cowboy, then I played a soldier, and now I play Han Solo. So the little kid in me is having a real joyride. – Alden Ehrenreich • The military offered the opportunity to see the world, and meet other people and learn new customs. Plus, the Army taught soldiers discipline. The life I experienced in the service was an education I could never have obtained as a cowboy. – Tom Johnson • The only negative thing is that I got into acting thinking, “One day I’ll be a cowboy, the next day I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll be a fireman.” It seems that I’m destined to play smart people in suits. I’d rather have that than no niche. – Joshua Malina • The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren – Sarah Vowell • The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There’s certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I’m not a fan of the cowboys. – Merle Haggard • The whites have always had the say in America. White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I’m blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you’re put out of a club, you’re blackballed. Angel’s-food cake is white; devil’s-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats. – Muhammad Ali • There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. – Paul Theroux • There is about to be a big cowboy boot in your ass if you dont shut up. – Jim Ross • There was a photo of me with weird sunglasses on and a green sweatshirt, some striped thing, with tights and cowboy boots…I just saw that photo and thought, ‘God, I look crazy.’ – Mary-Kate Olsen • There was no excuse for Dallas Cowboys to lose to Washington. Rivalry or not, Redskins are a bad team. – Jemele Hill • They gave me the chaps and hat and everything. I looked like a real cowboy. I walked around the rodeo and thought, I am a real cowboy and thought everyone thought I was a real cowboy. – Michael Biehn • Though Geographic didn’t publish that photo in the story that it was done for, “The Life of Charlie Russell,” a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic. – Sam Abell • To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys. – Deborah Kass • To be honest I’m the only one really who’s a cowboy. Like an honest to goodness cowboy. – Tim Rozon • Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. – Steve Earle • Trust me, Joe. You’re not a cowboy. The only cows you ever saw as a kid came under a plastic wrap in the grocery store or in a paper wrapped from McDonald’s. (Tee) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides – Bob Dylan • We are continuing to look for ways that we can do something that’s good for both of us. Good for both of us being the Cowboys relative to relief as to our cap management and good for him that would maybe be some pluses for him on his contract. – Jerry Jones • We have a sense that we should be like the mythical cowboy… able to take on and conquer anything and live in the world without the need for other people. – Morrie Schwartz • We ride and never worry ’bout the fall. Guess that’s just the cowboy in us all. – Tim McGraw • We say it’s a modern American Western – two gunslingers who ride into town, fight the bad guys, kiss the girl and ride out into the sunset again. And we were always talking from the very beginning that if you’re going to have cowboys, they need a trusty horse. —Eric Kripke on the decision to add the Impala – Eric Kripke • We were a really crazy band. This was in ’73. I had my hair real short with a white stripe down the middle of my head. The guitarists had pink hair. We weren’t playing CBGB’s either, we were playing Statesborough, Georgia, for cowboys on penny beer night. We used to keep crowbars onstage when fights would break out. Those were really wild times. – Rex Smith • Well sir, I may not be a for-real cowboy… But I am one hell of a stud! – Jon Voight • Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations – rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette. – Haskell Wexler • Well, Tommy Lee Jones is a little bit more intimidating. He’s definitely a cowboy. He’s from Texas. – Christina Milian • Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. – Brion James • What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. – John le Carre • What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows – almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more au courant. – John Baldessari • When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much. – Olivier Martinez • When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age. – Tim McGraw • When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. – Bruce Dern • When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker. – Robin Williams • With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn’t be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons. – Dan Harmon • Word of advice, kid. This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit. – Caitlin Kittredge • You can do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh, don’t step on my cowboy boots. – Hank Williams, Jr. • You can’t fool me, comrade. You want to put on a cowboy hat and keep lawless bank robbers in line.” “No time. I have enough trouble keeping you in line. – Richelle Mead • You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed … You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. – David Foster Wallace • You might be a redneck if a full-grown ostrich has fewer feathers than your cowboy hat. – Jeff Foxworthy • You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy. – Lyndon B. Johnson • You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much. – Bernadette Peters [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'y', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_y').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_y img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

[realtalk-princeton]

@belcalis can you explain why you think the lawsuit is “petty, disappointing, and reeks of entitlement”? I usually agree with your perspectives on things, but I felt invalidated by your statement; it makes it seem like equality for Asians is a selfish thing to ask for. No hostility, just trying to learn more & educate myself

Response from belcalis:

No problem! First, I want to say that I never intended for anyone to feel invalidated by my comments, but I can understand that that was the impact and for that I do apologize.

I’ll break down my response into the major gripes I have with the lawsuit & beliefs I hold that influence how I view the case.

1) I don’t believe in “race neutral alternatives.” Race matters and to this very day, it still has implications on the type of treatment/respect you receive from others, the resources you have access to, your income levels, where you live, the type of education you will receive, etc. I personally believe that race needs to be taken into account when universities decides who to admit because education is a fundamental key to advancing socioeconomically and as it currently stands, Blacks, Natives, Southeast Asians, and Latinx are consistently at the receiving end of a shitty education. As a society, we need to offer these groups more support and if that means admitting more numbers of them to these institutions like Harvard where they can receive these resources, then so be it. 

2) By arguing that Asian Americans consistently outperform their White, Hispanic, Latinx peers in academics (and subsequently arguing that they deserve admission into elite institutions bc of this fact), you erase Southeast Asians who do not fit this mold bc they don’t have access to the same educational opportunities.  In general this lawsuit completely centralizes the experiences of East Asian students and erases the experiences of Southeast Asians with our education system (which is similar to that of Blacks, Latinx, Natives). If your going to try and uplift your community, you have to start by supporting the most marginalized within your community and this lawsuit does not do that. It actually perpetuates an elitist view of who is deserving of certain resources and does nothing to try and advocate for the dismantling of the educational inequality that Southeast Asians today experience.

2) No one ever said if you got a perfect SAT scores or if you have a 4.0 gpa that you would automatically be given admittance into an Ivy League. This for me is where the level of entitlement comes in from people who love saying their spot was stolen by another student. Also don’t believe admissions should be all based on academics and extracurricular activities because then you are just admitting folks who have had the privilege to:

(a) have time to engage in all those extracurricular activities (I had a part time job in hs to pay for my books so best believe I was only in like 2 clubs that rarely ever met)  (b) had money to pay for tutors, sat prep, expensive summer courses/experiences (c) went to a school that had excellent resources for students.

3) It’s unrealistic to admit every single Asian American that applies to Harvard. 

4) I don’t like it when poc throw other poc under the bus to uplift themselves. It’s tacky and disrespectful.

5) The admittance rate for Asian Americans has actually gone up over the past couple of years and they currently make up 22.2% of the Harvard pop. 

6) I think people who have struggled academically and haven’t had the privilege of being able to engage in certain academic conversations or have access to resources that make it easy to be employable are the ones who should be prioritized in the admittance of elite institutions. If you were fortunate enough to have a robust and excellent education prior to college, then you will most likely succeed anywhere you go. Students who did not have this experience will struggle harder without access to some of the resources that elite institutions provide.

7) Admission counselors also use terrible and problematic language to describe Black, Latinx, and Native applicants yet they were left out of this lawsuit. The language that admission counselors used to describe Asian American students is indeed awful and should not be used. The tea is tho that counselors use this type of language to describe students of other races too so really this is not an experience unique to Asian Americans and again, this lawsuit chooses to centralize them, instead of advocating on behalf of all poc who have to deal with these types of comments/judgements. Universities should not be labeling any student with the type of insensitive and racist comments that they do. But the ppl who initiated this lawsuit only chose to focus on themselves instead of highlighting how the admissions process is problematic for others as well. 

I have other issues with the lawsuit, but these are my major points. I also know I have “unpopular opinions” on the way admissions should be run at the university level so I don’t expect ppl to agree with me.

[republicstandard]

Should I Give Up on [Black] People?

The increasingly anti-white racist New York Times strikes again.

Here’s the latest bit of anti-white racist clickbait, courtesy of your frenemies at The New York Times:

It is written by someone who is billed as a “philosophy” professor at Emory University and who talks in his piece about teaching his students “to internalize something of what it means to practice philosophy, to love wisdom,” but this is disingenuous: even the most casual look at his faculty page reveals that, other than being listed within the “philosophy” department in his university, this guy isn’t out there teaching students anything as high-minded and respectable as Kantian transcendental idealism or the Hegelian dialectic or even anything that might be fairly characterized as “wisdom.” In fact, Prof. Yancy isn’t a philosopher at all, at least not in any conventional sense; rather, he’s a typical anti-white, cultural Marxist race hustler:

Here are his education and his research interests:

And here are his “Selected Publications,” virtually all of which are clearly and transparently about race issues:

Prof. Yancy’s area of interest, in other words, seems to be not philosophy itself, but rather, the (allegedly) racist practice of philosophy, the (allegedly) racist nature of America and the (allegedly) horrible nature of “whiteness” (whatever “whiteness” is). All of this might fit perfectly well in an African American Studies department or, at best, in a contemporary politicized university sociology department, but it really has not got much of anything to do with traditional philosophy, which he seems primarily interested in attacking.

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The tall tale this “philosophy” professor tells readers in his new article is one in which he had previously published in The New York Times (on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2015) what he characterizes as a “letter of love,” entitled “Dear White America.” But his love, he tells us, went sadly unrequited by his letter’s mean white readers. To his shock, what he “had offered as a letter of love had unleashed the very opposite — a wave of white hatred and dehumanization.” He then describes some of the crests of that wave, ones in which some readers questioned his credentials as a “philosopher” (a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry, given what I’ve described above), and then pelleted him with racial slurs, taunts and threats. The rest of the article describes his emotional and intellectual reaction to these responses, leading him to his present “dilemma”: “ Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America, despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to forms of unspeakable white racist backlash?”

After plunging back down into more tales of “white racist hatred,” of which “America never seems to have short supply,” and telling us he is “convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness — white racism,” Prof. Yancy then ends on a more hopeful note, presenting to us other responses he received from white masochists, those white readers who responded to him by regaling him in welcome spasms of self-flagellation: “I am a white liberal/ardent backer of civil rights, but as you say, also a racist. Godspeed, and thank you for helping to keep me honest”; “I have been living this past year with the growing understanding that my white privilege is toxic”; “I would like to offer you a gift in return: A commitment to fully accept the racism (and sexism) that is embedded in me, acknowledge the privilege that comes with having been born a white American, try my best to be educated about the suffering my racism and privilege causes others.”

All of this reeks of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. First, of course, Prof. Yancy’s earlier “letter of love” to white America was nothing of the sort … or, rather, it’s a letter of love in the same way and precisely to the same extent as an ex’s Dear-Ungrateful-Bastard-I-loved-you-and-you-ruined-it-all-so-f-ck-you! note might be characterized as “a love letter.” The letter to “white America,” available here, is an exercise in some very tough love, a point Prof. Yancy makes quite explicitly: “This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear.” And, frankly, when he wrote it, he knew perfectly well he was going to get pummeled in response: “I give [my gift] freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.” Yes, indeed. Having laid the groundwork, what he then gives us as his “gift” is what’s by now become a standard-issue litany of myopic racial essentialism and hateful anti-white shibboleths (trigger warning: the quotes from his “love letter” that follow are all extremely predictable, superficial, racist and stupid):

“If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism.”

“Being neither a ‘good’ white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook.”

“After all, it is painful to let go of your ‘white innocence,’ to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.”

“I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist.”

“I’m asking that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you.”

“You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don’t need to engage in ‘the talk’ that black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers.”

“As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer for being black and people of color. But your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering.”

“White America, are you prepared to be at war with yourself, your white identity, your white power, your white privilege?”

After inundating us in this adolescent onslaught of animosity, Prof. Yancy then musters the temerity to tell us, “I’m asking for love in return for [this] gift.” Um … yeah.

Naturally, no one — and especially not someone with Prof. Yancy’s expertise and years of experience in stirring up racial animus — could genuinely be this tone-deaf, oblivious or flat-out silly. The “love letter” was plainly meant as a provocation, a finger poke in the eye deliberately calculated to shake the few genuine white racists that are out there out of the woodwork and to get them to come at Prof. Yancy with all the insults, slurs, taunts and threats they can muster. This would, then, provide a great opportunity for an even more angry and inflammatory “I told you so” article on Prof. Yancy’s part. I would venture to guess, in fact, that the follow-up article that is the occasion for his feigned surprise, grief and righteous indignation at the blowback he received was already planned out with malice aforethought from the beginning. This kind of stuff has been the anti-white race-baiter’s M.O. for awhile now. Here’s the step-by-step protocol from the official race-baiter’s handbook:

Step 1: Make a bunch of completely inflammatory and crazy racist generalizations about all white people that, ironically, accuse them of racism, while making the barest show of covering yourself by packaging your bigoted bitterness as some sort of feigned gesture of outreach.

Step 2: Sit back and wait for the blowback from some of the people you’ve tarred and pilloried.

Step 3: Dredge up the worst responses you can find, and say, see, that’s what I’m talking about, you white devils!

Step 4: Wait for an additional round of reactions.

Step 5: Repeat Steps 3 and 4 until you squeeze all the clicks and controversy you can out of it.

This kind of approach is a win-win for all involved. For a portfolio-building academic like George Yancy, it amasses exposure, prestige and credibility to his intended audience. For a once-successful, now-struggling publication like The New York Times, desperate to compete in a crowded and cutthroat media landscape with a shrinking profit margin, it stirs up controversy, collects clicks and ad revenue and builds cultural caché through virtue signalling to a certain subset of black racists, white masochists and others on the regressive identitarian rearguard. For white supremacists, they get to come in from the fringes of society, as their extremist views gain converts and their ranks swell due to once-non-racist white people, angered by the racist attack upon them, being sent hurtling into the open arms of the if-it’s-white-it’s-right whackos.

The one VERY BIG problem with this wonderful win-win-for-all is that, in the process, the self-fulfilling prophecy it instantiates makes our racial divide worse and worse. As I’ve demonstrated (and backed up with relevant numbers), this species of stirred-up racial animus is the kind of stuff that swings elections:

No, Ta-Nehisi Coates: Not “Whiteness” but Black Racists Like You Are Responsible for Donald Trump How the Regressive Left Fanned the Flames of Racism on All Sides (Medium.com)

Eventually, it’ll lead us right into a (second) race war, if we’re not careful. But, heck, who can think long-term when we’re all having this much fun in the process, right?

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And that, folks, is the story of how you get The New York Times comprising whatever small shreds of integrity it may have left and running awful clickbait pieces entitled, “Should I Give Up On White People?”

As for my own question, “Should I Give Up on Black People?”, my answer is; no… because I refuse to play the game of intentionally judging people based on their race, but if self-promoting black racist trolls like “philosopher” George Yancy and profiteering white media corporations like The New York Times keep this up, eventually their credibility will bottom out, and then, they’re really going to have no choice but to give up on ever reaching any of us again.

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[alatismeni-theitsa]

So I have a webcomic in development but here’s the thing... I race like majority of them and changing things to better fit the story. But I been going through your blog and reading through your tags and post about the topic and now I’m conflicted. (Pt.1)

On one hand I need and want to respect the Greek culture, their people and their issues but on the hand I spend so long on this and I know that my entitlement shouldn’t even be considered or even on the scale when respecting another person culture. I came here to ask for your opinion as an actual person of the culture. I would have some advice on how I can fix this. I hope this doesn’t come off as rude of anything! (Pt.2)

=============

It's not rude at all, thank you for asking! Oooh.. as a person who does art I am fully aware of the hours and effort it takes to create something even close to a webcomic! Believe me when I say I understand why you are hesitant to change things and that doesn't make you a bad person. Work is work and it matters. Now, I would suggest better try to stay close to the ancient and modern standards. A Greek friend chose to include a foreign culture in her book and she had written 150.000 words (more than a year's work) but she had many of the cultural aspects wrong. She then decided that she wanted to make things as accurate as possible. She got out on the internet and took opinions from people of that culture and rewrote a big part of her wip. Was it mad extra work? Yes. But she and I think the changes were for the best.

I am not suggesting this with a light heart because I know, it hurts. But I believe that you will become a more knowledgeable person after doing all the research in order to get close to the culture. You may even end up producing even better work than before after that experience.

I also suggest this because depictions have an effect on Greeks on the long run. Even today Greek people are viewed as not diverse enough, not "Greek enough" because they are white and we are told to check if we are real Greeks etc. I encountered a post from 4 years ago that was like "let us racebend the Greek gods, it's not like anything bigger is gonna happen". But social media and internet creators have power. They affect more creators and more and more people. Corporations get informed about this and they try to gain profit from it. So now we have BBC Troy that changed the depiction of Achilles from the Iliad ("blond", "they washed his white body") and made half of the Greek gods Black in the name of progress. But really what progressive is there to changing an established ancient religion of another culture to fit your narrative. There are more ways to include non-white narratives than erasing other narratives. Greeks generally are not happy with how American media has portrayed our culture and I have even stumbled upon shows (one of them on national TV) that discussed this.

But the general misrepresentation is how I ended up hearing from a Nigerian that he thought half of Greeks were Black, because of the American media he consumed :P And then I had more than ten Americans telling me they thought we were "brown with dark curly hair" and "how does Greece have white people"? Imagine this level of ignorance for a country that is maybe the most discussed in the western world. Greeks definitely feel weird about it, as we continue a lot of aspects of the culture. And at the same time this shows that foreigners a lot of times just care for only 300 years of Greece's history and they assume the rest. Sometimes they also assume the majority of things even for those 300 years they claim they know. But let's not leave people assume things about us any more. The internet is a thing, all the information is on our hands. We need to become better at depicting cultures outside of our own - as my writer friend also decided.

You can, of course, put humans of many ethnicities in ancient Greece. While we don't have documented communities it's sure people from other countries were there (just not in big enough numbers to be considered a solid community). You may also want to discuss some racial matters in your work? Greeks were not that friendly to strangers. A more negative metaphorical meaning of "philoxenia" is "we want you to come, but we don't want you to stay" :P You can be hospital and still be xenophobic. Persians could come and trade luxurious goods with Greeks but still be considered effeminate and barbaric by some. Which is bad, but it happened. Never underestimate the salty-ness of Greeks :P

For the simple people and the diversity also take into consideration the location of your story. Is it in ancient Macedonia where Greeks were more likely to mix with blond Scythians and red haired Thracians or is it ancient Crete (or even the Peloponise) where north Africans and middle easterners passed relatively often?

Ok that was a long answer and it took a lot of time to write, sorry :P If you want to send me a message on chat I would be happy to help with any cultural details or artistic suggestions. Learning more about your work would help me give more accurate directions on how to achieve inclusivity with respect to the Greek culture. Like, is it set in modern day Greece? Ancient Greece? Is it only about the gods or mortals as well? Etc. I am happy when people approach Greek culture and take inspiration from it! I am currently helping two other creators the same way so don't hesitate to come pick my brains! My tag #ancient greek art may be proved helpful if you want references for facial features and skintones. Just a tip, those noses in sculptures are hella unrealistic 😂 I don't think we ever had them, tho that's pretty much understandable by any logical person 😂 For more realistic noses maybe the tag #greek people would be better.