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How To Be Outraged in America
So, what's it going to be? What flavor of revolt and indignation do you prefer as we dance like drunken angels into the wilds of 2012? Choose wisely, and you can become electrified and alive, a full and informed participant in the culture. Choose poorly, and the world is bleak and joyless as bible study in Rick Santorum's shame dungeon.
(Photo: Rex C. Curry / AP)
Option one: Slap yourself and three or four equally sunlight-deprived compatriots into a frothy lather over an insignificant nothingness that affects no one and about which no one really cares in the slightest -- except, of course, for you and your tiny band of miserable misfits who think you have some sort of lock on morality and behavior, when all you really have is a fatal case of outrage myopia, far too much spare time and (I'm just guessing) some very unhappy children of your own.
Greetings, Parents Television Council! You are like a mutant version of Punxsutawney Phil, waiting and festering for months at a time in a cold, solitary hole, longing to emerge once a year just so you can wail and spit about some tiny indiscretion no one really cares about. You are like a strangely recurring rash that appears after any major national telecast to irritate the armpit of the nation by stirring controversy where none actually exists.
What was it this time? Right. Rapper M.I.A.'s 1.5 seconds of a middle finger, raised pseudo-defiantly during Madonna's completely ridiculous, lip-synced Super Bowl halftime show. A middle finger! Heads will roll! Punishment must be doled! Who, pray who, will save the children from this frightening woman's vile extremity, given how everyone knows hysterical middle fingers lead straight to unchecked lesbianism, Obamacare and dancing for seven straight days at Burning Man? What's next, Starbucks teaming up with Satan? Oh wait.
Parents Television Council! I have a question for all four of you, along with your 19 cats: Do you plan in advance? Do you sit around in your drafty conference room in the back of the strip mall fabric store, praying for the most minute Super Bowl transgression so you can fire off an outraged letter to various newspapers, TV networks and the billion-dollar hellbeast known as the NFL itself? Don't worry, I already know the answer.
One final question, PTC: Did you happen to notice the hordes of giant, sweaty gladiators furiously bashing each others' skulls in for three straight hours and calling it a sport? Did you notice the adorable homoerotics of it all, or perhaps the millions of very drunk fans, or the mountains of garbage food, or the onslaught of $4 million TV ads hawking beer and trucks and sex and beer, all pummeling the hell out of your kids' small, impressionable minds? Do you have any idea what real, healthy outrage even looks like?
Let me answer that for you: It looks like what we have right over here in option two, thanks to the Susan G. Komen Foundation's extremely unfortunate (but then again, maybe not) decision to slam women everywhere by way of yanking funding for the good folks at Planned Parenthood. Who knew?
Who knew Komen's pink-clad army was run by such anti-choice, right-wing hand-wringers? Who knew that their founder and CEO, Nancy G. Brinker, voted for Bush and their former VP of Policy, Karen Handel (who just resigned in a huff over the flap), was a failed Republican gubernatorial anti-choice crusader from Georgia? Who knew that it's possible to separate the cause of supporting women who have cancer from the cause of supporting women's health and empowerment overall?
Maybe we should have seen it coming. Maybe when Komen partnered with Kentucky Fried Chicken last year to sell pink buckets of deep-fried grease, we should have seen the warning sign. You think?
Let's call the kind of outrage Komen's decision ignited the healthy kind of outrage, in diametric opposition of PTC's childish pseudo-indignation, an informed and electrifying kind of reaction that had the wonderful consequence of alerting tens of thousands, even millions of people to the fact that not only is one of the nation's leading charities violently lopsided, fundamentally misguided and not so deserving of your dollars, but that Planned Parenthood is, well, just the opposite.
Note to Komen Foundation executives (and the GOP at large): Here's your final spank of delicious irony. Do you really want to reduce the number of abortions in America? You want to help Planned Parenthood get out of the abortion business once and for all? Don't yank their funding. Do what William Saleten over at Slate so rightly suggests: Donate more to them.
It's very simple: The more money PP has, the more they can offer birth control and contraception to needful women, and the fewer abortions they will ever need perform. Isn't that amazing? More education and contraception equals fewer abortions. Someone alert the GOP! And the Catholic church!
Of course, such simple math assumes you understand that women actually have, and enjoy, sex. It presumes you know that contraception is healthy and smart, that sex isn't merely for procreation (praise Jesus), that woman should be in full and complete control over their bodies and their lives. Which of course leaves out the GOP. And the church. And, sadly, the Susan G. Komen Foundation for Republican Women Who Can Afford Health Insurance and Don't Like Sex.
So there you go. Two opposing options, two wildly diverse approaches to outrage. Which did you choose? At which end of the spectrum -- insipid and pointless on one end, helpful and hugely necessary on the other -- do you land?
Are you furious, for example, that Microsoft -- and hell, all of Washington State -- now officially endorse gay marriage? Are you outraged that yet another appeals court deemed hateful ol' Prop 8 unconstitutional? Are you an outraged religious group, furious that Obama might make you step into the 20th century? Or are you upset, like the clearly brilliant GOP Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, that Planned Parenthood is opening an $8 billion "abortionplex" in Kansas, replete with a climbing wall, noiseless incinerator and gift shop? I'm so sorry for you. The crushing roar of imminent doom (and rampant idiocy) must be deafening.
Conversely, perhaps you're just a little furious and saddened that state of Virginia, after defeating similar hateful bills three separate times, was finally punched in the gut by right wing nutballs and will now force all women seeking an abortion to first submit to a needless ultrasound? Aha. Now we're getting somewhere.
Look, I'm merely trying to help. Please feel free, going forward, to use the two primary examples explicated in this column as your litmus test, your filter for what's worthy of your time, money and informed outrage. It's a long election year, my loves; there will certainly be no shortage of opportunities, news stories, rude insults to your intelligence. Filter wisely. Ignite beautifully. Oh, and send a few bucks to Planned Parenthood, won't you? It's what Komen would have wanted.
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37 Comments so far
Show AllGreat article. My favorite was the pink buckets of Kentucky Fried grease to fight breast cancer. Who knew?
I don't know if it's chemtrails, high fructose corn syrup, fluoridation, or 40 years of commercial television, but we seem to have become a nation of non thinking dolts.
We have exactly the government we deserve.
"Idiocracy", the movie, wasn't a satire. It was a documentary from the future, and the future is now.
I agree with everything you said except "We have exactly the government we deserve." Not sure how that conclusion follows from the sentence preceding it.
All possibliites for the cause of a dumbded-down nation, but my choice is lead in the environment from 50 years of leaded gasoline, used to minimize engine knock and
a lying capitalistic, corporate ( I know, redundant) media.
Actually the "sweaty gladiators" play for approximately 12 minutes; and not everyone plays at the same time. It's three hours of commercials.
I will never understand why so many women support foundations and politicians who are so clearly misogynistic. Of course, the Komen folks were very clever in keeping their reich-wing, anti-woman's health under wraps....pink ones.
In addition to Mark's 'brilliant' idea that supporting PP would go a long way to help prevent the necessity of many future abortions, I would also add that parents should try to get their local schools to include/reimplement Health Education for all of our children.
I must report that I was a Health and Phys Ed teacher many years ago, and I was always amazed at how many high school students had no clue about how their bodies worked and what they needed to do in order to ensure they continued to work for 70+ more years. Many school districts have cut health ed and and phys ed from their curricula in order to 'save money'. We see now how that short-sightedness, combined with the propaganda power of corporations hawking processed food, etc., and conservative programs selling 'abstinence-only' programs has led to an epidemic of obesity and sexually transmitted diseases among our children.
Planned Parenthood as it has evolved, has been one of the only organizations that has consistently focused on the health and welfare of women, and their healthy babies/families, by providing the necessary access to preventive care as well as interventions when necessary. But, I believe it is their focus on outreach and Educational Programs that is the greatest service to our society.
Forewarned is Forearmed.
I support them with the small donations I can afford.....everyone should, because everyone has a mother, sister or daughter....and maybe a son, too, who can benefit from their work.
"Many school districts have cut health ed and and phys ed from their curricula in order to 'save money'"
But I'll bet they did not cut funds for the football or basketball teams.
"So there you go. Two opposing options, two wildly diverse approaches to outrage. Which did you choose?" Option 3, this is a completely Amerikkkan ego/id feel good crap piece. USan's of all stripes have fallen into bickering as the primary mode of political discourse. Pieces like this work well to cutesyfy it. Hope you felt good after reading it and proud to be an Amerikkkan. Which side did I fall on? I fell onto the side that isn't snide, and that pretty much describes nobody in the "left", "right" Amerikkkan meme.
brainskeleton -
I think you slid past Morford's real Option 3 point early on in this article, which I certainly wouldn't characterize as a cutesyfing "feel good crap piece" in any event.
I believe what the author was saying is that the dust up over the Komin Foundation's defunding decision towards Planned Parenthood was nothing trivial, but a matter of real political substance. He then obliquely says that, far too often, progressives too make the mistake of defining Option 3 as choosing to engage in esoteric debate among fellow choirmembers over relatively small bore, transient, media hyped issues, rather than focusing their energy upon other big, pressing controversies which have genuine substance.
My dictionary defines "snide" as "to be derogatory in a nasty, derogatory way." I don't think this opinion piece really deserves that label, even the crack about Rick Santorum's shame chamber.
Snideness can emerge all across the political spectrum. I don't think there is a non-snide side.
Bill from Saginaw
Okay, I took another read after reading your comment. I was a bit flippant with the "snide" comment. I do think however that option 3 was never suggested, and frankly, I'm tired of dichotomy pieces, (which is my own problem.)
I was very disappointed that this article from Greenwald yesterday never appeared here, unless I missed it. One of his best.
Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy.
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/
You're absolutely right. Some quotes (to entice others to read it).
“A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.
The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.”
“A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process.”
As with the Guantanamo issue, majorities of self described liberals support these policies as well.
“I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this [Obama’s continuation and expanding Bush era policies such as keeping Guantanamo open] is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.”
Thanks for that link, socialist. I always appreciate what GG has to say.
Delightful piece of writing. . I enjoy the fierce humor of it. It's both hilarious and serious, and you make it work. I like it.
"Parents Television Council! I have a question for all four of you, along with your 19 cats"
Hate cats do you Mr. Morford? I'd suggest you are just as big an arsehole as the PTC.
Yeah, where'd he pull that "19 cats" stuff from? I can hope Morford doesn't hate cats, because it's a given that anyone who does has other problems too.
You don't read a lot , do you? You obviously have very little brain power,, you and brainskeleton, to ferret out...hahhaha sorry...the meanings and sarcasms.
I'll admit it's hard to get good brain power going from a bottle of soju.
"What flavor of revolt and indignation do you prefer as we dance like drunken angels into the wilds of 2012?....bleak and joyless as bible study in Rick Santorum's shame dungeon..... hysterical middle fingers lead straight to unchecked lesbianism, Obamacare and seven straight days of dancing at Burning Man..... the Susan G. Komen Foundation for Republican Women Who Can Afford Health Insurance and Don't Like Sex..... the crushing roar of imminent doom (and rampant idiocy) must be deafening....."
I like Mark Morford's turn of phrase and prose style.
Bill from Saginaw
His style is exactly what I don't like about this author. But if you like it, do read his sticky, gooey piece on Obama, where he refers to O as the "Lightworker," (and prompting one commenter to write: "Hear that? That was me puking." and I felt like puking, too. Want some examples, read on:
"Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway."
"Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot" ....... whatnot, indeed!
And this: Obama has "a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity."
more Morford: "The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare." and then he goes on to compare Obama with MLK.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/06/notes060608.DTL&ao=all
How do some of you manage to provide an actual link to articles?
How do some of you manage to provide an actual link to articles?
--------------
It can only be done in the channel (News? Views? I can't remember) that allows html.
If this had been that channel, you could have converted that link by prefixing it with
<a href="
and suffixing it with
">Read more here</a>
So it would have looked like
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/06/notes060608.DTL&ao=all">Read more here</a>
Hope that helps.
A lot of people into spirituality in California really DO see reality through rose-colored glasses. In the case of Moford taking Obama for a Light Worker, let's attribute it to effective back lighting by the pros on his TV sets. By now, even Moford has probably seen (through) the light...
"By now, even Moford has probably seen (through) the light..."
No, he's simply altered a few details to fit the new reality.
The other quotes were from 2008. This from 2011 - "Obama has a sense of the long view like no president in our lifetime. He seems to understand that his true positive impact will be felt cumulatively, over time, way down the road (your kids will love him). He thinks not egomaniacally, not insta-gratifyingly, but historically. This alone makes him one of the most remarkable politicians of any stripe, now or ever." The last line really got to me: "And you know it" - which I found condescending and utterly vacuous.
Interesting that the head of the ACLU says he's disgusted with Obama and the ACLU is actually suing Obama, how could Morford think progeny will look back and love him? "Hurray! Today is Barack Obama Day! He was the president who, way back in the year 2011, took away our civil liberties and gave the POTUS the authority to kill any of us, with none of that silly habeus corpus baloney. I didn't like my mom, anyway."
So, Mr. Morford, let's not sully our beautiful minds with thoughts of death, destruction, domestic surveillance, increased poverty. We're lucky to have Obama, lucky to see that poor people in the parks are better off now - they're being fed and paid some attention to, aren't they? And the death and destruction, it'll be just water under the bridge some day.
Coming soon: Pink Coat-Hangers by Susan G. Komen - "for the poor."
That is in outrageously bad taste -so much so that I am thoroughly ashamed at myself for howling at it.
How To Be Outraged in America?
I hadn't even begun to recover from the outrage initiated by Mark Morford's vicious and unconscionable attack on the venerable Punxsutawney Phi -- How dare he?! -- when seconds later I was confronted with his vile and reckless attempt to malign cats.
Mr. Morford: Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? (h/t Joseph N. Welch)
Certainly, human wankers are fair game, but stop making groundhogs and cats the objects of your derision -- not funny!
Outraged.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
hhahhahhahahahahhahahah
Your misguided outrage is exactly what Mr. Moford is describing....
I have always wondered how the GOP gets away with being the Pro life Party when their platform actually increases abortion rates. If the goal was to save the unborn why not use all the tools available and not just Abstinence Only?
I think it should be the Pro Control Party and come out and tell the truth... sex, without procreation is evil! Then, if you follow their rules and have 12 kids and need some help they tell you to pull up your boots and figure it out. Pro Life? not
lgillooly
You seem to be responding to a comment other than the one I wrote.
Actually, I didn't think I needed to include some sort of "snark tag" for clarity, but the failure to do so can present a problem for the bone literal reader who can't detect or discern satire and nuance in the text.
You declare: "Your misguided outrage is exactly what Mr. Moford is describing..."
D'oh! That was the point -- that was the joke -- that was the satirical nuance. Oh, never mind.
Then you rabbit on about the GOPers and "Pro Life" and the "unborn" and "Abstinence Only" and yada, yada, yada -- none of which had anything to do with my comment. I hope you enjoyed your rant, but whom were you trying to convince?
I'm an atheist who believes that contraception in all its forms should be available to anyone who wants it on demand with no deductibles or co-pays as an integral part of women's reproductive health care.
I also favor abortion on demand for any woman who wants to avail herself of that procedure as part of any health care service, and low-income women on Medicaid should not be excluded from public funding to pay for that service as is currently the case and will be the case under Obamacare.
Plus, I stand by my defense of Punxsutawney Phil and the cats. Full stop. End of story.
PS -- Don't mess withi Phil and the felines -- they're gods!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Plus, I stand by my defense of Punxsutawney Phil and the cats. Full stop"
Right on! Go pick on someone your own size you cowardly bully, Moford.
Thank you Mark Morford, excellent diatribe.
Outraged? Just wake up in the morning. If your not dead your outraged! America has gone insane since Reagan! Long decline ahead! It seems to be the law of entropy applied to societies.
Im still waiting for the 'family council' to demand we return to the good old traditional values of spraying kids heads down with DDT to save us all from the liberal plot of head lice in schools.
Or xray irradiation to kill ringworm.
Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided about her breast cancer knew:
"The first thing I discovered as I waded out into the relevant [Komen] sites is that not everyone views the disease with horror and dread. Instead, the appropriate attitude is upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive. There are between two and three million America women in various stages of breast cancer treatment, who, along with anxious relatives, make up a significant market for all things breast cancer related. […]
You can dress in pink beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces, and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone brooches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings, and bracelets; brighten up your home with breast cancer candles, stained-glass pink-ribboned candleholders, coffee mugs, pendants, wind chimes, and night-lights; and pay your bills with Checks for the Cure (™). "Awareness" beats secrecy and stigma, of course, but I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to "confront [my] mortality" bore a striking resemblance to the mall." (p.22-23.)
"The imminent energy crisis was going to be both apocalyptic and unavoidable,
and it was going to arrive sooner than expected... But the Caspian news would account for the absolutely unfathomable number of mistakes that were made in both the plan’s execution and the subsequent cover-up. It was a rush job. Quickly, any number of classified or once-classified contingency plans for a staged attack on the US — like Operation Northwoods — came down off the shelf.
"In May 2001 President Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of all planning for a terror attack, effectively giving him complete control over FEMA, the military, everything. In June 2001 the NORAD scramble protocols that had worked efficiently since 1976 were rewritten to take most decision-making power out of the hands of Air Force field commanders.
"Although minor exceptions in those protocols still allowed commanders to act
on their own in certain cases, as General Arnold did, the change itself provided
deniability for elements of the confusion that Dick Cheney was going to deliberately
engineer and control."
"...From their perspective, the Republican neo-cons were faced with a choice of massive panic and collapse on the financial markets; a loss of public faith in the political system; and the loss of most of their own power and wealth if the truth were known.
"To borrow a metaphor from Professor Peter Dale Scott, both the neo-libs and the neocons were players at a very lucrative crap game. Though they often played viciously against each other, their prime objective was to keep the game going at all costs.
"Whenever the game was threatened — as is the case with 9/11 — they quickly closed ranks to protect it while the turf over which they continued to fight among themselves grew smaller and smaller and the contests more heated and bloody.
"Within their own mindset and within the parameters of an economic and governmental system that functioned (as it continues to function) in the mode of
organized crime — incapable of transparency, riddled with corruption and cooked books, based upon the destruction of life for the sake of net profits and supremacy — these men, led by Dick Cheney, chose what they thought was their only logical option. I believe it seemed to them the 'right' thing to do; after all, it was only a few thousand lives. Other rulers have made similar choices in the past.
"But as all empires learn, once the river is crossed there is no turning back. In front of that decision there lay a continuum of ever more vicious bloodletting, decline, and collapse."
"As Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard shows, the need for such an event had
already been acknowledged in 1997 — conveniently, just as al Qaeda and the
Taliban were emerging as world and regional players. Operation Northwoods,
declassified in the late 1990s, had been planned in 1962.
"Since the end of the cold war there had been plenty of time to put a new potential enemy in place, and September 11th was not a new idea.
"As Zbigniew Brzezinski had written in 1997, the 'immediate' task was to develop and simultaneously control a 'direct external threat' to manufacture an attack 'like a new Pearl Harbor.' That required a credible (at least in the public mind) and well-developed enemy.
"The need for the same kind of attack was mentioned by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report Rebuilding America’s Defenses.
"Such an attack would then provide a pretext for massive sequential military intervention to secure the energy supplies of the Middle East and the lesser (but terribly important) oil-bearing regions including West Africa, Venezuela, Colombia, certain portions of the Southwest Pacific, and any other region with smaller but more readily accessible reserves."