DEATH, TAXES AND PRAYER

I’m behind on my bloggery, and it’s been a fairly bloggable week. So where to start?

I guess we’d better start with A.J. Stack's final flight, for a couple of reasons:

1. This paragraph from the MSNBC story:

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said in a statement that the crash was "a cowardly act of domestic terrorism." The police chief, however, said he preferred to describe it as "a criminal act by a lone individual."

See what just happened there?

2. Before Stack flew his plane into the office building, one of the stories I had in the queue was about Pastor Wiley Drake, who I’ve blogged about before. If you’ll recall, he’s the Southern Baptist preacher who prayed for God to kill Dr George Tiller, and prays every day for God to do the same to Barack Obama.

He’s still doing that, and while God hasn’t gotten around Obama, he allegedly did take care of someone else on Drake’s list: Rep. John Murtha.

Anyway, it turns out he’s not the only pastor with a prayer and a hit list. Meet Steven L. Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona:

“I hate Barack Obama. You say, well, you just mean you don’t like what he stands for. No, I hate the person. Oh, you mean you just don’t like his policies. No, I hate him … I am not going to pray for his good. I am going to pray that he dies and goes to Hell ... Break his teeth, oh God, in his mouth, as a snail which melteth, let him pass away, like an untimely birth of a woman—that he thinks—he calls it a woman’s right to choose, you know, he thinks it’s so wonderful, he ought to be aborted. It ought to be, ‘Abort Obama,’ that ought to be the motto.”

Nice.

What does this have to do with A.J. Stack? Not that much – not directly.  As far as we know, Stack wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian, and possibly wasn’t even all that conservative – I’ve heard plenty of left-wingers make similar complaints about both Wall Street and the IRS. Hell, even Cheap Trick wrote an anti-IRS song once (and a cracking good one at that). If Stack had any direct Tea Party links, surely he would have worked in some Obama/Kenya rhetoric or at least something about Muslims taking over the world.

However, it’s fair to say that he had at least one thing in common with the Tea Party: hysterical anti-Washington rage fueled by Big Dumb Fear. And sooner or later, that sort of thing leads to plots like this.

Not all the time, of course. And don’t get me wrong – most people who support the Tea Party would never do something this drastic, if only because most of them wouldn’t have the nerve.

All I’m saying is that when you combine fundamentalist Christian leaders preaching hate and death in the name of Jesus with far-out pundits and political hacks whipping up Populist frenzy and urging the peasants to grab their pitchforks, you can’t act surprised if someone gets their eye poked out.

Or shot in the head at point-blank range.

Put another way, I have a bad feeling we’re going to see more of this kind of thing as we get closer to the 2012 elections.

Recipe for hate,

This is dF

JACK U OFF

Remember that “banned” Sprite ad with the fizzy “money shot” that turned out to be a hoax?

Here’s an ad for Jack Soda ... and it’s also a hoax.

Don’t tell Media Bistro, though.

"Bikini kill - Rebel Girl" (Watch on YouTube)

Explanation here.

Anyway, fake or not ... is it wrong for me to admit I’ve had dreams about this sort of thing?

Spray it don’t say it,

This is dF

WHY DOES CAPTAIN AMERICA HATE AMERICA SO MUCH?

A few people have sent the Captain America/Tea Party Feud my way. If you haven’t heard that one before, it goes like this:

Captain America and Black Falcon come across an anti-tax protest that is clearly a Tea Party event, as one of the sign slogans mentioning tea bags is taken from a real-life event. Black Falcon makes an “angry white folks” remark.



Someone in the real-life Tea Party sees that issue and denounces Marvel Comics’ liberal agenda of portraying them as govt-hating racist white guys, forcing writer Ed Brubaker to say he never wrote that specific sign into the script, and Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada to promise to remove the sign from all future reprints.

Frankly, I think the whole thing is silly. I’m sure Brubaker didn’t specify a familiar teabagger sign, but he definitely meant for it to be an anti-tax protest, and even with no tea reference, anyone reading it would have made a Tea Party connection. I understand Marvel/Quesada wanting to be topical without at least appearing to take sides in politics – they want to sell comics to as many people as possible – but there’s a little more to neutrality than making up generic names for real-life groups.

To be fair, Quesada has also said the Tea Party’s criticism is mostly unfair because it takes one panel (and Black Falcon’s line) out of context of the rest of the story, which isn’t really about the Tea Party per se. Okay. Still, if yr going to be topical, you kind of have to assume that some readers will get the reference. Calling it another name is just a convenient out in case someone calls you on it.

As for the Tea Partiers, I’m not the first to notice the irony of a political group whose participants aren’t above hyperbolic name-calling and borderline racism screaming foul at the slightest criticism. From a comic book, yet. Sure, no one likes to have the race card played against them, but it’s disingenuous for Tea Partiers and their supporters to not only defend caricatures of Obama as a turban-wearing Arab, but also accuse him of hating Whitey, and then complain that their critics are the ones dragging race into the debate.

So overall I’m not really impressed with either side. Still, it’s fascinating to see all this kerfluffle over what someone said in a comic book.

And you thought comic books were meaningless low-brow escapist entertainment.

Well, not YOU. But you see what I’m saying.

You can’t say that in comics,

This is dF

THE KNACK, AND HOW TO GET IT

Some more catch-up bloggery, as I felt I probably ought to say something about the death of Doug Fieger.

I was 14 when “My Sharona” came out. I bought the 45 single. Here’s the sleeve art.



Between that and the lyrics, The Knack pretty much summed up my unfulfilled teenage urges in four minutes and 52 seconds – and with one of the best guitar solos ever recorded. The rest of their debut album was just as horny.

So I identified with it, yes.

(Which, oddly, means that I have at least one thing in common with George W Bush. Allegedly.)

In retrospect, of course, for all their popularity, the Knack didn’t command that much respect with the hipster crowd, either because of the lyrics or their alleged attempt to mimic the Beatles look (though personally I thought they were closer to the Kinks than the Beatles, but whatever), or because they played it too safe compared to punk just to get a record deal, etc. So in that sense they were never all that “cool”, and have since been written off as one-hit wonders.

But I’ve been saying for awhile now that Get The Knack is one of the greatest power-pop albums ever made. And for suburban Nashville teens like me who didn’t really have any exposure to Ramones, The Clash or Iggy Pop, The Knack were a welcome blast of guitars and bluster. And incidentally, none of those bands ever managed to get a song with lyrics like “til she’s sitting on yr face” in heavy rotation on the radio (and sure, a lot of stations played the “clean” version, but that’s not really the point).

Anyway, since you all know “My Sharona”, and seeing as how I’ve got the sleeve art here, I thought I’d share the B-side with you.

FUN FACT: That girl on the 45 sleeve there? That's Sharona. The real one.

It's getting tighter and I'm feeling the bite,

This is dF