Make Go Get Do Be See Barf

This is the most nauseating website I have ever visited. What is going on?! And how does one nourish an aspect?

Ew, Belgium.

Et Septembre, là-haut,
Avec son ciel de nacre et d’or voyage,
Et suspend sur les prés, les champs et les hameaux
Les blocs étincelants de ses plus beaux nuages.
-Emile Verhaeren

This is an ad for Ché magazine, Belgium's equivalent to Maxim or FHM, presumably. The biggest problem that I have with this ad campaign, besides the fact that the rag has co-opted Ernesto Guevara's beloved nickname, is that they have hijacked his message as well for their tagline: "Let us keep on dreaming of a better world." Really, Ché? Or perhaps I should rather question the men of Belgium, who apparatly buy this shit. Is your utopian dream one where women walk around with their tanned and tumulous buttocks barely hidden under paper, in fact stridently advertized with an arrow aimed at their tooters? Could this be a better utopia than, say, living in a country that helped found and hosts perhaps the most progressive and unionizing international monetary and financial intutution ever? A country that is about 97% urban (a must for a futuristic utopian society is people living on top of people a la Huxley or Dick)? A society from which came Jean Claude Van Damme, moules frites, René Magritte, the Gilles of Binche, Audrey Hepburn, waffles, The Singing Nun, Emile Verhaeren (as far as publications go, Ché is certainly a departure from La Jeune Belgique), and the most kinds of beer anywhere?! Can it get much "better" than officially sanctioned laïcité?

What is especially disturbing to me, Walloons and Flemings, is that you are already pretty accustomed to seeing sexually explicit advertising and PSAs, which is great, don't get me wrong. The thing I'm attacking here is taste, not the right to express one's taste. So lovely lady lump imagery is nothing new, and is probably more than little passé.

If anything, the element of this ad probably most subliminally interesting to the men of Belgium is not the female ass itself, but the treatment of the ass and the woman it belongs to like a homemade flier advertising guitar lessons. In this case ass=guitar lessons. Please, come have sex with my ass (please, come take guitar lessons from me). I'm hot enough to be a supermodel, but I'd rather have sex with you (I used to jam with Jerry Jeff Walker, but I found my true calling, and it's teaching 13-year-olds how to play "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple). It reeks of desperation. Is this what will make the world a better place? A bunch of super sexy, faceless, desperate women running around on train platforms with paper covering their asses? Paper complete with hanging chads, of all things? Sounds like a utopia gone awry, more like the dystopias of Heinlein, except instead of having Protestants in charge, there'd be frat boys. Quelle horreur!

I guess I just had a more romantic picture in my head of what the typical Belgian man would look like/be interested in. I imagined something like this:

But now I'm thinking the dystopia-fated, cobblestoned streets of Antwerp are crowded with a different breed, one that looks more like this:
Let's hope they die out soon enough due to lack of sex. I can't imagine this Belgian, or any like her, giving them any play.

Pit Bulls Have Lipstick, Too!

I can't believe no one has said anything about this yet. Seriously, John Stewart. Really, Stephen Colbert? Did you not realize that Palin opened it up for you to make a very clever and lewd joke about a canine erection? It was the first thing I thought of. When I heard her announce, in her nasally, tight-lipped, quasi-Canadian burr, that soccer moms were like pit bulls except with lipstick (teehee!), I thought, "Oh shit. Here we go." I was so excited she said something so stupid and that no one in her camp had picked up on it.

But then no one in anyone else's camp picked up on it. Not that I would want Michelle making dog boner jokes. That would be out of line. But c'mon, Rob Riggle. Show some balls.

My Mother is Going to Kill Me

I recently had a conversation with my mother that I expected to devolve into a competition in how many more facts one she party could recite than I could. I would say something negative about John McCain, and she would counter by defending that negative quality and explaining how I was misunderstanding it, blah, blah. And then she would do the same thing about Obama. However, I was swiftly stalemated, facing a brick wall mortared with stubborn repetition and dropped g's (I don't know where this tick came from, but she said "I'm not votin' for..." about twelve times). She might as well have put her fingers in her ears and started humming. What I found out is that she really didn't know much about Obama except that, according to her, he "panders to crazies." I'm not sure if that means my mother thinks half the country is insane, or that she just refuses to listen to the man because (despite her claims that she is an independent) she has voted Republican since I've been alive.

I decided to write her an email outlining the educations and early careers of both candidates (she claimed Obama was a "career pol." Uh, okay). I didn't end up sending the email, because I again came to face a fact about my mother and the way she votes and thinks about politics. The major issue for her, in fact the only issue for her is abortion.

It doesn't matter that health care is an issue that Obama is trying to do something about and is making one of his primary objectives. Health care that would save the lives of thousands of people and would make the life of her own daughter easier, not to mention her three other children, all young, all about to enter or are just entering the work force, the highest demographic of uninsured Americans. But none of this will convince her. In fact, she even said (and I'm paraphrasing here) something along the lines of "It doesn't matter who becomes president, it's not going to effect me." Well, Mom, it sure as shit is going to effect me. I am terrified of these people. I am terrified because my mother lives in Massachusetts and still doesn't seem to know or even have to desire to learn what Obama is about (he's not perfect, by the way). And now I'm even more scared because McCain picked a pretty lady who wears glasses and has a shitload of kids to make him look less mean and roboty. The Grand Ol' Party full of good ol' boys let a skirt into their smoke filled room. And I bet my mother loves her.

The choice of Palin for VP has made this election about abortion. Or it has at least prompted the press to slap the issue around for a little while. Ironically, it is distracting voters from Obama's global agenda that has avoided making the campaign about some of these divisive issues (he called them small in his acceptance speech, which I thought was a poorly chosen word) despite his supposed lack of foreign policy experience.

I have been lucky enough to have never had an accidental pregnancy (I've also never had an intentional one). I have used birth control in some form responsibly and regularly since I have become sexually active, and once used plan B when a condom broke. But if I had gotten pregnant while in high school or college I would have aborted the pregnancy. I hope in my lifetime I never see Roe v. Wade overturned. If it were, I would readily expatriate myself, as I would see it as a discriminatory step in the wrong direction (if the sexual dynamics of this country were identical in every way except that men bore children, I'm certain that abortion would have been legal around the same time as the Industrial Revolution). I don't think Palin's parenting choices should be questioned, and I admire Obama for saying they are "off-limits" for the rest of the election (he's really doing a great job of undermining nasty political tactics and leaving the Republicans with nothing left to say). What should be questioned are her qualifications and her policies. And why, until she had one of her own, Palin didn't very much care for unwed teen mothers.

p.s. I love you, Mom.