Relating to today’s previous post about people trying to misrepresent their religious bigotries (or beliefs) as something other then they are, my state of abode is currently going through a gay marriage battle. Now I know I’ve covered this before. but the current dialogue makes me want to go again. I understand the tricky spot that the anti gay marriage folks are in. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to not support gay marriage unless you have some religious beliefs that oppose homosexuality. Now since you can’t really (in this days and age at least) maintain a large public dialogue using reasoning like that, they have to come up with some other excuse.

That excuse being Tradition. I’m not sure when that because a valid excuse… Traditions change, if they didn’t black people would still be able to be bought and sold at market with no say in their lives and women wouldn’t be able to vote. Neither of them could own land and, of course, your wife should be burned when you die and your servants should be killed and buried with you. Strangely, those were changed.

So if one throws out the tradition excuse as just a red herring (or any tradition excuse that doesn’t claim an origin in religious belief), then what are you stuck with?

I don’t think that this is a gay marriage debate at all. The debate is still over homosexuality. The people who do not support gay marriage are the people who believe that homosexuality is a sin or some other kind of abomination and they probably think that gay people should be killed or sent to Siberia so they they don’t infect “our grandchildren” with their filth. God forbid one of your children become gay… How can we prevent it since we can’t just kill gay people anymore and make them hide? I know! The only opposition that is left to us in this country is to say that “real” marriage is too good for them. Let’s do it “No gay marriage, no gay marriage”.

It’s just easier to say in public than “kill the fags”.

So I’ve just spent the last 5-6 weeks working somewhere that I hear continual contemporary country music (except for the one time that they played each Jolene and The Gambler) for 9 hours a day, twice a week. That works out to about 90 hours of this stuff in the last month or so. Nice. To keep things clear, I cannot stand this genre of music. I couldn’t stand it before I’d really ever heard any of it, and I certainly can’t now. But I must say that it was a learning experience.

I’ve never really heard any modern country music before and since this was a “top-40″ style station, there were many songs that I heard 3-5 times per day, each of those days (to paraphrase one of their slogans “all the greatest songs played over and over and over…”).

Now, in general, the country songs sung by the ladies are alright; sad “lost love” type songs. Which is fine, even if they are a bit trite and the style if boring. But the dude songs? Man. I can listen to the classics: Cash, Williams, Haggard… Those are great songs about loneliness, loss and too many drunken evenings, but that’s not what these new songs are about. These songs covered exciting territory like: four-wheel drives, Jesus and America. And that’s about all.

They also had a strong focus on what I would call intentional ignorance. A blatant support for the idea of “I don’t care what the truth might be, because whatever my daddy said is good enough for me”. It was actually quite depressing.

High points? Here are some of my “favorites”..

Some obnoxious song called Chickenfry. Here are the lyrics that really twisted my tongue:

Salute the ones who died
The ones that give their lives so we don`t have to sacrifice
All the things we love
Like our chicken fried

Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up

I mean, is this their view of world affairs? Saddam and Bin Laden were out to get rid of the cold beer and fried chicken so we have to go and kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners who haven’t even heard of either?

Another one that thought bought up a fine grasp of the world was this:

I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young

So these are the folks who says “Support our Troops?” Which, in their eyes seems to mean send them to kill and die in other countries and don’t question it? “Invade/bomb/take over Iran/Iraq? Sure, since I don’t even know what those are”. It’s nice that they are so fond of this country and will stand behind mass destruction of other people and their countries without even caring to know what those nations are.

Especially since they seem to have a rather naive view of this country. These guys would be the first to say “Yay America! Yay “Democracy”! And yay to capitalism and the American way”. Yet they write these lyrics that show that they have no grasp of what this American capitalist way is that they love so much:

Because in the real world they’re
Shutting Detroit down
While the boss man takes his
Bonus pay and jets on outta town

What? Do they think that someone should be intervening with the bosses on behalf of the workers? Wouldn’t these same folks call that activity “socialism and/or communism (who can tell the difference)”, the same stuff that has also been out to get rid of our beer and fried chicken? How stupid can people be? And how desperately must these people stick to their frightened ignorance and stupidity in the glow of reality and knowledge all around? It’s very lame.

Finally, this lyric was just irritating… Especially when played over and over again in a song that I had to hear over and over every day.

‘Cause I’m a country boy, I’ve got a 4-wheel drive
Climb in my bed, I’ll take you for a ride

It’s rare that something makes me take the side of big business, especially take the side of the music business, as I don’t support the merger of many business into just a few conglomerates and I don’t support the homogenization of the music business into just a few mainstream artists. But one things that always lends my support to just about any business and their profits is hearing tales of that great America destroyer, Wal-Mart. Ever since watching that documentary from a few years ago that showed how Wal-Mart, in their drive for their own personal success uses their market position to force manufacturers to lower their prices so much that they can lose money and even go out of business, I have felt the hope that something would be done.

At this stage in Wal-Mart’s success (and how half of the US population seems to have sold their souls and communities to them), it seems that the only way Ito save American culture, businesses and business communities from this blight is for the major industries to band together and refuse to do business with Wal-Mart! What brings this on? Well today good ol Slashdot directed my attention to an article at Rolling Stone called Wal-Mart Wants $10 CD’s. This article describes how Wal-Mart is pressuring labels to lower the price on their CD’s to them. While this sounds like a good thing, it is a great example to point out the problems of Wal-Mart… The ones that stick out from this issues seem to be:

1) The cheaper that Wal-Mart drives their own costs down, the harder it will be for other retailers to compete, hence continuing the drive toward eliminating small businesses and lessening the variety of our culture.

2) The article states that while the average Tower stocked 60,000 different titles, Wal-Mart stocks 5,000. With Wal-Mart becoming the place that most people go for music, this is a terrible blow to musicians, fans, creativity, art and the future evolution of music… Not to say the terrible effect it could have on our culture

3) If the label’s need to lower their prices, they will need to lower their costs, which will affect the American economy. Whatever manufacturing and design that still takes place here will be driven overseas and, of course, the artists themselves will be the first to see their royalties diminished.

4) Wal-Mart is also know for having a specific and rigid moral standards. Their reputation for censoring the movies and music that they sell, and their unwillingness to sell music that they don’t approve of, may work fine for the corner christian music shop, but on this kind of national scale it is unacceptable.

On the bright side though, maybe a good portion of the population will continue to ignore Wal-Mart and to buy what they want where they want and will realize that sometimes, it is better to spend a bit more money to have a richer reality and a strong community. But with how much Wal-Mart keeps getting bigger and with seeing first hand communities who have had their small businesses shut down by their neighbors who would rather saving a little money than support their community, I don’t know how much hope I have for the population to do their part. It seems like some people have an obsessive drive for cultural homogenization.

There sometimes seems to be a desperate need for Creationists to support their beliefs, regardless of reality. I never thought much about the why of it, but I got a nice little glimpse today. Watching a mocumentary on the south winning the civil war, C.S.A: the Confederate States of America, something occurred to me. If one is not a creationist, one has really no argument for racism or racial purity. If people weren’t just created out of the blue as pure as they are now, then they all must have come from somewhere and as they are too similar to have just coincidentally appeared around the world at about the same time, that leads to the idea that they maybe came from the same place. This pointing to some common origin doesn’t say much for any kind of “god created whitey to rule the world” ideas.

I guess that part of the clinging to these old “creation” myths and lies is that these people get so much strength and security from their racial superiority that any kind of notion that the whole idea of “races” is just a bunch of B.S. would leave them with nothing but their own thoughts and actions to judge themselves on… Which we know how much these folks dislike that.

Not to get snippy, it seems as if a philosophy that is terrible and unsavory on its own (creationism), is also being used specifically to advance even more terrible philosophies (racism). The bad begets the badder, I suppose.

Does anything say New England more than ad’s like this one?