01.16.09
Posted in Rants, Political Commentary, Reflections at 00:50 am by Josh
It has been eight long years.
Look, I know it sounds cliche, but honestly, they have been long years. All eight of them. In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. The year 2000 brought about some of the finer jokes I’ve heard and some heavy-handed yet light-hearted criticisms of President Bush as he seemed to spend more of his first year as the world superpower’s commander in chief on vacation than he did in office. That was the last time life in America was not only good (for it still is and then some), but for the most part, carefree.
Enter September 11th. That day will live in on the memories of Americans not only because of the tragedy that took place, but also because of the direction it sent our President and consequently, our country. When President Bush first “declared war”, I was inspired. It is the only time in my life I felt compelled to fight, the only time I have ever tasted (and I pray the only time I ever will) what it means to leap to the defense of those you consider “your own people”. If there had been a draft, I’d have enlisted. If there had been a real war, I might have done the same. But we all know what followed: A war under the facade of diplomacy. That is precisely the sort of war no one can ever win. I think of it as fighting with “light” weapons. It’s a silly idea; the other side will not be so ill-equipped. Whether or not the American people agree with war as a majority is irrelevant. If you make the choice to fight, you sure as hell had better go in there blasting. Mr. Bush did not. Mr. Bush made excuses. Mr. Bush found scapegoats. Mr. Bush changed the course of the war to the extent that the real purpose was never realized. Now, as Mr. Bush leaves office, we remember that Osama bin Laden is still alive somewhere in the world. So much for avenging the United States.
But I do not have only contempt for the President. I want to make it very clear that I believe the job of criticising the President is much easier than the job of being the President. I do not believe, under any circumstances, that Mr. Bush maliciously or carelessly made any decisions which have affected the American people today. I do believe he made mistakes. I do believe that the President of a country should not make as many mistakes. But I also believe that this President faced some of the toughest circumstances — perhaps the most difficult since Franklin Delano Roosevelt — this country has ever seen. FDR, his cousin Ted, Abe Lincoln; these men were up to the challenge. George W. Bush, I think, was not. That’s no slur on the man; it’s just what I see from the very distant seat I sit in. I’m not sure who would have been up to it. Al Gore is a definite no-no, and Kerry would have been only a little bit better. Sure, we like to have a scapegoat just as our President did, but let’s not forget that we as the American people have not done a great job of supporting the proper leaders over the years. We could blame money, trust funds, silver spoons, oil rigs; it doesn’t matter. We The People are still the ones who did nothing but complain to each other about it.
I have no ill words for our Outgoing. I’m not happy with the job he’s done, but I hold nothing against him. The American people — not their leader — need to wake up and realize a few things. You can’t just elect the commander of a democracy and expect him to figure it all out. You also can’t just elect people who hold wealth and power in the country’s financial investments and expect that they will be the right people for the job. Sometimes you need someone who understands people, someone who understands true justice and stands for it above all else. You need someone who cannot be swayed by the petty offerings of the declining greenback, someone who speaks a language beyond that of capital or investments or future profit. America is a country, not a corporation. We are citizens, not a board of directors. We cannot sit up high and proclaim what is fair and unfair, what is profitable and what is not, without doing something tangible about it. No more useless protests. No more useless petitions. If you don’t like what the President is doing, get yourself into politics, change it yourself. “I don’t have the same corporate funding.” Who cares. If your ideas are really better, the people will listen. I’m sick of blaming one man for the faults of a country. I hope and pray that President Obama will do wonderful things for Our Great Nation. But in the meantime, I propose that we applaud President Bush for doing the best he knew to do for a country I have no doubt in my mind he loves with all of his heart.
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12.02.08
Posted in Rants at 14:31 pm by Josh
I think the law should require that companies selling teabags which do not have strings attached need to put clear warnings on the box. Honestly, I don’t care so much for any one specific brand of bagged tea to not switch based solely on the fact that there is no string and I now must fetch my teabag with a spoon or a fork or something of that nature. For example, from this day forward, I shall never again purchase products from Celestial Seasonings. Not only is their flavor much weaker than I’d like it to be, but as you have probably already assumed, they do not have strings on the teabags. I understand we need to think of the environment, but this really qualifies as either a half-hearted or overly-enthusiastic effort. Everything in moderation, people.
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09.04.08
Posted in Rants, Political Commentary at 15:08 pm by Josh
This promises to be a very long political season.
First, let me say that I have not declared my support for any candidate yet. I have only announced who I do not support and for those of you simpletons who think that means I must automatically vote for McCain/Palin, think again. Need I remind my faithful readers that four years ago, I voted for no one on the principle that there was not a suitable candidate for president? I’m not here to choose the lesser of two evils, and the American people should not be so misled based simply on the wonderful blessing of the freedom to vote. Look, I’m free to sleep around with half of New York City. It’s not illegal, I’m old enough to be responsible about it, etc. It still does not make it right. Just because you have power doesn’t mean you have to use it, or that you should.
Second, I’m vastly disappointed that this election looks to be headed down the same path most elections have over the last twenty years, which is to attack the people and not the policies. It takes my confidence away from any candidate when they cannot look to one another and say, “So-and-so would not be a good president because So-and-so wants to pull everyone out of Iraq right away, leaving a small force to maintain insurgencies until sometime in 2010. It would make more sense to leave the full force there, pulling out bit by bit, since I believe a small force will get its tail kicked in without proper backup.” There. You’ve won my presidential vote. But when you say, “So-and-so has no experience and so-and-so was mean to the Democratic party,” it sounds like a six-year-old deciding to pack up his ball and go home because he didn’t get his way on the playground.
Third: Calling all Americans! Stop being ignorant societal drones! Just because it sounds good in a speech, doesn’t mean that it’s true! Consider the likelihood that something can be done. Consider the humility with which it is proposed. Consider the fact that our country is slowly turning into something we never wanted (and still don’t want) it to be and continued support of any presidency which promotes scathing insults towards fellow politicians in the interest of a better country will never bring us back to true freedom and democracy. Stop funding the campaigns. Stop choosing the one who sounds a bit more reasonable. My Fellow Americans, we need an All-Star and we don’t have one yet, so far as I can tell. If we want to salvage what’s left of Our Great Nation, we need to work together, not tell one party that it’s ugly and the other that is smells. Let’s all grow up.
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09.03.08
Posted in Rants, Political Commentary at 17:18 pm by Josh
I’m not going to post a news link because I doubt there’s an American out there who hasn’t heard that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican VP nominee is pregnant. I am, however, going to address this because I’m kind of appalled.
Now it doesn’t surprise me in the least that the media is doing its very best to exploit the mistake of Palin’s daughter. After all, 230 years in the making we Americans like to present that clean-cut, country feel that once made everyone like us so much. I don’t agree with it, but in the name of the sport of presidential candidacy, I see why they’ve taken this angle. The easily-fooled American people think they are tired of a Republican administration. Nevermind that everyone — Republicans included — is sick of one particular Republican administration. In the land of the free and home of the stereotyping, let’s go ahead and lump them all into one group. I mean, it’s not really discrimination if all of the players involved are white, rich and conservative. And it is most certainly the media’s job to fuel the propoganda started by the loudest-mouthed, most ignorant members of Our Great Nation in the first place. I’m not speaking out against any of this in the current post. That’s all for another argument and another day.
What I’m here to address is the shameless way the media — and the American people — suddenly pretends that the morals of our country are so pure and wholesome and Christian when all they’ve been feeding us for years in the news, in the movies, on TV sitcoms, in print publications, etc. is that free sex is okay for the masses and if you’re not having free sex, you’re old-fashioned, a prude, or just plain old missing out. If I am to gather my understanding of life from the media, then I would have to say that free, premarital sex is perfectly okay, but if a pregnancy results from it, suddenly there is a major moral issue and a problem with the people involved. Did everyone miss that the two things are quite related? That without man-made contraceptives, pregnancy is often the natural result — indeed, even the main purpose — of sex? And where do The Daily News and The New York Post get away with publicising the “unmarried” part on their front pages? When did this country (and city for that matter) — I believe with the highest divorce rate in the world and a rapidly declining married population — care one lick about sacred union between two people? And why, why, does everyone act so shocked that a pretty seventeen-year-old girl is pregnant? Yes, very odd that a young woman and a young man slept together out of wedlock. Certainly not something endorsed by pop culture (Gossip Girl?).
If you want to pick on someone, why don’t you pick on the liberal left-wing (sit down, I didn’t say “democrats”) that promotes promiscuous sex in the freedom of youth? I’m not suggesting people aren’t responsible for their own actions; we are. Completely and one-hundred percent, we make the choices that dictate our futures. But even the smartest, most independant human being is influenced by the world around him or her. If we weren’t, I’m not sure that sin would still reside in the hearts of everyone. We behave based on what we know and what we know is based on what we see, who we talk to, and, whether you like it or not, what everyone else is doing. What Sarah Palin’s daughter did is no different from what so many — and I’m sorry to say, myself included — people do in high school, college, and beyond. Perhaps unfortunately, she now must suffer a repercussion, and I have the greatest respect for her family supporting her in her decision to keep the baby, and especially for their reasons for pledging their support. What I have no respect for is society’s way of exploiting a young woman who is no more or less prone to giving in to temptations of the flesh simply to try to make hypocrites out of the GOP. How about we get back to politics and stop dwelling on the mistakes of a teenager? Last I checked, she isn’t the one looking to help lead this country out of the hole it’s sunk itself into.
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03.12.08
Posted in Rants, New York City, Life at 10:11 am by Josh
6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. 7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
James 3:6-9
I’ve been struggling with this lately, and by “struggling” I mean talking smack about all kinds of people and making very little effort not to. Mind you, these people are not acquaintances or friends, which is probably why I don’t take the pains to abstain, but I also recognize that my justifications are no excuse.
Most recently, I’ve been bad-mouthing Time Warner Cable. They caused me to spend nearly ten hours of my life waiting for the grace of their services, and every time I called to get an answer, I was given scripted nothingness. I complained to many supervisors and managers, only to the avail of two months and five days of free internet. What bothered me was being treated like a number rather than an individual. If I have a client who I blow off or screw up, I don’t just make the sincere effort to apologize, but I take him or her out for drinks or lunch or something. It’s my duty to retain these people as clients. After all, they have choices. But TWC knows that we don’t have much of a choice here in NY, and that the choices we have are just as bad. So they treat people however they like. It’s crowd control, not customer service. And it makes me cranky.
Speaking of cranky, I think I’ve upset some friends with this latent bitterness I can’t seem to shake. I know that being bitter is wrong, but I’m not sure how to get around it. How does one find the strength to continue to show love when there is little or none shown in return? Christ mastered this, therefore, I must make it my goal to do the same. But alas, I am falling a bit short of the calling, once again.
And that, my friends, is what we call stream-of-consciousness rambling. Appy-polly-logies.
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03.04.08
Posted in Rants, Life at 10:27 am by Josh
21 “And in that day I will answer, declares the Lord,
I will answer the heavens,
and they shall answer the earth,
22 and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall answer Jezreel,
23 and I will sow her for myself in the land.
And I will have mercy on No Mercy,
and I will say to Not My People, ‘You are my people’;
and he shall say, ‘You are my God.’”
~Hosea 2:21-23
I’m going to try to open my posts with Scripture. It won’t necessarily be relevant to the post, as evidenced here.
I just had (another) disagreement with my co-worker, this time about credit. She was re-telling me a horror story she saw on the news about a woman who was defrauded and now she is responsible for paying back the debt, even though the culprit was caught and found guilty in court. I insisted that there must be something else to the story they didn’t mention. She says, “Joshua, it was on the news.” I replied with my typical plagiarized, whip-smart rhetoric, “Well then it must be true, right?” (anybody get the reference? I’ll buy you a cookie), which only made things worse. Finally, I was told that it’s not as easy as I think to get fraudulent charges taken off of your credit record and now my co-worker will “pray that it will never happen to [me]”.
So let’s hear it. Am I wishful in thinking that there’s still some justice to the American legal system, that there are actually laws that are enforced to protect us from identity/credit theft? Do credit agencies really hold that much power over our welfare?
I’m going to go charge a coffee. I’ll look forward to your answers when I get back.
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09.20.07
Posted in Rants, Political Commentary, Culture, Unsolicited Opinions at 10:55 am by Josh
It seems that Tennessee has banned lethal injections as their official method of execution. I was moved to blog about this after reading the sentence that says, “Harbison could be legally executed once the state adopted a legal method of execution.” Let me weigh in on this.
Picture a bunch of people, probably men, probably white, probably with very dated suits, sitting around a table in a room with few to no windows. They’ve all got coffees and briefcases with clipboards and legal pads, medical journals, history books, court records, and statute books. They’re all ready to discuss the best way to kill a condemned person.
I do not advocate the death penalty (haha to all you who thought I was a conservative Republican!). I have my reasons, namely that which tells me we are called to forgive the worst sinner. Lock the murderer up, but let him live. Leave death and judgement to God. That said, I’m not sure who’s worse: the man who takes the life of another in cold blood or the men who debate, in the name of justice, the best way to kill a man.
Let’s be cynical. If you’re going to kill a person, who cares what it feels like? As far as I know, death is painful, notwithstanding the supposed “peace” of natural death (that whole drifting off in your sleep thing). But those who suffer terminal illness, murder, or accidental falls into the Grand Canyon would likely, given the opportunity, report significant amounts of pain or discomfort in their different experiences. To instead speak of making unnatural death “humane” and then to debate the ins and outs of execution in a committee is, in my opinion, to be absolutely revolting and maybe slightly insane.
You know, some people think that my taste in movies and stories is disturbing because I’ve often explored those darker parts of humanity. I’d have to say, with the utmost confidence, that my dabblings in the supernatural and human psyche are nothing compared with the reality that there are people out there who are willing to sit down and discuss ending human lives in an organized and “logical” fashion.
The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2006) defines cruel in a couple of ways: “Willfullly or knowingly causing pain or distress to others” and also “rigid; stern; strict; unrelentingly severe”. If you want to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment”, how about you just don’t kill people? That ought to save taxpayers a lot of money in these governmental legal proceedings.
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09.10.07
Posted in Rants, Reflections, Life at 16:21 pm by Josh
I’m not much for pop culture, but here goes:
Remember Britney, circa 2000? I was in my dorm room at Roger Williams University when she came onto the stage wearing a black pinstripe suit with a Panama hat to match. At the very same moment when she ripped the suit off to reveal a flesh-tone something-or-other with sequins (because she didn’t have our attention already (?!)), every straight male and lesbian in the building screamed “Holy s***” so that it literally echoed through the hallways. Having never been the world’s best singer and only a good dancer, I’m sorry to say, it was that night in a September long ago when Britney had something to offer the world of entertainment.
Fast-forward seven years and you see a mother of two trying to look sexy in underwear, foregoing those pesky appointments with the physical trainer and painting the worlds’ television sets with the face of a deer caught in the headlights of a large vehicle. Did she forget that there would be thousands of people in the same room? Maybe she forgot the words to the song? Maybe she realized how awful she really looked in that costume?
I’m not embarrassed for Britney. I’m not even sorry for her. I’m mad at her. She took a perfectly sinful mental picture from what I would consider the last formative years of my youth and she bastardized it with one fell swoop. Still, the whole thing is kind of symbolic: Nothing is the same as it was, and nothing shall ever be again.
R.I.P., Hot Britney. We’ll always have the 2000 VMAs.
This is as shallow as my blog entries go…
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07.30.07
Posted in Rants, Culture, Writing at 15:46 pm by Josh
Because I aspire to write novels forever and ever, I recognize that it is my duty to read things such as the Sunday Book Review in The New York Times. Problem is, I’m never particularly interested in what such periodicals have to say.
The truth is that mainstream fiction is failing fast, unless the book has something to do with terrorists or plots to overthrow a faulty democratic government (please note: these two plots are extremely intertwined). But I have to say, I don’t believe that this is indicative of the common interests the of the public. If people only wanted grim whodunits about terrorists and government conspiracies, then why does Harry Potter do so well?
The fact, in my opinion (?!), is that people really do want a variety of genres and they really do like plot (sorry, Chris Baty), and they really will still enjoy reading books that don’t have three chapters’ worth of character development before getting into a poorly-developed plot. I’m not knocking character development; I just don’t think we need to put so much focus on it. In some ways, I blame the market. A couple of character-driven novels sell well, so that’s what agents and publishers look to until something with a tremendous plot sells well, and then they turn back to plot, and then plot has to get split into genres and then they find the genre that’s doing the best, saturate the market again until one of the novels has a great character or two, and then they say, “Gee, character development is really selling. Let’s push that.” And so the cycle continues.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this except that I’m quickly realizing that my writing is not immediately conforming to the market standard, and that might hurt my chances of ever being successful at this. Regardless, I stand by that stories about guys named Aziz infiltrating suburban America to hide out until it’s time to attempt a large-scale terrorist attack which is inevitably thwarted by masterful FBI work (now you know it’s fiction) just don’t do it for me. Never have. Never will.
And don’t even get me started on the non-fiction…
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04.26.07
Posted in Rants, Weather at 08:43 am by Josh
Let’s set the record straight for a moment: You don’t like spring. The truth is that nobody likes spring. Spring is the worst season around. Pollen drifts invisibly across the air, reddening eyes and stuffing noses. Rain comes in sheets, flooding streets and soaking us to the very bone, no matter if you have an umbrella or not. Of course the air temperature is only in the 50s so when you combine it with the moisture the chill goes straight through your body. If you live outside of the city you are likely up to your ankles in mud. If you live in the city you’re probably sick, maybe sick again. The merriment of animals frolicking in the accuracy of their impeccable biological clocks is not enough to make me like spring.
What you really like is summer. Warm nights walking down the west side with a light, humid river breeze brushing lightly past your face. The earthy smell of rain and the refreshing feel of it when the oppression of the city heat won’t let up. Lazing on a Sunday afternoon with an ice-cold LaBatt sweating like sumo-wrestler, water dripping over everything but you don’t care because it’s hot and it’s going to evaporate in thirty seconds anyway. Beautiful women in beautiful clothes sipping wine at a sidewalk cafe. Dirty hippies playing covers of The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival in the park. That’s what you like. That’s what you long for. And when spring rears its ugly head, it teases us with a day or two where we experience the bliss of the summertime and expect that it is here to stay.
And then the cold April rain comes again…
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