Project: Blog Different

This past election day, for all the things that went right, one thing (in this person’s opinion) went very wrong, and that was California’s Proposition 8 which overturned gay marriage for the state. Prop 8 passed by a slim margin after a huge push by the Mormon Church which funded upwards of 80% of the advertising. Bill O’Reilly and much of the media blamed black folks for it passing, but what else is new there.

Taking a smart and humorous look on the Prop though, was funnyordie.com which created this hilarious and star studded musical number.

Prop 8: The Musical

I hoped to imbed it in the blog, but that’s just not working. The clip features Jack Black, Neil Patrick Harris, Maya Rudolf, John C. Reilly, Sarah Chalke, and much of the casts of the Office and How I Met Your Mother.

The number brings up the an extremely valid point: the bible says a lot of things which really can’t be taken literally. The people in high positions just use it when it’s necessary to help their side of the argument. It’s all picking and choosing. From things like kosher laws which most Christians don’t follow, or phrases being blatantly misinterpreted, to miracles, you just can’t take the Bible literally. It has to be used as a guide to living a generous, respectful, peaceful, and overall “good” life.

Last night on The Daily Show, John interviewed former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a staunch social conservative and they debated the issue.

Daily Show w/ Mike Huckabee

The crux of the debate really goes back to the broader debate over gay marriage, and I guess non-heterosexuality in general. John Stewart compares this law to being similar to anti miscegenation laws of the past, while Huckabee argues that its entirely different because he feels homosexuality is a choice. Stewart comes back with one of the best rebuttals of that point which I’ve ever seen: that religion is more of a choice than one’s sexuality.

This idea that sexuality is a choice just seems like utter bollocks to my own mind, but I guess I was brought up in that crazy “liberal secular America”. When did I choose to be straight? I mean, its just not a decision that ever went through my head. Why should it? You’re going to be attracted to who you’re attracted to and that’s just how life works.

As far as I’m concerned there’s zero difference between telling two guys or two gal’s they can’t get hitched as telling people of different races that they can’t get married. While I’m glad our President Elect supports civil unions for all, I really do wish he’s take it a step further and support gay marriages, but I realize he had to toe a fine line to get elected.

Back to Huckabee though, as far as far right social conservatives go, he’s not my least favorite. I mean, I would never, and I mean never vote for the guy, but he at least was respectful in his debate with Stewart. I’m sure it’s really tough to be brought up in a conservative religious household, and grow up learning things which go against what you’ve learned through Church/religious home life, whether it is evolution over creationism (and no, fossils aren’t tests from god), or realizing that its ok to be gay, or even realizing you are gay. This goes for not just Christians by the way, I certainly have friends growing up in really conservative Jewish and Muslim families as well with similar inner belief debates.

Despite this difficulty though, we (everyone, not just people growing up in religious conservative families) need to question everything we are taught with a healthy skepticism. This includes what me and my likes watch on Colbert or learn in our liberal elite college institutions (please note lack of seriousness). Make up your own mind on things, and never follow anything blindly. Religion is this great thing for ideas, for morals (and I mean actual morals, not the morals which Fox News preaches), for faith. Just believing in something is really valuable. It’s incredibly important to believe that life has meaning on some greater level. The spirituality part of it is the key, but religion has been used for divisiveness, xenophobia, and a blind hate which has been the leading cause for war since the beginning of humanity.

What happened to treat others like you’d like to be treated. I know I’d like to be allowed to get married some day, why wouldn’t I want someone else to have that same right?

This past weekend I viewed Mike Judge’s (Creator of Office Space and more) film, Idiocracy. The film stars Luke Wilson, who plays an average, fairly lazy, Navy librarian who is given the assignment to be cryogenically frozen for one year to test a new piece of technology. While frozen, the top secret program funding his freezing is eliminated and the only man who knew about it was arrested for becoming a pimp. So the Navy forgets about our protagonist and he remains frozen for 500 years.

One might be wondering why I’m wasting my time discussing a comedy/sci-fi flick, but there’s a point, I promise.

So while our hero is frozen, things don’t go so well for the United States. The film shows a case study of two families of varying intellect. The first family, a very well to do couple is very cautious, if not too cautious, about having kids, and they eventually result in zero offspring. The other family is a hick-ish group where the male is procreating with three different women resulting upwards of 12 children who each then would go on to have many more children. This process results in there being more and more uneducated folks, while fewer and fewer educated peoples.

So, Luke Wilson wakes up in the year 2505, and the country is a mess. People no longer speak full English, they speak a sort of slang which ignores all non nouns/verbs/adjectives, and make fun of Wilson’s character for speaking in full English. TV is entirely dedicated to shows like Jackass and wrestling, anything and everything is sponsored, and a Gatorade like substance has replaced water in everyday life. Besides all of these drawbacks though, the country is just a mess. Crops don’t grow because you can’t water plans with Gatorade, dust covers everything because there’s no plants and the economy is devoid of life because nobody has any ideas.

I won’t really go into the plot any more than that, but the flick’s worth viewing. The reason I decided to write about it though, is that this isn’t too far from the truth or possibility. It would most likely take more than 500 years, but who knows. If smart and responsible couples have far fewer kids than unintelligent and irresponsible couples do, there will be more kids raised in households which don’t value education and this clearly will have repercussions on the country. On the corporate level, more and more things get bought by companies every year; even things which we don’t think could or would be sponsored. Pepsi owns a few high schools in which they have Pepsi signs painted around the school grounds and on the roof for planes to see overhead. I recently read about teachers selling ad space on their tests to make an extra buck. Just everything nowadays gets sponsored. Even my beloved Mets are naming their next park Citi-field after the now in trouble Citi-Bank.

I mean, how far are we from the dystopic world in Idiocracy? I would answer, not very.

I don’t think all hope is lost though, by any stretch of the imagination. As long as there are some smart folks out there to be subversive to mainstream culture, and as long as those crazy (read: smart) liberal elites (read: people who support sex-ed) valuing education maintain some power, this hopefully won’t be the case.

Let’s hope Obama doesn’t bow down to the almighty dollar in the same way that Clinton did, doesn’t let himself get intimidated and overwhelmed by the conservative military industrial complex like Carter did, and fulfills the campaign talk in the manner of F.D.R. or “New Republic” era Johnson, or John F. Kennedy. Or what I really hope, he can surpass the above president list in its entirety and overcome/avoid the eventual fates of F.D.R. (Death in office), Johnson (Vietnam), and J.F.K. (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Assassination).

Who knows, maybe this ship can be righted. Or more to the point. Maybe we can right this ship.

If you know me at all, or have even stumbled upon the introduction to my blog, you would know that I am not from the Boston area, and that I in fact was born about three and a half hours south in New York City. I lived there until I was 9 Years old when my family headed out to the ‘burbs. I still visit the city (NYC, not Boston) on occasion, usually for baseball games of my beloved Amazin’ Mets.

I currently am living in an area around Boston and come in to the city (Boston now, not NYC) at least 3-4 times a week for work, and often more for socializing. I’ve spent a considerable more time in Boston than New York over the past 4 years of my life, I rented my first apartment ever in the Boston area, I am holding my first career oriented job here in Boston, and have no immediate plans for leaving the area in the near future, and in general am very happy up here. With that said, I feel like a transplanted New Yorker surviving in enemy territory. I for some odd unexplainable reason yearn for more familiar boroughs such as Queens and Brooklyn instead regions I’ve actually spent more time in such as Cambridge and JP. I really can’t explain it, which leads me to a story from this past weekend and a list I viewed last night which somehow wrapped together in my mind.

Saturday night, about midnight, an apartment in Cambridge filled with recently out of college twenty something year olds having a party themed around “white trashyness”. For my costume I wore a backwards football jersey (11-1 New York Giants) and a baseball cap (my favorite hat from my favorite sports franchise, the New York Mets). For the most part it was a fun evening: saw some old friends, enjoyed some good snack food, listened to some hilariously awful music, and talked to a lot of fun people, minus one. I’ll refer to him as Disco Stu for anonymity’s sake. Disco Stu saw me wearing a Giants Jersey and a “f*ckin’ Yankees hat” (despite it actually being a Mets hat clearly marked by the curvier font and royal blue and orange, not a straighter font with navy and white) and began to lecture me on how Boston is better than New York, how the Red Sox and Patriots are the teams of the decade and that New York can perform a rather graphic sexual act which I won’t discuss on this more academic forum. I went on to explain that It was a Mets hat, and that I far prefer the Red Sox to the Yankees, and that the Giants were never rivals of the Patriots, and that in fact most Pats fans were Giants fans before the Pats joined the NFL, until this past year anyway. Thankfully some others around the group defended my argument despite their allegiance to the Red Sox and Patriots.

Disco Stu wanted to have none of this and began to act just as Bostonians stereotypically act, yelling incoherently, having a huge inferiority complex about their city, ignoring logic, and being loudly and incoherently rude regarding anything other than Boston sports teams. I’ve even tried to defend Boston fans to my New York area brethren in past years, but this guy really put a knife to my defense. Anyway, long story short, this surly gent grunted at me the rest of the evening and as I left the party I may have shouted “New York What”

This brings me to last night where I was showed a list: “You know you’re from Boston when…”. This list has about 50 humorous musings on Boston inside joke type deals and got me thinking about the divide between Boston and New York and why there is such a divide.

The cities have incredibly similar belief structures and political ideologies. They are two of the most historically progressive cities in the country, filled with diverse peoples, educational institutions, music scenes, cultural icons, and of course, enormous sports franchises.  The sports rivalry is obvious, but more recent than historic. The classic Yankees ultimate rival as the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Red Sox. Their rivalry really heated up in the 80’s and 90’s. The Jets and Pats have a division rivalry, but the Pats just weren’t good enough to be a serious rival until about 1996, but since then the Jets have been awful. My teams (Giants and Mets) only have one time rivalries with Boston teams (1986 World Series and 2007 Superbowl) which made it a tough rivalry to promote. As far as I can tell though, the rivalry is really only hyped by the media in a ratings scheme through depicting as much anger and volatility as possible. This all got me thinking, is there more to the city rivalry other than sports and media hype?

The obvious answer came from the self admitted inferiority complex on the half of Disco Stu. There does seem to be a complex among Bostonians because New York is considered the “greatest city on earth”, the sort of international city represented by the United States, and etc. It is easier to be humble when you are used to being on top as New York has been, and far easier to be bitter when fighting upwards. Not really sure if there are any lessons to be learned here. After all this thinking I still whole heartedly feel a representative of New York, not Boston, and am confused by Disco Stu and ignorant sports and culture in general. There really is no need for a rivalry, at least a bitter one. Both cities have a lot to offer the world, common progressive politics and are home to much of this nation’s history.

But for you Disco Stu: I hope for Amazin’ Again in ‘09 and Back to Back Lombardi Trophies for the New York Football Giants! New. York. What.