A Breakfast Crisis.

[ So, I know I promised the Bowiethon—but this post happened in real time—& I felt so strongly about it—& then I made graphics—& I think we could use a little levity 'round here, yeah? So, here it is. Bowie next. Swear to Dog. ]

In a particularly good (& therefore memorable) episode of The West Wing, Josh Lyman's ever-eager assistant Donna informs him that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over & expecting different results." While I'm not sure if anyone aside from Aaron Sorkin actually defines insanity in this way,* it provides the perfect framework for a discussion I've been meaning to have with my brain for some time—but which I put off, of course, until directly confronted with it this morning.

To begin: I stayed up through woke up bright & early at 8:30 AM, perfectly primed to stretch, shower, & get in a hearty breakfast before my 10:00 class. Brimming with goodwill & cheer, I practically bounced up Broadway, waving & smiling, for all the world like a modern-day Belle greeting her small, provincial town—&, lo & behold, upon entering the dining hall, I morphed to awestruck Charlie in his Chocolate Factory: this was the fare before noon?! This glorious spread of fruit salad & frittatas!—yogurts & chicken sausage!—cereals upon cereals!—large to-go coffee cups!—&, then I saw it: the perfect, protein-filled start to my day, steaming, quietly, in the corner: Oatmeal. My eyes brimmed: it was as if the gods themselves had shone a beam of pure, distilled Glory on my day—nay, my life—with such a patently ideal offering.

So, of course, I forewent the home fries & granola, the quickly dwindling scrambled eggs, & jumped for this beautiful, brimming cauldron of— Okay, well, it looked a little like something regurgitated by a colic infant, but still! I was not about to be thwarted by mere appearance! My breakfast experience was about so much more: it was about substance & health & deliciousness—&, well, so what if it also tasted a little like something coughed up by a really, profoundly unhealthy infant... A Garbage Pail infant, who has spent a lot of time chugging Elmer's glue & sand... A mutant Garbage Pail infant with 30 phlegm glands, who has experienced turbulence coming from the planet Terrible in the galaxy of Oh My God What Is This Demon Food???

My point—exaggerated, perhaps, by recent experience—is that I hate oatmeal. I hate it with the burning passion of a thousand neutron stars. I find it utterly repugnant in every aspect—& yet, I find myself eating it, again, & again, & again. For some reason, despite all evidence to the contrary, I still, in the moment, consider oatmeal the most awesome of breakfast foods. If you were to offer me a bowl of Lucky Charms, in which the marshmallows were Mario immortality stars & the milk was unicorn tears & all the cereal pieces joined in a chorus of "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" with the basso profundo of Robert Goulet—this, in exchange for some generic oatmeal, I guarantee you, I would choose the oatmeal every time. &, of course, three bites later, my day would be ruined, because I would realize, for the 8 billionth & yet somehow the first time, that I hate oatmeal.

It's eternally perplexing: for whatever reason, my brain has built up this Platonic ideal of oatmeal that just absolutely refuses to be disproved, no matter how many counterexamples I present. Now that I'm reflecting, I have only dour oatmeal memories from early years—the same three hopeful bites, followed by an unfailingly cartoonish frown. In fact, if we're talking childhood touchstones: in the musical Oliver!, there is an entire dynamic opening sequence in which a massive chorus of sympathetic orphan boys simply beg to eat anything but oatmeal—&, to top it off, young Oliver is banished from the workhouse for daring to request some more! & did I mention the mutant infant demon?!

It gets back to this idea of Sorkinesque insanity, I suppose: for whatever reason, I've developed a mental block when it comes to this puke-y breakfast cereal, & therefore decide, like Nancy returning to her Bill, that past wrongs aside, this time has got to be different. & yet, it's worse than a justification: it seems decisionless—amnesiac—like Leonard in Memento, who can't tell crazy, trash-talking Natalie from the victim he ought to protect—who, within a gap of only a few memory-lost seconds, mistakes the bruise he was provoked into giving her for the act of an enemy. It's a total brainwash, an irresistible Siren song: when approaching that steaming cauldron of snot, the only thought in my head is how much I love oatmeal, how I've always loved it, how lucky I should consider myself to have this rare chance to taste it once more... Honestly, it's important that I write this entry now, because I guarantee you that in a matter of hours, I'll be bounding back eagerly to ladle all over again.

I can't explain it—really, I can't—but I can identify plenty of other phenomena that conform to this Insanity pattern, at least in the life of Me. Here are a few:

Incense.

The only way I could think to illustrate this properly was in graph form, because this is just how I think sometimes.

Napping before class.

Because sleeping always—always—seems like such a good idea at the time. Luckily, my internal alarm clock has learned to seep into my dreams—often in the form of a plotline about the homework I should be doing—so now I don't so much nap through classes as right up until them, meaning I usually show up looking a bit disheveled, with sleep-hair & fabric grooves in my face.

Watching Law & Order: SVU.

See, even now, my lobes are whispering, like Grima Wormtongue, "But Anneliese, you love crime shows! & Law & Order is the greatest invention since fire! You should watch EVERY EPISODE, RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW." &, inevitably, someday, I will listen—head over to Netflix Instant & watch at least half a season—before I run into one of the countless episodes that engages in really unconscionable conservative moralizing (often revolving around crazy Elliot & his enormous, aryan family), at which I will become enraged, then despondent, realizing that there are a million, billion other things I could have been doing with my time—or, at least, a million billion better shows.

The Family Circus.

As edgy-scrumptious drug dealer Todd Gaines (played by my beloved Timothy Olyphant) articulates toward the end of Go:

Okay. You sit down to read your paper, & you're enjoying your entire two-page comics spread, right? & then there's the Family fucking Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck, & it ruins your whole experience.

So, why doesn't he just skip it?

I hate it, yet I'm uncontrollably drawn to it.

Preach, Todd. Preach.

* [ POST-SCRIPT: My post mortem research shows that someone besides Aaron Sorkin does, in fact, define insanity like Donna. His name is Albert Einstein. He did math or something. ]

Today's Headphone Fodder:

Change—Young Veins.

This is one of those songs that just magically ended up in my iTunes; I'm really not sure how I acquired it. However, it's pretty great: cheeky lyrics (someone should've told her that pretty ain't a job), interesting variation between chorus & verse—&, la pièce de resistence, an ORGAN, which has been massively underused in rock/pop music these past few decades.

A Struggle to Love My Hateful Neighbors.

[ NOTE: Upon waking, as so often happens when bile is spilt in print, I rethought a bit of what I had written here—but, rather than backtrack or edit that which had already been dealt, I decided to let this testament to my anger stand & simply reformed/clarified a bit of my argument in the comment section. So, just to make sure you get the full & measured weight of my opinion on the subject, you should read through to there. Many Thanks, The Management ]

So, here's the thing: I have a couple of posts in the works—some movie/TV ponderings, a tribute to David Cross, a review of the new Pernice Brothers album—but all of that has been put on hold in favor of this diatribe. I know it's not new—I know it's obvious to anyone who might actually be reading this now—but after encountering a particularly vile pocket of Christian hate speech on our beloved World Wide Web, I feel the need to contribute at least one small voice against the juggernaut, the minutest of slingshots against this unwieldy & fumbling Goliath, who manages to poison more minds than He will probably ever understand.

There is something fundamentally amiss, I feel, about calling these people (& their various counterparts, at varying degrees of severity—referred to en masse as the "Religious Right") Christian. Clearly, from the Jesus fish on their cars & the Bible quotes misspelled on their picket signs, we are meant to understand that they are admirers of Christ—but I refuse to call them his followers. After reading large swaths of the Bible this past fall, I learned several interesting things: that all of the Big Players (Noah, Abraham, etc.) apparently lived for multiple hundreds of years (seriously—look it up); that "Satan" was originally a name that simply meant "antagonist"—as in, the provocateur in the Book of Job, who is not necessarily the Prince of Darnkess; &, most importantly, that Jesus was, above all, a preacher of acceptance—the kind that trumps social strata & pre-assumed prejudice. Anyone—anyone—who would start a website called "GodHatesFags.com" has no business calling themselves a follower of Christ. It's just that simple.

I imagine that, if I posed this same thesis to any of the website's proprietors or supporters, I would receive a company line in the vein of we only hate people who hate God or we preach hate because the Bible preaches hate—to which I would respond, as I feel we all ought: BULLSHIT. Bullshit, utter & pure.

Look: the Bible is so, so very old—& has been translated & re-translated so, so many times—that it is, in fact, impossible to extrapolate the literal word of God from the literal words of the Bible. Anyone who claims that they can is just wrong; the very basis of Evangelicalism, certain other forms of Protestantism, Catholicism—the utter lunacy of "biblical inerrancy," that the Bible is infallible & divine—is actually just not possible at this point. Or, if you insist: this infallibility refers only to some ancient, molding text somewhere in Vatican City, written in Hebrew, NOT to the King James Bible in your motel room drawer or the Revolve magazine at your local Barnes & Noble. Because, as it stands today, the Bible just does not make sense as a document to guide modern human life, & therefore is in no way a valid justification for an attempt to marginalize an entire class of people.

This point was made far more snappily by Aaron Sorkin (filtered through the indignant & pointed bluster of Martin Sheen) in what will always be one of my very favorite episodes of The West Wing, which we will get to in due time—but, for now, let me just riddle you this: Do you believe that if a man sleeps with a woman who is a slave girl promised to another man but who has not been ransomed or given her freedom, there must be due punishment? Personally, I think that they are not to be put to death, because she had not been freed. Thank G-d, Leviticus 19:20 agrees!

Yes, gentle Reader, in the same chapter of the same book of the Bible that condemns homosexuality—or, well, the chapter right after it, as Leviticus 18 is essentially a long & detailed list of different kinds of incest—are the following decrees:

Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. (19:10)

Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. (19:15)

Do not mate different kinds of animals. (19:19)

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. (19:19)

Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. (19:28)

When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. (19:33-34)

Do not degrade your daughter by making her a prostitute, or the land will turn to prostitution and be filled with wickedness. (19:29)

My point is not that Billy Ray Cyrus is responsible for the underage promiscuity epidemic (though those in charge of marketing his daughter are certainly not helping). Rather, my point is that half of these "decrees" are blatantly archaic, while the other half are being broken by phenomena such as celebrity fetishization & "pull yerselves up by yer own bootstraps" corporate greed—causes I have never seen a single letter-of-biblical-law church group take up with the same fervor as they do anti-gay rhetoric. The day I see a baptist minister railing against polyester blend shirts—or, for that matter, immigrant mistreatment—with the same venom as he devotes to gay people, I will at least be able to lower my wild cries of "HYPOCRITE" long enough to point out these two verses the hate-mongers have conveniently forgotten:

Do not go about spreading slander among your people. ... Do not hate your brother in your heart. (19:16-17)

Remember, this is in the same section of the Bible as the famous line that condemns homosexuality—& therefore deserves equal importance at least, or so I would think.

Still, if it came down to it, I imagine Pastor Fred Phelps & I would each ultimately wind up shouting at each other the second half of this more conciliatory verse, the half that groups like Westboro seem to hang their ever-weighty hat on: Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Judging by the number of their own rules these so-called Christians are clearly breaking—to love thy neighbor as thyself, among others—all in the name of the very shortest line in these two chapters, I think that I & many of my LGBT brethren have far more earned our right to rebuke—& rebuke we must.

As a firm believer in the First Amendment & all of its clauses, I would never support the banning of Baptist Christianity or its vile, vile websites. Ignorant people yelling hatefully is, unfortunately, one of the necessary evils inherent in real & present Free Speech. However, I absolutely believe, from the depths of my being, that we need to yell just as loudly back. For every sign that says "God Hates Fags" at the funeral of a fallen soldier, there need to be at least ten that say "God Hates Bigots." For every website that preaches ignorance & ill will, there needs to be a daily influx of negative comments, each brimming with the same vitriol these sites dole out. I am so very sick of liberals & LGBT organizations sitting back & doing damage control, while the Religious Right captures the eyes & ears of America simply because they are loud, inconsiderate assholes. Liberals need to start punching back against this hypocrisy, & soon.

So, with that: fuck off, Westboro Baptist Church—your supporters, your peers, all of you. Seriously. I hope you each endure serious, excruciating torture for all the pain you have caused, you rotten, rotten people.

I am so tired of turning the other cheek, of trying to respect your right to exist—when, in fact, those are supposed to be your values, ones that you somehow shucked off along with basic human compassion & any sense of decency. I will always speak loudly & wrathfully against you, so long as you are allowed to spew virulent hate speech against entire legions of people whom you have never met, who mean you no harm, & who, in fact, often do their best to tolerate you, even in the face of your blind & ill-informed intolerance of them. So, please, crawl back to your sterile, sexless prison of misconstrued "values" & arbitrary law, endlessly stabbing towards Meaning with only the blunt cudgel of "spirituality" & stale hatred at your disposal. You are cruel, & you are wrong, & your opponents will triumph.

All right, I've said my piece. Take it away, President Bartlet.

Today's Headphone Fodder:

To balance out the preceding heaviness & bile, here is something that actually, without fail, makes me weep with laughter: Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights (which, come on, is a pretty excellent song—or would be, if taken down an octave or three) synced, without any editing, to Zac Efron's Golf Course Dance of Angst & Defiance from High School Musical 2. It is a goddamn miracle how well—& hilariously—it matches up. Hallelujah.

(Here, too, is the James St. James post that led me to this masterpiece.)