Why bother with health reform if all it's going to do is help you live longer? Who really wants that?
After a dreary, tedious year of back and forth namby-pambying over healthcare reform, we're still debating the pros and cons, mostly the cons. Blah blah blah the plan has too much this, not enough of that. Healthcare reform is bad because it will lead to socialism and/or Nazis. Healthcare reform is bad because it won't lead to socialism and/or Nazis. Blah blah.
Healthcare is expensive and getting more expensive with each tick of the clock. The hard truth is that as life expectancies increase, so do our expectations for our lives. Baby boomers fully expect to live to one hundred and fifteen, popping wheelies and sporting raging boners every step of the way. And if someone tells them the country simply cannot afford to subsidize their cushy retirement lifestyle and massive healthcare bills they'll do what they've always done, screw over future generations without a care in the world.
The more we talk about it, the bleaker it all gets, but when you step back from the maelstrom for a minute and take the long view, it becomes fairly clear that the whole thing is based on a false premise. All this time we've been acting on a blanket assumption that people want to live longer, a lot longer, with the benefit of expensive medical intervention.
Life, especially the sort of life you have when you get old and semi-mobile, is dramatically overrated. Have you talked to an old person recently? They're miserable. Hell, most of the people I know over the age of thirty are miserable.
If only we could honestly take stock in the underlying suckiness of the human condition, we might be able to take a more mature and enlightened approach to healthcare reform in this country. At the very least, we wouldn't have our panties in quite so tight a bunch over it.
Ask yourself, is it really worth all this trouble and expense to extend a life you aren't doing much with in the first place? You might think so, but you're probably wrong. Chances are close to 100 out of 100 that you're not going to find a cure for cancer or save the world or even write an enduring pop song.
By the age of 40, it's more or less over. Your options explored, your rather limited potential all but exhausted, your value to society is that of an ambulatory meat slab (imagine the Matrix but instead of human batteries we're just used to generate tax revenue). How long do you really want that routine to go on?
Once you reach that age and squeezed most of the fun out of life, the law of diminishing returns takes over in a big way. You've had sex. You smiled as a baby human squirted forth from someone's nether regions. You learned to resent that baby human and the owner of the nether regions from which is squirted. You learned how to drink to forget. In essence, you have partaken the marvelous panoply of human experience and the rest is just a series of rather dull reruns.
Before you know it, the only true joy left in your life will be watching hilariously bad reenactments of Bigfoot sightings on cable. That's no way to live.
Freddy Mercury was right. Indeed, who does want to live forever? Not him, certainly. He had the good sense to contract a fatal disease when he was still young enough to pull it off. There's a great deal to admire in that. Then again, he was a Brit so the whole thing was probably just an elaborate tax dodge.
Married people, do you really want to spend decades watching gravity savage your spouse's body even more than it already has? What have you really got to live for? You want to see your kids grow up? Sure, you say you want to stick around to watch them graduate from college but sure as shit when that day comes you'll be bitching up a storm about how "oh, it's so hot out here" and "why is it taking so long?" and "why did they sit me in the sun when they know I have liver spots?" Be honest. The truth is that you want to watch them get old like you so you can have a good, long laugh at their adult misfortunes before you kick off.
In Logan's Run they had the right idea, albeit a bit too extreme. The day you turn thirty, it's off to Carousel with you. It's like trading in your car at around 100,000 miles, before its parts begin failing and it starts to require major repairs. Let's say we upped the age limit a bit, something like this could elevate both rising healthcare costs and the overwhelming ennui of being alive.
We could handle it just like organ donation, just a tiny note on your drivers license that says "I'm OK. Don't bother." It's entirely optional.
Pick your poison. Literally. You get to pick the type of poison that will end your life. Personally, I'd go with cyanide. It's quick, relatively painless and has a pleasant almond aroma. That's consumer choice for you.
Posted by Chuck Charleston, Friday March 12, 2010 (0 votes) | 0 Comments | Permalink
Lemons to Lemonade: Eric Massa Launches His Own Line of Portable Closets
Like a lot of his fellow Americans, Eric Massa recently lost his job. It was a sweet gig, too, loads of prestige and an incredible health plan to boot. Add to that the fact that the alleged reason he lost his job, a series of sexual harassment complaints involving his penchant for homoerotic tickling and groping male underlings in their underlings, could make it harder for him to get another one.
Even worse, a track record of such behavior might cause people to mistakenly believe that Massa is gay, but as he has made it clear repeatedly, he's not gay. As a matter of fact, he's so not gay that he feels compelled to spend much of his day describing to random people just how not gay he really is. Whatever the opposite of gay is, he asserted, that's what he is. On second thought, that must have been a poor choice of words on Massa's part because, according to leading psychologists, the opposite of gay is also gay.
Regardless of the miserable circumstances in which he currently finds himself, Massa isn't the sort of guy to waste even a moment mourning this loss or feeling sorry for himself. Almost immediately after adding the prefix "ex-" to his Congressional business cards, Massa picked himself up, dusted himself off and got to work on a new business venture that has the potential to turn his fortunes around completely.
Wednesday night, just 24 hours after what appeared to be the end of his public life, Massa appeared on QVC promoting his new product, an amazing little invention called the Portable Closet.
Have you ever been standing in the warm seclusion of your closet and wished that you could take that feeling with you all day long? Now you can do just that with Eric Massa's Portable Closet.
Like all good gadgets, Massa's brain child offers an elegant solution to a common problem. It happens every day. You look down and you see brown loafers and black slacks. You wish you could get back to your closet somehow change pants, but how can you? You're on the subway in front of dozens of strangers. Ping! Eric Massa's Portable Closet is just the thing for you.
Or what about those times at work when you just want to hide away in a private space and escape the prying, judgmental eyes of the world? Just assemble the super-light aluminum frame and step inside Eric Massa's Portable Closet and, blammo, the world is your closet. Even in the middle of a board meeting or interview on Fox News, a Portable Closet is just the thing you need.
It's the perfect gift for your theatrical nephew or your child's dance instructor. Some people might be interested in the Portable Closet but think they can't take part because they came out of their own closet or accidentally fell out some time ago. That's nonsense, says Massa. With the Portable Closet you can act like it never happened. After all, that's what closets, both the portable and non-portable kinds, are all about.
Eric Massa's Portable Closet: even when you're outed, you're still in it.
Good News, Better News: Health Reform's Passage Will Force Limbaugh Out of the Country
After more than a year of discussions, the healthcare debate has reached its intellectual zenith. On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program that if health reform passes he'll leave the country. This isn't just some childish take-my-ball-and-go-home fit of pique, either. I can't be sure, but I think he meant that as a threat.
According to his point of view healthcare reform is apocalypse-triggeringly awful, and conversely the status quo is incredibly shiny and awesome. Forget for the moment that this is the same one that already passed both houses of Congress and polls well when it isn't called "Obamacare," passing it with a majority vote would be unfathomably undemocratic. So undemocratic, in fact, that he will have no choice but to punish us with his absence. So there, America!
So, it may not be a coincidence that just moments after he said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she had all but sewn up the votes needed to move ahead with the next step toward passing the bill.
I like to imagine that Harry Reid happened to be icing a cake when he received the phone call with the news.
The new development has lit a new fire under the Democrat caucus' collective butt and provide the motivation they need to get this puppy done by Easter- or at least by Pentecost. An updated draft of the House bill will reportedly include an amendment that would dispatch a dozen Congressional pages to Limbaugh's Florida home to help him pack. However, the new language may get mired down in a technical debate over how many fingers they will be required to use when waving him good-bye.
This sort of ultimatum is nothing new. Alec Baldwin said the same thing in 2004 and rudely refused to leave when the whims of history called his bluff. But in fairness to history, recent success aside Baldwin hadn't been in anything interesting for a while at that point.
Still, even if Baldwin did pull that again at least he would have options. He could easily slip off to France and be worshiped in an slightly creepy Jerry Lewis sort of way. What about Limbaugh? Where could he possibly go?
He certainly wouldn't emigrate to France with its stinky cheese liberalism, its off-putting Iraq WMD skepticism, not to mention its unsurpassed levels of Frenchiness.
Forget about the UK, too. Even though the Tories seem to be having a bit of a revival at the moment, their notion of conservative isn't nearly racist or crazy enough for his liking. Sure, the English hate on immigration almost as much as some folks do here, but they're so polite about it that it just sucks the fun right out of it. More importantly, the UK's income tax structure would cause Limbaugh's tiny, wrinkled heart to explode. Oh, and socialized medicine. They have that as well.
In fact, Limbaugh is going to have a hard time finding any industrialized nation that hasn't already made the jump to full-on single payer healthcare.
Imagine Limbaugh adrift in the Mediterranean settling in one nation after another until the universality of their healthcare systems offends him so much that he must once again set off for less-green pastures, truly a man without a country.
Keep in mind that the health reform being discussed on Capitol Hill is not socialized medicine. Chances are, it's not even going to have a teeny-tiny public option that would require an electron microscope to actually see.
If he went ahead with this, Limbaugh would be jumping out of the frying pan of "Obamacare" and into a fire of affordable health services for all. The horror.
We do have some specifics, though. On the show, Limbaugh mentioned that he was thinking of moving to Costa Rica, a country that boasts gorgeous weather, friendly people and, wait for it, universal healthcare. They call it Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, with an emphasis on the last syllable to give it that sexy island flare.
The Costa Ricans will be taking care of his drug-damaged body with taxpayer-funded health services well into his 90's. And he'll be hating every blissful minute of it.
Posted by Klem Johansen, Wednesday March 10, 2010 (2 Votes) | 0 Comments | Permalink
Blood Orgy of Glamor
Here's one thing I never understood about the Oscars. It's inacurate to say that a movie star in a nice dress is "stunning." Jellyfish are stunning. Humans lack the necessary fangs or venom sacks to effectively stun another animal.
It all gets back to a general inflation of red carpet rhetoric over the years. It's not enough to say that someone who has spent all day being dressed and primped by teams of elite hair and makeup ninjas looks pretty.
For some reason we have to describe them as if they are preparing to commit an act of senseless violence. In years past, it may have been acceptable to imply that someone's outfit was merely capable of murder (e.g. "fierce") but now we have specialized entertainment corespondents on hand to describe each actress's dress as a blood-orgy of glamor.
When an entertainment correspondent for CNN or E! tells viewers that Sandra Bullock looks "devastating" in whatever-the-hell she's wearing, they have to come up with something even more over-heated and violent buzz word when Angelina Jolie slinks out of her limo dressed in a cloud of cheekbones and human pheromones.
"She looks eviscerating tonight. She really, really does."
In the background of Sunday's Oscar's red carpet coverage, you could see some of them hurriedly thumbing through pulp crime novels mining for ideas.
"Wow. That dress is triple homicide. And that gem-encrusted clutch bag is about to abduct a small family of four, ritualistically torture them for several days and leave them for dead in the desert."
With a struggling economic recovery, two wars, and a cascading string of natural disasters going on at the moment, now might seem like a bad time to talk about redesigning bank notes, but according to a handful of influential Republicans, that's just what the country needs.
More specifically, I'm talking about the movement to put Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill. Just imagine what a morale booster that would be, the Gipper's smiling face winking up at you as you generously tip the valet or receive change for that jumbo caviar meal at Wendy's.
How fitting that we would place America's conservative hero on a bill that is so commonly used by Americans of all stripes, everyone from people who sell stocks to people who sell drugs. Truly, the fifty is the people's bill. Ask any ten people you know and you'll find that most of them have at least one fifty in their wallet right now. And if you don't, you should probably consider making better friends.
It's more than just national morale at stake here. Conservatives want to plant their flag, which incidentally is a large American flag made up of smaller American flags, deep into the craggy, infertile landscape of American politics on the eve of their expected Congressional victory in the fall.
In other words, they want to gloat a little. If movies have taught us anything about the tactics of battle, standing over your victim and delivering a lengthy monologue before delivering the final blow does not always work out well. For that reason as well as a host of others, putting Reagan on the fifty is not a good idea.
Firstly, to do this would be to replace the bill's current occupant Ulysses S. Grant. The proponents of this idea fully support jettisoning Grant on the grounds that he was a terrible President, and that's true. He was perfectly awful. We know this because A) newspaper accounts of the time paint a very grim picture of his administration and B) because he was a Republican.
It's the other line of reasoning in this argument that seems most disagreeable: that Grant should be replaced on the fifty because he is no longer relevant.
Quit to the contrary, I'd argue that he is more relevant at this moment than he has been for a century. Grant did something that modern political leaders don't seem willing or able to do. U.S. Grant kicked the living shit out of a horde of racist secessionist hicks, burned their mud huts to the ground and pressed his boot into their jugular until they cried "uncle" and admitted that we were one country for good or ill.
Grant looked Robert E. Lee in the eye when he surrendered at the Appomattox Court House, which means that he may have been witness to the last time anyone of that frame of mind admitted that they may have been wrong or bitten off more than they could chew.
Take one of those fifties out of your wallet and prop it up in front of the television for a few hours. Let Ulysses get a good long eye-ful of the modern political atmosphere. I have no doubt that he would immediately recognize this time as being far too much like his own. All that talk about "states' rights" and the vague, half-serious threats of armed rebellion would not escape his green-tinted ears.
He knows what that sort of code language truly means and the price to be paid for it because he has made people pay it. And that, by any account, is a terrible thing to have to do to people who were once your countrymen but, led astray by opportunists of the worst kind, thought themselves better.
So, rather than replacing Grant on the fifty we should be celebrating him and the bill that bears his image. The next time you run into someone who sees fit to vent his animal rage by talking tough about secession, wave a fifty in his face and see if he runs away. If history is any guide, he'd be smart to do just that.
Out of Ideas, We Post A Bunch of Chuck Charleston Snippets
For a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to something other than laziness, we have decided to post a bunch of Chuck Charleston's Tweets and Facebook drivel, snappy one-liners that make you want to put a bullet in your head. Klem claims to have done some of them, but it's hard to tell since everything on the site seems like it was written by the same guy.
Please, visit Chuck's depositories of random crap on Facebook or Twitter so we don't have to keep doing this.
March 3, 2010 Question: does PETA focus group their marketing campaigns? If so, I guess that means they engage in animal testing.
January 13, 2010 Two words that undo 90% of all suicide pacts: "you first."
February 2, 2001 Adulthood is a lot like a family vacation from when you were little. People keep telling you that you're having a great time but you're just riding along going where people tell you to and pretending to have fun to keep your loved ones from crying.
November 5, 2009 "High IQ != Intelligence," says a person who doesn't test well.
March 3, 2010 A given nation's economic strength standard of living is inversely proportional to how good your country is at soccer/futbol. Note: David Beckham arrived in the United States in July of 2007, just as the housing bubble began to burst.
January 30, 2010 My homework ate my dog. It was an assignment for chemistry class, aqua regia. Buster drank it and died almost immediately. It's rather sad, actually.
February 1, 2010 I was always wondered why the Rebel Alliance chose an IUD for its logo. What sort of branding message are they trying to send?
February 22, 2010 "Resting comfortably" is press release slang for "screw you- I survived"
December 7, 2009 Given the choice, I'd rather be a living myth than a living legend. A legend has a reputation to protect. A myth is just a whisper on the wind. Your very existence is a matter of debate. As a living myth you could do whatever the hell you wanted and when things got weird you could just arbitrarily choose to not exist for a few weeks until things died down.
March 1, 2010 Don't think of it as child labor. It's just that Apple is a firm believer in the One Laptop Per Child (per hour) project.
February 8, 2010 I don't think I could be a psychotherapist in Canada - every time someone would say "I'm crippled with self-doobt" I would bust out laughing and eventually lose my license.
January 14, 2010 I used to think The Huffington Post was a lifestyle site devoted to inhalant abuse. Honestly, it was one of the biggest disappointments of my adult life.
January 28, 2010 Corruption is part of human nature and you can't change human nature. In the future, we'll accept this idea and hand over power to sentient robots who will take care of governance for us. Everything will work fine for ten or twenty years until we learn that we accidentally programmed a corruption subroutine into the AI of the robots. The ensuing war to regain power is the inspiration for the Terminator movies.
January 28, 2010 I've been trying to commit passive-aggressive suicide for years now. A while back, I started the habit of popping random unlabeled VHS tapes into the VCR in the hopes that it's the Ring video. One time I happened upon an unlabeled copy of the movie The Ring recorded from TV. That was a pretty confusing couple of days.
February 15, 2010 Marrying someone is almost exactly like buying a fridge. Eventually you want a replacement and spend years waiting around for it to die.
Posted by Chuck Charleston, Thursday March 04, 2010 (0 votes) | 0 Comments | Permalink
First they came for Conan, and I did not speak out -because I was not Conan
First they came for Conan, and I did not speak out -because I was not Conan.
Then they came for Obama, and I did not speak out- because I was not Obama.
Then they came for me but I got bored and changed the channel.
The fact that Leno has chosen to book Palin as one of his first guests upon his return to the recaptured Tonight Show says volumes. It's as if he's telling the world "I know she's a joke- an unfunny joke to boot, but I don't care. You cannot stop me."
In many ways, the choice makes perfect sense. On one hand, Palin represents the deplorable state of American political dialogue. On the other we have Jay Leno, an unstoppable ooze of banality smothering anything original or interesting.
They are each possessed of a laser-like focus on a single, awful purpose: claw your way to the top on the backs of your betters and destroy what you cannot conquer even if it means killing the institutions you claim to love. Come to think of it, that's a pleasingly snappy sentence. As mantras go, it would look very nice on a framed needlepoint.
Their resumes that read like the victims list on a schlocky serial killer documentary. And even with the blood still wet upon their clothes, they play the victim. They look at us with wide cow-like eyes and demand for our sympathy. And each time, the news media scrambles to cover it as if the universe is imploding. They eat it up because they know you'll eat it up.
So, what is this mysterious power that keeps them in the spotlight even when any measure of merit would have sent them packing ages ago? Their appeal to regular folks, it would seem. Not just that, they appeal to the squeaky wheels who scream and tear at their clothes when anything in their dank, claustrophobic world is changed.
In either case, this appeal is no accident. Jay Leno has the personality of a glass of warm water, the product of a deliberate transformation to advance his career regardless of the cost to himself or to us.
Leno may have once been a very good stand-up comic at one point in his life, and Palin may have been a passable mayor of a tiny Alaskan village, but long ago they both learned the value of giving people what they want, especially when what they want makes no sense at all. There is, it seems, no more lucrative business than in convincing people they know better than the rest of the world even when they know next to nothing at all.
This is about more than mere money. This is power. Leno and Palin can use this power to do incredible feats of black magick. Like Super Man flying backwards around the globe to save Lois Lane, Leno managed to parlay his parasocial bond with people who don't know any better to push back the clock to 2008 and saunter back onto the Tonight Show set as if he hadn't been let go- twice. At the same time, Palin is whipping up a frenzy of resentment and ignorance to effectively undo an election that, if memory serves, she lost.
We had our chance to put an end to this and we blew it. And now Sarah Palin and Jay Leno cannot be stopped. We all know how this will end. By the end of this year, Republicans will have taken over both houses of Congress riding a wave of nonsensical rejectionism, and Conan O'Brien's show will premiere to lackluster ratings. People will react with shock as if things have changed but even they will recognize on some level that nothing has.
And around that time all the stupid people you know, people who listen to Nickelback because it "speaks to them" and think Dane Cook is the most original stand-up ever, will smugly spout about the wisdom of the common person. They will talk about how the choice of one dopey millionaire talk show host over another is an act of rebellion against the the media elite, of which Leno and Palin are quite obviously members. Every moment you manage to exist without gouging your eyes out (or theirs) with a number two pencil will be a tiny victory.
In the meantime, watch Leno spend another ten minutes pointing out typos in small local newspapers. That's funny. People love that crap.
Posted by Klem Johansen, Wednesday March 03, 2010 (0 votes) | 2 Comments | Permalink
Sen. Bunning: Don't Blame Me For Being An A-Hole, Blame My A-Hole
Republican Senator Jim Bunning wants you to know that he is not an asshole. Rather, his asshole is actually a big part of the problem.
When Bunning said "tough shit" after being asked why he was holding up legislation and effectively cutting off unemployment benefits for thousands of families, he wasn't just spitting out some glib, heartless response. He was attempting to explain his foul mood. You see, for some time now Bunning has been suffering from a very, very difficult bowel situation that renders his stool as dense and craggy as granite block.
According to the maintenance staff, Bunning's incredible rectum has broken six toilets in the Capitol building since January. Tough shit, indeed.
For some of the older Senators who fought in WWII, especially those who served on submarines, Bunning's condition has been quite vexing because every time he goes to the bathroom it sounds sounds like a depth charge going off. Apparently, there's something about the antiquated plumbing and its complex system of copper pipes that causes Bunning's ka-thunks to reverberate through the building's marble halls.
It's helpful to know that there's a reason why Bunning is acting this way. Otherwise, we might start to think he was a raging prick. Think about it: holding up legislation for some weird partisan agenda that at the same time accomplishes nothing at all and all the while ranting on about completely unrelated issues. Someone would have to be a real ass to do that, a class A colossal douchebag with no regard for the job he was elected to perform or the oath he swore to uphold.
Thank goodness we know that is not the case here. This isn't the real Jim Bunning we're hearing. It's his medical condition talking. And while such medical issues would not excuse a person's need for unemployment benefits in Bunning's opinion, it certainly excuses his own behavior.
Besides the colonic compression issue, Bunning has been under a great deal of stress over the reelection campaign he recently scrapped. In a few months, this man who has not held an honest job since the Reagan era will have to look for one- at least for a few years until he's allowed to come back to K Street and once again make a living off of his industry loyalties.
So, you see, it's all completely understandable.
Doctors blame the malady on Bunning's diet of cheese and sexual repression, but Bunning disagrees. He says that he hasn't consumed any cheese or had an impure thought since taking office in 1987. He went on to clarify that the bowl of nacho dip a copy of Hancho magazine reporters noticed on his desk last week belonged to a staffer who has since been fired.
To alleviate the situation, physicians recommend an industrial strength stool softener and liberal amounts of Dr. Rammington's Rectal Grease. So far Bunning has refused to comply with treatment since its description uses too many uncomfortable code words.
For Sen. Bunning, day to day life for Bunning has become nearly unbearable. On the bright side, however, Bunning is among the few people in the country who still has a job and decent healthcare. And thanks to his efforts on the Senate floor, he aims to keep it that way for a while.
Posted by Mark Arenz, Tuesday March 02, 2010 (3 Votes) | 9 Comments | Permalink
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