timmmmmmmmmmmmmmay!!!!!

Let Us Blow Up Bill O'Reilly
Of course the PR-sucking Fox News blowhard is off his nut. Again. Question is, Should you care?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 16, 2005

It's almost too easy. He's too easy a target, really, Bill O'Reilly of the casually toxic Fox News, too bloviated and too silly and too undercooked, and no one whose opinion you truly value or with an IQ higher than their waist size actually watches him with anything resembling intellectual honesty or takes anything he says the slightest bit seriously. You hope.

Especially when he, like Pat Robertson ranting about how gays caused Sept. 11 or that Dover, Pa., is now a doomed and godless hell pit, given how the town fired every single one the imbecilic, intelligent design-supporting Repubs from the school board, especially when Billy goes off his nut once again and essentially wishes al Qaeda would attack San Francisco, well, it is up to us to merely look at him like Shiva looks at a sea slug -- i.e., a moment of compassion for his regrettable incarnation -- and then laugh and shake our heads and move the hell on.

I mean, what else do you want to do? Allow him credence? Give his infantile words any sort of weight and import? Let him slither into your heart like a worm and fester and burn? O'Reilly is, after all, the Right's most self-aggrandizing blowhard, one who still vilifies France like a child who hates broccoli, one who has, next to Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the worst spin in all of media.

And he is one who now suggests that because San Francisco dared to ban aggressive military recruiting in our high schools so disadvantaged 18-year-olds won't be unwittingly sucked into the brutish military vortex so they can be shipped off to Iraq to die for appalling and indefensible reasons, al Qaeda should blow up Coit Tower.

What do you do with that? You laugh. Sure, file a formal complaint with the Fox network. Sure, demand that Billy be fired, which is a bit like demanding Ronald McDonald be canned from the McDonald's corporation for poisoning our children. Yes, you have to do it, even if such complaints come from someone like San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, not exactly the poster child for tact and grace when it comes to political maneuvering.

But of course, it won't make one bit of difference. BOR is still Fox's cash cow. He draws big ratings, even here in the Bay Area. And even if O'Reilly's cultural relevance is tanking right along with the bad ship BushCo, he's still getting PR for miles out of the childish comment. Hell, you're reading a column about it right now, which means all those extremist right-wing inbreeding sites get to squeal "San Francisco in Uproar Over O'Reilly Comments," and grunt and revel in our displeasure. Ah well. It matters not.

Here's the takeaway, the only thing you need to know: Bill O'Reilly is a walking, snorting cautionary tale. For those of us who occasionally tread similar terrain of barbed political commentary (tempered, I hope, with satire and hope and sex and humor and fire hoses of divine juice), he is the Grand Pariah, the threshold, the Place You Do Not Want To Go as an intellectually curious human soul. He is the guy you can always look to, no matter how bad it gets, and say, Wow, at least I'm not him.

In a way, we should be grateful for O'Reilly and Robertson and Limbaugh and Coulter and their slime-slinging ilk. They live in those black and nasty psycho-emotional places, so we don't have to. They show us how ugly we can be, how poisonous and ill, so we may recoil and say, Whoa, you know what? I think I need to be more gentle and less judgmental and kinder to those I love. BOR works an inverse effect on anyone with a vibrant and active soul -- he makes us better by sucking all the grossness into himself and blowing it out via a TV channel no one of any spiritual acumen really respects anyway.

Hell, this very column has been known to wallow in political extremes too, often and regularly wishing fiery karmic pain upon Rove and Cheney and Dubya et al. for the humanitarian and environmental and moral hells they have unleashed upon our once-prosperous, gorgeous, diverse nation, and for the wars and the homophobia and the misogyny and the rampant lies and the unchecked ignorance of the workings of the human spirit.

But I would never go so far as to wish terrorists would blow up, say, Washington, D.C. Or Bill O'Reilly's personal fetish dungeon at Fox HQ in New York. I would never take a similar BOR tack and suggest that every red state that openly supports Bush and his miserable wars (and by extension, O'Reilly and his miserable worldview) should offer up their kid as a blood sacrifice to the Iraq War.

Check that: Maybe I would. Of course I would. But I would recognize the inherent silliness of it all, and the futility, and push it so far into satire that I'd suggest we also send in the NRA, and the Bush daughters, and Ashlee Simpson, and moreover I'd suggest they string up Karl Rove as bait because you know what Islamic extremists think of creatures both godless and porcine.

Conversely, BOR, of course, takes himself quite seriously, the inflation of his ego and speed of his rapid-fire fury matched only by the obvious deterioration of his heart.

But maybe that's not quite true. It has been rumored, somewhere, that Bill O'Reilly has a soul, that he was personally hurt and wronged by that sex scandal last year, that he's reasonably intelligent and that his almost comical lack of nuanced comprehension on the air and in his public persona, like Bush's mumbling incoherence or Condi Rice's apparent lack of the slightest hint of femininity, is a bit of a stage act, a dumb ruse that masks a keener intelligence, all designed to milk his bloviation for his bloody, mealy slice of fleeting fame. You may believe this as you wish.

It does not matter. What is clear is that BOR has made a Faustian bargain of the ugliest kind, taken on a worldview where there is no room for humor and light and sex and joy and grace, whereby he gets to unleash streams of rather appalling ignorance upon the progressive segments of the nation -- like, you know, cities that dare to encourage peace and nonviolence and a measured, respectful response to the world -- and he gets paid enormous sums and lives like an angry, sneering king, while the gods of karma can only sigh, and shake their heads, and wait.

i'd like to:

be able to listen to iggy pop and not think of puking on royal caribbean
be able to listen to the cars and not think of circuit fucking city
be able to listen to the who and not think of goddamn CSI

just once i'd like to read about someone saying ... "you know what ... let's not ruin that song with profits and greed and crass bullshit advertising ...."

just fucking once!!!!!

if maturity is accepting the fact that all of this is "just the way it is" and everything can be sold out for the nearest dollar, then fuck maturity ....

and fuck capitalism too.

aiggggggggght ... that's it for now ...

time to go listen to some fugazi and completely forget about the enormous pathetic morass that american society has become ....

Popular Snowman T-Shirt Raises Concerns
- By DESMOND BUTLER, Associated Press Writer

Friday, November 4, 2005

(11-04) 13:44 PST New York (AP) --

One of the hottest-selling T-shirts around the country shows a simply drawn snowman with a menacing expression.

It's not Frosty's evil twin. The image popularized by drug-dealer-turned-rapper Young Jeezy symbolizes those who sell a white substance known on the street as snow: cocaine.

Anti-drug campaigners and education officials are alarmed, saying the T-shirt and others like it are part of sophisticated marketing campaigns using coded symbols for drug culture that parents and teachers are not likely to understand. Some schools are banning kids from wearing the snowman images.

"The snowman is made of white, grainy stuff like sugar," said 12-year-old seventh-grader Mailik Mason, standing next to his mother in a Manhattan store selling the snowman shirts. "It has to do with a certain drug, crack or coke."

Young Jeezy's hit debut album, "Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101," peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard album charts. On one of his songs he raps, "Get it? Jeezy the Snowman / I'm iced out, plus I got that snow, man."

The shirt was first produced solely for Jeezy by Miskeen Originals, a hip-hop fashion firm in New Jersey, the company says. The owner, Yaniv Zaken, says his artists produced a handful for the rapper to wear on TV appearances.

They then sold a larger batch to retailers, but pulled them when Zaken discovered that his employees had not licensed the T-shirt from Jeezy.

"I wasn't sure what the snowman meant until the artist explained to me that it was a drug dealer, the man delivering snow," Zaken said. "Now everyone is selling the snowman — all unlicensed. It's become a street-hood hit worldwide."

A spokesman for Young Jeezy's record label, Def Jam Records, confirmed that the rapper held the rights to the snowman image but declined to comment on complaints that it was sending children the wrong message.

"This is part of a phenomena in which parents have no idea what their children are exposed to. There is a code that children are aware of but not parents," says Sue Rusche, president and CEO of the anti-drug group National Families In Action.

Rusche's organization has tried to pressure companies that they believed were targeting children with drug messages, like fashion companies marketing "heroin chic" in the 1990s. She was unaware of the snowman T-shirt.

Mason says he'd like to have a snowman T-shirt — but that his school in Brooklyn has banned it. His mother, Autherine Mason, 34, said she had been unaware of the snowman's meaning and wouldn't buy it for her son now that she knows.

Dr. Gilbert Botvin, director of the Institute for Prevention Research at Cornell University Medical College, has been studying what influences children to use drugs and alcohol. He believes that pop culture does play a role.

"The research tells us that influences coming from the media can have a profound effect on kids and influence them to use drugs," he says. "All of these things help to convey the impression that engaging in these behaviors using drugs is normal and that drugs might help you be successful or sexy or something."

Botvin says parents need to educate themselves about the media their kids are consuming and pressure schools to monitor what messages they allow students to advertise.

But sometimes it's hard to overcome the buzz on the street.

Ali Kourani, a Manhattan wholesale salesman, says the T-shirt is their top seller across the country.

"It's big money," Kourani said.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/11/04/entertainment/e114615S97.DTL