Because I'm tired, I've spent the afternoon in front of daytime television. I don't need to say what a pointless endeavor this is, but can I just complain for a minute on how much closer we get to "Ow! My Balls" each and every day in this country? Oy. The political ads may push me right over the edge soon, and the Everest College ads are positively the most disturbing things I have seen in some time. Have you seen them? One has a guy in a crooked baseball cap standing in a parking lot telling "you" to get off the couch and call Everest. He barely speaks coherently. The next one - and this may be my favorite - is a young African-American woman with terrifyingly white teeth and ridiculous hair complaining about her life and how she "had" to go Everest "for me and my kids" - are you kidding me? She can barely speak English (as a NATIVE English-speaker, mind you) and she's college material? Really? If I can forget the fact that these ads clearly target the stupid and the unfairly stereotyped, is it really a selling point of a college to repeat the mantra "if SHE can do it, anyone can" to sell the enormous tuition and vo-tech training? I thought the point of education was to educate people. No wonder the world feels like it's headed to hell most days. Guh.
And on a side note, the most recent commercial ad was for the animated Star Wars film coming out soon, with the announcement, "Finally, what Star Wars fans have been waiting for!" And my only response was, "what? A good SW film after the mid-eighties?" I'm dismayed at how far my distaste of the recent SW efforts has clearly soiled my otherwise glowing SW adoration. All I can say is that thank the gods they finally made a Batman film worth the admission, and I'd like a "hell yeah" for Iron Man, which was simply an orgy of explosions and great entertainment - visually stunning in every way. Oh, and a hell-fucking-yeah for Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Damn. With exciting stuff out there delivering this magnitude, why is Lucas still bothering to bore us with all this prequel shit?
But on a more serious note, and the entire reason for my empty afternoon rant: The top of the newscast this afternoon is the Chandler story and the Phillips trial, and that he was found guilty of starving that little boy to death. Even the judge got choked up in reading the verdict, I hope because he is as horrified as the rest of us. Phillips will spend the rest of his life in jail. Big fucking deal. I consider myself a reasonable person and I don't openly endorse or challenge the death penalty because it's complicated; when I hear stories like this, however, my often philosophical approach and scholarly liberal response to capital punishment gives way to solid unadulterated desires for vengeance and vigilante justice. For this motherfucker, I wish we still had humiliating public executions in which the convict was brutally tortured and killed only after his worthless, lifeless body had all but died anyway. What happened to drawing and quartering? The rack? La guillotine? Gladiator battles with carnivorous and angry animals? Hot pokers up the ass, splinters under fingernails? I can't think of anything too barbaric for a person who - with a plethora of public services available to him - consciously decided that locking up and starving a child is the logical course of action. What's worse is how many people knew about it and did nothing. I don't believe a word that any of them say about not knowing, not suspecting that something was amiss. Who does this kind of thing? I can't possibly wrap my brain around it, and all I can hope is that what's his name and his wretch of a girlfriend suffer the worst kind of psychological hell and physical torture possible in our prison system. I've seen Shawshank Redemption. We all know what I'm talking about.
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