Whoo-boy. What a motherfucker of a day. I came to the news a bit late because I needed a doctor to give my pharmacy permission to refill a prescription, and I needed comics. But when I did hear? I went blind with rage. In my mind I started composing this column with a head full of hate and bile. I went through several starts before I did something that very few people in such a mindframe do. I took a breath and stood back. I thought about things because I knew I was going off half-cocked like everyone else on the internet.
But that's it. No matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, from left to right to the fuckers in the middle with me, WE ARE ALL FUCKING ANGRY. So maybe let's think a little first.
And then I decided fuck it, I'm going to write about the ending of Vikings tonight instead. And then serendipity struck. Why not write about both? You'll see what I mean in a moment.
I think (hope) there is one thing we can ALL agree with: this country doesn't work. We have a serious problem, and we can't keep letting the right blame the left and the left blame the right. If we can admit this one fucking thing, we'll be on the right track. But let's be honest. Right now there are alcoholics in this world who are way better off than the state of our country because at least they have met the First Step. We have a problem. Do we want to do something about it? Or do we just want to keep shitting in each other's cereal bowls?
Any fucking asshole who gets elected to US President (and they're all assholes; to quote Negan, "No exceptions!") has to be the president over all of us. Not just a select few. All of us. I think we can all--ALL--agree that Trump favors the right. To those on the left, you know what I mean. To those on the right, congratulations! So this guy should have been fired a long time ago.
REGARDLESS! And stop arguing. If I see any bullshit in these comments or on social media in reaction to this post, you will be summarily ignored.
If you can accept that we have a problem, then we can possibly make the next crucial step as to figuring out what that problem is. It's unfortunate that everyone on both sides are set in their ways. Most have forgotten the difference between opinion and belief. They think everything is a belief. I liken it to the difference between hypothesis and theory. But please note: NONE OF THE FOUR MAKE A LAW OF SCIENCE. Unless the theory is proved enough, that is. And theory isn't a dumbfuck idea that you read on your cousin's asshole ring. Maybe look up the definition.
Sometimes people need to be reminded that beliefs can actually be changed. They are not written in stone.
So Vikings. I watched the final two episodes, and I was very satisfied. Through a series of events that are too long and complex to explain here, the Queen of Kattegat is Ingrid. She has Erik as her kinda-sorta co-leader. Erik asks what she has done, and she says that she sent someone to the Land of Denmark where the king has been converted to Christianity. Why? he asks. To kill him, she says.
Why? Because "we all have a duty to preserve the old ways."
To quote a great man, "Allow me to retort!" The old ways might have worked way back when, but they don't anymore. I think know what our national problem is, and it is a very unpopular opinion. Because once you understand you have a problem, you should try to figure out what that is. Here is your answer: WE ARE RELYING ON A DOCUMENT HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD TO DICTATE MODERN LIFE. I know. I know. 95% of you are thinking the same as Luke thought in The Last Jedi: "The sacred texts!" But Yoda was right. Fuck the sacred texts. I find it mindblowingly insane that we still use the Constitution created by people who claimed all men were created equal but still owned slaves, and their immediate descendants fought a completely different war over it.
When I think of that, I think of religious texts THOUSANDS of years old. I'm mostly speaking to Christians here, since you have my country by the short and curlies, but have you even read that thing that the priest paraphrases to you on Sundays? It's fucking insane, and the New Testament makes the Old Testament null and void. That's why Jesus, if he really existed, died for your so-called sins. So if you get your Bible lessons from the Old Testament, you're doing it wrong.
Fuck. Don't get me started.
That's our problem. We rely on the old ways. We have some perverse thought that we have to save them. Bring back family values says every dickhead politician for how many years? Does that mean the family values when dudes were allowed to have a ton of wives and a bunch of concubines and even more slaves? Because that's the oldest family value in the world.
Sorry, my Irish is showing. So is my Italian, come to think of it. And fuck that. I may have the blood, but for good or ill, I'm an American. Here is another problem. This is not the first time we've gone through this. We've done it many, many times, and since history has an ugly habit of repeating itself, we will go through it again and again unless we break the cycle.
Your homework: when was the last time you watched Gangs of New York? Have you ever? WATCH THIS FILM. The third to last time I was in the hospital, I got to see it again, and it is more important now than ever. The story and most characters are fictional, but the situation they're put in really happened. The old way of winning office was not just by greasing the right palms (usually Boss Tweed's) but also by having people who would vote against you murdered, preferably en masse. Even while I was doing research for Vidal's Burr, I found all these accounts of voters being brutally murdered. Oddly enough, it was usually the Five Points involved, just like in Gangs of New York. They even had a nifty little sound byte that could have come out of any alt-righter's mouth today: "AMERICA FOR AMERICANS." That's when they were angrily against some white immigrants, and not just the immigrants Trump pisses on.
I'd planned to make a joke about how much I'd love to see the Capitol destroyed as much as the next man, but I can't. The scumbags who stormed it today were fuckheads who should have--no. To quote another great man, "I didn't come so far to sink so low."
We have a problem. Our country is dictated by a document that is so far out of date it's insane. If our country was a person, you'd throw it in the rubber room and have it shocked every once in a while. If it was your grandparent, you'd relegate it to an old folks home (where they would probably get Legionnaire's Disease if modern trends are to be followed).
We need something new. Something we can all work out. Something we can, if begrudgingly, agree on.
Speaking of Burr, he predicted the Constitution wouldn't last fifty years. Technically he was right, considering how many amendments were made. But fuck that. We don't need editor's notes. We need to start from scratch.
This is not working. If we continue down this beshitted path, what happened today will happen again. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but to quote another great man, "Your kids will love it."
OK, I almost have it out of my system. Just a little bit more, and we'll be done. Promise.
[SPOILERS FOR VIKINGS: Do not read anything from here until I post the end of spoilers if you want to enjoy the ending of this show.]
So we all know that Vikings traveled the world fairly well. On the show we saw them raid the UK, which is a matter of record. We even saw them raid France, again a matter of record. It got kind of weird when they showed up in the Sahara. Very incongruous for people used to snow, but also a matter of record. And then we saw a few of them travel the Silk Road to what is now Russia. Cool, weird and a matter of record. The same for Iceland and Greenland. When some of the Vikings, led by Ragnar's son, Ubbe, make it to America it was fucking beautiful to me. This is a matter of historical back and forth, but they definitely made it to Greenland. Why is America out of the question? It's not that far, especially if you start from Greenland. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest they made it here almost a thousand years before England was happy to see a bunch of religious nutbags called the Pilgrims head out for the so-called New World.
Before going any further, I have to say that history is very murky at the time of the Vikings. There is so very little evidence of anything that what we think we know, we can't rely on. I can't do for Vikings what I did for Burr. But there are some things that are almost certain, and the show veered away from that. For example, King Alfred never saw Ivar the Boneless die in Wessex because Ivar died in what we now know as Dublin many years later. That's just an example. Just as we can never know if it was Ubbe who made it to America. Probably not. But we can never be too sure. It's like trying to find a specific pipe in a crack den. The size of Lake Michigan. We just don't know. Did Ragnar Lothbrok even exist? I have a sneaking suspicion he did. Vikings tended to believe their heroes and gods were human, so I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a human Viking a few centuries before who was named Thor. Or Loki. Or even Odin. And so the stories began.
The very last scene of the show focuses on Ubbe and Floki, the latter who was thought to have been murdered in Iceland. The both of them sit on the beach watching the sun rise. Ubbe says to Floki, "There is so much I need to know."
Floki says, "You don't need to know anything. Let the past go."
Considering what I planned to write tonight, I think that's the very definition of serendipity, don't you?
END OF SPOILERS.
There really isn't more for me to say. I'm sure I, too, shall be summarily ignored as wishful thinking. Fine. I did my best to convince you. I hope if you take nothing else away from this, you will remember this:
Anyone who wants to be a federal politician, from the lowliest House member to the US President, those are the people who should be kept out of office. It's a shit job, and the only reason to have it is to gain as much graft as you possibly can before someone catches you.
I leave you with this. It's my favorite of the new Korpiklaani songs from the forthcoming album. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you know the backstory from other videos. The old man is deathly afraid of the river because it took the life of his beloved. He is scared shitless that his son will fall prey to it, too. Knowing Korpiklaani, there is probably a river spirit involved, too. So his son is the iconoclast, proving that what happened yesterday doesn't need to happen today.
PS: The saddest thing is that iconoclasts will always live long enough to become the icon until the next generation's iconoclast comes along. Put simply, per the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
PPS: In a hundred more, I can make the usual shitty weed joke.
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