Monday, June 20, 2005

Cultural Effluvium

I know I promised I wouldn't post links except for reference, but rules are made to be broken, and please remember the title of the whole blog. Besides, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

I do support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the many other places they are stationed. I wouldn't want their job for the whole world. I am not going to reflect this support in an empty gesture of sticking some ribbon sticker on my car or van or SUV. One - because I am not going to put a bumper sticker on my car, are you crazy, it will mar the finish. Two - because I won't be able to fit the two or three or ten stickers on there to really show the support that the other soccer moms and NASCAR dads have been able to muster. What? You only have one sticker, don't you support our troops? Are you some sort of monster with only one, or even, gasp, no stickers on your car. Pile those puppies on there, and then cut me off as I try to make a simple lane change.

I do feel really strongly that we should Support Our Pants.

Along the same lines, goodness knows that Scientology is as good as any other cult, and that we shouldn't begrudge a man going through a midlife crisis and general freakout his chance to date a pretty young thing, but we must Free Katie! Tom Cruise is freaking out. My favorite place to watch the freakout is on The Soup, which is about all of the reality TV that I can take, but the host (Joe McHale) is hilariously funny. Tom featured prominently at the end of last season due to his antics on Oprah and various other talk shows.

My mom didn't want me to read Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard because she was afraid I would be sucked into the cult. It's actually a good book, I would call it a science fiction classic. She should have stopped me from seeing the movie, which stinks so bad I am gagging as I write this. What was John Travolta thinking? If scientology makes people do what John Travolta and Tom Cruise do, that's the best evidence to stay far away.

I don't have the strength or will to talk about Michael Jackson. The next post will be less pop and more cultured, I promise

1 comment:

jipzeecab said...

L. Ron Hubbard made a small fortune off of his excellent sci-fi writings in the 50's. I never read Battlefield Earth but my late father was a huge sci-fi fan so I know I've read some of his stuff..Why he got so full of himself in his semiretirement is a mystery to many.
I used to drive a taxi in the Clearwater area where the World Wide Corporate Headquarters of Scientology is located. What a bunch of zombies. They all wear "navy style uniforms" because the original scientologists were the uniformed crew of Hubbard's yacht.
Tom Cruise,John Travolta, and other famous scientologists have never seen the way the rank and file of the cult lives. If they did they would be reluctant to embrace its exploitation of people.