Saturday, December 17, 2005

Associated Press photo Above: Dick Otterstad, left, a fundamentalist "Christian," left, argues with a woman outside of a Sacramento Wal-Mart today. Otterstad said that Wal-Mart's use of generic "holiday" language rather than "merry Christmas" violates "the reason for the season." (He was wearing a Santa Claus outfit. Think about it.) Below: The Ukrainian-American Chernenko family of Sacramento is the nation's largest family, with 17 children, 16 of whom are in the picture below. The youngest of the brood, in the arms of the family's father in the picture below, was born 10 days ago. The family's mother says she's not sure whether or not she'll pop out yet another puppy. My God. AFP photo Sacramento in the news Other than state government-related stuff, it's rare to see my hometown of Sacramento in the national news -- and even rarer to see two Sacramento-related stories in the national news on the same day. Not that the two Sacramento-related news stories to which I refer are necessarily flattering... Sacramento is now home to the largest family in the nation (and no, I don't think that they're Mormon), according to the AFP: Complete with proud smiles and self-conscious glances, Vladimir and Zynaida Chernenko's 17 children were introduced to the world. Cradled delicately in Vladimir Chernenko's thick arms was his baby, David, whose birth on Dec. 7 gave the Ukrainian-American family the largest brood in the United States, according to the Russian-language newspaper The Speaker. "When we got married back in the Ukraine, for six months we had no children and thought we wouldn't have any kids at all," Vladimir told reporters at a celebration in Bethany Slavic Missionary Church in Sacramento. "I never thought I would have such a family." Vladimir said he was serving in the Ukrainian army when his wife wrote in a letter that she was pregnant. "I said, 'How could this happen, me in the army and she is at home pregnant?'" he recalled with a laugh. "I was young then and didn't take into account we had lived together a while." The family emigrated and settled in California seven years ago, the couple said. Vladimir is a security and maintenance worker for a charter school and the family lives in a seven-room house in Sacramento. "It's a lot of work, and we all get tired, and it's difficult from financial point of view," Zynaida Chernenko conceded when asked if having such a large family was difficult. "But, we overcome the fear by looking forward to our children with love." The children, the eldest of which is 22, share duties and responsibilities, with the older ones filling in for their parents at times, the mother said. "It takes a great deal of work to raise all of the children, on each level," Vladimir said. "Education and upbringing plays a large role, but the most important thing is love and a big heart." It also helps to have a 15-seat mini-van and a huge dinner table, the family confided. ...The father and mother said it was difficult to estimate how much they spend weekly on food, because the money goes out as quickly as it comes in. ...The huge family group appeared to be thrilled by the presence of reporters and the notion of being on the television news.... The [parents] expressed thanks for the support they have received from Russian and American business people, along with their church. When asked whether David would be her last baby, Zynaida replied: "I can't say."... Human-interest stories like this are supposed to be heart-warming. Stories like this are why some gay men and lesbians refer to heterosexuals as "breeders" -- a term that I generally have considered to be offensive but more and more am beginning to consider to be just descriptive. As I've written before, I think it's wrong to have this many children, even if you can afford to take care of them. It's wrong to put even more consumers on the planet, especially when we aren't taking care of all of the children that we have on the planet right now. And I'm sure that the Chernenkos soon will be tied when the Duggar family of Arkansas, which has 16 children, pops out yet another puppy. And then it will be a race between the Chernenkos and the Duggars to see which family has 18 children first. Those of us who don't procreate (and perhaps those who procreate responsibly, having only one or two children) should be given tax breaks, I think, as a reward for the fact that we aren't producing even more individuals whom society will have to take care of. San Francisco columnist Mark Morford referred to the Duggar brood as a "squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers," which brings me to the second Sacramento-related story in the news today, this one from The Associated Press: A group of religious protesters demonstrated outside a Wal-Mart superstore [in Sacramento today], hoping to turn away customers by calling attention to the retailer's decision to use "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" in its seasonal advertising. But even shoppers who agreed with the protesters weren't willing to interrupt their quest for holiday deals. "I believe in Christ, and I don't like the use of 'X-mas' or the use of 'happy holidays,'" said Steven Van Noy, 39, as he left the store loaded down with packages. "The bottom line is that they had what I needed at Wal-Mart, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy it." Controversy over the secularization of Christmas is nothing new, but this year religious groups are publicly taking on retailers who have decided to tone down the religious aspects of the holiday in their store decorations and promotional material. In an online petition, the American Family Association recently gathered more than 500,000 signatures asking Target to include Christmas in its promotions. Stores such as Sears and Wal-Mart are facing boycotts. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Wyatt said the company has made no effort to remove Christmas from its holiday ads. She said a promotion set to run from mid-November to early January was simply misunderstood: its slogan is "home for the holidays." "It was a matter of choosing a slogan that carries through the entire season," Wyatt said. "The signs went up before Thanksgiving and won't be taken down until after New Year's. The idea was to focus on the family." About 50 protesters took part in [today's] demonstration, organized by religious leaders. Dick Otterstad of the Church of the Divide donned a Santa Claus costume and greeted shoppers with the message: Don't forget about the meaning of Christmas. "It is insulting that Wal-Mart has chosen to ignore the reason for the season," Otterstad said. "Taking the word 'Christmas' out of the holiday implies there's something sinful about it.... This is a part of our culture." OK, so one of Sacramento's finest put on a Santa Claus outfit to demonstrate to Wal-Mart shoppers "the reason for the season." "The reason for the season" is Santa Claus? Geez, I thought that "the reason for the season" was Jesus Christ, but I'm a fag who's going to burn in hell, so what the fuck do I know?  That the "Christian" wingnuts are now battling retailers over the use of such generic phrases as "happy holidays" over "merry Christmas" only goes to show that consumerism is America's national religion. Self-proclaimed "Christians" worship the golden calf, which the Old Testament warns us against. Of course, if you were to actually read the New Testament, you'd see that Jesus Christ was quite anti-consumeristic and anti-materialistic, and that something like Wal-Mart saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" would be the least of Jesus' concerns. Jesus Christ was much more concerned with such things as feeding, clothing and sheltering the poor, tending to the sick and visiting (not executing) prisoners. (It's in the New Testament -- read it.) But it's much easier, and a lot more fun, to harass Wal-Mart shoppers about "the true meaning of Christmas" than it is to actually follow Jesus Christ's teachings. I hope that Sacramento is in the news a lot less often from here on out. 9:24:30 PM    Comments []

Associated Press and Reuters photos Lost among Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative pronouncements are his saner ones. On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad (pictured above on Wednesday) wrongly called the Holocaust a "myth" -- but how many know that on Wednesday he also said this to the United States and other Western nations: "If your civilization consists of aggression, making oppressed people homeless, suffocating the voices of justice and bringing poverty to a majority of the world's people, we say loudly that we hate your hollow civilization"? That sounds pretty sane to me. Iraq will go the way of Iran U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently bragged about an "epiphany" he'd had. I have had an epiphany that I'm going to share, even though I'm not the secretary of defense. Here it is: Iraq and Iran will become as one. Here, in a nutshell, is what I think is going to happen: The Iraqis, on all sides, will pretend to be having the Western-style democracy that the U.S. military has been trying to shove down their throats. If that's what it takes to make the U.S. troops leave -- to pretend to be doing what the Bush White House is dictating that they do -- then the Iraqis will do it. Then, after the U.S. troops finally leave, be it one year, five years, 10 years or 20 years later, Iraq will adopt the theocracy that the majority of Iraqis want, and Iraq and Iran, which were enemies when Saddam Hussein was in power, will be tight. The new Iran-Iraq alliance will make Saddam Hussein -- who was, it seems, primarily interested in making sure that he and his family and his buds lived in opulence at the expense of the common Iraqi -- look like the tin-pot dictator that he was, and we'll sorely wish that the members of the Bush regime had kept their oily fingers out of the Iraqi pie and left the petty Saddam Hussein in place. The Middle East has been in so much turmoil because white people (Anglos) think that Middle Easterners are stupid and cannot manage their own affairs. U.S. "President" George W. Bush said this in April 2004: "There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern." (And that's from the official White House Web site, by the way.) Now, as no one had ever fucking asserted that "people whose skin color [is] not be the same as ours [cannot] be free and self-govern," clearly that's exactly what Bush thinks: that "people whose skin color [is] not be the same as ours [cannot] be free and self-govern." (And don't even get me started on the fact that Bush's statement implies that Americans, by definition, have white skin, and that by extension, if you don't have white skin -- and, according to the last U.S. census, at least a quarter of Americans don't -- then you're not really an American.) Now, if Bush truly believed that "people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern," would the Bush regime be taking such a paternalistic posture toward the people of Iraq? (Most of the people of Iraq, by the way, are classified as Caucasians by anthropologists, so it's interesting that Bush and his ilk view the Iraqis as being so different from whitey. And we need to be more careful than Bush was not to confuse the term "Muslim" with race. A Muslim is one who believes in Islam, regardless of his or her race.) The Bush regime's paternalistic posture toward Iraq is a lot like the old British empire's paternalistic posture toward the Middle East. It was Britain, after all, that royally fucked up the Middle East when it forced the creation of the state of Israel, beginning in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. After World War I Britain also determined Iraq's present-day borders, stupidly and blindly cobbling together disparate regions of people into one artificial nation. The Middle East has been in turmoil ever since the old British empire fucked shit up over there. Not to be outdone by Britain, now the Bush regime is fucking shit up in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. Whitey (by which I mean Anglos) just doesn't know how to leave shit alone, but feels compelled to stir shit up. Because, you know, those non-Anglos need whitey's help in managing their affairs, because whitey does such a great fucking job of managing their affairs for them. Israel was wrongly conceived; it was shoved down the throats of Middle Easterners, and the Middle East has been aflame ever since. Anything wrongly conceived cannot be successful in the long term. Similarly, the Bush regime is shoving "democracy" down Iraq's throat at gunpoint, compounding the mistake that the old British empire made when it wrongly conceived the borders of present-day Iraq. Again, anything wrongly conceived cannot be successful in the long term. Although Israel was wrongly conceived, I do not support its destruction; I do not wish to see it "wiped off the map," as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in October that he does. While I believe that the Palestinians historically have gotten the shitty end of the stick, that Israel enjoys way too much influence with the U.S. government and that the U.S. government historically has not been even-handed in its dealings with the Israelis and the Palestinians, more than enough people have already died in the Middle East and I don't want to see another Palestinian or another Israeli or another Iraqi die in yet another act of violence. Nor do I believe that the Holocaust was a fabrication, as Ahmadinejad this past week said it was. But I think that Ahmadinejad has some valid points that, unfortunately, few in the United States are listening to, because all that they are hearing are his sensationalistic call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and his sensationalistic claim that the Holocaust was fabricated. The Associated Press reported on Wednesday: During a tour of southeastern Iran [on Wednesday], Ahmadinejad said that if Europeans insist the Holocaust occurred, then they are responsible and should pay the price. "Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in Zahedan. "If you committed this big crime, then why should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay the price?" "This is our proposal: If you committed the crime, then give a part of your own land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them so that the Jews can establish their country," he said. I don't disagree with Ahmadinejad on this point: If the state of Israel indeed was created largely or mostly because of the Holocaust, which the Germans perpetrated, why did the Palestinians have to pay the price? Whether we agree with anything that Ahmadinejad has to say or not, we ignore him at our own peril. Shit like 9/11 happens and then we claim that we didn't see it coming. Shit like 9/11 happens because the peoples around the globe whom the United States routinely shits and pisses upon tell us exactly what their beef with the United States is, but we Americans -- too busy stuffing our fat faces with our fast food while we babble into our cell phones while we drive our SUVs with our "Pray for Our Troops" magnets slapped upon them -- don't fucking listen.  Besides calling the Holocaust a "myth" on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said this to the United States and other Western nations: "If your civilization consists of aggression, making oppressed people homeless, suffocating the voices of justice and bringing poverty to a majority of the world's people, we say loudly that we hate your hollow civilization."* That is why they hate us, and, as Ahmadinejad's statement demonstrates, occasionally they tell us why they hate us. If only we'd listen... ...But instead, we'll ignore them, and then when another 9/11 happens -- and after Iraq and Iran are as one, thanks to George W. Bush, there's a great chance that another 9/11 (or much, much worse) will happen -- we will scratch our overfed heads and we will ask ourselves: "Why do they hate us so much?" *Reuters translated his statement as follows: "If your civilization consists of unjust acts, oppression and poverty for the majority of the globe to provide your own people welfare, then we shout at the top of our voices that we hate your frail civilization." 2:43:21 PM    Comments []