Hypocrisy Under the Microscope: Bob Dutko

As I was driving in to work this afternoon, I decided to inflict torture upon myself by letting the radio's scan feature land on 103.5 FM WMUZ, a local Christian station. That time of day during the week is dedicated to the Bob Dutko Show, a politically oriented program designed to give the so-called Christian perspective on the issues of the day. Mostly he just calls anyone he labels as liberals hypocrites and sings Donald Trump's praises no matter what he has done or said or, for that matter, not done or said.

In his own way, Dutko is a bigger mouthpiece than Sean Hannity which is no small feat. And this wasn't my first time hearing or even enduring Dutko's diatribes (that would make a much better name for his show, I think) so I am well-acquainted with his approach. He basically delivers the conservative talking points of the day in a nauseatingly matter-of-fact-we're-just-folks-talkin' tone that appeals to an audience that despises formal speech from so-called elitists.

I have never felt the need to write about him until today.

Dutko was in rare form today. With a sob in his voice that sounded like it belonged to a grieving mother whose child was slain on the fields of battle, he went on and on about three "beloved children's' classics" that were being released in China sans all references to Christianity. That's right. His mighty heart was breaking over a Communist country that has outlawed all religion removing references to religion in foreign literature. And as if this wasn't bone-chillingly idiotic enough, he launched into a rant about the New Testament being (GASP!) rewritten to more readily reflect Chinese culture.

I can certainly understand his outrage; this has never happened before...except when it was translated into Greek...oh, and Latin...and English, French, German...you get the idea. This is a brand new thing!

Dutko's biggest butthurt was the fact that they are including Buddhist teachings in the New Testament. I won't even get into how much of Jesus' teachings sound suspiciously like they were ripped out of Buddha's mouth. What prompted this post was the arrogance from which Dutko operates, where he can actually express outrage over the supposed co-opting of his belief system when things like this exist.

Guess what? If there can be no Bible with Chinese cultural leanings, there can also be no Karate with Christian dogma planted inside it like a weed. You don't get to rip off another culture's identity, re-brand it with the Jesus seal, and then act like somebody else doing the opposite is a monster. That's not how reality works. Then again, if his listeners understand reality, they wouldn't be his listeners.

Well, I'm glad we settled that one!

Latest Other Blog Post.

I've been remiss in my link-providing duties because I'm not used to having a second blog anymore. It's been several years and that other blog is no longer fit for public consumption. However, the new one is up and running. The most recent post is our take on the Bill Maher/Stand Lee/Comics non-troversey. We focus on who Maher is and why he seems so content with being a shriveled up little douche-nugget rather than getting deeply into what is already a proven quality medium.

Read it here, Comment there!

Nine Things Social Networking Taught me that I Never Knew Before

Despite all the bemoaning of social networking and its various evils, one cannot deny its ability to inform and educate. I believe this happens in spite of itself but it still happens anyway. I freely admit the ten things below are things of which I was blissfully and perhaps tragically ignorant until I started "meeting" all the people on Facebook and Blogger (I despise Twitter and Snapchat).

If anyone is offended by this list, I am sorry you're so full of yourselves. If anyone isn't offended. I haven't done my job. The list, as always, follows:

• There are actually intelligent, in many cases highly educated, individuals who were headbangers, i.e. metal-heads.
• Some people literally only exist to advocate for one cause and have no apparent interests outside of it.
• Genre fandom is filled with some of the absolute lowest forms of hateful, arrogant, judgmental sub-human life.
• People who indulge in "Cosplay" are really, really, super serious about it! Like...really serious. Yeah...
• The world of videogamers is rife with sexist assholes.
• There either truly are people who believe thoughts and prayers can mitigate horrible tragedies or else people are so incredibly self-absorbed that they feel a simple sentence is all they need to contribute to the human condition.
• The more individualistic a person claims to be, the more they're looking for someone to tell them what to think.
• Millions of how people have no idea how to properly vet and disseminate information but they seem more than willing to allow someone else to do it for them as long as it makes them feel righteous.
• Many people see correct grammar and punctuation as an inconvenient formality rather than a necessity.
  
  You may notice I chose not to qualify any of my points. I feel they stand alone well enough and, frankly, I don't feel the need to explain myself.  However, I am interested in what others think so share away~

A Different Take on the Apu Controversy.

Maybe you've read about this but in case you haven't, here's a brief synopsis and a link if you want to read further:

The character of Apu on the long-running "The Simpsons" has been singled out as a particularly offensive stereotype thanks to a documentary by comedian Hari Kondabolu called "The Problem with Apu." The film's producer Adi Shankar started  contest to get scripts sent to him that would somehow "improve" the character while still maintaining his place in the Simpsons pantheon. The producers of the series have decided to forego all that and simply drop the popular character from the series, likely minus any fanfare or undue focus.

I have my own views on the whole controversy but I'm not an idiot and won't be discussing them in print. Whether I agree with the documentary's assessment or not, it can be used against me some time in the future. Instead, I have chosen to focus on what I believe is the reason for the response the "Simpsons" producers have chosen.

There has been a problem brewing in the creative world since the Internet went from being an underground rarity to a full-blown accepted part of daily human existence. People have become more involved in their various interests and causes, ridiculously so in many cases, and with that involvement has come an undeserved sense of proprietorship. Somehow real-time interaction has led many to believe they somehow own these franchises they claim to love. This is especially true of Generation X with its constant "You killed my childhood" whining and Millenials who feel the entire entertainment industry is one giant roleplaying game. The moment creation became content, the nature of the field was altered possibly forever.

Konabolu and Shankar are both in their thirties. They have come of age in a time when online slacktivism has been used to accomplish ends both positive and questionable. They know full well the power behind an online movement, even one as seemingly benign as an attempt to "rescue" a character from the perception of negative stereotyping. A contest thrown by someone uninvolved in the series to collect an acceptable script sends a simple and powerful message: We are going to politely yet aggressively make the change we want to see in your product. It is, at its core, a brilliant piece of diplomatic maneuvering and the response of the show's producers was the only one that could have circumvented it.

"The Simpsons" has stood as a monumental achievement of pop culture longevity for three decades. Even for those of us who haven't watched regularly for years, it's obvious they have done something right. And if social attitudes towards one of their characters have changed, one assums they're perfectly capable of dealing with it themselves. By allowing an outsider no matter how well-intentioned to push his way in, they would be sacrificing whatever autonomy they've enjoyed. The same autonomy that has allowed them to outlast any other animated series in history (so far.)

From a writer's perspective, it's a smart move. Everybody knows the show will be going off the air soon. They've made their mark and they want to continue to do so with the time they have left without some guy whose desire it is to hitch onto their accomplishments trying to influence "content." So while it may seem like a compromise, this move is actually the opposite. I applaud the decision not for its end result or even for that fact that the issue hasn't been resolved, but because creators have stood up to a softer, shrewd form of censorship and said no.

Quote of the Week

"CHELSEA CLINTON has degrees from Stanford, Oxford, Columbia and NYU AND she lived in the White House for 8 years AND is the daughter of the former U.S. President, and U.S. Senator and Secretary of State... Ivanka is a really good shopper ..."

-From a comment on a Yahoo! article

Literary Ignorance at its Finest.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“So at the end of that monologue I had a few choice insults for the president in return. I don’t regret that. He, I believe, can take care of himself. I have jokes; he has the launch codes. So it’s a fair fight.”

                                                                 -Stephen Colbert

The Arrogance of Imbeciles (1 of an ongoing series)

It's become a familiar story: Some smug jackoff shows up on a news article trying to be witty while insulting everyone who disagrees in a vain attempt to whine about political correctness. Then when several people call him on his BS, he tries to say he was being sarcastic but apparently he's too high level for their tiny brains.
 I decided to take a different approach this time. I decided to point out that perhaps he isn't good at sarcasm. Naturally he fell back on the everything is subjective argument.  I tried to help him understand that there are established criteria for fiction writing amd comedy despite whether or not someone"likes it."

His response? "The only criteria for fiction is that it be fiction."

My reply:   "I don't know which matchbox correspondence school you attended but they clearly only taught you that "it's fiction long as they's makin' stuff up."
I then told him before trying to understand the craft of fiction, he should start by learning the difference between comedy and sarcasm.

Okay. I looked at his Facebook page and added, "typical Trumper. Knows little about alot but passes himself off as an unaffected genius."

When I went back on Facebook a bit later I noticed all the likes etc. were gone. He ran. They usually do, especially when you point out they're showing their ignorance of a field the other person practices.

Sorry, man. Sarcasm is a high level art that only some of us can practice well. Good riddance.

Issac Marion's Fake Trump Tweet & The Death of Political Satire

Years ago during the opening credits of one of the Halloween specials "The Simpsons" does every year, one of the many gravestones with funny messages on them featured political satire as the dearly departed. As usual, the alien time travelers who write for that show foresaw the future in hilarious and frightening ways.

At the time, political satire was still viable, despite needing occasional trips to the doctor. However, the dominance of social media, something that should have been a force for increased knowledge and understanding of parody and satire, has actually aided in the swiftly encroaching loss of this most vital component of a supposedly free society. Instead, we're now moving towards an era where all attempts at irony become fodder for an increasingly easily offended population. And political affiliation is becoming meaningless, as the so-called "snowflake" mentality is just as prevalent among those on the Right as it is on the Left.

Recently, horror author Issac Marion who wrote the surprisingly engaging zombie romance satire "Warm Bodies" dared to post a humorous dialogue between himself and *urp* President Trump. I have also used the fake Trump Tweet app a few times. To my delight, nobody could tell if they were real or not in most cases. I never created a series of them like Marion because I knew some imbecile would screenshot it and, at some point, somebody would think they were real. It never occurred to me that a new breed of imbecile would find offense in the satire itself, but that's exactly what happened to him.

In a stunning display of contextual ignorance, angry people who thought the exchange was real and jumped to Marion's defense went on the offensive, reading him the riot act for daring to indulge a fiction writing exercise designed to make a point about a subject he finds repugnant. I'd mention the irony of the invective coming from members of the Left Wing, but since irony is a rapidly diminishing resource, I don't want to waste any of it by mentioning something so obvious.

Marion  breaks down his perceived "offenses" in list form, each point more ludicrous and asinine than the last. The most telling is Point #2, wherein he addresses an accusation of spreading the now ubiquitous and soon-to-be-meaningless concept of fake news. In his analysis, Marion writes:

I am a fiction writer. I wrote a fictional dialogue and posted it on my personal Twitter account, without any surrounding context to suggest that this was a real occurrence rather than just another bit of nonsense theater squirting out of my brain. If anyone thought it really mattered, a quick click to my profile—or Trump’s—would have revealed the truth. But no one bothered to do that because IT DIDN'T MATTER.

That's right, it didn't. People are so primed for and even seduced by the very notion of outrage now that fact-checking is regarded as quaint and wasteful. Not to toot my own horn, but my first instinct was to question the veracity of the reposting. It seemed too good to be true. Trump had finally crossed the line from journalism antagonist to displaying a woeful ignorance of the fiction writing process. And he'd chosen a lesser known writer to attack! Within moments, I'd discovered the truth and guess what? I was okay with it!

Granted, I'm a fiction writer as well and, while my renown is significantly lower even than Marion's self-described low number of followers, I am at least acquainted with the creative process. I don't expect everyone else to be, elitist as that may sound to those who aren't, but satire and parody are protected by the First Amendment! That means it's something all thinking Americans and indeed humans should know about.  There is no excuse for being so wrapped up in one's personal cause that harmless and entertaining humor becomes viewed as worthy of ridicule and scorn.

We are now entering a very dangerous era and it all started when the drawings of schoolchildren containing vaguely violent imagery became calls to the police and mandatory psychiatric sessions. Think of all the people of previous generations--people like me--whose writing and drawing could have ruined their lives in such a free thought hostile environment. Now the same preposterous censorship of the darker aspects of our minds are being scrutinized in authors by over-sensitive adults with too much time on their hands. These same people actually feel the need to write "sarcasm" after their barely sarcastic comments and insist that others do the same to avoid potential offense.

Isaac Marion created a satirical piece, mostly for his own amusement. Leave him the hell alone and get over yourselves.

The Ever-Increasing Problem with People Taking Everything Personally.

Ancient chair-accoster Clint Eastwood recently referred to the current generation as "pussies." Ignoring the negative connotation in his words regarding a slang term for the female sex organ, it's difficult to know to which generation he's referring since they're literally all younger than his! However, if my own experiences with social networking are any indication, he was not only not entirely wrong, but the Hollywood icon I once admired and can now barely stomach probably meant everyone from Generation-X down.

The problem lies in "identity politics," which is defined as a "tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics." In other words, intense, unreasonable tribalism, often for its own sake, sometimes for good reason, and always to the exclusion of openness to freedom of expression. This mentality stretches beyond the definition above to concepts, genre fandom and even eating establishments.

"Well, okay," you said, "But aren't you being a tad--Wait! EATING ESTABLISHMENTS!?"

That's right, nameless question-asking person...a restaurant. Not even a nice one, but I'll get to that in a bit.  What's important right now is that, until last night, I was ready and even happy to dismiss Dirty Harold's words as the ranting of an increasingly disconnected, grumpy old white guy bitter over the diminishment of his privilege.  It's still rather easy to do that, but I'm far too objective in my reasoning to deny the truth in his sentiment, at least as it pertains to a pervasive inability for many to accept discourse and criticism without losing their proverbial shit.

Case in point: Where I now live and have resided for four years, there is a local restaurant that is very popular with the majority of the town's residents. In fact, it isn't merely popular.  It has spawned a multi-generational level of fanatical devotion that is quite disturbing, culminating in a Facebook exchange that should have never taken place. This individual, for reasons clearly motivated by a thin skin and a fragile ego, took my not-even-all-that-bad review of his favoritist restaurant ever in the whole wide world and launched a poorly conceived personal attack on me in the comments section.

Below is the back and forth between us. The names of the restaurant and the sad human who attacked me have been omitted:

My initial Review: "Been here quite a few times because my wife loves it and have yet to be impressed. Food is ok but nothing special."


 Mr. Butthurt :Been going to [Restaurant]for 25 years great little restaurant......

I hope what ever you do Christopher someone is as critical on you...... 2 stars ..... I rank you as a ........

Like · Reply · 20 hrs

Christopher Nadeau Seriously? You're so personally invested in a greasy spoon that it compels you to denigrate another human being? You're a sad little person. Enjoy your salt and grease

Like · Reply · 20 hrs

Mr. Butthurt Dude:  your on such a tall pedestal that you give a small businessman such a poor review of his restaurant.......

You sir are the one who went out of your way to cause the owner to have less than a positive review of his business ultimately causing him finacial loss..

I denigrated you please. You denigrated yourself.

Out of all positive reviews only you and 2 other people gave (Restaurant] a bad reviews.....
Move on troll......
The owner is a great guy and runs a top notch business.

Like · Reply · 20 hrs · Edited

Christopher Nadeau





Oh right. We can only post good things or else imbeciles like you need to run to their safe places sorry. I thought social networking was for the free expression of opinion not dictated by a cult member and assclown who takes it personally when someone  doesn't sing a restaurant's praises. If we weren't supposed to be honest with our reviews there wouldn't be a scale to choose from. Get over yourself and stop trying to police the opinions of others.

Like · Reply · 20 hrs

  It's been an entire day since I wrote that last part. I'm hoping he realized how absurd he came off and decided to refrain. Perhaps he even decided he was on superior philosophical ground and chose to ignore the supposed "troll" who merely expressed an honest opinion. One wonders where he got the idea that small business owners who are "great guys" are immune to the dictates of capitalism but he obviously feels strongly about it. If nothing else, people like Mr. Butthurt are becoming the norm and the general discourse is suffering because of it. Just because I refuse to be silenced by stupidity doesn't mean others are as strong-willed or even in a safe enough position to act as I did.

Frankly, that's what people like him are counting on~