General Motors gets a little more specific

Yesterday was sad. GM announced it plans on cutting 21,000 jobs and four brands in an attempt dredge some profitability out of the murky waters of near-bankruptcy. Soon, we’ll also be sorrowfully waving bye-bye to Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer.

This really marks the end for those dedicated few still waiting for the release of a new Pontiac Aztek. And, with the phase-out of Hummer, experts are estimating that it will now be 143 percent harder to automatically identify a douchebag.

“Without Hummers, douchebags may be forced to drive ‘normal people’ cars — hiding themselves from the untrained eye,” said David Baker, the head of the automotive division of The Douche Institute — a not-for-profit that works to educate the public about how to identify and avoid a douchebag. “But the period of blending in won’t be long. You can never underestimate the doucheyness of these douchebags. The Hummer may be gone, but they’ll find another vehicle to turn into a lighthouse for douchebags and humongous fucking tools everywhere.”

The loss of the Saab brand also pangs my heart a bit. Where are the pretentious going to put their “You must be Categorically Impaired” bumper stickers? Or their “Fair Trade or NO Trade” stickers? What will become of all the unstuck “Gore/Leibermann 2000” and “My other car is a compost-and-hummus-burning motorized unicycle” bumper stickers? I guess they’ll all have to be framed and hung over the stacks of Morrissey, Radiohead and Dave Matthews Band CDs, or encased in the glass coffee tables that hold America’s stacks of McSweeney’s Quarterlies.

Reality TV stars get married, for real. We think.

The gays are getting married in Iowa. Well, that probably effectively eliminates the Hawkeye State from getting a spot on the Glenn Beck Comedy Extravaganza Tour — you know, the one that will make Carlos Mencia look like Richard fucking Pryor, by comparison. OK, maybe not Pryor. But George Lopez.

Frankly, I’m happy for those same-sex couples getting hitched in Iowa. And, maybe that will soften the rest of the often-frigid Midwest to the idea that same-sex couples deserve to have the same rights as straight couples.

After all, if Spencer and Heidi — from The Hills’ fame — are allowed to get married, gay and lesbian couples definitely should be able to.

I’m much more comfortable with the idea of millions of loving same-sex couples finally getting to honor their feelings in the same way straight couples have been allowed to for hundreds of years than the thought of a blond-white-goateed Willem-Dafoe knockoff marrying a skeleton with breast implants. Here’s an idea: let’s ban fake-reality-TV-star marriage.

If you think a man marrying another man is trampling on the sacred institution of marriage, but don’t think a wedding between two hologram-thin caricatures of the decline of humanity — not to mention a divorce rate hovering around 50 percent, nationally — has any affect on the bonds of matrimony, you probably already have your Glenn Beck standup tickets.

The whole Spencer and Heidi thing could just be scripted. The rest of their fucking lives seem to be. Instead of following the fake-celebrity-marriage bullshit as it plays out on the covers of check-stand publications, why not watch some real-life love stories finally get the socially legitimate ending the protagonists have been seeing in the movies since the invention of the medium?

Oh God! I just had this horrible thought: what if these Hills “stars” multiply? They’ll spit out a dozen new reality TV personalities that will work in packs to lower the collective IQ of the country another 50 points. We’ll barely have the brainpower to run all of our basic functions. I’d much rather my kid be a homosexual than a reality TV star.



Sort-of-related video

Tea is for drinking, not for bagging

There’s nothing more stimulating than a little faux-Revolutionary-Era tea bagging to protest stimulus spending — and on tax day, no less. It’s like a small, kitschy and entirely overblown “Fuck You” from a couple centuries back.


The irony of a group of people, who, taken as a whole, would be appalled by the more prurient connotation of their tea bagging protests — and anything sexual that isn’t marital missionary position (Don’t you dare put those fucking legs up, either!) strictly for the purpose of procreation — holding these tea bag-a-thons has been well explored. And there’s not a sexual takeoff on the stimulus plan that hasn’t been beaten into the ground. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still funny, and not just in that fifth-grade sexual way, either.

It’s also funny in a snicker-in-the-back-of-history-class way. That image of a collection of rich, gentrified sexta-to-octagenarians running around with brown face on, throwing Lipton Cold Brew Iced Tea bags into the water hazard on hole 7 of their country club just makes me giggle.

On second thought, these people aren’t going to be doing such a historically accurate redux. They wouldn’t paint their faces and dress like Indians. When you have a Roman numeral after your name, looking like anything but a pasty old fart isn’t at all acceptable.

The beautiful thing is, these people have the right to stage these kinds of protests. It’s still in the Constitution. George W. Bush gave it his damnedest to rid us of it — along with most of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights — but we still have the right to peaceably assemble. And what’s more peaceable than a bunch of trust funders getting together to tea bag their government?

The truth is, this thing isn’t alone in its absurdity — most protests look stupid. The Left, whether it’s an overly outlandish gay rights demonstration or the old school hippie sit-in (protesting at it’s laziest), has just as silly-looking civil disobedience as this Tea Party Day.

When you get to the core of all this tea bagging, these conservatives have legitimate ideological beef. Fiscal conservatism is (read: was in pre-Bush days) one of the tenets of the Right. Stand on your principles. It would be the first time in a decade, but you’ve got to start somewhere. My problem is that the philosophy and the actions that they’d like to use — spending freezes and tax cuts — is just as ugly and hirsute as the balls their tea bagging brings to mind.

The last little chuckle I get is from this thought: The 773 scheduled tea-bag-party protests of the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan has inadvertently, but pretty effectively (for the short-term), stimulated the tea industry — I’d assume so, anyway, because these people had to go buy the tea they were using or at least replace the stuff they threw in the water or carried around outside.

It’s just too bad we don’t grow much tea in America.

In other news, Rod Blagojevich is hoping to appear on a Survivor-for-quasi-celebs reality TV show. Since he was just indicted, heading to the Costa Rican jungle to film a reality show doesn’t seem like the best plan. But, after seeing what reality TV did for Flavor Flav’s career, who can really blame the guy?