And don’t call me Shirley.

In the meantime, I went out to a burlesque show last night at a place called Boomers. It starred a number of local talents as well as a couple of out-of-towners. It was a pleasure because I got to see the likes of Vi Vacious, Cha Cha Velour and Lou Lou Roxy (who I’ve known for about a decade yet never seen on stage) perform. After the show, I tagged along with a couple of the performers as they went to the Peppermill, this really great old-school fire-side lounge. It has been around forever and even though I only go in once every few years, it’s always kinda nice to see that nothing ever changes.

Man, I really miss that office.

I’m in a bit of a hurry and haven’t had time to let this stir in my head, so maybe my opinion will soften later on or I’ll see some sort of reason to it, but for now let me just say from the very bottom of my gut reaction:

YOU MISERABLE BUNCH OF WEAK-WILLED, COW-TOWING FUCKING COWARDS!!!

EDIT: The link above doesn’t lead to the article in question anymore, but the gist of it was that the president had decided that the public option was no longer a “must”.

Seriously, the worst thing these guys can have happen is to convince us all to follow along with what they’re preaching lately.

There are many pundits out there who have taken up waving around Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, suggesting that our nation will resemble her dystopian vision rather soon unless action is taken. And taken now! Now, since I’m a giver, I’m going to do what these guys do (because they are also givers, which already kinda goes against their viewpoint, but whatever) and ignore the fact that Ayn Rand was an Anti-Christian whose work was also touted by Anton LaVey, who espoused a very similar philosophy in his book, The Satanic Bible. I guess I’ll also ignore the fact that under her philosophy, these same people should also be okay with gay marriage, life-partner approved sex outside of marriage (which Rand herself engaged in) and every other given freedom they usually rail against. Or that since they don’t absolutely agree with all of her ideas, they must, according to Rand, clearly draw a line between her ideas and theirs whenever they speak. Or that the root of her belief would mean that those who made the rich men rich in the first place (the workers usually, in case you forgot who they were) should be the ones who benefited from their toil and labor, not the rich men they made rich. Christ, I haven’t even gotten to my point yet and this thing has already fallen apart under it’s own weight. What more could I do? Simple. I could agree to let them do what they suggest.

The big squawkers have been throwing their hands up in the air, declaring that they need to make like the book’s protagonist, John Galt, and cease doing the jobs they do. Doing this “stops the motor of the world” as it were and they finally remove themselves from our society completely, so that we might see how we’d fare without them around. So yeah, let ‘em do it. Every last Rush Limbaugh and John Campbell out there should go form their own nation. After all, I totally agree with them on another statement they’ve made quite a bit this last decade, “America, love it or leave it!” And since they are making it abundantly clear that they no longer love it, I can only assume that as the men and women of honor and decency they are, that they will soon be leaving it.

And you know what, believe it or not, they’d save America.

Imagine all the jobs freed up by all these people leaving. The “one percent of achievers” being gone would mean all the top spots would be filled by dirty socialists like Ben and Jerry (the ice cream guys) who are stupid enough to actually share the wealth with their employees (that’s why them and the people who work for them are all penniless bums that nobody has ever heard of). Actual non-bat-shit-insane conservatives would thrive, filling the top ranks of the Republican party with something it hasn’t seen in ages: actual Republicans! Our government would grow smaller because it would need less of those people they hired to “keep the rich man down”. Plus, once the achievers leave and renounce citizenship, our money will be worth something again because they won’t be allowed to take the gold our country used to base it’s currency value on with them on account of my agreeing with another hard-right belief that I’m not letting any dirty foreigner put his hands on my property, and since all that stuff is within our borders, it’s ours (along with all our vast resources, our women, our sweet sweet candy, et cetera, et cetera).

Meanwhile, in their new land, these people can all work only for themselves, just like Ayn wanted them to, without ever sharing any profits with anyone else. That’ll work out great when it comes time to build stuff! Imagine the conversations!

“Hey, I just got contracted to build this guy’s house over on Fountainhead Way. I want to hire you to do the plumbing!”

“Sweet! How much does the job pay?”

“Pay? What are you, a fuckin’ homo? It doesn’t pay anything! I did all the work here: I talked to the guy, he gave me the money and now I’m calling you to do the job! If I hadn’t talked to the guy, you never would have had the opportunity to even do the plumbing, so as the facilitator, the lynch-pin to this whole operation, I should by all rights get to keep the money, because without me, you wouldn’t get any money either way!”

“Yeah, that’s why we started this place, but I should get rewarded for my labors too, right?”

“Tell you what. I’ll pay you a dollar an hour… Until a better achiever comes along and offers to do the work for seventy five cents an hour.”

Sounds like Utopia to me!

For reals though, I’ve just been spending way too much time in the shop lately and working on myriad other projects (not to mention a little thing I’d like to call Call of Duty: World at War online). I’ll get back on the ball about this whole thing sooner or later. Let’s hope I’m worth the wait.