On Industry and Independence

This is a great day for lip-service patriots; nothing like a good excuse to get knee-walking drunk and feel superior to everyone else, and Independence Day has become basically just that. What I'm about to say is not going to be very popular and to be honest, I'm not even sure how I feel on the whole thing, so I'm just going to let it all hang-out and do a good old-fashioned Rundown rant:

Chris Benoit's doctor has been arrested for having prescribed Benoit something like 10 months' worth of steroids and painkillers in the last three weeks. But it wasn't like Benoit tried hard to hide it; I never liked him because he was so weird-looking! He was squat, with incredibly short limbs and a massive, oversized, cartoonish torso: the male equivalent of one of those tiny strippers with the Z-cup breast implants. Though I admit that I did like the fact that he used actual wrestling moves. But you notice how quick everyone - from the WWE to other wrestlers, to doctors and even the media - was to lay the blame squarely at the doctor's door, then (as an afterthought) agreed that Benoit wasn't exactly "victimized." Benoit's dead, they'll give the doctor an absolutely ridiculous, Paris-sized sentence to "make an example" of him and "teach him a lesson," and the world keeps on spinning.

No one's going to point the finger at the professional wrestling industry, itself. Makes too much money; wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

Barry Bonds is getting close to hitting 800 homeruns and no one seems to care. In fact, several baseball players have entered the once thought nigh-unattainable "500 Club" in the past decade or so. Of course, all of them have also been accused - or at least suspected - of having taken steroids and/or "performance-enhancing" drugs. See, it really isn't an accomplishment if you cheat to achieve it, but don't tell that to baseball. Baseball lays the blame squarely at the feet of the individual athletes who have taken the drugs, without ever admitting that the problem spreads across the field, as it were.

In both industries, it works like this: those who are against taking "performance-enhancing" drugs simply cannot compete with those who do unless they compromise both their health and beliefs and take the drugs, too. It isn't just about "keeping up with the Bondses," either; those who refuse to take steroids simply won't get the chance to strut their stuff in The Show because they won't meet the minimum requirements to make it there - minimum requirements which have been raised to superhuman standards because taking steroids has become de rigeur throughout the sport.

But don't blame the industry; take each individual on a case-by-case basis; they all act independently of one another, even if they all act exactly the same. They're all completely different and have their own unique set of problems, even if they're all in the same industry and they all have the same problems and those problems are all the same. Reminds you of another industry, doesn't it?

A new poll shows that the majority of Americans do not consider children important to a marriage. President Bush pardoned Scooter Libby while two border patrol agents are serving Paris-sized jail sentences for doing their jobs. 13% of people in Vermont are in favor of seceding from the Union - and Bill O'Reilly (who has completely lost his shit, by the way - he is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find literally anything to act Ann Coulterish about - just a senile parody of what he once was) has pledged to help them.

Pack your bags, kids; I say we move to Vermont.

Vermont is pretty much the only state in the Union which actually stands for the very principles on which America was founded - you know, when its indigenous people were poisoned and intentionally-diseased by the "foreigners who founded this country." Mainstream, lip-service Americans buy gas-guzzling SUVs, thumb their noses at the environment, and abhor the idea of personal freedom; Vermont lets guys marry other guys. Mainstream, lip-service Americans get drunk and scapegoat the individuals involved in the latest school shooting, steroid-based murder-suicide, and celebrity rehab entrance - after all, they're weekly events - but they refuse to change anything because that means "the terrorists have won"; the cats in Vermont are talking about seceding from the Union!

And these very same lip-service "Americans" are probably going to blast me for this post and call me a "Michael-Moore-lovin', America-hatin', baby-killin' Lib'ral" because that proves their patriotism, but from where I sit, they're just buying right into the Machine and helping it repeat the same processes over and over and over and over again. The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; this is apparently also the modern definition of American "patriotism." And I think it's crazy.

So look out, Vermont: the MD is gonna marry some hot guy, get me some of them Angelina Jolie babies, buy a bed and breakfast, and secede from the Union, dammit! And if mainstream America doesn't like it, I'll bulk-up on steroids, buy an SUV and kick some ass in a road-rage incident, check myself into rehab to avoid a prison term, and release my sex tape to pay for it all.

Oh, and happy 4^th, bitches!