Oprah after Oprah

Oprah Winfrey does much good with her money and celebrity. Now that we have that out of the way:

The stage set of The Oprah Winfrey Show is something akin to television's public square. Part circus ring, execution platform, porno set, part self-help couch, weeping gallery and buffoon hangar, Oprah Winfrey's stage is a combination slaughterhouse-gameshow-cum-withered-diseased-brain-lobe. The cavalcade of idiocy that has pranced across that stage defies description and imagination. The ravenous life-and-dignity sucking quicksand stories of human misery -- interspersed with jaunty tampon and cleaning product advertisements -- staggers the soul.

Like the annual Texas A&M bonfire, year after year, Oprah piles reprehensibility upon blinding reprehensibility. The latest salt-in-the-eyes saga she presented was that of actress Mackenzie Phillips with the story of her father allegedly raping her as a teenager.

It's too awful to comprehend, but in OprahLand, awful is never enough. Mackenzie Phillips went on to explain how the nonconsensual incest with her father turned into consensual incest. It's beyond comprehension, but not beyond Oprah's palette for excrement.

Oprah provides a platform for the most wretched, diseased and deranged among us in the guise of "helping." Mackenzie Phillips, in her own Oprahesque rationalization, stated, "I can't be the only one this has happened to. Someone needs to put a face on not only nonconsensual incest, but consensual incest, and I know that I can't be the only one who's lived through this. So in finding this redemption, maybe I'm helping someone else."

(Then Mackenzie, be that face. [bristle])

The only people helped are the advertisers. Oprah is Mahatma Gandhi to her advertisers, leading them to the promised land of profit and gain and brand recognition. If she has to do that on the back of the incest-ravaged carcass of a truly troubled and pathetic human being, she does it.

And all the while, there sits Oprah's zombie-hordes of soccer moms, the oral retentive, self-righteously obese, feeding, feeding on the rancid beacon of misery before them. It's the first law of commerce: "Give the people what they want." Oprah does.

Oprah has said that she will retire from her show in 2011. The question arises, where and how will she get her frequent, massive fix of despair. Certainly, there is plenty in this world to go around; and never will there be a shortage. But Oprah Despair is a very singular beast. It is highly concentrated for maximum upset and dyspepsia. It is highly commercial. And it must be shared. Oprah's like a malevolent emotional Nikola Tesla who beams human atrocity into the hearts of people, generating a collective power grid of shit. Of pure shit. And due to her alien physiology, Oprah feeds and lives off of this shit; grows stronger and ever richer off of this shit.

So, where will she get the fix? She may go on to be one of the most unsuccessful suicide hotline operators, finding her misery in small, phoned-in vials. Maybe she'll become an even less successful phone sex operator, one who handles masochists who call up to be outraged and humiliated, as she probes -- hour upon hour -- into her callers' miserable peccadilloes, deficiencies and dementia. But both of those options rob her of Power Grid of Despair.

Maybe Oprah will have a Queen For a Day contest through her magazine, soliciting the most sad and terrible stories from her readers, the worst of which gets to be Queen For a Day, like on the old TV show from the 1950s. And after having a gaggle of unwed mothers, abused wives, drug addicts of varying toxicity, former prostitutes, and other assorted human debris opening the tens of thousands of sob stories, I can see Oprah filling a bed the size baseball diamond with them, and rolling around naked in all the hand-scrawled missives of misery.

Fetal Felons: Crime epidemic beginning in utero

There was a time when criminals were unshaven scowling men, or rumpled world-weary women, with eyes staring out of mug shots that told silent stories of the three "D"s of crime: desperation, deprivation and desolation. The new face of crime, however, is decidedly younger, as evidenced in a Scott.net story Boy aged 3 is UK's youngest crime suspect.

Disturbing though it may be that criminality is afflicting ever younger segments of the population, there is a new crime-wave that's gone virtually unreported -- that being perpetrated by fetal felons.

Like gangsters within their own protected personnel carriers, criminal fetuses have the best cover in the world, that of a harmless, life-bringing pregnant woman. But within the family-friendly exterior lies a second, steely heart that is only out for profit and gain, anarchy and mayhem.

Twenty-six year old "Regina" -- who declined to use her real name -- was ecstatic when she learned she was pregnant, but by the end of her first trimester, she began to wonder if something was wrong. "I kept hearing this voice in my head saying 'Get me that iced-out cross rang you seen in the mall, bitch!' I had no idea where it was coming from. I thought I was going crazy. But then I started having pain with the baby."

The pain was no random discomfort emanating from a normal pregnancy -- it came from Rufus, the self-named fetus living within "Regina". Although Rufus was only a fetus of 14 weeks, he had crafted a makeshift shiv and was using it to etch in the wall of the womb, causing "Regina" great pain and distress. Soon, with the aid of an ultrasound, "Regina" understood what was happening to her, but had no recourse. The hands of the police were tied because the fetus was as yet unborn.

"So, I went to buy the ring," "Regina" says, "but Rufus insisted that I steal it. I didn't see what the difference was, but when he dug that shiv into me, I didn't care."

"Regina" stole the ring, but was immediately apprehended by mall security. "Oh, the language Rufus used when I was arrested," "Regina" cries. "He said such hurtful, horrible things. I can't repeat them!"

Then the situation went from bad to worse when Rufus took his mother-to-be hostage.

Communicating with authorities through a police department doctor's stethoscope, hostage negotiator's worked with him to resolve the stand-off. Without Rufus' knowledge, his father-to-be reimbursed the mall jeweler and all charges were dropped against "Regina." Charges, however, against Rufus were still being considered as an emergency in utero crime bill was rammed through during an all-night legislative session.

That's small comfort to Rufus' father-to-be. "Now we're terrified to see what's going to come out of 'Regina'," her husband says. "If we're having behavioral problems at this point, how are we going to cope when Rufus is ten or fifteen years old?"

There are no easy answers, but the proliferation of fetal felons demands that some action be taken.

In order for Rufus to start life with no police record, a judge has sentenced him to house arrest for the duration of "Regina"'s pregnancy. That solves the immediate problem of Rufus' police record, but what about after he's born?

Social worker Meredith Swanheart says, "The best we can hope is that in utero rehabilitation techniques will become more widely accepted and used. Otherwise, daycare centers in a few years are going to resemble armed camps."

Conservative legislators, though, see potential light at the end of this tunnel. Conservative politician, Lila Nojoy, believes there may be a solution to this problem. "The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to continue for generations, thank goodness. If we can get the international ban on child soldiers lifted, and rebrand these crib-crawling psychos as brave, pre-toddler patriots, we'll have the little sociopaths playing in the sand far, far away from here."

Solution to the abortion issue

Born-again Christianity makes full use of the elasticity of human beliefs. For instance, born-agains say they're all about the "culture of life," that "life is precious." Why else would they so aggressively picket abortion clinics? Because they believe in life.

But not all life.

Born-again Christians tend to be politically conservative, and if there's one thing conservatives love, it's capital punishment. The state of Texas has a human BBQ just about every month. They can't seem to put people to death fast enough in Texas.

Also, born-again Christian conservatives love war. It's like the Olympics, but "for keeps." And war is most fun when it's against people who have different beliefs. The born-agains tend to love Israel, and I've yet to hear about American born-again Christians declaring war on Buddhists. But when it comes to Muslims, born-again Christians just can't seem to get enough of the killing.

I once had a born-again neighbor who had a very easy solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. "They just need to kill them [Palestinians] all."

So, given this very selective outlook on the value of human life, I think a solution to the abortion issue can be found:

The next time a woman is harassed on her way into an abortion clinic, all she need do is tell the born-again Christians badgering her that her baby is Muslim. For added effect and realism, the woman could say, "Yeah, I couldn't decide whether to name the baby 'Jihad' or 'Abdul.'" Those words would hardly be out of her mouth when the born-agains would no doubt hoist her upon their shoulders and carry her into the clinic, and assist in every way possible in the termination of that birth.

You see, it can be easy dealing with hypocrites -- and by gosh are the born-agains world class hypocrites. Check out this article about anti-abortion activists who, themselves, have had abortions called The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion.

The world needs a Mr. Clean Corps

I know we're supposed to be tolerant of other cultures; respect them, even. . . . But I can't. I see a picture like this, above, and I just shake my head and think, Who the hell are these backward imbeciles who'd live like this?

I would never advocate the invasion or bombing of a country based upon its lack of municipal hygiene. And I certainly wouldn't discriminate against a person in a hiring situation because they originated from a country that embraces a more open and loose attitude toward mounds of garbage in city streets.

But respect? No. I just can't.

We don't need the Peace Corps, we need Mr. Clean Corps to send around the world. How can you have peace where everything smells of rot and decay? How can one even contemplate peace where nausea is a permanent part of the national character?

Why are we sending shipments of food to countries where the recipients are only going to consume it amid such filth? So they can have full bellies while enjoying all of the benefits of dysentery and plague?

My point is not to mock the poor, but to shame those who feel that disposing of masses of garbage in city streets is a viable sanitation strategy.

Doesn't the World Health Organization have some sub-sub-arm that deals with teaching people to put paper on public toilet seats, not to eat their toe-nail clippings, to avoid using used toilet paper for home decoration, or that garbage-strewn streets may be a detriment to public health?

The photo above is from an article about Egypt and how they are only now learning that it was a bad idea to kill every single pig in the country at the first blush of the misnamed "swine flu," H1N1. You see, the pigs there used to eat all of that garbage. Somehow, I don't envision pristine clean streets in the aftermath of pigs consuming that vast buffet of refuse. Unless the pigs are airlifted out of the area immediately after feeding, would they not simply replace the garbage they just ate with shit? So, what's worse? Streets filled with garbage or streets filled with pig shit? The WHO needs to weigh-in on this question.

In the meantime, cultures and countries that treat their cities and countries like a teenager treats his bedroom, are not high on the scale of things I respect, admire or care about.

Bono's running around the world talking about Third World debt. Christ, he should be making deals with Glad, Windex, Purell and Lysol to send massive shipments of their products to these hygiene-impaired countries.

We always hear about how high the unemployment rates in these developing countries. Why not hire masses of citizens into garbage brigades? Surely there's enough abandoned military equipment around that could be converted into garbage trucks.

I don't know. Surely in the year 2009, the world has better solutions to handling garbage than having swine simply eat it and turn it into shit.

Confessions of a Conservative Christian Libertarian Constitutionalist

The beauty of owning twin kraut World War II vintage Walthers is that the barrels on them are long and narrow enough to type with. They come from a time when men were men, and guns didn't need "safeties." Sure, that's cost me a keyboard or two, blogging with them, but no price is too high to pay in the name of freedom.

One time, I got so goddamned worked up blogging about that Barak Hussein, I blasted through the Enter key, and the slug did some weird dance ricocheting off the desk, going through the trailer wall separating the living room from the bedroom. It found its way into my wife's right temple. Before I hear any gasps from the gallery, let me tell you that she survived the mishap just fine. Poor thing's been dying of brain cancer the last year, and since we don't have any health insurance after I lost my job at the incinerator plant, I had to cauterize the wound with my soldering iron. Her head's a little lopsided now, but nothing a wad of toilet paper underneath her wig can't fix. Weird thing is, she says the tumor doesn't hurt so much anymore. Fancy that.

First thing I'd like to note: I don't have a permit for my Walters. Fedzilla is not going to have me on any its goddamned bureaucrat lists.

Second: when are people finally going to admit that the government can't get a goddamned thing right? From traffic laws, to taxes, welfare, to keeping the roads in passable condition. The mail's slow, schools are nothing but idiot-making factories, and snow plows only clear the streets where the mayor's friends live. Government sticks its incompetent nose into the auto industry, Wall Street, and now it wants to get into the healthcare business. Where does the madness end?

Now, I don't care if the bureacrats and their jack-booted police want to tell people what they can and cannot smoke, who they can and cannot fuck, what they can and cannot watch, read, drink, snort, or inject. Go ahead and jail those hippy assholes and their marijuana. Just don't try and take away my guns!

Some hippy, Communist, jackoff at the incinerator plant once said to me, "Why is it that conservatives think the government can't do anything right, except when it comes to executing its citizens?"

The son of a bitch. Sure, I know about "Thou shalt not kill," but everybody knows that God actually meant "Thou shalt not kill . . . unless you make me mad."

"And isn't it funny," the hippy Communist asshole went on, "that our economic system is called 'capitalism' and executing citizens is called 'capital punishment'?"

Yeah, hilarious. I didn't see the idiot's point, but that was nothing new.

What do I care about the government killing people who are murderers?

Then the hippy loudmouth said, "You know, conservatives live in society like there is no society. You live in the community like there is no community."

Well, who the hell can make heads or tails out of that?

I blog with my Walthers because how do I know some hippy drug maniac isn't going to come in through my window and slaughter me and my wife? How do I know the FBI isn't going to mistake my place for Ruby Ridge or Waco? I see those neighbors across the driveway sitting outside, always watching my trailer. Probably informants. Christ, they're probably a sleeper cell for some group of fanatical whackos. How do I even know my neighbors are my neighbors?

Sometimes, I watch my wife sleep and I'm tempted to poke at the cauterized bullet wound in her head, just to make sure it isn't make-up; that she's not some snitch sent in here undercover. There's even the odd time I'll look in the bathroom mirror and wonder if its not actually a piece of clear glass behind which the government has created a room to look just like my bathroom, and that they have an actor in there acting just like me. I've seen that in movies. Sure, the only time the government has its act together is when its up your nose and down your throat, snooping. So, I took a shot at that window, one day. Turned out, it was only a mirror after all. My wife wasn't bothered. She figured I was blogging.

My cat's been watching me extra intent this evening. When I look at its eyes the right way, they don't look like eyes, but camera lenses. Sure, the government has all the expertise in the world when it comes to spying on its own citizens! Time I took a closer look.

Stop pansy-assing around! Deregulate everything Now!

Once and for all, I want the government to get off my back! The one thing that will revive this narcoleptic economy is deregulation. We have far too many rules to live by and it's stifling innovation, commerce and growth. It's impeding freedom. It's poisoning democracy. It's turning humanity into so many lab mice.

The first and most important deregulation that must -- not should, but must -- be instituted is the eradication of all traffic laws. We've been following these laws -- intersection traffic signals, Stop signs, yellow lines, white lines, dotted lines -- for generations although they outlived their usefulness long ago. They are throwbacks to an overbearing, patriarchal age. What could be more of an affront to human dignity than a Do Not Enter sign? Or, this arcane business of driving on the right-hand side of the road? It's quaint, sepia-toned bullshit.

"Well, we have traffic laws to keep people safe!" squeaks the bureaucrat whose job it is to ensure all traffic fines are paid.

Safe? If someone is stupid enough to step out into a busy street, in front of a speeding car, maybe they don't deserve to be safe. We cannot legislate away death.

Traffic is a natural, self-correcting system.

Moreover, vehicles keep people safe, not laws. Deregulating traffic laws will finally get every vehicle under the weight of 6,000 lbs off the road. We need bigger, more heavily fortified vehicles. And once we get hydrogen fuel hammered out, it'll cost next to nothing to drive an eight-wheeled Hummer Steroid Hefty Edition.

Also, more people are killed each year by drivers running yellow and red lights, than any other traffic scenario. Intersection traffic signals are merely a red cape flashed before the bull in every motorist, challenging and tempting them to beat it.

"What about school zones?" wheezes the weak-kneed bureaucrat. "We've got to keep the children safe!"

More children than ever are driven to and picked up from school in motor vehicles, whether they be buses or cars. Nobody walks anymore, and it's a good thing. Walking is another ridiculous, outmoded memory of the past that serves to crush the future.

And I think it's time to speak frankly on the matter of children: once a fetus has successfully avoided abortion during its nine months in the womb, it's on its own. What are we supposed to do? Coddle people from cradle to grave?

No.

So, I propose that all traffic laws governing city and highway traffic be abolished. Will this lead to some car wrecks? Certainly, but traffic is a self-correcting, self-regulating system. Once we get the spaghetti-spined, heads-up-their-asses motorists off the roads, true freedom and innovation and commerce can finally be achieved. We cannot constrain and strangle our potential any longer like a child immobilized by a seat belt. We need to put the roof down, kick into fifth gear, lay on the horn, and speed the wrong way down that one way street called Progress.

Do Not Enter? You'll have to pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.

Modern Communications Techniques in Des Moines (and other stories) by Gary Britson

Murphy's Law Press is proud to announce the publication of Modern Communications Techniques in Des Moines by Gary Britson.

Some writers we miss entirely during their lifetimes: John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, Tom McHale, author of Farragan's Retreat, H.L. Humes, author of The Underground City, even Fred Exley, author of A Fan's Notes. Their books are thrust upon us by ardent strangers we meet on trains or in cafés, or by friends who pass along heated recommendations as though they're cures for gout or hangovers. Usually, we can only find these books in the dusty and shadow-shrouded stacks of used bookstores. Upon finding some partially disintegrating edi-tion, we clutch it, rescue it and devour it -- only to become that ardent stranger, ourselves, who thrust the book on strangers on trains or in cafés.

Searching through the vast swampy bulrushes of the Internet in 2002, I stumbled across the work of such an author who is still with us. His name is Gary Britson. I encountered his story, "A Job For Gotsdiner," on the Zoetrope Virtual Studio -- it made me feel like Joseph Smith unearthing those golden tablets, thinking, This is the stuff upon which new religions are predicated.

A baby-boomer from America's Midwest, Gary Britson has fermented in popular culture for more than fifty years. In his work, references to Finnegan's Wake and the operas of Wagner stand alongside mentions of Hee Haw and The Three Stooges. In other stories, zombies eat at restaurant salad bars and young women communicate with fellow riders on public transit via slogans on T-shirts. An equal-parts fan of theatre, opera and baseball, Gary Britson writes in his story "Harry in America," about a composer whose opus is a musical based on the Warren Commission Re-port on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In his story, "The Executioner's Groupies," Britson co-mingles capital punishment with baseball, writing of a wretched old stadium in Iowa where condemned men are strung-up to the scoreboard and electrocuted when a homerun is hit. In "A Job for Gotsdiner," he writes of the soul-demolishing experience of a middle-aged man losing a job he'd held for years and his fruitless, perilous pursuit of another, wringing pained guffaws from the reader as he recounts Gotsdiner's tragicomic travails.

The following stories are the hilarious and playfully perverse work of a man who's been overlooked by literary agents far and wide, shunned by the whole of American publishing, ignored by major magazines, and who is, quite possibly, the best writer you've never read. Check out an excerpt.

Negatunities Abound for "Deviant" Behavior of AmorGroup at Camp Sullivan, Kabul, Afghanistan

Sirs,

Adversity often brings with it certain negatunities. The recent publicity about so-called "deviant" behavior at Camp Sullivan (A.K.A. the American Embassy) in Kabul, Afghanistan among AmorGroup -- who guards the place -- may seem bad on the surface, but I am writing to assure you that marketing, PR, and even entertainment franchise opportunities abound.

First, from the POGO Letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding U.S. Embassy in Kabul:

Numerous emails, photographs, and videos portray a Lord of the Flies environment. One email from a current guard describes scenes in which guards and supervisors are "peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity…." (Attachment 2) Photograph after photograph shows guards-- including supervisors -- at parties in various stages of nudity, sometimes fondling each other. These parties take place just a few yards from the housing of other supervisors.

This isn't as a bad as it sounds. The reference to Lord of the Flies isn't great, but luckily, no one reads anymore, so the reference is lost everyone except the few nosey finks who'd even look at this letter. Next, the actions of AmorGroup in Kabul have been compared to the antics of the fun-loving roustabouts in the 1978 John Landis film, Animal House. This may be considered a PR win. The film Animal House depicts non-stop fun and hijinx. Sure, there are varying degrees of raunchiness to its merriment, but all of it is harmless, which is the most important thing.

Next, there is marketing potential in the ArmorGroup's frolicking, namely snacks and alcoholic beverage endorsements. May I ask, what brand of potato chips do ArmorGroup personnel prefer to eat from one anothers' buttocks cracks? Similarly, what brand of vodka -- or other alcoholic beverages -- do they drink from each others' behinds? I understand that video of these exploits exist. I will give you the email address of our "viral video guru," Calvin Ligula. He can have that footage uploaded to YouTube and other venues within 24 hours of receiving it. We also have power-user accounts on social media sites, such as Digg.com and Reddit.com, to ensure that we saturate your target audience with those images.

With the success of the animated TV series Family Guy, the Jackass franchise, Bum Fights, and the like, I have great hopes for an "AmorGroup Gone Wild" series of videos to spin-off from the initial product marketing campaign. So far, you've had excellent exposure -- if you'll pardon the accidental pun -- having been featured on the very enviable Web site, Gawker.com. That is a wonderful start; something my company could help you build upon.

I look forward to hearing from you, gentlemen! In the meantime, please remember that every cloud has a silver lining, and every buttock crack potentially has a tasty potato chip hiding within!

Yours,
Nigel Tepwater
Executive Vice President, Corporate Client Outreach
SilverLining Marketing Systems