#6 - The Great Recession

It was the decade when...

The free market cost us a whole lot.


Greed was very good in the aughts. Goaded on by the radical free-market zealots populating the Bush administration, the American economy resembled not so much a self-regulating system in the invisible hand paradigm of Adam Smith as it did a full-blown Reno casino with the taxpayers tied to the roulette wheel. And like a frothy-mouthed gambling addict on a lucky streak, there is no stopping the madness until it was too late. During the better part of the aughts, for the sharks within the financial system, times were good indeed: the Cristal champagne flowed at crowded velvet-roped clubs, credit was loose, and the word "bonus" came to mean a nothing short of a small fortune. The Masters of The Universe were back, "the hostile takeover" being replaced by "the credit default swap" as the archetypal dubious financial transaction of the decade. Complex mathematical financial models, totally inaccessible to laymen, became the backbone of our financial system, an apparatus so complex that even its practitioners didn't fully understand how the economy was working. All that mattered was profit, and, for some, there was plenty of that.

Sub-Prime loan. The quality of the investment is advertised in its name. You think that people making, oh, 20k a year (if that) would know better than to buy a $500,000 home but, hoodwinked by mountebanks peddling low-interest rates and manageable monthly payments, these sad-sacks couldn't help but reach for the American Dream when the carrot of home-ownership was dangled above their heads. "What's an Adjustable Rate Mortgage you ask? Don't you worry your pretty little head about that, that's just technical gobbledygook." And as these real estate robber barons bundled and sold the mortgages to ever-higher strata of financial institutions, the real estate bubble swelled to the point that the whole American economy rested upon the ricketiest of foundations. The pillars of American finance were weighed down with mounds of bad debt that could never be repaid. What happened when all these checks suddenly came due? What happen when that adjustable rate mortgage, well, adjusted? Let me put it thusly: did you ever play Jenga?

After the housing bubble burst, the shock-wave rippled through our economy, all but leveling its totemic institutions to the ground. The wealth of America had become little more than a slight-of-hand trick orchestrated by a few ingenious and unscrupulous bankers who put momentary profits ahead of sound long-term financial planning.

The narrative of the collapse of 2008 is now legendary. A domino metaphor is almost too easy to describe what took place in the fall of last year; perhaps a Nagasaki analogy is actually more fitting: it all just blew up in our faces. A mushroom cloud of cash whose fallout will prove radioactive for years to come. Lehman Bros was the first to fall. The headline was almost unthinkable but, there it was on the front page: Lehman Bros. files for bankruptcy. It was clear that this was a whole new depth of fissure in the capitalist system. Washington Mutual followed suit, the biggest bank failure in American history. It was looking like 1929 again. Insurance giant AIG was next on the chopping block when the United States Government performed a deus ex machina, saving the institution (and maybe the nation) from total financial ruin.

The economic collapse did provide America a living receptacle of loathing, disgust and resentment. His name was Bernie Madoff and, if history is just, the "Ponzi scheme" is no more; "Madoff scheme" will do very well, thank you! Stealing billions (billions!) of dollars from his investors, Madoff kept up his deceitful charlatanism for years, the robust economy allowing him to delay paying the piper as long as business was good. When the bull turned into a bear, and a really mean bear at that, there was no where else to hide. Madoff was through, his investors were broke, and America finally got a sense of just how corrupt and insane the world of finance had become. Yet Madoff is something of a whipping boy. Though he was without question corrupt, Madoff was, in a sense, a product of a system that encouraged behavior which, if not downright illegal, teetered ever so close to impropriety. Viewing Madoff as a singular and isolated example of corruption is to to ignore the myriad Bernie Madoffs that operated within the confines of a deregulated and corrupt system. These 21st Century Gordon Gekkos may have not broken the law but they nonetheless plundered America, turning our entire economy into a big game of "hot potato." Guess who was left holding the vegetable when the music stopped? That's right. All of us.

If there is a silver lining to the bleak clouds that now hover over America it is to be found in the resurgence of liberal Keynesian economics. If the crisis of '08 doesn't put the final nail in the coffin of Monetarism then we are all doomed. The economic meltdown has thoroughly discredited lassez-faire mandarins like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, the latter of whom finally admitted that he "found a flaw" in the system. "I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact." Well, about time you stopped jerking off to Atlas Shrugged and took a gander at the real world Mr. Greenspan.

"Experts" like Greenspan set the stage for this grand drama to unfold, blindly confident in the all-powerful wisdom of the "market." What we're left with is a disaster on a par with nothing in America since the crash of '29. But there is also hope. Hope of a future where greed may be kept in check by powerful regulatory forces and the "market" is utilized not as a grand schematic for all social organization but a tool, amenable to control, to help further the prosperity of society and welfare of the general populace. But, until these dreams are realized, we remain isolated in our private hoovervilles, singing the new anthem of The Great Recession: Brother can you spare a 401K?

You AUGHT to remember...

#7 - Fake News

It was the decade when...

The real news seemed fake and the fake news seemed real.


Let's face it, a lot of shit went down this decade. Compared to the temperate seas of the 90's, a decade so devoid of dramatic news that years were spent obsessing over a presidential hummer, the aughts were a roiling tempest of global turbulence, financial meltdowns, ecological disasters, foreign wars and game-changing historical events which, when seen in totality, mark this as the most significant decade for news since the 1960's and maybe earlier.

The news itself was news this decade. With the method of information dissemination being reinvented daily by the Internet, traditional news sources found themselves scrambling to keep up and stay profitable. On television, all three of the long-standing grandfatherly network news anchors either retired or expired, and with their passing so too the primacy of "the Nightly News" as the central authoritative televised presentation of the days events. Even Walter Cronkite finally gave up the ghost. No television program would ever be able to fill the role that the "Nightly News" used to play, not in the fragmented and blog-filled world that we suddenly found ourselves living in. That being said, there was one news program in the aughts that reported the news thoroughly and accurately while at the same ladling the comic absurdity of the modern world over every story it reported. I am of course talking about The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, without question the decades most important news program.

Ushering in a golden age of satire The Daily Show with Jon Stewart reasserted irony as the primary weapon of truth-telling in civil society. The show was the news media's sarcastic conscience in an era of unabashedly biased cable networks, barking media "pundits," political "spin-rooms", and shrinking financial resources for bread and butter field reporting. The aughts were an era where sycophantic "reporters" with dubious credentials infiltrated the White House press corps, lobbing softball questions to GW in times of great national crisis. An era when the 24 hours news cycle amplified every political skirmish into a hysterical crisis only to be discarded and forgotten by the next day. An era in which the talk show host with the most stringent views or most outrageous performance skills garnered the highest ratings, truth and thoughtfulness be damned. It was in this context that The Daily Show, though far from unbiased, acquired a carapace of authority and integrity shared by no other television program. To those who counted on a fair analysis of the news The Daily Show became a nightly ritual for many Americans, replacing both late night talk and traditional evening news. Host Jon Stewart went from being a successful stand-up comic and sporadically employed film actor to the most trusted man in America. Eminently astute and endlessly hilarious, Stewart combined old-fashioned borscht belt humor and the hyper-intellectual comedy of Ivy League publications like the Harvard Lampoon, with a dose of Tim Russert's inquisitional rigor thrown in for good measure. Unlike the self-congratulatory echo-chambers of 24-hour news networks, The Daily Show actively courted intelligent debate of a kind not seen on television since William F. Buckley gave us his parting switchblade smirk on Firing Line.

The shows most important function was its role as a media watchdog, ruthlessly exposing the lunacy and hypocrisy of the "legitimate" cable news channels, which, in the show's meta-analysis of the field, come across as inane and opportunistic loci of blathering idiots and any-for-a-rating gambits. How else to explain Glenn Beck or CNN's Star Wars hologram? By dismantling the edifice of legitimacy that the "real news" claimed a monopoly on, the void left behind was to be filled by a different kind of program, one with no obligation to seriousness but which nonetheless was executed with the utmost of integrity. The Daily Show's ridicule of mainstream news paved the way for its own meteoric rise to success. When Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's long runing debate program Crossfire the comic all but torpedoed his hosts, turning his appearance into nothing less than a full-blown confrontation, accusing his hosts of "hurting America." The show was canceled a few months later, all but coronating Stewart as America's voice of reason.

The Daily Show grew so popular it became a miniature star factor with many of the series' correspondents moving on to widespread Hollywood success. Steve Carrell joined Judd Apatow's cadre, transforming himself into a major film star. He then conquered the small screen yet again as the read role in TV's hit sitcom The Office. Ed Helm's eventually joined Carrell on The Office and later landed big screen success in 2009's biggest comedy smash, The Hangover. Rob Courdroy too has cultivated a modest film career after his tenure on The Daily Show.

But it was former correspondent Stephen Colbert who turned his faux-newsman persona into a one-man cult of personality on The Daily Show's remarkable spin-off The Colbert Report. A lampoon of blowhard talk show hosts of a sort popular on Fox News, The Colbert Report is even purer satire than its source. Never breaking from his assumed egomaniacal pomposity and party-line conservatism, Stephen Colbert (the character, not the actor of the same name) is a textbook lesson in satirical construction. From the beginning Colbert had his finger on the pulse of America. Introducing the word "truthiness" into the American lexicon during his first episode, the word could arguably be the most vital addition to the American vocabulary in years. When Colbert was plucked to bring his act to the Annual Press Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 his set left the room in a dazed silence, the routine being a sustained and penetrating critique of the Bush Administration's policies and the press' coverage thereof. After bombing in person, when the footage hit the internet Colbert's speech immediately turned into a sensation, eventually running a victory lap as the most watched video on iTunes. It still remains one of the most overtly confrontational and politically brave moments by a member of the press during the Bush administration.

With The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (as well as their cousin in print, the sublimely hilarious weekly news periodical The Onion) satire and humor acted as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of go down. As real news veered ever closer to the precipice of absurdity, more and more did the silly and comic approximate the actual texture of reality, even when the truth was anything but funny. With an administration and congress more closely aligned with the ideological perspective of the Daily Show's creative team now in power, it remains to be seen if the show will be able to maintain its critical satiric edge. But whatever happens, without the fake news of the past ten years the real news would have simply been unbearable.

You AUGHT to remember...

#20 - Shepard Fairey's "HOPE" Poster

It was the decade when...

A poster made a President.

Marketing professionals have long known that image is everything; political campaigns focus-group every piece of official electoral paraphernalia and photograph in an effort to target their audience and "control the message." They might as well be selling you detergent, so over-analyzed and blandly mass-marketed are most pieces of presidential advertising. Despite the strenuous labors by a presidential campaign's highly-paid and professional PR department, rarely does a marketing strategy break through the din of punditry and negativity that is par for the course in any modern presidential election. As electioneering gets more and more corporatized, the trend only seems to be worsening. Who would have thought then that in 2008 America would be introduced to perhaps the most effective and iconic piece of propaganda in the history of presidential campaigns: Shepard's Fairey's HOPE poster.

Fairey's creation is so classically appealing, so brilliantly anti-programmatic, so in-sync with the zeitgeist of not only a campaign but a nation, that it is now hard to imagine the 2008 Election without this blue- and red-inked portraiture. Fairey's poster, while utterly of the aughts, is - ironically - something of a throwback; redolent of Soviet propaganda, this image of the (then) future President can almost be considered an example of illustrative pastiche. A post-Warhol portrait, with it's "silk-screen" effect and large swaths of pure color, Fairey's is a decidedly "pop" representation of the candidate. Blissfully absent the platitudinous sloganeering that passes for a candidate's "message" in modern politics - "change you can believe in," "America first," "in your heart you know he's right" - Fairey reduces down an entire campaign's raison d'etre to one word : HOPE. Placed in large, plain font underneath Obama's placid but distantly-hopeful and deeply-dignified expression, the word is less a command for the reader than a definition of its subject. The man is the message. Candidate as abstract concept. When some critics (cough, Hillary, cough) were criticizing Obama as being short on wonkish detail and long on vague, inspirational speechifying, Fairey dived head first into the fray, turning the broad and imprecise substance of Obama's buzzword heavy campaign into a virtue; America, it turned out, needed the diaphanous and simplified power that comes with an ideological point-of-view based on simple and fundamental concepts like HOPE, CHANGE and PROGRESS. America's feverish and swollen head needed a detailed and systematic analysis to be sure, but, even more, its bruised and wounded heart needed the palliative that only comes from finding a powerful yet simple idea it could believe in. Eight years of the abysmal Bush Administration had demoralized us and tarnished our perception of ourselves. There was a crisis of national spirit. Obama's eyes reaching toward the heavens, it's no coincidence that Fairey's poster looks more like a stained-glass window than a traditional campaign poster. Obama inspired something akin to secular devotion in his followers, and Fairey knew it.

Not since Che Guevarra's iconic visage became a staple of college-dorm rooms has the image of a political figure so penetrated the general consciousness as Fairey's Obama. Seemingly unsullied by manipulation from computer software, the HOPE poster spoke true in an era when an analog aesthetic had become synonymous with a forgotten authenticity. Though Fairey's poster was developed independently of the Obama PR team, it quickly became the unofficial image of Obama's campaign and an endlessly imitable pop culture landmark. Parodies were common almost as soon as the poster was released. When a website called obomiconme allowed any user to Fairey-ize their face, a bold-lettered word of their choice below their colorized mug, the results were posted to endless Facebook pages, all but solidifying the HOPE poster as a watershed piece of political ephemera for an entire logged-on generation. The original poster now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a piece of American history encased and displayed for posterity. Fairey's use of the AP photograph that served as his "inspiration" has gotten the artist into a messy and as-yet unresolved legal imbroglio, a case which still may set new precedent in the legal intricacies of "fair use" doctrine in a world with Google Images and porous boundaries of ownership.

Am I suggesting that the HOPE poster won Obama the election? Hardly. Such an assertion would be at once widely hyperbolic and sillily shortsighted. It's bigger than that. The poster was the election: the victory of hope over cynicism and change over stasis. It is a testimony to Obama's skill as politician and his dignity as a person that he could carry the weight of such lofty ideas on his shoulders and not seem diminished in some way by the heavy load. And it is ironic yet inevitable that Shepard Fairey, an artist outside the political machine who emerged from the guerilla hinterlands of the skateboard scene, was the American who most knew how to connect a candidate with a country. Obama spoke to a nation full of people needing the reassurance and quiet resolve that comes from embracing the one item left at the bottom of Pandora's Box. If there ever was a decade when the rest of its contents had spilled out over America, this was, sad to say, most definitely it.

You AUGHT to remember...

#40 -Going Green

It was the decade when...

Green was the new black.

The bad news: We're all fucked. The planet is now a phlegmatic, feverish, invalid. Mother nature is looking more and more like Grandma Moses each day. Hard to believe for some but, if science is to be trusted, it seems that pumping carbon emissions and pollution into our environment unabated for a hundred years eventually takes it toll. Who woulda thunk it?

What's going to happen according to those nerds in the know?: Temperatures will continue to rise. Even one or two degrees upwards will wreak total havoc. Eventually, ice caps will melt, polar bears will go the way of the woolly mammoth, and the Kevin Costner film Waterworld will come to seem less a Hollywood debacle and more like the most prescient of documentaries. (Yes, in the future the oceans will be ruled by a leather clad Dennis Hopper in an eye patch.) I, for one, have already bought some beachfront property...in Nevada.

The good news: It was cool to be a harbinger of doom. There was no easier way to be "with it" than to decry the fate of our planet and mock those rubes who would deny the existence of climate change even as they suntan in January. And rubes they are indeed. There are few emotions as self-satisfying as justified pessimism in the face of delusional optimism. Convinced that climate change is nothing but a socialist plot to regulate commerce, the far right, though convinced of impending Armageddon by any and all other means, nonetheless refuses to believe that we could ever do anything to our environment that would threaten our well-being. The good lord said nature was there for our use after all. So, it was empirical fact vs. faith based denial. Um, score one for science. The problem is, of course, just how bleak the scenario really was. No one wants to hear about their inevitable destruction. Pandora's Box cannot be left wide open, hope must be maintained.

Enter the patron saint of the new environmentalism, the maharishi of green, the philosopher-king of Eco-alarmism, Al Gore. A dejected and bloated Gore left the 2000 election embittered and in shambles; a should-be president with no country to lead, what was the former VP going to do with himself? The answer, become earth's biggest hero since Captain Planet. There was something charming and professorial about his slide show of eco-terror, not the hippest of ways to spread his gospel of green. And yet, put that slideshow (OK, powerpoint presentation!)on film, release in theatres across America and you have yourself a major documentary hit. Two Academy Awards (Yep, even the song won!) and a Nobel Peace Prize later and the green movement had reached its apotheosis.

Now everything is green. Celebrities are green. Companies are green. CARS are green. CARS! Kermit was so wrong. Being green is a marketing ploy now, a signifier of a person or product being "with-it." Shedding the granola eating, hemp attired persona that typified environmentalists in the past, the environmental movement could count on movie stars to be their poster boys. Leo DiCaprio drives a hybrid and flies commercial, private jets use too much fuel. Less glamorous, Ed Begley Jr. has gone all the way, living in a "green" house and driving a converted electric VW rabbit. It's all about eliminating your "carbon footprint," one of the Aughts most pronounced coinages.

Is it all for nAUGHT? Though Gore would have you believe that changing your light bulb will change the world, I can't help but fear we are deluding ourselves about our own ability to divert the rolling boulder of climate change. China and India are on track to surpass the USA in almost every criteria of industrialization, including carbon emissions. America has passed no real laws or regulations that addressing the issue in any serious, systematic way. We couldn't even stand in solidarity with the rest of the civilized world and join the Kyoto protocol. What we have instead of policy is fashion. Instead of solutions we have "crisis awareness." Instead of leaders we have trendsetters. Own a hybrid car? Awesome. Seriously. But China is still poised to pump more pollution into the environment than any nation has in the history of the world. And they all ride bikes! Everyone doing their part may not be enough, and until we realize as a nation and as a world that a political solution in the only solution (if there is a solution), I'm afraid all the good intentions and Hollywood endorsements wont be worth the price of a gallon of dirt when we find ourselves canoeing over the Sahara.

You AUGHT to remember...

#48 - Reefer Madness

It was the decade when...

Pot became a wonder drug.

Have Crohn's Disease? Migraines? Fibromyalgia? Multiple Sclerosis? Arthritis? Hypertension? Insomnia? Urinary Incontinence? Crick in the neck? In fact, do you have any ailment whatsoever? Step right up and try nature's remedy. It goes by many names: Pot, Ganja, Reefer, Weed, Tea, Marijuana, Cannabis. According to many it is nothing less than a panacea for whatever ails you. And it's now legal for medical use in 13 states; in California it's practically aspirin.

Though marijuana decriminalization has been a liberal cause since the high-holy days of the 1960's, until recently it remained a fringe issue, associated with ex-hippies or free-market fanatics who would legalize Uranium if there was a market for it. For mainstream America however, pot remained tainted by its association with a counterculture seeped in anti-establishment ethos. Intimations of being a "gateway drug" have persisted for decades despite all research to the contrary. But the times, they are a-changin'. With a generation coming of age for whom the sixties were nothing but a historical epoch, the prejudices that besmirched cannabis's reputation simply hold no (bong) water. California in particular has become so lax in their marijuana laws that dispensaries are popping up everywhere, like doobie-stocked automats. Getting a legal prescription requires about as much subterfuge as jaywalking. What was the tipping point that pushed pot into legitimacy? My pet theory (probably concocted while high): really good stoner movies.

"Dude, Where's My Car?" (2000) was stoner film as written by Ionesco, an absurdist comic lark starring two clowns (Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott) as old-fashioned in their shtick as Laurel and Hardy, though a good deal more attractive with their shirts off. More chipper (and tanner) than Vladimir and Estragon, the Duo's confusion was nonetheless as existential as it was comic. (Or so I surmised while watching the film on Showtime at 3AM a few brownies in.) Another contact high was supplied by "Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle" (2004) which had as its comic highlights a Lothario version of Neil Patrick Harris doing his best to demolish his squeaky-clean child star image and a wild tiger ride though the backwoods of New Jersey. Awesome. In the backdrop of both was a general haze of pot smoke, though the subject was little discussed onscreen. (But seriously, why else would you drive around Jersey all night long for White Castle?) Proof positive that there doesn't have to be a joint in sight to qualify as a stoner film.

Joints were very much in sight (as were bongs, pipes and all other manner of marijuana paraphernalia) in the films of Judd Apatow. If pot-heads were to elect a poster boy for this past decade, the double-chinned visage of Apatow's favorite leading man, Seth Rogen, would have to be the winning candidate. "I want YOU...to grab me the potato chips." Jew Fro-ed, heavy lidded, prone to giggle at his own sarcastic barbs and suffering from a chronic case of the muchies, pot hasn't had such a cinematic champion since Cheech & Chong drove a "fiberweed" van into smokers hearts. If the gas mask bong employed in Knocked Up didn't make viewers want to toke up, Rogen followed the flick with Pineapple Express; this ganjapalooza was a genre mashing hybrid about a low-level drug dealer (James Franco), his best client (Rogen) and a gangland murder that these anything-but-action-heroes inadvertently wander into. The title refers a varietal of pot so choice it "smells like God's Vagina." Without question the longest advertisement for reefer put to celluloid in recent memory, the film is already a classic of the genre (for whatever that's worth).

So, as marijuana laws continue to be gutted, and with a new generation apathetic to baby boomer culture wars, it seems all but certain that Starbucks will be selling Maui-Wowie scones along side lattes in short order. Okay, maybe that's not going to happen anytime soon, but cannabis is, by any measure, integrated into polite society with a prominence never before seen in American history. When George Will, aka the political pundit least likely to ever say the word "blunt" in it's noun form, shrugs and admits the inevitable, the debate might as well be over. Marijuana is here to stay. Thank god that battle is over, I'm cached.

You AUGHT to remember...

#59 - Scopes/Monkey Trial: The Rematch

It was the Decade when....

Intelligent Design was not so intelligent.

Newsflash: The World is round. Oh, you knew that! (Don't tell Sherri Shepard.)

Ok then...

Newsflash: The Earth orbits the sun. More controversial? Not since the 16th century.

Fine...

Newsflash: All species of life on Earth, including man, evolved from a common ancestor. BINGO! Now that's controversial.

Of course, it's not. Or rather, it's not to anyone who believes that science is in any way a means of achieving objective truth. When I was taught evolution in school it was as much a part of accepted biology as cell structure and anatomy. There was nary a whiff of controversy. Sure, I knew about Inherit The Wind and the famous 1926 case which inspired it, but the "Scopes-Monkey" Trial was taught in history-not science-class, and had all the contemporary intrigue of Prohibition debates or revelations on the Teapot-Dome Scandal.

Of course creationists (or, tautologically, "Intelligent-Design" advocates) have their panties all in a twist about the label of "theory" attached to evolution, citing this as proof that the "theory," being a "theory," is anything but established truth. They're quick to forget that gravity too is a theory as is the germ "theory" of disease. ID'ers may score some rhetorical points with perplexed laymen - "Hey, if the scientists call it a theory, how can they be so sure that Darwin was right?" - but scientists and informed members of the public are not so easily hoodwinked by grammatical word games. The veracity of natural selection is determined by hard evidence and reasoned inferences, not taxonomic puzzles about what to title a proven scientific hypothesis. (Law? Theory? Fact? Who cares!) Is it true? That's the only question that matters.

When the Dover school board voted to have a statement read to students elucidating this bogus "theory" argument and then pointing them to an alternative pro-ID textbook in the school library, a nations culture war had found it's Gettysburg in another small Pennsylvania town. Battle lines drawn, we had a sequel to Inherit the Wind playing before our eyes some 80 years after the original court case, this time with air conditioning and less suspender snapping.

Stakes were raised not just by the historic connotations of the trial but by the religious debates in general that had been consuming the American consciousness. The President was seen as a product of the Christian right; the "moral majority" had never before had such a platform for expression and powerful ear to influence. Polls showed massive portions of the American populace did not subscribe to Darwin in the slightest. To the devoted Christian, the complete rollback of the enlightenment seemed no longer a far-off dream. Conversely, the blowback by the so-called "new atheists" had put the central tenets of religion up for debate in the public sphere with a prominence not felt since the high not-so-holy days of 20th century modernism. Lead by "Darwin's Rottweiller," Richard Dawkins was both the face of evolution and atheism in the Aughts. A victory for the former in Dover would likely be felt as a triumph of the latter as well, even if the conflation, by Dawkins' own admission, is not wholly necessary.

Ratcheting up the tension was the adjudicator of the whole debacle, Judge John E. Jones III - a Bush appointee. Would The President's nominee agree with his appointer and concede that both evolution and Intelligent Design deserve to be taught in public schools? Or would the case for natural selection win out and Intelligent Design would be called out for what critics claimed it really was: creationism with a lab coat. In a shockingly tough and definitive decision Judge Jones ruled against the school board writing, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

Writing also that:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

That is what we here at YATR call a judicial smackdown. In the 1926 trial, Scopes lost his case and was found guilty of illegally teaching students that men and apes had a common forefather. It took 79 years for another court to correct this miscarriage of justice. So, though Darwin won this battle, the war is still far from over. As recently as February of this year a State Senator in Florida introduced a bill requiring teachers to include ID alongside Evolution in their science classes. Like Lemmings toward the cliff, no logic can slow their righteous march to oblivion.

You AUGHT to remember...

#82-Same Sex Marriage

It was the decade when...

Gays got married. Then they got angry!

It is no small irony that Justice Scallia's stinging dissent in Lawrence V. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court court-case of 2003 that ruled the antiquated anti-sodomy laws still on the books in many states unconstitutional, provides the logical framework for same-sex marriage with ringing clarity. He writes:

Today's opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is "no legitimate state interest" for purposes of proscribing that conduct...what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising "[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution," ibid.? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case "does not involve" the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court. Many will hope that, as the Court comfortingly assures us, this is so.

This from a man who quotes Cole Porter Lyrics in official Supreme Court decisions. But Scalia's fears were not unfounded. The Lawrence V. Texas decision, announced the week of gay pride in a serendipitous coincidence, was the first domino to fall in a decade that saw a cascade of progress for gay civil rights, most importantly and most famously, the right to marry.

In 2001 The Netherlands (of course) were the first nation in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. In 2003 Ontario followed suit, with Canada granting universal marriage rights to all citizens in 2005. By the end of the decade seven different countries (including South Africa!) have full legal marriage for same-sex couples. Many others have newly enacted civil union laws. And in America, after the shackles of legal and institutionalized homophobia were loosened with Lawrence, same-sex marriage became, just as Scalia predicted, not a lofty dream but a logical necessity and social inevitability. Within six months of the Lawrence decision the ice had thawed enough to allow for the Supreme Court of Massachusetts to demand the that Bay State offer the same marriage license to all its inhabitants, gay or straight. In the culture war equivalent of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Massachusetts ruling promised a battle over gay marriage that would last years if not decades.

In another ironic twist for the Scalias of the world, the mass of media coverage on same-sex marriage, fueled by the right's hysterical response to the nuptials, only made gay people look more sympathetic. Here were women in white dresses, and men in tuxes, often with children in tow, kissing on city hall steps and sharing wedding cake. Weddings like any other. The wholesomeness of the images was almost comic. And yet, the defenders of traditional marriage keep repeating, ad naseum, as they attempted to enshrine discrimination into the U.S. Constitution, that these marriages were a "threat" to the very fabric of society. Sugar, I think homos know a thing or two about fabric.

For sheer drama nothing could compare to the all-out clusterfuck that was Proposition 8, the Gettysburg of the same-sex marriage battles. After the Supreme Court of California legalized same-sex marriage in May of 2008, the second State in America to do so, it was inevitable that the largest state in the Union would, through the mechanism of its "dysfunctional" ballot measure system, put the question of gay marriage to a public vote. Battle lines were drawn and each side mobilized to win what became the most expensive ballot measure in history. When Prop 8 passed, writing discrimination into the constitution of the State of California with a simple majority vote, a sleeping giant was awoken - the gay community was ready to bust out a big can of whoop-ass. Spontaneous protests erupted all over CA (and elsewhere), the shock of the loss shaking formerly complacent homos into action. The Mormon Church proved an effective locus for anger and complaint when it was revealed that the church and its followers had been the biggest donors to the winning side.

All sorts of mini-dramas popped into existence. When it was discovered that the owner of gay hotspot El Coyote in Los Angeles was a Mormon and Yes on 8 donor, an impromptu boycott threatened to close the doors on this longtime LA eatery. A hastily arranged press conference ended in shouting and tears; you can watch the whole thing, if you can stomach it. The skirmish got some press attention but it was a trite kerfuffle compared to the outrage over Scott Eckern, the Artistic Director of California Musical Theatre in Sacramento. Not only biting the hand that feeds him but swallowing it whole and then informing his victim how delightful his thumb tasted, Eckern, a Mormon (natch!), contributed $1000 to the Yes On 8 campaign, a fact that once discovered caused no small uproar in the Broadway community. Calls for his resignation came quickly: Susan Egan, Belle herself, circulated a damning letter about Eckern to her theatrical address book, and the word spread fast; soon Broadway composer Marc Shaiman was threatening to deny the company all future rights to his shows as long as Eckern remained at the helm. He resigned less than a week after election day. With that much anger in the air, someone's head had to roll.

Though homos had lost the battle on Prop 8, it became clear, with Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont (through legislative means no less), New Hampshire and Maine all legalizing same-sex marriage in rapid succession, that the opposition was losing the war. And, as more and more gays get married with society staying mysteriously still intact, the forces of discrimination and bigotry (and bad fashion) will lack any and all ammunition to combat the inevitable tide of history. And if this blog post has been more serious than most, less pithy in tone and even, god help us all, a little treacly, well, so be it. There are some things about this decade that we can feel proud about. There are some things we really ought to remember.

You AUGHT to remember.

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... from Jack Black

#92-Terror Alerts

It was the decade when...

Our anxieties were color coded.

The following is a confidential document from the Department of Homeland Secuity. It was a leaked by a disgruntled color-blind staffer in the department. The document was an internal reference for agents to decipher the meaning of the various color codes and learn when it would be appropriate to activate them.

Homeland Security Advisory System - Inter-office Memo #9786.7 (Confidential)

Please use the following as a reference when enabling the Homeland Security Advisory System :

RED(Severe) - If you are reading this, then good news, there is life after death! You're dead. By the time this color is activated it'll be too late. Major terrorist attack is inevitable and has probably already occured. America is now a scorched wasteland. Somewhere, Mel Gibson is riding a motorcycle around the desert and Will Smith is stranded on Manhattan with blood-thirsty zombies. If it's RED...you're toast.

ORANGE(High) - This is what the HSAS is all about! If we could get away with keeping the terror level at ORANGE we'd be set. It totally covers our asses! If an attack happens we can always say we warned the people. We were on top of it. We're the government! I mean, let's be serious, an attack is going to happen eventually, right? If we could just stay at ORANGE we'd always be prepared. If we go to RED and there isn't an attack we look like asshats who are just trying to manipulate the fears of the citzenry. But, if we set the alert to ORANGE and there is no attack...well, it's probably because we went to ORANGE. We scared them off. That's the beauty of this strata of alert; at ORANGE...we can terrify people and look efficent at the same time. We should try to be at ORANGE as much as possible. And Republican poll numbers go up to boot!

YELLOW(Elevated) - Since we can't stay at orange all the time (some people might find it suspicious) we had to come up with a day-to-day color that could still instill a little fear in the populace. So it's an "elevated" alert. We're saying with yellow, "It's not really safe out there, but there is a fair chance you might survive today. Just keep your concern elevated." After a period of time sufficient to make us look relatively safe, feel free to jump back to ORANGE as you see fit, especially if the Democrats' numbers are looking good.

BLUE(Guarded) - This color is really a formality. We had to include to make sense on the continuum. We're never going to actually use it. I mean, how would that help us in the next election cycle?

GREEN(Low) - Hallejuah! Praise Jesus! After the long battle of Armageddon all the infidels were cast down with Satan into the lake of fire. The rapture has taken all the true believers in a glorious moment of mass assumption. The lion and the lamb are busy doing the nasty together at the Bronx Zoo and Jon and Kate have to decided to re-marry. Yes, the terror alert is finally green.


P.S.- To the mid-level government official currently reading this blog after it got a red flag in your vast secret spyware network installed illegally on all home computers, please know this: this post was a joke! I don't really have any secret government documents. This is just satire. HA HA. I'm sure you have a great sense of humor down in Langley. Please don't put a sack over my head in the night and send me me to Gitmo. I was just making a funny. Just making sure you knew....

You AUGHT to remember.