The Ten Commandments Are Obsolete!

There seems to be an increasing desire amongst people to live in a simpler world and live by a simpler worldview. This is afterall the appeal of fundamentalism, be it Islamic or Christian or Economic, we would desperately like to believe that there is a simple set of rules which we can remember and understand and which will lead us to live a life which is moral and beneficial to our fellow men.

Now yes, I would agree that the ten commandments mostly make a lot of sense, and it certainly won't hurt you or those around you to follow them, but I think they could use a bit of an update. I'm not going so far as to propose moral relativism, all I'm saying is that the cause and effect relationships by which we interact with people today, are a thousand times more complicated then they were in Biblical times. If one were to isolate oneself with a few hundred other people in a river valley with some oxen and mana and maybe a pharaoh or two and swear never to IMPORT or EXPORT anything or send any kind of communication out of the valley, well then, I'm sure the Biblical commandments would still allow a person to live a full and morally upright life. However, these rules are far from sufficient to allow one to navigate the minefield of causality that is the modern globalized economy.

To give you an example of just how complicated things are let's imagine you are giving your old clothes to the salvation army. Helping out the needy AND saving the earth; nothing could be more clearly good for everybody, right? Wrong. In the mid 90's Africa had a burgeoning textile industry. Many people were employed and others were able to proudly purchase and wear clothing that reflected local traditions and aesthetics. However, during the same time the Salvation Army and Goodwill and other groups got better at soliciting donations of clothes, or possibly people began to buy new clothes with increasing frequency. Whatever the case, these organizations could no longer sell as much clothing as they received even at insanely low prices, and so they started shipping it to Africa where wholesalers purchased it for pennies a pound. As a result the African textile industry went belly-up and the factory workers are all now poor and unemployed and clad in either Chip and Pepper or Fido Dido tshirts which are utterly unsaleable here. [Article]

In our complicated world the right thing to do is actually to buy less new clothing, instead of feeling falsely generous after "donating" worthless shit that you would have thrown away anyway.

It's not enough to pick a few simple principles and precepts out of a hat and live by them and assume oneself to be doing right. This is what terrifies me most about the marriage between Christianity and Self-Help that is evident in the Evangelist Mega-churches (which have coffee-shops and movie theatre style seating). These people have genuinely good intentions and they genuinely believe that they are doing the world good by boycotting TV channels with too many cuss-words and holding bake sales for churches that already have more money than Harvard, while the kids of the lower-income families in their city that they've never met are getting shipped off to Iraq, flipping out and torturing Muslims. To love your neighbor isn't difficult or particularily useful if you live in a gated community full of rich, loveable people.

Being good has never been and will never be easy.

We all have a profound moral obligation to educate ourselves on the social, economic and environmental impacts of our actions. Find out where your clothes were made. Find out what's in your food. Find out what specific companies you're investing in when you buy an RRSP. Read the paper. Read a different paper and compare. Yes, it's true, it's impossible to really know for sure what the impacts of all the billions of decisions we make each day are, but you and both know that you could be trying a little harder.

This growing tendency amongst people to embrace a false simplicity is the greatest danger facing the modern world. Fundamentalism is only one example of this trend. Watching television recently I noticed that USA today's motto is "never gray." In the disturbing world of infotainment, this is apparently a selling point! Gray is EXACTLY what a newspaper should be. It should be factual and informative and unopinionated, it should represent the complexity of the world and the fact that there are good arguments on BOTH sides of most issues.

Perhaps the most ridiculous example of this tendency towards the simplification of ethics is the results of the last election. George Bush won because he seemed like a stand-up guy, and a straight-shooter to boot. No one actually thought that much about his policies, they just felt like he was the kind of guy that you would want as a neighbor. And it's true, he'd probably be a great neighbor, he'd greet you with what I'm sure is a firm handshake every morning, and he'd be happy to drive your son to soccer practice when you're car was in the shop. He's probably a good husband and father as well. These are qualities that will make him well-liked by the white house staff and the press corps. They will IN NO WAY help him to make the world a better place. Clinton cheated on his wife and presumably hurt her deeply, but he was an excellent PRESIDENT and certainly did more good than harm further down the chain of causality where the effects of one's actions are multiplied a thousandfold.

And Kerry? What of Kerry? Why was it again that no one would vote for him? Oh yes, he was a flip-flopper. What does this mean exactly? It means that depending on the situation he changed his mind. How shocking! It means that he probably actually read those hundred-page bills all the way through and weighed the over-all impact of the thousands of sub-clauses, instead of just reading the title and voting according to dogma. Isn't this something you would want in a President? Adaptability? Humility? The capacity and willingness to respond to the desires of voters?

In March of 2003, 71% of Americans believed the war in Iraq was worthwhile. A poll conducted by the same group using the same techniques discovered that last month only 41% of Americans thought it was worthwhile and 56% actually thought that it was NOT worthwhile.

What's that? THAT'S A GODDAMN FLIP-FLOP!!! Guess who would have REPRESENTED you best American People? C'mon, take a stab at it.

Boundless fury and rage have once again combined to shatter my monocle and I seem to be bleeding from the nose as well. I'm going to go soothe myself in the bleak, painfully dull and utterly gray mountains of information contained within the pages of the Economist. I might have a tea as well. Although probably not, because Alphonso has yet to get back to me on the health insurance available to the tea farmers who grew it.

The Picture of Everything!

Terrifying news! This just in! The apocalypse is closer than even I had thought! A man by the name of Howard Hallis has created a picture of everything!

You can view the picture at his website.

In this picture he has represented everything! For this to be possible, everything must have already been presented once (in order to be represented) and thusly there is no sense in waiting around for new things to emerge before the apocalypse. If everything already exists then it can easily be taken out in one fell swoop AT ANY TIME!

If anyone needs me, I'll be in my wine cellar trying to drink $658,000 worth of wine as quickly as possible.

________________________________
APPENDUM:

I urge you to both Lo! and also Behold! After a suggestion made by my esteemed colleague Justin, that perhaps certain things were not contained within the picture of everything, I performed an exhaustive search and was unable to find any representation of Pork Moss whatsoever. For this reason, I have ascertained that this is most assuredly a hoax as Justin suggested.

DO NOT WORRY! There will not be an imminent apocalypse, go on and read about the relative merits of French and German bread. It is one of my most insightful posts in recent memory.

Luckily I had only drunk five bottles of wine by the time I put two and two together. Unfortunately as a result of the perceived imminence I started at the expensive end and I'm now out $168,000 in irreplaceable turn of the century wines.

The Increasing Popularity of Baguettes

It has come to my attention that French bread is growing more popular every day. The increase is particularily apparent in Asia and Latin America. I have received this information from an article in Loaf Lovers Illustrated which states that "People the world over delight in the delicate texture and flaky crust of Baguettes."

To this I say, "Fuck French Bread! French bread is for Fairies!"

While some readers may take this as some sort of Homophobic slander, I assure you that it is not. I use the word in its original and accurate sense. I am referring to the faerie people, those little winged creatures; capricious, delicate and self-involved. The fact that humanity is now also being sucked in by the airy, insubstantive, half-pleasures of French bread is a sign of our moral decline.

What has become of dark heavy German bread? Bread which embraces the earth and human labour? What has become of the People's Bread? I speak of Rye and Pumpernickel and Linseed Farmer's Bread.

It has been said that Western painting (until the 20th Century) seeks to disguise its own fabrication, that it hides its brush-strokes under layers of effacement, attempting to perpetuate an ungrounded image of fantasy which floats before our eyes magical and sourceless, while Asian art, particularily Chinese ink-painting, embraces the brush-stroke, bringing it to the forefront, balancing art and artifice, acknowledging and indeed celebrating the human hand and physical brush which has produced the image. Clearly the Chinese style is more complex and meaningful allowing the viewer endless degrees of contemplative opportunity. This is why I sold off most of my Raphaels and Rembrandts in order to purchase works by Wen Zhengming and Wu Daozi -- but Lo!, I am developing an analogy here and must press on.

Just as Western painters have tried to hide their own mortal role in the act of creation, French bread strives obsessively to eradicate its own roots in grain and soil, to develop a radiant and diaphonous, but ultimately substanceless, aliment. While the product of these mendacious labours is delicate and beautiful it cannot be compared to the multi-layered honesty of German bread, a bread which embraces the wholeness of the wheat, the twelveness of the grains and the dark fertile colour of the earth.

The baguette is a bread which says "I am too good to care for my fellow man." It cries out, "I will take the wheat and leave you the chaffe." While this may be appropriate in one's choice of apparel or motorcar, one's choice of bread reflects one's humanity at a very basic level, and to choose French bread is to declare oneself uninterested in anything difficult. To choose French bread is to choose aesthetics over morality, fantasy over reality and utopianism over the rough inefficiencies of democracy.

It is my firm opinion that this trend in bread popularity foreshadows our doom in the most clear and direct manner possible. We will all go under, daydreaming about heaven, even while we are too lazy and selfish to battle in the dirt and trenches here on earth against the incoming minions of hell.

Our Doom Is like A Bloody Zit waiting to be Popped, and yet we lust to Drink the Ichor which is contained THEREIN!

Yesterday, after performing our rigorous and spartanic physical rituals, I went for a relaxing promenade along Spadina Avenue with His Lordship, Sir Lucretius P. Dancastner. We were strolling most leisurely, when we were both stopped in our tracks, pierced through by the most disturbing print advertisement which I have ever laid eyes upon. It was for a new product called a "Bloody Zit Froster." It is an iced beverage of the most ghastly, gleaming red tone. Other than the long-established transgression of the Bloody Mary and the Bloody Caesar, I had never before seen a beverage play so blatantly to its hemic properties. It was truly vile.

Sir Dancastner and I stood frozen in our tracks, staring at the bus shelter advertisement which glowed creepily from within. Front and center was a clear plastic cup containing a liquid of the aforementioned red tone, but not only was the liquid red, it was chunky. I tremble to say it, but LO!, it was indeed chunky, suggesting that the liquid within the cup had been obtained by mulching and or compressing vast mounds of zits, blackheads, whiteheads, blisters, boils, carbuncles, pustules and papules; perhaps warts and scabs as well. The disgusting cup was resting on a countertop, the entire background of the poster was composed of blue-green bathroom tiles which were unforgiveably streaked with little squirts and trickles of angst-infused, teenage face-nectar, as though to suggest this ungodly sanguine libation were lovingly-crafted by hand at home, one puss-bursting pinch at a time.

Dancastner and I were dumbstruck, we turned to each other, our expressions calling out; "What In the Blue Blazes are these advertisers thinking?"

While I was unable to find a link to the exact image which did so shock our mature and jaded eyes, I have found a link to a TV spot from the same campaign. If you are not eating, or ever considering eating again, you can safely view it here.

PS - Happy Mother's Day Mom!

_____________________________________________________
APPENDUM

I have discovered a picture of the poster on the "Torontoist" website.



Zounds! This is the first picture ever to grace the stellar surface of my webpage!
Congratulations are in order to myself.

A Side-Project

There shall be no new post tonight. Instead I would like to invite to explore a journalistic venture of mine wherein I report upon recent events in the life of Allen Iverson. Being the occultist and visionary that I am I know things about Allen Iverson which you would hardly believe. I am certain my readers will find this new website to be exciting, entertaining and enlightening, if only for the glimpse it provides into the fantastic world in which I live.

This spin-off project will perhaps be short-lived in that I only intend to document the 76ers performance in this year's NBA playoffs and Allen Iverson's off-court reactions.

I implore to click the link below and then scroll to the bottom so that you will be able to read the post in reverse chronological order, thus preserving the narrative progression of the tale.

The Truth about The Answer

I will not at this time reveal whether or not the events detailed on this other site will eventually constitute a sign of the apocalypse.

UPDATE:
It suddenly seems as though this blog, this most vital and topical of blogs has become the side-project in a sense. My Allen Iverson blog received about a thousand hits in one day. To give you some idea of perspective this site receives about 500 hits per month. So while the world is uninterested in knowing and averting the apocalypse, everyone needs to know about whatever ludicrous rumours I am able to concoct about SportsStars (by concoct, I obviously mean document factually). Very little hope remains within me.