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Empathy lessons from Ronald McDonald

 

Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, visionary of the $100 million Islamic Cultural Center, dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” needs a lesson in empathy.

 

The Imam doesn’t understand the firestorm of outrage he’s created.  Rauf is like a stray dog marking territory – if he can urinate on the memories of the victims of 9/11 in NYC, he can do the same anywhere in the U.S.  His mosque is an outrage for all Americans, not just New Yorkers.

 

Dogs are guided by nature.  Rauf is guided by arrogance.  His mosque is the beach-head of an invasion, and he's smearing Americans’ noses in his belief that no one has the stones to stop him.

 

Why don't we tell Rauf what we feel, and that he should be sensitive to our feelings.  Wait, what am I thinking?  Sensitivity isn’t a strong suit of a culture that enlists women and children to train as self-guided IED’s.  We need a zinger.

 

Yeah, here we go!  Empathy!  Walk a mile in our shoes.  A small dose goes a long way.

 

Rauf, how would you feel if a foreign power invaded your fatherland and built a franchise on top of its holy shrines?  Your shorts would knot so fast, the blood in your legs would clot.  Now, Rauf, how d'ya like walking in those shoes?

 

Two can play the same game, y’know.  That get your attention, Rauf?

 

A Texas-sized wedding gown

 

Everything’s bigger here in Texas, but Texas never met Zhao Peng.

 

Peng, a young groom-to-be of modest means, wanted to make his bride-to-be, Lin Ring, ecstatically happy on their wedding day.

 

And what did he do?  He set a budget the same way all young men of modest means do when forced to choose between extravagant hot air balloon weddings, or extravagant wedding gowns.

 

And what did he choose?  Why, the wedding gown, of course, a decision which would earn the ka-BOOM! pin-up honor for the month of June.

 

Measuring 2162 meters in length and adorned with 9,999 red silk roses, the gown required a caravan of family members 3 hours to unfold, and the services of 625 flower girls with back support belts to carry the train during the ceremony.

 

Just how long is 2162 meters?  Almost 1.3 miles, the equivalent of 23.5 football fields, or 6 times longer than the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, the largest aircraft carrier in history.  Put in perspective, the inset photo below shows how much of the Great Wall of China would be needed to accomodate the length of the train.

 

And the budget?  Wedding celebrations are over in an afternoon, but a wedding gown is forever.  When love matters, nothing is too costly for a man of modest means.  Peng thinks big.  A Texas kind of guy.

 

Nuggets of wisdom, Knuckleheads on parade

 

We’re under attack.  Again.

 

The O’Bomber is ratcheting up his barrage of babble, this time to levels of intensity exceeding "shock-and-awe" in the 2nd Gulf War.  O’Babble’s jabber has me in shock.  Stunned.  Numb.  So much that I was unable to think clearly enough to begin writing this post.

 

When the hour is darkest, miracles occur.  I got an email from my friend C-Jay who must have sensed my distress.  She sent me some potable quotes (as in “I’ll drink to that!”), and after reading them the feeling of doom began to lift:

 

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

 

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

 

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is tyrannical."

 

Who authored these nuggets of wisdom?  Thomas Jefferson.

 

Oof!  Pretty clear where Jefferson and B.O. part company.  Obama said at his inauguration he wanted to rebuild America.  And when the Knucklehead-in-Chief said recently "I'm gonna kick some ass!" we now know he was aiming his foot at Jefferson.

 

No blow-out preventers for presidential blow-outs

 

Just when it seems like Obama is running out of babble, he gets a second wind, drills down deep and discovers new veins of pipeline-grade babble.  And not just average-sized pools, but vast reservoirs of virgin-pressure babble, the “Big Kahoona” that only wildcatters dare to dream of.

 

When Obama finds the "sweet spot," he transforms into a raging out-of-control well.  No blow-out preventer can throttle his blather and no technology can rein him in.  There is no defense against the suffocating onslaught of his jabber; we can only watch and endure. 

 

All of Americans have something in common with the Gulf – two letters, “b.o.” which stands for “blow-out.”  The Gulf’s blow-out is oil.  Ours is B.O.

 

Gulf of Mexico, we empathize.

 

Looking to have sex in all the weird places

 

The internet is ideal for research, even better for wasting time.  It was, as you might've guessed, predictable for me to stumble over this thread:  weird places where people have sex.  Not sure how much of this is bravado, but here’s a sampling of alleged venues:

 

While hanging upside down in gravity boots

Inside an M1A1 Abrams tank while on training exercises

In a rowboat next to a herd of grazing cows

In an elevator during a power outage

At the zoo in an empty cage next to the orangutans

Inside a coffin in a hearse on the way to a cemetery

In a department store display window

On a vidcam during a business teleconference

In a hospital O.R. between surgeries

 

And last...On a bed.  Of nails.

 

Oww!  Who's the "moaner?"  Why, the one on bottom, of course.

 

The big whuppin’ on classroom warfare

 

The report about teacher Sherri Davis whuppin’ 13-year old Isaiah Johnson had the ingredients for a hot movie deal.  Then a cheap cell video of the performance went public and all deals were off.  Little wonder – the actual beating was as exciting as cramming a  "Tickle-me-Elmo Doll" into a garbage bag.

 

I’m reserving judgment on details.  I wasn’t there but I have a hunch.

 

When my wife was more tolerant she subbed in classrooms, the equivalent of trench-level warfare with gang-bangers-in-training.  Some kids learned the perp-walk before they completed Pre-K, and by age 13 were sociopaths who knew their Miranda rights and how to push system buttons like a “Blackberry.”

 

Sherri Davis’ buttons were pushed.  She flipped.

 

It wasn’t always this way.  When I was a pre-teen, our classrooms were proto-types of decorum and we were model citizens.  It never had a chance to get out of control.  Why?

 

Two words:  Sister Terasita.

 

Years earlier, this diminutive Franciscan nun ruled our class with fists of fury.  Sister Terasita was a 4’-9” wad of wound-up terror capable of explosive wrath at the slightest provocation.  She wacked classmates with rulers and grabbed disruptive students by their ears and twisted until they turned purple.

 

Once a girl student was late with her homework and Sister Terasita responded by hurling a box of dimes at the student.  The box flew by my head and crashed against the blackboard.  Coins flew like shrapnel.  Students ducked.  The girl burst into tears.  The rest of us feared for our lives.

 

Abusive authority figure?  Absolutely.  Yet fear kept us all in line.  "Wait 'til your father gets home" were Mom's magic words for jerk-control.  Between my parents and Sister Terasita, the thin line of bad behavior all but disappeared.

 

Shooting fish in a barrel of jokes made of clay

 

Houston artists went bobbing for apples in tubs of wet plaster.  If you like loopy performance art, it doesn't get any sillier.

 

The artists dunked their heads in a creamy clay mixture called "slip."  As the clay warmed and dried, the objective was to experience the thrill of a ceramic piece baking in a kiln.  But as Jay Leno says, "Where's the joke?"

 

Art strives to promote response:  laughter, fear, embarrassment or thoughtful-ness.  Admittedly, “What the F?” qualifies as a response, and at least WTF? is better than silence or a shrug.  But the problem with art that relies on the WTF? factor is this:  in the final analysis it panders to the lowest common denominator.

 

As a genre, performance art is heavily invested in WTF?. 

 

Andy Warhol made a film titled “Sleep.”  Yes, an 8-hour film of a sleeping man.  Warhol, concerned that sleep was becoming obsolete, decided the film would make an important statement.  And it did.  If his objective was to lull his audience into deep sleep, he succeeded.  Like shooting fish in a barrel.  WTF?

 

Art – whether painting, music, comedy, dance or writing – uses a variety of devices to pull off its magic: color, shape, texture, timing, rhythm and pacing.  And when these are seasoned with measured amounts of irony or contradiction, a work emerges that engages on many levels.

 

For an art project, I recall a classmate lay inside a coffin to experience death and burial.  In his critique, our instructor noted with a straight face the project could have been more compelling if my friend "put a little more life” into it.  My friend retorted he couldn't do that, because life was at cross-purposes to death.  

 

Now there’s the joke.

 

Vincent Van Gouda, artist & critic

 

When the going gets tough, talk tough

 

Way back when, when a pro boxing outcome seemed grim, the real champs followed a simple rule:  When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

 

So old school.

 

November 2008 gave us a poseur from Chicago and his posse of pimps who pranced into town with new school rules.  Now, when the going gets tough, they talk tough and tell you what they're gonna do.

 

Well, Mr. Sugar-Pants, don't tell us what you're gonna do, just do it!  Blowing smoke and telegraphing punches never won a prize fight. 

 

Bluster won't out-gun live ammo.  Nobody became champ with fake moves and silvery prose unless they were Muhammed Ali, the world's greatest heavyweight.

 

Not only did Ali announce how he was gonna whup a fighter's ass, he delivered his message with poetry and flair.  And followed up with lethal weaponry that set his opponents' clocks back to the Jurassic era.  

 

Mr. Sugar-Pants, you punch with delts made of Jello.  We've watched you flailing at air and we've watched Muhammed Ali.  Mr. Sugar-Pants, you ain't no "The Greatest."

 

Our cup runneth over with idiots

 

“I heard the news today, oh boy…”

 

And did we ever!  Friday, the nation’s chief Wannabe gave the coveted Gershwin award to the last Beatle standing, Sir Paul McCartney.  C'mon, who writes this stuff?  Since when did a politician's job description include giving air-kisses to pop musicians?

 

That's like Al Capone, Ted Bundy and Bernie Madoff voting for the best couple on "Dancing with the Stars.”  Okay, the analogy may be a bit squirrely, but it nails down the gangsters, narcissists and con artists.  Presidents, after all, particularly unseasoned ones, need mentors.

 

The ceremony gets better.  McCartney, reeling from an overdose of star-studded unctuous adulation, said “It’s nice to have a president who knows what a library is.”

 

Well gee, Paul, we all know what a space shuttle is, but that doesn’t mean we know how to use one.  So why do you think Obama knows how to use a library other than to store unsold copies of his autobiography?

 

Paul.  Seriously.  Liverpool is missing its idiot, so go back to England.  America isn't big enough for two idiots – our cup runneth over with The One.