The Butcher hollers, “Are you upstairs practicing black magic again?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, if you’re going to be communing with dark spirits, can you conjure me up a winning lottery ticket?”
“I’m not sure.”
“B., don’t tell me you suck at being a witch, too.”
God, that boy makes me laugh.
Kimora Lee Simmons is the ex-wife of hip hop mogul Russell Simmons who is the founder (along with Rick Rubin, who you may recall from his work on Johnny Cash’s last records) of Def Jam Records. Simmons’ brother is Rev. Run from Run DMC, who y’all better know, if only from their collaboration with Aerosmith on that version of “Walk this Way.”
Lil Wayne is a teeny tiny rapper who you think you’ve never heard of but if you heard one of his songs, you’d be like “Oh, that’s who sings that.”
I’m torn between writing about Lil Wayne and the term “Islamofascism.”
I keep teasing Mack that it’d be nice if there were a 6 inch version of him I could just carry around with me like Pinocchio has Jiminey Cricket to act as his conscience. Well, I swear to god, it would not surprise me to find out that Lil Wayne really were only 6 inches tall and that they shoot all his videos with the camera kind of below him, shooting up to make him look taller, and all the other rappers actually standing like fifty yards back so that they all appear roughly his size in the frame. And his lyrics are, I swear, like he just randomly throws some shit together that is somehow tangentially related. You can tell how he writes. He comes up with a decent hook, that sounds vaguely like something my grandpa would have said, but without the “niggas” and then gets as stoned as he can and plays word association for the verses.
It irritates the shit out of me and yet I watch his god damned videos like I’ve been hypnotized to do so.
But I swear, I could write a Lil Wayne rap.
First, we need a catchy hook that sounds vaguely badass and vaguely like something my grandpa would say, had he been a cusser. My grandpa would say things like, “She had freckles on her but(t) she was nice” or “What’s all that noise? Stop your hollering. Come over here and I’ll give you a reason to cry.” I think we can work with the second one.
So, okay, the hook will be
I ain’t bragging, no I’m a nice guy
But you come to close and I’ll give you reason to cry.
Now, the verse writing will be more fun. Inhale. Hold. Hold. Hold. Slowly, exhale. Eat some Cheetos. Wait. Puff, puff, pass. Really, pass that shit. Even when writing Lil Wayne songs, it’s not cool to bogart the inspiration.
Ready?
Sitting on my ‘puter watching Righties lie
A bunch of little babies; big girls don’t cry
But you got my carpet wet water falling from the sky
Yeah, the sky is big, not as big as my dick
When I whip it out, your girls all over my shit
Ooh, it stinks. Light a match
and remember back in the day watching Ron Santo catch
Oh, third base, not as sexy as first
Mmm. Mark Grace…
Like Apollo on the field
Mmm. Mark Grace…
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was thirteen. He was twenty three. He jogged out onto my television like a promise from Heaven. “Just wait, B.” Heaven whispered. “If you put up with all the inept smooches of your youth, someday, you can smooch a man like Mark Grace.”
Heaven, it seems, is a liar, liar of the pants on fire variety.
Where were we?
Oh, yes, “Islamofascism.” A term as much at home in a Lil Wayne song as it is in the right-wing blogosphere (don’t lie. You thought there was no way I could tie those two things together and look at how smoothly I pulled it off. Go ahead, admire how well that went and how it seemed to make sense and be on purpose. It must be hard, every day, to read someone as talented as me. Lord knows I can barely move under the weight of my awesomeness.).
Bill Hobbs was talking about it last week and you really should read his post, because Hobbs is the king of eloquently missing the point and this is, I dare say, his masterpiece.
I don’t have a whole lot of time to waste on Hobbs (I’d rather talk about Hitchens and he lingers in the background of this post like a Girl Scout waiting for you to find enough change to pay for your cookies), but I do want to point out that, when he says
Islamofascism, likewise, exists, and has declared its intent – and begun making moves – to establish a global 13th-Century-style Islamic caliphate based on sharia law.
I truly hope that Sarcastro and I are not the only people laughing.
Let me let you in on the joke. Part one: As you recall, when you say XXth Century, it’s actually XX-1 years. So, this year is 2007 (literally twenty oh seven), but we’re in the twenty-first century. So, when you say “a global 13th-century-style Islamic caliphate based on sharia law,” it’s the same thing as saying “a global 1200s-style Islamic caliphate based on sharia law.”
If one were going to claim such a thing, you’d think that the 1200s must have been a great time for Islam and the caliphate, right? I mean, we’re trying to monger fear here by insinuating that our enemies are looking back on a time when Islam was just dominating the shit out of the world. So, 1200s. What’s happening in Islam?
Oh, just a tiny little incident in which some guy whose name has practically been lost to history–Temüjin–and his sons overran much of the world and conquered the territory held by the Islamic caliphate.
So, Hobbs is saying that the “Islamofascists” are trying to recreate a time in which Islamic power was in decline and in which Muslims were subject to Ghenghis Khan and his offspring? Clearly not. That would make no sense. Why would “Islamofascists” want to recreate a time period in which the caliphate had little to no power?
Maybe Hobbs means 12th century Islam–a time that might be called the height of Islam’s golden age. But let’s look at why it was called Islam’s golden age: because Muslims seem to have invented capitalism and the idea of a free market; they had wide-spread industrial growth; women had unprecedented freedoms and the right to work; they invented the scientific method, algebra, and made great strides in astronomy, chemistry, and physics. This is the height of Islamic architecture, literature, philosophy, and art. There’s wide-spread religious tolerance and amazing creative growth.
Which is just about the opposite of what the folks who are called “Islamofascists” seem to want.
So, where is this golden time when Islam really sucked, but also dominated the whole world? Well, much like the imaginary conservative 1950s, when everyone got along just fine and all was right in the world, it never existed.
Which brings me to Hitchens, just as I’ve run out of time. I disagree with the term “Islamofascism,” just because I don’t think this is a fascist movement. I think of fascism having to do with the rise of a powerful nation-state fueled by an industrial machine that seems unstoppable. These folks have no nation-state and are, seemingly, against industrialization.
But I do think that Hitchens has one good point–fascism and this “whatever-ism” carry in it the seeds of its own destruction. They are both movements that thrive on death–the death of others and the deaths of their own. As bright as that might burn, it’s not sustainable.
1. I finished Good Omens and bless its heart, that was almost a good book! I really liked it. In fact, I do believe that, if Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Prachett wrote a book together, they might each be able to compensate for the others’ weaknesses, thus resulting in the most enjoyable, most awesome book ever. Just my opinion.
2. You know how I was all “Oh, how will I smudge with sage if it’s not dry?” Well, folks, here’s how it worked out. I had my tiny cauldron and I put one of those charcoal things you put in a hookah in it and lit it and then I put the kind of not dry sage on top of it and, of course, since it was not dry, it smoked like awesome. Hurray!
3. Can I tell you about sleep yesterday? First, I slept until 8 in the morning. Then, I slept from 10:00 to 11:30. Then I ate some tuna fish and some crackers, talked to Mack on the phone, and slept from about 2:30 to 5:00. Then, I slept from 10:30 to a quarter til seven this morning.
But that’s not the awesome part. No, I mean, it’s awesome. But I mean, what’s really, really awesome is that last night, though I woke up my normal six times, four of those times, I rolled over and went back to sleep!!!! I only got up and wandered around like a zombie twice.
I seriously could cry. I assume it must be the Advair.
Though there was one other difference. I put another blanket on my bed and now it’s really hot in my bed and maybe I’m just reaching an age where I need to be roasting when I sleep. Either that or my little tiny t. rex arms are too weak to lift all those blankets, thus effectively trapping me in bed.
Whatever it is, I don’t care. I almost slept through the night! I haven’t done that or even come close to that in a year.
Tiny Cat Pants 