Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

by John Scalzi

  I have to ask myself—and I did ask myself, several times over the course of the day—if it was selfish to celebrate the beauty I have found in that singular sky, that perfect, unblemished sky that I know I will never see again in this life. Was it wrong to appreciate its blue depths, when the cost was gray dust and black soot and red blood, mingled in the Hell mixed up hundreds of miles away? Did the peace this sky brought me mock the pain of thousands, and the pain of the untold number who loved those people? Would the mothers, fathers and children of those who have been lost find it unspeakable that on their cloud of dust and death, I found this sky-blue lining?

  I don’t know. I think it may indeed be selfish to celebrate that sky. But I can’t help myself. Pandora unleashed terrors upon the world when she opened her famous box, but she also released hope, the one thing that was to give people the courage to go on with their lives. In this time, in our time, a new box has opened with all the terrors and pain and suffering we have the capacity to imagine, and more beyond those. You can go insane thinking about them. I spent the day angry and distracted, wobbling between the barely-contained desire to crack dark jokes and the barely-restrained need to bawl like a child. What kept me together was the sky. The one perfect thing on this shattered day. It was my hope.

  How I wish I had never had to see that perfect sky. How grateful I am it was there.

  FOOTBALL

  WITH JESUS

  The lord is my receiver; I shall not fumble. He maketh me perform the handoff, and occasionally leadeth me to the Hail Mary pass. He restoreth the point spread; He leadeth me down the field toward victory in His name. Yea, though I thread through the Valley of the Blitzing 350-Pound Defensive Line, I will fear no sacking; for Thou art with me; Thy offensive line of burly disciples they comfort me.

  I’m looking through a Christian bookstore catalogue which features Jesus sports figurines, including one in which Jesus, be-robed and sandled, is playing football with some kids. But let me ask the Christians out there in the audience: Would you really want your children to play football with Jesus? Before you respond in the affirmative, let me point out a couple of things to consider first.

  1. Jesus is heedlessly playing contact football in a robe and sandals, those two articles of clothing being that which visually distinguish Him from, say, the lead singer of the Spin Doctors (who you almost certainly would not let play football with your children). While Jesus is the Son of God, His divinity does not preclude Him from injury; if you doubt this, take a long hard look at a crucifix sometime. Your child could, say, accidentally spike Jesus in His instep, injuring the Redeemer of Humanity and causing Him to be carried off the field, limping and grimacing in pain. No doubt Jesus would forgive your kid, but even so, your kid is going to be known forever as “The Kid That Took Jesus Out of the Game.” 4th grade has enough name-calling in it without that following your kid around for the rest of the year.

  2. Regardless of his protective clothing situation, Jesus is a full grown adult here, greatly outmassing any of His competitors, and offering any Pop Warner team He might play for a distinct (and some would say unfair) advantage. Imagine the terror any 60-pound kid would feel as any 180-pound opponent bore down on him, but especially one bizarrely garbed in robe and sandals and who has the power to unleash the Final Judgment upon all of humanity. Even if the kid covering Jesus attempts the tackle, what if Jesus stiff-arms him and keeps on going? What does it do to one’s faith when your savior clips you into the turf on His way to the end zone?

  3. Angry parents who see their kids hit by others on the field have been known to confront the other player’s parents during or after the game. Do you really want to try that maneuver in this situation?

  4. As alluded to earlier, when Jesus is playing football, not only is he playing for a team, he’s playing against a team as well. Well, honestly, who wants to play against Jesus? I mean, the kid attempting to tackle the Living Christ has a massive theological quandary on his hands. We all know what happens to those who aren’t on Jesus’ team, in the larger eschatological sense—they’re going to spend eternity in a hot tub filled with kerosene and people who voted for Nader. How is being on an opposing Pee-Wee football team any different? The answer, for your average 8-to-10 year old, at least: It isn’t. Jesus’ team would win every game by forfeit. That doesn’t make for a very interesting season.

  Well, you say, simple solution: Just pack the opposing teams with the infidel children of the unbelievers. Those little Wiccan kids shouldn’t have a problem tackling Jesus; they’re already going to Hell. Okay, but then you have another problem. There are a finite number of spots available on any football team, so only a relatively few Christian children will be able to play in those spots (not to mention that at least a few non-Christians will want to play on the team too, not because of religious reasons but because any kid’s football team with a 6-foot, 180-pound receiver has got a real advantage). And as we all know, from a “wrong end of Satan’s basting syringe” perspective, simply not being on Jesus’ team is just as bad as being actively against Him. You see the quandary.

  5. We’ve been making the assumption any team with Jesus on it will automatically win: If not by forfeit, then by Jesus’ height and weight advantage, and if not by that then by divine intervention, pure and simple. But intellectual honesty requires us to ask: What if Jesus’ team loses? Aside from the psychological toll this would take on the children (whose team is so bad that it can’t win even with the direct and active intercession of Jesus Christ Himself), think of the problematic theological issues—especially if, as postulated in the point above, the opposing team was populated entirely by the children of the infidels. If Wotan’s Whackers consistently drive down the field, smiting Jesus’ teammates along the way, you can bet that’s going to have some spiritual resonance, particularly in those parts of the country where Friday Night Football is attended as religiously as Sunday Morning Services.

  6. Akin to this, what if Jesus is just a really bad football player? Football was not exactly big in the Middle East 2000 years ago, after all. What if He fumbles continuously? Or is continually offsides on the snap? What if His philosophy of “turn the other cheek” translates to standing there passively while the defensive line pounds the QB into the dirt?

  Well, clearly, Jesus will need to be taken off the field to be replaced by a more competent player. But who wants to be the coach that benches Jesus? Who wants to replace Him on the field? And again, there’s the larger competence issue. If Jesus can’t even handle a hand-off, just how well is he going to guide the souls of the saved to their Final Reward? Both activities are about getting to the goal, after all. You don’t want to be in the hands of a bobbler.

  All in all, while having your kids play competitive sports with Jesus might seem like a good idea on the surface, in the end it simply raises too many theological and competitive questions. It’s probably best just to have Jesus cheering on the sidelines, as long as He’s discreet about it and throws in an occasional cheer for the other kids, too. You know. It’s the Christian thing to do.

  STANDING UP

  FOR DUBYA,

  SUCH AS IT IS

  People here know I am no big fan of George Bush, but you know, I try to be fair to the man. This is why I’m going to defend him from this broadside from Washington columnist Richard Reeves:

  James Buchanan, the 15th president, is generally considered the worst president in history...he was a confused, indecisive president, who may have made the Civil War inevitable by trying to appease or negotiate with the South. His most recent biographer, Jean Clark, writing for the prestigious American Presidents Series, concluded this year that his actions probably constituted treason...

  Buchanan set the standard, a tough record to beat. But there are serious people who believe that George W. Bush will prove to do that, be worse than Buchanan. I have talked with three significant historians in the past few months who would not say it in public, but who are saying privately that Bush will
be remembered as the worst of the presidents.

  There are some numbers. The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered—maybe they were all crazed liberals—making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.

  You know what, that’s just a slander on poor Dubya. Yes, he is an awful, awful president: an incompetent of the highest rank, a man of profoundly limited intellectual curiosity who is to the modern American conservative movement what Charles II of Spain was to the Hapsburgs. It’s always amusing to read conservative apologists for Bush, who wish to imbue the man with a sort of mystical deep thinking, such as when they suggested that when Islamicist insurgents started flooding into Iraq that it was some rope-a-dope flypaper “master plan” rather than a consequence of the Bush administration having no strategy, or even an interest in a strategy, in Iraq once Saddam was hauled out of his rat hole. It ain’t happening, people. Bush has all the vision of an Amish buggy horse: If it ain’t directly in front of him, he’s not seeing it. And let’s not forget that an Amish buggy horse isn’t exactly the master of his own destiny.

  For all that, he’s no James Buchanan. Perhaps the Civil War was inevitable—perhaps it was even necessary—but perhaps in both cases it was not, had there been a Chief Executive of the United States elected in 1856 whose entire plan for dealing with the sectarian issues rending the South from the rest of the nation had not been “well, let’s just try to ride this out and let it be the next guy’s problem.” When he finally did become engaged on the issue, it was, as they say, far too little, far too late, and far too incompetently. Let’s just say a president whose initial response on South Carolina seceding was to say “They can’t do it, but I can’t stop them” is not a man who deserves the comfort of letting another of his executive brethren front the “worst president” line in his stead.

  Say what you will about Dubya, but the Republic will not fall and shatter between now and 2008. There have been other presidents whose administrations have been bad, incompetent, malingering or some unholy combination of all three. But only one president is unforgivable, and that’s James Buchanan. They knew it at the time; during the Civil War they had to take down Buchanan’s picture in the capitol rotunda because they were afraid someone would deface it. The deaths of 600,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, accrue to his account. Dubya’s got a while before he gets there.

  Again, this is not to minimize the badness of Dubya; he’s a bad president, all right, and if one wishes to front the proposition that he’s the least competent president since Buchanan, that’s a legitimate argument in my book. It indeed takes some doing to cut in the line in front of Grant, Harding, Hoover and Carter, but Bush has got the goods, such as they are (Nixon was competent, he was just paranoid to the point of endangering the office of the presidency; he’s bad, in a scary category all his own). But let’s keep things in perspective: When it comes to worst presidents, Buchanan’s the top, he’s the Eiffel Tower. He’s earned the title in perpetuity, or at least until a president comes along who actually and irreversably destroys the United States of America.

  Bush isn’t that president, and no one derives benefit in suggesting he is. I mean, honestly, people. Being the worst president since Buchanan is bad enough.

  THE NEW

  SESAME STREET

  CHARACTERS SUCK

  This makes me feel like something of a heel, but damn it, someone has to say it: All those “new” Muppets on Sesame Street really and truly suck. Being a stay-at-home parent, I’m exposed to the Muppets on a fairly regular basis, primarily through Athena’s Sesame Street toddler software. While the software includes Ernie and Big Bird, the focus of the software is on three newer Muppets: Elmo, Zoe and Baby Natasha. All of them need to turned into terry cloth dishrags as soon as possible.

  Elmo, of course, is already at the top of the parental fatwa list anyway, thanks to the severe case of financial aggravation known as “Tickle Me Elmo”a few Christmases back. The red, squirmy dolls were disturbing enough to begin with—watch the thing giggle and writhe when you poke it and you can’t help but think that this is what methadone for pedophiles looks like—but paying triple and quadruple price for them was even worse. I can’t look at Elmo without thinking of him as a monument to parental guilt disguised as consumer mania.

  However, that’s not the reason I think Elmo bites; Elmo can’t be held responsible for the stupidity of America’s parental units, alas. I think he sucks because he has no discernible personality. He looks like a Muppet and talks like Muppet, but the thing that made the Muppets work—their cute little needy personalities—is entirely missing.

  Think about the classic Sesame Street Muppets and you’ll know what I mean. Each of them had his or her own endearingly neurotic quirk. Cookie Monster: Addictive personality and moderate mental retardation. Big Bird: Esteem issues. Bert and Ernie: Co-dependence. Oscar the Grouch: Misanthropy. The Count: Deviant lifestyle. Snuffaluphagus: Hell, he didn’t actually exist. Kermit, well, Kermit was the worst, with his veneer of calm control occasionally exploding into random fits of amphibian rage (now you know why it’s not easy being green). And as for Grover: Good lord. He’s a psychiatrist’s yacht all on his own.

  Elmo doesn’t have any of this. He’s merely obnoxious and red and has ping-pong eyes. But get this: He’s the most appealing of the new Muppets. The Zoe Muppet, for example, has a personality of the sort that makes you wish that she were real, so you could stuff her in a sack and drown her in a river and be done with her. Baby Natasha (whose existence answers the question of whether having the bottom half of your body as a receptacle for someone’s hand is an impediment to reproduction) isn’t bad, but I suspect that that’s only due to the fact she’s a baby. Were she ever to grow up, she’d be as bland as the rest of the new ones.

  I know why the new Muppets suck so badly. Most obviously, of course, it’s the lack of Jim Henson, who is to the Muppet universe as Charles Schulz was to the Peanuts universe: The engine without which it cannot move. Sure, the Muppet universe goes on, but you can tell something’s missing; the spark that animated the earlier Muppets, primarily.

  But it’s also something else. The first set of Muppets were created in the late 60s, when being freakish and weird held a romantic sort of charm, and there was the idea that maybe we should accept people even with their vaguely neurotic quirks. Today, of course, children’s quirks are merely something to be medicated out of them at the earliest possible opportunity. The new Muppets don’t have quirks, and without the quirks, they simply grate. This is bad news for our kids, since Muppets more or less reflect their target audience.

  The solution is clear: Write to the Children’s Television Workshop and demand they make their Muppets more freakish. Do it for the kids. They deserve neurotic Muppets! Years from now, they’ll thank you for it.

  BEST PERSONAL

  HYGIENE

  PRODUCTS OF THE MILLENNIUM

  Feminine hygiene products. Toothpaste and underarm deodorants are very well and good. But we don’t bleed from the teeth and armpits five days every month.

  This is a difficult topic for me to write about. There are several reasons for this, but primary among them is simply that I’m a man. Men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation. I don’t mean this in the sense that we all rush for the remote when the tampon ads are on television. Avoiding those ads is just common sense. No one should be expected to believe that any woman is that cheerful about tampons. It’d be like a man, wide-eyed and smiling, extolling the virtues of medicated, cottony swabs for testicular herniations.

  No, when I say men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation, I mean that there is no parallel in the male experience. Men simply do not bleed from their genitals on a
regular basis. We can’t even imagine it. Suggest to a man that his equipment should hemorrhage for five out of every 28 days, and he will instantly drop to a fetal position, clutch his tum-tum and scream for mommy (who, of course, would have no sympathy whatsoever). This is not to say that men can’t grasp the concept of menstruation. We’re aware it happens. It just fills us with a confused and holy terror, like Australopithecenes confronting the Monolith.

  Be that as it may, it’s just a physical process, and a messy one at that. Something had to be done. Or did it? The most amazing thing about feminine hygiene products is not what they do, but the fact that they weren’t commercially available at all until well into the 20th Century. This is astounding to me; after all, the onset of human menstruation didn’t suddenly occur in tandem with the rise of the radio. What were women doing before then?

  Various things. As early as the second millennium BC, Egyptian women were fashioning crude tampons out of available materials. Polynesian cultures created “menstrual huts,” in which women would retire for their interim. The “hut” concept is not exclusive to island paradises; similar huts pop up everywhere from the Caucus Steppes to New Guinea (New Guineans, incidentally, having a very complex and disturbing relationship with menstruation; among other things, the men in certain New Guinean tribes would practice genital mutilation, the aim being to imitate the menstrual flow. Women, that sound you hear is the soft thump of every man reading this falling to the floor and clutching his groin in sympathetic pain). Mostly, however, women made do, using natural sponges, rags or other absorbent materials. In the 19th century, reusable cotton pads came into existence, but, you know, ick.