The Political Spectrum

Whenever I get down about politics, whenever I feel totally distraught about the current political climate, all I have to do is read some ignorant piece of drivel like this and I feel just a little bit better.

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?

Hmmm, what a sad and pathetic woman. Man, you'd think there's some crazy shit in the Bible about repopulating the Earth. But I could be wrong.

And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with you people?"

Gawsh maw, did he uh juss say hiz name wuz JimBob? Wha he muss be sum kinda redneck hick with a name like that. Thank God the enlightened columnist from San Francisco can set us straight.

Oh, wait a minute.

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

Hunter S. Thompson lives! Ahh, smell the hallucinogens as the writer puts forth an incoherent mumbling sentence to relate, oh, who the hell knows what.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. Wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that's making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land. Or is it?

My my my, I sure do love it when "progressives" start hinting around about an overpopulated Earth. You know, nice Progressives on the other side of the globe have a cure for such a dilemma. Of course it involves a nice little dose of government mandated genocide, but of course, this clearheaded Progressive from the Bay would never suggest such a thing, now would he?

Okay, this is getting kind of long. So let's take it home with a few more quotes.

What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ... no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.

What's fascinating is that this man presumes to know how Michelle Duggar feels about having this many children. Seeing as how Mr. Morford hasn't delivered any children from his womb, he might not be the most qualified person to speak on this subject. Evidently she has the type of courage and strength than Mr. Morford can only dream about. The most painful thing he has probably experienced is burning his lip with a too hot latte, but man did it sting.

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?

Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. You see, the real problem is that people who have cultural values at odds with the esteemed writer will massively outbreed the enlightened priesthood of the progressive establishment. Why, most of them might even go to Church every Sunday for the rest of their lives! And we can't have that. Gee, could it have something to do with the fact that self-absorbed pricks like this writer can't be bothered with children until they decide to have their designer baby later in life?

But notice the complete ignorance of this one sentiment: assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right . Okay, think about this. He has just spent an entire column hyperventilating about a couple that has bred 16 children. And he believes they will inculcate an asexual ethic into their children. 16 children. Asexual.

I repeat. He is suggesting that a couple that has had 16 children are asexual. Now, perhaps the writer's mother never taught him all about the birds and the bees, but unless we have an awful lot of Mary moments taking place in the good old U S of A, there's something glaringly contradictory about this statement. Not sure what it is - can't put my finger on it. But something's off.

And of course they're all going to be a bunch of homo hating Christians, because as the left loves to tell us on a daily basis based on their incredibly keen understanding of Christianity, we all just can't wait to go out with our bats to bash anyone who even looks the slightest bit gay.

Oh the irony of this ignorance. An entire article arrogantly deriding what he perceives as a bunch of know-nothing rubes, and yet clearly the most ignorant person involved is the writer himself. This sort of oh-so-subtle analysis is repeated ad nauseum by leftist idiots who have absolutely no understanding of the people they are mocking. They accuse everyone else of narrow-minded bigotry, and yet the bigot is the person putting pen to paper, or, in this modern age, finger to keyboard.

Oh, but of course, it really just comes down to right-wingers being too selfish.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Um, yeah, kind of a big one. But what's a leftist good for if not for oversimplifying complex things which he is utterly incapable of understanding. Actually, it is quite simple, but because the man's brain is too narrow to pick up on what's truly taking place, he completely misses the meaning here. It's not that these people are too selfish, quite the opposite. As is par for the course, this ignoramus has greater compassion for the wider world than for the people closest to him. Better to have warm fuzzy feelings for the great, mystical planet Thulcandra than to share human feelings for one's neighbors of compatriots. I seriously doubt that the reason his wine-sipping buddies are failing to proacrastinate has anything to do with an urge to "save the planet." I have an inkling that it has more to do with something that has already been touched upon, and it is a desire not to be bothered with those pesky, messy, dirty creatures known as children. You see, having children alters one's routine. Suddenly you can't just burn the candles and both ends, hopping from club to club. Now there's another human being to take care - a human being that is not one's self. So, actually, it's really the non-child having people that are truly selfish. It's selflessness to give up one's time and serenity in order to bring life into this world.

The odd thing is that for all this smug superiority, the Duggars probably have a much greater understanding of the world than Morford. They probably have a greater appreciation for sacrifice, community, sharing, and, most importantly, love. I don't know the Duggars, so I could be wrong, but I get the sense that they are eminently more grounded and at peace with the world than this sniveling little coward of a man who cannot see the world beyond his narrow vision of it.

Mr. Morford fears that people who see the world as he does will be outbred by people like the Duggars.

I can only hope his fears are well-founded.