The Flip Flop Girl

END THE WAR!!!

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO ACHIEVE PEACE!!!

HERE'S WHY THE JOHN WAYNE APPROACH WON'T WORK

It's never too late to achieve peace. Thousands of protesters made their voices heard during demonstrations around the globe last weekend, on Saturday, September 15, 2007. Photos from the demonstrations in Washington, D.C. indicate that today's youth are not as passive as some pundits would have us believe. Is all this too little too late? I'd say it's never too late to speak up against this stupid war!

I do believe that a lot of people, particularly Democrats, regret not having spoken up sooner. The fact remains that this war was and is a wrong war to fight. We should never have invaded Iraq. Those who support the war believe it's too late to argue those points. The White House & Co. won't even admit to them and just wish them to all go away. No, it's essential to stress that this is an illegitimate war. There are also those who demand some sort of "victory" as if John Wayne could ride all through Iraq, knock out the bad guys, and make everything a nice red, white, and blue. Everyone would be so grateful and in awe of the good ole U. S. of A. We'd all have a big helping of mom's apple pie, salute Bill O'Rielly, and we'd be so very happy. Sorry, but that's a crazy fantasy!

John Wayne, God bless him, is long gone and not the answer. Dubya and Big Dick are not John Wayne. "VIctory" is a fantasy that draft dodger rich boys like Dubya and Big Dick have no trouble selling to the gullible.

We need to think hard about why we went into Iraq (admit our mistake) and the chaos and agony we have created. We need to think hard about our exit strategy while we still can and while we pull the hell out of Iraq. This is not going well for us and is not going to get better. Diplomacy needs to be our highest priority. I guess Bush & Co. are going to leave that for Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards to achieve. Whoever our Democratic president should be, he or she will have quite a lot to fix!

Some say that the US in Iraq could be the beginning of World War III. Not 9/11 but the US invasion of Iraq. We need to turn this situation in Iraq into a truly international effort to achieve peace. It's a mess. No doubt about that. The last thing we need is to be fantasizing about some John Wayne victory.

Labels: Barak Obama, Bill O'Reilly, blogs buzz, Congress, Democrats, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, news, politics, Republicans, right wing, sex, trends

The Very Fractured O'Reilly Factor

I wanted to pick up on my "Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes" train of thought. Think of all the current political thugs: Dubya, Cheney, Rove, Rice, etc. They all pander to the sheltered view of the world of conservative little old ladies and they themselves, not holding anything dear, actually believe right along with the little old ladies. This sort of "thinking" is what powers the whole right wing machine. To try to keep current, "the little old ladies" are called "soccer moms" in stump speeches but, if you really think about it, it's the same old little old lady all wrapped up in the American flag . Grafting religion with patriotism, this is packaged as the official line of thought and it is served up to be a one-size-fits-all drivel for immediate consumption by everyone from the Nascar fan to the power elite in the club rooms. I was thinking about all this as I took in the mug of Bill O'Reilly the other night.

Now, make no mistake, Bill O'Reilly is a third-rate hack who, lucky for him, has found a niche to exploit. He's menacing. He's amusing. And, unfortunately, he does have a lot of fans. And why not? Junk food for the mind--hard to pass up for a lot of folks.

Currently, Bill is on something of a warpath against all the provocative statements that Rosie O'Donnell has made. Sure, Rosie has managed to cross the line and she's an easy target. What's so stupid, is that Big Bad Bill himself has made far worse comments like when he said it would be OK if terrorists bombed San Francisco. Is that because San Francisco's gay population runs so counter to Bill's "religous beliefs" as if he had any sincere thoughts?

On that same show I watched, only because I was waiting for American Idol, Bill also made a distinction between Rosie O'Donnell and Ann Coulter. For some reason, he found that Rosie had to be held to harsher scrutiny. That, of course, made no sense. And it runs counter to his cheesy motto about never spinning the truth, right?

Bill, if you defend Ann Coulter, you are SPINNING!

Bill, you complete jackass, you spin all the time! You were tossed out with the trash from ABC News years ago and you should thank your lucky stars you get to keep riding this right wing wave.

OK, that's all I have to say about that for now.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, blogs, Bush, Fox News, news, politics, pop culture, President Bush, right wing, Writing

Go to the Beach!

New Post and New Thoughts!

Wear Your Flip Flops with Pride!

Don't Let the Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes Win!

I've been feeling a need to take a break both physically and mentally so my boyfriend and I headed out of town for a spring break. We stayed with my folks for a bit in LA and then made our way to a friend's beach house. They left us to ourselves quite a bit so we were basically sitting off The Strand, just the two of us, just a few flip flops away from the Pacific Ocean! Very breath-taking, very romantic, and just one bump in the road we had to deal with.

We were both a little drunk, maybe a lot drunk, and I was just babbling about all sorts of stuff. I decided to tell him about this blog which, until then, I had thought to keep to myself. But, at the moment, I figured it was nothing, just a blog, right? But maybe a blog is never just a blog, especially after all the crazy shit I've put on mine. Funny I should say "crazy" because that's the word that slipped through his lips after he read through one entry after another. He said I was crazy! And he didn't mean it in a nice way. He said the sex stuff was way over the top. And he wondered why I felt a need to write the way I did.

Instead of telling him to fuck off or anything hostile like that, I decided to be mature about it. I told him I'd have to think about it. I was too drunk to make any sense. And then I said that maybe I did know how to articulate that. I made the stories more charged than they had to be because I was getting off on it. As much as I've complained about being needlessly over-stimulated, I was actually seeking it out. I'd also tried to tailor my stories to make certain points. But before I tried to explain any further, he just smiled and said it was cool. I told him that maybe I didn't even need to write this blog anymore. He said that maybe I did need to step back from it but that he couldn't imagine me not writing. He said he saw some raw talent that was on its way to becoming something, exactly what he wasn't sure, but he still wanted to let me know that he supported me. He said maybe I could help people as well as entertain them. He also asked me to try to take a break from turning our sex into one of my hot stories if at all possible.

I do remember a mellow sobering moment we shared on the sofa that he can't have a problem with me telling you. He had his big feet on my lap. Usually, it's the other way around. I have my big feet on his lap. This time it was his feet on my lap. His feet just casually made their way over to my lap and I don't know if he was expecting me to do anything because he never said. For once, I let all my thoughts float away and did nothing. They just rested there. We both just rested. And it was good.

Being around so many people in flip flops, so many feet, so many pedicures, was a good thing too. Feet are simply more out and about in California and especially around the beach. It was refreshing to see form truly following function. It actually is handy to have flip flops around the beach! It's practical. It's a way of life. You don't have to think about it. The further away you get from the beach, however, the more thought you have to put into being casual. Once you're wearing flip flops down a busy city street, you're really making an effort to be care-free. I embrace that effort! Just trying to connect the dots.

As I relaxed in bed one day with the TV, I caught some of a Fox News talk show-or was it MSNBC? The Hannity Show, I think. Anyway, it was a typical political show tilted to the right with another no-neck/loud mouth, Mom's apple pie-eating host. He was interviewing Nancy Pelosi's daughter who has a documentary on Showtime exploring the world of American Christian fundamentalists. Well, I'd read awhile back a story about her documentary being unfair to fundamentalists in USA Today which left me wondering about USA Today's political views or at least about the writer's own right wing slant. When I saw her interviewed on this show, she came across as very professional and level-headed. She even had the Hannity guy playing nice with her. She pointed out that she made a point to show this demographic group in a fair setting leaving out extreme examples. I think his only pointed question to her was asking her why she chose to focus on evangelicals and she said, very correctly, that it was because they were considered a factor by the media in the last presidential election. If you ask me, she was far more polite than she had to be but maybe that was because she was talking to this bombastic talk show host.

Anyway, it has been interesting to me how I'm as attracted to politics as I am to any other pop culture subject. It takes someone like Jon Stewart to make us all aware of politics and make it entertaining but politics, all by itself, is such a circus. If I am capable of taking flip flops to an OCD level, I know that right wingers are using the same amount of energy, if not more, to drive home their agendas. Maybe their energy is actually the same kind of energy, some molten hot sexual force, that they have repressed and converted into self-righteous vitriol. The OCD for conservatives (and I know there are varying degrees but we're suffering from too many of the same along with those moderates afraid to be themselves like Rudy) is an overwhelming feeling that they are, no pun intended, right! They believe they possess some pure form of being right that can determine questions of right and wrong, life and death, when life begins, who should live and who should die, who has rights, who does not. It is a little old lady in tennis shoes out to save the world! But the little old lady in tennis shoes view of the world is very limited, backward, repressive, controlling, and out of touch with reality. What is so ironic and sad is that this view of the world finds itself taking so much space on our media, old and new from the tv to the blogosphere. Well, sheer quanity is never quality. We know that. What we're still working on, those of us who are sensible, is how to best reach a middle ground in this country so that we don't have more Bushies and Halliburton and the like in power forever.

The more we all find a way to go to the beach the better off we'll all be. I'm considering moving to the beach in the future when I can afford to do it right. I want to see us all take a healthy step back and watch our backs too! We want to have fun. We want to navel and toe gaze to our heart's delight-even to excess. Perhaps that's our right. But it's nice to have options too because the more distracted we allow ourselves to become, the more likely that the little old ladies in tennis shoes will always have the last laugh.

Labels: beach, blogs, conservatives, flip flops, foot fetish, Jon Stewart, politics, pop culture, right wing, sex, Writing

Flip Flop Girl: Another Pop Culture Snapshot

Hello there, I was just thinking again about the mess we seem to be in regarding our collective mindset, full to the gills with pop culture, at least in western society, specifically American. Still pondering poor Anna Nicole, the latest victim of our tabloid nation feeding frenzy. Good that we have artists that help us see the big picture. A perfect example is Charlie Chaplin who remains quite relevant in his world view.

I just saw a film that seemed to put our perpetual pop culture circus in its place. It is A King in New York. This was Charlie Chaplin's last film in which he also stars. I take this straight from Wikipedia: "A King in New York is a 1957 film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin in his last starring role, which presents a satirical view of certain aspects of United States politics and society. The film was produced in Europe after Chaplin's exile from the US in 1952. It did not open in the United States until the early 1970's."

How interesting that this film wasn't allowed into the US until 1973. It took that long, a whole generation, before the United States was ready for the sort of satire that Chaplin delivered which is not heavy-handed but quite sensible! Nice how a mild approach can still sting some people! And those same sorts are still among us today--just take a look at the Bush White House and the right wing blogosphere! Basically, Chaplin is asking for tolerance and understanding during the McCarthy Communist witchhunt. What makes this film so beautiful is that he is also doing so much more than that!

Get this: The plot really takes off when Chaplin's character, the exiled King Shahdov, is the victim of a reality TV prank!

King Shahdov is forced to leave his country after a revolution and makes it to New York only to find his assets have been stolen. Broke and desperate, the king is forced to become a spokesperson. Clumsy and befuddled, his mistakes make him more and more popular to where the public will buy anything he endorses.

To look good for television, the king is willing to try plastic surgery which distorts his features and leaves him unable to form real expressions. Lucky for him, the procedure is reversible and he gets his old face back!

Meanwhile, Americans are caught up in a patriotic frenzy that leaves them suspicious of each other and vulnerable to government and media manipulation.

As a leader of a small and struggling nation, the king feels that atomic energy might prove the key to improving his country's fortunes but he is forever being suspected of actually wanting to create weapons of mass destruction.

Despite it all, the king is still optimistic about America and can see a time when the balance of power will return.

What do you think?! See this film! And totally as an aside, there is even a little scene where Chaplin is engaging in a little foot play with Dawn Addams! Very cute.

Labels: blogs, Bush, Charlie Chaplin, Communists, criticism, film, foot fetish, journalism, marketing, McCarthyism, media, politics, pop culture, reality tv, right wing, sex, terror, war, witchhunts, Writing