Click on the image above to view this beautiful masterwork in its original, popup-captioned form. Those three smug dudes in a cluster on the right side? Mr. Hollywood, a college professor, and Satan. Only one of them has anything positive to say about your screenplay.

Spooky oil paintings you can buy over the internet aren’t the only place where Jesus holds up the Constitution. He also upholds it in real life, despite the relentless attacks of humanists, liberal woman reporters trying to interview the backs of pregnant ladies’ heads (bottom right-hand corner) and the Supreme Court. Sometimes,* though, Jesus needs a little help. Fortunately, the good people at Conservapedia (“The Trustworthy Encylocpedia”) have undertaken a re-translation of the Bible that corrects the pervasive liberal bias of modern versions. Seriously, their stated goal is to make a new, more conservative Bible. I’m going to say this once instead of including it at the end of every paragraph of today’s post: I am not [fudging] with you.

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One night at the club, eighteen years at home, dog.

It’s a beautiful day in Missoula, Montana, and I have spent the better part of the morning watching a man hack away at the eighty year-old willow tree next door. Based on the sheer quantity of cracking sounds, saw-binding, and last-minute-falling-limb-out-of-the-way-jumpng, I would say that he is not so much a tree surgeon as a chainsaw owner, but this is America, dammit. We don’t tell people that they can’t do something based on who they are, or where they were born, or how much money they make, or whether they’ve had any formal training, or how many times they swing a running chainsaw past their femoral artery in a way that makes even the dog jump nervously. That’s how they do things in England, and we didn’t have a tea party in Boston in 1773 just so the ignorant could be prevented from taking decisive action. No, the tree of liberty must be trimmed periodically, using a Stihl that’s way too small for the job and starting from the bottom up for some reason. That’s how nature renews itself, probably, and that’s how America stays strong, or at the very least extremely loud. You can either stand on the balcony with your coffee and watch, like a sissy, or you can get right up in there and start cutting at stuff and felling enormous limbs onto the chain link fence, like a patriot/unlicensed contractor. I think you know which you’d rather be, and we at Combat! blog do, too. Won’t you join us?

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Appalachia, where poverty becomes gothic

The death of Bill Sparkman, the part-time Census Bureau worker whose body was found tied to a tree in Clay County, Kentucky, must surely mean something. According to early reports, Sparkman was found with the word “fed” written—most news outlets have used “scrawled”—across his chest, and he happens to have been a government employee killed in a time and place that happen to be particularly charged with anti-government sentiment. He also died in meth country, where the Appalachian suspicion of outsiders is compounded by the practical considerations of manufacturing and selling narcotics in the woods. It is possible he was killed for being a stranger in Clay County. It’s possible he committed suicide. It’s possible that his death is evidence in the case to be made against a particularly virulent type of right-wing rhetoric, and it’s possible that to treat it as such is to engage in a particularly cynical type of hysteria. The only thing certain is that Bill Sparkman is dead and, even more than usual, we desperately want there to be a reason.

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