Santorum wins two raddest states

Lawyers, back me up: if a man is wearing boxing gloves, you can legally hit him in the mouth, right?

Miracle Mike Sebba and I used to amuse ourselves by discussing where and when in world history we would most like to live—Paris in the twenties, Greenwich Village in the fifties, Plato’s Athens, Da Vinci’s Venice. Strangely, Alabama and Mississippi never came up. At no time in recorded history was either of those states any fun. Even under the Cahokia—arguably its peak civilization, and certainly the one that consumed the least Jack-In-the-Box—Mississippi was a terrible place to live. And Alabama in the early sixties was an exciting, historically significant milieu only in context of the shittiness of all previous Alabamas. Both states consistently vie for the lowest literacy rate in the Union. But they were able to put aside their rivalry to agree on one thing: they love Rick Santorum.

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How a democracy starts to suck

Supporters of Mississippi's Proposition 26, including women past childbearing age, a couple of kids, and several dozen dudes.

Let’s say that you believe abortion should be illegal, in part because you have carefully considered the civic and cultural ramifications and in part because that’s what they said at your church, where you go with the kids you already have and the spouse who is the only person you will have sex with ever again. I’m messing with you—you’re not going to have sex with your spouse again. Anywhom, you are strongly committed to your anti-abortion position—which you call pro-life, although you are also for the death penalty—but you just can’t get enough people to vote for it. The Supreme Court said that abortion is legal, and even though they’re clearly the most bullshit branch of government, we still have to do what they say. The best alternative is therefore a constitutional amendment, but every time you get the words “abortions will be illegal” onto a ballot, a bunch of people vote against it. They’re mostly college kids and secularists and sluts who live in cities—clearly the most bullshit portion of American society—but, again, their votes somehow count as much as yours. You can’t make abortions illegal because the majority of Americans don’t want that. You must therefore figure out how to make them operatively illegal by passing laws that people don’t notice or care about, so that everyone else in America will abide by what you know is obviously right. For example, you can make a law that says any fertilized egg is, in fact, a person.

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