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So are a lot of the things that Mickey Z said in this book.
Like the mosquitoes I massacred, thousands of people are massacred every day - and to most people it means nothing. Unlike the mosquitoes I massacred, most of those people did nothing to me or to you. We are actually ingenious at finding ways to ignore that fact. Mickey Z in this book has found an ingenious way to confront our collective disingenuity.
So I agree with the thrust of the book but what sparked this spirit of revolt in me against the flow of the book was Mozart. You see, he came on the random thing on my music player. I will make a list about that later, then I will put it somewhere in the review. I know some people on the left that would abuse me for bourgeois mentality or some such drivel, for just having Mozart’s music.
I don’t think Mickey Z would. I also think he would probably abuse some of the idiots that think like that, in a funny way of course. Just as none of the mosquitoes in my room are safe, there are no sacred cows on the left or right in this book. Maybe that is why he talks about killing Michael Moore and saving Condoleeza Rice.
Mickey Z Sez - Once upon a time I was eating lunch in a Virginia beach diner with a bunch of friends when we heard a deafening roar.
“What was that?” I bellowed.
Our waitress smiled and proudly replied: “That’s an F-14… the sound of freedom.”
OK, I AM NOT STARTING THIS REVIEW NOW
In our almost entirely commoditised world we think we can have everything immediately. The supermarket is always open, the tap can always be turned on. This book manages to give a sense of the immediacy of some the problems we are currently facing. The author brings our problems home by mixing some simple yet brutal statistics with looking at every day behaviour in the light of those statistics.
A story with a fat little boy eating a big mac in the back of an SUV is a few pages away from the fact that some rivers are now full of Prozac. A story about looking at breasts in a gym is near a story about someone being beaten to death in Guantanamo Bay. The effect is like flicking channels on a TV that is happily free from corporate propaganda. The information imparted is brutal but I would still much rather watch this kind of TV.
ADDITIONAL ASIDE NUMBER 2 - A lot of Scottish people take pride that John Logie Baird, a Scotsman, invented the TV. Personally, I think we should start apologizing…I’ll start… sorry world!
Also, Henry Rollins is between Carl Sagan and Adolf Eichmann, which I imagine is not a place he ever thought he would find himself.
As well as a sense of immediacy there is something like a sense of ‘finity’. Is ‘finity’ even a word? ‘Finiteness’ is, but spell check doesn’t seem to think ‘finity’ is, nor does dictionary.com, which is funny because we all know ‘infinity’ is a word. ‘Finity’ is probably a word we should start using given the current state of things.
Michael Greenwell sez - You can overfeed all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time but you can’t overfeed all of the people all of the time.
ADDITIONAL ASIDE NUMBER 3 - There are a few words like that…only negatives, no positive example. Have a think about it.
Even the title of the book should make you think. And yet, I imagine that there will be a few people who will read this book and still not connect it to themselves. So removed from physical reality have many people become that you could write a book called “-Insert Name Here ……………….. - It is all your fault” and some people wouldn’t get it.
