You know why Democrats can’t get a break? Why we sit here banging our head against a wall trying to reason with people who just refuse to understand simple facts? Because we make assumptions, assumptions that are wrong.

Democrats pretend that most Americans are smart, and so they lose.

Republicans know that most Americans are stupid, and so they win.

It’s true. Here’s two people that know the score:

Ted Rall

and the Republican National Committee

I expect some people won’t be happy with the idea that most Americans are stupid, but facts is facts, and denying them doesn’t make them go away. That’s my story and I haven’t been proven wrong yet.

Rick at Eat More People talks about five TV shows he wishes were available on DVD. There’s two I know of that I’d like to see. Mind you, I wouldn’t buy these, but I’d surely rent them.

Project: UFO - “Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw.” I still remember the opening monologue. I only have vague recollections about this show, but I remember it being one of the first shows I really wanted to see every week. I also remember a couple episodes scaring the bejeezus out of me.

Tales of the Gold Monkey - This was TV’s answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark Stephen Collins was a washed up pilot who went on adventures set in the pulp 40s. It was on Wednesday nights, if I’m not mistaken, and every week I planned to watch it, only to be disappointed when it was pre-empted. Whatever network it was on simply refused to show the thing, letting its slot be the one sacrificed for Battle of the Network Stars or some miniseries or other. Finally, one night, it was going to come on! It was actually on the schedule, and I’d finally be able to sit down and watch it! I announced to my family that I had the TV for that hour and was not to be disturbed!

Ten minutes in, some dumbass threatened to blow up the Washington Monument. We went live to this event and for the next two hours watched as the Monument failed to be blown up by a guy who it turns out didn’t have any explosives anyway. I gave up at that point, and surprise, the show was cancelled. (Those same network execs, I assume, later went on to handle Firefly for Fox.)

So there’s two shows I’d like to see again. I’m not much of a TV watcher, and wasn’t much of one as a kid, despite these memories, but these two I would at least like to check out and see what they were all about.

I like the newish comic from Wildstorm, Ex Machina. It’s about a guy named Mitchell Hundred who, through means which still aren’t completely clear, gains a superhuman ability: he can “talk” to machines. He becomes a hero, “The Great Machine” and does the usual crimefighting schtick, but on September 11, 2001, everything changes. You see, Hundred lives in New York City, and on that fateful day, he’s only able to save the second tower of the World Trade Center. Dismayed by this “failure”, he retires from superheroing and instead decides to help the city in a different way: he runs for mayor, and wins.

Thus, Ex Machina is an unusual comic. It’s about a superhero trying to work within the system.

The artwork is by Tony Harris, who I’ve liked since Starman, and it’s good that he reminds me of that comics. Both Jack Knight and Mitchell Hundred share the quality of being reluctant superheroes, people who just happen to have stumbled into this world and are trying their best just to be decent people and do the right thing.

But then there’s the writing. Don’t get me wrong, Brian K. Vaughan’s characters and stories are just fine. The end of the first issue, revealing the fact about the single twin tower, was one of the few truly surprising moments I’ve come across in comics in a long time. But here’s the thing: it’s the language.

Lord knows I’m not a prude. “Dirty” words don’t have much an effect on me in and of themselves. However, the way each and every character in this book talks bugs me, simply because it stretches credibility. I have a hard time believing that adults in a professional situation would talk the way these characters do. Certainly not politicians, standing in front of the press: witness what happened when Dick Cheney dropped the f-bomb near a reporter and everyone acted like they’d never heard it before.

It’s not just the amount of profanity, either, it’s the level of it. Sure, I’ll accept some of what’s being said. But when Hundred tells an intruder in his house that he’s a “c*** hair away” from being shot, this doesn’t do anything but make me roll my eyes. Who on Earth talks like that, really, other than comic book writers trying to prove how gritty and realistic they are?

I see this lately in a lot of comics. The two-step process towards making a “mature” title (especially if you’re writing for Vertigo or Wildstorm) is to make sure characters have sex early and often, or at least talk about it non-stop, and to have every other word of dialog be profanity. Sometimes this works. But sometimes it just sounds silly. Mature comics all want to be like The Sopranos, but more often than not, it just sounds like someone trying to be like The Sopranos.

Interestingly, there’s a plot line in the book right now about “offensive” language and censorship. I’m not saying the language in the book is bad and should be removed. Well, maybe I am. But not because it’s offensive, but because I think it’s making what could be an actually mature book seem very immature. There are a lot of interesting elements to the book, and I don’t want to miss any while I’m rolling my eyes or snickering at the juvenile language. Quit trying to show how mature you are and just be mature and the book will be even better than it already is.

Trying to cut back on spending a little, so I didn’t grab any trades that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to pull off the shelf later. Except, of course, for BPRD, which I can’t wait for.

I’m seriously considering getting Powers in trade, both to avoid the obnoxious letter column and to read the stories in one go. But I’m not sure if this new Icon imprint will be as good about the trades as Image was.

There’s a lot of waiting for the trade this month. Dark Horse has a new Concrete miniseries from Dark Horse, as well as a new BPRD story starting. Battle Hymn from Image looks promising, as does Waterloo Sunset.

Anyway, here’s the haul-to-be:

Dark Horse

• BPRD: Plague of Frogs TPB

DC

• Adam Strange #4
• Astro City: The Dark Age #1
• Ex Machina #7

Marvel

• Powers

Image

• Amazing Joy Buzzards #1
• Jack Staff #8
• Walking Dead #15

Indies

• Biff! Bam! Pow! #1 (Slave Labor)
• Street Angel #4 (Slave Labor)
• Ape Omnibus #2 (Ape Entertainment)
• Reggie 12 #2 (Highwater Books)
• Mister X Vol 2 TPB (IBooks)
• Knights of the Dinner Table #98 (Kenzer & Co)
• KODT: Illustrated #41 (Kenzer & Co)
• Hardy Boys #2 (NBM)
• Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril #1 (Penny Farthing Press)

1) Sympathy cards should not have rhyming poems in them. Sure, it’s the thought that matters, the expression of condolences and comfort. But insipid june-moon-spoon doggerel isn’t the best way to do this. Hallmark didn’t know the person in question, so what it needs to do is say something nice and then get out of the way and let the sender talk.

2) When you’re ready to mail out a sympathy card, make sure you have some stamps that show something like flowers, doves, whatever. Anything other than R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic head.

(I try to keep the language here wholesome, but sometimes only a certain word will do. If this upsets you, I’m sorry, here’s a puppy you can look at instead.)

A friend of mine is having some problems with his neighbors. They have a bunch of dogs they keep out all day that just bark and bark. My friend tried to discuss this reasonably with them, but the neighbor would have none of it, insisting that my friend couldn’t tell her “how to live her life.”

I don’t know when it was — maybe it’s been forever — that our society decided that being an asshole was not only perfectly acceptable, but something to be proud of. All I know is that I’m tired of it. I don’t find the smartass, the jerk, the insulting, the snarky, to be charming or amusing anymore. Not in pop culture and certainly not in real life.

Somewhere along the way, the supposed values of American culture got sidetracked. We used to value success, but that’s become worshipping naked greed. Individualism has become isolationism and obnoxiousness. And freedom has just become selfishness. Instead of a functioning society, we have one-man armed camps drifting past each other and firing all guns if there’s even a hint of conflict.

It would be easy to suggest that this is actually the Conservative utopia. After all, they’re the ones that believe God rewards the faithful through money, that no one should have to answer to anyone for anything, that caring about your neighbor makes you weak, that you should do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you, that an armed society is a polite society, and that anyone who gets offended at anything that doesn’t involve Jesus or the flag has no sense of humor and is “too PC”. But it’s not just Conservatives doing this, and it’s not only liberals who get annoyed by it. I’m pretty sure that the guy blasting his hip-hop music on his car stereo at 2 a.m. isn’t Conservative. And there’s plenty of liberals who use the excuse of “just having to be themselves” to act self-absorbed and obnoxious.

There was a time, I’m pretty sure, when people didn’t want to be thought of as assholes. Sure, they might be assholes, but they certainly didn’t want anyone to say so. But that’s no stigma anymore. Many folks just shrug if you call them an asshole, many are proud of it.

I think, at its core, it’s just a problem of self-centeredness. Or maybe just I think of self-centered people as assholes, I don’t know. But a lot of it seems to reflect to an idea that you’re the most important person around, nobody else matters, you gotta do what’s best for you or what you feel like doing, and if anyone’s got a problem with it, screw ‘em. These aren’t my values, and I am not interested in being part of a society whose values they are.

The United States is 3,537,438 square miles in area. It has a population of 293,027,571. That means, on average, you’re sharing whatever square mile you’re in with 82 other people. How many of those 82 would have to be assholes before it would start to bug you?

Actually, he hasn’t, but I wanted to do something to help celebrate National Feel Oh-So-Superior to Star Wars Fans Day, even if it was belated.

I didn’t and won’t buy the DVDs, as I have my bootlegs DVDs of the original versions. But I certainly did enjoy everyone from CNN to people writing blogs about X-Men comic books telling me I should get a life and not take things so seriously. I love the smell of irony in the morning.

So for these people, I’ll help them out by being the straw man Star Wars fan that they enjoy proving themselves to be better than.

Ahem. GEORGE LUCAS IS A TRAITOR! I used to think he was a genius filmmaker but now I see he’s just a treasonous viper! He OWES it to his fans to make the exact movie they demand! How dare he make changes to the sacred cornerstone of my childhood, which must never be touched by human hands! I’ve half a mind to get rid of my basement filled with three copies of every Star Wars toy ever released (unopened and sealed in protective cases) in protest! Because of this travesty, I’m only going to buy TWO copies of the DVD trilogy! I will buy the third copy when Mr. Lucas ceases to be unreasonable and caves to my demands! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get in line for Episode III. Also, I think The Force is a real religion and a deep concept!

Bah.

There I was, sitting in the midst of the glorious new computing environment I had created. My main computer was now running SuSE Linux, I had a windows machine acting as a fileserver and print server, and Becky’s laptop was now receiving network signals through the very aether. It was all going swimmingly.

Until…

The Linux box started having all kinds of crashes and symptoms pointed to corrupted files. Reinstalls and reformats weren’t succeeding, and this was happening with multiple drives. It looked like the drive controller, the device that lets the motherboard talk to the hard drives, was flaky.

Back in the day, computer geeks like I was at the time told people to avoid certain companies’ computers, because they used cheap motherboards with integrated electronics. That is, things like I/O ports, drive controllers, and even sound cards, items that existed separately in many machines, were built into the mobo (motherboard). This made the computer cheaper, but at another cost. If your parallel port went bad, you paid ten bucks and thirty seconds to swap out the card. With integrated boards, you were now looking at replacing the entire motherboard. That was then. These days, well, the cheapness has won out, and you can’t buy a mobo that doesn’t have integrated electronics. So I don’t actually have a drive controller problem, I have a problem with the entire motherboard.

I used to work in tech support, way back when, but I quit because I found it frustrating. You had to run as fast as you could to stand still, as the technology was constantly changing. Here’s how the industry works. Let’s say you make one-gallon buckets. You’re doing a brisk business selling them, but you think people want larger ones. So you have the boys in R&D look into it. They come up with several ideas, and eventually develop a two-gallon bucket. Eureka! For the computer industry, that’s unacceptable. That two-gallon bucket might take a couple years to develop, and that’s unacceptable. So they release all the interim discoveries. You can get the 1.1 gallon bucket, the 1.3 gallon bucket, the 1.37 gallon bucket, and so forth, and eventually they release both the 1.97 gallon bucket and the 2.15 gallon bucket. (Oh, did you want one that was exactly two gallons? Sorry.) And every one is, of course, the absolute living end in bucket technology. I got tired of having to learn new equipment that was obsolete the second I closed the manual, so I got out of that business and never looked back. I do not like screwing around with computer hardware.

Where was I? Oh yeah, screwing around with computer hardware. So I went out yesterday and bought an IDE controller card, with the intention of sticking it on my machine and disabling the onboard IDE controller that was bad. No luck. The card sees the drives just fine, but won’t boot to them. Adaptec claims it gives me a menu at boot time that allows me to tell it what drive is the boot drive, but it doesn’t. I tried every setting I could think of in BIOS to get it to work, when I had a sudden revelation:

I have no idea what the hell I’m doing!

So I bundled up the whole mess and took it to a shop to make it into someone else’s problem. Supposedly I’ll get it back by Thursday or Friday.

This sucks for several reasons, mostly because this is my work computer. Right now I’m on the fileserver box, which is slow and doesn’t have anything loaded onto it because it’s not intended to do a whole lot. But the main thing is, I don’t want to spend another dime on that machine. I want to save those dimes for a new computer — a Mac, actually. A new computer isn’t in my near future, and keeping this one on life support is only pushing it further back. Besides, that motherboard is a whopping two years old, and I’m once again sick of buying stuff that isn’t designed to last longer than a pair of socks.

I also can’t believe that it’s almost 2005, home computers have been a reality for 20-plus years and we’re still having to futz with ribbon cables, jumpers, and cards. Wasn’t I supposed to have a cybernetic eye by now? You look at things like flat-panel monitors and USB thumb drives and think, “Yes! now that’s technology! But open the box and there’s cogs and vacuum tubes and tiny orphans with soot-blackened faces actually running the works. If I were the type to name my computers, that sucker would be called the Potemkin Village.

Hopefully when all is said and done, the cost will be minimal, and I can go back to my technotopia and dream of a better day of real technological advancements. In the meantime, I have to read all these punch-cards I got from The Onion’s website.