Originally posted December 23rd, 2012
By Michael Konik
The world didn’t end. We went on. After the last of the murdered children was laid to rest, buried in the Connecticut dirt, it was time for life to get back to normal. To play our “first-person shooter” video games – “Assassin’s Creed” anyone? – and watch our TV programs – Criminal This and Criminal That – and go to the movies!
What’s playing? There’s Tom Cruise in his latest. My, he’s a handsome fellow. And what a big gun he carries!
And there’s Leonardo di Caprio and Jamie Foxx, also handsome fellows. How amusing it is to watch such handsome fellows shoot guns at each other! They’re directed by Quentin Tarantino, so you know all the violence is meant to serve a higher aesthetic.
How about Zero Dark Thirty? It’s based on true events, you know. About how our national heroes found and murdered . . . → Read More: Life as a First-Person Shooter
Originally posted December 16th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In the days preceding the publication of Michael Konik’s eighth book, a darkly satirical novel called “Becoming Bobby,” writer and Vegas Lit Managing Editor Arnold Snyder interviewed the author. Much was revealed about the creative process and Konik’s motivations for writing a book so drastically different than his previously published work. The interview originally appeared at Write-aholic.
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Michael Konik is one of those renaissance men who’s been everywhere, done everything, and somehow keeps finding new ways to make us normals envious of his talents. He’s been an actor, an improv standup comedian, a TV commentator, a jazz musician, a magazine columnist, author of seven nonfiction books (including one of the most acclaimed books of gambling stories in print, The Man With the $100,000 Breasts) and now we get his first novel, Becoming Bobby.
Originally posted December 9th, 2012
By Michael Konik
I helped an old man load his groceries into the trunk of his car, which was parked curbside near the entrance to a 99-Cent store. He walked with a cane and seemed to have trouble handling his bags. A watermelon had fallen to the sidewalk, somehow escaping unblemished. But things didn’t look as though they would end well.
Do they ever? According to the old man, they do not. He thanked me profusely for assisting, and then he seemed to want to explain why he needed help, and then he sensed that this was already understood by both of us. He shook his bald head, covered by a baseball cap. Then he said, “Don’t ever get old. Stay the way you are now. Getting old. It’s no good.”
At a birthday party for an elegant lady turning 100, the centarian’s daughter toasted her . . . → Read More: Bad Endings
Originally posted December 2nd, 2012
By Michael Konik
We attended a Bat Mitzvah the weekend before the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced in Gaza. The service was held at a reform Jewish temple, a thoroughly modern place of worship where men and women are permitted to sit together, where the cantor accompanies himself on a djembe drum.
The ceremony was part celebration and part reflection, with much singing and much English. The Bat Mitzvah girl was showered with encouragement and kindness from a loving audience. It was an altogether uplifting experience — except for one thing.
During the sermon portion, the Rabbi delivered a commentary on the then-developing situation in Gaza. A partial transcript:
O God, who is the creator of all children, hear our prayer this day. Bless our brothers and sisters in the state of Israel. Protect them from all trouble and anxiety. May you . . . → Read More: Picking Sides from the Pulpit
Originally posted November 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
So long as the American people are quite alright with their elected offices being available for rent, let’s have some fun.
We’re resigned to a world where money is speech, not property, a world where no one minds that half their Members of Congress are millionaires (as opposed to 1% of the population-at-large), where $372 was spent on promoting or attacking 11 California initiatives, much of it by secret donors who went to court to keep their identities shrouded. We get it.
Since the Supreme Court has taught us that corporations are people and since it has come to light that this particular group of people largely controls the Land of the Free, we think it best if all of us could stop pretending it’s otherwise. Let’s celebrate!
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, had a cool idea. He thinks that . . . → Read More: The NASCAR President
Originally posted November 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In the days preceding the storm of the century, two candidates running for President of the United States strenuously assured voters that they would pump more crude, frack more natural gas, and burn more coal than the other guy. Whether or not an energy policy built on a fossil-fuel paradigm could or could not be sustained wasn’t discussed, at least by Messrs. Obama and Romney, who proudly reiterated their fealty to the oil and mining companies that sign the checks. Virtually every other candidate for President –the ones who weren’t members of the Democratic or Republican crime syndicates, such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party — characterized our looming environmental disaster as the biggest threat facing America, not terrorism or the national debt, as the Military-Industrial complex would like us to believe.
Originally posted November 4th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Right. Of course. We get it.
Who has time to read? Who has time to read newspapers?
Unemployed stoners, for one. We have time to read newspapers – and periodicals and books, as well as all the other stuff that passes for reading these days. We have time to read, and think, and try to figure it all out. That’s sort of what we specialize in.
This Tuesday, there’s an election. Americans will select a President, Californians will rubber-stamp another term in the Senate for their Auntie Dianne, and Los Angelenos will be asked to pick sides in a condom fight. We’ve researched the issues; we’ve read the Propositions – for which we feel strongly that we deserve some sort of remuneration, or at least some fawning appreciation. Although we’re not completely clear on every detail – there’s a lot of “ins” and . . . → Read More: Our 2012 Election Guide
Originally posted October 28th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Allow us to describe a country for you: Prisoners detained without charges. Prisons operating outside the legal system. Limits on free speech. Limits on the Internet. Legitimately entitled voters prevented from casting ballots. Government sanctioned kidnappings. Witch hunts against political enemies. Torture.
China, right? Or is it Russia?
Actually, this description, reported in the Los Angeles Times, is of the notorious human rights abuser the United States of America.
It’s part of a 56-page report “On the Human Rights Situation in America,” about America’s heretofore unexamined recent history of human rights atrocities. The scathing report’s main problem is that it was authored by the Russian Foreign Ministry, whose credibility and human rights track record run concurrently (into the Moscow sewers). One should not take seriously the human rights abuse complaints of a government that imprisons teenaged girls for the crime of audacity, . . . → Read More: America and Human Rights Abuse
Originally posted October 21st, 2012
By Michael Konik
This Tuesday (October 23) there’ll be a fourth Presidential Debate held at the Chicago Hilton and moderated by wizened celebrity interlocutor Larry King.
Didn’t hear about it? That’s because it’s not being broadcast on any television network – the debate is being streamed on the Internet – and neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama will be there. They were invited. But they’ve got their own big-budget production to worry about; they can’t support a rinky-dink sideshow.
Therefore the fourth 2012 Presidential Debate, sponsored by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, will feature people who weren’t invited to the first three debates: Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party, Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party, and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party – four iconoclastic, ambitious, passionate people promulgating ideas that span the political . . . → Read More: This is Democracy?
Originally posted October 14th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Representative Paul Broun (R-Ga.) is a member of the House Science, Space and Technology committee, which guides national science policy. His constituents, who elected and re-elected him, are untroubled apparently that Broun rejects science as a legitimate basis for decision-making. Broun has publicly called evolution – and all that we’ve learned about the process – “lies.”
Not “badly misunderstood.” Not “open to widely divergent interpretation.”
Lies.
Well, all right then! We take this opportunity to wonder out loud what that makes Mormonism in Broun’s estimation? Or his Party’s simultaneous denunciation of Federal entitlements and embrace of corporate welfare?
And speaking of Mitt Romney…is it unfair to call his entire campaign a lie? The animatronic Romney has morphed from moderate to extremist to moderate, a chrysalis in constant flux. The tune changes depending on what the house band prefers to play, but the animatronic Romney, . . . → Read More: Little Lies, Big Lies, and American Lies
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
