Obama gets Osama
We know you didn’t miss this one, unless you’ve been living in, say, a cave in Pakistan.
We’ve been recalling what it felt like right after 9/11, when we felt that sickness in the pits of our stomachs, then that surge of patriotism as we cheered former President George W. when he pledged to find the perpetrators of the attacks.
It was probably the only time we cheered him (OK, maybe when he expanded daylight savings time, too). We were swept up in the rhetoric about evil and defending our great country. We backed the military engagements that followed, in the name of finding Osama bin Laden, public enemy number one. We were united in our resolve for justice.
Then, when our involvement spread to Iraq, some of us began to wonder, “What happened to finding bin Laden?” We didn’t keep our eye on the ball, we broadened our focus to include oil and Saddam and alleged weapons of mass destruction. If only we had dedicated all of our resources to finding bin Laden, instead of getting distracted in Iraq, maybe we could have found him sooner. We sometimes wondered, how hard could it be to find one man in that region, given our vast military intelligence network and resources?
The day finally came on May 1, when our kick-ass Navy Seals swooped in and took the bastard out. Cue more patriotism. But when one of our co-workers had the nerve to post “Gobama” on her Facebook page, she was inundated with rightwing Obama haters who jumped down her throat for even thinking of giving the current commander-in-chief any credit for the mission. Wow. If McCain had won the election, would they have given him any credit for finally getting bin Laden?
You bet your sweet ass they would have.
Segregation alive and well?
Speaking of racist bigots, we stumbled across a handy online mapping application that purports to show how our states, cities and even neighborhoods are still quite segregated nationally.
Check it out at www.bit.ly/segmap. It is color-coded according to the percentage of African Americans who live in a given area, based on 2010 Census data. You can view the country as a whole, or zoom in to your own suburb, even your own address. As would be expected, vast swaths of Boulder County have populations that are less than 1 percent black, and a few areas have no blacks at all.
Nationally, the study says, the segregation trend has improved only slightly in the past 10 years. In 2000, 69 percent of people in large metro areas were living in areas of high segregation between blacks and whites. According to 2010 Census data, that figure was still about 65 percent.
Yes, that word
This week, we’re screening a new documentary about — wait for it — the F-word.
Yes, an entire documentary about the best, filthiest cussword around. They’ve got interviews with everyone from stick-in-the-ass news anchor Sam Donaldson to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. All talking about the F-word.
The film is simply called F*ck, and it’s pitched as “the documentary that dare not speak its name.” In addition to interviews with the likes of Bill Maher and Drew Carey, the film features a scholarly and linguistic breakdown of the word’s history, as well as some of the most famous — and infamous — television clips featuring the word.
It debuts on May 28 in the prime slot of 2 a.m. on the Documentary Channel (DISH channel 197 and DirecTV channel 267).
Since we’re an alternative newsweekly, we can print that word without the asterisks. Fuck. See? Hope no little kids are reading this.
The documentary rightly points out that the word can be used in a variety of ways. It can be an adjective (“fucking asshole”), a verb (“Wanna fuck?”), a noun (“You backwards-assed country fuck!”), an adverb (“I am fucking mad”), and can even be inserted into other words, as in, “unbe-fucking-lievable.”
We fucking love this word.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
