Top 5 Greatest Inventions of Humanity

McBane here. Happy September 11th, everybody!

This is a day when a lot of people tend to get a little down. But I’d like to take a moment here to pay homage to the five greatest intellectual triumphs in the history of man.

5) Abortion

Although I usually say I’m on the fence, I think I probably am pro-abortion, solely because if I knocked a girl up I’d probably want her to kill her baby. Shit, who am I kidding? I’d want her to kill that fucking baby even if she birthed it and it became a living, breathing kid and I didn‘t find out about it until it was ten years old.

I don’t need the aggravation.

But there’s also a powerful argument to made about women protecting their bodies, blah blah blah. Plus we murder like animals and shit all the time and eat them. Those animals have brains. Little fertilized eggs don’t. So what’s the big fucking deal, bitch?

4) Drugs

Drugs kick ass. Illegal ones, mainly, but prescription drugs aren’t bad either. Why work to fix the big empty hole in your soul when you can mask it chemically?

Declaring war on drugs, by the way, has got to be the stupidest thing this country has ever done. Booze is legal, which is a pretty solid drug in and of itself, and it powers our economy. We want our economy to grow, right?

And don’t get me started on how too many people over-consume booze. What’s so bad about vice, bitches? Are we fucking Puritans? Is drunk driving that big a problem? So what if slightly under one in one hundred people dies in a car wreck? That doesn’t even meet Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine” of going to war. (Odds are you probably won’t miss that one in a hundred anyway.)

At least give us weed, man. I’m willing to compromise.

3) God

I’ve covered God a bit in this blog before. But God really is wonderful. Without God, if we treated people with disrespect, or disgust, or disdain, we would just kind of be assholes. But God allows us to demonize people in all kinds of wonderful ways, AND we can be better people for it, AND it never has to make sense!

God also allows us to enjoy our second-greatest invention:

2) War

War = hell. Hell = other people. Logically, this means: war = other people. In fact, without crazy terrorist fealty to God, we probably wouldn’t even have had September 11th! (Er, at least it wouldn‘t be as meaningful…you know what I mean.)

Can you imagine?

Luckily, this was not the case. The reason this was so lucky is that war is very entertaining. If there was no war, there would be no war movies (Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Jarhead), no war-themed video games (Halo, Ghost Recon), no war-themed miniseries on HBO (Generation Kill, Band of Brothers), no contemporary war protest music (um…).

Face it: we love war. We can’t get enough of it. And it doesn’t really affect us in any other way. Americans who die over there tend to be poor or gung-ho patriots, and I’ll make you a bet: if you’re reading this, you probably aren’t friends with any people like that. I know I’m not. So why should it bother us? People in Africa are dying of HIV and starvation, and we REALLY don’t give a shit about them. Are people in America any more important? No, right? So again, what’s the big fucking problem?

Plus, war gives us a sense that there is something hugely important going on in our mundane lives. We can watch a war movie and think: wow, man, that’s really something. I really get it. That’s powerful stuff. Geez. It makes me look at the world in a whole different light. And oh by the way…do you think KFC is still open?

I want some fucking fried chicken.

And I want it now.

1) Satire

Ok, I’m back. KFC, in fact, was open! (God bless America.)

Oh yes, satire. Life is complicated. Issues are complicated. People are complicated. Existence is complicated. Yet, it’s hard to point this out without aggressively opinionated hardcore maniacs thinking you’re wishy-washy. Why is this? I don’t know. I‘ve never been able to figure it out. (It’s too complicated.)

This is where satire comes in. None of us really has any complete idea of what we’re doing, and we all fuck up more than we like to admit, even to ourselves. (It’s okay, though: you can’t spell failure without U-R-A.) Satire helps us realize that being a fuckup is not the worst thing to be: the worst thing is being an inflexible asshole. (No one likes those, not least of all the producers in the “movies” Raptor has a role in. They‘ve told him explicitly on numerous occasions.)

Look, the reality is there’s always a bit more going on in life than we want to admit, or than we can understand. So if you want to, go ahead and hate the Republicans or the Democrats or radical Islam or over-accelerated culture or unstoppable globalization or whatever you want to all you want this September 11th. It’s understandable, and human, and lot of it is probably reasonable and justified.

But don’t be afraid to be thoughtful on the issue. And while you’re at it, give someone a fucking hug or something too. Maybe catch up with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Life is hard for just about everybody, after all.

And if, at times, you can’t figure out what it is you’re supposed to be doing, remember: being a nice person is generally a pretty cool thing to be.

You fucking jerk.