Hand crafted blanket statements

My work week would best be described as not for everyone. I start my job at 3:30 in the afternoon and  get off at 4:30 AM. This happens three days in a row and then I get four consecutive days off. Sometimes I come out of it feeling great. Then there are days like today where I feel like a frenchman hs been shitting in my skull. I have to confess, I have no fucking clue what I'm going to write about, so what's going to happen is I'm going to drink this coffee over here and peruse the news for content.

By God's iron balls, it's election day! Who are we electing? Oh, it's a primary? (derisive mouth-noise, here) I think one of the most apt quotes I've heard to date was "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote in a national election".  -Bill Vaughn
Stings don't it? What stings even more is the guy who said that made a living writing for Reader's Digest, which everyone knows is marketed squarely at water-headed midwesterners who eat folksy aphorisms and shit lawn ornaments.
Ah. THERE'S my subject for the day: FOLKSY APHORISMS!!!!

Many Americans confuse plain-talkin' and straight-shootin' with over-simplified blanket statements geared to piss off anyone whose synapses fire on a regular basis. Plain-talkin' would be this: "Seeing as I am running for public office, I feel it is my duty to inform you, the voting public, that I have consumed illicit drugs in the past. Just like almost half of you judgemental bastards have." The blanket statement goes more like this: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only, Sarah Palin.
See the main difference here is I had to make that first quote up, because you never hear that type of thing out in the wilds of the American electoral system. On the other hand, thousands upon thousands of cubic feet of air are wasted on a daily basis fueling Sarah Palin's logorrhea. Somewhere between the fabled truth and the Fox News soundbite, lies the folksy aphorism, the homespun wisdom, and the whimsical musing. This is anything from a trite poem with religious overtones to Kids Say the Darndest Things.
For example, if you grew up like me, your parents had a copy of Footprints in the Sand hanging up in every bathroom in the house (3). This "poem" as about some dumb jagoff walking down a beach that represents his life.

...that's full of half-buried syringes and angry guidos.

There are two sets of footprints in the sand. One set is his, the other is god's. The jagoff looks back at his beach of a life and sees that when he was going through toughest times, god's footprints were nowhere to be seen. He turns to god and asks, "What the fuck, bro jangles?" He is answered by the echoing void of space where his perception of a god has once and for all dissolved and is replaced by the knowledge that his religion has basically been a lifelong opium dream, there is no god but man and that he is standing thigh deep in the remains of a beached walrus.
That "poem" is so popular with religious bathroom decorators that three seperate douchbags wrote their own versions of it, none of which involve god pimp-slapping the shit out of the whiny jagoff and telling him to grow a spine.

Carry yo ass? Muthafuckin' crackers be trippin'.

Keeping with the spirit of the "sandiness is next to godliness" bathroom accouterments (means "if it's brown flush it down" in Farsi or something), we move on to The Legend of The Sand Dollar. This charming little bit of fluff intones how a common sand dollar embodies all the characteristics of the life of Jesus plus some junk they made up to pad the damn thing out. Poinsettias are the Christmas flower? Why is that? Oh, I see, you just inferred holy significance in an inanimate object. Christians' favorite passtime is ascribing divine symbolism to the mundane. Because of this, roughly one out of every thousand flour tortillas is a holy relic. Thusly the story of Christmas can be read in the skeletal remains of a bottom feeding shellfish, much in the same way you can read the your fortune in the entrails of a chicken. I would actually hang a quaint multimedia collage of poultry offal telling the story of Pentecost in my bathroom. Somehow I think gazing at a mummified chicken intestine would greatly speed up the dropping of my morning deuce, if for no other reason than it provides incentive to get the fuck out of the crapper as soon as possible.

Not all folksy ramblings come in the form of non-rhyming religious "poetry" however. Take the teeth-grindingly inane stylings of Mary Engelbreit for example.

The root of illiteracy: FOUND.

This is the type of shite that litters craft stores and Cracker Barrels across the country. It's a safe bet that if you see some of Engelbreit's "art", you are no more than two yards away from a hot-glue gun, a scrapbook and a swag made of dried eucalyptus and pussywillow. People who love her whimsical scribblings and simplistic brain leavings are also probably WAY into seasonal/holiday correct banners and Precious Moments figurines. Engelbreit and her fellow hellspawn Anne Geddes have made a cottage industry out of being precious and non-threatening (hell they make Thomas Kinkade look like Salvador Dali) and thus they are adored by all of our mothers. What's that lady? You'll never take out that nose ring, get that tramp-stamp removed and wear pleated, high waisted jeans? Well check this out. Somewhere inside you just went "Awwww!" didn't you? Your fate is sealed.

Sadly, this type of asinine drivel isn't limited to the pages of Mom Pants Monthly or the checkout racks of Jo-Ann Fabrics. The inspirational office poster has been with us since the late 80's. You know, a picture of a bald eagle soaring over the Rocky Mountains or a snow leopard biting the head off an ibex with the definition of fortitude printed below in tasteful Times New Roman. It's only natural that something as affected and "inspirational" as yoga would pick up on this trend. The same basic construct as the office poster is intact but substitute majestic wildlife with a silhouette performing downward dog on a beach (again with the goddamn beach!) at sunset and switch the font to

because it's the most natural and organic font available. Replace the definition of a word meant to invoke a correlation between bending over REALLY FAR and scaling Mt. Everest with a Buddhist koan and you've got yourself one hell of an irritating poster.  It's a safe bet that if you see a poster like that, you are no more than two yards away from a bottle of Kombucha, a miniature rock garden and a mess of sweaty bamboo fiber gym clothes.
If you need these posters in your home (or office or bikram yoga studio) then do you really love what you're doing? If your life's ambition is to scale the corporate ladder one staple at a time, how does a picture of a bengal tiger make it anymore more worthwhile. If you truly wish to attain the level of flexibility required to perform autofellatio, how are you aided by a beatific photo of Buddha? Although if you are one of those people who cherry picks what they want out of an ancient religion because a regular gym doesn't go as well with your mock-hollistic lifestyle, I would argue you are already quite a cocksucker.

So where does this leave us as a people? It seems to indicate that we are a bunch of childish imbeciles who need everything in life to be pigeonholed, pre-packaged and dumbed-down so we can slurp it up through a straw. Certain aspects of our culture are beginning to resemble the dinner options at a nursing home: soft, bland and colorless. When will we grow our adult teeth and learn to chew with our mouths closed? When will be able to deal with the ungarnished truth and deal with all the nasty surprises life affords us every day? When?!

Oh, right.