Letter to the Editor, El Paso Times re: Opera and Monster Truck Rallies

Dear Fledermaus;

What an endearing use of your 4th amendment rights, to roll your porcine eyes not only at public funding of the arts, but to equate voicing your own diffidence to having a monster-truck mentality—as if that’s unendurably provenciale. After reading your pedantic and poorly researched libretto vomitus, I was moved to correct you post haste:

First of all, the cacophony and inherent danger of orchestrated oversized vehicular entertainment is as magnificent as Die Zauberflote any day of the week. The sheer effort and funding required to create one of these magnificent beasts is staggering. But the capricious disregard for permanence, the fleeting quality of the art inherent in the final crash and burn that destroys the trucks is sublime. It’s mythic. How you can equate such resplendent spectacle as somehow beneath the typical patron of the arts is beyond comprehension. If you had the good sense to attend one of these performances, you would see that the people doing jello shots and setting things on fire in the cheap seats are the same people you’ll find sipping champagne in a box at Chavez.

What is opera, after all, except the grande progenitor of country music and Evil Kneivel? Every great opera ends with an insane, wild-haired half-naked woman stabbing herself on stage to loud music. It’s not much different from CMT or a halfway decent My Chemical Romance video.

Rather than reveal your distressingly art-less upbringing by defaming both the great work that is opera and the sublime spectacle that is monster truck rallying, you ought to set down your laptop and engage one or the other mano a mano. Hemingway would never have said a word about monster trucks without having first crashed one.

Secondly, the $50,000 match you mention is a misleading statement which a man of your apish past is bound to make. Just a few seconds of googling the El Paso opera indicates they have an impressive roster of patrons, and a cursory calculation of them comes up in excess of $300,000 bucks. And a further look shows a lot of people giving as little as a hundred dollars--less than a decent bottle of Moet, for the love of God, to the opera. If that doesn’t inspire the children I don’t know what will.

And finally, your impressively original homage to the ‘fat lady’ tautology is woefully behind the times. The women of opera are hotter than swimsuit models. You’re thinking of Winona Judd.

Enter Bizzaro World

I'm just wracked over the new crop of congressiones. I. . .I . . .what the hell happened!? I thought Democrats were going to come in and show some decency, some respect for the hallowed ground they'll be resting their glutes on and instead I get some guy interjecting Elvis song titles into a speech with all the craftiness and seamless skill of a fourth grade Farticus; a woman with tragic, tragic hair making a speech about the Gators in which she dramatically dons some spangled glasses, and a woman who was trying way too hard to meld the subtle fashion sense of Oprah and Queen Latifah (the old QL), BEFORE CONGRESS!

Have they never seen Mr. Smith? Do they not know that's sacred ground? Jesus Haploid Christ, I didn't vote you bastards in so you could upstage the former GOP in sheer audacious stupidity. WE'RE THE SMART ONES! Or so I thought.

I was really worried for John Stewart when I saw the recent political victories scored by me and my fellow bluestaters. I thought: who's he gonna make fun of now, huh? US! HE'S MAKING FUN OF US! AND IT'S LIKE SHOOTING SHRINERS AT AN OLD FOLKS HOME!

And it gets worse! I'm actually watching The Daily Show and they promote Huckabee and I'm listening to the guy thinking: this guy really makes sense, I really like him, he's sensible and I realize HE'S AN EVANGELICAL CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN WHO REFELCTS AND ECHOS EVERYTHING I FREAKING BELIEVE IN!

I'm getting all wiggly. I need to lay down. I . . . I . . .