Pride, Prejudice, Pot, and Pants

Guns don’t kill people.  Pants kill people.

A gentleman in Tennessee recently shot himself in the chin when he took off his pants and placed them on his dresser, “at which time the 25 caliber Baretta pistol in the right front pocket discharged.”

You’ve got to love a police report.  You’ve got to love the passive voice.   That gun just went off for no reason, through no fault of the outraged incredulous redneck standing there in his dingy tighty whities. He is a blameless victim.  His pants shot him.  He will probably sue Dickies for the crotch seam that pulled the trigger or the rivet that released the safety catch.

This arming of clothing against God-fearing gun-toting conservatives is surely a liberal plot.

Guns don’t kill people.  4-year-olds kill people.

Last Thursday in Detroit, a 4-year-old girl fatally shot her 4-year-old cousin with a gun the children found underneath a bed.  “The female 4-year-old found a long gun underneath the bed and pointed it at the male 4-year-old and pulled the trigger,” Detroit Police spokesman Adam Madera told CBS.  Those bitchy females – you can’t trust them any more than you can trust what’s in your pants.

This arming of toddlers is surely a liberal plot to make God-fearing conservatives who keep loaded unlocked weapons under their beds look bad.

An uncle of mine just added my name to an email he forwarded to all his conservative cronies.  We don’t correspond, and he long ago dropped me from his distribution list since we agree on nothing but the facts that we’re related, scathingly sarcastic, and smarter than average.  He’s actually a very charming male, just as I am a very charming female; such traits run in the family.  We do pull out political rifles, but we only shoot words at each other, and from a distance.

Uncle sent a video called “Liberals With Guns” that I won’t link to here because I don’t want my site in any way connected to it.  Think Rush Limbaugh with closer-set eyes, fatter and sweatier and more self-righteous, wearing a Stetson in a vain effort to conceal his bald spot.  But even Rush doesn’t ingenuously and repeatedly hold a coffee cup up to the camera with his picture and the American flag on it and coyly urge that viewers visit his website to buy it.

It’s a sorry day when I find myself defending Rush Limbaugh.  Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

I stewed about the damned email for a week and just couldn’t let it go.  It was a loaded gun, stuck in my pants and stuck in my craw (like the bullet wedged in that red Tennessee neck) (that fellow is fine, by the way, and has lived to abuse his pants another day).  I had no choice but to respond:

Favorite Uncle,

I hate like hell to admit that I know you sent this just to get my goat and that it did, indeed, get my goat.

We yuppie bleeding-heart pansy-ass liberal Democrats out here in Colorado can now keep goats in our within-city-limit backyards!  Chickens, too.  I haven’t gotten into that yet, but with pot now being legal and all I suspect I’ll stop shaving my legs and start raising personal livestock.  You’ll have to come out and kill it for me, though.

I actually think that the pot-legalization bill was a conservative plot.  What it’s done is render marijuana totally uncool — so it worked, as a Republican plan to curb drug use. Pot’s main attraction was the allure of danger (but not too much danger–you weren’t likely to be shot to death while buying a pedestrian eighth-ounce).  Now, your parents can go out and buy a bag full and smoke it in front of you (provided they drive all the way to Denver and stand in line for hours and pay exorbitant rates).  How totally weird is that?  No self-respecting hipster wants to be like his parents.  I predict a drastic decline in pot popularity.  The whole thing, despite frenzied national coverage, is actually a non-event, here.

I know that some ignorant woodchuck wearing a big cowboy hat and clutching a .45 as a penis substitute may well be the death of me.  Until then, I will continue to believe that our duty here on earth is to take care of each other.  I had this sweet little grandmother in New Hampshire who didn’t have a pot to piss in — yet she’d give away anything she owned to anyone, with a selfless generosity of spirit that I’ve never seen matched.  Yes, she was eccentric and more than a bit neurotic, and the family ridiculed her mercilessly, but she “got” what life is all about.  When she died, an enormous group of friends and relatives was the poorer for it.

We’re all on the same journey, after all.  Liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, black, white, male, female, Christian, atheist, rich, poor, mouth-breather, effete intellectual — we all end up rotting in the grave.  We’ll all be dead together.  We all have the same terrors.

— except that I am not afraid that the Gov’mint will be coming in the night to take my weapons or my daughters or my Duck Dynasty videos or the supplies against Armageddon I’ve stockpiled in the cellar.  I sleep well, and soundly.

Mind you don’t throw your pants on the dresser in an unguarded moment.

Your fond niece,

Missy

Yes, I shamed him with a reference to his own mother.  A female’s got to use whatever comes to hand when she’s rummaging defensively around under the bed.

It’s all for naught, of course.  “For what do we live,” wrote Jane Austen in 1811, “but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”   Our pants are full of pride and prejudice.