Big Gooey Lefty Crush on Mark Morford

My husband reads Discover Magazine. He can daily share cool science factoids and tell me what's happening in the science world. And he reads news online daily, too. Meanwhile, I watch The Daily Show sometimes and my magazine of choice is Entertainment Weekly. For one thing, the only time I usually read magazines is on the pot, and Discover is too techno-jargony to assist me in the act for which the pot is made. So it’s EW for me, and some Knights of the Dinner Table when it arrives each month to give me a regular nerd gamer fix. Perhaps I'd peruse more news if I brought my laptop into the bathroom with me, but I think not.

If I did have an internet hook-up in the john, I’d be reading Mark Morford. Though this SF Gate columnist has his moments of pretentious drivel and piggybacking on whatever’s going around the hip progressive chat circles, and his take on most issues is entirely predictable (often pretty much the same as mine), most of Morford’s columns are glorious exercises in venting against the ruination of this perhaps always-already ruined nation. Let me share a few quotes from recent columns.

From “Liberals Are So Intolerant!” (8/10/2005):

“I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory of 'Intelligent Design,' to the detriment of about 300 years of confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point where America's armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly steep uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for fact and intellectual growth and spiritual progress against a rising tide of ignorance and religious hegemony and sanitized revisionist textbooks that insult their understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and bleed their minds dry. […]
"Enough. Basta. Let's refashion the old, stagnant definition of tolerance and make it less about merely enduring, merely putting up with the existence of other narrow-minded beliefs no matter how devastating and embarrassing they obviously are to the nation's health.
"Rather, let's flip that sucker over and baste it with raw goat butter and sear it on the open flames of divine justice and bliss and intellectual fire and white-hot orgasm and burn it new.”

From “You Now Hate Chocolate Cake” (8/12/05):

“Yes, we are an obscenely obese nation, the fattest on Earth and only getting fatter and clearly we are still desperately hungry, insatiable, our appetite only growing and our butts only widening and our sense of true health and whole foods and the appreciation for our radiant flesh all dissipating like honey incense in an oil fire. We have now accepted this as indefatigable truth, the sad American way. But you have to ask, how the hell did this happen? And what, really, are we truly so hungry for? Why can we not get ourselves full?
"Look at it this way: A balanced and humane, sexually healthy, well-educated, spiritually empowered nation has no need to gorge itself on poisons, no need to bloat itself and add massive layers of enormous flabby cushioning (mental or physical) to its body in order to protect itself from the violence of the world and the shrill ignorance of its warmongering leaders and hey wait did I just begin to answer the question?”

Other recent entries, with fab titles and content to match, such as “Who Loves Creepy Megachurches?”, "Hideously Skinny White Girls," and “There’s Sex in My Violence!”, should help to tempt you over to enjoy the rude progressive articulateness that is Mr. Morford—or at least his columnist persona.

Caveat: I reserve the right to read something Morford wrote or writes in future and decide I hate his guts.