Has anyone else noticed the new Premera Lifewise ads rip off Guided by Voices?

God to bugs

To a very small bug,

I am like God.

The earth trembles when I pass;

I am so large they can't comprehend me. 

I am sure when I walk I sometimes squish one and the others cry,

Why, why, bad things always happen to good bugs.

Other times I step carefully to avoid them, but they must see my shoe come so close,

And I bet they go home and talk wildly of the close call,

adventures that some doubt, but grand-bugs listen closely, believing, 

and they tell others because it confirms what is written about

in their holy books.

Then one is stupid and falls in my sink,

I see him scrambling away from the drain, fighting running water

when I do my dishes. And the water stops, 

and he staggers, nearly drowned, too beaten to fight or run as

I bring the aluminum foil near, and he climbs aboard, knowing or

not knowing, and then he tries to run off the aluminum foil but it keeps turning, 

like there is no escape and I imagine him wondering, "when will this hell 

end?" and then I am outside, dumping him on familiar grass,

where he knows what to do, and he can survive and rest and live and hope for tomorrow,

I imagine him bewildered and transformed, in awe even though he is back home,

and he is thinking, "wow, there is a God."

Letter to Obama - Guantanamo & Ghassan Elashi

Dear President Obama,

When I was 17, I conceived of a service project which involved letting all the animals out of the zoo. I had been selected by a civic organization as one of 12 youth to represent Seattle in overseas trips to sister cities Kobe, Japan and Rotterdam, Holland. Part of our our commitment was to perform a service to the community. While my plan never materialized to release exotic animals back into the "wild" of North Seattle, the sentiment was the best my idealistic teenage mind could come up with. 

The sentiment remains strong when I contemplate the uneven leverage of "justice" meted by the U.S. Government in the decade+ since 9/11. Guantanamo Bay, an issue you once saw clearly on but have failed to follow through on, is but one example. The conditions and terms of confinement at the U.S. Penitentiary at  Marion, IL is another. As depicted by Noor Elashi in McSweeny's #43, the facility houses some individuals guilty of no crime other than funding civic organizations also financed by USAID and other government agencies. This should bother you for two reasons. The first is that the conviction proved no connection to terrorism, but rather punished people essentially for being Muslim, demonstrating our continued commitment to a troubled history of extermination, oppression, enslavement, and systematic disempowerment of populations who seem to threaten a particular concept of life to which we summarily feel entitled. The second reason this case should bother you is that, by sentencing Ghassan Elashi to 65 years for an act also partaken of by the U.S. Government, we have by extension convicted ourselves. 

If we focus on the thought of wild animals on the loose, freeing them from captivity will never sound like a good idea. The fear this image inspires triggers a defensive reaction in all of us that reinforces the status quo. What we fail to see, in the status quo, is that the act of imprisonment of innocents makes us as vicious as those animals. When we stare through glass and bars at living beings whose liberty has been robbed through no fault of their own, and yet justify their imprisonment, we extinguish the humanity in ourselves. I am not saying that zoo animals and prison inmates are in any way similar; my point is that, by capturing, dominating, and imprisoning that which we fear, in both cases, it is we who become the monsters. 

True freedom requires a degree of vulnerability in relation to others. Our American refusal to tolerate our vulnerability in the face of unfamiliar "others" is the central failure of our experiment in democracy. You are a president who has the ability to see this. Please cease kowtowing to the forces of fear holding our government hostage, in the name of bipartisanship, and lead the way you were built to. Call out our hypocrisy and toxic elements while you have the wherewithal to do so. Start us on a new course for America.

Andy Varyu

Thank You!

Thank you for contacting the White House.

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The Office of Presidential Correspondence

The making of a grinch

The faded video with muted sound runs, and a 6-year-old in batman pajamas and an orange fisher price tool belt practices twirling two toy guns simultaneously on fingers of both his hands. A younger brother runs to help his distracted mother affix earrings that the brothers gave her. A father, usually invisible behind the camera, appears briefly to show off a picture of Hawaii to the mother. She struggles to act pleased. Two tickets are his peace offering, his reconciliation for the latest affair.

Fifteen-hundred miles away, five years and some affairs later, shouting from the lower level during late-night present-wrapping makes it impossible for the brothers to sleep, and threatens the fantasy that reindeer may arrive during their slumber. At age 11, the older brother roving downstairs has learned to manipulate his presentation. With an innocent "could you keep it down please," he rubs his bleary eyes. He must keep alive the illusion that Santa's helpers might not have been exposed. Inside him, however, the sentiment rages: "you're poisoning the holiday." 

Since my parents had been defiling the Christmas charade for some time, I was free to do so myself. I snoop around for the Christmas stash, then convince my brother at the bottom of the stairs that I have reached Santa on our new cordless phone. I can maintain the connection so long as he doesn't come upstairs. "Want to know what he's bringing?" I escape to the closet to expose secret after secret, then make him swear to silence. We maintain confidence expertly that Christmas morning, with many knowing glances exchanged, until the presents are done. "Wait, I think there's one more there behind the curtain," mom introduces the finale. My brother goes to look. "Andy! It's an orange sled with blue handles, just like you said!" Mom's eyes burn into me. While I steam with guilt at being exposed, I have had my first taste of the power to ruin Christmas.

I take to long, annual Christmas Eve strolls, solitarily serenading the moon to Elvis' Blue Christmas.

Parents give up fighting one year over who gets the kids on the holidays, and leave it up to us to decide. Now, if everybody isn't happy with the division of the holiday time, it will be our fault. Each year, we try a different permutation, and absorb their disappointed sighs when we propose our plans. Whatever we come up with is never good enough. 

Church becomes a good ground to define my brand of holiday mischief. At 11:55 one Christmas Eve, I track my watch from the acolyte seats and methodically show the time to my nearby red-robed friends. At the appointed moment, while many kneel at the rail and receive communion bathed in holy light, I pierce the sedate organ music with, "Merry Christmas, Everybody!" Translation: "if you're so damn holy, why were you dozing when Christmas came?" My friends snicker at the tainted ambiance. The priest raises a condemning eyebrow.

If Jesus can do it, so can I. I project enchantment and dole out Christmas sentiment like I learned it in the movies, adopting a state of wonderment meant to shame others with their lack of "Christmas Spirit." There is always a reckoning. One year I take out my anger in a freezing garage by pulling every piece of tape off of crumpled wrapping paper so it can be recycled. The rest of the family tries to enjoy a cozy Christmas morning inside, but I am there to remind them that the Earth and I are both outside, hanging on a cross because of them. Jesus said, "follow me."

By 18, I have found a girlfriend to school me in the next level of selfishness. She enlightens me there is no reason to keep a Christmas gift I would not have bought for myself.  I make an art out of unwrapping items, holding them up with the slightest look of interest, trying it on in the mirror, and saying "It's really nice, but… you kept the receipt, right?" My stepdad fights back by failing to get me a gift one year. My 10-year-old brother makes the strangely adult remark, "we would have given you cash, but you would have just exchanged it for foreign currency."

One Christmas, I come home from college to find the ceremonial candy dish empty of spice drops and thoroughly thrash my mother for her inconsiderate lack of hospitality. Neither spice drops nor a shamed mother are ever absent again. 

Christmases at my mother's become shorter, more going-through-the-motions. It is easy to be critical of how subpar they are. Christmases at my father's become more lavish and compensatory; it is easy to criticize their materialism. The bottom line is that my opinion counts most, and I am impossible to please.

I drive ten hours one year to join a girlfriend's family on Christmas Eve. Their Christmas joy and togetherness both thrill and threaten me. I have arrived early enough to participate in their tradition of making one gift from scratch for another participant, and draw my fiancee's name from a hat. Seizing on a comment she once made about appendages getting cold when jogging, I cajole one of her sisters into purchasing an oversized sports bra and soft, felt padding on a trip to town. I spend hours away from their family time, teaching myself to sew. On Christmas morning, as others unwrap collages, offer hand-knit scarves, or perform songs composed, I unveil to my conservative-Christian hopeful in-laws my creation: an insulated, padded bra for my bride-to-be. I may be uncomfortable, but I have a special way of making sure everyone else feels it too.

Four years later, a sensitive new girlfriend watches hopefully while I unwrap her central gift to me: a hand-painted plaque inscribed with a poem she has written. As I read words to me, about how I have been entrusted to hold her heart, I battle with a familiar pressure to manufacture the properly 'pleased' every gift is supposed to stimulate. I rebel at the threat of a sincere sentiment, and ingrained patterns easily find fault with her handwriting, with the word choice and rhyme scheme, like I am holding up an ill-fitted sweater in the mirror. Facing something new--an authentic Christmas gift--I am frozen from either giving or receiving. I manufacture an obviously fraudulent response, the first of the injuries I will inflict on the relationship. 

Distancing myself from forced family traditions for the past two years, and any semblance of a Christmas "haul" has started to dry me out, like a detox holding tank for "holiholics." I can barely piece together that my awkwardness, entitlement, and unconscious sadism around the holidays have not been random character quirks, but rather a systematic, unrecognized program to ruin the holidays like they were ruined for me. I will get mine, or make sure nobody else gets theirs.

Music, which has always told me more about myself than my conscious mind has been willing to see, has known this all along. From a young age, one of my favorite Christmas songs was "Darcy the Dragon" by Roger Whittaker, about a fire-breathing member of society who could not participate in Christmas without destroying everything he wanted to give to others. He goes to town to buy presents for friends, but starts fire after fire, and is chased away by the villagers. Until,

As Darcy let out with a dragon's cryHe opened his mouth so wideThat the wind and snow went right down his throatAnd put out the fire inside
When Darcy realized the fire was outFirst a whisper, then a shoutAnd a laugh, to knowThat he could speak without starting another fire

What is that "wind and snow," to quench the rage that burns in us who have taken up the torch of burning down the holidays?