PunkAssBlog.com

MSNBC lets the people speak in the elegantly named section “Gut Check America.” I have no idea what a ‘gut check’ is, and a quick google search suggests that it is something you get regularly in order to detect colon cancer early and also help you pick stocks. Either way, it provides a vital forum for regular middle-class Americans to finally get a voice in media:

What keeps you up at night? MSNBC.com’s Gut Check America series invites you, our readers, to tell us what matters most to you and how it affects you, your loved ones or neighbors.

Turns out the American middle class is concerned about money, keeping their money, and blaming someone, anyone for the precarious state of their money provided that the blame can be summarized as “they took our jobs!“. Actually, I’m sure the American middle class would be pleased as punch to aim their anger in more appropriate directions, but then they’d be shooting lasers from their eyes at Ye Old Powers That Be and for many reasons, this is not a good thing for Ye Old Fourth Estate. So fearmongering it is then!

Our readers have chosen our next assignment: How the middle class is coping with an increasing squeeze on their pocketbook. As our reporters work on that topic for our October report, please check back the week of Sept. 17 for our report on the Iraq war’s impact on the home front. Full story
PREVIOUS GUT CHECK AMERICA REPORTS
Health care: When living means bankruptcy
Health insurance didn’t keep cancer-stricken California woman solvent
Illegal immigration: Turmoil in Tulsa
For reader, accident with apparent illegal migrant crystallized city’s change

The main page is more ads and pleas for content than actual content, so I went straight into the trenches to find out what America is really concerned over.

Turns out it’s largely illegal immigration, and one guy who wants an electric car. That’s right, under MSNBC’s proud webpage banner, with its austere workingman (and women! some of whom may or may not be ethnic in some way, or it could be the implied lighting) waving the American flag over a bunch of fearmongering that links directly to a boiling kettle of semi-literate xenophobia. Although I’m sure that this is nothing to be concerned about. When was the last time that letting the disenfranchised masses pin the blame for their economic problems on a conveniently foreign scapegoat ever lead to anything bad?

Front-page topics include “Lets sue the big companies. Call this lawyer and get paid to fight the illegals” and the cheery “Remove hispanics one street at a time.” A slightly less lemming-like poster has simply reposted an MSN trademark “list of jobs for some reason” encouraging people to go into sales or teaching and finally rounding out the front page is a young American lad getting gobsmacked:

I think what I want to convey the most is what it feels like to be a young American man out and about in the world today.

I started as any other young American does. I felt like America was the world. We are great Americans. We live better than anyone else. We are more developed and educated. Everyone besides us are just primitive.

Ameri_guy go travel. Ameri_guy meet Non_Ameri_guys. Ameri_guy confused. You still Jane. I remember having a nationalistic “I’m glad to be American cause everywhere else sucks” thought when I was like six or seven; I assume I absorbed this idea by watching too much Captain Planet. A few years of public schooling took care of that, though. Poor Ameri_guy wasn’t so lucky.

Everyone treated me well as an American. They all tried to have their respects for the symbol of America.

I’m not sure what the heck he’s talking about, unless it’s that all his glamorous international friends tried to be polite and say nice things about America in front of the American. I try to return the favor to foreigners I know. For example, even though that Ukrainian dweeb was talking a lot of smack about how much better their pickles are than ours, I didn’t say anything even after I found out that he was totally full of shit. That’s because I like to consider myself an ambassador of good will.

In every conversation, however, I couldn’t help but notice that everyday life in America for average Americans is less free and privileged than any of the other countries that we talked about.

My God, is there any way to have less respects for the symbol of America than flaunting your own freedoms in an American’s face? Bastards!

I’ve had this “Americans are less free” conversation with a German acquaintance who noticed the same disparity between our cultures, and a similar one with a British guy who’d spent some time in Slovenia. Turns out other countries have way looser open-container laws than we do. Many of them make up for it, though, with drunk-driving laws that would have the average American making Soviet Russia comparisons in a heartbeat.

No really, that’s what this guy is talking about. America: Land of the Free and Home of the Brave his ass, not when a man can’t something something sex something women something work something walk down the street with a beer in his hand.

As young men in America we completely neutered of any real instincts to develop as healthy young men trying to find suitable partners and eventually making business, being a real father to our children, and having a real wife. In fact, once American boys are out of the American cage they make great prey for the real men and women of the world to take advantage of. This is because they’ve been denied the chance to be real men at all. In America the society takes every advantage to beat us down. Sex in all forms is basically bad or wrong–a completely sex a-phobic society that uses any form of sex to destroy men’s lives and even incarcerate them. Just walking down the street drinking a beer in America must be a crime or some event to involve authorities. What on earth are they thinking here?

This, as you can imagine, is the school’s fault. And although this find young lad seems to have connected open-container laws with “using any form of sex to incarcerate men” I’m sure that he was just typing too fast, and in no way meant to imply to women everywhere that it would be anything other than safe to accept a drink from him in a bar.

First, they came for your open container on public property, and you said nothing. Then they came for your wife-beater, and still, you said nothing. Well, Ameri_guy is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore!*

Let’s get to what really matters. In most places around the world, people understand the idea of building up a family base. They sacrifice and strive to build up a family name sake… Yet in America the government and society has completely raped and twisted the young women to the point they don’t even know they’re supposed to help men achieve this. They are happy to aid the courts and legal system destroy any real hopes of creating what a family name is supposed to mean and what a long-term future with a strong husband is supposed to be.

What is so great about a country that…forces its own citizenry to live under a fascist police state that even interferes with the domestics of everyday relationships?

Thanks, MSNBC, for bringing out the best of America right here on the interwebs for all to see. It’s nice to see the homespun values of Little Green Footballs or Men’s News Daily bubble up into the mainstream, with only a little help from an established media that hasn’t done it’s damn job in almost a decade. I’m sure you’re very proud to know that someone can look at this site, with it’s American values and American ideals, and think, “hey, this is an appropriate place for me to compare open container laws to fascism, while singing the praises of China where I met my Chinese wife which wouldn’t be terribly interesting except for here, have a heaping helping of my issues with women and violence which will cast a creepy pall on the rest of my post!”

MSNBC: You people made this environment. You’d better start cleaning it up.

*I am so close to finishing this post without having typed a single original thought. Wish me luck!