Heroes in a Half Shell! Turtle Power!

Today I posted this on the Mick LaSalle blog because I am one of those crazy people who posts things on newspaper websites now. I have become a modern day letter to the editor writer. One of those wackjobs. I've always admired those people for their intense relationship with their media. Anywho, this is what I commented:

"Speaking of The View... oh, wait, we weren't. Now we are. Speaking of The View, today Rosy et all weighed in on the Elizabeth Edwards Cancer Edwards Campaign issue and Joy expressed disbelief at the fact that many Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the bible. I enjoyed both of these conversations because they both speak to the fact that Liberals are still fairly of touch with a lot of America. I meet people all the time who are shocked to find out that there are many many people who believe Noah actually had that arc and managed to put all the animals into it. X2. Additionally, many people will not see Edwards as a standbyyourman kind of gal but rather as a woman who would choose to take part in a campaign instead of spending time with her children in what might be her last days. This may not play well in the heartland. Not that she has much of a choice. She is damned if she do and you know the rest."

I wanted to expound on this a little bit because when I said that I had met "many many people who are shocked" I started to think about to mostly my college days when I would meet people from southern california or the bay area and be somewhat glad and also somewhat snooty at what I thought was a mind set that was foreign to me. Especially when it came to the liberal minded kids, almost all of whom were at Humboldt anyway. On the one hand, I was so glad to meet such people as I had read about their existence and seen evidence of them on TV and knew of them within my own family but had met very few growing up in Yrethra. On the other hand, I became more and more proud of my hillbilly white trash exposure/existence so much so that I would look at this "NorCal" and "SoCal" people with quite a lot of disdain, often humming a few bars of my dad's song, "Hey Hey, They're Up From L.A."

Hey, Hey,
They're up from L.A.
To seal off our woods
And to ruin our day
Singing Hey, Hey,
They're a bunch of damn fakes
It's the garden of Eden and they are the snakes

Their children are rotten
They disobey rules
And they're sending them up
Just to fill up our schools
They've got strange diseases
And new kinds of bugs
And they're willing to share them
Right along with their drugs!
Singing Hey Hey
They're a bunch of damn fakes
It's the garden of Eden and they...are...the...sssssssssssnakes!

When I was a kid and listened to people's cheers in Yreka when they heard this song I always thought I was in on an ironic joke because my dad was really making fun of the people cheering in disgust and hatred for Southern California people who movie way way up to Northern California and Oregon.

When I got to college I became one of those small town people who hate the L.A. transplants trying to change the way things are done up north. So sorry, to my SoCal and "NorCal"(bay area) friends who I looked down upon whenever you would open your mouths. Sorry about that.

Anyway, why was I talking about this? Oh yeah, because some of these SoCal people are the ones I remember being surprised when I would telling them that most of the friends I had in high school and many many of my teachers took the stories in the bible quite literally. I always like to tell the story about my Senior AP English teacher who explained one day, when we were discussing issues of incest in works like Oedipus Rex versus Antigone, that there was a time when incest was not as taboo as it is now. "After all," she explained with the seasoned air of authority that only a high school teacher can pull off, "There must have been a lot of incest at some point since we all came from Adam and Eve." Aside from me and two other students in the class, Peter Bendix and Trish Kimbell (to their credit) not one other student, of the smartest kids our town had to offer, took any exception to this statement. It was a fact to probably 75% of the student body at my high school.

So I was just wondering, the people who read this, did you ever have a time in your life when this was a surprising notion? Or, like me, was the surprising notion that there were people in the world who didn't believe in this ridiculous notion of the earth actually being created in 7 literal days?

Oh and also, you can talk about the Elizabeth Edwards thing if you feel so inclined. I don't know. I've heard some people say she doesn't have very much time to live and others saying she had 5-10 years. If it was five to ten I would say, of course, campaign with Edwards. He is great. If he wins the primaries I will be happy with him as a candidate and will happily vote for him. If it is more like a year or something, I don't know. Her kids are very young. She won't regret it because she'll be dead but her kids might be a little bit bummed out that they didn't get to spend as much time with her as they could have especially since their dad, if he becomes president, will not be able to spend much time with them either. I'm going to see if that clip is up on youtube yet.