2dogs
February 27, 2003, 07:03 AM
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Me And My Big Dumb Gun
It's the new, biggest-ever Smith & Wesson .50 caliber monster handgun, and you without a shooting spree
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, February 26, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you feel the machismo? Can you feel the pulsing manly manhood just throbbing there in your hand, ready to silence a playground full of children or drop a charging elephant at 50 yards or annihilate a few hundred tofu-suckin' liberal jackass pacifist commie tree-huggers, protesting out there in the street? Mmm, phallic.
That's right, it's the new Smith & Wesson .50 caliber handgun, the biggest and deadliest the company has ever made, the most powerful production handgun in history, in fact, even bigger than the famous monster scum-killer .44 Magnum Clint carried in "Dirty Harry," because, you know, that's important to know.
Clearly, America needs this gun. It's the ideal dream-weapon not just for its practicality, like outgunning a horde of cops snoopin' 'round the meth lab, but also for hunting some wild humpback whales and blasting concrete slabs and protecting the family from the onslaught of all those Islamic evildoers who are right this minute sneaking over from Syria and Iraq and Jersey, eager to impregnate your wife and buy up all the beer and steal your HBO. Damn right they're coming -- Mr. Rumsfeld said so, so it must be true.
Bullets from such a gun can pierce light armor, they can penetrate buildings, they can blow up tanker trucks, they can bring light aircraft out of the sky. If you can find a more ideal weapon for every home terrorist's do-it-yourself kit, buy it!
It's the Hummer of handguns, the Frankenstein of firearms, the biggest dumbest most entirely useless and pointless and adorably, blatantly, phallically compensatory handheld weapon available to the public today, excluding a Big Bertha golf club or the multi-function remote control or, say, J.Lo.
And along with the Hummer, it is the perfect poster child for the U.S.' preemptive kill-first, aggro-thug superpower policy. It represents exactly who we are right now -- or rather, who ShrubCo really, really wants us to be.
All about who's got the bigger military crotch-bulge, who can say "Go ahead, make my day" to both the U.N. and the deluded millions of liberal hippie anti-war protesters rallying all over the world, as well as those damnable "Old Europe" objectors, while we whip out the big gun against whomever we want, whenever we want, just for the petrochemical fun of it all, because we said so.
The new gun is for hunting, they say. Right. And the Hummer is for rescuing baby seals in Antarctica.
No really, it's for hunting. They swear. It's for those sportsmanlike times when you want to blow that goddamn elk into so many little bitty smithereerny chunks it will look like God's precious creature just met with the business end of a grain thresher. Screw the meat, let's go for splatter. What fun. Hunters are so cool.
No no, that's unfair. Hunters are not all bloodthirsty thugs. And this gun is a perfectly valid weapon in these trying times, when the drug dealers are packing Uzis and raping kittens, and more than ever, the size of a man's fake bulge defines his stature, and his patriotism.
But more than that, the Smith & Wesson Super-Splatter Aggro-Magnum MegaPhallus 2000 (or whatever it's called) is more than the perfect example of the bigger is better, manlier is better, stupider is better American ethos. It is also the capitalist ideal run ragged. And tired. And deadly.
You see, the Smith & Wesson company is suffering. They were, apparently, one of the first American gunmakers to agree to Clinton-era regulations and install safety locks on their weapons, in an attempt to save lives and prevent more Columbines and more estranged ex-husband killing sprees and more undereducated second-graders from sneaking daddy's Little Elvis out from under his hidden stash of Honcho magazines in the garage and taking it to school for Show and Tell and Maim.
Hence, "real" gun collectors saw the company as wimpy sellouts -- after all, what sort of macho dude needs a girly gun lock? Sort of like drinking in moderation or sticking a "Free Tibet" rainbow sticker on the Escalade or actually obeying that restraining order. Yeah right.
And lo, gun locks in place, S&W's sales plummeted.
What's an all-American weapons manufacturer to do? Why, go back to basics, of course. Aggression. Machismo. Violence. Sure enough, the parent company decided to sell the struggling gunmaker, and the new owner said to hell with safety, forget the gun locks, let's get big.
Let's reclaim that elusive monosyllabic-hunter market and put the fear of God/violent brutal death back into the police department. Let's make the biggest heaviest most gut-wrenching weapon possible. And they did just that.
Because if America is about anything in the era of preemptive kill-first antagonism, it's about armchair bazooka kings who like their phallic symbols glaring and their sense of human empathy puny, their Nugent records cranked to 11 and their Charlton Heston posters menacing and who can belch the Star Spangled Banner and somehow still manage to vote. Or is that too unfair? Oh that's right, it's for hunting.
This is the real lesson of modern American business. This is the lesson leeched from the age of reality TV, of shock-crap Jerry Springer, of ham-fisted ad execs and bitter political mudslinging campaigns across the cultural spectrum. Subtlety and calm and nuance and grace and restraint don't get the ratings. And they don't move product.
In increasingly jaded and numb America, ya gotta go for shock. The biggest. The scariest. The wildest. The dumbest. The most sugary or fatty or creepy or quadruple beef triple bacon double cheese chiliburger with deep-fried cheese sauce only 99 cents while supplies last. It is all about excess, violent and deadly and mean. And apparently, it is what we are (still) all about.
Yet you want to believe this sort of thing is the exception. You want to believe huge absurd weapons exist out there on the lunatic fringe, that the tides of positivism and grace and harmony and mindfulness are, generally speaking, rising up to defeat this sort of karmically deleterious slur.
And that maybe, just maybe more and more companies -- not to mention individual consumers -- are beginning to choose not to pollute the cultural pool quite so violently, so mindlessly, that they have a responsibility beyond just exploiting the nation's fear impulse, and that their, and your, decisions about such products do, in fact, affect -- or infect -- the world. There are many signs.
Unless, of course, you believe the Smith & Wesson press release, which states that production on the new monster gun has already been increased. Due, naturally, to intense demand.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Me And My Big Dumb Gun
It's the new, biggest-ever Smith & Wesson .50 caliber monster handgun, and you without a shooting spree
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, February 26, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you feel the machismo? Can you feel the pulsing manly manhood just throbbing there in your hand, ready to silence a playground full of children or drop a charging elephant at 50 yards or annihilate a few hundred tofu-suckin' liberal jackass pacifist commie tree-huggers, protesting out there in the street? Mmm, phallic.
That's right, it's the new Smith & Wesson .50 caliber handgun, the biggest and deadliest the company has ever made, the most powerful production handgun in history, in fact, even bigger than the famous monster scum-killer .44 Magnum Clint carried in "Dirty Harry," because, you know, that's important to know.
Clearly, America needs this gun. It's the ideal dream-weapon not just for its practicality, like outgunning a horde of cops snoopin' 'round the meth lab, but also for hunting some wild humpback whales and blasting concrete slabs and protecting the family from the onslaught of all those Islamic evildoers who are right this minute sneaking over from Syria and Iraq and Jersey, eager to impregnate your wife and buy up all the beer and steal your HBO. Damn right they're coming -- Mr. Rumsfeld said so, so it must be true.
Bullets from such a gun can pierce light armor, they can penetrate buildings, they can blow up tanker trucks, they can bring light aircraft out of the sky. If you can find a more ideal weapon for every home terrorist's do-it-yourself kit, buy it!
It's the Hummer of handguns, the Frankenstein of firearms, the biggest dumbest most entirely useless and pointless and adorably, blatantly, phallically compensatory handheld weapon available to the public today, excluding a Big Bertha golf club or the multi-function remote control or, say, J.Lo.
And along with the Hummer, it is the perfect poster child for the U.S.' preemptive kill-first, aggro-thug superpower policy. It represents exactly who we are right now -- or rather, who ShrubCo really, really wants us to be.
All about who's got the bigger military crotch-bulge, who can say "Go ahead, make my day" to both the U.N. and the deluded millions of liberal hippie anti-war protesters rallying all over the world, as well as those damnable "Old Europe" objectors, while we whip out the big gun against whomever we want, whenever we want, just for the petrochemical fun of it all, because we said so.
The new gun is for hunting, they say. Right. And the Hummer is for rescuing baby seals in Antarctica.
No really, it's for hunting. They swear. It's for those sportsmanlike times when you want to blow that goddamn elk into so many little bitty smithereerny chunks it will look like God's precious creature just met with the business end of a grain thresher. Screw the meat, let's go for splatter. What fun. Hunters are so cool.
No no, that's unfair. Hunters are not all bloodthirsty thugs. And this gun is a perfectly valid weapon in these trying times, when the drug dealers are packing Uzis and raping kittens, and more than ever, the size of a man's fake bulge defines his stature, and his patriotism.
But more than that, the Smith & Wesson Super-Splatter Aggro-Magnum MegaPhallus 2000 (or whatever it's called) is more than the perfect example of the bigger is better, manlier is better, stupider is better American ethos. It is also the capitalist ideal run ragged. And tired. And deadly.
You see, the Smith & Wesson company is suffering. They were, apparently, one of the first American gunmakers to agree to Clinton-era regulations and install safety locks on their weapons, in an attempt to save lives and prevent more Columbines and more estranged ex-husband killing sprees and more undereducated second-graders from sneaking daddy's Little Elvis out from under his hidden stash of Honcho magazines in the garage and taking it to school for Show and Tell and Maim.
Hence, "real" gun collectors saw the company as wimpy sellouts -- after all, what sort of macho dude needs a girly gun lock? Sort of like drinking in moderation or sticking a "Free Tibet" rainbow sticker on the Escalade or actually obeying that restraining order. Yeah right.
And lo, gun locks in place, S&W's sales plummeted.
What's an all-American weapons manufacturer to do? Why, go back to basics, of course. Aggression. Machismo. Violence. Sure enough, the parent company decided to sell the struggling gunmaker, and the new owner said to hell with safety, forget the gun locks, let's get big.
Let's reclaim that elusive monosyllabic-hunter market and put the fear of God/violent brutal death back into the police department. Let's make the biggest heaviest most gut-wrenching weapon possible. And they did just that.
Because if America is about anything in the era of preemptive kill-first antagonism, it's about armchair bazooka kings who like their phallic symbols glaring and their sense of human empathy puny, their Nugent records cranked to 11 and their Charlton Heston posters menacing and who can belch the Star Spangled Banner and somehow still manage to vote. Or is that too unfair? Oh that's right, it's for hunting.
This is the real lesson of modern American business. This is the lesson leeched from the age of reality TV, of shock-crap Jerry Springer, of ham-fisted ad execs and bitter political mudslinging campaigns across the cultural spectrum. Subtlety and calm and nuance and grace and restraint don't get the ratings. And they don't move product.
In increasingly jaded and numb America, ya gotta go for shock. The biggest. The scariest. The wildest. The dumbest. The most sugary or fatty or creepy or quadruple beef triple bacon double cheese chiliburger with deep-fried cheese sauce only 99 cents while supplies last. It is all about excess, violent and deadly and mean. And apparently, it is what we are (still) all about.
Yet you want to believe this sort of thing is the exception. You want to believe huge absurd weapons exist out there on the lunatic fringe, that the tides of positivism and grace and harmony and mindfulness are, generally speaking, rising up to defeat this sort of karmically deleterious slur.
And that maybe, just maybe more and more companies -- not to mention individual consumers -- are beginning to choose not to pollute the cultural pool quite so violently, so mindlessly, that they have a responsibility beyond just exploiting the nation's fear impulse, and that their, and your, decisions about such products do, in fact, affect -- or infect -- the world. There are many signs.
Unless, of course, you believe the Smith & Wesson press release, which states that production on the new monster gun has already been increased. Due, naturally, to intense demand.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.