Playboy lets me down

The latest issue of Playboy has, as its interview, an article on country singer Toby Keith. Well…I guess that by interviewing a knuckle dragging, jingoistic, kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out Patriot^TM, Playboy is trying to stay controversial. Apparently, naked women ceased being controversial some time ago -- no idea why it ever was, though -- so Playboy has decided that giving even more limelight to someone who should've fizzled out with all the other dim-bulb rednecks is the way to sell copies and keep subscriptions.

Anyway, my first reaction to seeing that Playboy had published an interview with Keith was to rip the pages out and ceremonially burn them. Then the sub title to the article caught my eye. Something about many people being surprised to learn that Keith is, in fact, a Democrat. Yes, I would indeed be surprised to learn this, especially given Keith's "American boot up the ass of anyone in the world who dares challenge us" attitude. So I started to read the interview. That's when I learned that Keith isn't a Democrat in the actual sense of the word, but that he's a Zell Miller Democrat. That is to say, basically more vile than most Republicans, which is no easy feat given the wretchedly über-patriotic, hyper-religious state of neo-conservatism these days. If I believed in the devil, I'd say he was incarnated as Zell Miller; and Toby Keith was his cheerleader. Obviously, a flaming liberal such as myself couldn't stomach any more of the article. Regardless of how badly I wish I was emotionless enough to objectively read the interview without wanting to put my head through the TV screen, I couldn't do it. Maybe I'll try later. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that my knee-jerk reaction to the first page or so of the article was wrong. But for now, it's probably best for my rage to simply skip the interview and look at the pretty pictures.

And speaking of skipping articles, I wish I had skipped the one on the Mexican sweat-shops. I was expecting a hard-hitting exposé on the squalid conditions and sub-human treatment of Mexican workers and for the evil corpwhoreations to be brought down by the author of the piece. Instead, I wasted a half-hour of my life reading about speculations and unsubstantiated hearsay; about a so-called investigative reporter who could do no better than conclude that, well, he couldn't really find anything wrong with the factories even though he was pretty sure they weren't good for the workers. Hey, thanks, genius! Next time you're too lazy to actually dig into the issue and find something, maybe you could just sum up, in about a paragraph's worth of text, the rumors about how bad the big businesses treat their Mexican workers? Had to waste my time stroking your own literary ego with an entire article, didn't you! Nothing like blathering on for thousands of words only to leave your reader no better informed than s/he was when s/he began the article. And what editor decided that this would make good copy?

I really ought to just stick to the pictures.