Suppose you want to raise a little money for a charitable organization. Suppose you do it by spoofing the premise of a comedic Hollywood movie, having yourself be the butt of the joke. Finally, suppose that you live in the so-called moral heartland of America, say Iowa. What could possibly go wrong?
It seems that Manning, Iowa superintendent Roger Schmiedeskamp had no idea just how dumb and humorless some folks can be. Schmiedeskamp, along with other men of the community, posed for a 2007 calendar which will be sold to raise money for the Rotary Club. The twist is that the calendar features "semi-nude" photos of local salesmen, bankers and others who happen to be "less than buff", in a bit of self-deprecating humor reminiscent of the 2003 movie "Calendar Girls". While you might expect a bit of good-natured ribbing about this, some folks were downright upset.
I saw several of the photos during an interview with the superintendent on the Today Show. None of them are remotely racy, unless you're the sort of person who considers it immodest for a woman to be outside without wearing gloves. In fact, the men in the photos are wearing bathing suits, you just can't see them. The photographs simply have something covering the bathing suit, such as a briefcase. Consequently, these photos actually show less than what you'd see at the local beach. The men were pictured on-the-job, so to speak. Schmiedeskamp was shown in a schoolroom in what can only be described as an absolutely slap-stick dumb photo, yet it elicited the following reaction:
"When I saw it I was so angry at the setting," said Kathy Swanson, a parent and grandparent of students in the school district. "A kid is supposed to be safe in the classroom. This does not portray safe. It's sickening."
During the TV interview Schmiedeskamp indicated that there were some folks who were asking for him to resign. One person went so far as to declare that if the superintendent was a woman, she'd be asked to resign; therefore, it would only be fair for Schmiedeskamp to resign. My question is: Who would ask for a female superintendent to resign under these circumstances? Oh that's right, the very same humorless dolts that are asking for Schmiedeskamp to resign. Nice bit of circular logic there.
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It's always the adults who obviously spent their own elementary-, middle-, and high-school years in a de facto coma who rail on and on about the supposed moral and pedantic evils foisted on schoolchildren these days, just as the terminally anorgasmic and puritanical love deciding what is and isn't acceptable sex. These people don't give a sweet fuck about education (ostensibly the main reason kids go to school) or rules they disagree with (untold millions of Americans would love to see Bibles illegally distributed in classrooms); they just want everyone to believe and behave exactly as they do. If they ever get their way, I'll run from state to state setting ass many things as possible on fire until someone finaly manages to squash me between the pages of a fifty-foot-tall stainless-steel Bible.
People like to mock the American South for its anachronistic attitudes, but in general you won't find a more backward menagerie of tight-lipped, glaring, meddling crybabies than you will in the so-called heartland, which is really more of a rectumland.
Christ on a Kodak! Even I know that our illustrious Fucktard-In-Chief said that "although we are safer, we are not yet safe". I certainly hope she keeps that in mind this November.