By: Ben Johnson
What a year! We here at Total Bozo Magazine are
sad to see 2014 go, but before we turn the page, here’s a look back at some of
the incredible things that happened this year which will not be upsetting to
potential advertisers:
That Time
The Morton Salt Factory Collapsed, And Definitely No Mention Of Mike Brown Or Ferguson
Or Eric Garner Or Tamir Rice Or Wenjian Liu And Rafael Ramos Or The NYPD And Bill de Blasio
Just in time to still be on this list, on
December 30th, the outer wall of the Morton Salt factory in Chicago
collapsed, spilling a small mountain of salt onto several cars parked outside
of the neighboring Acura dealership. Reading about this and gawking at a
picture of a big pile of salt should take some of the sting out of a
half-millennium of slavery and endemic consequence-free racialized violence on
an institutional level, enforced as ever by a loosely knit working-class
community whose collusion, through hard and largely thankless work, in the
mechanism of institutional racism grants them just enough petty but palpable
economic advantage to become cheerleaders for the predatory capitalism which is
the root cause of the racism, which in turn further exploits them by doing
things like using their disproportionately garnished tax dollars to subsidize legalized
wage theft. Look at all the SALT. Does anybody have a margarita glass?! LOL.
Okay, We
Will Talk About The Interview, But We
Won’t Really Discuss Some Of The Troubling Results Of The Sony Hack, And We Will
Definitely Vilify North Korea Which Is A Nation Full Of Poor People Which Does
Not Participate In Capitalism, And Also We Are Not Talking About The Torture Report
Even A Little Bit; Boy We Just Feel Bad For Seth Rogen?
Seth Rogen had a difficult end to 2014, with
his irreverent comedy The Interview
being pulled from theaters in the wake of a hacking scandal. North Korea is not
responsible for the hacking, and is not a legitimate threat to U.S. National
Security except insofar as its totalitarian government might require some
evidence of punitive U.S. actions to solidify its ideological hold over the North
Korean populace, who are impoverished and oppressed to the point of U.N. censure
for crimes against humanity, but who are at least not forced to participate in
a oligarchic global economy which is actively and greedily destroying the
global ecosystem. Also, FYI, according to the Senate’s torture report released
earlier this month, the CIA paid $80 million tax dollars to two Air Force
psychologists who had no experience with counterterrorism to design a program
which tortured the living shit out of people and yielded negligible results. The
film had a modest opening weekend box office take of $1.8 million in only 331
theaters. Hang in there, Seth!
While We’re
Talking About Movies, Who Could Forget Sharknado
2? (Let’s Not Mention That Probably More People Remember Sharknado 2 Than The 219 Kidnapped Nigerian
Schoolgirls Still Under The Control Of Boko Haram)
Look out! Sharks! The 2013 pop culture
phenomenon that was Sharnado returned
with a sequel that took a big bite out of television viewership for the SyFy
network in late July. Dear God, those girls… we are still doing nothing to actually help them… nobody is doing
anything, anywhere… we have all just agreed that this is a regrettable thing
that happens sometimes, a thing that humans can and will sometimes do to each
other, regardless of our ability to prevent and rectify it, and we have turned
our backs on the fact of this collective decision of ours, and have left
unquestioned the utility and purpose of a human society which allows for this
kind of thing to happen, and yet through cognitive flaws in our adaptable
brains we are somehow able to go about our days and call this a world worth
living in… If you’re looking for a Sharknado
fix, don’t worry: plans for Sharknado 3
are already in the works.
Nobody
Could Stop Talking About The Serial Podcast (Despite The Fact That The Case It
Reports On Is Actually Not That Bad Of A Miscarriage Of Justice Within The
Context Of Our Broken Criminal Justice System)
The first episode of serialized investigative This
American Life spinoff podcast Serial came out in October, and since then over
five million listeners have downloaded the podcast from iTunes! That’s almost
as many people as the 6.9 million who are currently under correctional
supervision in the U.S.! Imagine if every single person who ever listened to
the Serial podcast had to serve a court-mandated sentence of some kind, those
are the kinds of numbers we’re talking about here! Meanwhile, Adnan probably
did it, and his case is an instance of a young black man’s testimony actually
holding up in a court of law and leading to a murder conviction! If you haven’t
listened to this podcast, you’re missing out! We’re hooked on it (as if it were
free prison labor)!
And What
About That Missing Plane? How Come They Haven’t Found It? Is It A Conspiracy Or
Is It Just Because It’s At The Bottom Of The Ocean And We Don’t Get To Know
Everything Even Though We Want To, And We’re Not Omniscient Or Immortal Or Even
Particularly All That Smart Or Capable Compared To How Amazing We Seem To Think
We Are
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing on
the 8th of March and we still haven’t found it! We are going to keep
looking, though, because airlines are for-profit businesses while little
Nigerian girls are not. The basic principle at work is that people who have
enough money should have the right to fly from continent to continent without
fearing for their lives, while people (especially brown people) without money
can’t be guaranteed the right not to be kidnapped and forced into being child
brides for militant extremists. Nevermind that intercontinental travel is not a
basic human necessity like food or water or not being owned by another human. We’ll
treat intercontinental flight like a basic human necessity if we want to, and
we will demand immediate explanations for why a giant pollution-burping metal
thing designed and constructed by fallible humans might have fallen out of the
sky, where no law of God or nature entitles us to be. They should have found
that plane by now! What’s the holdup, people?!
Gwyneth
Paltrow And Coldplay Lead Singer Chris Martin Broke Up But Called It A “Conscious
Uncoupling” And No Way In Hell Are We Talking About The Suicide Of Leelah
Alcorn
They seemed like such a lovely couple, but
alas, even the best things must come to an end. Such as the tragically short
life of a young trans woman whose suicide highlights the feelings of shame and
uselessness faced by thousands of Americans whose cowardly families would
prefer them to be “correct” rather than happy, an echo of a broader familial and
societal psychological undercurrent of many of the large-scale issues American
found itself bumping into in 2014. Looks like our hopes for Apple getting a
little sister named Pear have been dashed.
After Suffering
A Crushing Defeat In 2013, The San Antonio Spurs Obliterated The Miami Heat In
The NBA Finals, Please, Just Let Us Enjoy This, Do Not Force Us To Think About Bill Cosby Or Ray Rice Or Gamergate Or All The Ways Men Are Horrible To Women On A Routine Basis
It's okay to like basketball, right? I think we can all agree this is one good thing
that for sure happened. A basketball thing.
