Random Idiots Speed My Day Along

Spencer Pratt is an idiot....

But OK, he's a harmless idiot, with no apparent following other than 16 year old viewers of "The Hills" but apparently that gives him license to become a social critic...take the example of the new video from M.I.A called "Born Free."





Now I'll caution all of you with weak stomachs...it's a rough video to watch, and it's taking on a brutal set of topics in it's treatment of racism, genocide, and the tactics of the police state. No, it's not set in modern day Arizona, but the scary thing is that it could be. We are so dense anymore to the erosion of the basic right that make up our cherished freedoms that we are all to willing to give them away to the first carnival barker or tea salesman that comes along and frightens us with a story about people who are different.

Now in my neighborhood, the police haven't come busting down the doors looking for redheads....but they didn't do that in Germany in the early 1930's. It took some time before "papers please" became a yellow star affixed to your chest, and the seizure of your property because you were different.

In many ways, I assume this video mimics M.I.A's own experience growing up in Sri Lanka, where the government oppressed her family and the Tamil people for most of her life. I would think that these types of things are very real to her, and should serve as a modern day warning to those who think it's ok to discriminate and round up people who are different. Even if it's politically expedient, it's never right to legislate hate and discrimination...and yes, that one was for Arizona.

Anyway, that brings me back to my buddy and noted social critic Spencer Pratt...apparently Spence was a little bored sitting in the waiting room for his wife's latest plastic surgery adventure and he tweeted this little gem about MIA:

"The music artist MIA should be kicked out of America today for using the US flag on her Nazi like hit squad in her new music video!"

Are you kidding me?

So if you make a statement which offends Spencer-look out, you'll be joining the people who the police think might be illegal in Arizona and be run out on a rail.

Spence...buddy, stick to what you know best (whatever the hell that is) and leave the thinking that involves the firing on more than one synapse to the rest of us.

The way to open debate on something that offends you, is to talk about it, to rally against it and move public opinion using the ways of the pen and the lectern...not to simply escort the offensive ideas out of the nation....or as MIA shows us...out to the desert. If you think that there isn't a very short correlation between what MIA artistically presents and what is going on in the world today...please, turn off "The Hills" and turn on the real world.