Mark Morford, the Tattooed Love-Monkey

Mark Morford, the Tattooed Love-Monkey

As a result of this mighty fine post, we received an e-mail from one of our dutiful regular readers. This gentleman inquired whether we had ever heard of Mark Morford, a “professional” op-ed writer for SFGate.com, the World-Wide Web version of The San Francisco Chronicle. According to this reader, Mr. Morford has composed some of the most ridiculous rants in the history of literacy.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” had to admit that we had never heard of this fellow. We seem to recall a classics professor named Mark Morford, but obviously the op-ed writer was a different guy altogether.

But we were intrigued. And we were even more intrigued when we read Mr. Morford’s bio:

Mark Morford is a columnist and editor for sfgate.com. He is also a yoga teacher and fiction writer and an outstanding parallel parker and fervent wine devotee and former smoker and former LA rock-god wannabe and careful insinuator and occasional unfair mudslinger and frequent skeptic and sporadic true believer and paradoxical contrarian and tattooed love-monkey and vehement non-conservative and casual coffee drinker and ardent dog lover and medium sleeper and comparison shopper and funky subtle prurient neo-pagan gleaner of screaming delicious naked nuances.

Wow. Is there anything that Mark Morford isn’t? Well, other than frequent employer of commas: Mr. Morford may have mastered parallel parking, but he hasn’t quite demonstrated great proficiency in the realm of punctuation. In addition, we wondered what the heck a “subtle prurient [sic] neo-pagan gleaner of screaming delicious [sic] naked [sic] nuances” is. Perhaps that just means “idiot.”

And, if there were any lingering doubts about the stupidity of Mr. Morford, his column “Love Masochism? Vote BushCo!” should surely remove them.

In short, the mentally-challenged Mr. Morford argues that America may need four more years of a Bush Presidency (which he astutely labels years of “painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprison [sic]”). Our country, according to Mr. Morford, could require sixteen more years of the greatly redundant evil that he has deemed “neoconservative right-wing hate.”

Why would the deliciously clothed un-conservative Morford wish such horrors upon America? Is he—dare we say it?—insufficiently patriotic?

As John Kerry might say, mais non. Mr. Morford offers a different—if rather more obscure—rationale:

it will be necessary because the moral and spiritual and physical hemispheres of our existence will quickly become so dire and toxic and the nation’s socioeconomic situation will become so extreme and desperate that maybe, just maybe, we will finally learn something.

Oh, dear. Can’t you picture this scenario, dear reader? Sixteen years from now, myriad voters jump up from their Lay-Z-Boy chairs and declare to their wives: “The moral and spiritual and physical hemisphere of our existence has quickly become so dire that I just gotta’ vote Democrat.”

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Morford, yoga teacher par excellence, has somehow twisted his mind into a pretzel.

But wait, as they say in the infomercials, there’s more. Savor this learned sentence, dear reader:

If Kerry wins now, the nation won’t have suffered enough, won’t have traveled far enough down the road of right-wing egotism and misogyny and homophobia and religious self-righteousness and deficit mauling and sanctimonious ideology and mangled grammar to really learn anything….

“Mangled grammar to really learn anything”? Oh, come on, Mr. Morford: That’s a split infinitive. Anyone as vehemently non-conservative as you (tattooed love-monkey or not) should realize that. Or did the right-wing and conservative and traditionalist and reactionary and neo-conservative and paleo-conservative folk get to you again?