Question #113:

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What's the best thing about being a blind, stupid, bleeding-heart, unrealistic, Satanloving, hellbound, hippie liberal cockface?
- One Nation Under GOD

Dear One Nation,
  I'd say it was the sense of smug superiority, but I suppose there's plenty of that at every point on the ideological spectrum. Self-righteous boobs of every political bent succumb to the temptation to cocoon themselves in the silky softness of like-minded opinion. Of course, affirmation addiction strikes non-political types as well. Without it, Michael Jackson might still have a nose and the Star Wars would likely have been Jar-Jar free.

  There are a lot of good things about being a liberal/progressive/lefty. Our girls are hotter. Our scientists don't waste time trying to prove that an invisible sky man made it all from scratch. Our gene pool tends to be broader and more diverse. We're allowed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that comes from a living in a country that listed equality as a sacred principle while simultaneously enshrining slavery in its founding document.

  On the whole though, the most awesome thing about being on the ideological left is the inevitable approbation of history. The progress of freedom and justice is a little like the stock market. In the short term, there are ups (Brown v. Board of Education) and downs (the USA PATRIOT Act). In the long term, it's all upward momentum. Social taboos evaporate and political barriers to individual expression erode. The doomsayers who warned that suffrage for women would ruin us, and that interracial marriage would destroy the American family, are dismissed as misguided fools. The uptight moralists claiming that gay marriage will tie "traditional" marriage to a stake and beat it to death with pink-handled hammers will eventually get the same treatment. Say what you will about self-confidence and the courage of your convictions, but it's awfully pleasant that history, and hindsight, keep proving us right. Er, correct.

Happy Birthday, Earth!

  And let me say, for a sprightly lass of 6,010, you're still looking great. Don't worry about that slight equatorial bulge. It happens to all of us after our mid-5,000s.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  In 1,000 years, what will archaeologists who dig up Nike merchandise with the Michael Jordan logo think it means?
- Sarawesome

Dear Sarawesome,
  It's hard to say what future researchers, rummaging through the remains of long-vanished early-millennial America, will make of the iconic spread-eagled silhouette. Will they recognize it as representative of superlative basketball talent turned into marketing gold? Or will they mistake it for a weirdly lumpy bird?

  The key seems to be whether or not some civilization ending event happens between now and our hypothetical dig. We live in a hyperrecorded, obsessively archived age; the Intertubes are clogged with pictures of every cat in the industrialized world. With the sheer volume of information being stored every second, and given a smooth ascent into a glorious, flying car-filled future, it's hard to believe that any society sophisticated enough to make organized study of its predecessors wouldn't be able to find some reference to explain a symbol that was, during our time, so ubiquitous.

  Then again, the logo could be uncovered on the other side of a catastrophe sufficiently horrible to destroy our delicate technological infrastructure. There are plenty of candidates; supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes, nuclear war and drug-resistant bacteria could all do the trick. It's hard to know what a rebuilt civilization, without the benefit of our LOLcats, will think of us and our marketing tools. However, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they'll think those FCUK shirts are pretty fucking stupid.