The Boorishness Of The American Movie Patron

I dare the innocent reader to attend any movie in any movie theater in America and not be bothered by some boor talking during the movie. In fact, it is no longer the boor who stands out, but the movie patron who is silent and respectful during a movie who is in the minority. A lone voice in the wilderness (in the dulcimer tones of Baby Fatt) cries out "What's wrong America? Whither have thy manners fled?"

I blame much of the oafishness that accrues to modern America to the self-esteem movement. For a generation now baby boomers have been reassuring themselves--and, even worse, teaching their spawn--that no matter what one does one is a good person. Got drunk and burned the house down? Not to worry, you were just dealing with an addiction problem but deep down you're just swell. Molested the altar boy? No matter, you were just acting out the abuse you suffered as a child, but you're still a good person worthy of love and respect.

What a bunch of poppycock. Teaching people that they have worth no matter what they do frees them of shame and guilt, and have no doubt as to the importance of shame and guilt in maintaining our delicate social contract. Freeing an entire generation of louts from any sense of shame and guilt results in what we have now in America: a generation of sociopaths--of used-car salesmen and petty criminals and businessmen and politicians and reality-television stars and wanna be reality-television stars--all of whom are convinced first and foremost of their unique and unassailable worthiness.

So is it any surprise that when these oafs show up to watch a movie they feel no hesitancy whatsoever in voicing every idiot thought that happens to run their heads? From asking for a plot explanation to verbalizing recognition of a minor character actor, they let no excuse for letting their fellow patrons hear their voice go unrequited. They have no sensitivity at all to the fact that there might be patrons who want to concentrate on the dialogue on the screen--they simply could not care less about the wants or feelings of any one else in the world. Their sense of entitlement obscures any recognition of the thoughts or feelings of others.

Well, here's two words for my fellow Americans: shut up! When I pay to see a movie--even a bad movie (and believe me I've seen them all, or so it seems)--I want to see the movie in peace, which means without your idiot drivel. Would you walk into a church somewhere during services and start to comment loudly on the sermon? Well, for Baby Fatt the cinema is my church, it's where I go to enjoy a sense of the transcendent, of the enormity of the world and my little place in it. Leave me alone already.

While I'm at it here are some other simple rules of movie-house etiquette: Don't just put your cell phone on vibrate, don't bring it into the theater at all! Don't bring young children to a movie that's made for adults (they just get bored and make noise). Don't rattle your sack of smuggled-in cheap candy or pop the top on the warm can of soda you snuck in after the movie starts. Be nice to the people around you--who knows, you might find that you like it.

Come on America, show some respect. For a change.

Christmas In The Land Of Enchantment

Growing up in West Texas Christmas was always something less than joyous. People in the Big Country followed a hard-hearted, neo-Calvinist strain of Protestantism that allowed for celebration only if it were yoked tightly to shame. We were exhorted to "remember the reason for the season" and there was much decrying the commercialization of the holiday season--not that there's anything wrong with decrying commercialization of anything, but tying it to Christmas always gave the holiday an edge of negativity.

There was no alcohol allowed, of course (lest you be damned straight to hell, never mind any mention in the Bible regarding Jesus and wine), and so any drinking was done, necessarily, in secret. And if you and your significant other were of the same gender, or lived together without benefit of marriage, or were of different races--or even different denominations--you were expected to remain very much on the down-low for the entirety of your Christmas visit (having long ago moved away in order to escape such insanity).

All of which had the result of making Christmas a time for a drive-by visit with family and old friends. In and out quickly in order to minimize the damage to one's psyche from the shame and negativity the locals took for granted. It's much different in the Land of Enchantment.

Here, people take plenty of time off before and after the holidays in order to get ready and to spend time with family and friends. Folks in NM may have less money than the people across the border in Texas, but they seem to get more out of it. And while people here are very religious, it is without the self-righteous meanness of spirit that so many Texans seem to love to show off.

Molly Ivins once called New Mexicans "the world's most pragmatic Catholics", by which she meant that while very faithful--very faithful--to their mother church, it is faith without the severe judgmentalism that accrues to so many hardline Protestant denominations. Christmas Eve mass is standing room only--better get their early if you want to get a seat. People are hugely loyal to their local parish, and parents scrimp and save to send their kids to Catholic school. If one prefers the mass at The Shrine of Saint Bernadette's of Lourdes, for instance, then while one might go with a friend to mass at The Church of the Risen Savior occasionally, one would never stray far from Saint Bernadette's. Suffice it to say Baby Fatt is not religious, but no one ever questions a person about his or her faith here--it's a strictly personal matter that is not a polite subject for conversation (as opposed to the hectoring to which one is often subject in small town West Texas). I just wait until mass is over, and then show up for the after-party.

After the mass everyone heads to the nearest matriarch's house for a huge feast of New Mexican food: tamales, big bowls of posole (with red chili of course), tortillas and biscochitos, and plenty of cold Coronas to wash it all down. People who want to drink or smoke do so with enthusiasm, with nary a sideways look of reproach--"do you want another cerveza Mijo?" The next day it's back to Mom's again for a full day of feasting, gifting, and revelry. There are dogs and children everywhere, and everyone gets to be as loud as they want. Gay couples, or interracial couples, or whatever couples are as welcomed as anyone else is. So long as no one is in jail, it's a great Christmas.

In Texas I learned to dread Christmas. Life among fundamentalists is bruising to the soul. The cognitive dissonance between what Jesus taught (love) and how right-wing christians behave (intolerance) wears one down. It's depressing, and you just want to get back to the city as soon as you can.

In the Land of Enchantment I actually look forward to the holidays. Time away from work, hanging out with the Sweetie, enjoying friends, the best food in the world, and plenty of beer. As they say in mi chante, "Panza llena, corazon contento" (full belly, happy heart).

I couldn't agree more.

Memo To Progressives: Hold Your Water

Is there anything more loathsome than the self-righteous whining of progressives? "Waaa...Obama sent troops to Afghanistan, waaaa....Obama didn't fight for a public option, waaa...waaa" and so on ad nauseum. I'm sick of it already, so just shut up and hold your water.

Progressives are offended that Obama is more like Bill Clinton and less like Jesus Christ than they had imagined him to be. They are shocked--shocked!--that the politician whom they elected to the highest political office in the land turned out to be a politician. They are beside themselves with fury and indignation that their dreams of bringing about a Scandinavian-style democratic-socialist state in the old US of A have been pushed aside for the sake of political expediency.

These folks have no idea what life is really like in the "great flyover", where the hometown newspapers spin every national story to stoke fear of big gu'ment and resentment of coastal elites, and gun stores are doing a land-office business. Out here in the "heartland" (though my own metaphor would involve a different part of the anatomy--specifically part of the digestive tract) people are frightened by change, particularly by large-scale change undertaken by the government. They fear taxes and bureaucrats, and they resent being lectured by people who think they know best what working people really need.

I predict that Barack Obama will go down as one of the most consequential presidents in American history. He has presided over a sea change in politics and society when compared to the Bush years--and the dark age of Reaganism--the preceded him. He has admitted into political discourse the idea that the world is not Manichean--it is not divided into black and white, darkness and light--but rather is complex and full of greys. His speech at the Nobel prize ceremony was a sophisticated and realistic assessment of the world as it really is--just as was his speech on race during the campaign. Yes, he's just a politician, and I for one quit making the mistake long ago of having any sort of faith or trust in politicians (progressives have only themselves to blame for their delusions of salvation) but I'm extraordinarily proud to have a political leader of the character and intelligence of Obama. The fact that he's pissed off so many on the extremes of both the right and the left demonstrate to me a keenness of understanding and a sophistication of action that I think will hold up remarkably well in the rearview mirror of history.

So let me breakdown the realities of the progressives' latest cause for umbrage: the healthcare reform debate. We were never going to have a single-payer system, nor was there every any meaningful chance whatsoever that we would have some sort of "robust" public option. The reason is quite simple--the American people would not have supported these things, and had Democrats been able to pass them anyway the result would have been that the Dems would have been voted out of power for an entire generation.

About ten years ago as part of my job I participated in a forum on the problem of the uninsured. One of the speakers was a former cabinet secretary from an upper midwest state (I cannot remember his name) who had been instrumental in significantly expanding his state's Medicaid program to encompass working families who earned well above the poverty level. Everyone at this forum was deeply concerned about the massive number of uninsured people in our country. We were all progressives who were obsessed with the idea of universal health coverage.

In a drinking session after the forum I asked him, as a politician, when he thought America would finally go to a single-payer health insurance system. His answer was realistic and totally disheartening. He said America would never go to a single-payer system because Americans are by and large suspicious of massive government welfare programs. He said that he thought that America would bring about universal coverage--he predicted it would be in about a decade (in other words about now)--but that the form it would take would be a mishmash of mandates requiring individuals to purchase coverage and small business to provide it (most of the uninsured work full time but work for businesses that do not provide insurance benefits), along with subsidies for working families to purchase benefits and an expansion of Medicaid to cover more poor people. He predicted exactly what is happening in Congress right now.

Fundamentally, he stated that because of American attitudes about government and business any healthcare reform would preserve the for-profit insurance industry, because Americans are for the most part comfortable with for-profit systems and any politician voting to overturn the insurance industry's stake in healthcare would pay for it dearly at the polls (imagine the commercials). Reflecting upon it later I thought that what he had said made perfect--if depressing--sense.

Progressives who now advocate killing the healthcare reform bill are selfish in extremis. Most of these folks who advocate killing the reform bill or, in the event that it passes, refusing to follow any mandates to purchase health insurance, already have good jobs and plenty of insurance. They have no idea what it's like to be working for an hourly wage and without any health benefits. When I saw that pompous ass of the left, Keith Olbermann, urge people to refuse to follow any mandates to purchase health insurance, I thought well that's easy enough for him to say, he makes four million dollars a year (plus benefits). He's got the best insurance of all: cold hard cash. But how dare he urge working people to forgo health insurance in order to prove their ideological purity. How utterly selfish and evil.

What's important is that healthcare reform pass--in however impure a form it may be--because once it's passed it can be expanded and improved upon (just like Social Security and Medicare have been). Getting it passed will go down as one of the most momentous--progressive--events in legislative history.

One more thing before I end this rant. To that idiot dolt spawned of mediocrity who left a comment on my Facebook post that "Obama=Bush": how dare you! Here's a little thought experiment for you--what if McCain-Palin controlled the Executive branch, and Boehner-McConnell controlled Congress? Let me enlighten you.

Rather than a massive government stimulus (including, yes, bailing out the banks and Wall Street) the response to the economic catastrophe would have been to cut taxes on the rich while still bailing out banks and Wall Street (in other words, working people would have gotten nothing). Rather than unemployment of ten percent, we would have seen unemployment of twenty percent or more. The Great Recession would have been the Great Depression II.

Rather than drawing down in Iraq while trying to do what is necessary to eventually get out of Afghanistan, we would be preparing for war with Iran. And instead of debating healthcare reform and climate change, Congress would be taking care of whatever items appeared on the list provided to it by the Chamber of Commerce, none of which would benefit working people one iota.

Most of all, rather than a thoughtful, reflective president who allowed for cognitive uncertainty and advocated for open-hearted inclusiveness, the leader of our nation would be a simple-minded, mean-spirited old ideologue furthering the aims of the military-industrial complex. For working people it would have been a continuation of the disaster of the Bush years: an utter catastrophe.

If progressives have an enemy it is not Barack Obama, it is the American people. If progressives want change they can believe in, they should concentrate on organizing the working people of the "great flyover" rather than trying to tear down the best president they're likely to have in their lifetimes. If progressives can convince working people to support single-payer healthcare and other massive government-run programs (that would, admittedly, improve the lives of working Americans) then the politicians will follow. Don't blame Obama for your own lack of success in convincing Americans of the superiority of your views. Quit your whining, hold your water, and get to work.

Why Tiger Doesn't Matter (Hint: Sport Is Not A Metaphor)

Of all the many facile attempts at philosophizing that disgust me, one of the most disgusting is the assertion that sports are somehow a metaphor for life. No, a sport is a game, nothing more. It is not a metaphor for life or death or anything else. There is no value whatsoever to the playing of a game once the game has ended.

If one plays a physical game which one finds to be enjoyable and of benefit with regard to exercise, great, but the "meaning" of the game stops there. Likewise, if one plays a mental game (chess for instance, a game at which Baby Fatt is most terrible but which is quite enjoyable--the original video game) then, again, it has value to the degree it provides mental stimulation, but once the game is over, so ends the value.

It is stupid to suggest that games such as football or baseball or golf have some sort of meaning that can be extrapolated or read into life. No, these are just silly games. Games that involve men in strange dress chasing balls with sticks or tackling one another or trying to put balls into holes. While these games may have psychodynamic value (i.e., they can be seen as sublimated violence and homoeroticism made necessary by an evolved social contract that no longer allows blood games of the sort the Romans enjoyed), they have no larger meaning with regard to the place of man in the cosmos. Life is not a game, it is a daily struggle for survival and meaning that is, at bottom, nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes suggested.

The struggle of the Dallas Cowboys to make the playoffs has absolutely no meaning with regard to how one succeeds at work, or in one's relationships, or in any other area of one's life. The Chicago Cub's inability to win the World Series means absolutely nothing outside of the fact that they are unable to win the world series.

The only person who I think ever got close to using games as a metaphor in a way that actually had some meaning was Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher sometimes referred to as "the dark philosopher". Heraclitus said "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (Walter Kaufmann translation). In other words don't think of god as if he were some magisterial benevolent father-figure, deeply concerned about the world; think of him as a child playing a game the results of which he doesn't really care about. Or as Shakespeare put it in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport." That's life, my brothers and sisters, better make the best of it while you can.

But football or baseball? No meaning whatsoever. Golf? Rich guys despoiling vast swaths of nature in order to chase a ball with a stick.

Which brings us to the "tragedy" of Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods has no meaning at all in my life, and if he has meaning in any one's life then that person is an idiot. It's great that he has a job that involves making obscene amounts of money for playing an inconsequential game (though what it says about those who reward such a thing is not flattering) but I could not care less about his life, or his sport, or the meaning any of it is posited to have outside the realm of old guys who chase balls with sticks. If others want to care about his current domestic drama, or his place in "sports history", then fine, but I cannot imagine a greater waste of one's time or mind or spirit.

Sports: a lazy person's excuse for meaning.

Solving the Obama Conundrum

Progressives everywhere are wallowing in agitated condescension toward Obama's recently announced Afghanistan strategy. They rend their garments and cry to the heavens "forgive him Lord, he knows not what he does!". How, they tut tut, can Obama propose to escalate a war when he promised to bring our nation's wars to an end?

First of all he never promised any such thing. He was quite specific throughout the campaign regarding Afghanistan. While he decried the Iraq war as the wrong war, he stated over and over again that Afghanistan was the right war and that it should be fought to win. If some progressives deluded themselves into thinking that he was some way left-of-center comrade in peace, they have only themselves to blame.

More importantly is what the newly announced strategy reveals about Obama the politician (and please, my fellow progressives, please spare us your righteous indignation when finally realizing--gasp--that someone you voted for is just another politician, and not the second coming of Ghandi or Jesus--neither one of whom could have gotten himself elected dog catcher in any municipality in America). What the newly revealed strategy reveals is that Obama is an extremely wise politician who has studied history and is determined not to repeat the mistakes of LBJ.

LBJ is the stuff of greek tragedy. He was intelligent and ruthless and understood politics as well as any scholar. He knew--as the ongoing release of his White House tapes continues to show--that Vietnam was going to be the ruination of his presidency, and also that he had no choice but to escalate the war. Now, before everyone gets out their knives for Baby Fatt--why of course he had a choice, Baby Fatt, he always had a choice!--let me explain what I mean.

Please remember that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was elected in 1960 in no small part by accusing the Republicans of being soft on communism (i.e., the so-called 'missile gap'). Kennedy promised to be tougher on the communists than Nixon had been (during the Eisenhower administration) or could be as president (revisionist progressives forget this fact at their peril). Once Kennedy began to escalate the American involvement in Vietnam, Johnson was locked in a box (and please spare me any conspiracy theories about how Kennedy had ultimately planned go get us out of Vietnam--first of all, there's know way of knowing; secondly it's a moot point because of his mistake in considering Dallas to be part of the civilized world).

Johnson knew this from the outset of his presidency. He knew--his White House tapes continue to confirm this--that there was no way to win in Vietnam because its government was corrupt and its people were tired of colonialism and wanted all foreign occupiers out of their country (see David Halberstam's biography of Ho Chi Minh--Ho for an excellent analysis of how the Vietnamese felt about America). But he also knew that if he withdrew the Republicans--supported by the hawks in his own party, who were very much in the majority--would excoriate him for being soft on communism. He was damned either way, and so was his presidency.

Which brings us to the Obama conundrum. What Obama's Afghanistan policy suggests is that he's attempting to find a way out of the LBJ problem. He's escalating the war in the short term in order--I predict--to de-escalate it in the long term. When is the "long term"? It begins approximately one year from the 2012 presidential election. Coincidence? Nah.

In other words what Obama's doing is trying to make as many gains in Afghanistan for now, but whether or not his strategy is successful, he'll begin to draw down forces as the 2012 election approaches. This is why the Republicans are howling about his specification of a time line, and in a sense they are correct in their criticism.

They are correct in pointing out that setting a timeline (and again, it's no coincidence that the time-line in his newly announced strategy expires approximately one year out of the 2012 election) gives notice to the Taliban that all they have to do is wait for the timeline to expire before escalating their own attempts to re-take the country. But Obama is wily as a fox in setting the timeline (which is the real reason the Republicans are howling) because by 2011 he will be able to say that he allowed the military an opportunity to defeat the Taliban--if they are successful, then so much the better, if not, then it's time to call it a day and retreat. Recent polling--which shows Americans to be increasingly isolationistic--strongly suggests that Obama is likely to be supported in either outcome come 2012. The timeline allows Obama to escape an LBJ-like quagmire.

Either way the wingnuts will howl, but I suspect that most folks will see that Obama made a reasonable attempt to deal realistically with the situation he inherited, and will re-elect him in 2012 (which is the real goal of his strategy). The part of the LBJ dilemma that he is not likely to escape is that the wars to which the Bush administration committed us--backed, remember, by an overwhelming majority of Americans at the time--are likely to severely constrain a progressive domestic agenda for another generation. This would be true even if Dennis Kucinich were president.

The cost of the war in Iraq alone is a trillion dollars and climbing. Just as Vietnam suffocated Johnson's Great Society programs, so will Iraq and Afghanistan choke off any effort for the kind of massive spending on infrastructure that America sorely needs.

The Republicans knew and planned this from the very beginning of the war in Iraq (the planning for which actually began before 9-11). It's a strategy the Republicans call "starving the beast", and it works wonders for keeping Democrats from carrying out a progressive policy agenda. Reagan did it when he exploded defense spending in the 80's, and Bush did the same by going to war in Iraq. The more the Republicans can spend on war when they control the government, the less the Democrats can spend on America when they control the government.

It's a strategy that's as brilliant as it is evil, but Obama and the Democrats (and the progressives and all of America) are its victims, not its progenitors. Overall, Obama's Afghanistan strategy makes a lot of sense for now (and we'll see come 2012 if it makes sense in hindsight), but he also didn't have a lot of choice. At least he was intelligent enough to come up with a reasonable solution to the LBJ dilemma.

Meanwhile, progressive should remove their hair shirts--their mortification smacks of what Freudians term "moral masochism". It can also be quite itchy.

The Stupidity of Self Esteem

One of the worst developments for civilization began in the last half of the twentieth century and revolved around an attempt to make people feel better about themselves. While such an attempt might have been, generally speaking, laudable--a realization that the social hierarchies and child-rearing practices of the past had produced generation after generation of psychologically damaged people--the form it came to take turned out to be insidious: the self-esteem movement.

The self-esteem movement (think of books from the 70's such as I'm OK, You're Ok) sought to reassure people that they were not to blame for their neuroses; rather, their parents were. In punishing misbehavior parents instilled in children the message that children were bad, bad, bad. Once internalized these negative messages went on to poison later relationships, causing, for instance, people to act out cycles of guilt and shame in adult relationships, and leading to such ill effects as addictions and dysfunctional families.

The cure was determined to be the need to make people feel good about themselves, to cast out the negative shaming messages from their childhoods. Thus were born various popular therapies (e.g., Transactional Analysis) aimed at restoring the innate sense of self worth that all people are born with. With regard to children just being born, there was a concerted attempt--in families and in schools--to tend to and nurture children's own self regard.

And so it came to pass that a generation of children was raised by parents who were obsessed with making sure their child felt good about him or her self. If little Johnny set fire to the cat, he was told that it's not nice to set fire to a cat but, more importantly, that does not mean that little Johnny is a bad boy--he's a very very good boy whom his parents love oh so much. In other words, while little Johnny might do a bad thing, he can never be a bad person, because deep down inside he's just swell. God forbid he should internalize the message of shame and guilt that accrues to being told that only an evil little shit would set fire to a cat.

And that's the problem with attending to someone's self-esteem: it absolves them of responsibility. What do you get if you raise someone with the message that no matter what he does he is a good person? You get a sociopath, someone who knows no shame and feels no guilt no matter how much harm he visits upon others. You get a politician or businessman or criminal. You get someone who cares about no one but himself. You get a toxin eating at the heart of our civilization.

Forget self esteem, what people need is a sense of self responsibility. We are each responsible for all of our actions and behaviors, and there is nothing that can excuse us from that responsibility. When a child does something wrong, it should be punished and told in no uncertain terms that it did a bad thing. When adults act out and do stupid things, they too should be punished.

Morality is not about feeling good about yourself, it's about doing what is right because it is right. The only way a culture or civilization can survive is through a collective affirmation of right and wrong, and that affirmation cannot allow for the sociopathy that results from worshipping at the altar of self esteem.

Do you feel good about yourself? I really couldn't care less. What's important is whether or not you have behaved in a manner that is responsible (i.e., in a manner that has caused no harm to others). If not, then you're just another evil little shit.

The Prophecies of Baby Fatt

His stomach rumbled, and his bowels roared. A fetid aroma filled the room and Baby Fatt came forth with prophecy:

There is a city by the sea. In this city are many who have forsaken god. The residents of this city have placed before themselves false idols of materialism and conspicuous consumption. One day the populace will watch, bemused, as the sea recedes as if withdrawing from the city. Then, however, their bemusement will turn to horror as an enormous wall of water comes rushing toward their immoral city. Too late will they realize what is happening, and all will be lost as the gods take their vengeance.

So the next time a tsunami hits a populated area, don't forget that Baby Fatt prophesied it first.

This metropolis is home to artists, musicians, and storytellers. Its people work in many trades and have grown fat from abundance. In their self-satisfaction they have forgotten the importance of paying heed to the gods.

Soon, a day will come for the gods to take their revenge. The earth will shake and roar. The ground will open and many will be swallowed. Fire will spread and consume structure and being alike. Destruction on a scale seldom seen will be visited upon the ungrateful wretches who turned their back upon their gods.

Remember: the next time an earthquake hits a city, Baby Fatt prophesied it.

See the trick? Prophecy is easy. You look and the past and then infer that the same stuff's going to happen at some point in the future. You word it sufficiently vaguely to be able to take credit for it wherever or whenever what you've prophesied might occur. Thus is a prophet born.

Prophets are used-car salesmen. Those who buy their wares are idiots.

As for Baby Fatt--I gotta get me some of those vestal virgins.

The Putridity of Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out that I highly recommend: Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion Of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I couldn't agree more. One of the great diseases that haunts America like a fetid specter is positive thinking.

Ehrenreich begins her book by detailing her experience with breast cancer. Immediately after being diagnosed she got on the web to try to find facts, survivor stories, etc., and was immediately struck by an amazing amount of positive-thinking drivel about cancer. Idiocy to the effect that cancer was a blessing because it taught the sufferer to rethink one's life; how important it was to remain positive if one was to be cured; on and on the drivel spewed like some foul fount of anti-wisdom. An entire warm and fuzzy pro-cancer universe of pink ribbons and uplifting stories.

How I detest practicers of positive thinking. How it disgusts me to hear someone refer to something that's a problem as "not a problem, an opportunity!" No, idiot spawn of hell, you can call a problem a red shiny ball but it's still a fucking problem you insignificant piece of mildly sentient meat.

America is awash in positive thinkers. From managers who go on some weekend retreat and return talking about how "quality is the new paradigm" and "affirm it and you can have it" or "somebody moved my cheese"; to right-wing preachers who preach that Jesus wants you to be rich (memo to Christians: Jesus said that rich people don't go to heaven); to half-wit new-agers who maintain that you can have anything you want if you just visualize it (which means, alternatively, that if something bad happens to you--you know, like cancer--it's because you wished it upon yourself--what an evil premise). What a bunch of bunkum. What hogwash.

Someone recently commented to me that he found my blog to be a bit... well... negative. Negative? I'm the most positive person I know because my thoughts and feelings and ideas are firmly grounded in the world as it is not as one might wish it would be. I live according to what Nietzsche called amor fati: love of fate.

I would have nothing be different than it is: not by one jot. Every good thing, every bad thing, the beautiful Fall weather in Belle Plain, the pollution, all the terrible things people do to one another, all the joy that is to be found in love, good movies and music and books, the whole fucking shebang is just fine with me. I refuse to look at life through a fog of wishful thinking and absurd fantasy. It is those who try to turn their own pitiable lives into some sort of parable on the redemptive power of positive thinking who are negative because what could be more negative than to deny life as it really is?

Want to know what's going to happen in the future? It's easy: some good things will happen; some bad things will happen; and then you will die. Your death will likely be surrounded by pain and suffering that no amount of positive thinking can remove, but if you're lucky it won't last that long. After you're dead it will be as if you never really were, because everything goes on, but without you.

Positive? Perhaps not, but welcome to reality.

Lone Wolves and America the Sociopath

In the last 24 hours two lone wolf gunmen have struck America: one in Texas, one in Florida. Not to make too fine a point on the fact that a nation cannot criticize its citizenry for taking advantage of liberal gun laws to express a political point when that same nation allows anyone with a pulse to buy as much firepower as it would take to take a big lead-filled dump on the lives of the innocent, but this is becoming absurd: okay idiot religious/proletariat oaf filled with hate for everything America has done to you. Go away and just kill your own stupid self. Leave the rest of us alone. We are not your problem. We are your brothers and sisters.

Meanwhile, yet more stains on the vomit-filled bib of America.

For The Love of God Stop Breeding!

Nice article today in Salon about how Southwest Airlines forced a mom and a toddler off a plane because the idiot dolt of a mom couldn't make the idiot dolt of a rugrat shut its filthy pie hole (click on the title of today's blog post for the link). This has provoked the requisite outrage from all manner of parents--from new age yogurt heads to gun nut right wingers--about how terrible it is that society doesn't love children--and thereby families--as witnessed by this recent evidence of alleged intolerance.

I hate children and I hate families. The nuclear family is the cause--the root cause--of most societal problems. Just because two people want to breed does not give them--and their oafish spawn--the right force themselves on the rest of us.

If you want to breed, go ahead--hell, bacteria do it all the time so how hard can it be? But keep your trap shut and your boorish progeny the hell away from me.

The Problem With Magical Thinking

Everyone knows how stupid I think cults are. Of course by "cult" I mean any supernatural belief. But let me also make it clear that I also include in this number any of the various "new age" pseudo-beliefs in things like numerology, astrology, gluten-free diets, feng shui, "chemical sensitivities and/or fibromyalgia", satanism, vaccine-phobia, etc.

All of these belief systems--and the innumerable others that humans allow to pollute their minds--are desperate attempts to control an uncontrollable world. Here's the thing, my friends: the world is as it appears to be, if you have any doubt just look around. Everything that appears to be alive is slowly decaying--changing through an inexorable--entropy--into something new and unrecognizable.

There is no order, there is only chaos (and its correlate in earthly nature: brutality). Soon everything will be much different than it is now, and you have absolutely no control over any aspect of the process. Just know that your teeny tiny piece of existence is rapidly fading, and no amount of wishing can ever change this immutable fact.

As Rimbaud said (Paul Schmidt translation):

And what of the world?

What will it become when you leave it?

Nothing, nothing at all like its present appearance.

Here's an interesting deconstruction of numerology:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125668948820711987.html

Xenu Can Suck My Big Fat Crooked Cock

Interesting stuff in the MSM this week about Scientology. Poor Scientologists seem to be having a difficult time explaining their bizarre faith to others--a necessary component of luring others into their absurd excuse for a religion, but tough to do when your sacred scriptures just make people laugh.

Let's be frank: Scientology's religious beliefs (for instance, that a goddess name Xenu trapped millions of souls from another planet in volcanoes on earth gazillions of year ago and then blew them up with atom bombs so that these disembodied spirits now cling parasite-like to human beans) are really no more non-sensical than any other bizarre faith story told by other celebrity-endorsed religions like Christianity (homeless Palestinian who walked on water). It's just that Scientology's faith story is so much more recent and also that it was so patently concocted by a very bad science-fiction writer.

It's funny to me to watch religious people of whatever persuasion squirm when confronted to someone who knows them to be full of baloney. See some examples below:

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/10/26/scientology_haggis/

Collateral Damage

Week before last I was awakened in the middle of the night by a loud domestic disturbance next door. I heard yelling and a women screaming and glass breaking. I heard female voices sobbing. I looked out the window and two women were huddled in the yard next door. They were holding a small child and the three of them were crying.

I called the cops. The women had been locked out of their home and thrown into the yard by the drunken husband of one of them (the other woman was the younger sister of the woman whose husband had thrown them into the yard). Turns out the drunken abusive husband was a serviceman on leave from a tour with the army in Iraq.

More collateral damage. What a splendid little war this has turned out to be. Fought for no good reason but to drive the ego of a bunch of sexually impotent old mean white men (who, when they had the chance to serve in war themselves--in Vietnam--chickened out and laid around stateside drinking beer while working class men were sent to fight and die).

What a great idea the whole thing was. And what wonderful forethought: take a generation of our working class men and teach them to kill. School them in the intricacies of urban warfare and then bring them home and turn them loose on our streets, in our cities and towns. Addict them to the stress of violence and then return them to their families.

Too bad there is no heaven or hell (aside from the hell we create for ourselves here one earth). If there were--and if there were any semblance of divine justice whatsoever--then the flaccid Pooh-Bahs who thought up this debacle of a war would occupy the most painful, suffering-infused corner of hell. Of course right next to them would be all the super patriots who supported them--the great mewling herd of Fox News watchers who couldn't wait to send a bunch of someone else's sons to fight and wound and die in the name of the American empire.

A pox on all their houses!

Why We're All Going to Hell

In good times we cut taxes for the rich. In bad times we cut services to the poor.

Nothing New Under the Sun

One of the best teachers I ever had was Roy Applewhite. He taught English at Lincoln Junior High. He taught me my love of literature, and of good writing (woe is my fate to be so poor at it). He told me one time "there's nothing new under the sun." He meant that one of the more offensive traits of the young is their utter lack of humility, their confidence that they are experiencing something new, something never dreamed of before, something perhaps even heroic.

This rodeo was going on long before I got here, and it will continue long after I have left.

Arianna Huffington: Cultist

We all know how much Baby Fatt loves to deride right wing nuts (redundant phrase) who are in thrall to one of the various christofascist cults, but am I just as willing to deconstruct some liberal also possessed of a religious delusion? You betcha. Let's talk about Arianna Huffington.

Arianna first came to prominence as the Greek wife of a Republican candidate for U.S. senate. At that time she started appearing on various talking head cable shows and she always espoused a right wing conservative point of view. Her husband, Michael (millionaire rich boy formerly from Texas) lost his senate race and used the occasion to come out of the closet as a homosexual.

Bully for him, I say. This was followed by their divorce, which occasion Arianna used to come out of the closet as a liberal (politically speaking--with regard to her sexuality one can only guess but the likelihood is that it is for the most part Onanistic in character--this is virtually always the case with media personalities and media personality wannabes).

Bully for her, but political turnabouts for me always seem to me to be more about marketing than philosophy--thus, for example, southern Democrats converted to Republicanism in the eighties because that's where the votes were--and so I also suspect her of having no core values (this is virtually always the case with political personalities--they too are Onans, casting their seed barrenly upon the media in the desperate hope of getting elected to something). Then there's the matter of her religion.

Arianna follows a pseudo-eastern cult led by a pudgy white guy named "John-Roger". John-Roger started out in Eckankar (another pseudo-eastern cult led by another white dork who considers himself to be the godhead), but then decided he could do better by starting his own cult (Baby Fatt has considered this himself from time to time--hey it beats a day job--but unfortunately I am cursed with a conscience). He started out in the sixties giving out spiritual advise in his home for pocket change, and gradually built a cult out of upper class yuppies who are willing to hand over major coin in exchange for being told that they're enlightened.

His cult is formally called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, or MSIA ('messiah', get it?). John-Roger's claim to spiritual enlightenment is that in 1963 he went into a coma while trying to pass a kidney stone (you really can't make this stuff up) and while in the coma was taken over by a spiritual being, the "Mystical Traveler Consciousness".

The Mystical Traveler Consciousness (aka John-Roger) comes to earth once every twenty five thousand years and is able to help individuals clear their karma so as to achieve salvation. Of course the Mystical Traveler Consciousness only provides this service in consideration of certain fees (how else to separate the damned from the saved?). These fees are significant (hey, enlightenment doesn't come cheap), and so the Mystical Traveler Consciousness lives in an opulent palace in Los Angeles.

Of course the Mystical Traveler Consciousness also has certain earthly needs--he has become, however temporarily, flesh after all--needs that can only be met by young male acolytes who are willing to submit to the Mystical Traveler Consciousness. Unfortunately, the Mystical Traveler Consciousness becomes easily bored with a given male acolyte, and so is always seeking out new ones. Several of the old ones have been quite put off by this and have sued John-Roger.

I mentioned he was a pudgy white guy right? He's short with a little pot belly and he puffs up his hair to make it look like there's more to it and to give himself another inch. Imagine a caucasian version of Kim Jong Il.

So now we have Arianna Huffington, who took the money she got in the divorce after her husband came out of the closet (keeping a sex secret during a senate campaign? priceless!) and bought her way into the Washington cocktail circuit (actually pretty cheap to do). She used her wealth and minor fame to fund a popular left wing blog and get herself invited to all the cable talk shows where, she's allowed to bloviate to her heart's content. She's treated as a serious thinker by all her fellow gas bags (thank you, Calvin Trillin for a phrase that sums up so much), and by many on the left because of her apparently sincere embrace of progressive politics.

Progressive? Like hell! She's just another sheer opportunist with no core values who wants to get out in front of as many people as possible. She talks progressive politics but don't doubt for a second that she doesn't yell at the help (whether it be the lawnboy or an editor of her blog). She's allowed herself to be conned by an idiot like John-Roger, whom she rewards with cash and entree into her circle in exchange for being reassured that this is just the beginning, that she gets to be Queen Arianna for all of fucking eternity.

What utter crass stupidity. What a shameless evil tool (both of them).

Totalitarianism For Christ, part Duh

I previously indicated (post of 08/12/09) that I would follow up on my research into "The Family" the christofascist cult that operates a rooming house on C Street in Washington DC for right-wing politicians (David Vitter, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, John Thune, Pete Domenici, et al). I've conducted a bit more research (when time allows--the world is falling apart faster than a mortal Fatt can keep up). So here's what I've learned so far.

The Family was founded by Abraham Vereide, an immigrant (from Norway) who started the religious group in the 30's in order to oppose Roosevelt's New Deal. The founding principal of the group is what Vereide termed "biblical capitalism". Biblical capitalism teaches that salvation goes first to those who have risen through capitalism to amass wealth and power, and that the weak, the poor, and the humble just don't make it into heaven.

According to The Family it is wealth and power that are to be worshiped as a path to salvation, not the usual christian precepts of humility, charity, chastity, etc. Those who amass wealth and power are automatically given entree into heaven, even if they are not, technically speaking, christian (for example, the current House whip Eric Cantor, who is a jew, is a member of The Family). It is the elite to whom glory accrues, not the working class (who, by virtue of their peasantry are per se not redeemable). When it comes to getting into heaven, the poor need not apply, no matter how virtuous they might otherwise be.

What this also means is that the elite are excused from ordinary (i.e., bourgeoise) morality. Thus, when one of these elite breaks what are taken by many religious people to be god's laws (you know, do not commit adultery, don't be greedy, do not kill, etc.) the member of the elite gets a pass. Neat trick.

The Family cultivates the rich and powerful in Washington DC, mostly right-wing Republican politicians. It flatters them and subsidizes their housing and treats them to all manner of perks. It uses its influence to destroy any legislative initiatives that might help the working class (in particular they oppose and seek to destroy any legislation that might help organized labor) in order to maintain the stratified class system that it believes reflects the will of the god it worships.

Haven't heard much about this secretive right-wing christofascist cult at the heart of Republicanism? Wonder why? While Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck stir up all manner of conspiracy theories about the dark forces operating at the heart of progressive politics, neither has raised a word about the christofascist cult--to which many of their powerful friends and supporters belong--that is actively working to oppress the legions of "dittoheads" who are conned into attending "tea parties" or signing petitions protesting Obama's alleged lack of a birth certificate.

The rich go to heaven, while workers are organized for the purpose of working against their own interests. Now that's a conspiracy.

The Genius of the Ruling Class

Though I detest the ruling class, I do admire its genius. The Oligarchy that runs America and the rest of the world brought us to the brink of financial ruin in the last couple of years, but what is the hoi polloi busy arguing about? Socialized medicine (i.e., healthcare reform), ACORN, tea parties, and birth certificates.

Think about this works out with regard to healthcare reform for example. Healthcare reform will help working families and so one would think that the working class would naturally be behind it, right? Nah, thanks to the Oligarchy's control of the media (and refined understanding of the psychology of resentment), working people have been enlisted in the fight against something that will help their own families. Neat trick.

How was this accomplished? By paying shills like Rush and Glenn Beck et al to stir up resentment over "big gu'ment" and our black president, and then using the resultant dissonance to distract us from the fact that we lead lives of increasing social and economic desperation. The folks who show up for the "tea parties" are exactly the working people who would be helped by progressive economic policies, but instead they've been enlisted by the business class to do combat against their own interests.

See, the Oligarchy doesn't have to fight progress, it uses its power and money to enable the working class to defeat itself. The fact that the American people have allowed the economic elite to use our resentments and prejudices against us is a stain on our national character that will long persist in ignominy.

It also speaks to the genius of the ruling class--an evil genius, to be sure, but genius nevertheless.

Thank You Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter could not be more right: of course the reason Obama drives the right absolutely nuts is because he's a black man. It takes a Southerner to understand and explain this, because what one learns growing up in the South is the absolute primacy of race. It is not that race matters most of all in political or economic or cultural conflicts, it is that race is the only thing that matters, especially to white Southerners.

White Southerners can never accept the fact that a black man has achieved greater glory and power than a white man ever could. White Southerners can simply never accept that a black man could "better" them in any way. This is why Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber are creating all sorts of bogus issues--birth certificates, flag pins, Obama as socialist and Antichrist, etc.--with which to question the legitimacy of Obama's presidency: he can never be legitimate in their eyes, no matter what. Obama could cure cancer in the morning, and bring lasting mideast peace in the afternoon, and all that would happen would be the right wing would consider him to be even more uppity than usual.

This is not to say that all criticism of Obama or of his policies is racist--far from it. There are many wingnuts who hate healthcare reform or financial regulation because they are philosophically opposed to government programs of any kind. The problem is that these non-racist wingnuts have done nothing--absolutely nothing--to separate themselves from the Obama haters whose hatred is animated by race.

The right has embraced every opportunity to portray Obama as "the other". They questioned his citizenship and patriotism. They portrayed him as arrogant and uppity (as someone who thinks he's better than 'us'). They openly entertained the idea of having their state secede from the union because of Obama's programs (memo to Texas race baiter in chief Rick Perry: eat shit, get hepatitis, turn yellow, and go straight to hell you worthless traitor and bigot). They called him a socialist and from the floor of Congress shouted at him "you lie".

"Uppity" by the way is code for the "n" word (for my non-Souther readers). So is "arrogant", "socialist", "urban" and "you lie". If you have any doubt about any of this visit any country club in the South and ask the patrons what they think of our president.

Time to call these racists out for what they are: ill-mannered boors and troglodytes who hate America; idiot louts who willingly allow their petty resentment to cloud their reason; in other words, just good old boys (who are destroying our country and our future).

Why You Can't Argue With A Conservative

Because they are delusional. I mean that in a clinical sense: they are clinically insane and you cannot argue from a reality-based perspective with a person whose world view has no relationship whatsoever with reality. I previously discussed the dark cancer eating away at the heart of conservatism (see post of 06/24/09) so let's talk today about the mental health of conservatives--as in they ain't got none cuz they stone cold batshit crazy, and you can't argue logically with a person who lives in Crazy Town.

This is hard for liberals to understand. Liberals are wonks: we love to argue policy and philosophy and how to make government more efficacious. We want to think that if we could just sit down with a conservative and reason together then we can come to some sort of consensus about how best to make the world a better place.

Doesn't work like that. I spent much of my life in the behavioral health field (i.e., I worked with crazy people). I remember one client I had at the Austin State Hospital who was convinced that his brother was the Secretary of War. I mean totally convinced. You could point out all you wanted that there was no more Secretary or War (it was replaced by the Secretary of Defense, the current one of whom was demonstrably not his brother) but his delusion was so fixed, so rigid, so part and parcel of who he was as a person that he would acknowledge all your points and then go right on talking about his brother the Secretary of War.

So why try and argue with someone part of whose core belief system is that there is reasonable doubt about evolution? How can you be logical with someone who believes in a supernatural explanation for how the world came to be? Who believes that the world is five or six thousand years old and the reason dinosaurs do not walk is the earth today is because Noah could not fit them on the Ark? Why should we take anyone seriously who believes that Jesus is going to come back at any minute go take him/her away into the clouds?

These supernatural beliefs are evidence of a deep and rigid delusional system against which no amount of logic or consensus could ever penetrate. And yet these crazies control much of our nation and, by simple reason of their obstinacy control most of our civil discourse. I say stop the insanity!

These right wing idiots are crazier than shit-house rats, and should be treated as such. Just as with my guy who thought that his brother was the Secretary of War, we should listen patiently, behave respectfully, and then give them a big wampus injection of anti-psychotic medication and send them to their room. Maybe, if they promise not to blather their nonsense to strangers, they can earn enough points to be allowed "off campus" on a Saturday afternoon.

We must take away their power to rule our lives with their insanity. We must marginalize them. The one thing we must not do is treat them like they are somehow sane and worthy of civil discourse. Civil discourse is the purview of the reality-based community, and conservatives live someplace else entirely.

Republicans: Low Class America Haters

We already know that Republicans hate America--they care only about accruing power for themselves even if it is to be done at the expense of the American people. At last night's presidential address they also proved that they are just a bunch of low class rubes.

A Republican member of the House of Reps Joe Wilson heckled President Obama. This is the first time a president has been heckled in a speech to the congress. Despite the disrespectful behavior by a southern rube (pardon the redundant phrase) it was the president--our black president--who showed class and grace.

Black people know what this is all about--why it is that the first president to be heckled while giving a speech to a joint session of congress also happened to be our first black president (and his heckler a rich white man from South Carolina). One suspects that people of color are keeping track of all these racial slights, and stupid white southerners should perhaps exercise a bit more discretion before mouthing off and expressing their hate.

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest president in American history, but sometimes I think the rest of us would have been better off had he just let the South go its own way, because the South has been nothing but a drag on the rest of the country ever since.

The Problem(s) with Quentin Tarantino's "Bong Noir"

I was sitting around last Saturday night trying to figure out a good movie to go see. This hasn't been a very good year for movies (for several years now movies have really sucked), and so the pickings were slim. My quest finally came down to a choice between Inglorious Basterds or District 9.

Did you ever know one of those geeky guys who saw every movie that came through town? Who loved to get stoned and spend all Saturday watching movies and then arguing about them with his friends? I have--hell, I am one of those guys. Now suppose you gave one of those stoners fifty million dollars and told him to make a movie, what you would get would be a Quentin Tarantino movie. It's a style of movie-making I call "bong noir".

No one films a scene better than Quentin Tarantino. Take the scene in Reservoir Dogs where one of the hoods tortures the cop, while that cheesy song by Blue Swede plays in the background, for instance. It's beautifully realized. Or the scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel Jackson are driving around talking about Big Macs--stoner dialogue at its best.

The problem is that his movies as a whole just don't hold together because a movie is more than the sum of a few really cool scenes strung together. His movies don't make sense. I tried to sit through one of the Kill Bill movies, and just couldn't make it all the way through because its plot was nonsensical (also it was too long--one of the biggest problems with films today is insufficient editing).

Tarantino's movies are hollow at their core: they lack humanity. I'm not referring to the gratuitous violence he films so beautifully, because I love "a bit of the old ultra-violence" as much as anyone. I'm referring to the fact that there is no human element, no sense of tragedy or emotion or character to his films. His films are just empty aggregations of scenes without a human story to bind them.

Take Pulp Fiction for instance. Aside from being one of the most over-rated films of our time, what is the film about after all? Man's inhumanity to man? The redemptive potential of violence? Nah, it's just a bunch of scenes thought up by a stoner and strung together to make a movie. Contrast this with another recent violent film: A History of Violence.

In A History of Violence the violent scenes are held together by the tension of the protagonist's attempt to reconcile his past life with his current life and family. It's a human story driven along by the violent scenes (which are really cool by the way). The movie has a center and is wholly realized, unlike a Tarantino movie.

Here's a thought experiment: name one character in a Quentin Tarantino movie that you actually care about. His characters are one dimensional people for whom it's hard to have empathy or sympathy or disgust or any other human feeling--they're just flat, cardboard people around whom the violent scenes are strung like Christmas lights.

Don't get me wrong, I think Tarantino's a very interesting film maker, but it takes more than that to be a true auteur. I'd love to sit around with him and smoke some lamb's bread and talk about movies all afternoon, but I also suspect it would be a lot like hanging out with the friends I already have and doing the same--Tarantino's just got the Weinstein's to bankroll his bong fantasies into movies.

So, last Saturday I went to see District 9. A really terrific science fiction film (I'm not usually much of a sci-fi fan) that had excellent effects and lots of really cool violence but more than than was actually about something: it was political and human and brought a wealth of feeling to its subject. In other words, it was everything bong noir is not.

Stockholm Syndrome My Ass

So now there's been another of several recent incidents in which kidnap victims have been recovered many years after their abduction. These incidents always cause the idiots among us to ask, dopily: "Well, why didn't they try to get away from the kidnapper, surely they had lots of chances, right?"

Sure they had lots of chances, but they didn't try to escape for the same reason people everywhere follow orders to do things that are totally bad for them: they've been trained since birth to do what they're told, and to like it.

One of the greatest of the many bright and shining lies that defines America is the lie that Americans are an independent-minded people, deeply individualistic, who cherish their personal liberty above all. Nah, we're mostly a bunch of scared sheep, led hither and thither by various authority figures, feeding the narcissism of our idiot leaders with our blind obedience (Tea Baggers: I'm lookin' at you).

We're taught as children to obey our parents, to genuflect before political and religious leaders, to be respectful to teachers and the police, and to be happy while doing it. Those who resist this indoctrination are treated as bad seeds, malcontents with bad attitudes who don't know what's good for them and who will only encounter problems in the lives that await them.

Our schools give lip service to the need to develop critical thinking skills in students, but students who actually demonstrate critical thinking (by, for instance, questioning the precepts of American history and culture) are punished and ostracized. Our media celebrate as individuals people (e.g., 'Joe the Plumber') ostensibly for their individualism when in reality what is being celebrated are these idiots ability to suck up to the elite.

Americans hate critical thinking. Americans detest those who question the fundamental values of our empire (obedience as patriotism; exploitation as enlightenment). American values are herd values: glory be to he who subverts his own will to the will of his leaders and community; praise be unto she who relishes the opportunity to do what she's told.

Is it any wonder that some sex monster can kidnap a little kid and tell the kid what to do and the kid goes along with it? How can any adult question a child's subservience when that same adult happily carries out every order or direction given with a smile on his or her face?

America: land of the weak, home of the naive.

Insomnia: Pity the Poor Celebrity

Not to worry faithful readers, work on Chez Fatt has been completed, and all is well. The underground bunker/discotheque is beyond my wildest dreams, and that new layer of cork was just what the master suite needed. Let us now continue our study of celebrity culture with an examination of the celebrity's favorite excuse for substance abuse: insomnia.

Witness the pedophile fancy dancer Michael Jackson. We now learn that his addictions to multiple benzodiazepines, narcotics, and anesthetics (propafol) arose out of his terrible, unrelenting insomnia (of course none of the recent revelations--concerning bizarre sleep and dietary habits, terrific substance abuse, and general all around wackiness, came as a surprise to anyone who read my June 27th post about Jackson). As to the contention that insomnia lay at the root of his addictions Baby Fatt can only say: duh!

The real question is whence came this insomnia. Celebrities always complain about insomnia. From Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, to Heath Ledger, insomnia is the whiney, poor pitiful me excuse of choice whenever a celebrity ends up hooked on downers. What these idiot celebrities refuse to accept and acknowledge is that their insomnia is part and parcel of their fame and fortune, and the best cure for their insomnia is quite simple: it's called a job.

I've had insomnia since I was a child. As a little kid I would lie in bed at night unable to turn off my mind (it didn't help that I was trying to process all manner of cognitive dissonance accruing to life in a West Texas hellhole of racism, homophobia, and detestation of all things 'hippie'). I would toss and turn, and finally doze off a couple of hours before the opening refrains of Harry Holt's morning show would echo from my father's AM radio throughout the house, signaling that it was 6:00 a.m. and time to get up (Harry Holt would drone in his monotone the report from the previous day's livestock markets: 'feeder cattle closed at sixty eight cents in Big Spring, in San Angelo feeders closed at sixty six....'). Thus would begin another sleep-deprived day.

It only got worse in adulthood. Most weeks I'm lucky if I get one good night of sleep. But here's the thing: if it were not for the structure provided by the 8:00 to 5:00 job I hate, my insomnia would likely be worse. The structure of a job forces me to practice sufficient sleep hygiene to be able to function at least somewhat normally.

Now imagine that I were rich and famous. Rather than going to bed at the same time every night in order to get up at the same time every day, I'd spend my nights going to night clubs, or watching videos, or hanging out with various sycophants and cocaine dealers. I'd go to bed at dawn one day, at noon another, and then go for two or three days with no sleep whatsoever. Then would come the one day I had to be somewhere on time, and lo and behold I wouldn't be able to get any sleep beforehand, so let loose the whining.

Next step is a doctor's office, where I would be given all manner of really good prescription drugs. Now I've tried, as a non-celebrity, to get prescription drugs for legitimate problems like insomnia and pain, but am invariably directed to exercise better sleep hygiene or take something over-the-counter, like Benadryl or Advil. Celebrities, on the other hand, get pretty much whatever drugs they want from doctors, because the docs know that if they don't give over the prescription, then the rich and famous person will go around the corner to a doctor who will, and who, after all, does not want to have a relationship with a famous person?

Then, if you're really rich and famous, like Michael Jackson, you can hire your own personal physician to live in your house and give you big honkin' speed balls anytime you like (at least, whenever he can find a vein, given that so many of them have collapsed). Then, one day the celebrity has a really, really hard time getting to sleep, and so whines and cries until an extra dose is administered, and all the years of anorexia and unnecessary surgery and drug addiction finally catch up and the celebrity's heart says no more and stops.

Oh well. So sad, too bad. But it wasn't insomnia that led to all of this, it was narcissism and greed and self-pity and sycophancy. It was because of a constellation of symptoms and disorders the cure for which has always been the same: a fucking job.

Chez Fatt

To my multitude of readers (both of you), Baby Fatt may be offline for the next few days. Major renovations are going down at Chez Fatt--work continues on the underwater grotto and bar, the underground bunker/discotheque, and the latest layer of cork in the master suite (this will make four). I'll be back online as soon as my private security force has swept the manse for listening devices, and all members of the work crew have been "disappeared". Ciao.

Totalitarianism for Christ

Baby Fatt is hot on the trail of "The Family", a secretive fundamentalist cult that operates a boarding house for right-wing politicians on C Street in Washington DC (including multiple right-wingers who routinely cheat on their wives--Sanford, Ensign, Vitter, et al.). These christo-fascist dolts believe that Jesus doesn't care about the weak or the poor (the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding), only about the rich and powerful. They also believe that anything the powerful do is fine--lying, cheating, greed--so long as Jesus (as represented by The Family) gets his cut.

Research continues apace. I'll run these cretins to ground like a terrier on a fat rat. The lamentations of their women will be music to my ears. Watch out, Baby Fatt's on the case.

To be continued.

Racist America is Coming Undone

The latest battle for the soul of America is happening at the American "Town Hall" meeting. Idiots from near and far are showing up to shout down and disrupt local congressmen who are there to talk about healthcare. Mostly, it's an excuse for the idiocracy to indulge in some good old fashioned mob passion. What it is not about is healthcare; what it is about is racism.

It's not about healthcare because most of the people there have absolutely no idea what any of the issues of healthcare reform are actually about. For example, at one such meeting the congressman (whose name I disremember at the moment) got control of the meeting long enough to ask the hoi polloi how many of them were against socialized medicine. Of course they all shouted in opposition to this Red Menace. He then asked how many were on Medicare, and most (all the old ones) raised their hands. Thing is, Medicare is socialized medicine, but we'll see how many of these dolts give it up out of principle.

What this whole sideshow is really about is the color of our president's skin. The election of 2008 was a crushing defeat to pissed off rednecks everywhere--the idiots who listen to the radio and cable bloviators and who worship a blue-eyed, fair-skinned Jesus. Their nightmare scenario is of an America that no longer looks like them--fat, edentate, with Confederate flag tattoos--but rather is multi-hued, urban, and with no idea of who the fuck Toby Keith is. They cannot stand the fact that it will soon be whites who are in the minority, and not a second too soon for some of us (would be hard to mess things up as badly as white people have through the century).

Obama really does represent change--demographic change. The weak will always respond to change with fear, and out of anxiety is bred rage and violence. We've seen the rage at the Town Halls, and the violence in the numerous recent "lone wolf" shootings of minorities and women by lily-livered white men who perceive themselves always to be the victim of "the other". It's a very dangerous time in America, but also a very exciting time. I, for one, am hopeful (yes, a tiny ray of hope shines upon the face of Baby Fatt, the misanthrope's misanthrope). I am hopeful that the politics of resentment is losing its power, and that the redneck racists who have held our country hostage since its inception are finally dying away.

Meanwhile, however, be careful: the racists are everywhere, and they are going to become more angry and violent in the short-term.

You're just another punk in Cop Nation

So Obama's getting ready to have a sit-down with Henry Louis Gates and the cop who arrested him. It's an attempt to put the whole thing to rest. They'll have a beer or two and everyone will make nice and the whole thing will go away.

The media continue to have this whole contretemps completely wrong. They want to make it an issue of racial profiling. It's not (see post below). What it's about is the fact that we are all just punks who live in Cop Nation.

The cops can do anything they want to do, and ninety-nine percent of our populace will just look the other way. Out of fear of societal chaos (drugs! crime! youth run wild!) we have ceded all our rights to the police state. They now own us, heart and soul and ass.

The cop who arrested Gates arrested him for "disorderly conduct". What is "disorderly conduct"? It's anything the cop wants it to be, for instance asking the cop what fucking right he has to harass you when you're on your own property and doing absolutely nothing wrong. Stand up for yourself and you go downtown. Stand up for yourself too loudly and you'll also get the privilege of a beat-down before you get downtown.

America, land of the free home of the brave? Nah. Land of the weak and home of the spineless. That's why each and every one of us is just another punk in Cop Nation.

Addendum--From earlier this week, Hitch agrees with Baby Fatt: http://www.slate.com/id/2223673/

Baby Fatt hates police

"Dicks hate police, it's true

You can't find justice

It'll find you!

Yeah it'll find you."

"Dicks Hate Police"

--The Dicks

Recently a respected Harvard professor was arrested and taken downtown by the police. He was coming home from a trip and his front door was stuck. He tried to push the door in and one of his neighbors saw him. He's a black man and so of course she called the cops. The cops showed up and he showed them his identification--proving that he was in his own residence--but he became a little too uppity (which is to say he questioned their authority) and so he was handcuffed and taken downtown.

Many see this as yet another example of how black men are treated by the police. Others pointed out that it's not just a matter of race, it is also a matter of class, and a poor white man could have expected the same abusive treatment by the cop.

But it's more than either of those things. What it really says is that we have given over control of our nation to a bunch of steroid-ridden, self-important cops.

How I detest all this idiot drivel any time the police are mentioned in the media about how they are "first responders" and "everyday heros" for protecting us from the forces of darkness. How asinine. The cops are the gang that we hired to protect us from all the other gangs, but who have now taken over, and so we are no longer in charge, they are. We live in Cop Nation.

Out of our fear of disorder, we hired a bunch of thugs who would wear a uniform and protect us. The politicians told us that more cops would equal fewer criminals--all the criminals would be locked up (exploding our prison system--the US has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation in the world, including nations we belittle as being dictatorships), and so there would be less crime.

We hired the cops. And then hired some more. But if someone breaks in and steals your stereo or rapes your sister good luck getting justice.

If, on the other hand, you have a loud party, or drive through a nice part of town in a beat-up car, or smoke a little Lamb's Bread, you can expect the cops will be right there to show you the error of your ways. And if you question their right to do whatever they want to do, then you get a beat-down.

I'm not sure if we ever really had civil rights, but I know that we do not have them now. If you're driving down the street with a thousand dollars in your pocket and a cop pulls you over for some bogus charge ('unsafe lane change' for instance) and finds the money (by searching your pockets--i.e., by robbing you), he can impound it and you have to prove that it was not gotten through criminal means before it's returned to you. So much for the right to be free from warrantless search and seizure.

Or, to take the case of Professor Gates, if a cop shows up at your house and you prove that you have the right to be there but ask for the cop to prove that he has the right to be there, you get taken downtown in handcuffs. Sure, you might get the charges dropped, but the cop gets to have fun with you in the meantime (as cops like to say: 'you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride').

I was driving through New Mexico recently on vacation. I was on the interstate going by some shithole town called "Belen". I had the cruise control set on the speed limit, hand some old David Bowie on the sound system ('Helden', the German version of 'Heroes'--great stuff) when I saw the flashing lights in my rearview.

The cop pulled me over and had me get out and show him my license. I asked what the problem was--why I had been pulled over--and he wouldn't answer. He looked through my stuff then, finally, in response to my question, said "riding in the left lane". Riding in the left lane? Since when is that against the law? It's an Interstate! Of course he didn't give me a ticket--proving that I had done nothing wrong--he just wanted to look through my stuff.

By the way Detective Adam Keck, to paraphrase Frank Zappa: if your children had any idea how lame you really are they would murder you in your sleep. Worthless scum-sucking punk.

The citizens of the USA do not rule our country. We decided we didn't really want to and so have allowed the cops to do it for us. If a cop pulls you over or shows up at your house you better forget any concept you have of what the Constitution says--it's just an old piece of paper in a far off city that's displayed with a bunch of other antiques. Best just to say "Yes sir, no sir, thanks so much for the rapid response sir" if you don't want a beat-down.

America: racist punk police state. How stupid we all are for putting up with this crap.

Baby Fatt: Outlaw

I'm an outlaw. Why? Because women love outlaws.

I've always been an outlaw, but I came by it naturally. I remember once Dad said to me "Son, there's more to life than cold beer and cheap hookers" and then he looked off, into the distance, at some unseeable place past the horizon. Daddy was an outlaw, and I knew at that moment that I was too.

Toward A Psychoanalysis of Celebrity Culture

Baby Fatt loves celebrities. I've been an avid reader of the National Enquirer since I was seven years old. One day at my grandmother's house (who, in addition to my love of celebrities, also gave me my love of monster movies and of a nice cup of English tea), I noticed a copy of the Enquirer. This was back in the day when it was a black and white rag, and even at that young age I was immediately captivated by the headline screaming from the cover: "JFK found alive and living in the Caribbean".

Wow, I thought, I gotta read this (and yeah I was able to read well enough to understand all this at that young of an age--not a sign of intelligence, though perhaps from a psychodynamic view a premature development of ego----more of an early hobby with which I was fascinated and which I acquired in no small measure as a means of avoiding my parents). And boy was it interesting.

Turns out that JFK, instead of being assassinated in Dallas, had just been horribly wounded instead, and he was now living out his last days as a cripple on an island in the middle of the Caribbean. There was even a blurry picture of a guy huddled in a row boat with a black cape wrapped around him being taken back to his island refuge. This was just a few years after Dallas so man was I shocked.

Incredible I thought! Here's amazing, secret knowledge that only those of us who read the National Enquirer have. Consider me hooked.

Secret knowledge! Special insight! Understanding of things only briefly glimpsed by mere mortals--what could be greater than that? I've been a total information junkie since, and can tell you anything you want to know about cults, serial killers, celebrities, politicians, go ahead and try to stump the Fattmeister, baby--can't be done.

Of course the quest for secret knowledge explains only part of the fascination with celebrity culture (and I define celebrity culture as anything having to do with the rich and famous--for whatever reason they might be rich or famous, be it show business, politics, whatever). The biggest part of our fascination with celebrities has to do with the universal need to have our deepest instincts and emotions acted out in front of us so that we can thereby feel like we are part of something greater and more powerful than the mere shitting reality that in actuality defines us.

Consider the mythology of the Greeks and Romans. The tales of Zeus and Pan and Apollo. The legends of Midas and Sisyphus. The conflict--often sexual but always, at its core, about power--that these figures acted out allowed the hoi polloi to live vicariously through these tales of irony and woe. It allowed ordinary people to share in the sense that they were part of something greater than life as a mere sentient dustball. It allowed the powerless to project themselves into the drama of gods and heroes and also allowed them to pull something of the supernatural and heroic back into their own pitiable lives.

Thus it has always been with the hoi polloi, and thus it always will be. From the domestic conflicts of Zeus and Apollo, to those of Michael Jackson and George Clooney, the attraction remains the same: the opportunity to dream. The imagining consciousness (i.e., that which makes us human) always wants to be part of something greater, something with meaning, something with power. This is the etiology of religion, and also of celebrity culture.

The quest for meaning in something greater than ourselves is, of course, ultimately futile and childish. And at base--on a deep instinctual level--we all understand this. It is in this understanding that anxiety and dread have their origin, and it from this anxiety and dread that we spend our lives in increasingly desperate flight (money! fame! power! I swear I'm not mortal, I swear!).

Alas, we are doomed. We are powerless, insignificant creatures who will soon die and it will be as if we never were. Oh well, there's always the National Enquirer. And that little tart Britney Spears.

Baby Fatt and Michael Jackson

All right, I know what everyone's thinking: "Baby Fatt, given that you are one of the most esteemed psychoanalysts of our time--you do after all have a BA in English from a state university and have dated several crazy people--when are you going to give us your psychological autopsy of Michael Jackson?" So, legions of fans, innumerable multitudes crying for knowledge (or at least gossip), here goes.

Clinically, Michael Jackson's diagnoses included histrionic personality disorder, opioid addiction, anorexia nervosa, and paraphilia (inappropriate sexual desire, in Michael's case, pedophilia, or sexual attraction to children). Psychodynamically, Jackson was a self-hating racist, who loathed himself for being black, hated his father, and was ambivalent about his mother. He literally tried to wash the black off of himself, a Sisyphean task that required ever more surgery. His eating disorder (I estimate his BMI at around 17) was another attempt to control the world by punishing his body.

As a child he was abused, horribly abused. His evil father put him on stage at the age of four, like some organ grinder's monkey. He was on stage for the rest of his life, and so never knew what it was like not to be the center of attention. While utterly addicted to the attention, it also tortured him to try and imagine what it would have been like to be normal, to have been just another face in the crowd (one always wants what one does not have, but take it from me, Michael, you didn't miss that much).

His father also beat and emotionally abused him. For his youth, Michael was essentially a slave to his father's desire for fame and fortune. Then, at approximately thirteen years of age, another male--someone whom Michael trusted and looked up to as a kinder, gentler father figure--sexually abused him. This stunted his emotional development so that he was, from this point on, essentially about thirteen emotionally. This was also why he was attracted to young boys who were about thirteen (pedophiles often lust after children who are about the same age that they were when first abused--one can infer the age at which Michael's abuse took place by looking at the age of his victims).

Michael became a drug addict because, well, drugs make you feel good. His wealth and fame shielded him from any consequences of his behavior, and so he was able to get all the drugs he wanted without having anyone intervene in his addiction. One of the sadder aspects of being rich and famous (and there are many) is that a person who is rich and famous has no real friends, only servants and sycophants. Anyone to tries to be a real friend--for instance by pointing out to the rich person the consequences of his/her inappropriate behavior--will be rejected and replaced by another sycophant. Why? Because the rich person can, of course (the rest of us, by necessity more than choice, are forced to have as friends those who will not always let us have our way--this keeps us humble and sane--but the rich and famous need not suffer humility or sanity).

One of the worst things that can happen to someone who is both clinically insane as well as psychodynamically disturbed is to become rich and famous. What one sees when this happens is a sort of state of nature of utter, unbridled depravity. Unencumbered by personal or financial constraints the rich and famous are free to indulge their every whim. See: Hughes, Howard; Presley, Elvis. Thus we will soon see all manner of tell-all accounts of life with Wacko Jacko, and believe me, these accounts will curl your hair. They will involve bizarre dietary habits, impaired sleep cycles, periods of manic behavior (shopping! parties!) followed by crushing depression and paranoia, and never far from the crazy proceedings will be children, lots and lots of children. Pretty little white children, mostly boys but with just enough girls thrown in not to be too awkward, white children like Michael always wanted to be, like Michael dreamed himself to be even as a middle-aged man. White children that since Michael could not be, he could at least have.

Rest in peace, Michael, your suffering is over. Now maybe all those kids you "played" with can get some therapy for themselves--they're going to need it.

Run toward the light, Blanket, run toward the light!

Conservatives lead lives of noisy desperation

Conservatives are inherently unhappy people. They can never be satisfied with life as it is, they always yearn for a simpler, more noble sort of life that can never exist in reality (see post below on Baby Fatt, Barry Goldwater....). Also of course they must hew to strict moral guidelines that are based in the bad faith they espouse. This means that they are always miserable.

That's why conservatives are so often borne out to be utter hypocrites. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ted Haggard, and, most recently, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, are all examples of pompous blowhards of the right who could never adhere to the moral standards they want to enforce upon others. What must really drive them to distraction is how much fun liberals have, and how little guilt we feel in having it.

Oh sure, we have our own hypocrites (e.g., Bill Clinton and John Edwards) but these guys were never real liberals anyway--just craven politicians who espoused a certain political philosophy in order to gain power. Even then, it was mostly conservatives who were appalled at what Bill or John did--while liberals were disgusted by the hurtful arrogance they displayed toward their loved ones, we didn't care much one way or another about getting a knobber in the Oval Office or getting some strange while on the road.

I'm sure there are other progressive politicians ensconced in a closet somewhere, but for the most part closets are conservative architecture. The liberals I know never "came out" of the closet, they tore the door off and set fire to it in the front yard and invited the neighbors over for a weinie roast.

What a sad, angry, wasted life it must be to have to live a lie. This is why so many conservatives (gambling addict Bill Bennett, drug addict Rush Limbaugh) are morbidly obese: psychodynamically, fat is sublimated rage. If only Bill Bennett could walk into a casino and gamble to his fat little heart's content without fear of being called out for his hypocrisy, or Rush could smoke a bowl of fine Lamb's bread, then maybe they could know some peace, and leave the rest of us alone.

As it is they will continue in their never-ending quest to try and make the rest of us as unhappy as they are. Conservatives can never be silent so long as there is one person, somewhere, living a life of joy and affirmation and, you know, fun. While I do feel sorry for conservatives, one does find their noisy desperation rather tiresome.

More on Scientology

Excellent series out this week from Tampa Bay about Scientology post-Hubbard, and it's annoying little dictator David Miscavige:

http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/project/

Baby Fatt, Barry Goldwater, George Bush, and the Coming Terror

As the right wing of American politics loses power and credibility, it also becomes more fearful, more radical, and more dangerous. Out of fear and radicalism it will, increasingly, turn to terror (it has already happened). It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Animals are always more dangerous when wounded, and the radical right is now a wounded, lumbering beast. Be afraid, be very afraid.

The wingnuts are haunted by the essential delusions that lie at the heart of conservatism. These delusions--these lies that conservatives tell themselves--are inherently contradictory and dissonant. They are cancers eating away at the dark heart of right wing America, and unless excised they will destroy conservatism--but not perhaps before conservatism destroys us. The problem is that rather than excise these cancers, the rabid right will instead lash out at the rest of us in anger and recrimination. Recent acts of rightwing terrorism are just signs of what is to come. But first, let's look at the two essential, ineluctable contradictions that conservatism can never surmount.

First is their belief that life was better in an earlier America. Conservatism is fundamentally an appeal to the past. Conservatives believe that prior to the 60's all was good in the towns and suburbs of America: crime was low, the USA was respected around the world, the middle class was prosperous and thriving, and everyone was hanging out in their backyards cooking burgers and talking about how great it was to be in America.

This version of America, so hallowed by conservatism, is a bright and shining lie. It never existed. Prior to the 60's America was a nation of racism, crime, and class resentment; all the 60's did was to show everyone exactly where the fault lies were.

America emerged from the Great Depression by only by dint of World War II (a resounding victory against Nazism, yes, but also one in which the Soviets did most of the heavy lifting), which was immediately followed by the Cold War and witch hunts for communists. Schools and neighborhoods were utterly segregated by race and by class. Gays were arrested for their lifestyle, and anyone who did not look and live like Beaver Cleaver knew exactly where he stood in the grand scheme of America the Beautiful: on the bottom. If you were rich and white, then life was peachy keen, but that's always been the case. For everyone else, life sucked, and there was less of it (lower life expectancy).

For decades conservatism was able to persuade legions of white Americans to vote for Republican candidates by motivating them through their resentment over the loss of an America that in fact never existed. Modern conservatism is deluded at its core. It is partly for this reason that the Republican party is dying; the rest can be ascribed to demographics.

The resentful whites who gave victory to the Reaganauts, year after year, are old and dying daily by the bushel basketful (maybe it wasn't so bad that so many of them smoked after all). Young people today grow up in an America with only distant memories of the Cold War, or of desegregation, or of hippies and the threat they posed to Nixon's Silent Majority. Today's young are multicultural and multiracial. They all know someone who has gay parents. They are much less frightened by people who are different. It's no wonder that the Republican party is shrinking.

The other great flaw inherent in modern conservatism is the essential contradiction between liberty and authority. Conservatives maintain that they are for liberty, while at the same time appealing to a sense of moral authority that would severely circumscribe the behavior and lifestyle of many of our fellow citizens. One cannot advocate liberty while simultaneously appealing to authority. Liberty and authority are mutually exclusive.

The libertarian strain of right wing politics sees government regulation as antithetical to freedom, and freedom to be the only worthy state of being. These are the gun nuts and "black helicopter" conspiracy-theory folks. They ally themselves, uneasily, with the big business, low tax types who believe first and foremost in laissez-faire capitalism. Libertarians believe that the less government the better, and that people should be free to buy or do and shoot whatever they want to buy or do or shoot without any interference from the government. Their hero is Barry Goldwater.

But this libertarian strain of modern conservatism is in direct opposition to the authoritarian strain of conservatism. The authoritarian strain of conservatism seeks to intrude actively into the lives of ordinary citizens. For example, it wants to strictly regulate reproductive rights by outlawing abortion and birth control It seeks to actively promote religious education by mandating prayer in the public schools. It would legislate matters of lifestyle by denying rights to gay people. Rather than laissez-faire economics, it would strictly regulate what could and could not be sold in the market place (no pornography, for instance). Authoritarians support governmental activism for the purpose of enforcing what they see as social norms. They have no problem with Big Brother so long as they get to be Big Brother. Their hero is George W. Bush.

But how can libertarians and authoritarians ever reconcile their views? They cannot. The party of Barry Goldwater and the party of George Bush cannot coexist in the same big tent (Goldwater, by the way, hated the faux populism, self-righteousness, and sheer stupid vapidity of the religious right). Those who promote liberty are fundamentally opposed to those who champion authority instead.

While the politics of resentment allowed those two opposing camps to unite against progressives, the conflict inherent in these two philosophies simmered just beneath the surface. With the waning of the resentment that animated the right during the last 30 years, the conflict between liberty and authority is now exposed for all to see. The next presidential primary season is going to fun to watch.

And so we have the two delusions that haunt the heart of conservatism: the worship of a past that never actually existed, and the conflict between liberty and authority. Rather than acknowledge and confront these inconsistencies, the right wing instead has hunkered down into total denial mode. It now sees itself as beset by enemies on all sides: a bastion of white patriotic folk surrounded by a polyglot horde of effete, multi-hued internationalists hell-bent on instructing children in multiculturalism and pansexuality.

This is why we will see increasingly desperate acts of rightwing domestic terrorism. The rabid right can never admit that it is a political philosophy that is based on lies and delusions, and it can never change without first facing up to its essential contradictions. And these demented souls can never rest until everyone is as frightened as they are. They despise progressives for our moral consistency and basic good will. They envy us our mental health. Thus we will see more acts of revenge and terror carried out by lone-wolf cells of determined radical right-wing vigilantes. They will not let us know peace but instead are driven to extract their imbecilic vengeance.

Be careful my friends. We are surrounded by madmen.