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.

Terrorists Strike America Again!

Terrorists have struck America again.  First it was the right-wing assassination of Dr. Tiller; now, another right-wing extremist has assassinated a worker guarding the National Holocaust Museum.  It's time we used our anti-terrorists capabilities right here at home, and seriously started investigating the nutty right wing fringe (sorry for the redundant phrase).  

The fomenters of right-wing hatred--talkin' about you Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly--are also to blame, as are the idiots who patronize them.  For months the MSM has been reporting all the idiocy regarding runs on gun shops, and don't forget Fox News shilling for the "teabag" parties earlier this year, and now we get to see where all this stupid hate speech leads:  innocents are being killed.  

America is a racist nation and always has been.  Obama's election was the result of a demographic change--for the first time the racists did not have control of the media and the electorate.  The racist right hates what has happened to our nation (multiculturalism, etc.) and is now fighting back.  Time to quit spying on law-abiding citizens, and use the police forces of our nation to look closely at the gun nuts and anti-semites and homophobes and racist rubes (hello Texas).  

Stop the insanity.  Now.   

Baby Fatt and L Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard was a fascinating man.  An intensely insane, paranoid, disturbed man to be sure, but also quite fascinating.  He tried to make it first as a science fiction writer and, when this did not work out (although he could excrete words his writing was as turgid as it was dull), he decided to start a religion.  Starting a religion turned out to be gold, and he really raked in the bucks after that.  

He called the religion he started “Scientology”, and he poured all of his skills as a fabulist that he learned trying to write science fiction into his new religion.  Thing was, the crazier he made it sound, the more people flocked to it.  It’s quite amazing that a person could actually sit down at a typewriter and start to write fantasy and then sell it to others as Eternal Truth, but that’s a testament to just how gullible the average human bean really is.  

As a person LRH was quite the ogre.  He lived on Scotch Whisky and Kool cigarettes, and liked being attended to by young women dressed in quasi-military uniforms.  He was a philanderer and there are varying accounts of just how many children he fathered (quite a few).  He was prone to manic rages and hypergraphia (compulsive writing—yet another symptom of his mental illness that he used to good effect in founding his religion), and was paranoid in the extreme, using his money and minions to spy on his enemies, both real and imagined.  He hated the government but spent much of his adult life trying to get a pension out of the navy.  He would ramble on endlessly and nonsensically (you can hear many of these recordings on You Tube), yet folks continued to follow him, and sign over all of their money to him.  Like so many madmen he lived out his last days in the desert, utterly psychotic, yelling at clouds.  The best biography of him so far is Bare-Faced Messiah.

Today of course his little religion seems to be centered on Hollywood, where multiple celebrities have been taken into the cult and now shill shamelessly for it (LRH developed a concerted strategy for going after celebrities knowing full well that the hoi polloi endow celebrities with more credibility than their achievements—not to mention IQ’s—would merit).  

It’s quite amazing to me how easy it is to convince people that one knows all the Divine Secrets of the Universe.  One doesn’t even have to try that hard.  Just fake sincerity (fake sincerity is the best kind) and although many might reject your message there will be enough idiot dolts ready to follow you that soon enough---no more day job!  Of course this requires that one have a conscience, which is why Baby Fatt has never been able to start his own cult (though I have practically been begged to do so).  Just because I live in the desert doesn’t make me a madman.  

Where's the war on Christian terrorism?

Now that a Christian terrorist has assassinated an abortion provider, where are the calls for a war on right-wing Christian terrorism?  If the assassin had been Muslim, and the victim a Christian missionary, how the wingnuts would be howling for justice!

Likewise, why are not the dolts who insist that we must keep Guantanamo open and ready for torture calling for this newly revealed terrorist to be tortured and imprisoned indefinitely in Gitmo?  Not exactly sporting if you ask me.  

One of America's many dirty little secrets is that we are chock-full of terrorists, and always have been.  Our federal prison in Colorado contains the Unabomber, one of the Oklahoma City bombers, and many others who could be classified as terrorists.  Right-wingers are all over the internet whipping themselves up in racist, gun-loving, paranoid fury (with a great deal of homo-eroticism thrown in) about how Obama signifies the end times.  These idiots are whacked, and extremely dangerous, but our constabulary spends most of its time profiling people of color.  

The assassination of Dr. Tiller is just the beginning of what the right-wing Christian terrorists have in store for us.  Meanwhile, the government will look the other way, and the wingnuts on the internet will foment, and the idiots on Fox will bray and spew their hateful filth.  Innocents will die, but because the perpetrators are right-wing Christians, nothing much will get done about it.  Such is America.