Above All, Please No Creepy Fake Smiles

 [We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.]

Today’s topic is insanity.

Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so.

Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of these calls to action are just nuts.

The idea that mental illness causes good people to do bad things is generally false. Mental illness most often causes good people to do good things that aren’t practical and not in their own best interests, or good things that aren’t efficient. Whereas, it causes bad people to be bad out in the open. Mental illness itself is morally neutral, like pneumonia.

When I was 12 I was visiting the house of another kid I’ll call “Charlie”. Charlie was the little brother of a former babysitter of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years. His parents begged my parents to get me to play with Charlie, because he was so lonely. His idea of playing that day was to hit me repeatedly with a stick, for half an hour, until I finally snatched it away from him, and broke it in ten pieces.

The parents, when notified of all this, sobbed, and said, “It all started when another boy threw a rock at Charlie’s head. He’s been mean like that ever since. That’s why he has no friends.”

Very sad, very tragic, very false. When I’d known Charlie before the tragic blow to his head, he was also a vicious jerk. He was just more efficient at it, and didn’t do anything so overt, so he could drag it out longer. All the blow to his head did was put him off his game. He lost his gift for creating deniability.

My mother was verbally abusive to people who visited her near her death. They excused her for it by saying it was “the brain tumor talking”. But she hadn’t had a talkative brain tumor 22 years earlier when she decided it would be fun to burn the back of my hand in one spot over and over again with a cigarette.

It’s all irrelevant until you start talking about prescriptions. The most popular prescription for the latest tragedy isn’t as bad as Homeland Security was for 9/11, but it’s just as illogical. We can’t be forcing ourselves to be civil just to keep from touching off a Jared Loughner.

It’s like saying, “we can’t integrate the Armed Services, Mr. Truman, it will touch off some violent racists, and there will be riots in the barracks!” Well, we did it anyway, there were riots, and anyone who says “I told you so,” give them a dirty look for me.  

It’s not that we shouldn’t be civil, it’s that you can’t be civil for that reason. It isn’t a sustaining reason to be decent. You have to be decent and civil to begin with. Some of you aren’t, and you know precisely who you are. Don’t strain yourselves to act civil for the sake of public safety. We’ll all see through your phony civility, including the Jareds. Be civil for the sake of your own self-respect, or forget it.

Topical local applications

The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil.

Most of you good readers live in the Greater Seattle area, AKA The Passive-Aggressive Capital of the World. Is this is a great place to observe phony civility in its natural state, or what? If you say it is, the teacher likes you. If you say “what,” the teacher smiles at you, says, “let’s get together sometime” and avoids you from then on.

As I write this, the state legislators debate eliminating programs that help pay for mental health treatment and the survival needs of the mentally ill. This is happening because state voters wouldn’t approve higher taxes for the rich, for fear that it would cut into their own chances to be rich one day. Who’s crazy in that picture?

The Lions Will Lie Down With the Lambchops

[from 8/25/10]

Let’s talk about justice, equality, ethics, and decency!

Ha, ha! Did I get you going? Actually, we’ll abuse wishy-washy liberals today. First, let’s define “wishy-washy” in the context of “liberal”. This may take space. I sure hope so.

Here’s my great insight. People of all political varieties, not just liberals, when faced with a situation that calls for a judgment, may miss the crux of the matter by letting themselves get lost in side issues. It only tends to look “wishy-washy” when liberals do it.

Take the “Mosque at Ground Zero” debate. The Republicans wrote and got passed a law that prevents New York or any one else from stopping the Islamic Center. When Newt Gingrinch misses that central crux, he misses it much the way a tank rolling down the road overlooks a lame pigeon. There’s a crunching sound. We don’t call the conservative Newt “wishy-washy” when he annoys us in this way. We call him “belligerent” or “jerk-tastic”.

Whereas, when liberals annoy us by missing some point, we discover them playing in the liberal sandbox of ethical relativism respectfully disagreeing amongst themselves over whose rights take priority over whose needs, historical patterns of oppression, and whether one person’s offense offending another person’s offense is more offending than the offenses going the other way around and backwards.

So President Obama reminds us that the Imam has the right to build the center, and then turns around and says that saying so doesn’t necessarily mean building it would be the best thing to do. The best thing for who to do? Pee Wee Herman? Shut up.

So, by “wishy-washy” I’ll mean, that particular losing sight of right and wrong that happens by being blinded by dreams of a liberal paradise in which all that is best and perfect will poop out of a grand consensus that even conservatives will join in. The lions lying down with the lambs, as it were, frolicking with them in the clover. And even the clover sees that what we, lions and lambs, all of us, will have decided, is for the absolute very best for every living thing in the world.

Conservatives rarely appear wishy-washy, simply because the conservative paradise doesn’t involve consensus. The conservative paradise involves you doing what you’re told. So conservatives that get sidetracked merely forget their own principles & tell you to do what they wouldn’t, if their heads weren’t also sidetracked to where the sun don’t shine.

“Hey! What brought this on, Wes?” Well, Anitra “Legal As The Day She Turned Eighteen” Freeman was playing with conservatives on the Interwaste the other day and dredged up a year and a half-old story of two girls being expelled from a private religious high school, having been both successfully accused of being lesbianic, and she thrust it out, asking the right & wrong of it.

By the time I found the discussion Anitra began, there were some thirty interweaving comments all along the lines of, golly, freedom sure is complicated, isn’t it? How will we ever sort out the competing interests here? Freedom of religion versus the right to one’s sexual orientation?

Here’s how you sort it out. Forget the liberal sandbox. Forget freedom of religion. Forget sexual orientations. Forget competing interests. Forget that it was a school and a school principal.

When do adults have the right to traumatize minors by conducting inquisitions into their sexuality or their sexual feelings for one another?

If the religion sanctified child-rape and the parents consented to have their children go to a school that meted out rape in the principal’s office, would the parents’ consent stand in for the consent of the children? Newsflash: Grilling teenagers with prying questions about their sexual feelings amounts to emotional rape.

A judge ruled that the girls could be expelled based on grounds of religious freedom to believe that lesbians are “wrong”. The judge was wrong to allow that to even be the issue. The issue was and remains, you don’t harm children that way.

The 33% Genocide

How genocidal is the system that causes and perpetuates homelessness? Let's put a percentage on it!

I get told from time to time I shouldn't call the system genocidal because to do so dilutes the meaning of the word "genocide" and is thus an abuse of language. To the people who say that, I could say, stop abusing the word "abuse." But I won't. Instead, I plead guilty. Yeah, I abuse language. What are you gonna do about it?

That's the kind of guy I am. I don't kick the living. I kick the abstract, the inanimate, and the dead. And I'm proud of that choice. (Note, though: The alternative is thinkable. Whenever I beat a dead horse, the live horses should be grateful I spared them.)

But I understand how deeply bothered others are by all this. Therefore I will try to make amends. Rather than calling the system all-out genocidal, which is so very very harsh to the poor delicate innocent fluffy word, I will allow for the sake of the word's and the word's defenders' sensibilities that the system is only genocidal to a degree less than all-out, and, moreover, to be absolutely conscientious, I will compute that degree.

US life expectancy varies by date of birth but gathers around 75. So, now, suppose I kill a guy 74 years and 364 days old. How much have I killed him, really? He was probably going to die tomorrow anyway! It's hardly fair to say that I have "murdered" him. It's an abuse of the word! I haven't murdered ALL of him, only the last tiny little bit. You could say I have murdered one day of him, out of his 75 years worth of expected being. That's not even four tenths of one percent of one per cent.

You might then say, "Well, he might have lived to be a hundred if you hadn't killed him just now." Sure, but that extra quarter century would have been a bonus. We're talking about rights and expectations here. In fact, suppose I let him live now and he does lives to be a hundred. I should get CREDIT for helping him eke out that 33% bonus. I will have murdered him by a NEGATIVE amount, exactly minus one third.

Come to think of it, this reasoning explains why day-after abortion pills are so bad, but capital punishment is just dandy. If you do away with a day-old embryo, you cut his or her life expectancy by the 75 years plus an almost 9 months of pre-life. So you have not only murdered him or her entirely, you have murdered him or her by 75.75 divided by 75 = 101%. That extra one percent will get you to Hell one per cent faster. But say a 15 year-old commits a capital crime, gets tried as an adult, and after years on death row dies by lethal injection by our hands, by means of our instrument, the state, at age 25. That's only 66.66% murder, so it's 33.33% live-and-let-live, and St. Peter's going to smile on us all, some.

Anyway, let's get back to the partial genocide. Given that there are 2000 homeless people living on the streets of Seattle because the system can't be bothered to expand shelters. Given that the average street person dies before the age of 50. Assuming that average is exactly 50 for ease in estimation (one or two years won't matter much.) How much genocide is occurring?

The answer will be a pleasant surprise to those who want to say there is no genocide whatsoever. There is only 33% genocide! It isn't 0%, but it's in the right direction! This means that the system is NOT genocidal by a whole two-thirds!

Applying What We Have Learned

Our mayor has been conducting so-called "inhumane" sweeps of homeless encampments. Calculate how inhumane those sweeps are. Is the answer closer to A. 80%? B. 50%? Or C. 20%? Partial credit for showing partial work.

Torture Simplified

Warning: this won't be one of my more humorous efforts. Not only is the subject too sad, but I also think that I shouldn't have eaten that tuna fish casserole for lunch yesterday.

Continuing from last time and speaking of the value of a free press, has anyone out there reflected on the fact that CBS now plays an essential role in the briefing of the president?

If it weren't for 60 Minutes II, Bush wouldn't have known about the severity or the extent of Abu Ghraib abuses. Bush should publicly thank the 60 Minutes crew and invite them all to dinner at the White House. Bush should use the occasion to ask CBS to advise our military intelligence officers on how you actually learn things. For example they could explain to them that humiliating your sources doesn't work.

Or he could get Bob Woodward. Woodward got Bush and all sorts of administration officials under Bush to open up to him. I'm sure he didn't precede his interrogation of Bush by "softening him up" Pentagon style. He probably did it the way I would do it, by telling Bush what a great guy he is and what a cool president he's been, and "that tie looks absolutely fabulous on you, Sir," and "I'll bet you'll go down in history as the most compassionately conservative president we've ever had."

If I threw up during any of that I could blame it on something I had for lunch.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, on a scale so grand and epic it outdoes Hollywood. One hardly knows where to begin.

How about the fact that the Pentagon directed that some prisoners should receive "softening up" treatment prior to interrogations? Maybe that would be a good start.

So last October, when the Red Cross discovered that Iraqi prisoners were kept naked in dark barren cells for days at a time, and the interrogating officer said that the practice was just "part of the process," he was really describing a process that had been approved by the Pentagon.

Now to be fair where fair isn't deserved, the Pentagon's directive requires that such procedures only be used under orders from the top. But how does the Red Cross know who ordered what they saw? And how does the private who carries out the order in the prison to strip a prisoner know whether the original order came from a general or whether it came from the M. I. officer standing next to him telling him to do it?

The problem is, the description of what the Pentagon allows in the way of "softening up" (bad but not so bad) and the verbal descriptions of what was actually done are too easy to line up. I can easily imagine Rumsfeld, busy as he must be what with protecting the free world and expanding its borders by bombing the unfree world to bring freedom to it, would quickly skim a report of wrongdoing by prison guards at a military prison and not be alarmed.

He could have thought, "Oh, this isn't all that bad. They just got a little carried away doing what we told them to do. Hell, that's why we have a professional army, so we can expect our guys to have initiative."

Likewise it would have been easy to dismiss the Red Cross complaints. A general reviewing the complaints could easily convince him/herself that the Red Cross was misinterpreting the evidence. He/she could think that what they really saw was soldiers carrying out procedures that the Pentagon allows, procedures that would look similar to the abuse that was actually seen.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld reminds us all that it's abuse, not torture. That is so true, Rummy, and we thank you all from deep in our hearts for pointing that out to us.

Torture is when I threaten to electrocute you if you don't tell me where you hid the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Abuse is when I threaten to electrocute you so you'll tell me an hour from now where you hid the nonexistent weapons. See the difference?

Questions For A New Millenium

Recently a satisfied reader plied me with questions about the year almost ended. These are my answers.

Q. What did you do with your life this year?

I abused it, as usual.

Q. What was the biggest mistake you made this year?

Waking up.

Q. Did you meet any of your goals this year? Which one(s)?

I said to myself on 1/1/99, lets see if I can't be flat broke by the end of the year, so that while everyone else is stocking up for Y2K, I can look forward to dying of thirst and starvation the first week of 2000! And it's happened!

Q. Are you further towards some of your goals this year than you were at this time last year?

I am exactly one year closer to my goal of dying of extreme old age.

Q. What were your successes and failures?

I survived a trip to Cleveland.

Q. What did you learn?

I learned that I am allergic to Cleveland.

Q. What do you have still to learn?

Why did you take so long to ask? I have so much left to learn I will need another millennium to find all the answers:

What are the names of the Brady Bunch? Why was it called the "Rocky Squirrel & Bullwinkle Moose Show", when Bullwinkle was clearly the star? How may I withdraw $200 at a time from an ATM, even though I have no bank account and no credit cards, without being caught? Suggested by my ex-wife: could I be any more stupid? How many barking dogs does it take to change a light bulb?

How may I hotwire a 747? What day(s) is(are) garbage pickup? What is the song "Louie, Louie" about? Instead of making two-ply toilet paper, why don't they just make toilet paper that's twice as thick? Who actually watches Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee? Is there really a two-pack-a-day Barbie? Is that two packs of beer or two packs of cigs? Why? What does "Jedi" mean?

Compare and contrast: the production of maple syrup in Vermont, and the times you've been kissed by your aunt. How many words rhyme with "purple"? What does "mean" mean? Why were there four musketeers? What does cat toe-jam look like? Why don't cats want you to look between their toes? What do they have to hide? Are anarchists out of control or what?

Will English ever be spelled fonetikly? Iph naught, waigh naught? How many eyebrows does Brook Shields have? Did Monty Python have legs? How auld _was_ auld lang syne? Who was the first guy who ever said "I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest, baddest, m*f* in this whole valley of the shadow of death"? Why doesn't everyone just shoot "chartreuse" in the head?

Can you tell me the way to San Jose? What does chicken taste like? What is a dash of pepper? A dash of hippopotami? How many smidgeons make a pinch? Did Whitey really respect the Beave? How Tricky was Dick? Was it really easy to dance to, or were they just joshin'? Whose brilliant idea was poodles? Dachshunds? Irish red setters?

Compare and contrast: Brazilian hand-puppets, and a performance of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. What was Paraguay's finest hour? "I fought the law and the law won." What, exactly, did the law win? What would Palladin have done for a living if he ever lost his gun? Quick, what do you get when you cross Captain Kirk with a female alien elephant? Too late...

What happened to 001 through 006? Were their licenses revoked? If I were a little tea kettle, that wouldn't be my spout, would it? What was the strangest thing Mick Jagger ever did with his lips? Was Keith Richards involved? Was there a chihuahua in the room? Were lawyers for Taco Bell alerted?

Q. Why couldn't you have written this column entirely about Y2K?

I could have, but it wouldn't have made any sense.