1 everything: a distraction
“I really don’t care about the Depp/Heard case. I want to see the Epstein/ Maxwell client list released.”
I think the Depp/Heard trial and verdict were severe blows to the “Men Are Scum” project that gained maximum momentum with “MeToo” and went beyond fairness, logic and evidence to paint all men as Perps (guilty until proven innocent) and all women as saints and victims. If it was a distraction, I think it was an opportunistic one. I don’t think it was planned by TFIC*, though Big Media has tried to spin it in the Master Narrative’s favor (as it tries to spin everything). I think, in fact, I’m detecting that, among the “Resistance,” the tendency to spin the trial as a fake and preserve Heard (clearly an air-headed gold digger with severe emotional problems, aka: a product of this culture) as a victim of “misogyny” is a result of Big Media’s efforts at damage control. The parapolitical bloggers asserting that the trial was “Fake” are insinuating that TFIC never fuck up, never suffer a loss, never miscalculate, never shit their collective pants and that nothing happens without their permission. I can see how TFIC would like us to believe that they’re Omnipotent and Omniscient and anointed by Destiny to see their kinkiest dreams realized… but I don’t see it. What I see is a ruling structure that is A) far from monolithic and B.) still putting most of its energy into trickery (Absolute Power does whatever it wants without needing to waste resources on subterfuge). I think it’s more reasonable to assume that said bloggers (of “The Resistance”) have been effectively bamboozled. The same bloggers would have one believe that Putin’s recent outing of NATO, as all bark and toothless bite, and nearly-impotent, was “all part of the plan” too. NATO has been swatting around Third World “armies,” for so long, that we all began to buy into the hype. NATO is like a bully-daddy who’s been abusing his kids, for so long, that he wasn’t ready to face a bigger bully-daddy, with a scarily unemotional face, on the playground, and so NATO-bully yelled embarrassing taunts while pushing his kids in the middle and backing discreetly toward the playground gate…
What we should be keeping our eyes on, during this period, as Schwabite TFIC recover from a few major setbacks, is the re-deployment of Der Bumble Trump. It’s obvious that 2020 was such a roaring success, such a high point, in the annals of Sinister World Domination Gambits, owing largely to the use of Der Bumble Trump as an unparalleled figure of Orwellian hate-harvesting. Der Bumble Trump was our world’s Emmanuel Goldstein. Do you remember the character from the book? Years were invested in Trump’s remaking into such a character. Do you think Trump’s ascent to media prominence was an accident? Was the “New Coke” debacle an accident**? Some accidents are accidents; one has to consider the contextualizing details. Der Bumble Trump was sold as a Presidential “accident,” (how could such an accident be possible? The “voting” mechanism has been under control for generations); he was the Bizarro Pied Piper, an effective vector of reverse-psychology who managed to sell the Libralish Masses on the patently ridiculous FLU COUP, and the toxic CLOT SHOT, by merely appearing to scoff at both (after investing rather heavily in the latter, reaping vast profits). The momentum of the Global Brainwashing Cluster Fuck began to wane as soon as Trump exited the stage. The corners began to crumble. They are therefore bringing him back. Just watch, kids. Just watch.
Where was I …?
Depp is a creep, Heard is a psycho, that kind of Hollywood marriage of impulse, convenience and recrimination is standard. The Depp/Heard divorce only went “Global” when amplified by Heard’s artificially prominent position, as a “MeToo” figurehead, in the first place. But the implications of Depp’s “win” are useful… to ordinary men and women. How many innocent men are accused of spousal and/or child abuse, every year, as a standard divorce case tactic? This may change that landscape, a little. Perhaps a little balance is restored. “Believe all women” is the rallying cry of gender-bigot lunatics. The irony being that the one concession one can make to the “Men are The Problem” crowd… that most men are physically stronger than most women (however equitably psychopathy may be distributed among the sexes) will now get you (drum roll)… cancelled.
Re: Maxwell: I wonder if she’s valuable enough, to TFIC, to get an expensive fake death and a new identity, in the land of palm trees and Apartheid, like faux-billionaire Epstein…? I somehow doubt it. I somehow suspect her end will be genuine.
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*TFIC = The Fuckers in Charge, as we know
**I utilize this snarky comparison fully realizing that many won’t get its relevance. I accept responsibility for this comedic editorial decision.
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2 a million new seeds of grief
A tragic story of Fads and Foolishness, which I have access to, more from the outside than the inside, now, is the story of my best friend in college, Thad.
Thad and I met in the gymnasium of that college about a month or two after I’d arrived in 1977. I was spotting my best female friend, Mary Johnson, who was 5’11” but doing gymnastics on parallel bars. I was there with Mary and to our left, on a tumbling mat, was this guy with super-long (like down to his ass) blond hair, in overalls, looking like a classic hippie exactly ten years too late. It often blows my mind to think that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released just a decade before I went to college.
It turned out that Thad and I had similarly absurd senses of humor. We became chums and would listen to LPs from The Firesign Theater, together, memorizing the dialogue, which is ironic, now, because one of the two surviving members of The Firesign Theater is my FACEBOOT friend, and a major disappointment: I always assumed they were Snarky Radicals but in my agéd wisdom I see now that they were only court jesters and part of the acceptable Show Biz spectrum of the West… far from the dangerous pariahs I mistook them for in my nymphatic state. I left college after a year and several people left with me, including Thad and the girl-woman, from deeply-racist stock, who would con me into becoming a father less than two years later.
The difference between Thad and yours truly being that I learned, at the age of 20, after that first existentially-unjust burn. I learned at the creepy hands of the upper-middle class girl-woman con artist. I began to understand just how fraught with traps the world is. Thad, on the other hand, remained as foolishly gullible, at 40, as he was at 20. Thad and the Con Artist and I moved into a grown up apartment off-campus. Time worked its disinterested magic and all sorts of complicated twists ensued but they are tangential to the narrative thrust. I will stick to the narrative thrust. I am reporting on a case history.
The thing about Thad was that he was some sort of idiot savant.
I’ll never forget the night, in the student dining hall, that Thad played the glasses. I think it was a Thursday night because Thursday night was “fancy food” night and there was a festive mood, the holiday-like aura of plenty, everybody there, everybody from our circle, the circle centered on the denizens of the 2nd floor of our dormitory, because nobody skipped the “fancy food” night. Beautiful Mary was there, Mac was there, the girl-woman con artist was there, Eric was there and so on. Thad arranged twelve little water glasses, filled them with water, carefully poured a portion of water out of each glass until he had a more-or-less accurately-pitched scale of twelve notes, as from the second-to-highest octave on a piano, and played the main motif from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with a spoon striking the glasses. The cafeteria exploded with applause (though I recall a bitchy-faced girl, who was seated at the designated “Black” table, a table I shunned like I would have shunned Auschwitz, complaining that she had a “headache” so the concert stopped with the Beethoven). Thad played that famous (Clockwork Orange-identified) melody flawlessly on a musical instrument of his own improvised creation.
Quite impressive and, yet, tellingly, not linked to any great actual musical talent, of Thad’s, on the piano or anything else. It’s as though Thad had access to a large cloud of potential talent and intelligence but the cloud was too diffuse to condense or cohere into anything. Maybe Thad’s is a kind of genius that never manifests externally but produces incredible internal effects untranslatable to anyone outside his skin. I’ve thought about the issue of Thad’s mind for years: he was the dumbest smart person I’ve ever known. He baffled me. I had a tendency to assume his high intelligence and then he’d do or say such a simple-minded thing that I’d just stare at him (or the phone, channeling his voice, with him at the other end). I always thought he was unique, in this sense, but I’m beginning to reassess this belief. There may well be an army of Thads out there. Taking a reading of the sanity/intelligence of Social Media produces disturbingly Thaddish pings, I think, and in great numbers.
But Thad was my first.
For example: one bright day in 1979 we were walking along a semi-desolate, parking-lot-blighted, stretch of Lake Street, in Minneapolis, and we happened across a man seated at a card table in a corner of a parking lot near the sidewalk. Out of curiosity, we approached the table, which was stacked with books. The guy was a Scientology recruiter, and while I laughed off his spiel (he literally said, to me, right in front of Thad: “Maybe if you find the entry level too simple, you could be a leader in one of the groups…?”), Thad was intrigued. Years (and hundreds or thousands of dollars) later, he finally got out. And plunged right into EST. And so on.
[Sidebar: when the girl-woman con-artist (of incredibly racist stock) conned me into inseminating her (by promising that a non-existent doctor had pronounced her sterile “because: an infection of my, um, cervix”) the con worked because I could not imagine why anyone would want to trick a penniless 20-year-old into being a co-parent. The flaw in my reasoning being that I projected, upon the con artist, the ability to reason. She conned me into paternity the same way that a violent moron might kill someone, over a trifle, because the moron lacks the intellectual capacity to imagine the dire consequences of an irreversible act of such gravity. I have learned, therefore, never to project my intelligence (or decency) on to an opponent. But that’s not the main point of this detour in the story. The point is that I remember an afternoon with my infant son, in the front yard of the Hippie Mansion that I lived in, then, with his con-artist-mother. Son was crawling around, on a blanket in the grass, in the sunshine and Thad was explaining some idiotic philosophic theory, inspired by the presence of my son. I remember this sentence from his gobbledygook: “You know: babies don’t care if they die. They don’t care if they’re hit by a car. You know?” He was making the case for a que sera, sera approach to human life, popular among Hippies and pseudo-Hippies of the era. I countered (while making a mental note to never let him babysit): “Thad, a baby doesn’t understand what a car is but of course a baby has a survival instinct! Why do they bother sucking milk [from a bottle administered by me because my poor son’s pathological liar mother also has inverted nipples] if there’s no survival instinct? Why are they capable of experiencing the warning-signal called pain?” I remember that very dumb thing Thad said that day and I shudder to consider how it connects to what happened.]
Sometime around the year I met my future Wife, Thad met his future wife, too, and the two of them married and then almost immediately fell for a Real Estate scam they needed costly lawyers to back out of. I’m not certain of the time frames of these recollections but the core events happened and they all feed into the awful climax of this narrative.
Far worse than falling for various cons and scams, Thad and his wife fell for the Ambient Scams of the Culture… the bullshit fads and trends that too many well-meaning, Liberal-ish people fall for. All the stupid fucking ice bucket challenges and what have you. The turn-on-a-dime herdthink switching: left, right, left, right, 2+2=5. The tragedy of Thad and his wife is frightening for not being rare enough. What they let happen to them is happening to hundreds, or thousands, of people as I type this.
Thad’s wife is an attention-demanding mega-irritant who wants to be a world-famous writer/ actress/ poet/singer, has all the shit-eating-permagrin headshots, takes all the classes, buys every affirmation tape, enters every competition and networks like a demon to, for example, get her bizarre/tacky/ histrionic “One Woman Play” voted the “best” regional production of her neighborhood for the year 2018, etc, as if networking for the affirmation of such an award magically confers the talent she wishes the award really signified. All she really wants is fame/ adulation/ status, however it may come to her, and, pursuant to that, and here’s the tragic crux of the narrative: Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy is another route to early 21st century status, of a kind... but this is Munchhausen in a new and subtle and postmodern way.
As in: I noticed, sometime around the early Aughties, that many of my Liberalish Yuppie friends (who didn’t even know each other) suddenly started announcing that their boy-kids were “probably Gay and we totally support him!” I mean, at least four couples I knew, with boy-kids, made this announcement, in the seasonal, photo-clogged, braggy group emails it was once popular for all of us to share and they all made this announcement around the same time. What a coincidence. They each somehow detected a telltale spark of homosexuality in kids who could barely walk or talk (and, in fact, I remember my Son’s mother making a similar announcement, to me, when he was eight-ish, way ahead of the curve, in the ’80s): twenty years later, all those kids are, “sadly,” each straight as an expensive work bench.
Except…
When Thad’s wife was pregnant with their son, Thad told me the son came to him in a dream and requested the super-feminine imaginary name “LaDarla” (not the actual imaginary name, because the actual name, dropped here, will lead you directly to the private materials, and identities, of people I would feel guilty leading you to). Thad and his wife therefore submitted to their Egoistic wishes in the guise of an imaginary version of their then-fetal son, and the boy was legally named LaDarla upon his birth. How stupid would one have to be, really, to do what an imaginary version of a fetus told one to do? They let his blond hair grow very long, and, by the time LaDarla was seven, he looked like a pretty little girl… much prettier, in fact, than his little sister, who barely managed to carve a place for herself in a family for which LaDarla was the Virtue-Signalled Star.
Years zipped by, Thad and I had a falling out (long story short: Thad wrote me an email about his wife’s extensive digestive problems; in the course of the subsequent exchange he mentioned that his wife had been a strict vegan for years; I pointed out the problematic evolutionary red flag that humans don’t have the Ruminant’s ability to extract maximum nutrients from grasses/ salad; he defended veganism as the perfect diet; I countered, with brutal effectiveness, that Thad’s opening email was about his wife’s terrible digestive problems… and we never spoke again! laugh)… and then one day, about a year later, Thad proudly group-mailed all his friends (including me):
LaDarla is graduating from High School! Article in the local paper! LaDarla is interviewed about HER Art (the Art not especially good, as indicated by photos in the article, but the Art isn’t the article’s hook) and, more importantly, LaDarla is interviewed about the STRUGGLES OF BEING TRANS.
The photo of LaDarla (who is 18 at the oldest) shows what looks like an overweight 30-year-old (you’re probably aware that vegans tend to supplement their caloric-intake-deficits with sweets?) with long, thinning hair and bad teeth. The photo is like a final twist, or jump-scare, in a Body Horror flick. It brought slight tears to my eyes. I wanted to hug the poor kid. I was shocked and then suddenly angry.
Spineless Thad and his status-craving wife destroyed their son for social media “likes,” but they sold it to themselves as “letting her be herself”. They sold this act of betrayal, to themselves, as an act of Love. I still don’t have the nerve to find out if LaDarla had her penis removed.
I don’t care who it is that pre-pubertal kids think they may hypothetically be attracted to, or identify as, when the time comes. What I want for kids of all kinds are wise and caring parents. Wise and caring enough to risk the agonies of appearing to be Uncool in the act of protecting their children. What I abhor are irreversible procedures mutilating perfectly healthy kids because of Fad and Fashion. The ’90s, MTV-spread contagion of septum piercings and clit rings are child’s play… something to wink at… in comparison.
Who is so stupid, as a parent, to not know that kids go through phases, change their minds all the time, and that a parent’s job is to encourage the grand or harmless passions and moderate/ work around/ protect against the dangerous stuff? Even worse, these irreversible gender-jamming procedures are clumsy mutilations that don’t work: the supposed “vaginas” they make, surgically, are, in essence, open wounds that have to be forever kept, from sealing shut, with a device called a dilator. Can you imagine? Opting to have your penis removed to have an open wound installed, instead, because of a bunch of trendy lies and social engineering hype, and Pie in the Sky, on The Internet?
And if they can’t create a functioning vagina, imagine what the fake “penises” they whip up, are like? The Hippocratic Oath used to be “First, do no harm” now it’s “Whatever you can get away with if the client signs a legal form and you make a profit”.
That little boy, “LaDarla,” lived in a fantasy world similar to the kinds of fantasy worlds all children live in: wonderfully disconnected from consequences. But then his idiotic parents, instead of protecting him from his own naïve ignorance of the actual world, doomed him with their own naïve ignorance of the actual world, and their greed for trendy approval, and the kid was shoved through an unforgivingly one-way portal into Real Life, like Seth Brundle, in the ’80s remake of The Fly, re-materializing as a pitiable casualty of Hubris… but at the very beginning of his adult life. Obviously sick from the virtue-signalling “vegan” diet his idiotic parents followed, that is the least of his problems; the most reversible of his problems. I hope he eventually takes his parents to court.
I hope all kids who suffered similar fates do.
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3. EXCERPT from F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE LAST TYCOON (a not terribly-good book but useful in this case)
It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn, and the little silver fish rocked offshore waiting for 10.16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide, and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop on the sand. A Negro man came along the shore towards them, collecting the grunion quickly, like twigs, into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful, round the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.
“I wish for another pail,” the Negro man said, resting a moment.
“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.
“I used to go to Malibu, but they don’t like it, those moving-picture people.”
A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly, leaving the sand alive again.
“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.
“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?”
“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”
“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me too, but I’m fed up with them.”
The wind had changed a little – the waves were stronger farther down, and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.
“What’s your work?” the Negro asked Stahr.
“I work for the pictures.”
“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”
“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.
“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”
Stahr watched him, and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.
“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray, but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again, and this time he looked at her indifferently.
“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.
“Seems as if they don’t know what they are for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”
Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone, and still they came. The Negro’s two pails were full, and finally he went off over the beach towards the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.
Stahr and Kathleen walked back to the house, and she thought how to drive his momentary blues away.
“Poor old Sambo,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you call them poor old Sambo?”
“We don’t call them anything especially.” After a moment, he said, “They have pictures of their own.”
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ADDENDUM
Come on Friends… you’re not this stupid, right? Nobody is… right?
THE IMPERIALIST 