Makes Sense
From Michael DiGioia, advertising creative director and one-time colleague of mine on the arts magazine Third Coast:
So, should we give school librarians silencers?
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Killer Comedy
Aw, hell, how about another? From comedian Dana Gould:
The pro-AR-15 argument comes down to “preventing state tyranny.”
In other words, “I need an AR-15 because one day I might have to mow down a bunch of US soldiers. Don’t get me wrong, I support the troops. I just want to be ready to murder as many as possible if necessary.”
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Psychosis
The story circulating around Bloomington social media circles right now: A person recently was out hiking in the Griffy Lake Nature Preserve and met up with another hiker — who was carrying an AR-15 and was decked out in battle equipment.
Jesus Holy Christ.
The person, the story goes, asked the fellow if it was a paintball gun or the real thing. The guy carrying it brusquely replied it was the real deal and added what he was doing is perfectly legal.
Admittedly, the story by now may well have taken on aspects of the old telephone game. At this point, who knows precisely how accurate any of the details are but, really, it’s reasonable to assume that a citizen did indeed encounter a guy packing some serious heat.
Because this is freaking Indiana and we are in the midst of a pathological orgy of gun worship these days.
Image: Lisa Marie Pane/AP
I’ve long held that societies occasionally suffer nervous breakdowns or otherwise lose their collective minds. Hell, pretty much the entire world lost its mind from the years 1914 through 1945. Think of a nation — even a world population — as a single entity, a hive of interconnected thinkers, a network of neurons. For years, for instance, the vast majority of humans on this planet thought it perfectly acceptable for one group to own the members of another group and force them to do its labor. Today, no one in the world would admit to entertaining such a thought. I’m not saying slavery isn’t still practiced, only that it’s impolite to brag about it. So, yeah, the lot of us often think, act, and react as one.
In this holy land right now, there’s a group of folks who are banding together via their common and growing mental illness. They think efficient, affordable weapons of death are swell things to have around.
Let’s drop all the bullshit about Freedom and the Founding Fathers and the citizens’ duty to resist tyranny. These people fondle guns because they get off on it. This is a group of folks in America right now who are suffering a nervous breakdown or are otherwise losing their minds.
And I’m not interested at all any more in any argument to the contrary.
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I’ll Take Chocolate
Something I learned today via the crossword puzzle. The clue: First single by a rapper to reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Answer: Ice Ice Baby.
Sheesh. Imagine aspiring to be a rapper and knowing that Vanilla Ice is one of your art’s founding fathers. I’d quit.
It’d be like me learning the best selling book of all time was Fifty Shades of Grey.
Wait minute! E.L. James has sold more than 125 million copies of her septic trilogy. There’s no hope for me.
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Lit Bit
BTW, just scanning some book titles while formulating the above entry, I came across this one: Does God Love Michael’s Two Daddies? Hmm. One reviewer’s take: the author “gets around to answering the question posed in her title: God kinda loves them, but God would love them a whole lot more if they stopped sodomizing each other.”
The author’s name: Sheila K. Butt.
What an odd planet this is!
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Hormone-Driven Humanity
The news comes fast and furious these days. Do you even remember who Rob Porter was?
He was a political aide to President Gag, becoming White House Staff Secretary the day Li’l Duce was inaugurated. He held that position until three weeks ago, when he was compelled to resign because a couple of his ex-wives claimed he slugged them around.
One of those exes claims he began to get abusive with her immediately after their wedding, during their honeymoon as a matter of fact.
Sex Mad.
This particular ex-, named Jennifer Willoughby, claims Porter got rough with her because, well, her sex drive didn’t precisely match his. She says:
He started calling me names, calling me a “fucking bitch,” how I behaved was “fucking ridiculous” and most of that was instigated around my not having sex with him often enough on our honeymoon.
I find that telling. I’ve speculated before about what I consider the overblown sex drives of too many extremely high-achieving men. I mean, just pick up a biography of a man who’s risen to the top of his profession, the very top, and it’s an awfully good bet that guy’ll be a walking hard-on. Bill Clinton. Our current president. Tiger Woods. Hugh Hefner. Frank Sinatra. Harvey Weinstein. Napoleon. Picasso. Peter the Great. George Gordon (Lord Byron), JFK. Genghis Kahn. Jack Nicholson. Hell, some guys even have five-figure “conquests” attached to their reps, to wit:
- Warren Beatty — 12,775
- Wilt Chamberlain — 20,000
- Fidel Castro — 35,000
That’s right; those are the numbers, purportedly, of women each knucklehead slept with in his life. Even if the numbers are inflated (most likely), cut them in half and those are still bizarre amounts of empty sex.
Of course, there are those high-achievers who are faithful and monogamous. Heck, Richard Nixon probably rarely had the urge to dance horizontally with Pat. And J. Edgar Hoover managed, most likely, to stifle every single sexual impulse he’d ever had, leading him to become, well, J. Edgar Hoover. But I’m leaning toward thinking they’re the outliers.
It’s the guys who are chronic sundials who, generally, become generals, heads of state, moguls, and centers for championship basketball teams.
And then you hear about all these frat boys and high school lunkheads who try to justify forcing one young woman or another into sex by saying, I couldn’t stop myself.
Might they not be telling a certain truth? Maybe there are guys on this planet whose sex desire is so overwhelming, so irresistible, so damned pathological that they can’t stop themselves from humping other human beings. And, I’m positing, it appears they are the kinds of numbskulls who shoot to the top in far too many areas of human endeavor.
Perhaps the early psychologists and psychiatrists were right — sex is the reason men strive to get ahead.
I consider myself a reasonable character. If a woman didn’t want to have sex with me, I did not view that as an emergency. First off, I’d know long before push would come to shove that a woman wasn’t looking at me with dewy eyes, so there’d never really be any kind of dramatic moment when she have to throw up the stop sign. I get the feeling that too many of my gender brethren (Is that redundant? If so, you get what I’m getting at.) are so over-stimulated vis-à-vis their dates or their co-workers or their grad students or their assistants or the hopeful stars of their planned blockbuster movies that they can’t even pick up on clear and obvious nonverbal cues.
Heck, if a woman didn’t want to rumba with me, I was perfectly satisfied to go home and read myself to sleep. Tomorrow, I always knew, would be another day.
There was no crazy, inexorable drive within me either to get laid or to defeat all competitors in the writing racket so that I might emerge one day on the Nobel award ceremony stage. I never cared enough about either goal.
Could it be that human history has been written by a bunch of sex-mad males? We know for a fact that history has been manufactured by, at the very least, some kind of generic mad-males.
I’m willing to lay good odds we’re a psychotic species because our men are drunk with testosterone. How else would you describe a guy who berates his newlywed wife, calling her names, tossing fists and elbows around, just because she wants to wait a few minutes or even a few hours before their next mindless physical coupling.
I’ll bet even more money that, one day, when we get this testosterone thing under control we’ll get ourselves under control.
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