Can We Try Cowboys And Sharks Next?

That would kind of rock. Or maybe Snakes on a Spaceship. I'm actually kind of enjoying the mashup movie playground, and to be honest, Cowboys and Aliens was, if somewhat derivative, at least not an actual fucking reboot. There were no Smurves, the A-Team did not show up, and Harrison Ford's character's kid was absolutely not Indiana Jones redux.

It's easy to get snotty about a movie called Cowboys And Aliens, but it was actually not a bad movie, and anyway, anyone who thought Firefly was fun needs to aim their contempt a little carefully.

The thing with the hat kept annoying me unreasonably though my partner did not notice it at all, and I honestly still don't know why, even after having it explained to me by the movie and by reviewers, the aliens were bothering to abduct people and experiment on them to find their weaknesses. Because on a planet with no sattelite technology, avoiding the humans would probably have been easy enough, and as far as I could tell the only reason anyone tried to fuck with the aliens at all was to get back the people they abducted. So, yeah, there was that, but a movie where the aliens come, mine gold from barren deserts, and disappear without a confrontation is probably pretty boring, so I'll give them a pass.

This is not necessarily a spoiler, but I will note that the aliens seem to take a fairly unsystematic approach to investigating the weaknesses of humans. After you've established that your disintegration ray disintegrates them, you may not need to start exploring the potential of The Pointy Stick. Disintegrating them kind of seems like you've solved your problem ("How can we get rid of these stupid human things?") and further messing about with poking holes in them seems like busywork.

The woman next to me appeared to have been unprepared for the possibility that there might be blood, and made louder-than-necessary "EEewewwYuuuuCK!!!!" noises every time someone got, you know, shot, or hit, or whatever. In her inner landscape, apparently, cowboys don't have guns, and she was apparently expecting them and the aliens to sit down and negotiate a settlement. Or maybe she stumbled into the wrong theater by mistake and spent an hour and a half wondering why they'd decided not to make them blue after all.

Almost everyone dies who you would expect to die, everyone lives who you would expect to live, the special effects were not terrible, and if you're plunking down fourteen bucks to see a movie called Cowboys and Aliens, you pretty much are getting what you are paying for and if you think it was a terrible movie but you were not paid to go see it, then you are an idiot because you cannot possibly have been expecting something else.

And I'm too lazy to look into it and see why this has suddenly become A Thing, but I would have found the "Depictions of characters smoking are not intended to make smoking look cool" end credits disclaimer somewhat less sad if there'd been an accompanying one about shooting people.

Happy Voluntary Homelessness And Finger Amputation Day!

Okay, between the migraines and the paranoia, I'm not the target audience for fireworks. I admit that. Growing up, getting stung by bees seemed like just something you had to put up with in summer, but burning yourself on a sparkler? That's just evidence you're an idiot. So, yeah, fireworks, not my thing.

But assuming you are totally into things that go bang and shit, I do have to wonder about the mindset of some of our neighbors. Two fire trucks go screaming by? Maybe you should put down the fireworks for, say, twenty minutes, just to not jinx yourself. Because, really? You're that secure in the mercy of your loving god? Even if I thought my gods were totally cool with everything I had ever done--which no one who believes in a deity should be--I'm not that convinced they don't enjoy a little entertainment enough to fuck with a fuse at that point. If you watched someone fall off a cliff, wouldn't you take a few steps backwards? Wouldn't you grab your kids and pull them back too? Apparently there's a stupid cluster in my neighborhood, I don't know. Something in the coffee.

And even if you lived in a world entirely free of irony, wouldn't common fucking sense say "Hey, the fire department is busy right now putting out some other idiot's fire. Maybe I should wait till they're back at the department before I risk having a house fire of my own." You are always risking that they are too busy to get to you fast, but in this case you know for a fact that this is the case... and you pull out the lighter anyway.

You know what? Maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

Even The Jell-O Thinks I'm A Buzzkill

So I had, who knows, stomach flu or something last week. (For the record? Someone who does as much barfing as I do has no business weighing the same as a manatee.) My partner brought me home stuff like rice and applesauce and berries and pudding.

Jell-O, it seems, has decided to shame me for my mental illness. "Frown," informs the lid helpfully, "is a four letter word!"

(Okay, skip over the obvious issue for the moment, because really, you think pudding can do math? Just let it go.)

Me, I was just delighted to learn that my fucking Jell-O thinks I'm bumming it out and wishes I would get my shit together. I'll take that from my mom, my shrink, and even the post it notes I leave around the house to remind me I'm just crazy, not actually desperate, but I'll be goddamned if I'm taking that from fucking snack food. The people at Jell-O got hate mail from me. I pointed out that by their idiot rules, SMILE is also a four letter word. Then I proceeded to use a good number of four letter words in context noting that "Wow, you suck for being unhappy" is not exactly helpful in a nation with epidemic untreated depression, let alone PTSD. Overkill? Maybe. But Jesus, who comes up with this crap? They have to know that a lot of people eat their unsatisfying junk food out of a desperate attempt to self-medicate for mental illness. And they've decided to shame you for being sad. Marketing fail, as the kids say.

I'll let you know if I get a reply. I doubt it, but what the hell. They're probably used to deleting hatemail from crazy people who take shit way too personally.

Evil or Stupid: Second Round!

I watch a lot of CSPAN. Like, a lot. I probably spend more time watching Washington Journal ("Where People Who Haven't Mastered The Telephone Yet Tell You How Often They Vote") than I do sleeping, and this is not coincidental what with me being on the coast that apparently does not exist as far as programmers are concerned. (Suck it up, East Coasters, you know damned well you're convinced you run the world's clocks.)

Anyway, Washington Journal is CSPAN's call in show ("You'd Be Amazed At The Correlation Between People Who Want To Talk About Fiat Money And People Who Forget To Turn Down Their Televisions"). Three hours of a host and three phonelines (Republican, Democrat and Independent), about half the time a guest. Brian Lamb used to read the newspaper at us a lot, and in fact someone just mentioned how much he missed that. I assumed it was some sort of chemical imbalance on my part. Nowadays people tweet and email comments as well. This is clearly one of those arenas where the char limit on Twitter is a good thing, if you've ever heard an Informed Voter try to explain about the Pan-America World Order. Frankly, if you can't explain your feelings on The Gold Standard in a tweet, you aren't trying. I'm almost positive those views have reference numbers by now.

So this morning they opened with "Tell us what you think the most important story of the day is". Which gets pretty quickly to my biggest complaint about CSPAN: Even screamingly egregious disinformation is almost never corrected by the hosts, and you have almost no chance of calling in to explain why the person who just explained that Most Homosexuals Are Pedophiles is a twerp before the end of the segment. This morning, Francis/Frances from Ft Lauderdale wanted to share with us, as the most important news story, that Planned Parenthood doesn't even do mammograms! They're an abortion factory!

This shit makes my head hurt, and not just because it was not one of the "most important story" choices. Honey, this is sandwich board and streetcorner territory, not Washington Journal ("Can't You At Least Wait Till The Sun's Up Before Screaming Invective At The TV?") fare.

Anyway, the second segment had the Grand Chancellor of PBS Totebag Technology or something on. Don't get me wrong, I love PBS. But holy shit are their executives and spokespeople boring. I assume on purpose. In fact, I assume for the same reason that WJ hosts respond to "We should just ship all the Muslim people back where they came from" with nothing more confrontational than "And we'll leave it there, in the papers this morning..."

Apparently they were deluged with tweets asking more or less the same thing two callers said, which was, I swear to God almost word for word, "Besides William F Buckley, can you name even one conservative you have ever had on PBS? Ever?"

The third time around, we were informed that "David Brooks doesn't count". Because I guess he's Silly Party or something.

Thing is, all of these callers and tweeters and emailers were awfully confrontational and clearly somewhere on the far side of annoyed though only one seemed to be actually angry. (That would be the guy who demanded to know "Where are your Tea Party voices?" He was reminded that before he went to Congress and started explaining that Postcards From Buster is theft, Rand Paul spent a good deal of time on his local PBS station ranting about runaway nanny-state government. This did not suffice.)

Don't get me wrong, fuck knows I spend a lot of time angry at CSPAN myself ("This weekend on Book TV, guy-you've-never-heard-of will be asking if Barack Obama wrote his autobiography, The Thing About My Dad."). PBS, not quite as often but it happens. Actually, I can answer both that question and the question of the day with four words: Tucker Carlson. (Oh, you're gonna go math on me? Apparently you don't mutter "That Prick" under your breath every time you say his name, and I think the problem here is your common sense, not my math skills.)

All of this is basically my long form version of asking if these people, vibrating with apparently sincere outrage, have actually not noticed, in their blind rage and persecution complexes, the other conservative views in the media, or if they're just gaming the ref. Because every time they said something like that, the Archduke of Non-Caillou-Related Programming explained that he felt conservative voices were represented but that he wanted and expected more of them in the fullness of time.

Me, I'd have just laughed. But I suppose there's a reason I'm not the Mayor of Sesame Street.

So, Conservatives: Self-Martyred or Disingenuous? (Both is an acceptable answer.)

Comment character limits, Jesus, who dreamed that up?

You know why I rant at any unfortunate rightwinger who enters my range when some random nutjob commits violence against anybody? Because they have spent the last thirty years tearing apart whatever feeble nets we have had in place to help people before they get to that point. They are determined to shrink government and lower taxes, whatever the costs to society. And one of those costs is that people who are mentally ill can get ahold of guns, can kill people, can kill themselves, can destroy lives. And there's no reason for it. We can catch most of these people before they hurt someone. But it costs too much, it means having mental hospitals in someone's neighborhood, it means decent background checks on people buying guns, it means universal health care, and not just any health care, but universal mental health care. And if you think these people think people with cancer don't deserve help, you better believe they don't think people with mental disorders deserve help, because, hell, they're probably just faking it anyway. Remember the Newt Gingrich/Rush Limbaugh nonsense that disability to help mentally disorderd kids was causing child abuse because kids were being beaten by welfare moms for not getting "crazy money"? This has been going on a very long time. Conservatives don't want to help anyone, but they especially don't want to help those creepy crazy people whose problems are probably just drug-related anyway. Better to dismiss them after the fact as just the random acts of evil, and pretend there are no underlying causes we can do anything about.

Mental illness destroys people. Most of the time it does it in ways that are less obvious, people dying of drug overdoses as they desperately self-medicate, people dying on the streets because they are non-functional, people killing themselves. And it doesn't have to happen, much of the time, if we just accept that we are all in this together, that we are our brothers' keepers. A decent health care system, a decent welfare system, a decent disability system, a decent education and screening system, a decent drug treatment program--even just laws that keep the guns away from people who really shouldn't have them.

We can catch a lot of these people before they quietly destroy themselves and their loved ones, or before they loudly destroy strangers in a parking lot. If we only are willing to accept that it's a priority, that it's a problem, even when there aren't a dozen people bleeding out in a public school or a mall or a workplace. But to do that, we'd have to accept that we have some kind of responsibility to help these people, even if only out of self-defense. And eliminationist rhetoric aside, we've been inundated for decades with conservative policy and politics that say government big enough to help people who can't help themselves is too big, too expensive.

Look, I'm schizophrenic. I'm out, and this week has been awful on several levels both in my own head and dealing with the suddenly very concerned people who desperately want me back on the antipsychotics that had me suicidal for the last year. My partner, in a dying industry, has had five jobs in three years, just started a new one, and after some debate has insurance that will cover me, but you better believe we're an experiment. And if I get too costly--and trying to sort out medications so that everyone is adequately convinced I am not a danger to myself or others (I have never been violent, most of us aren't, but hey, one nutjob and everybody starts freaking out) is going to get really expensive really fast--they may consider the experiment failed and drop partner coverage. Plus this sort of shit always leaves me worrying that hey, maybe I could wind up violent, and I would do literally anything to prevent that happening, which in this case means going back on drugs that leave me even less functional than I am now.

I know exactly how much harm the "We are none of us responsible to or for anyone else" policies of the Randian supermen do. I see it when one of us destroys his or her own life. And yes, I get outraged. But usually no one pays much attention until one of us destroys someone else's life. Never mind the violent talk and the ads and soundbites explicitly designed to make the other party sound like baby- and grandma-killing jackbooted terrorist-sympathizing fascists (and I think it absolutely does have an impact, but let's say just for right now that it doesn't), I watched a guy from a right wing think tank on CSPAN the other morning explain with contempt that liberals believe that we're all responsible for each other, as though that were the most revolting notion possible. *This* is what they've been doing since Reagan and before. And now that they're finally drowning what's left of our society in the bathtub, they expect us to keep quiet when the bodies float to the surface and they use them to as soapboxes to do more of it.

I'd have been outraged if it'd been Dick Cheney, though I deeply loathe that man. I'm outraged because, while we can't say for sure, there's a good chance this guy could have been helped before he destroyed so many lives. I'm outraged because we are absolutely determined not only not to learn from this, but to use it to actually make things worse. And that's crazy. Me, the unmedicated schizophrenic, is telling you that that. Is. Crazy.

It is worthy of comment, it is worthy of a search for explanations and ways to prevent it in the future, it is worthy of outrage.

You Mean I Have to Pick One of These to Link to?

You would hope that in the wake of realizing people are actually using those Second Amendment rights on them, that Congress would consider some reasonable gun control measures. Fat chance. "Your money or your life" apparently only works on people who realize there's a choice. As far as they can tell, it's still "The NRA's money or some random constituent's life."

Rep Peter King has proposed something that would make it illegal to knowingly carry a firearm within a thousand feet of, well, Rep Peter King.

You know, if this thing passes, I'm just handcuffing myself to a fucking Senator.

"Stalking? What stalking? I'm just availing myself of your safe zone. Oh, and today we'll be escorting at an abortion clinic. You got mittens, yeah?"

Probably Just The Moon

My partner watched Casino Jack. I was interested, as my partner is no political junkie.

"It was totally unrealistic! There was this creep named Grover something. What kind of name is Grover?"
"That would be Grover Norquist?"
"I dunno. The only Grover I know of is a Muppet."

This at-least-partly-tongue-in-cheek conversation is my way of getting into the weeds of what happened in Tucson. I think everybody worth listening to agrees that it's horrible. It is admittedly disturbing how many people aren't worth listening to.

There's a lot of "He read this book" and "He sounded like this guy" and "He said this thing" speculation going on on the internets and talk radio and Washington Journal, where of course, even sane people gather to say crazy things in the name of the First Amendment.

Reasonable People are sticking to their "Both sides say awful things" centrism, coupled with the "He was just a nut" Just-Sos.

The media, typically, is running with their "It's time for an ethics panel!" theme.

As Doghouse Riley points out--and if you're wasting your time here and haven't been there yet you probably need more than just a link, but at least there's that--pretty much no one is bothering to ask how a nutjob legally got ahold of a gun, because, you know, it's Arizona, and beyond that, pretty much any of us could get a gun with only a little fudging of the facts, if that.

Hacks of all stripes are industriously exploiting this: I just watched* a public talk radio and TV figure hold up his book on CSPAN and point out that he wrote a book about why we should all stop saying such awful things, followed immediately by the panel host reading an email from a random person asking who shares blame for this and who might find this an opportunity to advance their agendas. He's not the only hack by any means, hell, he isn't even the only hack on this segment, but man was the irony stark.

Anti-government types, whether they are anti-government in general or specifically anti-this-Administration, are attempting to distance themselves from it, because, really, the second most prominent feature of this guy is that he is anti-government. (Probably more the former than the latter, but people who are anti-government do tend to oppose more strongly the party that is painted as Big Government.) I can understand the desperation to distance, because the most prominent feature that can be observed about him is that he's fucking crazy. As a fucking crazy myself, and the type of fucking crazy that is usually fingered when this shit happens, a paranoid schizophrenic, admittedly one of my first thoughts was, Oh, shit, I hope this wasn't one of us. It wasn't my first thought, but it was shamefully not long in coming. So if I were a fan of firearms, or an avowed enemy of government, or if I'd ever said anything bad about this particular Congresswoman, or I knew the guy, or I shared a name with the guy--if there was any other point of commonality between me and a killer, I'd be distancing myself on that grounds too.

So I can sympathize with that impulse, it was one of mine too. I don't think it's going to work, though, not for all of us. Even without the "You'd have to be crazy to do something like this" assumption that we all sort of make, it's reasonably clear the guy is mentally ill. Well, a lot of people are, and this is not the same as "not responsible for their own actions", so I'll just let that sit there for a minute without trying to feel either guilty for or persecuted by the mental stability of a killer, because if nothing else, it's an awfully fucking juvenile reaction and lacks class.

More practically, I think the "First Amendment" vs "Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument has some merit. We believe, as a society, that the messages we broadcast have an impact on people. We recognize certain types of people as more susceptible to these influences, children for example, and yes, the mentally ill. So there's even some merit to the media reaction of navel-gazing editorials proclaiming everybody does it and everybody's to blame. Which is not to say that hacks aren't exploiting that to advance their agendas, sell ad space, or distance themselves from past instances of incivility on their own part.

But beyond that, maybe there's something deeper going on. And this is something I think Doghouse was trying to say, so go back and click on that link and read his take if you haven't already. The non-reptile parts of your brain will thank you for it anyway.

So, maybe this is what happens when we start to regard politics as entertainment, as a spectator sport, as something like pro-wrestling with winners and losers and sponsors and spectators, where everybody knows it isn't real and no one is really affected, where sometimes people just get carried away and do crazy things in the stands.

An awful lot of this stuff is described as "throwing red meat to the crowd", or "pumping up the base", and I often get the impression that no one is expected to take it seriously. In fact, I often get the impression that no one *is* taking it seriously. We're told who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and the outcome of any election may affect who gets more money and bragging rights, but everyone knows politics isn't *real*.

And let me stop now and address the people with the excuses. I don't know if you're listening to me, but maybe there's some version of cosmic osmosis. I do know people read here, and maybe some of them will find a way to make the point to some of you in ways you'll hear:

Politics is real. That's not just something the Meet The Press version of a soccer hooligan believes. It *is* real. Everything in politics affects real people. Three hours of talk radio ranting about "tax and spend welfare state liberals" isn't just a pep rally, and even if it was, that's bad enough. Because getting people to believe we're none of us responsible for or to one another, getting people to vote as though they believe that, that's not good. It doesn't just mean tax breaks for you and the people who contribute to your campaign or buy your books or listen to your radio show or watch your channel. That money has to come from somewhere. And pretty often, especially with so few things to take the money from anymore, it comes from programs that care for the people among us who most need help. Just as an example, it comes from the sorts of programs that provide care and medication and therapy and concrete help to people who are mentally ill.

So even if you want to pretend that the the hateful talk doesn't influence the mentally ill, even if you want to pretend the shooter was a left winger, even if any of your excuses are remotely valid, I'm still laying this at the door of the people who say these things. Because you spend so much time telling us we're not responsible for or to each other, and when people start to believe that, civilization breaks down.

You can't pretend you're being civil, you can't demand the other side be civil, while you're helping to destroy civilization.


* Okay, it was over twelve hours ago now, but beyond the fact that it can take me hours to write a blog comment, much less a post, I thought it might be a good idea to let this sit and reread it later to make sure I was saying what I actually meant to say, to the best of my ability. By now, of course, it's all been said faster and smarter and better by others, but if you're only blogging for an audience rather than saying what you have to say, you're probably in for a rough road on the statistics alone.