Conquering For Peace

 Roughly 40 years ago I stopped being fazed when people disagreed with me. One of the things people around me disagreed with was the Sabra and Shatila massacre: I said it was just plain wrong and that Israel should not have allowed it, because it was immoral and unfair.

Some people disagreed with me because the Palestinians were "terrorists" or closely connected with them. Some of those thought Israel and its buddies were doing God's work, some supported Israel and its allies/proxies for secular reasons. It made me sad when people disagreed with me about what I saw as a basic moral issue.

Some people agreed with me that it was wrong for Israel to let the Lebanese fascists slaughter civilians, but said it was wrong because TheJews(R) were evil. And some people agreed with me that it was wrong but attributed the evil to Capitalist Imperialism. I disagreed with both attributions: I thought it was wrong because it's wrong to massacre civilians, regardless of who does it. It made me sad when people agreed with me for what I saw as the wrong reasons.

Since then I've studied the history of the "Middle East" going back 3000 years, and what I see is the old pattern of people slaughtering each other, both in battle and in massacres, over ethnic and/or religious differences. It doesn't matter who's doing what to who at any given time, there's always some tribal conflict going on. In 1982 in Lebanon the Falange Party was a right-wing Christian tribe of Arabs; in 2023 in Gaza Israel has become in effect another tribe of Arabs. In both cases their enemies were supposedly left-wing tribes of Arabs, some fighting for Islam and some fighting against Capitalism. Who they were and why they said they were doing it didn't matter, which side they were on was irrelevant, what matters was they were all bloodthirsty.

In just about every instance of intertribal violence the "Mideast" over the past 3000 years people have been killing civilians, such as shooting up refugee camps and blowing up school buses full of little kids. The reasons change, the names of the peoples change, but the basic geography and how people behave there remains the same. Maybe there's something about that area, something in the soil or air or water, some germ or radiation, that makes people bloodthirsty.

The only practical solution I see, the one that's least immoral in the long run, is for Israel to pacify the area. History has shown the only way people in that area will stop killing each other like that is if they're all under the heel of some really nasty bunch who can beat everybody else, separately or together.

The analogy is the Mongol conquest of central Asia, which is also in the same general sphere: the Mongols beat everybody else so bad for a couple generations the tribal warfare died down. The Mongols had the same methods and the same ends, but they forced everybody they beat to join in their attack on the people next door.

Israel doesn't need to build that kind of enforced coalition because behind Israel is the USA, this era's greatest empire. As long as the USA keeps the IDF in business Israel can keep all its neighbors down if it feels it has to. Israel can force its neighbors to be peaceful, or at least to stop ganging up to kill TheJews(R).

We've also seen that Israel didn't have to do much in Syria because the Syrian Arabs were too busy killing each other to harm Israel, and unlike in Lebanon Israel didn't pick a side because it hated them both. That Syrian civil war was good for Israel but not good for the people who live there: it would be better if somebody could stop the Arab tribes from killing each other. In the long run it doesn't matter who does it or why, what matters is that some overwhelming force compels peace.

It seems to work better if the overwhelming force is not from that area, if they're Assyrians or Persians or Mongols or Turks; Israel can fulfill that function with US help, if Israel remembers to act like imperialists instead of just another bloodthirsty tribe. Forty years ago in Lebanon Israel got bogged down in the tribal conflict and picked a side, which in the long run was a mistake. The Mongols would have conquered the whole place and made the Arab tribes get along or else.

Note that the idea is to stop the tribes of that area from slaughtering each other, and the way to do that is overwhelming force. "To make a desert and call it peace," and then to make the conquered people get along well enough to do business peacefully with each other. The Silk Road was safer and more profitable under the Mongols than it had ever been. And once the Mongols had killed enough people fewer people died by violence, and more people got enough to eat. and so on.

The history of the most ancient civilizations, those between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, has always been one of bloody murder. And certain areas, like the Middle East, are concentrated hot spots where murderous tribes have been banging against each other since time immemorial. Unless some bigger beast makes them stop.

In southeast Asia for a couple hundred years the various European empires conquered the area and imposed the kind of peace where all the different tribes had to get along so the empires could profit: e.g., Chinese and Malays and Burmese and and Khmers and Annamese and Thais and so on, of various languages and religions, helped the Brits and the French and the Dutch build a huge commercial network that could basically run itself, as long as the Europeans stayed on top and as long as they weren't too busy fighting each other. The long-term winner in the region was Thailand, that became a rich country because of all the immigrants and refugees who moved there to work and raise kids and eventually intermarry. And for as long as the European empires had control the various tribes of southeast Asia were peaceful with each other.

People are stupid and develop bad habits. One bad habit we have is tribal conflict, which over the course of centuries comes to be normal. Only an empire, be it Persians or Romans or Brits or whoever, can keep them from fighting among themselves. And for a while everybody benefits, some more than others, from the ceasefires among the subjected tribes. Whatever else they're doing they're not at war with each other.

In the long run, if you value peace and prosperity and life itself, you have to allow some overwhelming force to eventually make the tribes stop fighting. The only country that can do that in the Levant is Israel, with US backing. Only "the Zionist conspiracy" can keep the Arab tribes from killing not only TheJews(R) but also each other.

West Virginia and Pennsylvania don't go to war because the USA rules them both. It works if you let it: tribes stop fighting when you make them. And that is peace, which is a good thing, which benefits all the tribes.

People are that stupid. That hasn't changed in over 3000 years. That will only change for our species when one power rules the planet, such as a global communist dictatorship. Speaking of (a kind of) communism, consider the example of the Russian empire: under the Tsars the Russians had been conquering northern Asia from west to east a couple centuries, when in the 1800s they conquered the smaller nations that bordered them, the Armenians and the Georgians and the Turkmen and the Uzbeks and so on, that had been fighting each other for 2000 years, and were starting to make them peaceful. Then came the "Marxist-Leninists" of the USSR who enforced peace among those peoples for 70 years. Then once the USSR fell apart these tribal societies got back to killing each other, until once again the Kremlin overwhelmed them all.

One good thing about Leninism is it valued unity, making the Georgians and the Uzbeks cooperate for the benefit of the USSR. There was more to that than armed force, but only armed force brought enough peace so maybe people could be taught to not fight each other. The USSR gave lots of good and bad examples of how to be a communist empire, so we can build on that without having to reinvent the wheel. All we need is a global hegemon we can subvert, like the Leninists subverted the Tsarists, to get back to the problem of civilizing humanity.

We might have to have more than one hegemon, say Russia and China and the USA, but once they've divided the world between them they'll have to more or less get along. In that case it doesn't matter if Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia and at war with Eurasia, as long as the empires are doing business peacefully and keeping their own societies under control. Each empire will have to evolve systems that work in similar ways, whatever vocabulary they use, and as time goes by they might learn how to come together in one world. If not at least the Shiites and the Sunnis, and the MAGAS and the Woke, all the conquered tribes that make up each empire, will learn to cooperate, because they have to. And the big empires won't fight each other because that would destroy them.

And time will pass and power will mellow and people will learn to get along because it's the right thing to do, because peace is better than murder. It'll be easier if the official ideology of each empire is peace & prosperity for all our members, but even if it's not eventually people will learn peace the hard way.

Democratic socialism and/or anarchy will come later, when the various tribes that make up the planet have been kept down together for so long that they forget about that shit and learn to do something else. Learn to share, to cooperate, to negotiate, for mutual benefit. First they have to be united the way Pennsylvania and Virginia are united. Beat their swords into plowshares. Wise them the fuck up.

The official ideology is almost irrelevant. What people think they're doing matters less than what they're actually achieving. How many people have to die before they're forced to be peaceful will depend on how stupid they are, how long it takes them to catch on. If they're so stupid that they'd rather all die than be peaceful that's their problem. 

We have to start with the species we have, taking the facts as they are. Basically speaking Hobbes had a point: Leviathan brings peace. Once we have peace we can go on to the next step: learning to share. 

  

On My Abysmal Egotism

I should probably put a few style books on my Kindle just in case, so I won't have to use DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you, to prove I have heard of them, that I can if need be cite things like a scholar. In case anybody out there suspects that I never got a PhD because I'm not smart enough, as opposed lacking the self-discipline bordering on masochism one must exhibit to attempt such a thing.

One girl I dated actually followed through on her high school plan to get a PhD in Russian Literature by writing about an obscure poet from (I think) Petrograd so she can go around signing herself Doctor [Whatever] for the next 30 years, even though her actual career has nothing to do with the subject and doesn't require such a credential. But advanced degrees were expected in her family, her older siblings and their spouses had or were pursuing them, so she couldn't let down the side; and perhaps also she presumably wanted to prove that she didn't spend six months getting naked with me every Friday evening because she was a total dimwit.

When she told me she'd worked out that plan with her school guidance counselor, to get a PhD she'd never really need, I told her it was pretentious bourgeois wankery, and advised her to do something else, such as marry me, have my baby, and make an honest househusband out of me, which of course I didn't think she'd even consider so it was safe to suggest. Who in her right mind would get a PhD in an obscure subject just to prove she could? At the time I wrote parodies and pastiches of translations of dead French poets, but that took very little effort as, for example, the sonnet form requires only fourteen lines, and alliteration, allusion, assonance, and enjambment come naturally to idle eccentric with a congenital gift of babble.

Yet upon reading her published dissertation, which I hunted down in the local university library twenty-two years after she got rid of me, I could not withhold my admiration and respect for the fact that she actually followed through on that ridiculous scheme, and that she invested several years and fuck knows how much of her father's money in tracking down all those publications and all those interviewees, thereby proving herself my intellectual superior, to herself at least.

To be fair in those days I had a near-fatal case of Dunning-Kruger and loved to babble on about things I had only a cursory knowledge of, because I thought that's what people with 140+ IQs did, which doubtlessly annoyed the fuck out of everybody who knew better, as APs in an expensive Quaker school presumably did. It turned out that people were right when they said that IQ scores alone mean nothing, you have to back up your bragging with actual achievement, and that by the way she was absolutely correct in leaving me for dead, as it felt at the time. This realization by the way was one hell of a comedown for me, that exploded in my head once I got on the Internet and gained access to all the world's knowledge and to people who could compare Derrida and Pagels having actually read them; so thence I've spent the last fifteen years trying to prove to myself, by voracious reading in those subjects that interest me, that I'm really not a total dimwit after all.

So I hope getting involved with me was the stupidest mistake she ever made, which if so means she got that over with in her junior year of high school; I'd love to take credit for the forty-four years of brilliant successes that might have followed that, inspiring her to decide--as her people are wont to decide-- "never again." Even if she did have surgery on her nose and marry a frigging Midwestern shegetz with an even more common English name than mine which she replaced her own with, and go around putting "Doctor" before her name instead of "PhD" after it like more modest eggheads do.

I used to count this person as the love of my life, going by the extreme emotional investment she somehow called up from me and the six months of near-total collapse that followed her 'escape', yet in the years since then I have been kicking myself with "what was I thinking?" It wasn't that I punched above my weight, the kind of chicks a white trash eighth-grade drop-out are supposed to chase after literally bored the fucked out of me, but that I gambled so much on such an obvious long shot. That works okay for picking Derby winners, but then I never bet more than $5 on any horse race and have only lost less than $20 in my whole life.

I never had much success with either playing the ponies or fucking the fillies, but at least I was smart enough to not bother accumulating all the tokens middle class white men are supposed to be able to show for themselves and then lose everything because of an idiotic miscalculation or two. As I saw it there's not much difference between gaining a normal life and being an inveterate gambler, except that when gamblers win at the track they get a lot of money but when normal men win they get saddled with a lifetime of debt and perennial exhaustion. Only a damn fool--in my expert opinion--would take either role.

So the dear Doctor was right, I never got anywhere, but then I never had to try very hard either. Dragging my crazy ass through day after day has indeed been tiring, but that--as with reading thick books with lots of big words in them--came naturally to me. As does emitting this unnecessary torrent of neurotic drivel that I really can't expect anyone to read.

Nor did I ever lose very much.

 

 

 

 

Don't Sell Out Ukraine

 I doubt US troops would have ever been committed, and Trump seems to intend to sacrifice as much of Ukraine as he can get away with. But consider that if Russia takes over all of Ukraine after all the "support" we've provided it will damage this country's image, almost as bad as giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban after 20 years did, and presumably the USA's prestige matters to the people whose opinions count even if they disagree with the trend of US policy.

The best that's going to happen is the de facto war will end with Russia keeping what it's stolen, which isn't that bad considering that before WW2 the Crimea and the area roughly coextensive with that we call the Donbass were in the USSR, and the unconquered parts if Ukraine used to be eastern Poland, so in the long run Ukraine still breaks even.

That's a geostrategic defeat, as much as the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was for the rulers in the Kremlin and the return of the Sinai to Egypt was for "the Zionist entity," but then many people say those areas should never have been conquered in the first place.

It might be unwise to insist Ukraine become part of NATO, but NATO and/or its constituent nation-states should guarantee its independence and its borders, and Ukraine should be included in the European Union if the people of the Ukraine and the constituents of the EU agree. (Note that joining the Eurozone and the Schengen area would still compromise Ukrainian sovereignty to some degree, perhaps even more than joining NATO.)

Objectively speaking the USA needs an enemy, one whose disappearance would not greatly undermine the USA, and that can't be China because most American consumer goods are made there and Chinese interests own big portions of the US economy. Since 1941 this country has been dependent on the idea of a foreign threat to sustain its military-industrial complex, and an isolationist non-imperial USA would soon wind up a third-rate power like Belgium or Thailand. Russia is not the enemy I would choose, but nobody listens to me so Russia would have to do.

Therefore Russia cannot be allowed to conquer all of Ukraine if the USA is to continue as an entity worth considering. That would look like weakness, whatever incidental benefits it provided to some people, and a weak USA will soon find itself under some kind of attack from all the peoples it's damaged in its imperial course. A USA without NATO, without military bases in "friendly countries," without enforceable pretensions to being a Great Power, would be as internationally weak as it was before the Spanish-American War. No foreign power would take it seriously, and even the Monroe Doctrine would be dead in the water.

So it would be extremely unpatriotic for the US government to sell out Ukraine, and anyone who'd do so is a traitor.

 There were better tables here before. Big round tables, circular anyway, about three and a half feet in diameter but they were probably measured in the meters, four of them, each stop a different kaleidoscopic mandala mosaic of different colored tiles. The tiles were about an eighth of an inch square, and the patterns must have been laid down in installments at  different times because the tiles of the same color were often in different shades, like you see some of a bright crimson and then further along in the pattern some would be a deep blood red. It was subtle, but if you had time to sit there and stare at it, as I often did in 1994, it became impossible to not notice. And because the tables were outside on the sidewalk you could smoke, cigarettes, which I did a lot back then.

But this place was a deli then, not a vegan bistro. Not kosher but kosher style, they would serve you pastrami and cheese on bagels, but then most of the students would not have known any difference. There were more Japanese than Jews in those days. In some world-renowned universities it's rather difficult to find students who grew up in the area. And the people who ran the deli were very sweet. They would let a person come in off the street and use the bathroom and not buy anything.  Now the restroom door in the vegan bistro is locked and there’s an embossed plastic sign saying Paying Customers Only. There’s a lot of that going around, all over the country. So the alley around back stinks like piss all the time.

30 years ago I had plenty of time to think. Or I thought I was thinking. I would sit there chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes, the generic kind, and drinking large coffees one after the other. I would sit there thinking I was thinking and impatiently wait for something. For her to walk by, or for her not to walk by, or for someone else to walk by to take my mind off her.

It can be hard to think about what you want to think about. At least for me. When I'm actually thinking, which in those days did not happen often.+

The difference is that these days I smoke cigars instead of cigarettes, after 20 years of not smoking any tobacco at all, and I'm drinking an organic apple juice from a big plastic bottle from The Bistro of course, alternating with gulps of cheap bourbon from a little bottle I carry in my pocket. Don't pour cheap bourbon into apple juice, you won't like it.

Too much has changed in the past 30 years. But I'm still the same person, or at least I think so, and the street is basically the same but sometimes with different stores and in some cases with new buildings She'll follow the same traffic pattern that it has for a hundred years. St Paul here runs southbound, Charles Street, a block over, where I used to live, goes north, and Maryland Avenue where I lived before that goes southbound again. This part of the city was laid out back in the horse and buggy days. And in some ways those days never ended.

You can still sit outside at these tables, out on the sidewalk in front of their big plate glass windows with their silly seasonal health related displays , the table is being small folding plastic monstrosities that they take in when they close every night, barely two feet across so much impossible for two people to sit and eat. And smoking tobacco is frowned on these days, and sitting here even outside on a windy blustery day with a lit cigar in your hand you have plenty of personal space all around you. Smoking a cigar says I hate you don't come near me. Which is true.

These days I'm not waiting for anything. Some guy from long ago recognized me today and told me she killed herself before I left town, but nobody told me. There was a restraining order on her anyway. I put a restraining order on her. Those were the days. Several people I knew back down have killed themselves, or died of repeated drug overdoses which is the same thing. But she didn't use a needle, he told me, she used a knife, actually stabbed herself in the throat and sawed at her neck a little to make sure the carotid was severed.  That’s what I heard, sawed. I didn’t hear if the knife blade was serrated, which might have explained the sawing part. And he did not tell me she was on heroin at the time, but I imagine the pain would be too much otherwise. Of course if you hate yourself as much as she hated me, which seems to have been the case, things get easier. It’s easier to die when you hate being alive. And it’s somebody’s fault.

Now I'm sitting here waiting for someone else, if I'm really waiting at all. But there's no one in particular I'm waiting for, just someone who might remember me, or someone who might be so offended at my cigar smoke that they'll stop to tell me how insensitive I am, or for some even drunker bum to shamble up and beg for a cigarette which I don't have. Faces change completely every year or so in neighborhoods immediately around the college campus. Sometimes the faces belong to the same people, they just make themselves look different, as if this new look, this new trend, will give them an identity after all. But I don’t recognize any of the faces passing by, and I think some people would manage to get themselves remembered even after thirty years.  

The difference in my appearance is that now my hair is so thin and so patchy that instead of growing it long like before I shave it bald.  Otherwise I still look the same, sometimes I'm even wearing the same clothes, sometimes literally the same.  Things were made to last longer thirty years ago.  I had no idea I would last this long.  It's not like I wanted to.

30 years and I'm back again.  Only for a while, not very long.  I'm here because.  There is a reason.

But it's not her because she's dead.  I hadn’t known that until somebody recognized me earlier this afternoon and told me about it. Thirty years later. It just happened to come to mind when this guy who tried to steal my LSD once recognized me as he was driving by.  Somehow it’s important that I know that, after thirty years.  I’d almost forgotten her, even though she was very important to me for about six months, and not always in a good way.  I wonder if the restraining order was still in place when she died. It was necessary because she would not leave me alone. She said it was all my fault. What happened was we were at a party, the band she roadied for, and friends of the band, and friends of their friends, and she did a little too much of everything and she could not handle it. She was crying and screaming and blaming me, telling me it was all my fault that she was like this, that I was so broken I broke her, that she hated me, that I should just go away. Go home. Go die.

Apparently she woke up sometime the next morning, face down on the floor, with her panties hanging loosely from one ankle and semen dripping from her anus. She had to tell me that, she told everybody. And she told me and everybody that it was all my fault, that I abandoned her there like that. She did not tell them that that happened after she told me to go away, after she told me to go die, because it was all my fault that she was in that condition in the first place.  So I went away. I went home. If I had been there I would have protected her. Somebody had to. Or should have, when nobody did.

When I had wanted to see her it wasn't easy to arrange. She had to make time for me. She was a very busy person. She had so many friends and so much to do. And I was so demanding. But she had insisted I come to the party with her that night, there was someone she wanted me to meet. Her new lesbian paramour. She was lesbian then she said, except for me, and the boys in the band. She even learned to play bass guitar to fill in sometimes when the junkie who usually played bass couldn’t stand up. But after I had stopped wanting to see her, after she started screaming at me from the sidewalk in front of my house and banging on the door because it was all my fault, she would not go away. She'd be gone for a few days, doing Lord knows what, and then she'd be back to blame me for everything. 

So soon after that I went away. Not because of her, or not just because of her. It was just time to go. Mainly. There were other women out there, far away, who hadn’t met me yet. Whose lives I hadn’t ruined by failing to be sensitive to their needs. There are lots of needy women everywhere. Who will want me to forget about everything else in my life and fix their lives. By being totally devoted to them. So I’ll do that for a while, I’ll devote a lot of my attention to them, until that too turns out to be futile. These women can’t be fixed. That’s not what they really want anyway, it became clear to me after a while.  They don’t really want me to fix them, they just want to blame their brokenness on me. Most of them don’t kill themselves though, and the ones that have usually did it by accident, in a car crash or an overdose or getting beaten to death by some macho man who was so much better than me.  It’s happened before. She was the fourth one I’ve heard of, but probably the first in the series. I’m a serial killer without doing anything. Against my will, without my consent.  

Minor Annoyances

I just learned the hard way that there are USB A to micro USB cables that only charge without doing data transfer. And the older cables that I've had for a few months that were made to transfer data quit working, neither charging nor transferring: they don't stick in the device snugly, wiggling around, which is why I'd bought the cables that turn out to only charge. This happens all the time, cables just stop fitting right, I go through a dozen or so a year. (At first, years ago, I thought the port in the device was busted, but new cables work so that's probably not it.) So I had to order new cables that are specifically supposed to transfer data as well as charge, that'll be here on 3/20 i.e. Thursday, and until then I won't be able to transfer files between my computer and my micro-usb devices.

And to order them, because I'm fucking broke from paying my credit card bills, I had to use more credit. But first I had to check the balances on a couple cards to see which was safe to use, but when I went to log in the site told me I had to verify my identity by calling customer service. So first I entered the 16 digit number, them my Social Security number, then waited for a Customer Service Specialist with a lovely accent (is that racist?) to give me a numeric code to type into the appropriate space.

And now I have to register the Protection Plan I bought for the new Tablet I had to buy to replace the one that got scratched up in my shoulder bag because I didn't have the case on it. I don't usually do that, most things should be covered by the warranty, but the warranty on the scratched one had recently expired and anyway the warranty didn't specifically mention the customer scratching up the damn thing.

And I'm just getting over the headache I got from taking naltrexone after I'd had a couple shots of bourbon: one or the other, not both, and no I didn't need the bourbon anyway. (I know, I know.) Now I'm out of booze and I really can't afford to buy any more this month so I probably won't.

And earlier today I went downstairs to check my mail, but I forgot to turn around and transfer my I'm Not Dead tag into the box provided, so the poor guy at the desk had to come up after 4 PM to knock to check on me.

And I still have to finish wiping off my kitchen counter and cleaning the floor like I do when the exterminator is coming so they don't snitch to management about what a slob I am. (I'm not sure they do, but I wouldn't put it past them.) That'll need doing before I go to sleep or the paranoia will keep my awake.

This has been my Tuesday. It hasn't been a really bad day, like I don't have cancer nor am I in legal trouble, but it can't count as a good day because the only memorable events have been minor annoyances. One after another. I should "count my blessings," for example I have all my fingers and toes, but that's not how my brain wants to work: it's as if I'm hard-wired to be annoyed by trivial "tragedies" like these, and when several of them happen in one day that day will be ruined. Even so this is an improvement over my natural default: I actually had to train myself to endure days like this without breaking down into an over-emotional mess, so, instead of hiding under the covers rocking myself and whimpering for an hour or so, I'm able to sit up here and persist at these tasks. Because of this it's a good thing that I don't have to go out into the world for such annoyances to happen, especially not around people for example at a workplace; over the years I've noticed that when people sense I'm having a day like this they often decide it's a good time to give me trouble, and that when people just had to insist on making a bad day even worse I would get called "crazy" and "violent" for letting them get to me. As if it were perfectly fucking okay to aggravate me just because they can instead of helping me out or even just leaving me the hell alone. It's because I'm able to protect my vulnerable psyche by isolating myself that I've gone 62 years without "going postal" or becoming a suicide bomber. Having an apartment all my own with a lock on the door has been a great boon for Humanity, you see; it also helps that I keep my cell phone set on Do Not Disturb so those voices can't worm through that way. And in order to hide away so other people can be protected from the consequences of their need to be annoying I have to have my rent paid by Social Security, because for one thing if I were medicated strongly enough to insulate me from those assholes out there I'd be too damn sedated to do anything useful, which pretty much rules out trying to work for a living.

This is what I mean when I say that people like me should not have to happen. What I really mean is that people should learn to leave vulnerable people alone, but that would be asking too much of y'all cretinous assholes out there. Because there are always more assholes than anybody else, as if infuriating people gives y'all an evolutionary (and economic) advantage. (Or maybe it's supposed to work the other way: maybe pissing people off until you get yourself stabbed is an example of the herd auto-correcting, but our societies are set up to thwart that natural impulse.) So, because stupid assholes are always going to be so damn common among our species, whatever genetic arrangement that produces people like me should be bred out of the gene pool for the good of the herd. Because the Earth really needs many billions more infuriating morons than it needs people like me.

I found this out for sure back in third grade in 1971, when I was informed several times a day by several different people that my mother who had cerebral palsy was a "retarded monkey," and that my father who had a curved spine was "the hunchback of Notre Dame," and that it was perfectly normal for people to treat me that way -- and abnormal of me to not just shrug it off or better yet play along.

And the only way to avoid it was to hook school, to avoid going out in public, to hide in my room behind my locked door instead. And because when I cut school the Principal would summon my mother to school to scold her for not making me attend, which meant the other kids would see her, so they'd be sure to remember to jump around going "hoo-hoo hee-hee this is your mother the monkey" the next time they saw me. And again it was perfectly normal for children to torment me like that, because it's simply asking too much for patents and other adults to teach these kids some simple fucking manners. And my mother had to Be A Good Mother and show up to give these assholes ammunition, so the Principle could scold her for being a bad mother by not making sure I go to school every day. And a couple years of this got me involved with Social Services and the Juvenile Courts, again because it's perfectly normal for people to let their kids be fucking assholes instead of teaching them that some people have physical handicaps, that it just happens, and that you should leave them and their children alone about it.

Furthermore I could not get this through my mother's head, that instead of agreeing with Those People that I'm a Bad Boy she might try sticking up for herself and trying to get Those People to teach their kids to leave me alone about her cerebral palsy. She didn't get that part, no matter how many times I tried to explain it, because she was too damn weak to stand up for herself to Those People and/or too damn stupid to understand the reason why I kept getting in trouble with the school. No, all she got was that "They think I'm a Bad Mother because of YOU. Because you keep getting in trouble. YOU are a Bad Bad Boy!"

And the few people who did get it were either unable or unwilling to stand up for me (and by extension my crippled parents) because That's Just How It Is. There zillions of idiotic assholes out there who just have to persecute people for one stupid reason or another, because their parents are physically disabled -- or because they're a different "race"* -- and that's perfectly okay. It's entirely natural, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to learn to suffer in silence, or grow such a thick skin that empathy is impossible (or was when I tried that), or you have to hide yourself away where Those People can't get to you.

Because there are always so many more of Those People out there, who either cannot or will not learn to leave people alone, and because it's not legal, for example, to take an AR 15 to school and get rid of several of them. The wonder is not that such "crimes" happen but that there aren't more of them. Because if it's perfectly natural to persecute people for some "flaw" then it's also perfectly natural to decide you're just not going to take it any more. One reason such "shooting sprees" are getting more common, one that your brilliant pundits keep missing, is that the more people there are the more bullies there are. Because y'all have decided that it's perfectly okay for people to act like that, and it's somehow "abnormal" to object when it happens to you. You people not only allow it, you encourage it. Generation after generation. Because, even if you are a Nice Person, you think that everybody has a right to reproduce, even if they're unable and/or unwilling to teach their kids to have some fucking manners. This is why I go for what for lack of a better word is called eugenics: this has gone on all over the world for at least all of recorded history, so there might just be a genetic basis for it. That can be isolated and bred out. In fact I got the idea years ago from a bumper sticker I'd see every now and then: STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN'T BREED.

I concentrate on stupid people not because smart people never persecute The Other, but because smart people can learn how not to. And there are proportionately so few smart people that there must be far fewer of them than there are people who are somehow Different. One thing I noticed in school is that almost all of the kids who followed me around going "hoo-hoo hee-hee your mother is a monkey" were the kind who did not do well in school because they just weren't very smart. (That's an argument against universal education: if you must let stupid people breed you should at least not force your kids to put up with their stupid kids day after day.) And I have no idea what the kids who weren't pestiferously stupid thought of my parents' handicaps because they didn't mention it. If they did think that "people like that shouldn't go out it public" they were at least smart enough to not bother me with it. Perhaps because they had better things to do, like learn the material and get good grades. Smart people can do such things. They can either learn that "some people are handicapped but they're sill people," or at least they can learn that it's rude to bother people about it. Mind you some smart people have criticized me over this, for letting it get to me, as if it's my fault. I posit that those smart people do this because the pattern is an easy one to exploit for their personal gain: it's so much easier to enable people to "smear the queer" than to teach them manners, and there seems to be no political or personal benefit to it. Why stand up for me in public, why even bother to comfort me in private, when there's nothing in it for you? Why not learn to exploit that phenomenon instead? Go into politics! Run for office, start a blog, organize a committee. Make perstiferous idiocy work for you. I'm not sure how many smart bully-enablers are pestiferous themselves and how many just exploit Those People. Put it this way, very few smart kids ever told me my mother's a retarded monkey. Most simply avoided me. Perhaps, as I was told privately several times, they avoided me because they didn't want to be lumped with me and get bullied themselves. (And also, as I must admit, I can be a bit of a dick sometimes.)

Anyway. As I see it the problem is that not enough smart people want to breed out stupidity. That is they don't have enough basic human decency to want fix an obvious problem, or they're too cowardly to buck the ongoing trend. They just don't understand that we have a responsibility to improve the species, that we must favor quality over quantity. No, they "respect human rights." They'd rather try to educate Those People. But listen: Trump 2.0 shows that that's the wrong way to go. "You can't fix stupid." And we should not have to put up with it. Okay, we shouldn't have to put up with babbling crazies either. But I never reproduced because I am smart enough to avoid perpetuating a problem. And because I have some compassion for y'all out there. I practice what I preach. Because I know what I'm talking about. I can't be all scholarly about it here because I've concentrated too much on avoiding the outside world to get much formal education, and I've also been too lazy to teach myself things that don't come naturally, but there have to be a few people out there who've read this so far who think to themselves "this guy has a point." Maybe it's time to wise up, maybe it's time you admitted that to yourself. And maybe it's time to consider doing something about it. Spread the word. Find each other and organize. Write for a blog, go into teaching, run for office. Preach. JUST DO SOMETHING. How many generations of idiots is enough?

*And yes I did just equate kids whose parents happen to be crippled with people who happen to be Black (for example), and vice versa. It does not matter WHY you pick on people who are different, only that you do.

Dr Judith

 "A regularized and constrained repetition of norms is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal conditions for that subject." - Judith Butler.

So a Self is not something you have or something you are. What you're supposed to do is follow the cue cards. You don't even really exist, so why should you matter? They say "know thy place, peasant."

As the doctrine goes, "There are those who fight, and those who pray... And then there's you, whose job is to move that plow and not your mouth. Unless we tell you to, then you say what we write down."

Why are the most feudal interactions framed as "liberating"?

No no no. I come first. It is I who feel, sense, think, and speak. Whether my self is begged or borrowed, it is at least mine. I'll say what you tell me to if you insist, but that won't make me agree to it. I am a subject who performs things. But you can't make me love my role.

Because I have other ways to make a living, because I don't depend on the approval of my sponsors or the approbation of my peers, because I have no need for tenure nor does anyone care whether I publish, I speak my own mind when I can maybe get away with it it. And if what I say or how I say it pleases no one, not even you, that's your problem.

I am a fool. But Judith Butler has sold out. Follow her published writings through the last thirty-some years. Compare them to who she was working for, or was trying to work for. Follow the doctrinal trends of "progressivism" along the same period. Do you see a pattern? If so consider the Benjamins.

This is the same self I embodied literally fifty years ago. Of course some things have changed, but I can show how and why. And you can see that it's got very little to do with making money, just that I'd rather not get locked up again. By the System that Judith Butler supports because she gets paid by those people.

Judith Butler could probably find a way to get me locked up. Everybody in her position knows somebody who can do certain jobs, or have them done. That's what power in society is about, that's why an incipient public pundit gets a PhD. Power ion society means getting people to do what you want. It's tautological. Even I can figure that out.

So her yadda yadda babbling feathers her nest.

Not me. I run the risks, I speak my mind. My own mind. I, the subject doing the performing.

To be generous, I'm wrong. Perhaps Dr Judith Butler is not meretricious but only confused.

I might be wrong. Or confused. But I gain nothing by it.

Now step out of my sunshine. It's still only March.

"OH. So that's what they mean."

 It sucks that two people, both blond women, in two successive decades, tried so hard to talk sense into me, and failed. I'd love to be, respectively, 13 and 23 again, and actually get it. But it took till the early 1990s, after a few years of psychiatric pharmaceuticals, for me to catch on. "OH. So that's what that means."

I can't prove the pills made me any better, but they have made me feel, and act, very differently. As some might notice.

By the way, if those drugs did no good for somebody they'd take them off the market. Or they're supposed to anyway, because of federal and peer-reviewed oversight. Right?

But now the United States secretary of health and human services is a(n ex-?) junkie with a worm-eaten brain. (So it really does happen. Sorry guys.)

I wonder what that means? Put it this way: I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly ignored. And don't forget that even a busted clock is right twice a day. (Or at least it is here.) But now I can tell you that it's the obvious truth, my fellow Americans are in for HARD time, especially those (however few) who might feel "spiritual kinship" with me. Or who might agree with me that I should have listened to not just them but my father. Even if they never met him they saw his side, or would if they could. Some "common sense" might even be necessary, even for me.

So if I can catch on anybody can.

The fact is those who are "abnormal" in the eyes of J.D. Vance are in hazard for our lives. He wrote that book for a reason, okay?

I have nothing, and no one, holding me here. And nobody I know has any use for me, which has gone on for so long that it seems like my general condition. And maybe even if they did I wouldn't be up to it, it's so much easier to sit here alone with the door locked. Albeit on fucking Facebook.

So. This will probably never apply, but just in case (and note the case): don't you dare pretend I deserted you. How long am I supposed to wait? And wait for what? If you had anything for me I'd have known it by now. Okay, I'll admit I'm only thinking back about 15 years, and by then I was middle aged (but still troubled). But that's even more reason to not need me anymore, because my looks had faded. Fourteen years ago, so it's even worse now. And in some particular ways my physical functioning ain't for shit no more neither.

And now I'm almost out of money, with credit card debt worth two month's pay. For that San Diego trip, the one I had to go on or I'd pitch myself off the roof. The one where I had a "mystical" experience, which amounts to "OH. So that's what they're talking about." Golly. Okay, I really am dense. (At least it's not terminal. So far.)

But still. I plead a mental malfunction. I did not set out to be this dense on purpose. That was not part of the plan. I was supposed to be a prophet, a voyant, and not such an idiot. Something happened. Perhaps from heredity, or from hard knocks (including on the inside from drugs), or (most likely) both, I seem to have misplaced my mind. ('Misplaced.') My brain don't work like it's supposed to. Maybe it broke off too. 

So. I can't claim to be a total naif. Far from it. But your dog will probably like me. And I stand alone. Here. Where it's lonely. Out in space. And I think I've got it this time.