InstaPunk Rules

Yeah, I’m smart. I have a certain kind of almost awareness of almost everything. Sadly, what Brizoni looks like these days. Penalties of the high carb diet. Maybe he’ll avoid the devastating inevitable brain damage that afflicts most vapid pseudo-intellectuals.

Both Peregrine John and I have had some contact with home-schooled kids. Our experiences differ. Hence this exchange, which began on other terms.

Peregrine John on September 4, 2014 at 4:08 pm.

The death of Christianity has been greatly exaggerated.

As has your ability to give up. The desire to, well, that is likely understated, contrary as that may sound to anyone of differing descent. (Clan MacThomas, yes.) Items 3 and 4 are the real kickers, and I see no way around them short of something more easily spread than ebola – smallpox, perhaps – causing an awakening, an actual Come To Jesus moment in America. The less hard-core idiots are realizing that Dear Leader isn’t quite all that and a well modulated bag of chips, but will happily make another idiotic decision if their masters tell them it’s different this time. Say, if it’s a genuinely Marxist woman instead of a conveniently Marxist half-black man.

There is an enjoyment in shouting into the darkness, and even more in “I told you so” when there’s evidence aplenty of having done so. I’m also German, and that lot coined “schadenfreude.” You might prefer the survival through suffering, I don’t know. For me it’s fairly balanced with enjoying my enemies – and they are declared enemies, no choice of mine – hanging themselves in droves.

In the mean time, I try to guide and prod a cadre of young people, of no particular earthly wealth but loaded with talent and intellect and beautiful spirits (homeschoolers, all), toward seeing things as they are without becoming nihilists. They are what keep my nature Jovian and not something grimmer. Though the Missus is surely a boon, I do recommend finding youngsters (a relative term, certainly) to inspire and who will, I assure you, inspire in return.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 5, 2014 at 1:04 am.
Not too much experience with the home schooled. The only ones I know spell like pidgin-speaking Maoris.

Youngsters have been notably not inspiring me. If they knew even half what they loudly assume they do, I’d be impressed. Am not.

Reply:

Peregrine John on September 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm:

Alas. You might need a different set of younguns. It is possible that I am simply very fortunate.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 1:08 am:

Maybe I’m asking harder questions than you are. In my experience old folks are foolishly eager to assume kids know what they don’t. Ask the basics. Don’t let them squirm away. They change the subject adeptly. What con artists do.

Reply:

Peregrine John on September 9, 2014 at 3:30 pm.

For some topics I do need to address the basics, it’s true. Social issues, for which they’ve been fed palaver and good intentions by those who should know better, need foundational questioning. The good news there is that they have less brainwashing to untangle than the lads asking me why their marriage is faltering after 5 years after doing all the right things. Those can be slippery if you don’t handle them carefully. Too tender.

Now, you may well be asking harder questions. I get asked pretty challenging items myself, from this group that reads Chesterton, Lewis, and Hofstadter. I am absurdly hopeful that they know or come to realize things others clearly never dreamed mattered. No secret there. It’s gratifying – and no bad thing for my own thought processes – to see them reasoned out in real time.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 3:53 pm.

PJ: WordPress is a bitch. Sorry.

About hard questions. My wife’s 40 year old daughter, who has an advanced science degree and a six year old daughter, had NO IDEA how many senators there are in the federal government. For asking the question and insisting on an answer I was treated as if I had farted in an elevator.

Reply:

Peregrine John (maybe) on September 9, 2014 at 9:31 pm.

Good lord ‘n’ butter. I know advanced degree holders hate being called out on ignorance of basic facts, but geez. First-round items from Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader don’t really qualify for categorization as “hard questions.” She should be embarrassed, not incensed.

No, the last discussion around the fire pit involved whether deep characters simply have layers of junk built up on them or have some other kind of complexity, whether the answer to that applies in real life or mostly in fiction, how as a concept it relates to what is called “depth” in game theory and design, and the common confusion between complexity and complication. It went from there to how it all relates to why ENFP personality types are so drawn to INTJ’s and the role of cognitive function order in relationships. I can’t take credit for the topic, though, since it started with one of the authors asking me about creating layered fictional characters. Some times I find myself a tad out of my depth.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 11:16 pm.

I think you’re being silly. Throwing acronyms at ME is also a dodge. You want to talk about fiction with a real writer? Do so. What’s your question, PJ? (And are you quite sure you’re not Brizoni playing raccoon?)

Reply:

Peregrine John (really??) on September 11, 2014 at 4:56 pm.

They’re shorthand, not a dodge – and apparently a useful way to identify how to communicate with people. Be that as it may, the question I was posed, which I pass along to you since I really don’t have a reliable answer, is this:

If a character is said to be deep, does that usually mean it is filtered through layers of crap that has accumulated on their natural personality? Does it instead mean that they prefer to be less forthcoming about their yet-unspoken thoughts, whether from the aforementioned psychic sediment or an inability to convey them to perhaps simpler minds? Or is it that a complexity of thought means that more than the usual number of things must be discovered about them to get a clear picture (for reasons other than simple obscuring)? Or do people usually mean something entirely different by the term?

Obviously, that’s distilled from some short conversation, but it’s the whole of the thing in one. The follow-on, and the reason for it, was to wonder how often a given cause of “depth” is applied in works of fiction, and why.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 13, 2014 at 6:46 am.

Apparently NOT a useful way to communicate, since I don’t understand it. With every response, you get more faux intellectual. Funny.

Instapunk on September 12, 2014 at 8:42 pm.

Peregrine John.

I hate to offend you. Why I’ve been slow to respond.

You seem amazingly determined to miss the point. But it’s an important discussion. You are not inquiring into what your bright young things actually know.

Deep? For any writer, it’s an easy determination. Paragraphs and chapters you need to read out loud. Narratives, characters that stick with you through time. Structural elements that require you to reassess your own cultural base. I AM a writer. Sorry to take this off your big wide multiculti table.

Sunday School stuff, really. But asking questions, that’s hard. Old farts don’t want to ask questions of intelligent youngsters who can’t answer them. Do the kids have a continuum of dates that places them in relation to the Egyptians, the Romans, their European heirs, the Enlightenment, Napoleon, blah blah? Geography? World capitals? Great rivers by continent? Mountain ranges by continent? Masterpieces of art by era and nation? Dante? Picasso? Newton? Of course not. Old man having too good a time pretending he’s having an intelligent conversation. (Or young man just pretending for fun’s sake?)

More pedestrianly, do they know the state capitals, the rules of punctuation and grammar, Algebra, the Constitution, the presidential succession at least approximately, the Revolution, the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, World War I and II?

My guess is, they don’t for the most part. I’m guessing they haven’t read Twain, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. Or Shakespeare.

My granddaughter, niece of my wife’s daughter who didn’t know how many senators there are, worked her way back to the date of Pearl Harbor. She didn’t know it, mind. She figured it out. Hope for her. Not a lot. But she has a brain.

You can continue to fool yourself with how talented the Millennials are. But if they don’t know anything, they have no context for anything they believe. Which renders their opinions on the depth of any literature from any time moot.

If you’re keeping score, PJ is the smart one. Obviously. (“Does it instead mean that they prefer to be less forthcoming about their yet-unspoken thoughts, whether from the aforementioned psychic sediment or an inability to convey them to perhaps simpler minds?”). Jeez. No one could keep up with that. Me? I’m terrified.

P.S. Don’t know exactly when or how my conversation with PJ got hijacked. But it did. Some Internet trick, no doubt. Faux intellectual talk doesn’t work here. If you think you’re smart, confront me. Don’t waste my time with idiotic semantics.

SOS. What have you done with my friend Peregrine John?

Tim comments here. We converse by email. We talk about books and such. Today he’s mad:

Finished American Caesar. Loved it, thank you. It was fascinating not just because of MacArthur himself but also to look at the important moments of American history his family line was a part of. The part at the end which you referenced was only about the last page & a half and I’m glad I read the rest of the book first, otherwise much of its impact would have been lost.

It put a lot of modern day happenings into perspective, too. MacArthur was right about how to fight in Korea. I’d mark that as the official beginning of our nation’s decline, when we first lost the will to fully win wars. And we’ve learned absolutely nothing from history. What’s the strategy now? Drone strikes and arming “freedom fighters” to beat back ISIS? Sure. And it only took two or three weeks and however many rounds of golf to come up with that. Amazing.

And so many young people, who should be the most fired up & concerned about all this, are perfectly happy to wrap themselves in Obama’s idiocy of “Don’t worry, ISIS actually has nothing to do with Islam.” Had an argument yesterday with someone in their twenties whose whole point was yeah, just like how the Westboro Baptist Church people are not really Christian. Same exact thing. Muslims down the street aren’t rooting for these guys, and he snarkily apologized for interrupting my “Fox News” rant. Unless, I said, you happen to live down the street from MAJ Hassan, the Tzarnaev brothers, the British guy who beheaded the first journalist, the Australian guy who tweeted pics of his Australian-born son gleefully holding up a freshly cut head, or any of the other Western not-actually-Muslims swelling the ranks of ISIS. No response, of course. He probably doesn’t even know who MAJ Hassan or the Tzarnaevs are.

I mean…are you fucking kidding me? Fox News is the problem? Mentioning Westboro in the same breath as Islam is supposed to be some profound, intellectual statement? Oh and this was Thursday, of course. On Tuesday, the whole of Christendom was still being held to account for the actions of WBC and the Spanish Inquisition. I think the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor a few decades too early. Nowadays we’d be falling all over ourselves to assure each other the Japanese marauding their way through the Pacific were not actually Japanese. This is the future of our country. Well, the limp-dick whitebread neo-lib commies and the 6 million or so illegals, that is.

We even have leftist groups actively working to flip red states, not just with fraudulent votes but by getting the flotsam & jetsam from blue states to move there. You can see them talking about it on the internet. I have seen an unnerving amount of Michigan license plates on the roads here in the past 12 months, for example. And what’s the strategy of our vaunted Republican leadership? Run Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush in 2016? Never, ever, under any circumstances impeach Obama or indict a single member of his administration? Help pass amnesty so all those Hispanics will be eternally grateful to the GOP? Maybe Erick Ericson or Ed Morissey have some thoughts on how to flip blue states like California & NY?

Remember the “HOLD!” scene in Braveheart where Wallace gets them to hide the long spears until the English horses are too close to stop their charge? I feel like that, except that cavalry has already stomped over our line and is marauding through the rear, while our alleged leaders continue to yell “HOLLLLLD! Not yet, guys. Not yet. Don’t want to act in haste, ya know.”

I remember the scene. We’ve all been waiting.

Interminably. On hold. Time to yell.

Keep opposing that damn War on Women. If you can figure out where the lines are or ever were. Just under her bust, I’m thinking.

My own definition of hysteria is when people are more interested in emoting about something than doing something about it. (Case in point, Redskins.)

The Ray Rice thing has become a ridiculous circus. Last night, CBS analyst James Brown — yet another Harvard twit — thought it was his place to lecture all men about their responsibility to stem the tide of this guerrilla war on women.

Nonsense. But so is the pushback. Rush Limbaugh is still arguing that all the fuss is part of a liberal conspiracy to take down the NFL. He may be right in that but he’s still missing the point.

Just to begin a real discussion, read this piece from beginning to end. It’s called “The Third Rail of Domestic Violence.”

There is one vital element of the domestic violence dialogue that ignites torrents of unwarranted disapproval: an examination of the dynamic of the women who stay with, and even defend, their attackers.

Attempts to explore what leads otherwise smart women to remain in injurious and possibly fatal relationships is met with bizarre condemnation. A popular reaction has been that this somehow “blames the victims.”

Blames them? This is an attempt to save them.

This is particularly peculiar criticism in view of the fact that there is actual victim-blaming to be found. Amid the week of reaction to Rice’s decking of his then-fiancée, there has been a smattering of observations along the lines of: Did she provoke him? Wasn’t she aware he had a short temper? Shouldn’t women navigate their irascible men with greater skill?

Now that’s victim-blaming, or at least an attempt to pass onto women some responsibility for preventing their own clobberings. It is, of course, nonsense.

But how do we get to a place where it is frowned upon to ask about the abundance of women— some of whom can be found in cemeteries— who keep themselves available for repeated beatings?

Perhaps we are in no mood to impose anything on victims that even looks like an obligation or even a strong suggestion. More likely, we are hesitant to wander into delicate territory in this era of reflexive, contrived offense.

But we must.

We have a societal responsibility to deliver a message to men that women are never, ever a proper target for physical violence… But there is also a vital signal that must be delivered to women: Get out.

This is a message that must be delivered with an understanding of its complexities. Getting out is not always easy. Before we get to the mental pathologies that compel some women to stay willingly, there are plenty of women who would love to make an escape but cannot, at least not immediately.

Their kids are in the house. They have no money of their own. There is no trusted friend or relative nearby. We should always know that our advice to get out of an abusive relationship is fraught with possible obstacles, including an enormous elevation of risk.

The men poisoning these relationships are often unhinged control freaks. If living with them on a daily basis is a hazard, imagine the consequences when the woman decides she’s had it and hits the road. If the exit is foiled or the wayward woman is found, the results can be unspeakable. So let’s not just say “get out” and walk away satisfied with our wise advice.

All true. But there are several other variables — and constants — that need to be taken into account.

Begin with constants. Domestic violence has occurred since the beginning of the human race. Because men and women have violent differences all the time. Often with odd unintended consequences. There has never been (contrary to feminist wishful thinking) a matriarchal society. There have been matrilineal societies, notably the Picts, which passed property through the female line. Pictish girls were routinely married and slain for their property in preteen years. Why there are no more Picts.

The Egyptians and Easter Islanders had similar problems, inheritance customs that led to royal/aristocratic incest and fatal genetic problems.

Another attempted solution to sexual dimorphism was dowries, which continue to thrive in the most primitive Stone Age cultures on earth. Which also leads to resentment and frequent violence, although most commonly female subjugation to the level of near slavery.

So, women owning property and women as property are equally a problem. Female equality might seem to be an answer. But it is, culturally, an enlightenment innovation. Which carries its own unintended consequences. Enter the variables.

Poverty is the most gender leveling thing there is. The woman needs a protector. The man needs a servant and baby maker. It returns us to our Cro-Magnon roots. The second biggest influence is lack of education. When the language of expressing emotion does not exist, violence becomes an earlier resort.

If you do not have words to describe your feelings, you will express your feelings physically.

Both men and women will regard this as appropriate. It becomes, “How we can communicate.” A subject nobody will touch. A fourth rail if you will.

Yeah, there are screwed up middle class white guys who beat their women. But they are fewer, as are the women who expect that and regard it as a normal response. It’s a different case with the poor. They don’t identify their abusers as psychopaths. They regard them as people they can also throw things at and, if need be, cut them up in their sleep. Eleven out of twelve of the most common acts of domestic violence are performed by women. It’s another way of talking.

I, too, am touched by the statistic that one in five American women may have been subjected to domestic violence by a man. But I also know something about statistics. It does NOT mean that one in five men abuses women. Unless you’re hanging onto the idea that all women connect with one man and cleave to him until he kills her.

I can tell you the whole class of “nice guys” is sick to death of the whole bad boy schtick. Why men may not be as upset about domestic violence as James Brown would like us to be. If you seek out people who disrespect and abuse you, precisely because they disrespect and abuse you, maybe our empathy capacity has been damaged.

Consider this:

“6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

Campaigners claim that men are often treated as “second-class victims” and that many police forces and councils do not take them seriously. “Male victims are almost invisible to the authorities such as the police, who rarely can be prevailed upon to take the man’s side,” said John Mays of Parity. “Their plight is largely overlooked by the media, in official reports and in government policy, for example in the provision of refuge places – 7,500 for females in England and Wales but only 60 for men.”

The official figures underestimate the true number of male victims, Mays said. “Culturally it’s difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the authorities. Men are reluctant to say that they’ve been abused by women, because it’s seen as unmanly and weak.”

Still worrying about the one in five women stat? Six percent is not twenty percent. How does that happen?

These days, women have many contacts with men. They have more opportunity to indulge their age-old predilection for bad boys. Bad boys are attractive because they they are bad, get in trouble, ignore the women attracted to them, and, well, beat them when they’re in a mood or something.

Exhibit I. Rihanna chose to return to the thug who did this to her.

She loves Chris. Just like Janay loves Ray.

When women actually get their act together, we nice guys will be glad to work with you about things which MUST be done, including making restraining orders stick, making local police departments care about frightened wives with broken arms and broken noses, and figuring out how to rescue even the moronic fools who think a right cross is something like a kiss. Not to mention shutting up the libs who pretend to protect women when they try to deny threatened women the right to own a protective firearm. Why do you think the term equalizer was ever coined?

Alternatively, learn the English language and your rights under the law. And get yourself a gun for that moment when a restraining order proves itself a mere piece of paper.

Final Note: The players of the NFL are arrested at a lesser rate than the population at large. Same goes for domestic violence arrests. Mostly, they’re decent if imperfect citizens.

Bet you didn’t know that.

The Guardian’s theme song. It grows on you. Like the show.

I tried to watch the popular TV series The Mentalist. Slick, superficial, inane. The Aussie star struck me as gay.

Today seems to be my day for confessing failures. I was wrong about the Aussie star. His name is Simon Baker. Beautiful wife and three kids. (Gaydar fail. Sigh.) When I was surfing Netflix for Midsomer Murders replacements, I stumbled across a three year major network series called “The Guardian,” which ran from 2001 to 2004.

Watched the pilot. Not too impressed. A pricey corporate lawyer in Pittsburgh gets busted for cocaine and is sentenced to divide his time between his father’s law firm and 1500 hours with the child services department of the city’s welfare system. Yawn. Fish out of water stuff. Silver spoon kid seeing real people problems for the first time.

A bit too transparent, you know. The name of the lead character is Nick Fallin (get it?), and he is so remote and without reaction that you might think he’s just a pretty boy coasting through a TV gig. Everybody rightly denounces him as arrogant, superior, and beyond the pale.

Don’t know why but after a long pause (desperation probably) I went back and watched a couple more episodes. Okay. I’ve strung it out long enough. This is a GREAT American TV series. Simon Baker is a gifted actor, wasted in The Mentalist.

If you have Netflix, start watching it before it goes away. Sixty seven episodes. I’ve watched sixty five. Don’t want to see what they do to him at the end. Because the real ending happened a few episodes before.

The show dates from the era when series TV required 22 or 23 episodes a year. You wonder how any of the actors managed it. And the more I watched, the more I wondered how Simon Baker, so urbane and charming in the Mentalist, always a twinkle in his eye, could play the part of Nick Fallin day in and day out for years.

There’s only one hook for the audience. Everyone detests and despises him, absolutely no one likes him, but it’s clear that he cares, that he feels everyone’s emotions, and he is nevertheless imprisoned inside an icy exterior he cannot break through. Nick Fallin is an undiagnosed borderline autistic. The three Emmies Baker should have received were not forthcoming because he works so hard to do so little. He looks no one in the eye. He does not respond at all to the most obvious of emotional cues. He suffers unutterable torment without a flicker of recognizable emotion. And yet you can still see him hurt. And care. But never a twinkle in his eye.

All this in a show that is stuffed with overacting. The plots frequently careen into soap opera.

Not going to give you spoilers about the long arc of the show. But I will say I have never seen a major network series offer us such a subtly developed and more humanly revealed Christ figure. Nick Fallin? Code name for demon damned. It takes them three years to make their point, a long long arc that does seem prescient about innumerable social and cultural issues, but at the end you find yourself thinking that a guardian angel plumped down on earth might very well find himself conflicted, tempted by vice, and struggling every day to discover what is right in both the highest and lowest realms.

And, oh yeah. Billy Budd. Herman Melville’s Christ figure. Innocence betrayed. A much better read than Moby Dick. And, mercifully, much much shorter.

Autographed Ray Rice jersey.

I tend to congratulate myself for being right a lot, for being prescient, for having good timing. So it’s only fair that I admit when I’m none of those things.

Last Christmas, I got my wife an autographed Ray Rice jersey. Thought I did good. She went to Rutgers and after the Vick fiasco in Philly she transferred her team loyalty to the Baltimore Ravens.

To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the Ravens. On the one hand, they’re the only NFL team named after a poem. On the other hand, the Ravens are an abomination, the Cleveland Browns stolen from their home in the dead of night and therefore permanently accursed and evil. You know.

I had mixed feelings about Ray Rice too. He went to the NFL before he graduated from Rutgers. I carped about that, blamed the coach, though I understood the hardship argument without fully accepting it. He also couldn’t talk like a college student. “Should of went” is not a locution I countenance in anyone.

But we have season tickets at Rutgers, and we have seen Rice play valiantly many times. We watched him help the Ravens to Super Bowl victory. So I bought the jersey.

It was a matter of only days later that the Atlantic City elevator video surfaced. The one of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancé into the hallway. We were done with him then. There was no need to see what happened inside the elevator.

We were equally disgusted with the two game suspension. One of many reasons why my interest in the NFL is plunging. Why I seared Rush Limbaugh a while ago. I don’t care about political correctness. Hitting women is not a mistake. It’s a mortal sin.

Now my disgust has reached an altogether new level. The video of what happened inside the elevator has generated a ridiculous flurry of “shocked, shocked” reactions. Please. I never needed to see it and have done my best not to see it, in the same way that I have done my best not to watch beheading videos or the compound fracture videos of Joe Theismann or its NBA counterpart a few weeks ago.

But we still have this autographed jersey. Anybody want it? Call it a monument to the prophetic pretensions of yours truly.

If you want it, I’ll mail it to you.

What? Me worry? No. The rest of us did.

I was disgusted and done after the first half. But here’s the official story:

Nick Foles threw two touchdown passes in the second half and the Philadelphia Eagles rallied from 17-0 deficit to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars 34-17 Sunday.

“You can’t lose your head out there,” Kelly said. “You have to understand that it’s a long game. We felt there were plays to be made.”

Iggles going nowhere this year. You heard it here first.

From Barbara. Paradise. Different things for different people.

But you’re from Jersey too. You know we have our own version of Paradise.

Sometimes summer. Memories of times past.

Sometimes trans-seasonal. Memories of times paster.

We get by. But love your views. Someday. Maybe. When life isn’t so hectic…

There are always nasty women. Some we like. Some we don’t. Some, meaning me. I don’t have to explain myself. Three I like:

Dorothy Parker.

Elaine Stritch.

Joan Rivers.

Though I despise Joan’s heirs, including Kathie Griffin, Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Silverman.

Unfair? I get to choose which nasty women I like. And don’t. I’ve chosen.

There is divinity. Only glunks fail to see it.

I wrote about this. Life is ineffable. Nihilism is nothing. Atheism always collapses to nihilism. Because if there is nothing at the beginning, there is nothing at the end. And we are closer to the end than we have been in a long long time.

Why I’m still awake at this hour. Read what I wrote.

Trophies for showing up. Terrific idea! Love our kids.

The title comes from my wife, who urged this fortune cookie on me this afternoon. Of course you can give up. I do it all the time.

Why am I giving up this time?

1. The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

2. The reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket is Obama.

3. The U.S. Electorate voted this incompetent idiot into office twice.

4. His margin of victory is two demographics without any capacity to change their minds based on anything but fact-free emotion.

5. The young people who are supposed to represent the hope of the future are either gullible fanatics inducted into some monotonic cause or retro Babbits who want a title on the door, regardless of whether the door is locked or on fire.

So. For now I give up. Congratulations, Brizoni. You’ve succeeded in torpedoing my earthly faith at least. The death of Christianity looks like a mighty positive development. Congratulations, Joshua Babbitt. You’re right. Life is really only about you. Tony prep school kids demand your attention first and foremost. Don’t worry. You’ll both get your trophies.

But my wife will be home soon. No doubt the hope generator will be restarted soon.

From “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Not me, obviously.

An actual full frontal nude was so much worse than this that nobody at Apple, the MSM or FBI could take it. They had never seen nipples or pubic hair before. God, how they they’d love to. Can’t wait. The hunt is frantic.

Famous actresses who took pictures of themselves naked are now surprised that someone found and published the pictures. Really? Career boost on the way?

Both MSNBC and Fox News are chewing this to death. How tiresome and hypocritical can you get on both sides? MSNBC doesn’t want to objectify women. So let’s talk about how naked they are. Fox News doesn’t want to disrespect women. So let’s talk about how naked they are. Can we see the labia minora? Fox? MSNBC? Can we?

Where are the pictures? I’m happy to look at them. I gave up on Facebook long ago. They won’t let me quit their service, but they won’t let me look at naked stars, either. Pretty much like doing a full frontal nude privately to your 200 friends, eh? Tweet and delete. Posed pics never show the labia minora, anyway. The acid test.

Why is this an issue of any kind? Actresses do things to become stars. Anybody out there who doesn’t know that?

Ship John Light. Guardian of the Cohansey/Delaware Bay.

Went out there one day. We were maybe 21. In a twelve foot Boston Whaler. Guy who had the con told me it was the dumbest of innumerable dumb things we had done together since teenage, including driving at 125+ speeds on the roads, shooting pistols with no adults around, and water skiing on an eight foot diameter, eighth of an inch thick piece of plywood that could have, and probably should have, sawed us in half like a saw blade. Ship John Light was there because the waters are dangerous. To well rigged eighteenth century sailing ships. Worse for dinghies with two idiots on board.

We survived all of that. We both survived everything.

Except life. Now we’re both recluses. Even from one another. No better friends through our elementary school years — and after an interruption for boarding school — in our late teens and twenties. WE WERE AWFUL. If it had a motor, we would drive it. If the motor was dead, we would revive it with ether. We were monsters.

We always had different talents. He could do anything mechanical. Which is not to demean him. He had an 800 Math board score. I could do other things. You could say we were each other’s friends when no one else would be, and you’d be both right and wrong.

In most ways, we were opposites. He married the most persistent woman, which was — well, isn’t it? — the American Dream. Like the way Jimmy Stewart kept marrying June Allyson. I remained the screwed up romantic, falling for one after another of the wrong women. He had four children. I have had none.

He stayed in the house he was born to, and I travelled widely. He remained the pillar of his father’s business. I did something altogether else.

Yet we both experienced the same kind of pain upon the death of our fathers. He told me his father turned bitter at the end, which I’d never have expected. Just wasted away. Mine wasted away too, from cancer, but I don’t think that was all of it. More. Deeper. And sadder.

We haven’t talked for a long time. He doesn’t approve of me. For oh so many reasons. His reclusiveness is different from mine. But exactly the same.

I think I can guarantee you all now, we both drive like little old ladies these days, and if we had our preference, we’d let our wives do it for us. If they knew what they were doing. His always had a tendency to ignore the speed limit in residential zones. Mine still tailgates on the Turnpike. The Two-Second Rule does not compute with math majors. Go figure.

It’s much much better to stay home.

Live like a prince, patronize to the proles like one.

I’ve disagreed with him before. I’ve made fun of him at times (yeah, read the post and enjoy all the graphics), despite agreeing more often than not. But this time, last Friday, he totally screwed the pooch.

Here’s the link: We’re Just Days Away from the Start of the NFL Season and We’re Talking About Domestic Violence Penalties. Despicable. I won’t quote it out of context. You’ve got to read the whole thing. Apparently, love for the NFL supersedes all.

It’s rare that he misses the point completely. This time he did. Domestic violence is not a joke, a PR cause, or an excuse to blame liberal media.

Men who beat women are the lowest of the low. Even if there are crazy women in your life who ask to be abused, who demand to be smacked, it’s the man’s responsibility to end the relationship. There’s never ANY excuse for it. That’s part of what being a man is. Mostly, it’s men who cross the line and one hell of a lot of them do. I have no use for the “lifestyle” argument. Broken jaws, eye sockets, noses, ribs, arms, and legs are counterbalanced by Maseratis and grossly over-decorated McMansions? Screw you.

This is an all-time low point of the Rush Limbaugh Show.

I’m posting this before his show starts today. I’m hoping for the rarest thing in talk radio, a full blown Rush apology.

I’m not hopeful.

P.S. Coincidentally, Rush wasn’t on air today. Maybe this will all blow over. Maybe he isn’t a dick Steelers fan to the exclusion of all else. Maybe.

I’m very tired, you know.

I’m in my seventh decade. You lose a step along the way.
You try things that don’t fit with who you are.

I don’t know. Maybe I was going for an Old Man of the Mountain thing. My father and grandfather both sported mustaches late in life. Well, my grandfather always had a mustache. And snow white hair from the age of 21. Try to compete with that.

I know it’s not Wolverine, but white hair overnight at 21? Imagine.
From the rest of his bio, I’m pretty sure he was the first X-Man.
Of course, he was my age when this was taken. So much more dignity.

My dad spent his life living up to him. My rebellion was that I didn’t try to live up to either of them. Couldn’t be done. So I went my own highly individualistic way. Freedom!

Until, like all stupid young men who get older and smarter only gradually, I realized I was always, obsessively, trying to live up to both of them. The consequence of being the son and grandson of men.

Strike that. The son and grandson of gentlemen. My father was critical of me, but he also criticized himself to me when he (rarely) transgressed his own code. He was in many ways opaque, but his courage was to tell me when he had been deliberately rude to a man who, in retrospect, didn’t deserve it.

This is, ultimately, a sad story. What all the young men will ultimately find life insists on. Nothing rational about it. Life is finally poetry, and justice is not measured in official outcomes but splinters of insight.

Do you want to hear? Probably not. It’s a mere anecdote that spans half a century. But maybe it will explain why, in my musings, I succumbed briefly to a desire to hide, which is always the function of beards.

In the early 1960s, we lived here and my parents socialized with all the local social lions, some of them fabulously rich. As I’ve also explained. One night, one party, shortly after the election of JFK, whom my father despised as a shanty Irish, drug addicted hood. (No idea to this day where he got that idea.) After a few drinks at a ritzy party, he announced “I hate all Democrats.” Just as a local unrich Democrat state senator entered the room. My dad was too embarrassed to apologize. So he didn’t.

Subsequent to that, I was, well, coerced into becoming a Cub Scout. Good for my socialization, I suppose, since I spent so much time reading and exploring by myself in Little Egypt.

The pack was located in the colonial village on whose outskirts we lived. They had their own history and tribal customs. While the Bostonians dumped tea into a harbor, these folk burned tea in the public square. The residents were mostly descendants of the tea burners. They didn’t like the wealthy outlanders. I discovered too late that I was one of those. They beat me up at every meeting, once punching me so severely in the groin that a doctor had to be called. The ringleader of the bullying was the son of the man my father had inadvertently insulted.

Pressured by the doctor and my parents, I told who had done it. My dad called the parents of the kids involved. All but one blew him off. One night I was called downstairs to see someone at the door. It was that man with his son, whom he brought expressly to apologize to me. I accepted his apology. There were no recriminations. From then on, he was my friend.

My father told me afterwards, “I’m in his debt. He proved to me he was a gentleman. I’ve never proved to him that I am.” But I think he did. There were no fisticuffs. Both were gracious, honorable men.

I’m more aggrieved at myself for what happened many years later. By an accident I was living in that very village not 15 years ago. I remembered the man and his wife. She was lovely, with a windswept hairstyle I wish would come back. But the story in the village was that they had both come to grief. She was incapacitated and nearly catatonic, I don’t know why, and he was physically debilitated, confined to a wheelchair. People described the two of them sitting in what should have been their perfect retirement home, staring listlessly at one another. He’d been a realtor, an earnest local politician, and she had been the mother of three. And their inheritance was unimaginable ruin.

Then, one day, I saw a sight I will never forget. A man in a motorized wheelchair wheeling down the exact center of the wide road called Ye Greate Street. He looked neither left nor right. I think, just once, he wanted to see the Cohansey River again. I’ve had that feeling myself. I told myself I know that man, know who he is, that proud jaw, that stolid substance. I should run into the street and introduce myself and tell him about the example of fatherhood, manhood, he had shown me.

But I didn’t. He whizzed slowly by. Now I know how my Dad felt.

Why people grow beards and hide behind them.

Forgive me, Mr. Robert Webber. I coulda, shoulda, didna.

But I’m older now. Hope to see you later on. Clean shaven.

For you, for me. The ineffable Cohansey River.

Float me on a wooden boat on that river. I’ll be content.

P.S. No intent to deceive. Best pic I can offer. Just can’t take the flash of the camera. Sorry.

I am everyone’s nightmare. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I have spent all day avoiding two terrible posts I knew I had to do. Sorry for the eye slits. Can’t keep them open when the flash goes off. I chose to do this egotistical post instead of the harder ones. Sometimes two posts are too many. Sometimes five are not enough. Why I’m just treading water.

But look. If I’m not St. Nuke, I’m Johnny Dodge. Still everyone’s nightmare. Count on it.

And, yes, I do have eyes.

I see everything.

Seventh decade of watching. That’s worse than the NSA. Because it involves actual insight.

An old, famous New Yorker cover. How it works in the benighted province of Manhattan.

She was a pioneer. A female standup comedian who started at it fairly late in life. A boundless font of energy who motored on through personal travail, tragedy, and controversy. She idolized Johnny Carson, then was betrayed by him. She could have given up and spent the rest of her life repeating old routines in Holiday Inns. But she never did. (I saw an ex-Tonight Show staple standup opening for Sinatra at an open-air concert in Cincinnati. He was doing, word for word, the last monologue I had seen him do for Johnny Carson twenty-some years before.)

Sure, she’s controversial. She got married late in life, had a child late in life, continued busting comedy barriers by getting bluer and bluer over the years, and she endured the vicissitudes of life — her husband’s suicide among other traumas — and kept on trucking. She got addicted to cosmetic surgery, a horrifying refuge of the insecure, and augmented her comedic income with shopping channel hucksterism because her husband left her penniless and there were all those face lifts to pay for.

In some ways, she’s the ultimate stereotype of a New York Jew, bossy, foul-mouthed, obnoxiously liberal, and sometimes just plain ugly in her insistent egotism.

But hold up for a second. Take a look at the map up top. It makes me think of another trailblazing comedienne named Minnie Pearl.

Yeah, the price tag on the hat was part of her schtick. She was from Tennessee.

Do you know of her?

Pearl’s comedy was gentle satire of rural Southern culture, often called “hillbilly” culture. Pearl always dressed in styleless “down home” dresses and wore a hat with a price tag hanging from it, displaying the price of $1.98. Her catch phrase was “How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E! I’m jes’ so proud to be here!” delivered in a loud holler. After she became an established star, her audiences usually shouted “How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E!” back. Pearl’s humor was often self-deprecating, and involved her unsuccessful attempts at attracting the attention of “a feller” and, particularly in later years, her age. She also told monologues involving her comical ‘ne’er-do-well’ relatives, notably “Uncle Nabob”, his wife “Aunt Ambrosia”, “Lucifer Hucklehead”, “Miss Lizzie Tinkum”, “Doc Payne”, and, of course, her “Brother”, who was simultaneously both slow-witted and wise. She usually closed her monologues with the exit line, “I love you so much it hurts!” She also sang comic novelty songs. She often danced with Grandpa Jones.

Pearl’s comic material derived heavily from her hometown of Centerville, which in her act she called Grinder’s Switch. Grinder’s Switch is a community just outside of Centerville that consisted of little more than a railroad switch. Those who knew her recognized that the characters were largely based on real residents of Centerville. So much traffic resulted from fans and tourists looking for Grinder’s Switch that the Hickman County Highway Department eventually changed the designation on the “Grinder’s Switch” road sign to “Hickman Springs Road.”

Parochial in the extreme. But I think Joan Rivers was exactly the same, just as parochial. Just as everything about Minnie Pearl was ultimately Tennessee, everything about Joan Rivers was ultimately New York. She went to Barnard College at Columbia, she had the pre-feminist hunger to succeed, to prove she could best the men at wit and in monetary gain, and she was big city relentless in her ambition.

People carp about her cruelty on Hollywood red carpet events. She was a ruthless fashion critic. What hardly anyone seems to realize is that she was at base a New York fashion snob and an extraordinarily candid old fashioned Jewish girl. Famous women who insist on dressing and acting like whores offended her. She made it the stuff of comedy. But the dripping venom of her jokes was unacceptable to the nouveau riche of Hollywood. She got fired from red carpet coverage. And so reinvented herself again. Now she would be the ‘Fashion Police,’ in which capacity she tirelessly slammed the rising young survivors of the casting couch and used her earthy Jewishness to make anatomical jokes no one had ever heard from a woman, let alone one in her advancing old age.

Yeah, she occasionally slammed conservatives generally and Sara Palin notably. But look at the map. It’s like Minnie Pearl claiming George Gershwin never wrote music. Consider the source.

I just saw what may be her last episode of Fashion Police on the E! Channel. A 90 minute special about both the Video Music Awards and the Emmy Awards. Her very last joke on the show may be one of those perfect last lines. The climax of Fashion Police is always the awarding of the title “Fashhole of the Week.” This time it was for someone named Amber Rose, who went to the Video Music Awards in this:

Really? Really?

Joan has made herself famous at Fashion Police for vagina jokes. She once gave herself an award for the thousandth one she’d told. Sorry. I should have been outraged. But I kept seeing an octogenarian little Jewish girl fighting back against moral rot in the only tool she had at her disposal — aggressive, uncompromising, disdainful wit.

Her last joke?

“This dress reminds me of a chain link fence at the border. Hundreds of Guatemalans tried to escape across her vagina.”

Add your own final punchline. Did they escape by going over, under, or through that chained up vagina?

Joan was 81. No saint. Hardly anyone who makes it past 50 is, if you want to know the truth of it. I wish her well. And hope the map of her heaven looks like a certain New Yorker cover.

Get up, Joan. Let me tell you the Eddy Rickenbacker story.

He was in a commercial airline crash in 1941:

When Rickenbacker arrived at a hospital, his injuries appeared so grotesque that the emergency surgeons and physicians left him for dead for some time. They instructed their assistants to “take care of the live ones.” Rickenbacker’s injuries included a fractured skull, other head injuries, a shattered left elbow with a crushed nerve, a paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, a pelvis broken in two places, a severed nerve in his left hip, and a broken left knee. Rickenbacker’s left eyeball was also blown out of its socket.

He was dying. Until he heard a radio announcer proclaim that he had died. With his remaining strength, he smashed the radio to bits and proceeded to recover.

As I said. Get back to work, Joan. More than half the population have vaginas. That’s many more jokes to be made. Get better soon.

UPDATE. This doesn’t sound good. Camille Paglia weighing in with less to say than I have said but somehow more finally. Wake up, Joan!

Don’t look like me.

I know. You think I don’t know. I’m the eternal outsider. But after ten years together, I have to take some responsibility for my wife’s children and grandchildren. Not a lot of responsibility. Just being nice. They’re all awful. Starting with the great grandchild. He’s a bruiser. His daddy’s a veteran. His mommy is small. I haven’t met him yet. But I’ll be resentful for sure.

Which leads to my first rule of grandfathers.

1. Don’t overdo the love babies thing. Babies do lots of disgusting things. When their moms ask you to hold them, plead frailty.

Unfortunately in this day and age, grandchildren are likely to come in assorted ages. I have one who is so mean and selfish that she reminds me of me. And she’s not even Scottish. Though she’s six. Which is the exact emotional age of most Scottish men. Thank God she’s Irish. But. She’s so predictable, she manipulates everyone, stares at me until I stare back at her, which makes her giggle, leading to Rule two.

2. Horrifyingly nasty granddaughters need to be teased, stared at, and told what to do.

I know it sounds impossible. It isn’t. Take it from me, Instapunk. My granddaughter thinks I’m really cool. She peeled pistachio nuts for me last week. Two for him, one for me, she announced. I told her she was okay.

3. Teenage granddaughters turn into women overnight. But the older you get, the more you remember they’re still little girls.

Have a college girl granddaughter. I think she likes me because I’ve actually tried to talk with her. Successfully. But to me she still seems fourteen. So I disapprove of all her boyfriends automatically, and she’s able to bridge the gap because she calls me Robert.

You know what, though? I’ve told her exactly what my hopes and fears are for her regarding education. And she listened. She’s getting A’s now, but I fret about her living alone at home in the old neighborhood.

There’s a grandson or two too. One too old to think of any connection. But I think we might be moving toward at least a rapprochement. It’s a long leap we have to overcome. His father is a construction worker. He’s a computer scientist who sidelines as a construction worker. I used to be in the computer business, after having been a truck driver in a lumber yard. No chance of any commonalities.

4. Grandsons think you’re deadmen. Don’t disabuse them of their presumption. Surprise them with your longevity.

It takes boy children a long long — did I mention long — time to recognize that men might have advice for men.

Annoying. We didn’t all run out on our families screwing every babe at the country club and every secretary in the office, but… Enough of us did. Which is screwing our sons too. And our daughters.

Grandfathers have to field every kind of ball bouncing out of the infield.

5. Grandfathers have to hold the line. Right is right, wrong is wrong, even if your granddaughter has a crush on her cousin. Even if they seem to be moving drugs around. Somebody has to be willing to levy judgment. (Not saying this is happening. Just being hypothetical. Another GF task.)

6. Grandfathers have to be willing to die for rules one through five. Sorry.

7. Don’t look like me.

If you need any clarification of the rules, I’m happy, or at least willing, to oblige.

I’m right, I’m right, I’m right, Goddammit.

So. Brizoni is finally ready.

I haven’t dismissed these arguments. I’ve dismantled them. [Yeah. I saw the movie. Shutter Island. Lots of dismantling there.]

I’ve been plugging away at yet another dismantling of everything you said in your last email, point-by-point. Marshalling evidence, refining arguments. Don’t want you to think I’ve ignored anything. Gonna be massive. Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan [uh, where is it, big boy, this massive evidence, any sign whatever that you know more about Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan than I do? SPOILER: Not here. He brings not only no massive evidence but no evidence whatsoever. He just attacks me.] But I keep getting hung up on this:

“I like to hear you say,

In my view, Ayn Rand has done this successfully.’ Yes, in your view she has. In my view, she hasn’t. Would John Galt have done anything to stop the Holocaust or the Killing Fields? It doesn’t actually come up in Atlas Shrugged, does it? Rather, there’s a sense of letting the dumb-ass victims be dumb-ass victims while us smart ones run away to the Colorado Hole in the Wall Butch and Sundance were aiming for.

What you have can’t be called a “view.” It’s a mostly uninformed opinion. [As opposed to your own uninformed opinion.] I know you think you Get It, no sweat, because that’s what Robert Laird does. Not this time. You read Atlas once in high school, didn’t understand it***, retained less of it as the years wore on, and now have a bad picture of her philosophy sketched from too few facts. Add those facts together and you maybe have half a clue, at most. [No facts whatever in Atlas Shrugged. It’s pure ideology.]

Since you don’t know what you’re talking about, you inevitably attack straw men. [Atlas is completely about straw men, not my response to it.] The theme of Atlas is, to cop the lexicon, the role of man’s mind in human life. Which it dramatizes by showing how quickly, and how totally, human life falls apart when the mind withdraws. [Hardly. The book is a cartoon, starring Dagny, the curious winner who keeps losing… and talking.] The book is demonstrative, not prescriptive. If Rand had thought Galt’s Gulch was the way to go in real life, she would have gone there. [uh, Dagny went there.] She could have built the place with her own money if it came to that — she died with a couple million bucks stuffed in a Savings and Loan across from her apartment. [I thought Ethan Frome was a good capitalist parable too, all that gold stuffed under his mattress.] It could have been many times that if she’d ever cared to make any investments whatever. She never did. [Everything under the mattress is the Russian way.] All she wanted was the freedom to write. The rest was gravy. She didn’t flee to a secret paradise and watch the world of fools burn. She thought the world was worth trying to save. Can you say the same? [Really, you callow clown? You dare ask that of me?]

I thought about linking to a debate that answers many of your entry-level objections. You should at least know what you’re rejecting before you reject it. [I’m well aware of everything I’m rejecting. I’m a fucking polymath and a genius. You’re a lowly rote-Randian with pretensions.]

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point. [Acute observation. Ask anyone. They’ll all swear I’m quitting hope tomorrow. Or the next day.] You’ve had your fill, thanks so much, and what kind of monster am I to force more down your gullet. Fact? Proof? No such thing as either, if you squint hard enough. Maybe the universe began ten seconds ago, with history intact. Yooooooooou can’t “”””prove”””” it didn’t, can you? Pigeon strut. And a sigh of relief that God is safe and sound behind the veil of unreasonable doubt. [What worm has eaten your brain? What have you ever proved? Name any one thing you’ve proved. Except your own idiocy? If I squint hard enough, I can see a fool blowing up his own life in a narcissist fantasy.]

Why you think the Byzantines had the right idea. [???!!!] Stagnation is fine as long as you’re content. Who needs Mozart when you’ve got your grandfather’s hymnal? Who needs Michelangeo when you’re surrounded by all these perfectly fine frescoes? Who needs Dante when you can just read Matthew 24 again? Who needs Bacon at all — never mind that medicine has had no new ideas for five hundred years. [???!!!] Who needs Magellan when everything’s awesome right here? [You’re insane. Utterly. I told you more about these people than you ever knew before.] Spend your days like a soft white belly, basking in the sun. What a lovely retirement for a worn-out old man. Peace without life. [You think what you’re doing is life? lol. When it comes to minds, you’re the soft white belly. The jelly of not quite knowing much topped by the deathly flesh of not believing in anything but the screeds of an ancient Brit homosexual.]

Hell with it. Here’s the link. You’ll skim it for an excuse to ignore it. If even that. Religious freedom means the the [sic] freedom to lie to yourself about whatever you want. Without so much as being called out on it. Facts be damned. [So keep on lying to yourself, dude. Don’t let me stop you. I’m just twice your age and twice your IQ. No prob.]

Go on. Prove me right yet again. [Yet again? You’ve never proven a single damned thing.] My expectations are as low as a casket.

In which it is proved once and for all that the once vaunted Brizoni is now an incoherent meth-head. When he comes to his senses, he can call me. But he’s not now in my league. Never will be. But not many are. Sorry. I’m in a mood. Not a mood for pretending.

That would be the notorious pigeon strut. Which I do every day. Notwithstanding being a worn-out old man.

***”Didn’t understand it.” Where does such arrogance come from? I understood it fine. Loved it. I was fourteen. Brizoni is now twice that age and more. He’s still mentally fourteen. Sorry, folks, I’m tired. Shouldn’t have reopened this can of worms. I apologize. He really is a moron. Past help.

P.S. I’m all done pretending now. Brizoni is a junkie. Anyone reading this who knows him get him some help. He would never have written or argued this poorly without being in serious trouble mentally. Mother? Wife? Anyone who follows his Internet exploits. Get him some help.

P.P.S. Just saw the ‘smoking gun’ of Brizoni’s rant. Should have detected it before. My error. Highlighting mine.

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point.

“Full-stop”is a Britishism, their affectation about avoiding the use of the simple grammatical element known as the “period.” Probably related to their aversion to all things female, which is so pervasive that they use the words “twat” and “cunt” exclusively as insults to men. They’re too afraid to use them on women, except under the most extreme circumstances.

At any rate, this usage by a boy from the Pacific Northwest is proof positive that he has been reading the tweets and other spontaneous Internet defecations of Richard Dawkins. But here’s the interesting thing. Being the butt slave of both Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins has to be a rending experience. No chance that Dawkins would regard Rand as anything but a capitalist twat. No chance Rand would regard Dawkins as anything but a pansy Brit cunt.

Gotta be tough on poor Brizoni.

Rather than deal with the polar opposites in his own religion, he chooses the much easier alternative of attacking me and mine. Sad.

But also funny. Time to man up, rent boy.