A Wit Called Wanda

All the scapegoats Republicans cite are dodges. The right wingers don't care how many children are shot to death in this country. Literally. 

They only care about their REAL babies, the guns.

Only Sometimes Am I Understood

I wrote this on a Washington Post thread: “Fox News propaganda is fogging up American reality with hateful lies, carefully building to a future of unimaginable violence in this country.”

Naturally, the remark drew a sneer from some brain-dead Republican. But another reader decided to explain.

OnlySometimes replied, “George, read the sentence for comprehension. The first part, ‘Fox News propaganda is fogging up American reality with hateful lies,’ this means that content put out by Fox News is fogging up its viewers’ sense of reality with hateful lies. This is a fact made clear by the Dominion Voting lawsuit that shows without a doubt that the ‘news’ team at Fox News puts out content based on what they think will generate ratings — not based on facts or truth. 

“Fox News has determined they get better ratings and therefore make MORE MONEY when they give their viewers content filled with garbage about how Dems are coming for guns, immigrants are coming to rape, teachers are trying to groom kids to be gay, the list goes on.

“The Fox News people telling their viewers this crap don’t believe this s#it. They know their viewers crave this worldview and know they make TONS of money off them. It’s GREED. 

“Now, the second part of the sentence, ‘carefully building to a future of unimaginable violence in this country.’ This means the result of this careful feeding of misinformation to Fox’s viewers will inevitably lead to unimaginable violence, whether that’s the intended consequence or not. “If you are a Fox News viewer and you trust their presenters/ opinion-ers, then you believe the lies they tell you, so of course you’d be afraid, angry and ready to take up arms to protect what you think is being stolen from you.

“Can you see the problem here? Fox News has viewers all worked up over imaginary bogey men. Dems aren’t coming for their guns — just sensible safety regulations. Immigrants aren’t coming to rape — they just want a chance to work hard and provide for their family in a country that’s not buried in corruption, or at war. Teachers aren’t trying to groom kids — they’re trying to educate kids to be kind to others, be knowledgeable citizens, to teach them to read and think for themselves so they can make up their own minds about the issues of the day.”

Duck and Cover, 2023

For safety's sake, let's stay out of all schools, all synagogues and churches, all movie theaters, malls, supermarkets and Walmarts, out of Vegas and Dallas and New York. 

Let's hide and cower at the approach of every stranger. I'll dash for groceries while you give me covering fire. 

But above all, let's never, EVer do anything about the guns. THAT would interfere with our FREEEEEE-DUMB.

The Plain, Ugly Truth about the Right

As Mitchell Zimmerman observed, "With or without Trump, the modern GOP — with its love of guns and sympathy for violence, its contempt for free elections and hatred of a free press, and its embrace of white supremacy — remains an extremist organization that threatens American democracy."

The Gunfire That Barks "I Am! I Am!'

“Ego starts when a being stops considering itself a being and starts being its own point of view. It thinks survival is maintaining that point of view. An ego, therefore, is a point of view attempting to cause its own survival. So its purpose is domination of everything. An ego will sacrifice its own body just to be right.” — Adam Smith, writing about EST in his book Powers of Mind

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And that, right there, explains every mass shooter.

Some Sense on Guns

PLUS any gun owner whose firearm ends up in the hands of a child does jail time, without exception.

The Mug Shots Blur After While...

You glimpse some dead-faced, vacant-eyed guy in a mug shot and you think, “Now, which is that? The mad gunman? The mad bomber? Is he the one who shot those people in the supermarket today or in the cinema yesterday? Or is he the one who crushed that protester with a car, or the one who slaughtered all those schoolchildren in that place, where was it again? In America somewhere. Yes, certainly in America. Only in America.”

Warm Guns and Cold, Dead Children

I have thought that ever since. That's why I knew the Parkland teens would be able to accomplish nothing. We are a society of monsters. A country of warm guns and cold, dead children.

Six That Should Be Seen

Six movies many should see, but most have not. Here they are in chronological order:

A Face in the Crowd (1957): Andy Griffith made monstrous by celebrity culture in a film that suggests the vast dangers swimming just beneath the surface of American triviality and anti-intellectual self-satisfaction.

Lonesome Rhodes: “This whole country's just like my flock of sheep!”

Marcia Jeffries: “Sheep?”

Lonesome Rhodes: “Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be ‘Fighters for Fuller.’ They’re mine! I own ‘em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ‘em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I’m gonna be the power behind the president — and you'll be the power behind me!”

The Americanization of Emily (1964): A very funny film that takes the glorification of war very seriously. After the laughs settle down, the insights remain unsettling. Way ahead of its time and — in our bellicose, warrior-worshipping society — still ahead of its time.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: “You American-haters bore me to tears, Miss Barham. I’ve dealt with Europeans all my life. I know all about us parvenus from the States who come over here and race around your old cathedral towns with our cameras and Coca-Cola bottles... Brawl in your pubs, paw at your women, and act like we own the world. We overtip, we talk too loud, we think we can buy anything with a Hershey bar. I’ve had Germans and Italians tell me how politically ingenuous we are, and perhaps so. But we haven't managed a Hitler or a Mussolini yet. I've had Frenchmen call me a savage because I only took half an hour for lunch. Hell, Ms. Barham, the only reason the French take two hours for lunch is because the service in their restaurants is lousy. The most tedious lot are you British. We crass Americans didn't introduce war into your little island. This war, Miss Barham, to which we Americans are so insensitive, is the result of 2,000 years of European greed, barbarism, superstition, and stupidity. Don't blame it on our Coca-Cola bottles. Europe was a going brothel long before we came to town.”

The President’s Analyst (1967): Does the American political system ever give you the feeling that you’re the only sane person left standing? A film for those born with the gift of laughter, and the sense that the world is mad.

Bing Quantrill: “Hey, Dad. You want the Magnum .357 in the house?”

Wynn Quantrill: “Darn it, Bing. I told you not to play around with my guns. No, I do not want that in the house. That is my car gun. My house gun is already in the house. Now, put that back in the glove compartment, and don’t let me catch you fooling with my guns again.”

Bing Quantrill: “I’m sorry, Dad.”

Wynn Quantrill: “Great kid.”

Dr. Sidney Schaefer: “I thought you said you were an accountant.”

Wynn Quantrill: “I am.”

Dr. Sidney Schaefer: “Why do you have all these guns around, then?”

Wynn Quantrill: “You know.”

Network (1976): The madcap film that presciently predicted the contemporary TV “news” environment by springboarding from a simple premise — what happens to a society when profit trumps truth?

Howard Beale: [laughing to himself] “But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in ILLUSIONS, man! None of it is real! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even THINK like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion!”

The Lives of Others (2006): Big Brother sees all, hears all — including existential and moral examples that may shake the foundations of his own inhumanity.

Anton Grubitz: “Did you know that there are just five types of artists? Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a ‘hysterical anthropocentrist.’ Can’t bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won’t cause us any more trouble. Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.”

A Single Man (2009): The prospect of death becomes a lens that transmutes despair into a vivid vision of the wonders just under the surface of quotidian human existence.

George Falconer: “Waking up begins with saying ‘am’ and ‘now.’ For the past eight months waking up has actually hurt. The cold realization that I am still here slowly sets in.”

Boot Hill USA, circa 2012

By Dan Hagen

The difference between the United States of America now and the USA in Wyatt Earp's day is that in Wyatt Earp's day, he took away people's guns by law. Then, when they got drunk, they didn't have them.

Earp's ordinance #9 was put into effect on April 19, 1881. This regulation forbade the carrying of weapons, including knives, inside Tombstone city limits.

Look, nobody is trying to confiscate anybody’s guns, okay? That's just Fox News lying bullshit. Americans have a Second Amendment right to own guns, but they should do so with the knowledge of the price that society pays for that right, and it is steep indeed.

The rate of deaths caused by guns in the U.S. is many times what it is in England, with its strict gun control laws. So, despite the talking points that right wingers parrot, gun control obviously does work. You can argue that it's a violation of fundamental rights, but the facts speak for themselves.

The U.S. leads the world’s developed countries in per capita gun deaths at 14.24 gun deaths per 100,000 people. England is way down the list at 0.41, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

So gun control reduces the deaths caused by guns, obviously. Duh.

They know it in London now, they knew it in Tombstone, AZ, in 1880, and they know everywhere that people don't have their heads shoved straight up their ideological asses.

Any discussion that suggests that we might have problems not solvable by guns prompts an immediate attack of the vapors among right wingers, along with calls to be carried to their favorite fainting couch.

Funny. I have walked the streets of central Illinois for decades without feeling the feverish need to carry a gun for protection, and yet I'm still alive. Not even a flesh wound.

But, according to the right wingers, the streets here and everywhere are just teeming with murderous, armed criminals.

I must be awfully good at dodging bullets.

But why stop at the right to carry handguns? Doesn’t the Second Amendment cover flamethrowers, too? If you're confronting a gang of armed criminals who are trying to take your lunch money, you're going to need to exercise your God-given right to bear flamethrowers. And hand grenades, of course.

You can have my hand grenade when you pry it out of my cold, dead hand (something I wouldn’t advise, by the way).

Right-wing gun nuts are now insuring that not only lunatics but FELONS retain the right to CONCEAL and CARRY guns in the U.S.

Who pays the price for our refusal to rationally discuss guns in this nation? Here are some of the people who did:

— In June 2008, a 4-year-old girl shot herself in the chest after snatching her grandmother's handgun from the woman's purse while riding in a shopping cart at a Sam's Club store in Columbia, SC. And America became just that much safer.

— In April 2009, Richard Poplawski of Pittsburgh shot and killed three police officers, telling friends he feared that President Obama planned to confiscate weapons. He expressed fear about a supposed plan by FEMA to herd people into concentration camps, which he had seen discussed by Glenn Beck on Fox News.

— Also in April 2009, Joshua Cartwright of Florida killed two sheriff's deputies at a gun range before police officers killed him. His wife told police he was “severely disturbed” by Obama's election. 

— One Saturday in 2010, in his rural eastern Kentucky trailer park, Stanley Neace snapped over how his wife cooked his eggs and killed her and four others with a shotgun.

— In February 2012, a 20-year-old minister’s daughter was shot in the head and killed in a St. Petersburg, Florida, church when a man who was showing off his gun accidentally fired through an interior wall.

Funny how no Republican ever mentions the fact that President Ronald Reagan supported the Brady handgun act. Reagan did, of course, have the advantage of the additional insight that is provided by the experience of having been shot.

Only in private, hypocritically, will right wingers admit the truth about American guns. Republican Iowa State Rep. Jeff Kaufmann was caught joking on a hot mic that a proposal which would allow state residents to carry weapons in public without permission from a sheriff and without any training or a background check might better be called the “give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic” bill.

Back in the late 1930s, songwriter Harold Rome penned a satirical song “(When I Grow Up) The G-Man Song,” wherein a barely pubescent protagonist sang: "Gee, but I'd like to be a G-Man and go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I'd be a brave gang-busting he-man and go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I’d put on disguises of all different sizes and would I win prizes for telling who spies is!"

Yes, Americans have a right to own guns to protect themselves, but a disturbing number of them seem to be irrational gun fetishists who talk about America as if it's one big running gun battle, and who regard gun ownership as a panacea for all their problems. It isn't.

Few of life's problems can be solved with a gun, and only extremely immature people think otherwise. A feverish obsession with guns reveals that the person obsessed is compensating because he feels so frightened, powerless and small.

Unfortunately, the placebo of a handgun will not really give such men the courage and self-confidence for which they hunger.

The fact remains that guns belong in the hands of adults, and not those of children, whether chronological or emotional.