Farhad Manjoo frets over the power of the reactionary paranoid media and how it’s leading our people astray, but it ain’t that. That’s a symptom. That’s merely their reading material.
There are two primary causes of violent insurrection in today’s America:
Arsenal Sadness: Most people solve the problem of arsenal sadness by unlocking their arsenal and killing themselves, or their wife, or both, with a selected weapon from it. They are sad because they have spent decades, and tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have, amassing a world-class armory, and have been unable to use it. It sits, a seething reproach to their promise to themselves that someday they would spray some setting with bullets and everyone would pay attention to them. These people have what used to be called an itchy trigger finger. They are actively looking for occasions to pop someone; they open carry in desperate hopes that in the course of this or that ordinary day they can whip out their semi-automatic and do a wee-wee on the Waffle House lawn. Scaring people with their AWS-16 Beowulf just doesn’t do the trick anymore; they’re still sad. What better target than the national leadership of American democracy? It’s cathartic; it’s a culmination; it’s a hoot. If Stephen Paddock hadn’t prematurely shot his wad in Las Vegas, he’d have been blasting his way into the Pence family secure location on January 6. Ditto Adam Lanza.
Stupidity: This is the most thoughtful analysis of American stupidity UD has found. Yes, it is a long read; yes, it is somewhat pedantic. But the author captures better than anyone I know the roots and significance of the globally recognized idiocy of many Americans, their hatred of intellectuals, and their love of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Tommy Tuberville. Like the almost seventy percent of Americans who cannot name our three branches of government, Senator Tuberville, pride of Bama, cannot … name our three branches of government. I would not be surprised if Senator Tuberville thinks he sits on the Supreme Court. The archē-idiot, the person who took the ultimate, most powerful, opportunity to do good in the nation and the world and turned it into the foulest, most degenerate, most pointless killing field this country has ever seen, directs these people in their political activity. He shows them where to point their Beowulfs.
Despite manifold complaints from all directions, Mercer ain’t doin nuthin and UD thinks it’s cuz it’s positioning itself as the go-to school for Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Identity Evropa, Richard Spencerians, and assorted Capitol bombers and Pelosi slaughterers.
Whether NYU’s Bobst Library, or Hudson Yards’ Vessel (or, across the country, the Golden Gate Bridge), certain locations gradually become iconic for the suicidal. “When you build high,” said one architect, “folks will jump.”
Yes, Manhattan is wall to wall high-rises with jumpable balconies; but these are largely private suicides; we are talking about people who choose suicides maximally traumatic for large numbers of onlookers.
In the wake of its third suicide, Vessel has temporarily shut down; it will consider installing barriers.
Expect an AMAZING run on high-end Florida real estate in triple-gated island communities with their own police forces/armed guards/electronic surveillance. Most of the Trump syndicate has already fled there, and Javanka’s neighbors in particular (drug kingpins, Russian kleptocrats) couldn’t be more thrilled.
“We’re not too sure about the daddy though!” laughed ‘Little’ Pablo Escobar in response to a reporter’s question about the president possibly moving there. “He attracts a rather … grubby … element… Depresses home values. But the children are very presentable.”
“I disagree,” said Escobar’s neighbor, Tatiana Akhmedova. “I find the president’s personal violence, and the larger violence he incites, sexually exciting. I am getting excited just from saying this. You don’t understand because you are not a woman. You are not Russian. We are mad! We are revolutionaries! Our beloved Stalin made the streets run with blood just like Trump! Look at Trump’s power. Look at what he has unleashed. Many Republicans in congress want to vote to impeach him, but they are terrified because they have it on good authority that if they do their families will be shot to death! It is too exciting, darling… Give me five minutes in bed with Trump’s enormous хуй and I’ll know what to do with it!”
I asked him to order for me on Instacart this combination:
Like a lot of traumatized people, I’m reverting to the foundational securities of childhood – a childhood in which my mother basically cooked one dinner – spaghetti – and set out one lunch – a lukewarm Hebrew National hotdog, with French’s Classic Yellow mustard, inside a tasteless white bun.
Under normal circumstances, I would never ask Mr UD to order this for me, to have it in the house, to watch me eat it.
I mean, he would refuse to order it; and if I smuggled it in and he saw me eating it, he’d flee the room.
But when, out of a deep well of need, I – seemingly casual, but trembling inside – asked him to add these things to our grocery list, he unhesitatingly, with a profound and humane expression on his face, did so.
“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told [Pence], according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
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“We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac,” said Joe Grogan, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy adviser until last year.
To read about-to-be-censured Cong. Mo Brooks (‘bama) angrily defending himself from incitement to violence charges is to realize that William Faulkner had a totally unfair advantage over Northern writers. Yes, yes, he was a brilliant prose stylist; but he was also located in that y’all and shut ma mouth land and I tell you it just ain’t fair! They don’t grow em like Mo Brooks ’round these parts! ‘thesdans don’t run their mouths up and down and all around the block when they got something to say – they just, like, say it. Down South, ‘Faulknerian stream of consciousness’ is just another way to say howdy my name is Mo and there is SOOO much I want you to know so hon let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has cancelled a trip to Europe trip at the last minute.
Mr Pompeo had been due to fly out on Tuesday but Reuters reports that Luxembourg’s foreign minister and several top European Union officials have declined to meet with him.
No actually democratic country will have anything to do with you, ya big doodoo! Stick to your own kind – plenty of authoritarian regimes just like yours would love to hang out with you.
… in the Capitol building with a bunch of sick losers? Even at his lowest, when he was living in his car, Klete Keller was never a loser, never sick. He was, by his own account (listen up – it’s a half hour long but worth the investment of time), an entitled jerk, a man who thought being an Olympian meant he could keep swimming swiftly and easily through post-Olympic life.
Life had other ideas, and, when Keller realized basically nobody besides a few swim team kids gave a shit that he was a champion swimmer, he got depressed and angry and stopped working (or was fired) and started drinking and lazing about. His wife threw him out and he spent extended time homeless and altogether down and out.
One of Keller’s former Olympic teammates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Keller’s apparent descent, drew a line from the “goofy, oafish” swimmer he knew in the 2000s to the aimless, rudderless, 30-something man who, he speculated, became a perfect candidate to fall into a radical, conservative rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists and rioters involved in insurrection.
His sister eventually let him move in with her, and that’s when things started looking up for him.
Until a few days ago, he had a steady job in a real estate firm in Colorado; he might well have lost that job now. His name has been erased from the firm’s website. He faces possible arrest.
We needn’t waste time accounting for Keller’s big enthusiasm for Fuckface – that is apparently well documented in his (now-erased) social media. Anyone who wants to can be enthusiastic about Ff. But it’s certainly worth considering the fanaticism that brought him from Colorado to DC to the violence at the Capitol.
Having listened to him tell his story, I’ll offer this idea, sketchy and ill-informed as it has to be.
As I listened to Keller tell his tale, the phrase drama junkie kept coming to me. Also adrenalin junkie. After years and years of intense unrelenting swimming – in competitions, in practices – Keller had clearly built up a strong need for everything in life to be an unrelenting competitive test of his endurance in dramatic contests. He makes it clear that once his swimming career was over he entirely totally thoroughly collapsed. Ordinary vague daily life failed to be commensurate with the extraordinary small sharp warrior focus of the swimming pool. But Keller’s need for battle, self-testing, winning, superiority persisted.
Now this is a guy who dropped out of college – to focus on swimming, natch. One option as he left swimming would have been to finish his University of Southern California degree and get, like, a marketable skill. But he was, by his own admission, too arrogant for that. So down, down, down, he went. [Correction: According to this, he did eventually finish his degree.]
So my old friend Courtney, a really impressive all-around athlete, once sent me an article about the connection between athleticism and self-destructive behaviors. Here’s an excerpt from it:
If you’re an outdoor athlete and you’re good at it, you’re probably like I once was: a selfish, self-involved son of a bitch. It’s always more, more, more and me, me, me, and I was no different. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to do the hardest sport routes, to be the boldest on high, killer walls.
Why? Why not? I was addicted to climbing, and then to starvation, and when that wasn’t enough, I became addicted to drugs.
Maybe you see some of my method in your own madness. And perhaps your obsessions are “healthy”: wheatgrass, long runs, body sculpting, rock climbing. That’s great. But I tell you now, absent your passions you will feel the sharp scrape of withdrawal — just like any fixless junkie bug-eyed in a January alley. Reality can be reduced, at its sparest, to chemical reactions, our body craving the release of GABA, oxytocins, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. It doesn’t care about their provenance. It just doesn’t. Cut off the source—any source—and you will pay.
The drama, injury, contests, even in some perverted sense the teamwork at the Capitol must have felt very familiar to poor Klete Keller, once a champion, then a loser, then a winner, and now at this late date once again a terrible loser. Turns out – maybe; I’m speculating – he never quite lost his addiction to bloody battle. And now he has drowned in it.
.. the obvious one, which is that if we don’t let them fly they won’t be able to leave. Give each man one free one-way ticket to anywhere outside the US willing to take him. THEN impose the flying ban.
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As to where they should go: Hawley’s a no-brainer: Heiligenkreuz Abbey, a twelfth-century monastery near Vienna, and home to
Pater Edmund Waldstein, a 35-year-old Cistercian monk… By any conventional standard, his views are extreme: in addition to rejecting the separation of church and state, he is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake.
Burning individual heretics at the stake can’t hold a candle, as it were, to violently bringing down the most powerful democracy in the world; but it’ll be a way for Josh to cool his heels while hatching the next assault on the Capitol.
Cruz? The Northern Lights look spectacular from Murmansk.
Daniel Lubetzky points out that cowards and lazy fellow-travelers almost always help create the conditions for catastrophic social madness. If we don’t all stand up to nuts – writing and speaking against them, financially and otherwise supporting the enemies of unreason, demonstrating together against the debauched among us – we can’t pretend to be surprised when, emboldened, they strike.
The main thing, though, as the above excerpt from Lubetzky underlines, is that, once we’ve let it happen and the shit hits the fan – well, no kidding: You’ve got to hit them hard to make them fall back.
The abundant nut cases – most lately Elise VOTE FRAUD YES!!! Stefanik – are rapidly being removed from positions of responsibility, leaving a gaping hole where rational conservatives are supposed to be. I worry about Mitt being spread thin.
Ask yourself why a rich successful guy, facing very minor charges (unlawful entry; curfew violation) stemming from his effort to overthrow the government, came home to Georgia and apparently blew his brains out. “There’s blood everywhere,” his wife told 911, and there certainly would be if he used one of his SKS-45s to do the deed.
Judging by his house, the dude could have afforded excellent lawyers who would almost certainly arrange things so that he’d have to pay some eminently affordable penalty or something… So what the hell?
Let us speculate.
One possibility is that he was so devastated by his failure to destroy America that he saw no further reason to live. The event itself was heady stuff; he felt part of a righteous revolution. But within hours Nancy Pelosi – who should by rights have been dead by the end of the day – was not only alive but still presiding over the house. The anguish that settled upon him on his return to intolerable normalcy overcame him.
Another possibility is simply that this man, like his idol, is mentally ill. His violent extremism held off the inevitable violent suicide for awhile (there are several effective ways to off yourself; ask yourself why this man chose the absolute bloodiest, visiting piercing trauma upon his family as they discovered what he did to his head) by establishing a cult within which he could “normalize”and play out his fantasies. The failure of the cult’s attack on democracy shattered this man’s tenuous hold.
Another possibility goes the other way: shame. When the party’s over, and you see precisely the damage you’ve done to yourself and the people you love — hey, maybe even the country you love — you feel overpowering shame.
