“… We went to the Café Maure de la
Mosquée de Paris and got lots of
peppermint tea and smoked a little
bit of hookah and we felt very authentic.
It was really fun. We just sat and talked
for two hours. We saw the Arc de Triomphe
last night which was awesome and tonight
we’re going to the Eiffel Tower and getting
dinner by Musée d’Orsay. We got a really
yummy dinner last night at a restaurant
called something Odéon and then we
just wandered around St Germain…”

But that’s nothing! Look at his carry-on luggage!

Lots of stupid commentary has been generated by the events at Panama City Beach. This is the first smart opinion piece UD has read.

‘Miami Design Preservation League walking tour waits while firefighters hose the blood off the Ocean Drive sidewalk from this morning’s fatal spring break shooting.’

“You can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend” remarked Christopher Hitchens of the founder of the only university in America that’s about to reopen. In an extraordinary opinion piece about perverse pockets of resistance to self-isolating, Candida Moss duly notes this country’s raving reverends, its potted pastors, the flagellants at the journal First Things; she mentions too the South Korean cult at the heart of that country’s epidemic… She fails to mention the sometimes violent ultraorthodox cults in Israel, Europe, and the United States, but we need to throw them in…

She lists all of these disease-spreaders with respect, with the understanding that of course all such people and groups qualify as upstanding Christians and Jews, our brethren, part of the beautiful world (as a word in her headline puts it), of “faith.”

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Since we need to stop fanatics from killing us, let us examine precisely how ethically dense people like Moss help make this life-saving goal unreachable.

This week, as stores, restaurants and other businesses shuttered their doors to help stem the spread of coronavirus, a number of conservative Christians chose to frame their response to the pandemic in a different way: as an opportunity to choose “faith over fear.”

The rhetoric of that last phrase – an opportunity to choose – recalls Jack Gladney’s response to his wife’s choice, amid the “airborne toxic event” in White Noise, to regard the disaster as “a good time to cut down on fatty things.” To which Gladney responds:

I think it’s interesting that you regard a possible disaster for yourself, your family and thousands of other people as an opportunity to cut down on fatty foods.

Of course, the people Moss has in mind don’t really choose anything; they are proud submissives, majorly into suffering and dying for the lord or the chief rabbi or whatever. To them, the virus represents an opportunity to manifest submission. They’re not like hedonistic spring breakers; they’re compelled to prove something.

We’re talking snake-handlers here, many of whom die venomously while under the protection of the holy spirit – and I’m pretty sure Moss would extend the same ecumenical courtesy to snake-handlers that she extends to the Falwells.

Hers is a category error, not to mention a catastrophic mistake for humankind.

While religious activity may be an essential part of people’s lives, the assumption that social distancing equates to spiritual estrangement is up for debate. Should religious freedom be allowed to put the lives of the many at risk?

Religious; religious; spiritual; freedom – how kind of Moss to honor the kinkiest among us with these epithets. How kind of her to frame the problem of what to do with destructive masochists as a “debate.” Here are some better word choice suggestions from SOS: cultic; criminally negligent (I mean, let’s also honor with words like faith Christian Scientists who kill their kids: Or is Moss reserving judgment of isolation-resisters until they too kill family members?); stupid; socially toxic.

In her last paragraphs (how many readers will get to these?) Moss finally says the right stuff:

What is most frightening about these latest expressions of “religious freedom” is not just that they threaten to place others at risk, but that religious conservatives form a substantial part of Donald Trump’s voter base — his plan to reopen by Easter may be well timed to speak to them.

Now the phrase religious freedom gets the quotation marks it deserves; but Moss still considers fringe groups (think here of the Mormon church’s endless efforts to disaffiliate itself from backwoods polygamists fucking fourteen year olds for the lord) “conservative Christians.” Call them what they are, lady – disturbed reactionaries who damage the legitimate religions they parasitize, and who now threaten the health of nations.

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The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason. What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes. Plagues of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of infidels and heretics who were thought—in an alternative explanation—to be spreading disease by witchcraft or else poisoning the wells. We may make allowances for the orgies of stupidity and cruelty that were indulged in before humanity had a clear concept of the germ theory of disease. Most of the “miracles” of the New Testament have to do with healing, which was of such great importance in a time when even minor illness was often the end. (Saint Augustine himself said that he would not have believed in Christianity if it were not for the miracles.) Scientific critics of religion such as Daniel Dennett have been generous enough to point out that apparently useless healing rituals may even have helped people get better, in that we know how important morale can be in aiding the body to fight injury and infection. But that would be an excuse only available in retrospect. By the time Dr. Jenner had discovered that a cowpox vaccine could ward off smallpox, this excuse had become void. Yet Timothy Dwight, a president of Yale University and to this day one of America’s most respected “divines,” was opposed to the smallpox vaccination because he regarded it as an interference with god’s design. And this mentality is still heavily present, long after its pretext and justification in human ignorance has vanished.

Er, I mean blood.

Spring Break is quite the American tradition. We bring to it our nation’s own very special way of celebrating the renewal of life.

… anything but happiness.

On the matter of happiness, she’s with Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst. Here are some Phillips snippets:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?”

“The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.”

“Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.”

“One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence. [S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.”

“Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”

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All of which is why reactions to the decades-long Harvard Grant Study, which followed a group of Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives in terms of their happiness, have been like this:

♦ The lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.”

♦ Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.

♦ Education, marriage, moderate alcohol intake, and exercise are fairly reliable predictors of happiness; so are certain “mature adaptations” taken in responding to challenges, such as maintaining a sense of humor and channeling aggressive feelings into more healthful channels like athletics. As for offering any definitive answer as to how to live the good life, no convenient elixir is forthcoming. To deny the Grant Study its ambitious objective to pinpoint the causes of happiness has a whiff of the wet blanket about it. But there’s something even more miserable about thinking that our happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist.

Here’s an example of how weird, strange, disturbing, and difficult we are:

[P]eople tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day.

In fact, [explains one of the Harvard Grant Study researchers], positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs — protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections — but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Amen, brother. Some of UD‘s most difficult moments in life involve her confrontation with extremely high appraisals of UD.

Don’t get her wrong. She wouldn’t trade these beautiful appreciations — often written as if after lengthy consultations with UD‘s most embarrassingly grandiose narcissistic fantasies about herself — for the world.

But since she knows herself to be much less impressive and much more unpleasant than what she’d like to think she is, part of her responds to beautiful appreciations with fear. “If you only knew,” she wants to say to the writers. “If you only knew, you’d be so bitterly … so vengefully? … disappointed.”

I think that’s why we cross the street.

That’s because for decades Greek fans have been killing people and torching cities and all. The hapless government thinks a temporary pause and some more security cameras will bring Peace in Our Time, but this latest scheme will work out just as well as Chamberlain’s. I guess it’s real hard to confront the only thing to be done with a significant population of nihilist shits: No. More. Soccer.

**************

A BAD CROWD

Since that’s way rad an idea, let me say a bit more about pre-modern and postmodern crowds, and how they’re making crowds themselves obsolete.

The Greek football fans generate primitive, pre-modern crowding, all about atavistic drives among men. We had one of these recently in the States — the mass shooter at the Super Bowl victory parade was just, you know, hormones, spoiling for a fight.

Any scenario that surrounds fundamentally aggressive men with other young men will bring out the AK47 (that’s new — primitive cavemen had rocks), or, outside of gun-drenched USA, knives. And not just random young men: It was a signal cultural moment when the sixty year old owner of a soccer team got angry and ran onto the field during a game, with a gun in his outstretched hand to kill a referee.

You understand – yes? – the message Savvidis sent to all random hormoned-up young men? What I’m doing is a highly charismatic act.

You make matters worse when you present these people with established ‘enemies’ – opposing domestic or foreign teams. They don’t have to – like the Super Bowl shooter – go looking for enemies. You’ve set up a war for them to fight in, collectively, cuz they’re part of… a crowd.

And it’s an all-male, all-young crowd, right? Didn’t use to be, but over the years women children and older people have arrived at the conclusion that Greek soccer stadiums are not conducive to longevity, let alone a fun afternoon. So now you’ve concentrated the scariest element of society into loud sweaty excited rageful quarters.

So Greece is simply farther along in the evolution toward the end of crowds: It has watched for decades as its soccer matches – increasing numbers of them – devolve into fatal violence. It has tried everything, including, indeed, the end of crowds. The country is coming off of a two-month moratorium on soccer attendees.

But now that they’re letting these incredibly dangerous groups of people back in, what do they think is going to happen?

So, you know, we’re getting the stern announcements about enhancements of the police state they’ve already set up in the stadiums – vast numbers of security cameras, police, mandatory digital identification, weapon checks, blah blah.

Will it work? Keep your eye on Miami’s spring break. It’s happening right now. Those crowds are so awful that Miami released this ad a couple of weeks ago, and has made clear that it does in fact want the total end of those crowds. We don’t want you. Don’t come here. AND here are all the police state goodies we’re throwing at you if you come anyway. Let’s see if it works. Might make the guys madder, you know.

Anyway, so Greece. So what was once supposed to be A GAME, a certain thing, a sports gathering, is now – you understand? – a kind of lord of the flies free for all held perilously in check by insane levels of surveillance technology plus a very large, very frightened, security force. The players are scared, and not just the ones dreading racist chants. The referees? Forget about it. You know that groups of them have gone on strike because of the attacks.

So my thing is who’s kidding who. Eventually it won’t just be Savvidis packing heat. Obvious escalations of an already lurid situation are on their way, and we know from security’s inability to stop a mass shooting at the Super Bowl parade that guns are too quick and easy and lethal to police.

Think security will find weapons and confiscate them? Haha. Check out how many smuggled guns are discovered every day at all of America’s airports. People are always trying, and think about how many guns the TSA isn’t finding.

When crowds become impossible, what are your choices? You can try identifying and excluding the evil doers, but you’ll never get them all, and of course they’re evil enough to figure out how to get into the stadium no matter what you do. You can get to North Korean levels of police state apparatus, I guess (lines of soldiers with guns pointed at the crowd throughout? torture chambers below the locker rooms?), but this won’t be very… pretty. No, UD is thinking that Greece (and other countries) will have to shut down the whole thing.

************************

Our highly advanced postmodern crowds are a whole other thing. It’s their innocence that gets you. They are sitting ducks, awaiting the Las Vegas shooter, the Prague shooter, the Highland Park shooter. They are gathered to enjoy a concert, a parade, or just a sunny afternoon on the campus of Charles University. Massive, extensive, the highest of high-tech firepower rains down upon them from a heavily fortified genius who has thought everything out to guarantee he’ll be able to shoot for a long time and kill a lot of people.

I don’t think American parades or outdoor concerts have a very long shelf life either.

**********************

Oh, and on the subject of Greek violence — We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the petrol bombs being thrown at police, even as we speak, in opposition to the government’s shocking intention to allow private universities to operate freely in Greece.

Yes! What’ll they think of next? Private, as well as, public universities!

Most Greeks are in favor; over 40,000 of the smartest young Greeks currently study abroad, having fled the squalid corrupt national system. (Put Greece university in my search engine.) Competition might wake up the dead public campuses and reverse the brain drain, but who would want to do that?

A Temple professor neatly sums up Spring Break USA, which leaves the rest of us to wonder why it keeps happening year after year, since cities have known for quite a few years that with absolute certainty several people will be shot, several police will be assaulted, scads of guns will be confiscated, riots or near-riots will break out, etc., etc. Every year is significantly worse than the last, and with every year normal tourists who find the terrifying, nationally broadcast, sleazefest offputting decide to stop coming altogether to Spring Break cities. A real win/win, ja?

UD’s thing is that drunk armed breakers and their drunk buddies should be directed via social media, incentives, etc., to America’s most insanely gun-friendly locales for their fun. These cities are begging for it. The local gunnies will welcome the incoming gunnies with open arms, and open-air festivals of the gun, with shooting into the air and elsewhere, will be scheduled nightly. No curfews or closed bars, and plenty of supercheap hotel rooms. If there are fights under these fight-friendly circumstances, that’s presumably the very outcome insane-gun-city has been dreaming of. BIG BIG GUN FIGHT!

Let it all come down, babe. You’ve been waiting for it, storing up ammo and armaments and protective gear and a week’s worth of grub.

Galveston!

Galveston.

Here’s a thing UD has learned about UD as UD has gotten up there in years.

Time was she loved poignant films featuring tender damaged people brutalized by the world (A Patch of Blue, Forrest Gump); now she has trouble handling the vulnerability/cruelty thing (zillions of films feature this theme), and instead leans toward disaster films where thousands of extras go SPLAT under asteroids.

She seems done, that is, with main characters we deeply glomb onto and watch disintegrate; now she wants a smoking hulk of an earth inhabited by five families who manage to get to the shelter or to Planet New (Greenland, Knowing).

She’s zooming out, in other words, of the whole condition humaine thing…

**************************

And when she reads articles like the one I’ve quoted from in my headline… When she feels the desperate pathos behind names like People Matter Festival…

When she realizes that both the cease fire and the mass education in basic compassion campaign are taking place in Miami-Dade Florida in preparation for Spring Break, she feels that familiar, heavy, useless, unbearable empathy creeping in upon her… An entire American city pleads for a temporary putting down of guns, knowing the gesture is hopeless and that multiple young people will be shot to death during what used to be a fun innocent week… A city government – again, hopelessly – reminds its populace that you really shouldn’t shoot people to death because PEOPLE MATTER…

UD can’t handle how pathetic this is. UD can’t wait til Greenland 2 comes out and she doesn’t have to think about this shit.

****************

Here we go.

Love the way the reporter describes a barely-underway spring break (March 17 is Day One of the cease fire) as “relatively calm and peaceful.” LOLOL

******************

UPDATE: Wotta shocker.

You know, there are many things you can do to “close” your city to violent, unmanageable, crowds. You’ll need cooperation from owners of bars and hotels; you’ll need a temporary shift in traffic patterns, coupled with a huge uptick in traffic enforcement. You’ll need a lot of help from police around the state; they’ll have to come in and help you.

You will need to place portable jail cells along beaches and boulevards, so you can immediately arrest high, drunk, armed, dangerous people as they shoot into crowds. Not a very pretty picture; not a very festive picture. But modular cells make sense when lethality overwhelms your city. Remember that when you attract scads of young people, you attract rival drug-selling gangs. These are responsible for some of the killing and much of the menacing/fighting/unrest. If you attract a smaller crowd, you’ll attract fewer gun-bearing drug dealers.

Do not forget social media: Get the message out strongly and early in the game that – as Miami’s mayor keeps saying – your city doesn’t want spring break. It simply endures it.

Spring Break, USA!

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Look at ongoing spring break in Miami Beach.

Compare it to last year’s spring break in Miami Beach.

As you know, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” and at some point gun-mad, cheap hotel and booze-mad, no-government-interference-mad states like Texas and Florida are going to have to get sane, which UD thinks in this case means accepting the fact that when you proudly broadcast your gunny rummy scummy ways to the world, the world will respond. If you build tacky, they will come. And as the violence gets worse year after year, you’re going to need police-state-quality surveillance, which UD is sure your permanent residents are going to love. They bought their five million dollar condo for sunny, carefree Florida, after all.

Now, Florida – all shot up and beaten and exhausted – is grandly claiming that it never wanted spring breakers. “We don’t ask for spring break, we don’t promote it, we don’t encourage it, we just endure it, and frankly it’s something we don’t want to endure.” Fine words, Mr Churchill, and, now that it’s not just a source of revenue but a human and public relations disaster, you will fight it on the beaches etc. But of course you have promoted it; yours is not just a party city, but a mega-club party city, and a warm, longtime home for drug and gun dealers.

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Note what an even more sleaze-friendly city – New Orleans – did before last year’s Mardi Gras:

[The governor put] a statewide mask mandate in place as well as occupancy limits on bars, restaurants and other businesses.

New Orleans Democratic Mayor LaToya Cantrell, also a Democrat, went even further by closing bars completely in the city, even those allowed to operate as restaurants. City officials also closed iconic Bourbon Street to cars and limited pedestrian access for the final weekend of the season.

Next thing you know they’ll be confiscating weapons!

UD certainly expects college football players to fuck themselves up during spring break. This usually involves alcohol, and certainly does not feature hyper-clean-cut West Pointers. Nah.

And yet there they are, stretched out on the palm-edged front yard of their rental house, having fentanyled themselves almost to death. Policemen administer Narcan to their fine ripped torsos, while other attractive young people stand around being upset and useless.

[Illegal ultraorthodox] gatherings have led to disaster. Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights (the three major Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn) have experienced horrific death tolls. Other Hasidic Jews and I have heard of weddings and other mass gatherings followed shortly by a rash of infections and deaths.

This is a systemic problem that won’t go away just by pointing out that other areas of New York have had moments of people gathering, or that they are a minority within the community (both of which are true, but have little relevance in a discussion about communal dynamics).

Many leaders were slow to act, and even when they did, it has been clear that they were unwilling or unable to stand up to the extremists in their communities who refuse to listen.

******************

You can keep throwing it all at the wall – antisemitism, it’s just a few extremists, how ’bout those spring breakers doing it too, we have to gather outside cuz our apartments are stifling, we didn’t get the memo cuz we’re too pure for any form of communication with the outside world, our rabbi said fuck that, if I don’t keep going to the ritual bath my husband won’t fuck me and we can’t get me pregnant, etc. etc. Go ahead and throw it all at the wall. You’re still killing yourselves and others and deserve all the condemnation coming your way.

Spring Break 2019 is just getting started.

With Spring Break just on its way, and with fond memories of Spring Breaks past (oh wait: that was Father’s Day), it’s downright ominous that yet another merchant is restricting our right to bear arms.

The only way to stop a bad baby with a gun is with a good baby with a gun, and they’re taking guns out of the hands of our babies.

Freedom’s Safest Place right now lies at the frontline of the battle against collectivism: America’s mentally ill babies.

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That’s why UD (and his outraged lawyers) is so bummed that a judge refuses to let Alwin Chen out of jail before his trial. Who’s going to protect Clarksburg High School (not far from UD‘s house) now that wee Alwin – just eighteen years old and knee-high to a grasshopper, bless him! – isn’t, every day of the school year, bringing his loaded Glock (and a knife) to school?

Alwin’s dad is a YUUUUGE gun (and larger weaponry) lover (they even live – I kid you not – on Gunner’s Lane) and has passed down his vast arsenal to his bouncing baby boy, who wants to kill people just the way his comic book heroes do (read Alwin’s journals).

The only comfort UD takes in our local children’s protector being (temporarily) out of commission is her confidence that there are a dozen or more lads at Clarksburg High just like him.