My story 'Instrument' released in a new fiction anthology

A new fiction anthology from New Lit Salon Press entitled Southern Gothic has just been released, and it contains a short story of mine entitled "Instrument."

The genesis of the story is this. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a phenomenon began at a Toronto area Pentecostal church called the Toronto Airport Vineyard. (Much as this sounds like an airport hotel, it was simply a branch of the Vineyard Fellowship of Pentecostal churches with an unusually anodyne name.) The phenomenon was marked by an outbreak of seemingly out-of-control emotional outbursts. The phenomenon came to be known as "the laughing revival" because one of the behaviors on the part of church attendees was uncontrolled laughter or crying. It lasted for years and spread to many other Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

I developed a morbid fascination with the phenomenon, which also took root in Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. I was fascinated by the stories of wild behavior and the claims that the Holy Spirit was behind it all, when a distanced observer could clearly see it was nothing more than mass hysteria.

Despite my personal disdain for this brand of religion, I sensed that sincere people were flocking to such churches for a reason. They wanted not only experience, emotion, and entertainment, but also something genuine. They wanted what the revivalists were promising: not just an overflow of emotion, but to be truly changed.

With this in mind, I developed a story about someone who came to such a church out of curiosity. He's not a true believer, but a skeptic, a not-particularly-religious young man who looks at spirit-filled Christians not with envy but with pity. Nevertheless, he finds himself at one of these revivals, and is tempted by the offer of a truly changed life.

My character Roy is assistant manager of a Chevron station. But he has a secret wish: to become an EMT, an ambulance attendant. And when he attends the revival he is caught up in the experience and dares to think that despite his doubts his life might really change.

Southern Gothic, with my story and 14 others, is available now in many e-book formats, handsomely illustrated by Nathan Mark Philips.

Underground for years

The following exchange was broadcast a little while ago on the BBC News Hour. The announcer, Owen Bennett-Jones, was interviewing former British Ambassador to North Korea John Everard about life in that country. At one point they reference the Google Maps of North Korea, which were just released.

Everard: You could travel freely within thirty km of central Pyongyang, which gave you the city itself and a lot of countryside. If you went outside that, the rule book said that you require permission. In practice, you could go to the beach at Nampo, heading due west from Pyongyang, and no one would actually stop you. And colleagues did the same on the beach going the other way, at Wonsan (?), going east. And on one occasion I drove about two thirds of the way up to the Chinese border to see a museum there, which I duly did, and no one seemed to (care) that I'd gone way outside Pyongyang.

ANNCR: No permission?

Everard: No permission. So the system isn't quite as watertight as people make out.

ANNCR: One of the striking things about the [just-released] Google Maps -- I don't know if it surprises you -- they've marked one of the labor camps.

Everard: Yes, so I saw. The position of the labor camps has been argued over for quite some time. And things are complicated by the fact that -- we believe -- that some of the labor camps are actually underground, so they won't show on maps.

ANNCR: Really?!

Everard: Yes.

ANNCR: Why?

Everard: Well, because, if you put a labor camp underground -- remember that these are slave laborers, often making munitions and things that the regime doesn't want to show the world. If you put them underground, you can't actually spot them from satellites, or it's a lot more difficult to do so. A colleague of mine once gained access, incredibly, to one of these places. And told me that he found that the people there had been underground for years, hadn't seen the light.

ANNCR: How on earth did a foreigner get in there?

Everard: It's a long story.

ANNCR: Which you can't tell?

Everard: Which I can't tell.

-- BBC News Hour, 2145h GMT, 29 January 2013

Everard is the author of a memoir about his time in North Korea, Only Beautiful Please.

Amateur philologist 'through the looking glass'

The current New Yorker has a fascinating and moving article by Joshua Foer about an amateur philologist named John Quijada. This middle-aged employee of the California Department of Motor Vehicles devoted his life to the creation of a language which contains the most distinctive features of other world languages, from the most common to the most obscure, in an attempt to create a more perfect language. The invented language, which he called Ithkuil, attempts to express concepts in a compacted fashion, so that, for example, a single word can express "that chin-stroking moment you get, often accompanied by a frown on your face, when someone expresses an idea that you've never thought of and you have a moment of suddenly seeing possibilities you never saw before."

The article, "Utopian for Beginners," develops like the usual wooly New Yorker article, taking as much time as is necessary to explain who Quijada is, why he grew interested as a youth in invented languages, and what he achieved with Ithkuil. But it is when he learns that his invented language, which he had published on the internet, had been taken up by a group of intellectual Russians and other post-Soviets, that the story suddenly becomes like a Bolaño novel.

Quijada is invited to attend a conference in an obscure corner of the forgotten USSR and finds that he is considered a hero by young students who are using his language in a discipline called psychonetics. Psychonetics turns out to be one of those quasi-mystical, quasi-scientific fields that Russians and other former Soviets tend to foster -- an allegedly scientific approach to changing how people think.

Quijada once hoped to become an academic, a professional linguist, but simply couldn't afford to go to grad school, and instead became a bureaucrat in a state agency. Now, still slightly mystified by his hosts' goals, he basks in the attention of scholars:

As the evening unfolded, he found himself perched barefoot and cross-legged on a sofa, with a group of young Russian students gathered on the rug at his feet.

"I was surrounded by all these people hanging on my every word. It was intoxicating -- especially for a loner like me," Quijada said. "For one day, I got to play as an academic. I got to live this fantasy where I took the other path in the garden. I got to see what it would have been like if I had gone to graduate school and become a professional linguist. The fates of the universe tore open a window to show me what my life could have been. That night, I went back to my room, took a shower, and burst into tears."

You'd think that this would be enough of a poetic ending to Quijada's story. But it's after this that things start to get weird.

Invited to another conference the next year, he gains an insight into what these "psychonetics" enthusiasts are really about. It turns out that one of the primary supporters of psychonetics is an ultra-nationalist who "talks of developing 'intellectual special forces' that can bring about the 'reëstablishment of a great power' in greater Russia, and give birth to a 'new race... that can really be called superhuman.'" It seems the psychoneticists want to use Quijada's "more perfect" language as a tool.

Appalled by their goals, Quijada withdraws from any further participation in post-Soviet psychonetics, and the article's author draws the usual wan New Yorker-ish conclusion that Quijada isn't the first person to invent a language and see it being used for means he never intended.

But I was impressed by the story's Bolaño-ish theme: How the actions of well-meaning people are adopted by a fascist movement, and the temptation this represents for ordinary people.

Dept. of Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: The "Dragon Tattoo" fashion line

I almost choked on my Wheaties this morning when I saw an ad pop up on the side of Gawker for a "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" fashion line. I guess it's supposed to be for young women who want to emulate the title character, who is a punked out Rooney Mara:

For the record, the fashion line is like this:

Somebody please help.

A typical screed from a paranoid right-winger

I often note the posts of collapsitarians, but today let's look at a typical blatt from one of your basic paranoid right-wing racists. It's titled Lone Wolf False Flag or Real Mumbai-Style Active Shooters?

"False Flag" is right-wing-paranoid lingo for an act blamed on one group but secretly perpetrated by their enemies in order to defame them. The classic example is the Reichstag fire, blamed on the Jews, but actually done by the Nazis. Ever since they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, almost every act of terrorism is said by one foamer or another to be a "false flag" act, or in other words, a terrorist act secretly enacted by the government and blamed on right-wingers. You get the idea. Without further ado:

As the media and Spokesman-in-Chief, President Obama, warn us of a "lone wolf terrorist event" on or around September 11th, I can't help but think back at all of the articles I've written or posted regarding a "Mumbai-style Attack" or an active shooter scenario such as Arizona's Jared Loughner and the Oslo, Norway event. Many on the far-right continue to believe that this incident will portray a typical causcasian of the conservative swagger to be the trigger man in an effort to further demonize the "Patriot movement" (which has withered into the Old Republican Guard 2.0, ala George Bush-esque Rick Perry and Palin's successor: war-mongering, former IRS tax prosecutor Michelle Bachman) and alleviate pressure on the Middle East and "Obama's homeland." ...

Gun bans. Permanent renewal of the PATRIOT ACT. Orwellian pre-crime thought police. Internet censorship. Even further widespread eavesdropping and wiretapping. New "terror laws" regarding assembling in groups, limits to free speech and access to firearms. This would be one of the cheapest and yet most effective terrorist plots in American history. And with it, broad, sweeping political powers for the Elite.

So that's their basic paranoid take on things: All regulation exists to limit the rights of true patriots, and because any serious terrorist act would only lead to more laws and regulations, which are in the interest of the government, it follows that only the government would be behind terrorist acts.

This is the train of thought of the 9-11 conspiracy nuts, who go to great lengths to demonstrate that only a well-trained crack government effort could possibly have produced the destruction of Sep. 11th, 2001. I won't even both to link to any such blatts, you can find them yourself in ten seconds if you try. They are entertaining for a few minutes and then simply tiresome. Look for them to peak next month, and then if anything remotely terroristic happens in the next, oh, 20 years.

More hysteria from the collapsitarian center

Yes, the center, not the fringe. Given that the collapsitarians are all on the fringe anyway, it still makes sense that the movement itself has a left, right and center. Anyway:

Since "terrorism" is now a term we can use to describe just about any action deemed a threat to the public and government infrastructure, the possibilities for what the next "terror attack" will look like are endless. It can come in the form of suicide bombers at your local shopping mall, a cyber attack on financial markets launched via the internet, or any number of other potential threats that have been recently highlighted by our Department of Homeland Security. There need be only a single event that occurs at an opportune time and is pushed by the mainstream media and all hell will break loose.

Imagine, for a minute, what America would look like if nationwide curfews were implemented, civil rights were suspended (including confiscation of guns), the US dollar crashed, ATM's and credit card transactions were restricted, and food and gas purchases were limited.

-- Gerald Celente

The reasonable-sounding rhetoric in that example masks very poorly its hysterical premise: that somehow "a single event" such as a suicide bomber in a first-world country would be enough to push the entire world financial system into collapse. Frankly, a suicide bomber in a mall probably wouldn't have much effect, given that malls failed as a retail model years ago and are now passing from the scene and such an attack is likely to only blow up closed storefronts and lonely discount shoe stores. Now if you blew up a NASCAR race, that would get some attention. An attack on America!

Meanwhile, Dilbert jumped on the bandwagon in Sunday's strip:

On today's great reality show, 'The President and the Nutty Congress'

The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities.

--Jonathan Chait on tnr.com

When recordings betray you

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old self-proclaimed "Bible teacher" (he never refers to himself as a "minister" or preacher, contrary to references in SF Gate.com and other reports), is being released from the hospital after treatment for a mild stroke which he suffered a few days ago. Camping is the head of Family Radio, an obscure but world-reaching Christian radio station which he used to disseminate a prediction that Christ would return on May 21 this year.

That prediction, its failure, and Camping's rescheduling of the apocalypse to Oct. 21, has been widely covered. In the meantime, what's Family Radio been doing with its main announcer and on-air presence down with a stroke?

Running recorded programs, that's what. And they don't do him any favors. There's no way of telling when the recorded versions of his daily "Open Forum" call-in show were recorded, but they give us a noticeably younger and more in-control Camping. His voice has always been gravelly and monotonous, but in the last year or two has been quivering with age. The recordings only point up the contrast to his present state.

Another program in which Camping has been going through the Old Testament book of Ruth seems to have been recorded even longer ago than the "Open Forum" recordings now running. He sounds positively middle-aged, his voice powerful and steady. All the sadder for this misguided man.

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

They're just fucking with us now

Via BoingBoing: Blackwater, the infamous private security firm synonymous with US corporate exploitation of the Iraq war, has appointed Bush-era attorney general and former "Singing Senator" John Ashcroft to head a subcommittee in charge of "ethics and professionalism."

A head start on dying

A year or two ago I received an email invitation for an event having to do with some entity I'd never heard of, the "Jejune Institute." Cloaked in mysterious language, the invitation, and a website I found by searching for "Jejune Institute," only hinted at some sort of interesting experience that would result if one showed up at a certain address in downtown San Francisco. It was impossible for me to figure out from the invitation and the website what the organization (or cult or marketing experiment or whatever it was) represented and why I should devote any time to investigating. I think I replied to the email saying "Is this some kind of put on?" to which the mysterious sender replied "Certainly not." Then I forgot about it.

Now today in the Bay Citizen (and NYT) is an article revealing what it was all about. It turns out to have been an elaborate art project - cum - "immersive game," the subject of which I still can't discern from afar. The writer of the article talks about tableaux and events that sound like performance art and makes it all sound fun, but it's hard to understand just what was fun.

I have several wistful reactions to all this.

First, you may have read recently about the psychological phenomenon called "Fear of Missing Out," which is an anxious sense that somewhere within striking distance a fabulous event is taking place which you are missing, either because you don't have the time or money to attend, or have to work, or worst of all because you didn't hear about it in the first place. I never had this fear in relation to the "Jejune Institute" because I did have the opportunity to hear about it, and evaluated it as far as I could, rejected it as an activity, and never thought about it again until today. Instead of Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO, as people have waggishly begun to abbreviate it), I have only a terminal sense of having missed out.

And yet -- secondly -- I find it hard to kick myself for failing to catch on when I was offered the chance. Because the initial invitation and website looked so much, on the one hand, like an invite from some amateurish cult, and on the other hand like one of those would-be viral websites that are actually a front for a cable TV show -- of course I didn't bite. I'm not that stupid!

Thirdly, it turns out I am that stupid -- stupid enough to have been invited in the first place and not to have discerned what dozens or hundreds of other people were able to, that this was something worth checking out. What did I miss? Whose fault is it? Is it the fault of the creator of the... thing... for not making the mysterious invitation intriguing enough, or are my senses of curiosity and adventurousness merely so dulled, in my mid-50s, that I no longer cotton onto something I would have eagerly investigated 25 or 30 years ago?

Fourthly, no doubt many of the people who wound up participating in, or witnessing, the events that were part of the thing heard about it through word of mouth. Someone they knew told them about this cool thing that was happening. And because it was mysterious, and little-known, it was hip. To know about it became a badge of coolness. To have attended one of the events became something you could brag about to others. If you wanted to impress someone or get in good with them, you'd invite them to the next event. If you merely wanted to brag without extending the circle of people in the know -- for what cool cultural event remains cool if too many people hear about it? -- then you could simply hint that you were doing this cool thing, without telling too many details. So it became an exercise in in-crowd dynamics.

(For example, this random blog entry by someone I don't know: "Friday, my mom, Anna and I went to San Francisco to check out the Jejune Institute. Again, there's tons I could say about that, but this time, I'm just saving it for a full post that I'll put up after it's officially closed, so I won't spoil it for anyone who has a chance to go see it. But seriously: If you can get to San Francisco before April 10th, go to 580 California Street, take the elevator to the 16th floor, and ask for the Jejune Institute. You won't regret it. Unless you've got a deadly allergy to fun. [sic] It was an immensely cool experience, and I'm glad I got to experience part of it while it's still there.")

But the tragic thing is that I did not hear about it through word of mouth. After I received the initial invite, I completely forgot about it, and I never heard about it again. Clearly none of my friends are in the in crowd, or maybe they are but know I am not. So to "fear of missing out" and "the tragedy of having missed out," we can add the depressing realization that "no one thought to tell me about it."

Fifthly, even having read the article, it still doesn't sound like something I really would have enjoyed (this article in The Awl is much more informative and gives a feel of what it was all about) largely because I get nothing out of in-crowd dynamics. I don't like exclusivity, and I bridle against secrets. To the extent the whole "Jejune Institute" thing existed merely to maintain in-groups and out-groups, I'm glad I wasn't a part of it, because I think those are sick dynamics in modern society. Or perhaps I have, in the words of the anonymous blogger above, "a deadly allergy to fun" (her italics).

On the other hand -- sixthly (I wonder what you call words like "secondly, thirdly," etc. -- in any case they start sounding silly if taken too far) -- I wonder if this "Oh, I'm glad I didn't" attitude isn't really just an attempt to justify to myself my increasing isolation from popular culture. I've been noticing in myself, for the last several years, an increasing failure of curiosity, and while I have a strong suspicion it's a very disadvantageous trait for a writer to have, it's been hard for me to resist. Sometimes it seems to me as if I'm simply shutting down, getting a head start on dying. Perhaps that part of the brain that is curious about new things is, in me, failing. Perhaps it's a hormonal problem.

Finally, I got another invitation last week. It was an invitation to investigate a private 55-and-older condominium development. Because I am turning 55 next week, and somehow the real estate people know it. Of course, I quickly threw the invitation in the trash, but doing so did not delay, for one minute, my impending birthday.

Right-wing collapsitarians' racist beliefs

One of the core beliefs of the crypto-fascist collapsitarians, who think the western world is headed for an economic and social apocalypse, is that when "the end" comes, all cities will collapse into hellholes of violence, rioting, looting, pillaging, and so on. This is one of the main reasons they believe in "prepping" for the catastrophe -- which they refer to as The End of The World As We Know It, or TEOTWAWKI -- and "bugging out" to a well-stocked, heavily armed and fortified compound in, say, Montana. 

When this collapse of the cities is predicted, the example almost always cited is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to this way of thinking, that aftermath was almost exclusively characterized by, on the one hand, looting and violence, and on the other, pathetic dependency on government to save the people. Cable TV coverage of the event stressed both these themes, because they made for dramatic images, and that is what right-wingers have in mind when they say the collapse of the cities will look like that.

They are, of course, ignoring all the incidents where people helped others, acted with compassion, shared their resources, and made peace. TV ignored these incidents too, for the most part, because they aren't conflict-y, and are therefore boring.

But the other reason the crypto-fascist collapsitarians talk about the collapse of the cities, and assume they will descend into a cauldron of violence, is that they're racist. Take a look at this post on a prominent collapsitarian blog. About the cities, the author says: 

Misconception number four: Roving criminal hordes will come from the urban environment to your rural home or Bug Out Location (BOL). Nope, these people do not play chess or even checkers; they do not plan ahead much at all. Criminals, with few exceptions are lazy. And many are on drugs. Yes, a few will flee at the very beginning if they have a specific refuge in mind, the uncle with the farm, but most will not leave their familiar comfortable environment. Even if they have an operational vehicle capable of the trip it is likely to be low on fuel, particularly these days. They will burn up what little fuel they have driving around their usual haunts, to the liquor and drug stores, then to the convenience or grocery store like they did before the event, until their tank is empty. Walking or biking to save fuel will never cross their mind. No gas means no travel for this group.

They are stupid, lazy, and many are on drugs! Really!

Refuting those ideas, which are based on such an idiotic image of city dwellers, would be a waste of time. The only thing I can say in response is that that paragraph actually represents a more moderate prediction than the usual one, where crazed and armed city dwellers, having used up and then burned all the resources in their city, then go out to attack the good Christians in their Montana bunkers. (See my previous entry, Grim Dystopians Hoping for Complete Collapse.) So never mind that -- they are simply too lazy to do so!

It would be laughable, if not for the utter gullibility and ignorance of these collapsitarians, many of whom are elderly people who fall victim to tax-dodging schemes rooted in weird, almost schizophrenic ideas (such as so-called "truth language"). There is lots of money to be made from all the paranoia being served out there.

Meet a "sovereign citizen"

A Tennessee TV station sent a news crew over to the home of 69-year-old Hollis Fay Summers, who "became a sovereign four years ago after attending a seminar in Alabama." Among other futile efforts, he has filed several billion-dollar lawsuits against officials of the bank which holds his mortgage, because they won't believe that his mortgage has been paid in full with funds from his "secret account."

WTF, you say. Well, in brief -- and the mention of the "seminar" he attended is the giveaway -- there are charlatans going around the country preaching a form of magic. The magic is contained in a mystical and completely bogus interpretation of legal language, and among other things, asserts that every American has a "secret account" of money being held for him by the federal government -- a government in which the profess not to believe, but that logical contradiction is only one among many -- and that you can access these funds if you know the magic. (For an explanation, see "Bill of Exchange" on the Southern Poverty Law Center's page on the so-called sovereigns, or see this page on the ADL's website for a full picture.)

The TV station's page with the story also includes links to a couple of Summers' mumbo-jumbo court filings, including the one where he asserts his sovereign status.

There are not that many of these people -- tens of thousands, at the most -- but they are responsible for gumming up local courts with these bogus filings, each of which must be addressed and declared frivolous. From the ADL's page:

The filing of frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens, on the other hand, has remained a favorite harassing strategy. These paper "attacks" intimidate their targets and have the beneficial side effect of clogging up a court system that sovereign citizens believe is illegitimate. Frivolous liens became such a problem in the 1990s that a majority of states were forced to pass new laws to make filing them illegal, their removal easier, or both. Today, eager sovereign citizens can use the Internet to download a variety of boilerplate forms and documents to wield against the government. More adventurous types can matriculate at "schools" such as the Erwin Rommel School of Law; additionally, a number of activists, ranging from David Wynn Miller to The Aware Group, hold seminars around the country to teach people -- for a price -- about the latest tactics and weapons.

(Undeterred, Summers has filed another document in which he attempts to redefine the word frivolous to mean "true and correct," the story says.)

And the thing to know is that these people are not crazy. They're just a bunch of losers who have various grievances and have been tricked into believing that this particular form of magic will somehow lead to the redressing of these grievances.

Some nice details in the story, including the arrival of a dumpster during the interview -- a dumpster being delivered by the bank which is about to evict Summers from his long-foreclosed house. And where will this old grampa go then? Some poor relative, no doubt. But what you should focus on is the people who led him to this pass, who profited from his ignorance and credulousness. Here's the SPLC's page on the leaders of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, many of whom are now serving sentences in federal prison.

Previously:

'Sovereign' files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

The King of Hawaii (the verb)

Breaking news from the paranoid front

A website called The Survival Retreat -- you know, that well-stocked fuhrerbunker that will allow you to get through the supposedly coming apocalypse -- alerts us that now is the time to stock up on ammunition.

It just occurred to me that perhaps all the zombie movies and zombie TV shows are really about our anxiety about this eventuality, where there's total societal collapse, everyone attempts to flee, and the well-stocked right-wing Christian survivalist is vindicated. (See my entry from yesterday. (Speaking of which, the title of a post from another collapsitarian blog says it all: The US Government Is Preparing For Unlikely Events Like War, Catastrophic Collapse of Society, and Even Asteroids -- Are You?.)

Related: the Seattle Times reports that it's a buyer's market for islands. Which might help protect you from zombies, who (which?) presumably can't swim, but not from the desperate marauders imagined by the apocalyptic collapsitarians whom I mentioned yesterday.

By the way, can you guess which famous 1960s musician wrote a song about this topic? None other than Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose 1971 song "John Henry Bosworth" imagined the same riots, flight from the cities and suburbs, and survival on a remote piece of property -- but minus the guns and with a much more truly Christian vision than the apocalyptic right-wing Christianity the survivalists apply to their fantasies.

For another optimistic alternative, see this April 2009 NYT magazine article about what was called the Transition movement, which I linked to before. It says something about the appeal of the more horrific fantasies that they're 99 percent of what you hear and read about.

Rand Paul supporters rough up Move On demonstrator

Why would anyone be surprised that far-right wing demonstrators, whose stock in trade is rage and violent images, actually resort to violence?



Via mediaite.

Updated: The man who did the actual head-stomping has been identified as a local campaign coordinator for the Rand Paul campaign. He has verbally apologized, and has been banned from the campaign.

There's always someone more conservative/crazier/foamier

Reading conservative blogs and news for research purposes, I came across this doozy, which says that "some libertarians" believe foamers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are secret "neocons... conning the Tea Party."

Here's all the salt you have to throw at that bird:

1. The assertion that Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is laid to someone called Pastor Chuck Baldwin. Who is he? See below.
2. In the universe of the Ron Paul cult, a "neocon" or neoconservative is just another big-government interventionist who wants to interfere in their lives. Thus, to suggest conservative demagogues like Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is tantamount to calling them false prophets and potential traitors (indeed, "Judas goats") to the Libertarian movement (which Paulites feel is the only proper approach to conservatism) and the US as a whole.
3. The poster goes on to defend and praise Beck and Palin.
4. Most comically of all, the poster's main allegiance seems to be to the "Tea Party," ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the fact that the "Tea Party" organization is nothing more than a collection of front groups funded by Texas billionaires (as reported last week in the New Yorker).

This guy Chuck Baldwin is a real piece of work. From his Wikipedia page: "Baldwin supports lessening U.S. involvement in the United Nations, reducing U.S. income taxes and repeal of the Patriot Act. He would withdraw troops from Iraq, seek to end illegal immigration, and enforce stricter immigration laws. Emphasizing "America's Christian heritage", he supports the gold standard, the right to keep and bear arms, homeschooling, and pro-life legislation such as the Sanctity of Life Act." And that's his Wikipedia entry -- his own blog is even more hilarious:

Speaking of Hillary Rodham, I predict that she will replace Vice President Joe Biden BEFORE the 2012 elections. I've said that in private for many weeks, and now say it in this column -- remember, you heard it here. The Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate (CBCS) needs Hillary in the White House badly, and Obama has readily accepted a subservient role in the criminal affairs of CBCS (for very profitable reasons, no doubt).

In other words, a nutbag pretty much on the scale of the guy who took over the Discovery Channel building yesterday (permalink).

The strangest thing is that as far as I can tell the entire pro-Tea Party blogosphere is simply ignoring the New Yorker's piece. They require their Tea Party to be a grassroots movement, therefore it is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Meanwhile the Ron Paulites, who predate the creation of the Tea Party, are all sour grapes, complaining they were the real conservatives all along and only they have the right answers.

It would be great if this division and infighting, this struggle for conservatism's mantle, translated into general confusion among the right wing when it came to the election in November. But it won't help the Democrats, because nothing will make any of these people vote Democratic, and there aren't enough third-party candidates to dilute the right wing. November will be ugly, people.

'Radical Christian' wants to balance 'radical Marxist'

I've been following a certain Christianist nut, apparently a high school football coach who says he "walked away from public education in 2000" but last year "started a varsity football program at a local Christian High School" in Ohio. I know this because of his inimitable rant "They Don't Even Look Like Men," which he posted halfway through the season, in which he criticized his own players for their lack of aggressive attitude:

Our football team is driving me nuts. They are great young men, obedient and mannerly, the kind of kid you could trust with your daughter. But as my own high school football coach often said they need a little "piss and vinegar." They take the "turn the other cheek" attitude with them onto the field. Our Christian-culture has taught them that being "gracious in defeat" is Christ-like. I tell them being "gracious in victory" is more fun.

Maybe it is just me. I want them to be MEN. Our Christian-culture teaches them to be doormats. ... Someone, somewhere, determined that trading the old man for the new man meant losing your backbone. Heck, you can't even pass gas at a "men's fellowship" without being looked at as if you had just pee-peed on the Decalogue. Pastors are the worst. Any whiff of "Christian testosterone" sends them to their Joyce Meyer collection of sermons in an attempt to "soften" your rough edges.

Well, not for me. My new birth made me more manly, more courageous, and more willing to live life on the edge. I like guys with rough edges.

I quote this dick at length just to give you an idea where he's coming from. In addition to being a monomaniac on the subject of "Christian testosterone" (whatever that is, he elaborates by saying "Jesus was studly"), he also considers himself a political commentator, and in fact, he is running for Congress this year in the Ohio 18th. (Even his website is "coachdaveforcongress.com".)

And yesterday he wrote something that really clarified for me the thinking of the Tea Partiers, birthers, Oath Keepers and other whack jobs. Daubenmire writes:

We have a radical Marxist in the White House. We need a radical Christian in "The People's House."

There it is -- simplicity itself. Because this man (and, no doubt, the many thousands of his ilk) believes that the President is a "radical Marxist," they seek to balance his supposed pernicious influence by being radical conservatives. Whatever their belief is based on -- probably just the endless repetitions of this phrase by right-wing radio and TV commentators -- it justifies their own radicalism. It's a perfect, self-reinforcing system.

Daubenmire goes on to offer himself as a party leader -- the Tea Party, that is, not understanding that the Tea Party is not an actual political party. "I want to lead a movement," he says, saying his comrades need "someone who will grab a flag and run up the hill... 'Come on boys; let's go take our country back.' I'll build a team, lead a charge, and build their courage."

Then, toward the bottom of the essay, in his impatience to get the show on the road, he urges (emphasis mine):

Make a pick, take a stand, and put all of that energy behind one candidate. This is war. Stop worrying about hurt feelings. Pick a horse and let the internet do its job.

Let the internet do its job! What a strange thing to say.

But we needn't treat this fellow Daubenmire as being off the scale, just because he is clearly a whack job. Today Newt Gingrich, who threatens to run for President every four years and probably will this time around, said that Obama is "the most radical President in American history" who runs "a machine... a secular, socialist machine."

Gingrich, of course, is just jealous. He wishes he were at the controls of such a machine, not Obama; he would do things just as radical, if not more, but call his actions Main Street American values. Because anyone who doesn't agree with right-wingers, even the most radical ones, even the ones like Daubenmire who admit they are radical, is of course "radical."

Here's the thing. At least Daubenmire believes what he says; clearly, he is a true believer who jaws with a supporter if asked to take off his "cross hat." Gingrich is nothing more than a cynical, well-connected politician trying to make a comeback; he'll say anything. He's like Bush with brains; he doesn't need a Cheney, he only needs Addingtons and Yoos. So he mouths the right-wing verbiage of the season: no more "family values," now we're fomenting against "socialism" and "radicals."

And no, I wouldn't prefer Gingrich to Daubenmire, nor "Coach" to Newt. Both are abhorrent.

technorati: Obama,Gingrich, Tea Party

Ostentation meets hype meets D&S

After some stranger followed my Twitter feed, I was led to this bizarre video in which the woman -- judging from the feed she works in promotions for some booze company -- is tutored by some aggressive British gent in the basics of enjoying some super-expensive whiskey. The British gent is so noisy, so controlling, so in-her-face that it's almost like watching a D&S scene. The woman's "What have I got myself into?" expression as the scene goes on and on is priceless.

technorati: live the lush life, whiskey