Skip to main content

Switching to alters at Columbine (7 April 2009)

re: "For systematic change, I also suggest honoring those who get up everyday and go to work, even if they don't like it. It takes toughness to do that. The thugs on street corners and the killers in schools aren't tough enough to go to work everyday." (bigguns, response to article, "What you never knew about Columbine." Salon. April 6, 2009)

Would need some work, but it could draw them in - -especially if the working world regresses to "Organization Man" manliness (and maybe that's where business is headed -- certainly "Revolutionary Road" understood the draw of such for men; so too Apatow and Ferrel; so too "Mad Men") and away from JPod effeminacy. But it would come at the cost of empathy towards, and understanding of, delinquents, which would not be so okay.

Personally, it was when I understood that much audacious behavior that can strike one as brave or even heroic, is accomplished by bullied people who have switched into a different brain state -- an “alter,” not so susceptible to “disabling” emotions like fear (and empathy) -- that I learned not to be impressed by the audacity and accomplishments of righteous loners. People who are bullied when they are young, dependent, so very impressionable, know the awesome power of angry terror -- threats of abandonment, strong displays of aggression, are writ large and become nothing less than threats of absolute annihilation to the self. They integrate this “voice,” this personality, and it essentially becomes Freud's punitive super-ego, a voice which normally functions to school one away from doing presumptuous things, but which can readily accomplish the horrifying but also audacious and imposing, when it fully takes over in pursuit of righteous punishment of "guilty" others.

Link: What you never knew about Columbine (Salon)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump

When Rose McGowan appears in Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"

The best part of this film was when Rose McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted Odin and his sons for covering up, with a prettified, corporate, outward appearance that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural, absolutely for the rights of the indigenous, etc., centuries of past abuse, where they predated mercilessly upon countless unsuspecting peoples. And the PR department came in and said, okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin' sons, here's what we suggest you do. First, you, Odin, are going to have to die. No extensive therapy; when it comes to predators who are male, especially white and male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You did what you did because you are, or at least strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have to work with. Now death doesn't seem like "working with it," I know, but the genius is that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and when they're resurrected as somehow more apart from your regime,