If you think the "involuntary celibate" movement is all about sex ... think again.
The Thing Nobody Understands About Incels ...
Showing posts with label misconceptions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misconceptions. Show all posts
Sunday, December 9, 2018
Monday, January 18, 2016
10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About MLK
To commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we take a look at some tidbits rarely discussed regarding the life and legacy of the revered civil rights leader.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X
The late, great, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is in rare company. In the history of the United States, only four people have ever been awarded a national holiday in their name, and King is the only one who has been alive over the course of the last 150 years. Indeed, the vaunted Rev. Dr. King is about as close as contemporary American culture gets to a patron saint; beyond being celebrated as a skillful, effective civil rights leader, he's basically become a deified figure, a super-man whose name is to be mentioned in only the most respectful and reverential of hushed tones. In today's cultural climate, to deny that he was anything short of a sacrosanct messiah is enough to get you labeled as a hatemonger, and saying you disagree or look unfavorably on anything King said or believed is pretty much considered a thought crime on par with declaring Hitler to be, and I quote, "fucking awesome."
Alas, we here at The Internet Is In America know that anytime anyone is celebrated as a near-perfect God-Man, there's usually a lot of stuff the celebrants tend to overlook or simply forget about. You know, like the part about John Lennon being a remorseless woman beater and deadbeat dad, or that Gandhi was a crypto-racist warmonger who routinely compared his wife to livestock and engaged in activity that can be rightly labeled as paedo-incest. Nobody's perfect, and the ones everybody keeps telling you are the most perfect of all are usually the ones who have the gnarliest skeletons in their closet. And yes, Martin Luther King, Jr.- as celebrated and beloved he is - is not immune from The Great Man Myth, either.
Of course, none of this is to say that MLK was, inherently, a bad person, or that all of the civil rights crusading he did back in the 1960s wasn't worthwhile and noble and heroic and courageous and inspiring and all of that jazz. Interestingly, it seems like most Americans, especially the younger crowd, have no idea who King was or what he did other than deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech and get assassinated, which, of course, is a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of half-truths, misconceptions and flat out lies to percolate as non-existent facts about his alleged life (including the easily refutable assertion that the government was found "guilty" of murdering him in a 1999 trial.)
Below, however, are a few pieces of trivia about MLK that are far from hearsay or conjecture or after-the-fact fabrications. As it turns out, there is an astounding amount of public information on his life that, despite being quite accessible, just hasn't entered the domain of everyday knowledge. On what would have been King's 87th birthday, let's take the time to reflect on who the American icon really was ... and who that is, most certainly, might just surprise you.
Fact Number One:
His real name wasn't Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fact Number Two:
He grew up in a family that, even by today's standards, would be considered wealthy.
If you've ever visited the King family home, you probably walked away thinking "you know, for a house built before World War II, this place is nice." In fact, MLK's old digs on Auburn Avenue would probably be fetching $300,000, maybe even $400,000 in today's ever-gentrifying Atlanta housing market. Whereas Malcolm X grew up eating dandelion weeds, the King family was very, very well-off financially - indeed, they were certainly in far better economic shape than the average white family in Georgia at the time. A lot of that has to do with MLK's maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, who as head minister of the famed Ebeneezer Baptist Church - which, by 1903, already had 400 members - held a lot of social clout in Atlanta's black community. (Keep in mind, black churches in the wake of the Civil War - thanks in part to their tax-free status - became something of a de facto community war chest. Even in the late 1800s, the Department of Labor noted the economic significance of black places of worship - "the church collects and distributes considerable sums of money, and the whole social life of the town centers here," as one bulletin put it.) A founding member of the National Baptist Convention - which was basically the NAACP before the NAACP existed - Williams was able to land a position as president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union and chairman of the General State Baptist Convention's executive board and finance committee. By 1918, he had risen to the rank of NAACP branch president in Atlanta, which quickly grew to more than 1,400 members. Three years before MLK was born, Daddy King married Williams' only child, Alberta King, and when her father died in 1931, MLK, Sr. inherited his "Sweet Auburn" empire. Despite the Great Depression, King's evangelical enterprise flourished, and he was oft-referred to as "the best paid negro minister in the city."
Fact Number Three:
He attempted suicide at the age of 12 (and was almost killed by a deranged female stalker when he was 29.)
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was just a wee pre-teen, he came *this* close to offing himself. The day of his grandmother's death, he had snuck out against his parents' wishes to see a parade; so distraught over not being there during his nana's final hour that when he heard the news, he responded by taking a suicide dive out of the second story of his home. Believe it or not, that wasn't the closest King got to being killed before he was assassinated in 1968 - the revered civil rights leader almost died in 1958, when a paranoid schizophrenic black woman with an IQ of 70 stabbed him with a steel letter opener at a book signing in Harlem. Oh, and Junior isn't the only person in his family to succumb to the bullet; his mother was shot and killed in 1974 - and, in quite possibly the most horrifically ironic fashion imaginable - by a racist black radical.
Fact Number Four:
His dad told him he was "too good" to marry a poor white woman.
While attending the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Penn., King began a courtship with Betty Moatz, a young Caucasian cafeteria worker and the daughter of German immigrants. King was so besotted by Moatz that at one point he mulled marrying her. Alas, interracial marriages were still deemed taboo even north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and King's fellow seminarians eventually talked him out of going any further with the relationship. Interestingly enough, the biggest opponent of the would-be marriage was King's father, who was vehemently against his son "marrying down." As David Garrow penned in Bearing the Cross, Daddy King wasn't neccesarily a big fan of King marrying Coretta Scott, either - indeed, King Senior had more or less set up an arranged marriage between his eldest son and Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was the daughter of Atlanta Civic League founder John Wesley Dobbs, as a way to strengthen the family's already considerable political clout.
Fact Number Five:
He was a confirmed plagiarist.
The Internet Is In America readers who have attended college anytime over the last 10 years have probably used the Turnitin software - an online service schools pay for to check student submitted papers for plagiarism - at some point during their academic sojourns. Well, if MLK were to turn in his dissertation using said software, the damn thing would've had more red on it than a Coca Cola can. In the late 1980s, Stanford University got a hold of MLK's Boston University doctoral thesis, the ultra-academic-sounding A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. Upon closer examination, it appears that gigantic portions of the paper were lifted - sans attribution - from a paper submitted at the same university just three years earlier. As researchers at Stanford further investigated a treasure trove of King papers, they were shocked to find out that not only did the dude plagiarize the shit out of his school assignments, he even appeared to have copied and pasted a large number of his speeches and sermons. Civil Rights historian Ralph E. Luker described the impressive scope of King's intellectual thievery: "the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established practice." Oh, and regarding the "originality" of King's most iconic speech? Apparently, he had some dreams about the previously published works of Archibald Carey, Jr. and Mahalia Jackson, too...
Fact Number Six:
He packed heat, smoked cigarettes and cheated on his wife A LOT.
With his name more or less synonymous with nonviolent resistance, it might surprise a few folks that MLK was a pretty staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. Fearing a hit by the Klan, King even applied for a concealed weapons carry permit once, but seeing as how he tried to obtain said license in ALABAMA, I reckon you can figure how well that went. Nonetheless, King owned guns out the wazoo, with former adviser Glenn Smiley once describing King's home as "an arsenal." Ironically, King's assassination would be one of the major catalysts of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which, among other things, prevents the sale or transfer of weapons and ammo to drug addicts, the mentally insane and illegal aliens. Rounding out the vice-a-rama, King was a lifelong smoker (in fact, he was taking a drag when he was popped by James Early Ray) and FBI surveillance - not to mention firsthand accounts from longtime compatriot Ralph David Abernathy - gives a lot of credence to allegations that he had affairs a' plenty behind his wife's back.
Fact Number Seven:
Some of his top advisers were avowed communists.
From the get-go, King's socialistic stance on economic policies had him pegged as a no-good Red by the John Birch Society-types of the late '50s and 1960s. Indeed, rumors about King's alleged connections to the Communist Party persist to this day, with some even hypothesizing that he was taking orders directly from the Kremlin (fun fact: horrible racists actually own the domain martinlutherking.org, if you didn't already know.) While there is no public evidence verifying MLK as a Commie, card-carrying or otherwise, quite a few of those in King's inner circles were indeed self-professed Communists. King's secretary and mentor Bayard Rustin - an openly homosexual man in the mega-conservative 1950s who would later serve executive positions with the AFL-CIO and the Socialist Party of America - spent the World War II years rallying troops for the Young Communist League. Another close King confident - speechwriter, public relations point person and financial adviser Stanley David Levison - held a high-ranking position in the Communist Party USA and is believed to have received payoffs from the Soviet Union. And two of King's top financiers - Jack O'Dell and A. Philip Randolph - were both, at one point in time, members of Marxism-espousing political outfits. Which brings us back to the topic of King's economic beliefs...
Fact Number Eight:
His politics leaned heavily towards socialism.
While King is primarily remembered as a civil rights crusader, economic issues were just as big a part of his political platform as race relations; indeed, in 1958, he described "economic injustice" as the inseparable twin of racial injustice. Throughout his career, he rallied and advocated for a series of extremely progressive policy measures - i.e., the kind of stuff people who smoke a lot of weed and are always tweeting about Bernie Sanders are yammering on and on about today - including a guaranteed basic income and the creation of a sprawling government program ensuring a public job to all who want one (but, uh, not in the form of the military, of course.) So yes, MLK can rightly be considered a socialist, in the classical sense of the term - after all, he did say he promoted merging capitalism and communism into a "higher synthesis that combines the truths of both" socioeconomic models. He was also a pioneering proponent of reparations, telling Playboy that legislative equality wasn't enough to close the financial gap between whites and blacks and proposed the U.S. government dole out $50 billion in restitution to marginalized peoples of all varieties. Interestingly enough, this indeed came to pass, albeit as federal entitlement measures enacted by President Lyndon Johnson's so-called "War on Poverty," which created both the federal food stamp program (the Feds doled out $82 billion in SNAP benefits in 2013 alone, plus another $55 billion in earned income tax credits, PLUS another $50 billion in Supplemental Security Income) and Medicaid, which handed out about $475 billion in state grants in just the 2014 fiscal year. Which sort of begs the question ... why isn't LBJ celebrated as a deified figure in the black community as well?
Fact Number Nine:
He left his family destitute following his assassination.
While King collected quite a bit of moolah from his ministry, speaking engagements, book royalties and miscellaneous humanitarian prizes, one place we know for sure he didn't sink the funds was in his own family's future. Despite being an obvious assassination target, not only did he never take out a life insurance policy, he never even drew up a will; as a result, when he was murdered in 1968, he left his wife and children with hardly any appreciable benefits. Following King's intestate funeral, a number of activists (among them, Harry Belafonte), took up the financial slack and crowdfunded the surviving King brood. To this day, legal battles abound regarding who has the rights to King's likeness, possessions and published works. Alas, MLK's kids have gotten some measure of financial benefit from their father's legacy, having started the for-profit organization King, Inc., which, among other shrewd business moves, charged the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation $2.7 million to construct the National Monument, forced Living Colour to change the lyrics of "Cult of Personality," and sold almost every known recording of King's voice to Steven Spielberg.
Fact Number Ten:
We're going to learn a lot of things we didn't know about him in 2027.
Plan on living another 11 years? If so, you'll be privy to some newfound public info on MLK, whose full FBI record is set to be declassified in 2027. Now, as to what those files consist of is anybody's guess, with both hardcore King supporters and detractors throwing out their own hypothesi. On the pro-MLK side, the general narrative is that the files were ordered sealed for so long to prevent the public from finding out just how underhanded the FBI - in particular, alleged transvestite J. Edgar Hoover - were in their quest to undermine King's character. And considering their cockamamie COINTEL smearing campaigns that have been brought to light - including a notorious "anonymous" letter encouraging MLK to commit suicide - one has to imagine the stuff they didn't want publicized is WAY the hell out there. On the flip side, the denizens of Stormfront and other white nationalist sites are damn certain the collection of wiretaps will conclude once and for all that King was a bona-fide communist, or at the very least, will reveal some downright kinky extra-marital odysseys. Alas, all anybody can do is throw out conjecture at this point, but whatever those FBI files reveal? Make no mistake about it, they're going to change the way we view King - for better, or for worse.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Five Southern Traditions Nobody Talks About
The common experiences everyone in Dixie shares … that they don’t want the rest of the country to find out about.
People tend to have one of two perspectives on the Southeastern United States. One perspective sees a particularly brutish, ass-backwards anti-culture, where racism and institutional classism runs rampant. The other depicts the Southland as a pastoral, picturesque wonderland, a place where all the old charms and values of yesteryear lingers on as an affront to modernity itself.
As always, the truth is really “none of the above.” Indeed, Dixie in the 21st century is both a goulash of widespread poverty and ostentatious suburban wealth, a land filled with methamphetamine and wilding out young uns and manufactured paradises where respectful youths sip sweet tea on Antebellum porches and everybody shows up on time for the annual downtown Christmas parade.
But, there are other time-honored traditions those south of the Mason-Dixon line aren't too fond of discussing with outsiders. You know, the southland ain't all gravy biscuits and crazy ass outsider art; here are five long-held Dixie traditions you probably won't hear Tennesseans or Louisianians boasting about on your next visit to Music City or 'Nawlins...
Watching Pro Wrestling with Your Racist Granny
It’s an inarguable fact: all people above the age of 62 in the American south are racist. I’m not just talking about white senior citizens, I mean all senior citizens: whether you’re the color of mayonnaise, Nesquick or Heinz 57, if you’re eligible for Social Security benefits in today’s modern South, you are indelibly a hate-filled, rancorous ethno-supremacist.
If you’ve ever wondered why Southern people, specifically the senior crowd, seem to have such a penchant for pro wrestling programming, that’s pretty much the reason why. Professional wrestling, by and large, is a gigantic universe of crude, cruel and borderline offensive racial stereotypes, all battling for metaphorical ethnic supremacy using fake violence. In fact, I probably first heard a majority of the five-star slurs thanks to my granny’s utter disdain for the Orient Express, Tito Santana and especially Ron Simmons, whom had the honor/misery of becoming the first black WCW World Heavyweight Champion.
Over the past 30 years, it’s amazing how little the professional wrestling industry has done to curb back all of the race-baiting. With a contemporary cast of characters that includes a Moslem terrorist, a gang of lawnmower riding Mexicans and an African American tag team known as “Cryme Tyme,” it’s arguably more ethnically-charged today than it was in the heyday of Sgt. Slaughter, the Iron Sheik and Saba goddamn Simba.
Having Relatives Show You How Big Their Dumps Are
The southern man takes great pride in even his most meager of accomplishments. That’s why, in the era of the Xbox and the iPad, horse shoes and cornhole remain astoundingly popular pastoral activities south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Combining that nearly biologically need to compete with a dearth of recreational resources, it’s probably not too surprising that southern folk invent some wildly unorthodox ways to outdo one another. As in, engaging in let’s see who can pee the furthest contests, which were indeed quite the popular neighborhood activities in my carefree days of youth.
But don’t think this is something that only the kids partake of. Oh, no sir-ee Bob. For reasons that completely defy explanation, I’ve noticed that true Sons of the South take enormous pride in the size, length and texture of their own excrement, having been yanked from slumber by more than one adult relative so I could marvel at their gargantuan turds coiling around the commode bowl. I had one uncle who even kept a Polaroid scrapbook of his own shit -- he was utterly convinced that one of them had to break the Guinness World Record for lengthiest poo, and eagerly awaited the day they mailed him a check for a million dollars.
Being Drunk at Wal-Mart
Getting sloshed is definitely a Southern way of life. Likewise, frequenting America’s number one retailer is another time honored tradition for the sons and daughters of Dixie. Therefore, visiting Wally World while inebriated just makes all sort of sense, in a way that makes no sense it all. Primarily, because you’re too shit-faced to know you’re trying to carry on a conversation with an unintended checkout lane.
In every shitty small town in the south, the Wal-Mart is the proverbial center of the universe. In terms of footprint and daily volume, its almost always the biggest communal gathering place in the village; what the watering hole is to antelopes in the African Savannah, Sam Walton's monolithic discount department store is to poor rural and exurb people of all shapes, sizes and hues.
Growing up in a little burgh that was just then developing a taste for the crystal meth, me and my school chums spent many late evenings and early mornings. just ambling down the aisles of Wal-Mart while intoxicated. The idea, you see, was to get rip roaring drunk on cheap-o vodka in the parking lot and all of a sudden, the local depot of consumer misery turned into some sort of post-utopian wonderland, albeit one with edited gangsta rap CDs. Looking back on it, I'm not really sure what the appeal of drunkenly stumbling down the canned tomato sauce section at two in the morning was supposed to be, but it remained a popular pastime, nonetheless. Exemplifying the importance of this abstruse regional rite: I ran into a kid I hadn't seen in literally 10 years recently, and the first thing he said to me? "Hey, Jimbo, remember when we used to get drunk at Wal-Mart back in the day?"
Anticipating a Full Blown Race Riot at School
The southland is pretty much a racial powderkeg, waiting to explode at any minute. The strange thing is, despite having the most profound historical track record of racial unrest in the country, the modern southland remains the most racially diverse part of the country. In fact, the 12 states with the highest concentration of African-American residents are all in the American South, with the racial composition of local governments in Atlanta, Memphis and Birmingham looking suspiciously similar to that of the aggregate pro basketball team.
So, let’s do the mathematics on this one. It’s a two-dyad political power struggle, mounted in 300 years of racial fury. People are just jonesing to let that undercurrent of ethno-rage froth up like magma, and really, all it takes is just one teeny, tiny incident to flick off an eruption.
At my middle school and high school, our team mascot was a palette-swap of the Ole Miss Rebel -- a cartoon character clearly designed to resemble a slave owner of yore. Well, one year, our long-tenured (and white, of course) principal stepped down, and our new head honcho was an African-American. With the white folks silently uneased, the shit really hit the fan when a new design for the team mascot came out … and chuckles a plenty, the new logo was a mulleted brigadier general, with a facial complexion a few shades south of “acceptably olive.” It may sound stupid to the rest of society, but that little decision almost led to our small hillbilly hamlet turning into Ferguson, Miss. A week later, a white kid slung an eraser tip at a black kid in geometry class, and holy shit, everybody in town thought the National Guard was going to have to come in. Of course, such tempers always simmer down to a light boil, but that friction is an omnipresent element in the Southland -- one of the quaint joys that kids in Caucasian utopias like New Hampshire will never, ever comprehend.
Fearing that you May Have Unintentionally Engaged in Incestuous Activity
Yeah, yeah, we all know the stereotype, which was more or less culturally codified by countless episodes of “The Jerry Springer Show” back in the late 1990s. Southern folk, for whatever reason, have a peculiar taste for their own kin, with a cultural depiction running the gamut from innocuous first cousin French kissers all the way up to full blown sibling-humpers.
While that little stereotype is erroneous for several reasons (historically, incest has always been an activity of the upper crust and not the lower mantle -- lest we forget, Eleanor was a Roosevelt way before she married FDR), there is an uncomfortable nugget of truth to the longstanding belief. You see, it’s not that Southern people actively seek out their own blood to bone, it’s just that so many people in small towns are somehow genetically linked that really, you’re probably only four or five leaps away from encountering some kind of distant relative.
That’s why no matter who you’re dating in the little burghs, there’s a still a slightly-above average chance you’re re-stirring your own genetic batter. I had one friend who was seduced by his sister’s hot girlfriend from out of town, only to run into her at an extended family reunion a month later. To be fair, it was a sizable leap in genetic material -- we’re talking third or fourth cousin, once removed -- but they still shared a common forbearer.
Alas, it’s a shame the South must continue to live with, if for simple geographic limitations. But as a positive? That means that for the next few decades at least, you can actually use an oblique reference to “mitochondrial eve” as a pick up-line in Ol’ Dixie.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The Truth About Columbine
Just How Much Do We Have Wrong About The Massacre? According to Author Dave Cullen...Pretty Much Everything.
While I didn’t learn about the shooting until later on the evening, when I got home from school, the aftermath of the tragedy lingered on for well over the remainder of my middle school tenure. Bullying became a major no-no (not so much because of administrative policy, but because all the jocks thought one of their victims might come to school the next day with an Uzi) and the very next semester, our principal made shirt-tucking a MANDATORY practice - because as we all know, the only thing standing between us and adolescent bloodshed was one set of droopy drawers.
Columbine was our Kent State, that major moment in American history that - unlike that boring stuff that was going on in Kosovo and whether or not the President did or did not receive something that may or may not have constituted oral sex from somebody not named “Hilary” - had a very direct influence on our daily lives. Of course, EVERY public school student in the country was paranoid for at least a couple of weeks after, and for a while, at least, the entire junior high caste system was in disarray. For the first time I could recall, it was the outsiders and freaks and dweebs that had the element of power over the popular kids, because all of the yuppie offspring thought that one kid they made eat Play-Doh behind the seesaw back in the third grade was finally going to get retribution and plug them full of more holes than Alex Murphy at the beginning of “Robocop.” Of course, it was all over and done with in a year’s time, but for a good couple of months, we were all truly living in the long, towering shadow of a school shooting that went down about nine states over.
As momentous as Columbine was, it’s pretty shocking to me, at least, just how much disinformation is STILL out there about the massacre. It’s been well over a decade since the shootings took place, and even now, most people tend to believe some sort of fantastical, media hodgepodge version of the incident rather than what really occurred. I recently read Dave Cullen’s “Columbine,” an absolutely outstanding recount of the events leading up to the massacre, and it shone a pretty amazing light on what ACTUALLY transpired in Colorado almost a decade and a half ago. Just how much do we have wrong about Columbine? Well, if Cullen’s book is to be taken as the most accurate, factual info we have…apparently, just about everything.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER ONE:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold never intended to execute a mass shooting on April 20, 1999
Perhaps the largest misconception about the Columbine massacre was that - from a structural standpoint - it was never meant by the perpetrators to entail a school shooting. As it turns out, the “shooters’” original plan was to detonate several improvised explosives around the cafeteria, with the hopes of bringing down the ceiling and killing hundreds upon hundreds of people. They also had their cars rigged with crude explosive materials, with the intentions of blowing up the entire parking lot as soon as emergency response personnel arrived. From what was pieced together from video tapes and journal entries, the only reason why the perpetrators brought firearms with them was so that they could pick off fleeing students from the ruins - apparently, the entire “school shooting” was an impromptu incident that was rigged up, on the spot, because their explosive devices failed to go off as planned.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER TWO:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not the victims of bullying, Goths, homosexual or neo-Nazi terrorists
The media narrative, to this day, is that Harris and Klebold were long-bullied nerds that, after years and years of harassment, finally snapped and decided to kill their aggressors. This is an accusation that has been refuted time and time again.
Harris and Klebold were considered to be fairly “normal” students that had many friends. Days before the massacre, they even went to their senior class prom, in which Klebold’s date was the eventual class valedictorian. While there’s very little evidence to suggest that Klebold and Harris were the victims of bullying, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence out there that suggests that Klebold and Harris were more or less bullies themselves, as they allegedly had a fondness for victimizing freshmen students. Additionally, both students performed quite well academically, and both were involved in several sports. Despite allegations that the two specifically targeted “jocks” during the massacre, Dylan Klebold - like Eric, a major MLB fan - wore a Boston Red Sox cap throughout the shooting spree.
Similarly, Harris and Klebold were pinned by many in the media as “Goths,” although neither perpetrator was a fan of popular “Goth” music or style. Despite perpetual media reminders, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were never a part of the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” a separate campus clique that had virtually zero associations with either student.
Several accusers in the media have alleged that Harris and Klebold were secretly lovers, and that their deadly attack was spurred on because of “cultural insensitivity” and homophobia. As it turns out, both students seemed to be rather heterosexual, with Harris claiming to have “made it” with a 23 year-old-woman and maintaining lengthy - and depraved - heterosexual rape fantasies in his journal. Klebold, on the other hand, seemed to be absolutely enamored by a classmate code-named "Harriet," who he obsessively referred to in his own diary. The fact that “Harriet” rejected his affection, in some aspects, may have even proved to be a pivotal “trigger” that instigated his decision to join Harris on his rampage.
While Harris seemed to have a penchant for Nazi culture, no research has been trudged up that indicates that he or Klebold was involved in any neo-Nazi organizations. In fact, it would seem a little unlikely that Klebold would be into Nazism, since he himself was half-Jewish. While the two routinely used racial slurs and epithets in their video diaries, both boys were also said to have had several African-American and Asian friends. Furthermore, although some media reports allege that the shooters specifically targeted minority students, just about every official document detailing the shootings indicates that the perpetrators were indiscriminately selecting victims throughout the incident.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER THREE:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold already had extensive criminal backgrounds BEFORE the shooting took place
Many media reports said that the attack came without warning, and that both students had exhibited no signs of violent behavior beforehand. This, without question, is erroneous.
Both Harris and Klebold had been placed in a juvenile diversion program after being caught breaking into a van, just months before the massacre. Prior to that, the family of a classmate Harris allegedly victimized filed a damning complaint to the police, detailing Harris’ murderous threats against their son. At one point, word got out that Harris had been constructing homemade bombs, and an affidavit had been filed to search the Harris residence for contraband material. If you’re wondering why information of the like was never reported after the shooting, it’s because Jefferson County officials pretty much “covered” it up, with the full information not being released to the public until years after the massacre.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER FOUR:
Neither Harris or Klebold targeted Christian students during the shooting
Shortly after the massacre, the story of Cassie Bernall became a nationwide phenomenon. According to some reports, Bernall was killed after she said she believed in God…even though subsequent 911 audio indicates that she never said anything to her killers before being shot. It was actually another student - who was not mortally wounded in the attack - that addressed the attackers when asked if she believed in God. Even so, Bernall’s story - which, despite being disconfirmed, was turned into a best-seller by Bernall’s own mother - remains a popular myth surrounding the Columbine incident - a rather odd coincidence, as Bernall, during her earlier teen years, was said to have been both suicidal and at least mulled the possibility of murdering her own parents.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER FIVE:
Most of the misconceptions about Columbine stem not from student hearsay, but erroneous “official” statements
According to author Dave Cullen, “every scrap of testimony after day two is tainted” when examining “official” statements on the shootings.
Shortly after the massacre, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone gave multiple erroneous reports to the media, including doubling the actual body count, suggesting that a third perpetrator may have been involved and alleging that automatic weapons were used in the attack. Instead of releasing information about Harris and Klebold’s juvenile records - which included multiple counts of vandalism, as well as an never-certified affidavit to search the Harris home - the county officials practically “sat” on the info, refusing to release the evidence until years after the incident. And if you want a full report on what went down, you’re going to have to wait a little bit longer, as the official transcripts won’t be released to the public until 2027.
Further demonstrating their complete ineptness, officials ended up selling copies of the cafeteria shooting footage for $25, ultimately prompting a lawsuit from Sarah McLaughlin, whose music was featured - quite illegally - in the video tapes.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER SIX:
Despite the magnitude of the event, the massacre didn’t change anything regarding federal gun laws in the U.S.
While one of the worst high school shootings in history, the ultimate influence of the event - in terms of national legislation - remained virtually non-existent. While several loopholes regarding “straw purchases” at gun shows were closed in Colorado (Harris and Klebold obtained several of the firearms they used during the massacre by getting a friend to purchase the weapons at a gun show in Denver) and a few other states, no federal laws directly tied to the massacre ever came to fruition. In fact, perhaps the single most important legacy of Columbine, as a policy framer, has been for S.W.A.T. usage, as it ultimately led to most national outfits abandoning a hostage-oriented strategy for the now practically-universal “active shooter” protocol.
COLUMBINE MISCONCEPTION NUMBER SEVEN:
It was most likely psychiatric problems and substance abuse issues that “drove” the two to kill…not “Doom” or “Natural Born Killers”
Cullen minces no words when he describes why he believes Harris made plans for mass murder; he was an out-and-out psychopath, an emotionally under-developed human being with less capability to sympathize with others than the common Golden Retriever. According to Cullen, Harris demonstrated all the classical attributes of the psychopath, including a sense of egotistical superiority, enjoyment of causing harm to others and compulsive lying - a so-called “duping delight.” His journals indicated a thorough hatred of humanity, containing multiple “extinction fantasies” - and contrary to what you might have heard, it may have been “high art”, and not low culture trash, that influenced Harris the most as a fledgling mass killer.
While Harris was a fan of violent video games and violent films, he was also an avid reader and appreciator of classical works. He cites “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and “The Pastures of Heaven” as among his favorite works, and was greatly inspired by both Hobbes and Nietzsche. He reveled in writing essays about the Holocaust, and wrote diary entries filled with sadistic sex fantasies. His favorite musicians weren’t shock rockers like Marilyn Manson and The Insane Clown Posse, but rather, German industrial acts KMFDM and Rammstein.
Klebold, on the other hand, was assumed to be manic-depressive, and most certainly suicidal. Oddly, he seemed to be a very religious young man, and quite possibly an emerging alcoholic. His nickname was “VoDKa,” assigned to him because it was his “drug of choice.” Klebold, an outstanding student, academically, saw his grades slip dramatically during his senior year - a time in which both his depression and alcohol abuse was thought to have been reaching critical mass.
And as far as “direct causes” go, the most viable “trigger” for the killing spree had nothing to do with art, music or entertainment, as most researchers suggest that it was a single incident - the two being arrested and placed in juvenile services for breaking into a van - that proved the ultimate catalyst for the rampage.
As far as the long-lasting impact of Columbine, I suppose it’s safe to say that it’s cultural import has almost vanished over the last 13 years. Since then, we’ve been assailed by countless more tragedies - 9/11, Katrina, Virginia Tech, not to mention two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and in many ways, we’ve become a bit more desensitized to the idea of mass violence as a cultural reality. We shudder, we mourn, and we move on, to the next major story involving bullet-riddled corpses. At the time, Columbine itself wasn’t a new incident - although it was one of the first of its kind occurring in a predominantly upper middle class neighborhood - but the sheer shock of the event, the idea that it could happen to “normal communities,” was enough to cause mini-pandemonium throughout the nation.
As time drags on, and more massacres, with heftier body counts ensue, one wonders if we’ll ever truly retain the lessons taught to us by Columbine. But in examining our social recollections of the tragedy - which are filled to the brim with inconsistencies, inaccuracies and flat out falsifications - one has to wonder if we even remember such lessons at the current.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Jimbo Goes to the Movies: “2016: Obama’s America” Movie Review
It might just be the spookiest movie you see all year; albeit, for none of the reasons the director intended…
"2016: Obama's America" (2012)
Director: Dinesh D'Souza
I recently caught “2016: Obama’s America” - the anti-Barack “documentary” that has become the fourth highest grossing doc in U.S. history - and, surprisingly, I didn’t like it. For many, Many, MANY reasons.
First of, let’s begin with the director of the film, a fellow named Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza is a guy that was born in India that got a chance to attend an Ivy League school based on some international scholar program, who ended up becoming a member of the Reagan Administration, despite the fact that he didn’t have legal U.S. citizenship at the time (and this, I might add, is a point he actually MAKES HIMSELF in the movie.) Early on in the film, he criticizes Obama for showing a fondness for welfare programs and placing a focus on foreign diplomacy - not at all an ironic statement, seeing as how the sole reason D’Souza even GOT into the U.S. to begin with is because of a massive welfare program that targeted non-U.S. benefactors. It’s an upfront dose of fatalistic hypocrisy that makes sitting through the rest of the film a laborious chore - and rest assured, there is a LOT to not like about this movie on top of that.
Obviously inspired by Michael Moore’s ego-centrical pop-documentary approach - which, peculiarly, has been (mal)adopted by dozens of conservative doc-makers, from Ben Stein to Sarah Palin’s utterly hopeless PAC - D’Souza narrates the film, serving as the great, omnipresent tour guide through the four year nightmare known as Obama’s first term as President of the United States of America. This is an ill-advised decision on D’Souza’s part, for several reasons.
First off, D’Souza is about as interesting as a piece of microwaved white bread, displaying the sort of on-screen charisma usually relegated to Kristen Stewart performances. D’Souza - who, strangely, sounds JUST LIKE Stephen Colbert - drifts around the world, staring at Barack Obama Sr.’s grave, pacing back and forth while pretending to talk on a cell-phone and reenacting his college conversations with boring white people. My girlfriend said that the dude is a dead ringer for the villain from “Lost,” while I mulled the consideration that he looks like cartoon mouse come to life. At any moment, I expected him to put on a pair red suspenders and eat a block of yellow cheddar while he droned on and on about American exceptionalism.
Even BEFORE you get into the politics of the movie, there’s no way around it; this is a flat-out terrible documentary, from a technical stance. I’m not kidding when I say that half of the damn movie is just stock footage of dirty people hanging out in Kenya and Indonesia - if you’re looking for a comprehensive critique of Obama Administration policies, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed, while if you’re a fan of scenes of brown people shambling through muddy streets and smoking cigarettes on the back of dinghies, then my friend, you have hit the mother lode.
The editing in the film is pretty poor, with a ton of jump cuts and clearly staged scenes spliced together with completely context-less audio bits, a majority of which is culled straight from Obama’s book-on-tape reading of "Dreams from My Father." At one point, D’Souza talks about violence erupting at “Occupy” rallies across America, and I’m almost 100 percent certain that the footage onscreen is actually video from the 2011 Vancouver riots when the Canucks choked in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.
About halfway through the movie, I realized something: had Obama not titled his book "Dreams from My Father," there probably wouldn’t have been a documentary for D’Souza to film. In a nutshell, the director’s “grand statement” with the film is, well, just a little convoluted: since Obama, Jr. never really knew Obama, Sr., that father absenteeism has given him a psychological yen to carry out the anti-colonialist “dreams” of his daddy, which thus explains his foreign policy and “socialistic” aspirations as POTUS.
Despite the fact that D’Souza is clearly NOT a guy who has “Euro-centric colonialist” plasma in his platelets, he seems to be, well, a proponent of colonialism. As in, he comes out and SAYS that Kenya would have been in better shape had the white overseers just hung around like they did in South Africa, which if not for the mind-breaking HIV-infection levels and frequent executions by tire necklacing, is truly a developed, modernized country in ever sense of the word. In a later segment, D’Souza interviews a former “policy advisor” that said that the only thing standing between humanity and total civil collapse is a hegemonic American presence. D’Souza’s argument, to summarize, is that Obama is using his stature as President to relinquish American power AS that global hegemonic force, which means that any day now, the United States of Islam will nuclear annihilate us all while we burn $100 bills to stay warm in winter, because the Chinese will be using all of that Keystone oil that would’ve been ours to fuel modern industry for the next 100 years.
D’Souza, like many conservative analysts, predicts something REAL bad will happen if Iran develops nuclear weapons, and argues that our measly nuclear arsenal of 5,000 plus warheads isn’t enough to keep the rest of the world cowering in their boots every time they hear the letters “U,” “S,” and “A” strung together. He argues that Obama isn’t doing enough to fight Islamic extremists (I’m guessing that was a Doombot that got capped back in ‘11, then) or enough to support Israel.
And then there’s Obama’s economic policies…and yeah, it’s pretty much the same-old, same-old in D’Souza’s documentary.
The director of “2016” said that Obama was influenced by a quartet of socialistic thinkers, including Frank Marshall Davis and Bill Ayers. He concludes the film by saying that Obama’s “dream” for America - an anti-colonialist-fueled, quasi-communistic recipe for American decay - is something altogether different than the “dreams of Americans,” which D’Souza never explicitly spells out. And then, the credits roll, and you realize that you’ll never be able to get your 20 bucks back. By the time the lights flipped back on in the theater, a guy in front of me was dabbing away tears from his two glass eyeballs with both hands.
You’re probably curious about what all the hubbub is about. I was, too, and eventually, I just caved in to the pressure. No matter how crappy I tell you the movie is, you’re going to want to experience the pure fecal stench for yourself, so capping this review of with a declaration of its’ lousiness as a motion picture is sheer superfluity.
If you see “2016,” you’ll no doubt experience some chills and shivers, though. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the most frightening film of the fall, and a flick that will surely give you a case of the creeps and the willies.
Unfortunately for D’Souza, however, it’s for all of the reasons he didn’t intend.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
