by Mykel Board
Mykel's Column for MRR # 358(February)
"Children
suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to
adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it.”
--Michel Houellebecq
Bzzzzz:
Drone 593 launched. Passing 120 miles from Pakistan border. Over.
Bzzzzz:
Roger, following on radar. 593 approaching target. Satpix show small
house. Over.
Bzzzz:
Roger, reaching target in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Bingo! Over.
Bzzzz:
Radar reports slight miss. Hit family wedding party, target 2 miles
West Southwest. Over.
Bzzzz:
Got it. Plus two West Southwest. Will launch Drone 594.
FLASH to Newtown
Connecticut: Adam Lanza shoots his way into an elementary school.
Twenty-six people die-- 20 of 'em kids. The president flies in...
hugs family members... TV spends days covering teary relatives...
casting blame. Pundits cry out from here to NRA.
USA
Today writes (in a horrible run-on sentence): Several hours
before Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults Friday
in an attack on a school in Newtown, CT, a 36-year-old man a
half-a-world away in China attacked 22 children at a primary school.
None of the kids died. The reason? The man in China had only a knife
The
NRA answers: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is
a good guy with a gun
The
NRA also blames the media, saying news organizations sensationalize
mass murders. In an equally horrible run-on sentence they say,
"How
many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame
from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall
attention and a sense of identity that they crave?"
That
rage-against-the-media-machine has strange net-fellows. Something
ostensibly posted by Morgan Freeman makes the Facebook
rounds:
It's
because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch
how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter
like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names,
but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see
the news and want to top it by doing something worse...Why children?
Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad
nobody.
CNN's
article says that if the body count "holds up", this will
rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if
statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another... Fox News
has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any
articles or news stories that focus on the victims and ignore the
killer's identity? None that I've seen yet... Congratulations,
sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top
this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
Someone
else posts that the message was fake. Or at least not from Morgan
Freeman. It doesn't matter. It's what a lot of people think.
A
Mexican pal of mine suggest that police profile white males since
most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white
men... Follow them like the
airports and CIA follow Muslims... like NYC cops target black or
Latino guys for Stop and Frisk.
My Mexipal suggests that WHITE MEN need some targeting, at least an
extra look when they hang around school yards.
Then
there's salon.com.
They point out the important fact that the shooter was a vegan. This
is a tantalizing but somewhat irrelevant point. There is no report of
the assassin actually trying to EAT his prey.
The
Huffington Post prints an
article by the mother of a mentally ill child called, I
Am Adam Lanza's Mother.
She's
not really, as Adam offed his mother. But she has a son, Michael, who
she says is like him:
I
live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies
me.
A
few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and
then himself, after I asked him to return his overdue library books.
His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan -- they ran to the
car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to
get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp
objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now
travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me
and threaten to kill or hurt me.
In
the rest of article, the woman explains how so many mentally ill
people are left untreated. That can
lead to behavior like that of the shooter, or any other kid who goes
wild!
Only AFTER some kid
hurts someone else can they do something... and that something is
jail.
Says the writer:
It
seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of
choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the
number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000
to 2006, and it continues to rise -- in fact, the rate of inmate
mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the
non-incarcerated population.
With
state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now
the last resort for the mentally ill -- Rikers Island, the LA County
Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest
treatment centers in 2011.
There's more: Some
TV Talking Heads blame the shootings on slasher films and Quentin
Tarantino. I'm surprised no one's blamed it on tobacco.
Joel
Randell, who, as far as I know, is just some guy, tweeted, Going
after the NRA and assault weapons only treats the symptoms. We need
to treat the root: the American cultural psyche.
BINGO!
FLASH
BACK TO AFGHANISTAN:
Reuters reports two marines face criminal charges. They were
photographed pissing on the bodies of dead Afghanis. Is that against
the law? Nope. Piss where you please. So what are the criminal
charges? "Posing for
unofficial photographs with human casualties."
Get it? It's not the pissing that's the problem. It's that someone
took a picture of it. Piss on whoever you want, just make sure you
shoot the photographer.
In
Vietnam, vets cut the ears off enemy
corpses as souvenirs. Seems logical to me... at least American. No,
they didn't eat them. Maybe they were vegans.
In Iraq it was the
tortures in Abu Ghraib... and smiling soldiers in front of corpses.
Americans have
killed more innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq than in a
thousand Newtown Connecticuts. And it hasn't stopped.
It's not (only) the
mass media that glorifies killers, it's America itself. What is
Veterans Day, if not a day in celebration of killers? We can feel
sorry for vets. Many have been railroaded into the service to avoid
jail or deportation. But they are NOT heroes.
America has been
killing people since it's birth. For the last 100 years it's been
MASS murder. In this century (and most of the last), not one of those
murders has been justified. The US hasn't been on the right side of
any war since 1949.
Americans
are the most blood-thirsty people in the world. A bunch of white guys
sentence Charles Taylor to 50 years in jail for cutting off people's
hands in Liberia. Who's gonna sentence our boys in
uniform? And the
professional murderers in American prisons whose job it is to kill
people (often wrongly)
to prove that killing is wrong? We're so PUNISHMENT oriented we have
more people in prison... a higher percentage of the population...
than any country on earth, including Russia or China.
America's bloodlust
isn't in slasher movies. It's in war movies. It isn't in glorifying
crazy child-murderers. It's in glorifying cold, calculated,
paid-by-the-government child-murders.
It's
not the guns, mental illness, or Fox news. It's AMERICA. It's the
culture that tells every one "if you don't like it, KILL IT!"
We worship killers. Have national holidays for them. We travel
halfway around the world to kill people who've done nothing to us.
That is America, the worst world plague in almost a century.
Listen
America, you pathetic excuse for a civilized country, you want a
REASON for so many mass murderers? Don't look to pundits, the NRA,
Quentin Tarantino, or the media. Look in the fuckin' mirror! You'll
find the reason.
ENDNOTES:
[email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com)
or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/)
will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column. Your
zines, Cds/records, and... er... private
videos... can
and should be sent to me at: Mykel Board, POB 137, Prince Street
Station, New York NY 10012]
-->This is from a
punkrock pal o' mine who's stuck living in his car. I even gave him
$5!
Here's
old Bob, he wasted his life with punkrock, he's really hardcore. He
carried the torch, he suffered and martyred so that you might rock,
he was a true-believer to the point of idiocy and now he's homeless
and broke and can't get a decent job, but he hates all the right
political things and cares about puppies and babies.....please help
him out..
Sad
and pathetic, but thats pretty much the truth......I just keep
pricking my finger when I try to pin the punkrock hero badge on
myself. Can you help? Cheers!
-->Life
imitates entertainment imitating life dept: The Utne Reader
reports on a 300-acre "hunting ranch" outside San
Antonio Texas. The site streams live video from a platform with a
computer, a video camera, and a 22-caliber Remington rifle. When an
animal wanders into view, users take aim with their mouse and a
remote control device does the rest. For a few hundred dollars more,
the cyber-but-real corpse can be sent to a local taxidermist for
stuffing and delivery.
-->Vegans
strike again dept: I found an old issue of Censorship News
that had an interesting report on a San Francisco Institute of
Art exhibition. Actually, it was only a planned exhibition,
canceled because of a video called DON'T TRUST ME. The video showed
animals "being killed by a single blow to the head." The
C.N. analysis is perfect:
The images in
Don't Trust Me are deeply disturbing, though
probably less so than videos of animal abuse distributed for advocacy
purposes by some of the animal rights organizations that protested
the exhibition... Had the director stated that this work condemned
practices of slaughtering animals... it seems unlikely that SFIA
would have been subjected to the threats that caused it to cancel the
exhibit.
Sounds like "hate
crime" laws. Don't punish the crime, punish the thought. Of
course the victim, in either case, is dead.
-->Behind
every pillar of evil is an American Christian dept: Conservative
lawmakers in the Ugandan Parliament are
pushing a bill that would make being lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender a crime punishable by death.
After he initially
endorsed the bill, Ugandan President Museveni responded to
international outrage and promised to veto it. But there's intense
pressure at home for him to follow his original endorsement.
The newest version
of the bill would pit Ugandans against each other. Teachers, parents,
and landlords — among others — could be criminally charged if
they fail to denounce their students, children, and renters they know
to be gay.
Homophobic fervor
has been brewing for years in Uganda, but was most recently
stepped-up by American, right-wing evangelicals. They traveled to the
country to spread disinformation about homosexuality and encourage
anti-gay legislation. They've been cheering this bill on and pushing
for its passage. (Late news: The bill has been tabled by the Ugandan
legislature.)
-->Pray to Pay
dept: Also on the religious front Church and State Magazine
reports that Washington DC had plans to provide $12 dollars to
the CENTRAL UNION RESCUE MISSION. The mission "provides food and
shelter to the homeless, but only if those served attend Christian
religious services-- once for each benefit. Clearly a $12 million
violation of the separation of church and state... as well as the
general freedom to worship (or not) as you see fit.” As of this
writing, the grant is still up in the air.
-->Pay to help
dept: The magazine REASON reports that a 10 year old girl wanted
to raise money for the Japanese tsunami victims. She decided to sell
cookies and lemonade in front of her home in Miami Beach. The city
government, however, refused to grant her an "occupational
license" so she was unable to open her stand.
-->You can
kill 'em but you can't fuck 'em dept: Germany has just banned sex
with animals. The acts had been legal since 1969. The badguys, as are
often the case, are "animal rightists" who say that animal
sex "forces animals to behave in ways that are inappropriate to
their species."
Michael Kiok, the
leader of a Zoophile group, has spearheaded opposition to the ban.
"There are already laws against hurting an animal," he
says. "Of course animals can show if they want to have sex. They
can show if they are hungry or want to exercise."
Christian-- and
vegan-- morality strikes again.