Category: Rants

In 1885 the Protestant clergyman and popular author Josiah Strong wrote his most widely read book, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. His treatise was popular largely because it was awash in the kind of nativist sentiments that found a receptive audience during the immigrant boom that began after the Civil War and intensified throughout the Industrial Revolution. Strong identified the Seven Perils to American society, most of which are easily predictable and align with the most common prejudices of the era: Catholicism, Mormonism, Socialism, Intemperance, Wealth, Urbanization, and Immigration.

In the era of scientific racism, social Darwinism, and Robber Baron capitalism it is not hard to see why the moneyed classes and the anti-immigrant working classes alike applauded Strong.

I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.

In his warning about the menace of Catholicism, Strong wrote:

…the Roman Catholic is not at liberty to weigh the Pope's judgment, to try his commands by his own conscience and the Word of God – to do this would be to become a Protestant. Worse, (the Catholic) stands not alone, but with many millions more, who are bound by the most dreadful penalties to act as one man in obedience to the will of a foreign potentate and in disregard to the laws of the land. This, I claim, is a very possible menace to the peace of society. (Emphasis original)

Throughout the book, Strong repeats the warning ("Again, our Constitution requires obedience to the laws of the United States and loyalty to the Government. The Pope also demands of every subject obedience and loyalty to himself.") For this exact reason, Catholics were for many decades – as they are more than happy to remind anyone within earshot – discriminated against in American politics. Today, of course, Catholicism has mainstreamed along with the people – Irish, Polish, Italian, etc – who brought it to the United States. Catholics are no longer discriminated against outside of their own imaginations.
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Instead, they have become part of a new bloc that argues that far from being a menace to civil society, the right to disregard the law when one's religious beliefs – even those curated by a Foreign Potentate – conflict with it.

Of course 19th Century Protestant leaders feared Catholic conscientious objections only inasmuch as they were perceived to conflict with laws that were already crafted in accordance with the beliefs and desires of the dominant Protestant orthodoxy in the United States. There is no conflict between the law and one's religion, in other words, if one's religion is the de facto faith of the civil institutions that create the law. Now the Papist Menace has exercised enough political power and influence over the law to have their wants and beliefs taken into account from the outset – try to find a remotely relevant law in the last thirty years that doesn't have some sort of abortion caveat written into it. I'll wait.

Allowing personal religious beliefs to trump the law was perceived as a threat to the future of our nation and of civil society when it was wielded by a religious minority. In the hands of the now-majority, it has been rebranded as the last bulwark against that same civil society. What the white Protestant male majority once treated as a combination of treason and heresy is now an act infused with nobility and, as of Monday, sanctioned by the highest Court of the land.

While the practical impact of Monday's decision likely will be minimal, the endorsement by the Court of this once-dangerous principle has introduced a dangerous precedent and we will be bathed in its radioactive fallout for some time to come.

The key to maintaining the illusion that America and everything in it are WOOO #1 THE BEST IN THE WORLD is never leaving the United States.

I don't present myself as a Great World Traveler, but having been in two "Second World" countries recently (or at present, in the case of Mexico) I can't shake that "Why is everything here much nicer than where I live" feeling. Now, contrary to popular opinion I am not an idiot.
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Obviously both Mexico and Brazil have areas serious social problems along the lines of inequality, crime, and poverty. Obviously these are not paradises. But they also have things like functional, cheap public transportation and highways that do not look like they were bombed by the Luftwaffe five decades ago and the damage was never fixed. Short of going the full chauvinist Asshole Tourist route ("I hate this place because everything is foreign! Everyone talks funny! Why aren't there more Burger Kings?") it would be extraordinarily difficult for an honest person to look at an unexceptional city in Brazil and argue that St. Louis or some random mid-major city in the U.S. is superior.

Cities with huge areas that are off limits due to violent crime? Throw a dartboard at the U.S. and you'll hit one. Crushing, third world-style poverty?

Stroll through housing projects, half-abandoned rural towns, or an Indian reservation and see it stateside. Staggering wealth and embarrassing poverty coexisting side by side? We practically invented it.

The inevitable endgame of thirty years of neoliberal right-wing economics has been to convert the U.S. into a pseudo-third world nation. The only thing we're good at anymore is Cheap.

Our workforce will take wages they can't live on and are encouraged to be happy that they have a job at all. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Hundreds of our cities are ugly, polluted, half-empty museums of a time when blue collar work could support a family. To think that Americans living in Terre Haute or Montgomery or the Florida panhandle have the greatest and bestest standard of living on Earth is pretty laughable if you visit…

well, essentially any country in Asia, Europe, or South America.

This is a bit unfair because admittedly I live in one of the worst, most troubled cities in the country, but other than having cheaper gas, lower national income taxes, and more Wal-Marts I honestly can't figure out how living in Peoria, Illinois is "better" than living in a supposedly poor country. Maybe this is somewhat naive – I've never lived in a different country and perhaps the downsides to other places would become more apparent if I did. Regardless, the physical isolation of the United States combined with the "Why go anywhere else when everything here is THE BEST!!
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" attitude ensures that we don't travel internationally nearly as much as our foreign counterparts…and that really helps to fuel the mindset that cities and our society have to be broken because nothing can be done to provide effective basic public services, nor is there any reason for wanting to do so.

Does anyone make a living as a journalist anymore?
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Once you get past the top tier of media personalities, I'm starting to doubt it.

Sure, the few Old Media outlets left standing are probably paying their writers something that approaches a livable salary for the incredibly expensive cities in which they are located, but the vast majority of the New Media is getting the millions of words it needs to Generate Hits every day for nothing or close to it.

Despite being a staggering failure myself, I happen to know a lot of people who are successful. Some of these people are Writers. And through these friendships I've kept abreast of what one is paid to write for Big New Media sites. Major sites that you have heard of and might even visit regularly. The figures are not inspiring. They border on insulting. Of course as we talked about in Friday's post using a record low amount of subtlety, payment in "experience" and "exposure" is common. As best I can tell this simply leads to opportunities to write without compensation for more media outlets.

I'm at the point where the phrase "I'm a writer!" immediately is filter-translated to "I live in San Francisco / NYC / DC / etc and play writer into my thirties because my parents are still supporting me or I haven't burned through the trust fund yet.
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" There's just no way people are actually making a living – especially the kind of lifestyle that most New York "writers" live – writing for Slate and Rolling Stone and Politico and all these other content mills.

Part of the problem, as Thomas Frank and the original Baffler people used to talk about extensively, is that the realities of journalism as an industry during the dying days of the Old Media era virtually eliminated all but the children of the rich from contention. Working a beat for a newspaper used to be a blue collar profession, but when newspapers started bleeding money in the late 90s and early 00s, the barrier to entry to the profession was raised to multiple years of (unpaid, exploitative) "internships" before finally being granted a low-paying entry level staff position. When you require two or three years of living in the most expensive cities in the country without compensation – hell, even a few months in NYC would financially drain most normal 22 year olds – you're effectively guaranteeing that journalism, even when it pays, is not a profession but a pastime for people who don't need to worry about earning a living.

Of course this has all sorts of consequences for the content and tone of media coverage – Doris Graber is among a number of media scholars who have shown that upper-middle class issues are overemphasized in the media because, not surprisingly, most reporters are upper-middle class either by professional success or by birth. Today, there are so many Writers out there trying to earn a living and so few media outlets paying enough to support them that whatever remnants of the working or true middle classes remain in journalism will probably go extinct in the next decade or two.

Not being a Professional Writer, and in fact never having been compensated to write anything, I may need to stand corrected here.

Maybe there are gobs of money being made out there in ways that remain a mystery to amateurs. From this perspective, however, it looks like the media is inventing new ways to generate content a lot faster than it is inventing new ways to pay for it.

I've been resisting writing this for years because it is going to make me sound (potentially) like a crazy person, but now that we're doing a mass shooting per day here in the Land of Freedom it seems like it needs to be said.

Like millions of Americans, I had an unpleasant time in the K-12 educational system. By that I mean I got picked on a lot and "bullied" in the parlance of the 21st Century. This was by no means an experience that makes me unique.

In hindsight, frankly, it makes perfect sense. I was an odd combination of extremely weird and not shy, so rather than keeping to myself I actively engaged with my peers even though I lacked the interpersonal skills to interact successfully. Nothing happened to me that was particularly scarring or that hasn't happened to lots of other people with no particular ill effects. Sure it made me dislike school a little more and it probably had some long term effect on the way I deal with people in social situations, but all in all I would say it fell within the range of Normal childhood experiences.

When you get picked on as a kid, especially as a male in a society in which you are strongly encouraged toward aggressive and violent forms of entertainment and behavior, I don't think it's all that unusual to throw the occasional Eight Year-Old Hissy Fit and think something like, (say in petulant child-voice) "I hate everyone and I'm gonna blow up the school!" Nor is it particularly odd to have a juvenile fantasy about going Bruce Willis on the people who pick on you on the playground.
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As a young male raised on a steady diet of action films, GI Joes, and video games where you kick and punch and stab and shoot everything in sight, there's nothing surprising about that. There were times when I had particularly bad days in middle school and junior high where I spent an afternoon at my desk thinking how fun it would be to get revenge.
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My best friend and I created a comic with a protagonist named, creatively, "Super Ninja" and drew strips that inevitably ended with the titular hero cutting the heads off of whoever had spent that lunch period making fun of us.

Today, school administrators would have lost their shit when they discovered our poorly-drawn little strips, but at the time it seemed perfectly harmless. It was understood – by me, by my friend, by everyone involved – that no one was actually going to do any of this. The line between fiction and reality was clearly demarcated. We all understood that two ten year-olds who got picked on a lot for being nerds were retreating into a harmless fantasy in which they didn't get picked on so much. The point is, at no point did it ever occur to me, or any of the other kids who got picked on, to actually blow up the school or shoot anybody. It wasn't even within the realm of possibility.

In short, I don't think it's particularly rare for young people who get picked on to have an imagination that creates revenge scenarios. And, as a kid whose dad took him to see RoboCop on opening night when he was nine years old, I don't think it was particularly odd that sometimes those thoughts involved cartoonish amounts of violence. I may be wrong about this, and in fact I am some kind of rare and dangerous psychopath. In any event I turned out alright, notwithstanding the poor career choice.

It's easy and quite fair to blame the constant and easy availability of guns for the increase in spree-type shootings in the US, particularly in schools. There are too goddamn many people who have too goddamn many guns available for acquisition with almost no effort. What that does not address, however, is why the line between thinking about something and doing it seems to have disappeared or at least retreated. Prior to the mid-1990s, school shootings were almost unheard of and usually perpetrated by disturbed adults rather than students. Yet I don't believe for a second that during that time period, school kids never thought about doing violent things. We watched violent movies and played violent video games and played football and listened to The Rock Music and all of the other supposed triggers and causes that purport to explain the waves of violence in the past two decades. Despite all of that, we managed to think "I hate everyone and I'm gonna blow up the school!" without actually trying to blow up the school. Somehow kids managed to think about going Terminator on grade school bullies without doing it.

I don't know what changed, when, and why. Blaming the media coverage or entertainment or shoddy parenting all feels lazy and unconvincing. Spree killers have always received heavy media attention. Entertainment has always glorified war, fighting, and violence (particularly of the Death Wish "revenge" variety). There have always been lots of bad, negligent, or abusive parents. This generation of kids, however, is noticeably different in how willing some of them – still a very small minority out of the whole, yet far too many overall – are to turn their normal reactions to normal juvenile and adolescent social problems into concrete plans for mass murder.

I have always been hesitant to write this because people do not readily admit to having ever harbored a violent thought. We're all supposed to say that when we got picked on as kids we had emotionally healthy, adult responses and we never thought about shooting things or blowing stuff up like the Good Guys did in every movie, game, comic, and TV show we saw. But I think that recognizing that this is not especially rare is an important part of being able to understand why the distinction between thought and action has weakened and devise some useful ideas about how to strengthen it again.

For as long as I can remember I've loved politics.

When I was in the first grade, my best friend and I would spend recess having "summits" on the playground. We bickered over who got to be Reagan and who had to be Gorbachev and eventually agreed to flip for it, freeing up considerably more time to hash out reductions in strategic nuclear weapons.

In October of 1984 my dad took me to the old Chicago Stadium, since demolished, to see a Ronald Reagan campaign rally shortly before the November election. It was, to a six year old, just about the coolest thing I could imagine. Reagan made his entrance atop a wailing fire truck, a fact that was sufficient to persuade me that being president was a goddamn cool job.

In 1988 we waited outside in subzero weather for five hours to shake hands with George H. W. Bush.

By middle school and junior high I had the Senate and most of the relevant people in the House committed to memory; I can still tell you who was in the Senate in the late 80s and early 90s with useless accuracy. I watched the news for fun, mostly CNN despite its raging Liberal Bias. Whatever was happening in Congress or in the elections, I would tell anyone who would listen about it in great detail.

Finally I got to college where I could major in political science and spend every day talking about politics in great detail with like-minded people. It turned out that the other students didn't seem to care quite as much, or often at all, but at least the professors and grad students were usually willing to shoot the shit. That helped. But by the late 90s, something had started to change.
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The strategy of the Republican Party after the "revolution" of 1994 became to disassemble or otherwise ruin the government when in power and to be mindlessly obstructionist when in the minority. Oddly enough, government became less interesting when it wasn't doing anything. Or, after 2000, when everything it did was driven by ideology rather than reality.
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Still, I loved politics. I started this blog mostly to talk about it, although never focusing on it exclusively. I used to write up quite a bit of armchair analysis of the elections; in particular there is a lot of election content in 2004, 2006, and 2008. It tapered off in the next two elections and now here we are halfway through 2014 and I haven't given the midterm elections a moment's thought.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about this while on vacation and it became apparent that, if I'm being honest, my name is Ed and I don't think I care about politics anymore.

The GOP has become a cargo cult of extremists, the white Christian American version of the Taliban. The Democrats, when in power, offer some improvements around the margins but on economic and defense issues essentially tow the same one-party line with a softer message. And more importantly, 90% of the time, nothing is happening. Elections have become bizarre spectacles that cost billions and take place in the intellectual sewer. And ultimately the GOP ends up doing better than it deserves because millions of people like you and I – people who occasionally read stuff and have better things to do than take a debate between Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid seriously – just give up. The GOP base, however, never gives up.

Yes, I'm being somewhat lazy and taking the easy way out. It's facile to say "These people are all the same, who cares who wins" because of course we know that there are instances in which it will matter. It is on some level important; I still vote and I still teach it well (teaching political science, unless you're a hack, involves very little of the day-to-day of politics). It just isn't interesting anymore. And I don't feel bad about that, because the process has changed more than I have. As the old school Republicans say, I didn't walk away from the Party; it walked away from me. Look at the ways in which doing business in the House and Senate have changed, or how the Supreme Court has changed, or how the media coverage of all things political has changed, and I feel justified in saying, yeah, this is stupid.

Maybe it will come back to me at some point. Maybe it won't. Maybe this was the plan all along, to make the political process so unbearably awful and uninteresting that people would stop paying attention to it altogether and the moneyed class could get away with literally anything. If that was the plan, then I feel the same way I feel when I realize an advertising jingle is stuck in my head: I'm mostly annoyed that such a cheap trick worked on me.

Several months ago the world took great delight in a news report out of North Korea – a report that turned out to be bogus, predictably – that an uncle of the current dictator Kim Jong-Un was executed by the uniquely brutal method of being attacked by vicious dogs. Americans love stories of this type that allow our Enemies to be depicted as backward, subhuman savages.

This gives us an opportunity for collective back-patting on account of being clearly the more civilized race.

Of course the collective laughter and feigned moral outrage encourages people to focus on the cartoonish evil of the North Korean regime and not, under any circumstances, to pause to reflect on the fact that the United States stands only with nations like North Korea and Iran in practicing capital punishment. I guess it makes us feel proud to tell ourselves that we do it…

better? Nicer?

American voters and the people they elect love the death penalty because supporting it allows a bunch of soft, flabby-assed white guys to sound tough. But they're starting to run into some problems. The recent issues with lethal injection executions in Oklahoma and other states has the forces of capital punishment scrambling for alternatives here. One enterprising Utah legislator suggested bringing back the firing squad. On the political left there were the usual "Can you believe these savages" responses, focusing on the 8th Amendment's mandate against "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Here's the thing: why not bring back the firing squad? Or hanging? Or the guillotine? The act of state-sanctioned murder as the final step in a demonstrably imperfect and manipulable criminal justice system is itself cruel and, in the global sense, highly unusual.

America abounds with that loathsome brand of Centrist that opposes the death penalty if it makes them feel bad and uncivilized about themselves but supports it if it is Nice and Humane (a word generally reserved for descriptions of the treatment of livestock). We need to abandon that delusion post-haste. Either we are killing people by act of the courts and legislatures or we are not. Once we have leaped the moral chasm to conclude that we're cool with legal murder based on the judgment of a twelve-yahoo jury and the testimony of law enforcement, the method hardly matters. So long as we're not actively and gratuitously torturing people to death, any reasonably quick method of causing death is as good as any other.

The focus on method, in other words, is an effort to take something awful and brutal and dress it up real pretty until it is acceptable fodder for dinner table conversations. Capital punishment suffers as a political issue for our tendency to argue about tangents. Is the death penalty "right"? Well who gives a shit about whether it is morally right or wrong when it and the entire justice system are demonstrably flawed in practice.

Which method is the most humane? That's a red herring intended to condition people to accept the death penalty as inevitable by pushing the conversation forward to arguing style.

Is lethal injection cruel? Sure. So is the firing squad and the electric chair and every other method devised and put to use throughout our history. It is cruel inasmuch as capital punishment is cruel; our methods are barbaric inasmuch as the concept itself is barbaric. No amount of window dressing can make the act of killing the people least able to leverage social power and privilege over the justice system seem dignified. If all of our methods seem ugly it is because what we are doing is ugly.

(Editor's note: I'm going to try updating at noon rather than midnight for a while. My hypothesis is that it will accommodate Summer Academic Schedule a bit better.)

It turns out that someone employed by the NRA has a basic grasp of the way a normal person reacts to seeing dangerously zealous and ignorant people walking into quasi-public establishments like malls and restaurants carrying loaded semiautomatic rifles. The organization's DC lobbying arm is asking Texas open carry advocates to stand down, explaining to people who need to have this explained to them that normal people whose lives do not revolve around fetishizing firearms find it "downright weird" and "scary.

" Most importantly, from the NRA's perspective, the more gun owners behave in such a fashion, the lower the odds that their cherished open/concealed carry laws will be enacted. It's the classic internal clash between the movement members who have half a brain and those whose thought process occurs mostly in the intestines and gonads.

(Side note: so when the "threat" materializes, is she going to drop the infants in order to use that rifle?

I mean, the Gay Black Muslim Teenage Immigrant Union-Member Welfare Mother Assailant certainly isn't going to wait for her to set her children down in a stroller before blowing her away.)

And now for something completely different. Hold on, I'm going somewhere with this.

Regular readers know that I'm, if not "obsessed," at least very interested in the Cold War. I recently re-read Victor Sebestyen's 1989, an excellent take on the fall of non-Soviet communist regimes in Europe. In any book about the final years of the Cold War, several cliches and tropes are usually well-represented. One – and this is Sebestyen's biggest failing, I believe – is the "Pope John Paul II killed communism!" line that no actual historian takes seriously anymore. The second is the dynamic explanation for why the revolutions of Eastern Europe, Romania aside, unfolded bloodlessly. Once it became apparent that Gorbachev had no intention of using Soviet military power to intervene, the communist regimes of Europe were left with only one choice to retain their power: to use their own military and police forces to put down anti-government protests by force. The cliched explanation for failing to use that option is that those domestic security forces "would not be willing to fire on their own people.

" Whether this is entirely true is questionable, but if one reads enough books about the fall of communism this phrase will be encountered no less than several hundred times. In short, while Soviet tanks might be more than willing to roll through Prague shooting at Czechs, Czech tanks would not.

I often wonder how much the militarization of police and the "Us vs.
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Them, citizens are all the enemy" mentality of American law enforcement (coinciding with the War on Drugs, but that's another story) is responsible for the looniest aspects of gun culture in the US. After all, can any sentient observer be unclear on how ready and willing American police are to shoot "their own people", in the parlance of hacky Cold War prose? Left, right, black, white, old, young…
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pretty much everyone realizes that American law enforcement from the local patrolman to the ATF have proven themselves to be itching, or at least willing, to whip out their piece and start shooting at the slightest provocation – real or imagined.

It takes only passing attention to the news to see how easy it is to get cops to beat the shit out of unarmed public protesters en masse or that every couple of days some innocent and usually black pedestrian ends up dying in Mysterious Circumstances or that some kid gets beaten to a bloody pulp for daring to be insufficiently deferential to Officer Friendly. While old, white America may actively cheer the use of police power against Leftists, minorities, and Punk Teenagers, they're certainly coherent enough to connect the dots that police will basically do anything they're ordered to do, and a lot of things they're not, when it comes to inflicting violence on their fellow citizens.

How much, I wonder, of the armed-to-the-teeth culture on the far right is a reaction to the way law enforcement behaves in this country? Back in the 90s things like Waco and Ruby Ridge were rallying cries on the far right for the specter of the government coming to get law abiding gun owners, but even without reference to such extreme examples it isn't hard to make the connection between the police beating up Occupy protesters and poor black males today and those same police posing a threat to Responsible Gun Owners tomorrow.

Arguably, law enforcement suffers the most from the loosening of gun laws in the last thirty years, as they now face better and more lethally armed criminals with less reserve about shooting (or shooting back) at police than ever before. Maybe – just maybe – some parts of the American public that believe it is necessary to be so heavily armed might not feel it quite so necessary if police were not so goddamn violent, aggressive, and downright mean so often in this country. Sure, some people are nuts and would make all the same pro-gun arguments no matter how police behaved, and at the same time some cops are Good and don't treat every person they meet like The Enemy. It stands to reason, however, that the militarization of law enforcement and the drop-of-a-hat willingness to use force is not entirely unrelated to the increasing popularity of the idea that individuals must arm themselves as a bulwark against the power of the state.

In any mixed group of people of different nationalities it is only a matter of time and drinks until the token American will be asked to shed light upon the aspects of his homeland that foreigners find the most baffling. This is eminently fair; payback, if you will, for all of the times a group of Americans have asked the one Japanese person if everyone eats sushi every day and does karate, or the German is asked to defend his fatherland's somewhat checkered history since…
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Charlemagne, I guess.

The last time I visited Canada, a group of people explained to me why the U.S. healthcare system is idiotic as though this had not yet occurred to me, and that if only I brought back to America an explanation of our faulty logic we could finally fix the broken system. In my more recent experience abroad the topics were not quite as esoteric. Three times in a single week, though, I was asked to explain why everyone in America carries a gun.

It is hard to explain U.S. gun culture to a non-American. Especially as an outsider. Six capirinhas in, I cleared my throat and prepared to break new ground in advancing understanding among peoples.

First – and in any conversation about guns you really, really owe it to your audience to hammer this point home at the outset – the percentage of Americans who own guns is actually declining. Our country has more guns – nearly 300 million – than ever before yet the share of households that own a gun has fallen steadily during this Gun Boom (see what I did there). Simply put, everyone in America does not have a gun. America has a relatively small, possibly even shrinking, number of people who each own a large and growing number of guns. It's a bimodal distribution (note: do not explain it this way to normal people) with peaks at Zero Guns and Shitload of Guns.

So the first thing to understand about American gun culture is that you're either in or you're out. And if you're in, you are all in. Go big or go home, son. Back to this point in a minute.
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The second thing to try to communicate is that unlike most nations, we do have firearm ownership written into our Constitution. What this means is that individuals have a right to own a gun. It does not mean, despite what the NRA has successfully argued, that one has a right to own any and all types of guns or to do with those guns whatever one's heart desires. The 2nd Amendment may tell us we can be armed, but it does not establish your right to own a .50 cal heavy machine gun and to carry it (supposing you could) into a Federal courthouse. This, I tried to explain, is where the left and right diverge.

Increasingly, though, the "no restrictions or regulations of any kind ever because freedom" argument has become the status quo. This is due almost singly to the relentless work of the NRA. Foreigners know "NRA" when they hear it but often do not know what it is. It is an interest group, and easily the most consistently successful one, I said.
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At this juncture my own ignorance was a roadblock, because I do not know much about how interest groups function in other democracies despite knowing a good deal about interest groups in the U.S. In most other political systems corruption and influence-peddling tend to be a little more brash, unvarnished, and Mafiaesque (think Russia, for example). In the U.S., however, with its pretensions of a free, transparent, and equitable democratic system requires the going through of many motions. Interest groups and elected officials must engage in these ritualized war dances and secret handshakes and coded oaths to arrange political exchanges with the facade of plausible deniability. Why no, my supplemental rule on that bill had nothing to do with the $100,000 campaign donation I received. It was a mere coincidence.

Any moderately politically interested foreigner grasps this readily. What might not be obvious, though, is the NRA's grand illusion – the Big Lie that it is a group that represents firearm owners. On paper and in mission statement this may be true. In practice, the NRA represents gun manufacturers. In furtherance of the gun industry's desire to sell a fuckton of guns to the declining percentage of Americans who own guns and who happen to already own a fuckton of them, the NRA must constantly fan the flames of fear that They are coming to Take Your Guns. Never mind that Congress hasn't passed a consequential restriction on gun ownership since the Great Depression. The impending threat looms large that Obama and Clinton and Liberal Judges and Saul Alinsky and the tree huggers and Ed Begley and the Comintern are always coming to take them away imminently so the only logical thing for a freedom loving Patriot to do is rush out and buy, buy, buy. Get them now while you still can, fellow Minutemen!

Are people really so stupid that they fall for this ruse? And fall for it repeatedly?

Well, yes. I ask by way of answering, "Have you ever been to Florida? Go to Florida sometime. Walk into a chain buffet restaurant at 3 PM on a weekday and start talking to people about guns.
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Or about anything, really. And that this kind of cheap hucksterism works will no longer be a mystery. Watch Fox News for 15 minutes, remind yourself that an appreciable minority of Americans take it seriously, and suddenly the NRA Theory doesn't seem so far fetched.

"So to answer your question, we don't all have guns. In fact Canada has more guns per capita than we do. I guess our gun owners are just…dumber? More malleable, if we're being polite? Anyway," I said, scanning for a valid target to redirect this line of questioning and finding two erudite German backpackers, "don't you all wear leiderhosen? And where do you hide all the Nazi gold?"

Recently the media were collectively wise enough to republish a college freshman's op-ed in a student newspaper because history has proven that 19 year old white kids usually have the most important and interesting things to say. A monstrously ugly child named Tal Fortgang, which I pause to remind you I did not make up, went from the typical Princeton freshman to a guest on major news networks overnight. OK, so it helps if you're telling them what they want to hear. But say the right things and you too can go from masturbation enthusiast to Hannity guest in the blink of an eye, teens!

Fortgang has become the planet's leading authority on white privilege, which is remarkable given that he does not appear to have the slightest idea what the phrase means. His opus is basically the typical "Several generations ago my family was pretty poor, therefore I deserve what I have" argument that is second only to drunken copulation in popularity on college campuses.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended…Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?”

Tal, I think I finally get it. White privilege is a sham. Let me share a bit of my own story to drive home your point.

My grandfather was a humble turd miner, digging in the hard, feculent ground for 18 hours every day across the fertile turd deposits of eastern Poland. Every day he walked uphill several miles to work, and then because of the way the planet rotates he also had to walk uphill to get back home. He and his wife, who cleaned toilets with her tongue because she could not afford a brush, lived under a bridge and had nine children, none of whom survived. Every day they ate a single bean cut into quarters, half for breakfast and half for dinner. They also had a dog who was poor.

That was my father's family.

On my mother's side, my grandfather licked the mosses off of damp rocks for sustenance when he was forced off of his land by the Potato Famine and also by Hitler. Then he fought Hitler and his Nazis and beat them even though he was so poor that his rifle had no barrel because he had to pawn it for a potato.
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This brave man beat up Hitler with a rifle that, when you think about it, was really just a piece of wood. Then he met and married my grandmother who was dancing for pennies in the poorest part of Latvia. They realized that in Latvia there was no freedom because of Hitler and communism, so they came to the United States and humbly opened a very humble business making low-grade solid lubricants from rendered street children. It was arduous work since almost to a child, the children resisted being reduced to grease. While they slept they made extra money by doing the whole town's laundry. They never complained about what hard work it was.

All of my grandparents worked hard and sent their children to Harvard Yale State, where they studied hard and got degrees in American Values.

They had two children while they were in college and never once asked for any help, which may partially explain why my sister disappeared from the yard one day in 1983.

I grew up to be a strong, hard working, respectful lad who knows a few things about life such as when it is not worth it to chase after a van that has just kidnapped your sister.

Why should I have to apologize for anything? Isn't being poor and understanding the value of hard work transmitted genetically, after all? As long as I am the descendant of some people who were not rich assholes, it is impossible for me to be a rich, privileged asshole.

QED.