Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

About half of gun owners say that having a gun is either a very important or somewhat important part of their identity.

Think about that. How many of you can point to a single material possession you think defines you in any way? You might say “My car” or even “My college degree” (with the latter obviously symbolizing an experience rather than standing as a “possession” in the usual sense). But what sort of person actually associates a weapon, or any one object, with a strong sense of self?

Apparently, millions of people who own guns do Read the rest of this entry »

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the right-wing media has advanced two ideas about the students who survived it and are speaking publicly about it: they’re too young and emotionally distraught to have valid opinions on the issue of gun control, yet at the same time they’re savvy operators being coached or even paid by liberals to parade themselves in front of the cameras and therefore cannot be trusted on the matter gun control.

Either way, the message is the same: “Don’t engage these silly kids on this issue.”

I’m not going to claim that I ever endured anything remotely resembling what these students did. But as a high-school sophomore in December 1985, I was, in fact, present for a school shooting at a time when those were extremely rare (the lone fatality was the shotgun-toting former student himself). And one month later, a teacher at my high school was killed on national television along with six others in a space-shuttle mishap while virtually all of us, from the superintendent of schools to the cafeteria ladies, watched. I saw my teachers and other adults on the scene sobbing and wandering the hallways in shock, no better prepared to handle this unexpected plot twist than any of us kids were;  this collective breakdown was itself an unreal tableau.

I would say that counts as trauma by any reasonable standard. And it didn’t mean our brains were hobbled.

When you’re a teenager, no matter how skeptical and scornful you might be toward your elders — especially teachers and parents — at some level, you tend to believe that they are better or stronger than you, or at least immune to crippling fits of emotion. That’s how it was in the 1980s, anyway, and it was still true in 2001, as I saw during the 9/11 attacks. You tend to think that only obvious psychopaths like Jeffrey Dahmer are ruined grown-ups, and you tell yourself you’ll never confront such monsters anyway.

As a result, I cannot imagine how appalled I would have been in the wake of Challenger disaster to see a supposed adult – a news figure, no less, or at least a flapping  face on a TV screen — attempt to delegitimize my and my classmates’ ideas and feelings by declaring, in effect, “Whatever those Concord High kids are saying about the space program, NASA, Morton Thiokol — they’re not reliable commentators on any of it.” Sure, we were kids, but a lot of is were already a fuck of a lot more on the ball and worth listening to out there than at least half of the adults in this country.

But we didn’t know it. In those days, there was no national-scale media-propaganda outlet set aside especially for stupid and insane people, as there is now. Carnival-barker media figures like O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and every other squint-eyed piece of shit out there didn’t exist except in their ugly formative stages. Unfortunately, the sort of ignorant, resentful, incompetent mouth-breathing, Bible-banging bumpkins did, and they were an untapped market, unknowingly waited for a series of wrinkly peckers to metaphorically (in most cases) fellate (or worse).

Anyone suggesting that the kids in Parkland have an emotional stake in  what they’re saying is absolutely correct. But trying to say this doesn’t matter is both obviously stupid and cruel. And people like Bill O’Reilly know it.

Also, my inclusion of that response from Shannon Moore, whoever she is (“a witch in search of her hat” is my first guess) was no accident. Despite being a simpleton, this “Christian” — who on her profile at least has the honesty to refer to herself as an aspiring writer,  which makes sense given the wealth of basic grammatical and factual errors on her shitblog —  is among the many amateur conserva-pundits pretending as though a handful of young people eating detergent constitutes a generation-wide phenomenon. Millions of howling rednecks, most of them older Americans like Shannon Moore, believe the crap spraying from the face-anuses of O’Reilly and Donald Trump every day, and most of them are “Christians” who think the cheerleader-fondling Roy Moore should have been elected because party loyalty. I’d say the latter peer group constitutes a greater danger to society than the former one does. Fortunately, they’re older and will die fairly soon, although not soon enough, the damage they’ve done will live on even as their bloated corpses rot unpretentiously away, the charred imaginary souls within destined for a Hell that unfortunately is as much of a lie as the rest of the nonsense these syphilitic twats believe.

If Trump were serious about an infrastructure overhaul, he would find a way to permanently plug the gushing sewer pipes extending from the faces of O’Reilly, Hannity, Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Dana Loesch, and of course himself and the various misbred proto-hominid life forms in his own family. He would find a way to detoxify the source of these messes, so whatever later emerged into the restored face-conduits was less obviously wrongheaded and inflammatory.

HOLY SHIT! No U.S.-Mexico border wall is forthcoming after all, and Mexico was never going to pay for it anyway.

This is a stunner, like the idea going around that the Holocaust is a historical event and that the Apollo missions unfolded exactly as the official record describes.

I have mentioned a few times that I’ve lost a scattering of Facebook friends since the 2016 campaign started, which doesn’t bother me, and a couple of actual friends, which of course does. I did not cut off the other people or browbeat them personally over their voting choices, and would never weigh politics more heavily than real friendship, unless, of course, there was simply no way to establish a meaningful barrier between the two. Read the rest of this entry »

When people refer to a failure of the public school system, what they really mean — often unknowingly, because humans are excellent at not knowing things — is a failure of biology combined with a perverse and resounding success of large-scale tribalism.

I would love to believe that the “It’s 9 degrees outside! Explain that, global warming cultists!” cry that Fox News-dependent primates unfurl every winter is meant as a joke, and that the loudest voices in this off-key yahoo chorus are merely sowing doubt for the sake of political leverage. But in fact, when one visits the comment sections of Fox News (sometimes I get lost), one quickly realizes that huge swaths of the population really do not grasp the notion of — among countless other climate-related concepts — local cooling as a consequence of general warming. It really isn’t that hard to understand, for example, that as polar ice melts, this has effects on atmospheric circulation that can push especially cold air from the Arctic into lower, but still cool, latitudes — say, where Boston and Minneapolis sit.

But people are not machines, and they need to be engaged in what they are being taught to grasp non-intuitive scientific concepts like the one I just outlined. I can think of a number of things I came to understand only after poring over the material numerous times, something I did only because I was highly motivated to learn them and, importantly, not encumbered by cultural reasons to reject them.

When a kid from an Evangelical household in the Bumpkin Belt who passes through his K-12 years and emerges scarcely less ignorant about certain things than he started, it’s probably not primarily the fault of any of the well-meaning teachers he may have had. It’s most likely because he belongs to a tribe that requires him to mightily reject certain concepts, no matter how sensible these appear to kids of a similar age not poisoned by extremely tenacious religious and political dogma. These kids look for all the world like basic morons, but even the smarter ones are capable of sounding no more informed than a typical house plant when it comes to things like evolution and the age of the cosmos, because their parents have inculcated hopelessly fucked-up ideas into their heads.

Now, if people were actually intelligent by some external and reliable standard, we might be better at absorbing and accepting facts. But really, humans are only smart because we’re the best of a weak and pitiful Earthly lot. If I stumbled into a basketball game among pre-schoolers, I am pretty sure I could absolutely annihilate any five-member team the kids could throw together all by myself, especially as soon as I figured out how to get away with vicious flagrant fouls. But this would not offer a valid reason for proclaiming myself a basketball star. We humans might be fairly smart compared to the rest of the animals on our own planet, but compare what even the greatest of humankind’s feeble minds are capable of in relation to even the most virus-riddled CPU from the 1980s, and it’s far more lopsided than “no contest.”

I could spend a lot of time emphasizing where the political left screws up in these areas, too, but I’m trying to offload the least loyal friends I have before moving on to the ones I’m less eager to offend. It’s also a lot easier in this political ecosystem to see where folks normally associated with the right frantically fist-fuck so many basic and seemingly undeniable concepts into unrecognizability. None of those poor waddling souls are aware that Fox News is nothing more than long, slow, non-pharmacological lethal injection that erodes whatever higher cognitive functions they once may have possessed, leaving them only with the capacity to feed themselves and make sojourns to secure groceries, watch stock-car races, and vote for the kinds of people who make the permanent “news” haze seem even more rewarding.

So, while shitty teachers abound just as incompetent workers populate almost every occupation with aplomb, trying to blame the public-school system for the reason so many people grow up making all the sense of farm animals equipped with goat-thought-to-speech devices is wrongheaded, and is a facile argument made by shitpile-hominid hybrids like Betsy DeVos so they can promote even bleaker collective intellects than the one in which all of us sad sacks are continually drowning.

People are dumb and hapless. I am, you are, and most people both of us know are probably even worse off. Life is a thankless task none of us asked to undertake, and the practices we adopt to stave off ennui and misery often make things worse. We are fucked in the head, so it only stands to reason that any solutions we create are bound to magnify the problems. We create tribes filled with, and invariably led by, monumentally ignorant noisy motherfuckers whose ability to maintain a veneer of superior intelligence in the eyes of the deluded is their only real cognitive accomplishment. Blaming schools for the collective intellectual ruin of our citizenry is like blaming aeronautical engineers when a hijacked plane is crashed into a building. We’re a bunch of fucking idiots who gather in groups to jabber, fornicate, and use drugs so it doesn’t seem so bad, and creating enemies of each other is just one more tonic for this sad party.

(You can probably understand why the notion of a global thermonuclear war fails to trouble me much.)