The buzz of bullshit is in the air. Take care. Breathe too much bullshit and you might become part of it. Nobody wants to be a carrier of bullshit. It’s best to avoid bullshit altogether but that’s nearly impossible. The best one can do is mitigate exposure to the environmental toxin of bullshit. Some methods (among many) I use to combat bullshit are introspection, bourbon, the study of history, books, reason, and endeavoring to comment on things well after the initial wave of bullshit has dissipated:
In mid-January, my clock radio, which is tuned to the strongest signal in my area*, woke me with the word “shithole”. I’m not a morning person so I hit snooze. The device went off again in ten minutes and it was “shithole, shithole, shithole”. Like most adults I don’t take to the fainting couch over language; in fact the tendency to refrain from hyperventilation over words might be part of the definition of “adult”. I briefly wondered what happened to “Russia, Russia, Russia” which has been my morning alarm most of 2017. Rather than ponder it before I’d had coffee, I hit snooze again. Another blissful few minutes of sleep and now talking heads were discussing the horrible unthinkable impossible idea that some nations (like Norway) are preferable to other nations (like places where you might starve or contract dysentery).
To me, this is like pondering the impossibility that the sky is blue or water is wet. I killed the radio and went to work. (Another thing that is part of the definition of “adult”.) By lunch I was aware the world was filled with talking heads whining about Trump and his alleged analysis of crappy countries as shitholes. (Oddly they were twerking over the unverified possibility Trump might have spoken in the vernacular of anyone over twelve.) Wow! Trump can tweak the press with the “possibility” he “might” have said something virtually anyone who’s traveled already knows! The press have marionette strings leading to their greatest enemy.
Nonetheless, it didn’t get traction in my head. Some places are shitholes; Detriot, Mauritania, Hati, a particularly bad apartment I rented back in the 1990s, WalMart at 3:00 am. If you don’t think there are shitholes then you haven’t seen enough of the world. I waited patiently while the press rolled in it. You can only be upset about a true thing for so long. (CNN literally used the word 195 times. It reminds me of a toddler who’s learned a new naughty word and can’t wait to tell everyone.)
In a handful of days “shithole, shithole, shithole” faded, as did “Russia, Russia, Russia” before it. Within a week it was “shutdown, shutdown, shutdown”, which I have to admit, is an improvement in vocabulary.
Then I dropped off grid for a while. I emerged just in time to find the press drooling all over themselves over Kim Yo-jong at the winter Olympics. Really? The unelected relative of an authoritarian dictator who grinds starving peasant masses underneath the feet of his oppressive, all controlling, tyrannical government…. she has a “nice smile”.
Oh for fuck’s sake!
Is there nothing so loathsome and repulsive that the press simply won’t go there? It’s North Fucking Korea… among the ugliest, meanest, most horror filled, black holes of misery and death on planet earth. The maniacal leader of this quagmire unearthed a human puppet that looks suntastically happy and quite likely would be killed if she failed to do so. She’s pretty compared to dour Vice President Pence and his tie. So we’re supposed to get wobbly at the knees for North Korea? No! Only a gold plated asshole would measure a monster’s sister’s smile as so pleasant that representing a prison state that will bludgeon starving prisoners to death with a hammer is somehow… OK. When you forgive starvation, misery, and torture because you really hate a generic American politician you’ve lost it.
North Korea is a horrible place where people suffer terrible oppression. It was rightly called part of the axis of evil, it’s a likely place to starve to death, and nobody should be getting a hard on for it because the evil ruler’s sister seems pleasant. North Korea is a genuine shithole.
I was grossed out. For some reason, among all the bullshit of the last few years, emoting over Kim Jong-un’s variant of Eva Braun seems uniquely awful. It’s a bridge too far. Can’t we all agree that the repressive monstrosity that is the government of North Korea is evil? I don’t mean something vague like “weighing the pros and cons of life’s path” but just plain old fashioned, irredeemable, flat out murderous and violent, starvation, blood, torture and death, evil. Look it up in the dictionary, evil is a word, it exists on earth, and Kim Jong-un is evil.
Who tiptoes around evil?
At any rate I am not alone. Many of us know shit and know shinola and aren’t too proud to say so. I took this photo a few days ago. I have no idea who created it. It’s just a silly little bumper sticker and I’ll grant that it doesn’t go into the difference between oppressed starving peasant victims and their violent dictatorial overlords; but that’s because it’s just a bumper sticker. I’m happy to see that not everyone is going to give that murderous regime a metaphorical hand job. Enjoy:
A.C.
* Throughout most of rural US, the strongest FM radio signal is government propaganda. We call it “National Public Radio” but it’s paid for by the government and it’s not 100% factual. There’s a word for biased information that’s paid for by the government. The word is propaganda. Look it up. Even if I call a carrot an aardvark it’s still a carrot. This doesn’t mean I’m an apocalyptic tin-foil hat wearing bunker dweller, it merely means I have a dictionary and pay attention to FM frequencies. Technically that means I’m pedantic and a nerd. At any rate, during my lifetime I have personally observed government funded FM radio based propaganda evolving from one scratchy voice among many, to loud and clear damn near everywhere between Canada and Mexico. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Get in a car and drive around. Hit your car’s “scan” feature and try and find a place in the lower 48 where NPR isn’t strong and indeed among the clearest broadcasts. Try it in cities, suburbs, plains, mountains, deserts, coasts, whatever. I’ve tried just that. From the most boring cornfield in Nebraska, to the high deserts of Eastern Montana, to the Canyons of Utah, to the lobster boats of Maine, to the drab suburbs in Missouri, to the windy flats in Oklahoma; NPR is funded with your money, is never absent, and does not constrain itself to cellos and weather.