May 31, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
09:03
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| First things first, I'd like to wish Sargon godspeed on his well-earned vacation in Spain, with fervid hopes that his significant other isn't swept away by a swarthy Spaniard with an open shirt and a skin-tight Matador Unitard. | |
| I thank you for the opportunity to keep the ass divot in your computer chair warm, in my usual fashion, with a piping hot rant. | |
| And to that end, I'm going to keep things nice and light here today by talking about mass shootings. | |
| The argument's never really over, is it? | |
| For every gun control or video game censorship advocate who finds their points obliterated by 40 years of plummeting gun crime statistics running concurrently with all-time high video game sales, there comes yet another slack-jawed Senate hearing pondering regulation or outright prohibition due to the perceived desensitization caused by the habitual consumption of violent video games. | |
| The most recent censorious shit show came at Obama's behest just a year and a half ago. | |
| Look, I'm not arguing that a semi-regular surfeit of, say, sexuality has no countersensory effect whatsoever. | |
| Fuck, in the age of free internet porn, my Jaded Johnson is beyond desensitized. | |
| It's Movie Bob's ass after a seven-hour melancholia screening. | |
| I need nipple clamps and a trained circus bear to get off at this point. | |
| But the idea that what you consume can turn a saucer-eyed foundling into a razor-tooth killing machine? | |
| Is this real life or the plot to gremlins? | |
| Fuck's sake, Will Wheaton started on a show that featured rape gangs and live disintegrations as a child, and he couldn't have grown up into more of a pussy if he had giant puffy lips, a throbbing swollen head, and a foot-long wad of cotton jam in his quivering. | |
| Oh wait. | |
| Look, a child's recreational preoccupations do not cultivate their latter-year genocides any more than Hitler's artistic pursuits created the monster that would fruitlessly attempt to lubenshile the living shit out of all Germanic jewelry a decade hence. | |
| Video games didn't create your school shooter. | |
| They just happened to be something he or she enjoyed doing when they weren't busy being badly parented by you. | |
| So where indeed did these kids pick up the fusely chromosome? | |
| Truthfully, I don't think we'll ever be certain. | |
| But I will say the fact that so many of these mass murderers' parents, when questioned in the aftermath of these tragedies, passed more bucks than a big game hunter with glaucoma. | |
| We didn't see this coming at all. | |
| Did you know that he was sick? | |
| No. | |
| This is the American horror story, or the world's horror story. | |
| It kind of tells me a little something about where they may have picked up their earth-crushing air of entitlement from. | |
| I don't even have a young girl's phone number in my cell phone. | |
| And that's just such an injustice because I'm so magnificent. | |
| Whether it's Norse nutjob Anders Brevek's mother committing herself to a mental institution to avoid facing the acid scrutiny of allegations she may have molested the shooter in question from an age so early it gave Polanski the dry heaves, all while his father was being repeatedly denied custody by the Sterling Norwegian court system. | |
| Call me a fucking curmudgeon, but I tend to think that may be placed a little higher on the periodic table of culpability than, say, double dragon. | |
| Fuck, Timothy McVeigh seemed to do alright at the Enterprise of Manslaughter, and that fucker wouldn't know Super Mario from Mario Lopez. | |
| And listen, we were once a nation of calloused hands, of workmen's coveralls, a nation of emotional armadillos, a nation in short, with psychic armor. | |
| Not necessarily hard-hearted, but with our super ego tucked away cozily behind five inches of emotional titanium blast plating that was once required to sally the fuck forth in their wild blue bitch fest that is life. | |
| Then came the 60s, the 70s, 80s, and 90s. | |
| The age of new parenting, of aging hippies in Oprah, coddling our children in pusillanimous pillow force, so suffused with tolerance and bereft of physical and emotional conflict that steadily and by degrees, they've become incapable of distinguishing between the two. | |
| Today, we call that a Sperger syndrome. | |
| In foregoing the emotional rod for the delicious carrot of unremitting parental approval, steadily evoking in our young an unwarranted confidence bordering on delusions of grandeur, we, as Americans, as Europeans, as citizens of planet fucking earth, have spawned a generation of Fabergé eggs, ornate on the outside, perfectly hollow on the inside, with a shell that can be punctured by a stiff autumn breeze. | |
| I think the purest distillation of this dog shit. | |
| Could be found on the bygone braggaduccio generator that was MySpace. | |
| Toward the end of the Big M's ephemeral reign at the top, you couldn't skin, swing, or fuck even pet a cat, living or otherwise, without hitting a MySpace page featuring fully animated, garish gifts festooned across post after preening post, assiduously cataloging every item of aberrant minutiae, every band lyric, every song, every movie clip, every strategically angled tit shot carefully cropped to excise 80 or 9 chins. | |
| Initially founded as a mere networking service, Latter-day MySpace, I think we can all agree, degenerated into what can only be described as a shrine to narcissism. | |
| See them on my MySpace page, along with my favorite songs and movies and things that other people have created, but that I use to express my individualism. | |
| I have a MySpace page too. | |
| Yeah, I have mine, ironically. | |
| But don't you dare look the fuck away from the blood and brain matter here, folks, because MySpace was like an aerial reconnaissance photo, grimly surveying the wreckage wrought by three decades of taking parenting advice from a daytime talk show host who regularly congratulates herself on a fallow womb, an empty crib, and a sort of kind of not really husband who answers to a fucking dog whistle. | |
| I was just wondering if Steady Stead could get a little bit of spending money. | |
| Well, did you do the laundry? | |
| Yes. | |
| Scrub the toilets? | |
| All of them. | |
| All right, then. | |
| Ugh. | |
| That's why I'm Oprah! | |
| Consequently, we live in a society where we would rather assemble a 12-person oversight committee to curtail the tie to teen shootings than permit that responsibility to fall to the traditional two-person oversight committee of fucking parents. | |
| Look back and say, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s. | |
| For good or ill, the effeminate kid, well, he got called a fagaloon. | |
| He got the kick-me sign, and yes, on occasion, he got his ass beat. | |
| And sure, bullying eats a dick, but so does a bright-eyed baby sparrow that leaps from the nest only to plummet to an early grave. | |
| Life hurts, wear a fucking cup. | |
| Because both these unfortunate circumstances, while reprehensible in the moment, serve one very important function. | |
| They build our emotional body armor. | |
| And in a day and age where accountability is harder to find than Movie Bob's belly button, that is a very valuable commodity. | |
| We raise our children in a bronzium fucking bubble, impenetrable by even the faintest criticism. | |
| We gorge them on paternal approval and ply them with unrealistic career expectations. | |
| We find charter schools and private academies, fire them off into the wild world of college, and then the Fabergé egg takes an Owen Hardian dive bomb from the mantelpiece into a job market with all the stability of Crispin Glover and a fucking moon bounce, where the lifetime of quixotic indulgence is dashed upon the jagged cliffs of real fucking life. | |
| And then you see a school shooting and honestly wonder where these fuckers come from? | |
| While hailing from disparate backgrounds and espousing divergent manifestos, the one trait these shooters all share without exception is narcissism and entitlement and you honestly wonder where these fuckers come from! | |
| Us! | |
| Motherfucker! | |
| The left shrieks about video games and gun control. | |
| The right bellows about violence and entertainment and all these things we do because it's an infinitely more appealing exercise than peering into the nebulous ether of our modeled souls and honestly asking the question, did I help cause this? | |
| So shooters, the next time you get the bracing urge to take aim at a human being, find the nearest Hall of Mirrors instead, asshole. | |
| It can be your personal tribute to the lady from Shanghai. | |
| I tell you to blow your own brains out, Turbo, but not even a Stalingrad sharpshooter can hit a target that fucking small. | |
| I'm Razor Fist. | |
| God, fucking speed. | |
| I am a vicious young man. | |
| Oh, I am a wicked young man. | |
| It's not the games that I play. | |
| The movies I see. | |
| The music I dare. | |
| I'm just a wicked young man. | |
| What do I always tell you? | |
| Uh, uh, Beloved is a great movie? | |
| The other thing. | |
| Uh, you're not that. | |
| The other thing? | |
| I'm stupid and I can't do nothing right. |
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