You
Still Do Not Understand
In the great Christopher Nolan movie “The Dark Knight”, Bruce Wayne, aka
Batman, tries to understand the Joker and what his ultimate plan is. He makes the mistake of thinking that the
Joker is just another criminal thug, like the thugs that have been running
rampant in Gotham City. That’s when his
loyal guardian and servant Alfred tells him that he doesn’t understand the
Joker at all because the Joker is not like the other players and bosses in the city.
To explain his point, Alfred tells Bruce the story of a warlord who was
terrorizing people. His superiors think
that this warlord could be bought, so they bribed the warlord with precious
jewels. Then they discover that this
warlord was giving the jewels away to the people and continuing his reign of
terror. He wasn’t motivated by greed or
power; he simply wanted to watch the world burn.
And so did the Joker. Everything
the Joker did was out of chaos and anarchy.
He didn’t want power or money. He
just wanted to watch the world burn. But
Batman didn’t understand that. He
couldn’t comprehend that everything the Joker did was to upset the way things
are and the way things work. Because of
that, the woman he loved was killed. The
man he looked up to as the city’s “White Knight” was turned into a
villain. And Batman’s own name and
reputation was sullied just to keep the Joker from “winning”. Which, of course, was still a win for the
anarchist clown.
And so too do a lot of you, the great unwashed, fail to understand a few
things that are going on in the world right now.
Let’s start with the biggest and most obnoxious...
President Donald Trump: I still keep hearing people talk about how
“dumb” Trump is. He’s supposedly a
“moron”, an “idiot”, “dumber” than a box of rocks, and all because he claims to
be a “really, really smart guy” and “almost, like, a genius”. He supposedly doesn’t listen to briefings, he
needs flash cards to say the obvious, and he supposedly has an attention span
sorter than my cat when she was a kitten.
Look, I get it. You don’t like
him. I don’t like him. He is quite literally the anti-Obama. That’s why the cult members are embracing him
as their messiah.
But, come on, folks. Donald Trump
is not an idiot! He may not be a genius,
but he sure as hell is not the exact opposite of one either.
Think for a minute about all of the business dealings he’s been able to
conduct before becoming President of the United States. Think about all of the bankruptcies he’s gone
through. He went through a lot of
failures, but people still bought into his ideas. An idiot wouldn’t be able to do that. An idiot would have been stopped at just one
failure and would not be allowed to try again, never mind again and again and
again and again and then given a reality TV show and then become President of
the United States.
Think of all of the relationships that Trump has been through. This is someone who has been caught going
from wife-to-mistress-to-wife-to-mistress over and over again, as a matter of
public history, and yet he’s still able to find women to bed. So... who’s the real idiot here? The man who manages to bounce between wives
and mistresses even after his infidelity is a matter of record? Or the women who think that they’re the “special
exception” with him?
Trump is a narcissist, not an idiot.
That’s the reason for his eccentricities. That’s the reason why he claims to be
something he’s not. That’s the reason
why he acts like he does and says things like he does. It’s not because of a lack of intelligence.
It’s because of an overinflated ego and a perverse sense of
self-superiority. The sooner everyone
else can comprehend that, the better we would be in knowing how to deal with
someone like him.
And we better comprehend it soon, because this is the same person with
access to nuclear weapons.
And speaking of bombs...
The Austin Bomber: So apparently the man responsible for sending
package bombs to various people in the Austin, Texas, area went by the name of
Mark Anthony Conditt. He also apparently
blew himself up when cornered by police.
And now everyone is asking the same question: “Why?” And they apparently are not hearing what they
want to hear.
The mad bomber had pre-recorded his confession, but it doesn’t really
answer that all-imposing question.
Instead, he
just says that he’s messed up and that isn’t sitting too well with
people. They expected Conditt to have
some sort of manifesto or declaration stating what social or political or
religious cause he was doing all this for.
They wanted him to say that he was doing it for Islam or for white
nationalists or for less filling or the right-side Twix candy bars. Something.
Anything.
Because that would make things so easy, right, people? It would be so easy for him to just say “I’m
a terrorist” and leave it at that.
Here’s a thought... maybe he wasn’t a terrorist. Maybe he just picked victims at random. An improvised explosive device with a
tripwire, which was the third bomb, is not selective. Anyone could trip it, which means he wouldn’t
be going after any particular person.
Maybe he just wanted to cause pain and misery for the hell of it. Maybe he really did just want to watch the
world burn, like the Joker in “The Dark Knight”.
We want to believe that bad people do things for a reason. Sometimes there is no reason.
Terrorism is a tool, not an enemy group.
That brings us to the third clueless subject...
Protesting Gun Violence: There is nothing more insulting for this
commentator to open up the local Sunday newspaper and find that there is an
opinion column praising the people who stood up and marched as a call for
dealing with gun violence, and then, on the exact opposite side of that
section, is a full-page ad for guns, guns, and more guns, in, what they call, “2nd
Amendment Days”. Yeah, so much for “the
adults in the room are the kids”.
Look, I get what the “March for Our Lives” protests were all about. I know you want change. I know you are sick and tired of hearing
“thoughts and prayers”. You’re sick of
hearing politicians whore themselves to the National Rifle Association. You want something done. I get that.
I’ve been at this for over two decades now, so all of you folks are really
in my wheelhouse.
But I also know why the NRA and their conservative whores are mocking you
and ridiculing your efforts and your claims of turnout and successes. And, yes, they are mocking you.
They’re mocking and ridiculing you because they know… that it is the end
of March (as of this column’s posting) and not
the end of October, and there are seven whole months between your protests and
the next election in November. And they
remember all of the other times that other people who are pissed off and
demanded change in the spring and summer would magically forget to actually do
the one thing that really mattered… and that is to vote!
That’s why I dismiss all of the claims of “record voter registration”;
because I know, just like the conservatives do, that all of the registrations
in the world mean absolutely nothing at all if those people don’t actually vote
on Election Day. You can have a million,
billion, trillion people “registered” in March, and it will mean nothing if those
same people don’t show up in November when it truly matters.
Let’s get brutally honest here… the NRA and the conservatives have the
luxury of mocking children and mocking the parents of those children who are
demanding action because they know how the game is played. They have their legions of cult followers
that are properly conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to show up and vote accordingly. And they know that everyone else… don’t.
And, I’m sorry newly-woke Parkland activists, but the politicians are not
scared of you. Not now. Not for another seven months. If you’re still here and you’re still pissed
by then, then maybe, just maybe, they might be nervous. Can you stay pissed for that long? I don’t think so.
You’ll get angry today, and you’ll protest today, and you’ll scream and
shout for change today. But today is not
Election Day. So you’ll wait and
stew. And then spring will turn to
summer, and thoughts will go to prom and graduation and TV season finales and
baseball and summer vacation and basketball playoffs and the start of football
and the return to school and the World Series.
You’ll forget about primaries, because those are intentionally scheduled
so that nobody will really know they are going on. And by the time you remember that election
time is getting near, you’ll all be so disgusted with all of the candidates and
their negative campaigning that you will do the one thing that you always do…
and that is to not vote.
If you don’t believe me, then look at our collective history. The vast majority of registered voters in
America do not vote for mid-term and off-term elections.
And the NRA knows this. And so do
the conservatives. And so do I, because
that is how the game is played.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m glad you’re pissed. I’m glad you’re wanting change. But that is not enough. It is never enough to simply want things to
change.
We are living in an age of rampant anti-intellectualism and
propaganda. That’s part of the reason
why things are screwed up and we just can’t seem to know why that is. We need to understand just how things work in
order to make things happen. We need to truly
understand the people that are elected, not as we want them to be but as they
really are. We need to accept that
sometimes thing happen for no reason other than because someone wants to see
the world burn. And if you want change,
you need to be more than just angry and frustrated. You need to actually make some of that change
happen when the time calls for it. And
we’re not talking about simply reposting a Facebook meme from some Russian
troll farm.
It's ironic that the legend of Batman is based on his supposed understanding
of the criminal element. Batman
supposedly believed that criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. And yet his worst villains are those that are
neither cowardly nor superstitious. That’s
why he ultimately lost to the Joker’s plans in “The Dark Knight”. So too must we go beyond our preconceived notions
of how things “ought” to be and deal with how they really are. It’s reasonable to presume that the ones that
already know this are the ones making sure that you don’t.
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