Stupid Human Tricks

I've been wondering lately, what motivates some people to do the stupid things they do? Not the everyday, small, stupid things, but the big, macro, showstopping, get the world's attention stupid things. The kind of stupid things that make headlines, that grab your eyes and draw them to the television. The kind that go international and have people in Kamchatka discussing around water coolers the following day.

First up, Balloon Boy. You watched. I watched. We all watched that jiffy pop inflatable soaring through the blue Colorado sky to parts unknown. What was it? Where would it land? Was there a boy in there? Could there be? Would there be? Did he fall out? Was he clinging for dear life inside of the popcorn basket? I stopped at the plasma t.v. in my office lobby when I was getting coffee and watched the balloon fly for a few minutes on CNN. People were gathered round. There's a kid in there? Waaaaa?

Of course, it turns out there was no kid in there, and the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by a bad-acting, irresponsible, pathetic tool of a father to get himself on television. How sad a person is Richard Heene? What kind of father puts his wife and children at risk and makes liars out of them all so he can get famous? Who teaches his sons to lie on purpose, all for celebrity? We'll see what comes of his boys. My parents have their faults, but they are honest people who value truth and integrity. I once got the spanking of my life for lying to my mother about eating a banana when I actually threw it away. Things are a bit looser in the Heene household.

Heene got what he wanted: he's famous alright. Infamous. Right up there with Octomom. But I'm sure he feels bad celebrity is better than no celebrity, eh? All those fake tears, the pretend kicking of the deck chair when the balloon took off. That floppy moppy hair-do, circa 1994. He'll go down in the anals of American history frauds. Or is it annals?

Ironically, the only honest one in the family, Falcon a/k/a The Falconer -- the kid who told the truth to Wolf Blitzer in his little Yoda voice -- HE's the one getting ridiculed. For the rest of his life, Falcon will forever be known as Balloon Boy. He'll be 22, graduated from college, interviewing for his firt real job, and he'll say "Hi, my name's Falcon" and they'll say, "Falcon, Falcon, where have I heard that name before? OH YEAH, YOU'RE BALLOON BOY!" Hey, maybe it'll open a few doors for him, who wouldn't want to meet Balloon Boy if given the chance? Sure makes a resume stand out, dudn't it?

But it's the parents who should be ridiculed and bitchslapped here. It's Richard and his Yoko Ono wife who should suffer, not the kids. Makes me pine for the old days of tar and feathering. The Heenes would be prime candidates. Yet, I have trouble understanding their motivation, even now. Are people really so fucking desperate to become famous that they'd do something like this? What is in the mind of these people, that's what I want to know. What makes them tick? What defective gene, or millimeter of frontal lobe are they missing that they'd undertake something so dumb, so obvious, as this? Did they really think they wouldn't get caught? I mean, shit, didn't Henne know there was, at best, a 50% chance he'd come out of this looking like a total ass and facing criminal charges? Apparently not.

I don't think we've seen the last of them. I think this whole uproar is a part of the Heene Plan to Get Famous. It has to be. He's going to take his licks, maybe do some jail time, ride out the investigation by Child Protective Services, then he'll do a big mea culpa, maybe write a book, do a tour, appear on Oprah, say he's sorry, and THEN get that reality show he's been dying for. By then everyone will have forgotten how much of a dick he is and he'll just be an entertaining footnote in celebrity history, like John and Kate (or is it Joe and Kate? I never watched that fucking show.) And he'll get the last laugh on us. Oprah, Barnes & Noble book tour, The Surreal Life, Celebrity Rehab. It's the American way.

The above aside, you know what the real tragedy is here? The next time some poor kid gets stuck in a balloon for REALS, no one's going to believe him. And he'll just float away into oblvion and no one will care. Thanks to the Falcon who cried wolf. Thanks to the Heenes.

Then there's those sweat lodges. Three people just died in one this week. I guess the concept is you go into this tiny teepee house that's covered in tarp and rocks and they heat it up inside until it gets so hot you want to pull your skin off, and you just stay in there and sweat to the oldies for like 40 hours, until you start having hallucinations, pass out, or drop dead. Where do I sign up?? Found out tonight that the leader -- another one of those pie-eyed cult loonies -- had people fast for two days before they went in and then told them to "push past" the feeling they were going to die and to not fear death. MMMMMkay. Looks like that worked out real well, for three people at least.

The Koresh types are well documented. They're everywhere. Poople who want to lead sheep. Maybe they're frustrated politicians, teachers, priests, I don't know. I know enough about them, the cults of personality; what's curious to me is the sheep, those who frequent cults and sweat lodges? Who are these people? The lambs of God, the easily led, the easily slaughtered? Where do they come from? Why are they so fucked up? Why are they so willing to bare their necks to the vampire? That's what I just don't get. I go through life, working, living, sleeping here in New York, thinking life sucks on some days, thinking it's great on others, trying to keep a balance where the positive comes out more often, and making the best of this mediocre existence. But somewhere else, people are deciding that they'd like to plant their New Age ass in a sweat lodge and risk death for a few perspiratory hours. And for what? Enlightenment? By who? Some dude with a mesmerizing stare and a God complex? Heaven's Gate. The Jim Jones cult. The David Koresh cult. So many people willing to surrender their autonomy, their money, their critical thinking, their self-worth to crackpots. Misguided doesn't even come close to describing this. But if you're going to go out, I can think of better ways to "get closer to the Creator" than sweating to death like a bunch of pigs in a stinky teepee or burning to death in a Waco, Texas compound. Maybe Jim Jones had it right. Try the Kool-Aid.

My final example of questionable human behavior that is beyond me are these Oath Keepers. I just watched their leader joust with Chris Matthews on Hardball. The gist of this new set of rightwing, paranoid wackjobs who have been coming out from under rocks ever since Obama got sworn in, is that they want members of law enforcement and the military (gun-toters all) to take sworn oaths that they will not do certain things -- allegedly unconstitutional things -- if called upon to do so by The Fedral Gubmint. The Fedral Gubmint is dangerous and bad. The Oath Keepers think the Fedral Gubmint is on the verge of declaring martial law, sticking Americans into concentration camps, and taking away their civil rights. We're on the verge of Armageddon, folks! 2012 is almost here! So let's have all our law enforcement types take a sworn oath, shall we? It's right out of the movie Valkyrie, purportedly designed to prevent a dictatorship from taking root if uh, something should happen, for instance, if a bunch of right wing nutjobs should take a shot at the President and certain members of Congress and try to start a uh, REVOLUTION.

Now, most of us normal people understand that such a scenario is unlikely in our country. We trust our leaders who are too busy sucking the capitalist teat to try to overturn the apple cart and impose a dictatorship. The Oath Keepers beg to differ. Much like Richard Henne, who thinks the world is ending in 2012, they see trouble on the horizon, and it just so happens to have coincided with the first-ever election of a progressive black man as President of the United States.

Purely a coincidence, mind you.

Didn't hear about the Oath Keepers too much when Bush was President for those eight years. Didn't see too many people taking AK-47s to political rallies back then either, after 9/11, or when Bush started two wars and recommended an expensive, government-run bailout before leaving office. But now, surprise surprise, they're everywhere. When liberals organize, they have a sparsely attended rally in Washington, smoke weed, wear tie-dyes, and go home. Okay, maybe they break a few windows during G-8 summits. Why is it when rightwingers organize, it always involves guns, conspiracy theories, and paranoia?

I for one think these people and those like them forebode something very bad for this country. The kooks are stirring. They're armed, dangerous, and restless. They don't like Obama or Democrats running things, even though the Constitution they claim to support is what allowed these people to take power in a fair and free election. What we have here is a burning cauldron of bad circumstances, indeed. Foreign terrorist trying to kill Americans. Homegrown terrorists plotting something equally as bad, if not worse. Timothy McVeigh, one man, managed to destroy a huge federal building and kill dozens of people in a single April afternoon. What could a dozen do? A hundred? A thousand?

Regardless of what you think of Obama and his policies, if something nefarious should happen to him or to other leaders, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, it would do serious damage to this country's psyche. How big a daze were we in after the Kennedys were killed? How long did that last? Sometimes I think we're still not over it. A similar fate for Obama would destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans (those that are left after the tanked economy and the TARP bailout run their course), and call in to question the validity of this so-called democracy of ours. If a person some people don't like can't be fairly elected and take power, then what we have here, folks, is nothing more than a Banana Republic.

Of course, the ensuing chaos of such an event would start some serious ass rioting in certain parts of the country, the type of chaos that play right into the hands of the Left Behind and Oath Keeping crew, as well as the equally pathetic anarchists on the left. They're just looking for a way to validate their doomsday scenarios. What we need to do is keep an eye on these paranoid freaks and counter their attempts to instill fear with a bright spotlight and a heavy dose of reality. That's what Chris Matthews was trying to do last night.

But I wonder. Who thinks like these people? Who sees a threat around every corner? Lives in fear and propagates fear? And why do they always wear black, like Johnny Cash impersonators? Maybe if they mixed in a little yellow or fuschia, they'd lighten the fuck up and start living in reality.

They're everywhere - people behaving badly. Focus on it too long, you start to see a disturbing, completely fucked up world with all kinds of weak-minded, needy, and paranoid people doing irrational things. Maybe it's time I moved to Nepal.

Guilty As Charged

"Guilt is like a bag of fuckin' bricks. All ya gotta do is set it down."
-- John Milton (The Devil's Advocate)

I've been thinking a lot lately about guilt. I've come to the conclusion that it is an utterly useless, but quintessential, human emotion. We're bombarded with it from our earliest days on earth, it seems. In an effort to raise us to be upstanding future citizens, or suitable carbon copies of themselves, parents use guilt as their primary weapon of choice. Parental guilt works on two levels, conscious and unconscious. On the conscious level, our mothers and fathers use guilt openly, usually to accomplish some obvious objective, like picking up our toys or stopping us from murdering our siblings.

On the unconscious level, parents pass their character flaws, fears, hopes, and resentments on to their children without even knowing it. They do so in too many ways to count. One parent might make their son or daughter their best friend and confidant because of an unhappy marriage, thereby robbing them of a responsibility-free childhood. Another may do it by berating their child for being too heavy or too shy. Another may simply abandon their child, financially or emotionally. All of the above involve parents selfishly putting their own needs first and instilling guilt in their child as a result. Kids end up feeling that if they do x, y, or z they will be loved, that parental love is conditional and can be taken away. Love and security thus become shifting sands, which makes for quite the anxious Johnny and Sally. And it's a vicious cycle. Kids get it from their parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, and on and on. Familial guilt is an ancestral curse that can't be lifted without a conscious awareness of its operation in the mind and a hell of a lot of work.

But that's for the therapists to sort out. What interests me at the moment is how childhood guilt negatively manifests itself in adult personalities and relationships. When you start to look for it, you quickly come to see how pervasive guilt is in everyday life. How nearly everybody is both its wielder and its victim. As an adult, guilt takes a new form, having metastasized over time into anger, pessimism, depression, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence. Nothing's ever good enough, no matter how much a person accomplishes, how many friends they have, how much money they make, or how far they've gotten in life. If you always think you did something wrong, or that there is something inherently wrong with you, how are you supposed to feel good? And so we get people making bad life decisions. Jumping into relationships to feel complete or fulfilled. Turning to booze or drugs to numb internal anguish. Divorces, broken relationships, depression. Not pretty.

When you bother to look, you see guilt everywhere. At work, it's criticism that's not constructive or well-intended, but rather, the kind that's excessive and mean-spirited and designed to tear a person down so the purveyor can feel better about himself or herself. In a church or mosque, religious leaders use the ole GNG (Guilt N' God) to get you to pray more, give more money, vote a certain way, or in extreme cases, engage in a murderous crusade or jihad against an enemy who is, you guessed it, GUILTY! of all kinds of transgressions conjured up by those very same religious leaders.

In the military, you've got all kinds of behavioral conditioning going on from the earliest days of boot camp. There's no way to put human beings in life and death situations and get them to kill strangers without it. So they appeal to "duty," "honor," "sacrifice," "patriotism," and "pride," to attract recruits. Here's an excerpt from the Marine Corps website:

Who are these young men and women who choose to put others before themselves? They are selfless individuals - optimistic, and filled with a sense of duty to themselves and their country. They choose to follow in the footsteps of those who came before them, and to defend both our nation and its honor.

Can you see the guilt working its magic in there? What they're really saying is "We're better than the average person because we're serving the nation and they're not. We're willing to risk our lives for the good of the country, and they're not. They're guilty for benefiting from our blood and our sacrifice without lifting a finger. Those who serve with us are NOT guilty because they are willing to die for a cause. Be one of us and you too will not be guilty, you too will be honorable." I'm not picking on the Marines. Every branch's website has a similar theme. And I'm not slighting the military by pointing this out, either. All I'm saying is that the military, like other groups, uses guilt to control people. I'm no history professor, but I'm sure the same is true for every military power that ever existed in history, from the Greeks, to the Romans, to the British, to Napoleon, to Hitler, to the Chinese and Soviet Armies. There is no denying that guilt is a great human motivator.

In fact, if you read any of Bin Laden's or Al-Zawahiri's writings or speeches, you'll see that guilt is at the very heart of Al Qaeda's philosophy. It's dripping with it. Islamism mixes guilt with moral relativism and a bastardized interpretation of the Muslim duty of jihad, to glorify -- and attempt to justify -- the mass murder of innocent people. In my view, there is no clearer demonstration of the destructive power of guilt than the suicide-bomber and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Distilled to its core, the use of guilt is really an appeal to self-hatred. You're making someone feel bad about something they've done or haven't done in order to goad them into doing something you want. To me, appeals to jihad and patriotism are two sides of the same guilty coin. Any time the goal is killing, you can bet your ass that guilt has its finger on the trigger.

People are even using the PLANET to make us feel guilty. We're on to inanimate objects now. Apparently, we're fucking the Earth up with our carbon emissions, strip-mining, and cowfarts. (Okay, that last one is NOT on us.) We need to do something NOW, they say. We need to "save the planet for our children and their children," says Big Al (big props on the Nobel Prize btw, Al.) So now, we're also supposed to feel guilty towards people who haven't even been born yet! Where does it end? Brief environmental aside: The irony is, the Earth is going to be just fine no matter what we do. It's the human race that's going to be fucked. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are future versions of where we're going. They're totally deserted and completely uninhabitable. But the planets themselves are still there, aren't they? They did just fine, and so will our Mother Earth, long after we've microwaved ourselves into oblivion.

Guilt is so deeply-ingrained in us, that we don't even know we're using it or being subjected to it. So, as an experiment, play a little game with yourself this week. Listen closely to your conversations with your parents, your siblings, your friends, your lovers, your exes, and your pets. Follow the bouncing guilt ball. Pay attention to how our politicians are using guilt in their debates and election campaigns. Make no mistake, politicians are the Jedi Masters of guilt-mongering and deflecting. You'll see that every damn word out of their mouth is blaming or attacking another person or party for something they did wrong, or something they didn't do that they should have done. You're bad, I'm good. We know what we're doing, you don't. We deserve your money and your votes, not them.

Once you've heard all that guilt, you'll probably want to down a stiff drink. Afterwards, maybe you'll decide that you don't need to respond to people's guilt trips anymore. Maybe you'll conclude that you don't need to attack to get what you want out of people. If enough people do this, maybe we'll start having healthier relationships and just maybe, a little less conflict in the world.

So, like Pacino said, put down that bag of fuckin' bricks.

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that if you thought this entry was too touchy-feely or presumptuous on my part, or just plain unsatisfying, I'm very sorry. I didn't meant for that to happen. I feel really badly about it. I'll try to do better next time, I promise.