White Noise

When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of the women of the South, the lynching will stop.

— Rep. Thomas Sisson

I despise Sen. Ron Johnson.

He postures as a "maverick," when he's merely a chickenshit White Supremacist who thinks it's gutsy to preface race-baiting with "this could get me in trouble."

Were he brave, he'd speak with candor, as Rep. Thomas Sisson did a century ago during the Congressional debate of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Instead, he employs tropes.

Fortunately, Sen. Bob Menendez has called Johnson out on the Senate floor.

"I get no one likes to be called racist, but sometimes there's just no other way to describe the use of bigoted tropes that for generations have threatened Black lives by stoking white fear," Menendez said. 

"For one of our colleagues to cast those who attacked the Capitol as harmless patriots while stoking the fear of Black Americans is like rubbing salt in an open wound."

The gutless Johnson has denied he race-baits, saying, "There was nothing racial about my comments, nothing whatsoever.

"This isn't about race. It's about riots."

Sheer disingenuousness.

Imagine Rep. Sisson saying, "Lynching isn't about race. It's how Southerners practice knot-tying."

Crawl back into Mom's rectum, Sen. Johnson. 

We're sick of your white noise.

Hardened

To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.

― Adolf Hitler

After the Las Vegas sniper took out 60 concert-goers three years ago, Bill O'Reilly called the killings "the price of freedom." 

"Government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people," he said.

To protect ourselves, according to O'Reilly, we need guns, the more—and more lethal—the better. 

"The Second Amendment is clear: Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons."

The two latest mass shootings prove to me that, for fascists like O'Reilly, freedom is dear—and life, cheap.

That's a degree of callousness most Americans find hard to swallow.

Callous, by the way, was borrowed seven centuries ago from the Latin callosus, meaning "thick-skinned." 

Callous means "unfeeling" and "hardened in the mind."

Callousness is a personality trait, I've noticed, among all fascists. 

Psychologists say it stems from self-loathing.

They're probably right.

Pulp Fiction

If these yarns were trash, then they were the best trash. 

They were trash for connoisseurs of trash.

― Don Hutchison

Frank Munsey dreamed big.

A mid-level manager for Western Union, Munsey quit his job and moved to New York in September 1882, with the dream of becoming a publisher. 

In less than two months he launched Golden Argosy, a monthly boys' magazine he conceived as a replacement for the "dime novels" so popular at the time.

But Munsey had to scramble for readers—boys worked long and hard to spare a dime in the 1880s; and many couldn't—and after four years found himself going broke.

Rather than give up his dream, Munsey repackaged Golden Argosy.

His decision gave birth to an industry. 

First, he shortened the name of his faltering magazine and shrank its physical dimensions by 60%. He also replaced its expensive cotton-paper pages with wood-pulp, a move that allowed him to price Argosy at just five cents a copy.

Most importantly, Munsey expanded the magazine's audience to include adult men.

Argosy became a runaway hit, attracting over 500,000 monthly readers. 

To keep his audience coming back, Munsey made sure his "pulp" dished up every sort of story the American male craved—romances, adventures, sex stories, war stories, crime stories, mysteries, Western tales, historical tales, and sci-fi thrillers.

Appearing in droves, copycats soon launched competing pulps—by the hundreds. 

Within a few years, they crowded the racks of drugstores, newsstands, tobacco shops and confectioneries nationwide. 

Their titles included such gems as Black Mask, Marvel, Nick Carter, Clues, Dime Detective, Nickle Western, Fight Stories, Railroad Stories, Pirate Stories, Saucy Stories, Pep Stories, Spicy Adventure, Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Dare-Devil Aces and The Mysterious Wu Fang.

Not only did publishers cash in on the pulp-fiction craze, but writers did, too.

About 1,300 of them wrote short stories for two cents a word, in order to feed men's insatiable demand for escape.

While most pulp-fiction writers are forgotten today, some are well remembered—even lionized.

Among the latter are William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Earle Stanley Gardner, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke.

A paper shortage during World War II, the debut of the 25-cent "pocketbook," and the proliferation of movies, radio programs, and TV shows displaced the pulps.

Bleeding readers, magazines like Dime Detective and Dare-Devil Aces simply shuttered.

Those that didn't abandoned fiction altogether, moving into the category of "men's magazines" and devoting their lurid pages to topics like Nazi sadists, serial killers, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. 

I still remember seeing those throwbacks in the confectioner's stores in the early 1960s, on the racks above the comic books and the copies of Mad. 

By then, the age of the pulps was over.

"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters were forced to be literate," pulp-fiction writer Isaac Asimov lamented.

Attractive Nusiance

I count religion but a childish toy and
hold there is no sin but ignorance.

— Christopher Marlowe

After his arrest this week, Atlanta gunman Robert Long told police he merely wanted to wipe out temptation.

His vicar has said Long's actions were "the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind" and "completely unacceptable."

Bull.

While liberals ballyhoo about pistols and prejudice, I don't hear an outcry against the real culprit: Christianity.

It's time to outlaw it.

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad," Friedrich Nietzsche aptly said.

Long found the world ugly and bad, and merely tried to better it. 

His only real crime was childishness.

Fortunately, there is solid ground upon which to ban Christianity: the doctrine of “attractive nuisance."

Dating to 1841, the doctrine holds a property owner responsible for a child's injuries when the owner fails to eliminate a "nuisance" that lures the child to trespass.

Attractive nuisances typically include swimming pools; artificial ponds and water fountains; trampolines; treehouses; merry-go-rounds; building equipment and debris; discarded appliances and cars; and unsecured animals.

In the case of Victims v. Long, the vicar of Crabapple First Baptist Church (as well as Long) should be found guilty. 

Long pulled the trigger, yes; but the vicar lured him into doing so, by dangling the "attractive nuisance" known in his trade as "eternal salvation." 

The Crabapple First Baptist Church should be shuttered and demolished, and the congregation's assets awarded to the plaintiffs.

For once, let's get to the root of things.

Shake Your Booty

The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

— Sen. Dick Durbin

The filibuster is a Senate procedure invoked by the minority party to "pirate" a popular bill.

This act of piracy used to be difficult, but no longer. 

Until 1975, senators could block a bill only through the “talking filibuster.” Today, they can call for a "virtual" one. No one need talk. 

Joe Biden wants Senators to filibuster like they did "in the old days," talking until they're exhausted. Republicans disagree.

Hard or easy, piracy lies at the very heart of the filibuster.

Filibuster derives from flibustier, the 17th century French word for "pirate." A 1684 memoir by buccaneer John Oexmelin popularized the word in America.

By the 1850s—when Manifest Destiny was on everyone's mind—militia leaders like William Walker were called filibusters. (If there's something strange in your neighborhood who you gonna call?) To filibuster meant to wage a private war; a filibuster was an insurrectionist.

Three decades later, the filibuster was formally introduced in the Senate. Southern obstructionists would use it to "pirate" debates over civil rights bills, spurring ruthless, minority-led "insurrections."

Filibuster is closely related to freebooter, derived from the 16th century Dutch vrijbuiter, meaning "plunderer." Vrijbuit meant "free booty." Booty derived from the 14th century French butin, meaning "plunder taken from an enemy in war." And boot derived from the 11th century German busse, meaning "penance."

Today we call pirates "freebooters."