politics

The Utter Ambivalence of Evil

Posted on July 19, 2024July 19, 2024 by Malcolm J. Brenner

by Malcolm J. Brenner

I woke from a nap last Saturday, just in time to witness on live TV the attempted assassination of ex-President Trump. It was quite a surreal situation, I assure you; I’d laid my head on a pillow on the couch for just a moment, and it seemed like no time had passed. I sort of lap-dissolved from the national evening news into coverage of The Donald’s election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and became, as they say, another witness to the latest chapter in America’s dark, violent and bloody modern politics, the politics of hate, of polarization, the politics of the AR-15 and the bump stock.

Do you know what the wonderful thing about hate is? It is utterly indiscriminate! As an emotion, a state of self-perpetuating rage and battle-response stress, hate doesn’t care about any reasons who or what is hated, it’s much too primal for such refined cogitation. Any reasons it could come up with would only be thin masks, barely concealing the need to inflict hurt on others. Because hate only acknowledges its own existence, its own pain, its own wounds, and uses them to justify lashing out at the perceived person or object hated, or, as psychologists call it, the other.

Hence, we get news stories of rednecks attacking Sikhs, not because Sikhs are evil or have done the rednecks any harm, but since adult male Sikhs all wear turbans, grow full, luxurious beards and appear prosperous (the ones I’ve seen, anyhow), they fit the rednecks’ preconceived image of “your stereotypical A-rab oil sheik” and as such become the target for discrimination, harassment, assault and worse. Mind you, the rednecks wouldn’t know a real sheik if they tripped over him; many sheiks wear Western business suits when visiting our side of the world. Besides, I hear relations between the Muslims and Sikhs aren’t exactly what one would call amorous, and haven’t been much that way for the past, oh, I don’t know, 525 years?

Would-be Trump assassin Thomas Mattew Crooks, it now turns out, had images of both Trump and Biden on his cell phone, along with schedules of the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Crooks targeted both, but Trump’s convention came first, and was thus the earliest opportunity to do something totally random, totally chaotic, and thoroughly evil. It’s obvious Crooks didn’t care who he killed, finding one victim as good as another! He therefore had no impetus, no narrative, and no motive, except the brooding rage of one incessantly bullied, access to his father’s semiautomatic people-hunting rifle, enough cash to buy 50 rounds of ammo, and the immanent, irresistible presence in his world of an important, accessible target, like the smell of bacon attracting a hungry dog.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are having a hard time assigning a motive to Crooks’ murderous actions, and no wonder! His only motive was the opportunity to kill someone famous, it didn’t matter who! This kind of randomness, where the flip of a coin may decide whether you live or die, doesn’t care which side you’re on, what uniform you’re wearing, what color your skin is or what language you speak. Like the Xenomorph in the Alien movie franchise, Crooks killed because he could. His attempt to murder Trump made about as much sense as nobody John Hinkley trying to kill President Ronald Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster: NONE WHATSOEVER!

Is this assassination attempt, such a meaningless gesture, a signal that the era of extremism in politics is over? If it no longer makes any difference to a would-be assassin what you as a victim believe, or do, or plan, why bother holding extremist viewpoints? Now, both sides of the Congressional aisle can feel equally threatened!

When it no longer matters who you kill, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, you have truly become a psychopath.

***

NO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (A.I.) WAS USED IN THE COMPOSITION OF THIS ESSAY. AS A WRITER, I REJECT A.I. IT’S MORE PRONE TO HALLUCINATIONS THAN I AM! I MUCH PREFER THE APP NATURAL STUPIDITY. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT AT… OH HELL, JUST GO FIND IT YOURSELF!

Signs O’ the Times, Part Deux: If we don’t call #45 back, he may stay dead!

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Malcolm J. Brenner

All photos taken with an iPhone 7, most in the parking lot of a local Winn-Dixie supermarket. Wherever possible, identifying details of the license plates have been obscured; otherwise, these are the digital equivalents of box-camera negatives, and should be treated as such: nothing fancy! Enjoy, and ponder what it all means when we roll the bones!

“If I wanted to hear from an asshole, I’d fart.” Or you just might stay where you are and await the scream of tortured metal…

**This would be on a Jeep…** obviously, the owner has a problem with the flood of refugees the U.S.A. is accepting from South Stickistan!

**There are those of us who want to live in the past, and then there those those of us who just want to live.**

Conflicting opinions… What would John do?

And if you don’t know who Bob Dylan is, or what he was, or represented to Baby Boomers, don’t ask your folks, ask your grandparents… but only if they are, like, cool! You know, they do yoga, smoke weed, spout poems that don’t rhyme and there’s a gleam in their eye when they reminisce about ‘shroom hunting in the cow pastures just outside Sarasota in the early 1970’s?

Yeah, them. Ask them who Bob Dylan was, and why his anthem “Like a Rolling Stone” (sorry, stoners, this has nothing to do with the Stones) is quite possibly the greatest rock song ever written: because it embodies the sense of loss my generation suffers from, not only the loss of our brothers in the meat grinder of Vietnam, but the sense of loss of control over our own lives.

I don’t follow any professional sports, but I probably know more about the Steelers than I do about women… they’re from Pittsburg, right? The football team, I mean!

But… why be merely annoying, when, with just a little more effort, you could be a truly Evil Genius?

…And she’s better behaved than that slutty, potty-mouthed daughter of yours, beee-atch!

Again, different parents, different parenting styles! **Where is Dr. Spock when you need him?**

(CLARIFICATION: “Spock” here refers to the influential 20th Century American pediatrician Benjamin Spock, not the half-Vulcan bastard with the pointy ears and the sarcastic sense of humor on Star Trek: The Original Series! Am I understood?)

The flying lights sighted by both Allied and Axis air crews during WW2 were called, for some reason, “foo fighters” by our side and “fiendish Red Fascist weapons of aerial assault, built by the damn Jews of America, to thwart our beautiful plans for founding the Third Reich” by the Nazis.

(JK, of course, I don’t know what the Nazis called them but I’ll be fucked if I’m going to try to look up the German for “flying saucer”! I already know what it is in Italian, *disco volante.* That comes from reading my older sister’s Ian Fleming novels about a spy named… Bond. James Bond…it was 1961, and somewhere history was being made. But it wasn’t near me!)

Here I am, at the Charlotte County Arts & Cultural Center, which is just a few blocks from my house, getting my first vaccination shot on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day! That date is also the birthday of my father, Millard Maxwell Brenner, born in 1915 while the “War to End All Wars” was being waged. If you’re hesitant about the vaccination, don’t be! I feel really healthy for a change with Bill Gates’ nanobots, running Windows 13, in my veins and arteries! They are keeping me perfectly fine! perfectly fine! perfectly fine! perfectly…

Signs O’ the Times

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Malcolm J. Brenner

I keep track of interesting, relevant or stupid bumper stickers I see. Here, randomly selected, are the ones that have drawn my iPhone’s attention in the past year.