So by now you’ve heard that Alex Jones is mad as a wet hen that Donald Trump is telling people to get a vaccine.  Being as how Alex Jones stays in a chronic and perpetual mood of mad, it’s not terribly surprising that eventually Jones would cross paths with everyone on the planet and achieve herd impunity in the mad war.

Jones is also well known for not being able to use his mad feelings productively or internally. He’s just gotta hurt somebody, so he doesn’t give a flying flock of fox feathers who gets hurt.

Jones says he has “dirt” on Trump and is promising to dump it on the public square if Trump doesn’t admit he was wrong and take it all back. Rock, meet hard place.

Jones has dirt on Trump. Whoop-te-do. Who doesn’t?

First of all, how the hell would Alex Jones know what “dirt” is? The man is an electric double barreled squalor machine. Ratty is upscale for him.  How he can point a finger at someone else would require Houdini and a broken arm.

Second of all, think about it. Trump has committed murder by Covid, screwed hookers and then cover it up,  lied to congress and the American people just for practice, stole from the government and let his kids cut financial deals with the Russians, and plotted to overthrow the Unites States government and dammit he still has not been charged with any crimes.  What could Jones know that Trump’s supporters would even care about? Trump could torture baby puppies on Main Street and his followers would say those vicious dogs needed training.

So yeah, Jones, take on the devil by eating out of his hand.

But, it would be fun to watch.

I decided to break this into parts because no one wants to read that much and really these issues are not quite the same. One of the points of debate on the issue of the Roman McClay books was whose responsibility it was monitor such a thing. The argument was essentially that it wasn’t so much that these books should be banned, but that Amazon shouldn’t be the vehicle for them. This is not the first time that Amazon has pulled books and it certainly won’t be the last.

While I retain some level of anonymity, I would like to point out that have had a few books published in my lifetime. I’m certainly not as prolific as some of our commenters and regular readers and the books haven’t been successful. In fact, that is what led me to Amazon to self-publish my last work. See, ADP (Amazon Direct Publishing) offers the lowest costs to authors and so I was guaranteed a profit (even if small) for the first time in my publishing life.

This is paramount as it pertains to issues of regulating taste and content. Traditional publishers have gatekeepers that monitor this throughout the publishing process. One publisher took my original book idea, threw it out, and asked me to write a new one based on a single chapter from the original. Others edited or revised the content slightly depending on the situation. Amazon did not edit my work. Amazon did not make suggestions for changes. As far as I was concerned, I was completely on my own. Naturally, this made the process much easier and cheaper to me, but it also made it more difficult in terms of limiting errors. Like most writers, making the occasional error is unavoidable, but finding those errors is more difficult when you are looking at your own work.

A friend on another site suggested that Amazon should be responsible for monitoring their site for offensive material. This sounds great, but I’m not sure if he knew exactly what he was suggesting. Amazon would need to hire quite a few gatekeepers to review material before it gets published. They would either have the power to say yes or no or they could have the additional power to recommend changes. At that point, Amazon ceases to be a self-publishing company. They become a traditional publishing house and those gatekeepers would need to be paid somehow. Those additional costs would be passed on to the authors.

The current system relies on consumers to alert Amazon to problems when they see them. They could then remove such items in a similar way that Twitter and Facebook reviews questionable tweets/posts once they are flagged as either abusive and/or misleading. Of course, Amazon has the further issue of supporting fiction and nonfiction content. It is one thing to take an informational tweet or post and tag it as abusive, offensive, or misleading. It’s another to take a work of fiction and do the same.

In that sense, Amazon serves as a platform and not a traditional publishing house. Traditional publishing houses actively control the content they release to the public. Amazon obviously does not, but clearly they have shown some restraint after the fact. This is clearly where some folks misunderstand how free speech works. Everyone has freedom of speech. Platforms have the freedom to determine if they want to amplify that speech or not. Everyone gets the right to say what they want to say. No one has an absolute right to a microphone. They also don’t have the right to restrict people’s reactions to their speech.

Lyndon McLeod wrote two books that were available on Amazon. They were ostensibly fiction and penned under the name of Roman McClay. He then went out and killed five people in almost identical fashion to what was mentioned in the books.

Situations like these raise many questions and we can’t possibly tackle them all in one post, so we will focus on one at a time. The first question is whether this even qualifies as art. This is where we have to be careful and show our work as the math teachers used to tell us. A book about killing other people is not unique. Hell, shows like “Dexter” and “Hannibal” have famously pushed those boundaries and that’s just two prominent examples.

So, what is the difference between those books/movies/shows and these two books here? It can’t be that those books didn’t inspire a crime spree. That’s an extremely low and convenient bar to clear. Besides, that’s not specific enough. “Grand Theft Auto” has had any number of iterations and people still steal cars. One could argue that the video game glorifies the act. In fact, I’m sure they have, but those video games are still in circulation.

So, the question before us is what differentiates these two books about killing left-leaning politicians and people and those books. movies, and shows? I would say the difference comes in the specificity of the subject matter. Dexter and Hannibal Lecter are fictional characters that harm other fictional characters. The story lines are exactly that: story lines.

Amazon took the books down yesterday. A search on their website won’t yield any results for these two books and even say that anything by him is unavailable. Obviously, this was based on a public outcry and the problem of a mass murderer profiting off books that described his crimes. The public has every right to protest such a thing, but one has to wonder where we draw the line.

I normally detest the slippery slope argument. It’s lazy and misleading. Yet, in this case I see the impulse. If the so-called woke crowd pulls these books then where does it stop? This is a valid question that has little to do with left and right. At the same time that liberals and progressives are protesting these books, conservatives protest books they don’t like. They want to force libraries not to carry books and art they object to. It really is about whether we put guardrails around the marketplace of ideas or not.

I would go back to the specific subject matter of these two books. The author fantasizes about killing specific people that exist in reality. That somehow blurs the line between art and reality. It is incumbent on those that want to take a book out of circulation to articulate the precise reasons why. It has to move beyond a matter of taste. A free society can be messy. The marketplace of ideas is not always tidy and respectable.

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once famously said he could not define pornography but he “knew it when he saw it.” The definition of politically inspired revenge porn might fall under the same category. We can’t provide an exact definition, but we know it when we see it. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a duck. These two books are most definitely quacking.

A funny thing happened before the Christmas holiday. Donald Trump admitted that he not only has had the vaccine, but he has also had the booster. The crowd’s reaction was interesting to say the least. Avid readers will recognize Mary Shelley as the creator of Frankenstein. The story is easy enough to remember.

As on the money as that analogy seems at first blush, I’m not certain this is a Frankenstein situation. Trump didn’t so much create this monster as much as he simply fed it and released it from it’s cage. He recognized it when he decided to run for president. Say what you want about him, but he recognized the anger that was there and plugged into it. People will make the obvious comparison with dictators and demagogues of the past. They’ll make the obvious and lazy connection to Adolf Hitler. Sure, there are parallels there, but one can always find parallels when they look hard enough for them.

The parallel I draw is not necessarily with Germany but with the French Revolution. He doesn’t fit any particular individual in that scenario. What he has done is take advantage of his place as an outsider. The country is not in as extreme a situation as France was, but there are similarities. People are smart enough to see how things are slipping away. They are largely incapable of pointing the finger where it belongs. They see education costs rising. They see wages stagnating. They see other costs going up like health care costs and housing costs. One party has been really good at pointing fingers away from them. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s women’s fault. It’s those LGTBQ+ people’s fault. It’s ACORN. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Antifa. It’s critical race theory. It’s the war on Christmas.

What Trump didn’t figure is that once you get people started on a lie, they will follow that lie to its illogical conclusion. They will keep latching onto alternative treatments that don’t work. They’ll keep resisting the obvious. They’ll keep looking for scapegoats and when they don’t find a new one they’ll start pointing the finger at you.

That was seemingly going on in France at the time. The people were dissatisfied and they wanted new leadership. New leadership came in and they didn’t like them either. So, they kept revolting and they kept replacing until they stumbled into Napoleon. The funny thing is that I don’t think that’s what they had in mind in the beginning, but they did so much damage that is who they ended up with.

In that sense, I’m sure there is a comfort in someone that hates the same people you do. There is a certain amount of comfort in that hate. I can offload my failures and my insecurities onto those who I hate. The problem is that same person who helps us to point the finger either has no ideas to fix anything or actively doesn’t want to fix it. They want to fund raise off of it. They want to rob you blind while they are getting you to look at the “other”.

I do not call them New Year’s Resolutions. I call them casual promises I make to myself that I am under no obligation to fulfill.

Look, before I agree to 2022, I need to see some terms and conditions. I fell for this trick once before in 2019 and I am hesitant to go to the trouble of getting tipsy and blowing little horns if it’s going to be a godawful year, which I have a tendency to suspect it will.

Here’s my starting list:

While I am interviewing for a job, I will keep it to myself that I have trouble with authority.

I will try to overcome my nomophonia (fear of being left without a mobile phone or being in an area without coverage).

I will stop using hashtags before every word on job applications and IRS filings.

Live my best life and only buy pants with no buttons or zippers. 

Turn all my high heel shoes into cozy house shoes. I will also purchase basic woodworking tools: a saw, a hammer, and a big ole tub of Crazy Glue.

Recycle my tattoo “New Year, New Me (Just Kidding)” for the third year in a row.

Never take HomeGoods trips for granted ever again. Linger in the aisles and touch things. 

Practice to become the GOAT at sarcasm toward

Keep kicking ass and taking names, because detailed record-keeping is important.

Eat more tacos because … Honey, if you need a reason, you ain’t in Texas.

Stop drinking orange juice after I’ve brushed my teeth.

Lose weight by hiding it somewhere you’ll never find it.

Got any of your own?

Progressive Insurance runs a series of commercials with a trainer that works with younger adults that are becoming their parents. It’s hard to say how many iterations of this commercial we have seen to date. I want to say half a dozen, but I think you get the general idea. As ad campaigns go, it’s very effective. Anyone that has seen these ads can find themselves or someone they know in at least one of them.

The problem is that they’ve made a joke about becoming our parents. The cold, hard truth is that we are destined to become our parents. We always have been destined to become our parents. Introspection is difficult to say the least. It is a lot more noticeable when you compare your parents to their parents. It gets to the point where it is unavoidable.

Personality quirks are one thing. We could go on all day about those. Obviously, most of us had two parents growing up, so we become a kind of hybrid combination. However, we also become a combination of their greatest hopes and dreams and their worst instincts and fears. It becomes a competition to see which side ultimately wins. Do we become the best of our parents or the worst of our parents?

When we view politics in that prism, the current state of affairs makes a lot more sense. Many wonder how people could become so nasty and hateful. That doesn’t happen out of thin air. People don’t suddenly become something they are not. What they become is something that has always been inside of them. They have simply chosen (consciously or unconsciously) to become the worst of their parents. Sometimes that choice is overt and sometimes it is activated by outside factors.

This happens for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is that a parent’s basic aim is for their children is to have a better life than they did. We are in the first time in our nation’s history where that hasn’t happened. We aren’t seeing a rapid increase in people going to college. Those college degrees are not paying off like they used to and those loans are getting bigger. Wages have stagnated overall and costs are increasing. It’s human nature for fingers to point outwards when that happens.

Of course, we have politicians. networks, pundits, and talking heads that invite people to do just that. We collectively know we are not as successful as we could or should be. We know it isn’t our fault and so we look for someone to blame. Those politicians, networks, pundits, and talking heads provide the targets to us. From there it is just a short hop, skip, and jump to become the very worst of our parents.

The darkness hasn’t completely succumbed us yet, but it is close. Progress has always been slow because there has always been these two instincts playing tug of war inside of us. Maybe the Progressive Insurance guy can’t stop us from becoming our parents. Maybe he should stop trying and focus on how we can collectively become the very best version of our parents. It might be less funny but we will be a lot happier in the long run.