Mama weer all crazee now

Get in line, it's time for medicine.

I’ve heard people say that we’re all dead, and this is Hell. I disagree. Instead, I think it’s more likely that we’re all crazy, just bats in the belfry nuts, and this is an insane asylum. Granted, we’re at differing levels of crazy: some of us might snap out of it and return to normal someday, while others are chronic head cases for whom there’s no hope. We’ve gaslit ourselves and each other into oblivion. If you were to tell me that everything I see, hear, and read is the product of a diseased mind – not anyone else’s mind, my mind – I’d nod with a sigh of relief.

I’m not joking. We’re all batshit insane.

It’s too easy to attribute our collective insanity to the 2016 election, although that’s certainly when we found it less necessary to hide it. No, the lunatics took over the asylum at least a decade before that, thanks to social media. Whereas it should have opened us up to global experiences and the positive exchange of information and ideas, instead it has done the exact opposite: it’s made us more insular, more cynical, more paranoid, and, most damaging of all, less empathetic. We have lost the ability to even acknowledge that other people exist, let alone that we should treat them with respect.

We can no longer express an opinion without treating it like a cudgel to beat someone into submission. All subjects – comic book movies, pop stars, the ideal sandwich condiment – are treated with the same level of red-faced, screaming rage. We’re angry (but not in a constructive way), delusional (but not in a fun, kooky way), and Extremely Online, all the time.

March has offered up a buffet of some particularly noxious discourse. It’s the kind of discourse that’s impossible to ignore because we also cannot tear ourselves away from either actively participating in it, looking at it, or treating it like a container of spoiled milk, shoving it in other people’s faces and demanding that they take a long, dizzying whiff of it. Even I’m doing it, right now:

Sydney Sweeney’s Ripe, Luscious Jugs Are Going to Save America

Sydney Sweeney is supposedly one of Hollywood’s biggest rising stars, and I’ll just have to take Hollywood’s word for it. At some point, she became the alt-right’s modern-day equivalent of Betty Grable, presumably because she’s white, blonde, and, more importantly, her parents are allegedly Trump supporters (though Sweeney herself hasn’t said anything either way about her own political beliefs). On a strictly physical basis, I’m not sure what makes her all that unique from, say, Scarlett Johansson, other than the fact that, at 39, Johansson is too old for someone like Jordan Peterson to furiously masturbate over while he fantasizes about filling her womb with his decrepit seed, whereas Sweeney at 26 is just right.

Nevertheless, Sweeney’s curvaceous body and impressively large rack are driving liberals into a tizzy. Or at least, that’s what conservatives seem to think, as illustrated in an article run in Canada’s National Post that I absolutely will not link here, but you can find it if you Google “Sydney Sweeney” and “liberals.” The article notes that Sweeney’s big naturals mark the “death of woke,” because they force liberals to accept that beauty in diversity is a sham, and society will always consider a blonde with massive jugs to be the feminine ideal. In another article which I will not link to, Sweeney’s success is praised because it allows the younger folks to see what a real woman looks like, as opposed to whatever freaks and ogres the writer evidently thinks get cast in movies and on television these days.

Naturally, both articles can be distilled down to the usual conservative bullshit: (a) a desperate need to cling to the status quo, and (b) the idea that liberals and leftists are so easily triggered that the mere thought of boobs will cause them to question everything they believe. This, of course, is what (if not the only thing) they do best: projection. It’s they who fall apart at the suggestion that a trans woman or a Black woman or a fat woman could be considered attractive, or even just that it’s acceptable to not have one very specific idea of what “attractive” means.

The idea that until Sweeney’s rise to fame Hollywood had overwhelmingly rejected “traditional” (meaning, of course, blonde and white) femininity is so ludicrous that it comes off as parody. One of the biggest movies of 2023 was about Barbie, the literal symbol of blonde, white femininity. Another one of the biggest movies of 2023 featured a pop star so blonde and white she might as well have been the product of a marriage between a carton of milk and a vanilla-scented candle. What is Florence Pugh, if not blonde and white? How about Jennifer Lawrence, remember her? Hollywood didn’t reject blonde white women (not even the ones with bangin’ bods), it made the tiniest bit of room at the table for different kinds of women, and conservatives cannot process that.

I don’t have to tell you any of this, because you know it already. We all do. The problem is that liberals and leftists have our own brain disease, which compels us to respond to this garbage, despite knowing that social media conservatives crave attention like a plant craves water, and gleefully interpret any reaction as having “triggered” someone. We keep thinking that they can be made to feel dumb, or some sense of shame, that this time will be when they stop and think “Hey, you’re right, that’s a pretty stupid thing to say.” There’s a saying about how insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results, and even if no one is quite sure who actually said it (I’ve settled on either Albert Einstein or Bob Marley), we demonstrate that every goddamn day. 

I don’t know that I would have even known about how some people think Sydney Sweeney’s tits symbolize a return to traditional values if it weren’t for the tiresome “look at this asshole” bullshit we insist on engaging in that replaces talking about actually interesting things with each other. We’re just stuck in this asylum dayroom, discoursing each other until we die.

Princess Kate Has Been Replaced by a Clone

Before anything else, I urge you to read Ryan Broderick’s excellent deep dive into everything that resulted in the rare discourse that is hilarious, infuriating, repugnant, and deeply sad all at the same time.

I think the very concept of the Royal Family is funny, especially when you consider how much British people love looking down on Americans for everything. It’s true, our government officials, even though we pay their salaries, are, at best, ineffectual, and, at worst, working directly and willfully against our interests. But, not only could the same thing be said for the British Government, but workers’ taxes also go towards paying for the sumptuous lifestyles of people whose position has been solely symbolic for decades, and, as best as I can tell, do little more than occasionally show up at events while doing a bad job of not looking like they’re holding in a painful fart.

The fact that, even into the 21st century, we treat a mostly inbred, completely useless family with great interest, if not even reverence, for the mere act of existing is mind-boggling. I’m not saying I don’t care that Princess Kate has cancer. I’m not an asshole (well, not entirely). I’m saying that the fact that we (and for once this seemed to be bipartisan) spent the past three months worrying, speculating, and making wild accusations about what might have happened to her during the time after she claimed (truthfully, as it turned out) that she was about to undergo abdominal surgery is just one more sign that our brains have collectively turned to rice pudding, and are slowly oozing out of our ears.

Now, much of the blame for this lays squarely at the feet of the Royal Family, or, rather their PR people, who, instead of just issuing press releases curtly explaining a situation, engage in a bizarre game of subterfuge, which, as pointed out in the Garbage Day article I linked to above, occasionally involves at least temporarily throwing other members of the Royal Family under the bus. Isn’t that great? What a lovely family to admire and emulate! Anyway, because the monarchy who inspired the Prince Albert piercing, and whose current King was once recorded telling his mistress he wished he could be her tampon, evidently finds talking about cancer just too inappropriate, demanded secrecy about Kate’s condition, the resulting silence led to some of the most deranged theories since the one about John F. Kennedy Jr. still being alive and about to take over the Presidency any day now (four years ago).

That’s not true, most of it is no more deranged than anything else that passes for “thinking outside the box” these days. There’s the usual psyop nonsense, or that she died and was replaced with a body double, which very nearly every prominent figure has by now, I guess. Then, of course, there are the internet sleuths who insist that, based solely on a passage from Prince Harry’s memoir that recalls Prince William shoving him during a heated argument, William beat Kate so badly that, even three months later, she can’t be seen in public.

My favorite involves the (probably true) allegation that Prince William is having an affair with one Lady Rose Hanbury, whose meaningless title is Marchioness of Cholmondeley, whatever the fuck that is. Anyway, this theory claims that William intends to divorce Kate for Lady Rose (even though she’s also married, to the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, whatever the fuck that is), and that, like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Kate has been hidden away somewhere while the public is introduced to its new future Queen.

It amuses me primarily because Charles and Camilla had been lovers for literal decades before she was “introduced to the public,” even though the public was already well aware of the situation. Though they’ve since been retconned by royalists into a grand love story, Camilla at the time was so wildly unpopular that she and Charles had no choice but to wait until the beloved Diana had been dead for two whole years before admitting that they were a couple, and had been for a long time. So I can’t imagine that William, who, given the news that King Charles is relying on herbs and tonics to treat his cancer, might be crowned the next King as soon as a few months from now, would risk that loss of public support for a woman who, frankly, looks so much like his wife that this all hardly seems worth the effort if true.

But also, who gives a shit? Why did we treat the “disappearance” of a woman, even though she was right where she said she was going to be (recovering from surgery) the whole time, like it was a mystery to be solved? What kind of mind sickness do we have to jump immediately from “hey, she hasn’t been seen in public for a while” to “clearly she was beaten beyond recognition”? What more productive thing can we use to fill these gaping, hungry holes in our lives? And when I say “we,” I absolutely mean me too, I just wrote five paragraphs about this shit. I don’t mean you, specifically, I’m sure you’re above such trivialities, blah blah blah shut up.

There Are No Such Things as Accidents (Anymore)

I’m sure you’ve seen the footage of Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapsing by now. It’s pretty horrifying, some real Roland Emmerich-type shit. The interesting thing is that, like the footage of the 9/11 attacks, we were able to see right away how it happened: a container ship lost power and accidentally hit one of the bridge’s support beams, bringing the whole thing down, and–

I’m sorry, how silly of me. I forgot, there are no such things as accidents, even the kind in which the cause is clearly visible on camera. With the same sort of abundant self-assurance that allows someone to accuse Prince William of beating his wife to the point of disfigurement, various social media pundits have instead chosen to attribute the bridge collapse to either the ship’s captain deliberately driving the ship into the beam (even though a mayday call went out immediately beforehand), a controlled explosion (relying upon a photograph of a bridge explosion in Crimea as their “proof,” rather than the actual live footage of the actual bridge), or, the new favorite boogeyman, “foreign hackers,” who somehow managed to hack that specific ship’s electrical system and disable it at just the right time. But you might be asking, “None of these make sense, why would a terrorist destroy a bridge in the middle of the night, when hardly anyone is on it?” Don’t be stupid, it was a test run.

An honest-to-goodness elected official, Utah Representative Phil Lyman, along with former Florida congressman turned professional Twitter troll Anthony Sabatini, went so far as to blame the collapse on conservatives’ other favorite boogeyman, diversity, suggesting that if America wasn’t so focused on putting anyone but white male Christians in positions of power (or even teaching anything beyond the history of white male Christians), this would have never happened. I don’t know if Lyman even elaborated on whatever the fuck he was trying to say, it’s just that “D.E.I.” has become such a buzzword for Republicans (a trigger, one might say) that it always sets off a lot of repugnant commentary about Black mayors and how the Secretary of Transportation is a gay man who dared to take time off from work when his child was born.

Like Sydney Sweeney’s humongous knockers, I wouldn’t have to hear about any of this if both liberals and the media didn’t compulsively share it. “Look at this asshole,” man, do you think that any of these people care about looking like an asshole? Their lord and master has failed right to the top entirely on a platform of looking like an asshole. They fucking love looking like assholes, especially when they think it’s upsetting other people.

The center stage for the Republican National Convention should feature a giant picture of Nelson from The Simpsons pointing and laughing. This sort of grade-school bully-level attention is all they have as the world slips away from them, and we keep giving it to them. We continuously feed into each other’s insanity, over and over, in this giant psych ward that we’ve voluntarily checked ourselves into, but can never leave.

But hey, at least it’s Friday. That’s when they give us ice cream.