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  • God Dam

    This is more of a broad-topic philosophical essay than the more pointed work addressing environmental and other issues that I was producing during this period. Also a bit lighter-hearted, maybe, at least not quite so intense. And the analogy stands.

    Original description: Did that guy just compare religion to playing with yourself? Yeah, I think he did. JH takes on religion, hypocrisy, responsibility, and asks why we’re waiting for the invisible man to solve our problems for us.

  • Beach Head

    This series of videos is particularly interesting to me. This and the two which follow chronologically were shot in South Haven, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

    Original description: Get your mind out of the gutter. John Henry, the “LowGenius,” steps up with a clear and unavoidable notice: our planet is try to kill us, because we’ve been killing it. It’s time to change, FAST, and without regard for comfort, tradition, or profit.

    So as you can probably tell this was shot while the Deepwater Horizon disaster was ongoing. Having a beach and a large body of water at hand, I thought hey what a great way to illustrate this idea! Drove down to South Haven and shot three videos.

    In this video, I ask the viewer to contemplate what would happen if a Deepwater Horizon type of incident happened in this place, describing walking up and down the beach as far as the eye can see only to keep tripping through tar balls and oil residue.

    This was shot on or around June 26, 2010.

    One month to the day from the publication of this video, a ruptured pipeline spilled around a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, which empties in to Lake Michigan in Saugatuck, roughly 15 miles down the beach in the direction the camera’s pointing.

    Fortunately for the beach, the spill was much smaller and happened inland far enough that the oil was mostly minor soluble residues by the time it got to the lake. Unfortunately for everyone else, a million gallons of oil dumped into a river sucks, and the cleanup and damage impacts are ongoing to this day, twelve years later as of this article’s publication here at johnhenry.us.

    One of many, many times in my career that I’ve inadvertently been a voice which, if heeded, would’ve possibly prevented major disasters. Of course it’s synchronicity and coincidence…mostly. But it does speak to the legitimacy of the stuff I’m trying to put over and discuss and get you talking about, when the things I say are potential outcomes of bad decision-making continue happening, often not long after I’ve said something.

  • Boycotting Ignorance

    Original description:

    A response to all the people who keep saying a boycott of BP is a waste of time or that it will prevent them from compensating the victims of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak. NOTE: THE AUDIO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. Seven Dirty Words definitely get used, and then some. [Edited to add: BEFORE you tell me that all a boycott is going to do is hurt the “mom & pop” stores and “little people,” please check out the blog post for this video at http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06… ]

    This is particularly fun because we get to have video and writing archives. This may also be a good place to point out how some folks try to source the idea that “all I post is snarky tweets” and so forth. I spend a lot of time on social media, reading news, watching and reading how people are reacting, watching how comment sections are directed and misdirected either deliberately or out of sheer force of ignorance, and those activities often inspire content or help me provide a relatable real-world frame for what I ultimately hope is good storytelling in service if driving home greater truths.

    I know, the idea of speaking in parables and metaphors to make important points is pretty dumb, I don’t know what hippie came up with that crap. Surely nobody would take it seriously. Anyway.

    Originally recorded June 21, 2010 in Benton Harbor, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Trivia note: this is not the leather duster I have had since around 2012; if you look carefully this one’s WAY too small, but the effects and lighting and camera position help hide that so I don’t look like a goof. Well, more than usual anyway.

    In a weird bit of synchronicity, I discuss the value of the music business, which is a subject I ended up learning a great deal more about, years later, when I worked for Musician’s Friend. The number mentioned in this article doesn’t include instrument sales and a few other categories, some of which barely existed at the time if at all. The general point is still valid and stands, however.

    Below is the full text of the original post referenced in the description above.

    Oh, PPS: I legit haven’t spent one dime at a BP gas station since before this was filmed.

    Another one inspired by some idiot talking smack online and not knowing what the hell they’re talking about.  PLEASE pay attention to the disclaimer:  this video is by far the most aggressive and profanity-laden diatribe I’ve recorded thus far, and I’m absolutely certain it’s going to offend some people.

    I posted this video to YouTube several hours before I am now writing this blog entry.  In that time it’s been picked up and shared, and one of the very common responses I’m seeing is best illustrated by this polite, well-thought-out, and well-written comment, which I am leaving unattributed to avoid any inadvertent appearance of attacking or criticizing any person in my follow – up comments, which will comprise the bulk of this blog entry.

    I understand your outrage, but please remember that the ones who will suffer from a boycott will be the mom and pop owners of the franchise gas stations selling their products. Most of them have contracts with BP and cannot stop selling the product, even if they want to. I’m sickened by this whole thing, but I hate to see hard working people pay for what the corporation did. It’s a tough situation.

    There is nothing in the above response that I find objectionable, or disagreeable, or bad, or evil.  It’s obviously well-meant, self-less, and full of love for one’s fellow man.

    Unfortunately, it’s also a stark example of the sort of thinking that’s going to drive us to extinction in a big hurry if we don’t fix our thinking, NOW.

    “But JH,” you say, “How can you BE so heartless?!  How can you be so selfish and self-serving as to just throw Mom & Pop, those stalwarts of American Entrepreneurial Spirit, under a big oily bus like that?”

    Well, you know, I don’t like it any more than you.  And I’m not throwing anyone under a bus…I’m trying to end the practice of allowing them to throw themselves, and you and me along with them.

    In spite of the aggression volume of the video here, I don’t mean that in any bad sense.  I’m not accusing Mom and Pop of being genocidal greedy corporate bastards raping the planet for their own selfish gain.  They’re just trying to make a buck the best they can, just like all of us.

    But.

    Well, I’ll let my original response, as written, speak the rest of my thoughts on the matter.

    Hi.  I’m the guy who made the video.  Please indulge me for a few minutes, if you will, and let me see if I can explain this in terms that sound less like I’m about ready to hang Mom & Pop from the nearest yardarm with extreme prejudice.

    I don’t want to see working people pay for what the corporation did, either.

    I also don’t want to see us continue to be dependent on petrochemicals for every aspect of our daily lives from transportation to information to packaging to hygiene, because that dependency is killing us.

    The reality is this:

    The “working people,” including Mom & Pop, have paid.  And paid.  And paid.  And paid.  You’re paying right now, and so am I, and that’s nothing about the ongoing crisis – it’s just the side-effects of petroleum dependency.  Air pollution, water pollution, groundwater contamination, we all know the drill.

    What we’ve lost sight of is that the working people – including each one of us, including most explicitly yours truly – have allowed ourselves to be talked into remaining dependent on petroleum and its by-products…because it’s easier than taking the hit. 

    It’s easier than finding another way to do things. 

    An illustration, if I may…and again I know this is long and I apologize but I think it bears the time and effort to try to explain properly.

    I don’t know if this exists in other countries, but here in the US, there is this concept of the “rent-to-own” store where the baseline or poor person or family will go to a store and rather than paying a set, one-time price for a given item, they’ll pay a weekly fee for a set term, say a year.

    When you do the math on these places, it’s really a boneheaded, terrible thing.  A computer that might cost $800 at the local big-box store will cost you $40 at a rent-to-own…$40 PER WEEK, for 52 weeks.

    That’s about $2000.  For a computer that you could have paid less than half that for.  It’s a mortgage or a car loan stuffed into a _reducto ad absurdum_ argument that for once *isn’t* a logical fallacy.

    Stupid, right?  But it’s hugely successful and profitable.  All it requires is a complete lack of ethics on the part of the business owner, and a sense of desperation on the part of the buyer.

    It’s preying on the poor and the needy, and the poor and the needy are complicit…because hey, you GOTTA have a new TV, right?  Keeping up with the Joneses and all that.  Or even furniture.  You GOTTA have furniture.  Of course, you could go three weeks without the furniture, save up, and pay maybe $1000 and get the furniture new at retail…

    …or you can pay ONLY $50 RIGHT NOW…

    …and every week for the next two years.  Which of course adds up to FIVE thousand dollars rather than the thousand you would have paid if you’d taken the comfort hit for a few weeks and sat on boxes while saving up your money and eventually (far sooner than two years, I might add) buying it retail.  But then you gotta sit on boxes for a few weeks, or do without television, or what have you.

    (Note:  The math NEVER, EVER comes close to even being sane in these places, it’s ALWAYS a 100% markup on the base price PLUS like 150% interest).

    We’ve been doing the same thing with petroleum for DECADES.  We could have been running biofuels made from hemp fifty years ago or more…but it costs more than petroleum.

    Now this is important:

    It’s always GOING to cost more than petroleum.  The petroleum companies (and they’re not the only ones, but they’ve certainly done their part as have tobacco companies and cotton companies and so forth) have worked hard to build an image of hemp and cannabis as a “dangerous” thing, a technique that’s proven particularly effective in the US, but it works well enough anywhere.  Make people afraid of alternatives to your product; use political power gained by financial success to rig the laws such that alternatives are cost-prohibitive.  Then argue to the general public that the costs of alternatives are too high, and voila:  the purest definition of ‘captive audience.’

    Pretty soon, you’ll have the audience fighting each other to buy bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles than they would ever possibly NEED for any reason, simply because they’re status symbols.

    And then the oil guys are happy little yachtsmen, and the silly little consumers – that’s you AND ME, I don’t mean in any way to condescend or suggest that I’m any less guilty than any one of you or anyone else – enjoy the smug self-satisfaction of exercising their “right” to kill the rest of us with 8-mile-per-gallon social status symbols.

    At some point, we’re ALL going to have to agree to take the hit.  Sorry, mom and pop, but you’re gonna have to find a different primary attractant (fuel is NEVER a profit center for gas stations, and outside of states where pricing below cost is prohibited by law it’s often a deliberate loss compensated for by the other things that fuel customers purchase).  Sorry, Mom and Pop, you’re gonna have to change your business model or get out of business, because we can no longer avoid the stark reality:

    Our sympathy for mom and pop, and the commercial inertia that goes with it, is killing us. 

    It’s no longer killing us invisibly and slowly; it’s killing us graphically and quickly.  I still don’t think we really understand just how BIG this mess is, and frankly I think we’re being encouraged to NOT understand it…because I think if we really did understand it, some of us would panic and then a REAL mess would start.

    Fine, we don’t need rioting in the streets.  But we also don’t need to continue to complacently accept the “fact” of oil dependence…because it’s only a fact to the extent that we have allowed it to become a fact, and we are allowing it to remain one every time we say “a boycott won’t work, what about the little guy, what about mom and pop?”

    This is one of the very few times in human history we can legitimately be said to be consciously standing on the edge of a change in paradigm.

    I say this without the least bit of condescension or condemnation, and with every full understanding that I have just as much burden of guilt as anybody and probably more than many:

    Isn’t this really our golden opportunity to take charge of our destiny as a species and finally, for once, make a conscious decision to do the more difficult thing because it’s also the RIGHT thing?

    We CAN reject oil, but it will require courage, and sacrifice, and the rejection of many realities that we have long accepted as immutable but which are really only inconvenient to change.

    Yes, I’m sorry for mom and pop and all the clerks and pump jockeys, but you know…I just bet if we put mom and pop into , mom and pop could make just as fine a living selling alternate fuels.  I bet mom and pop could make a GREAT living selling food to people who commute 20 or 30 miles to work in a human-powered, enclosed, personal vehicle.  There are thousands of ideas out there that fit the bill.  There are other ways to do this, if we want to find them.

    Maybe it’s time mom and pop got to work on solving THAT problem, instead of solving only the ultimately selfish problem of how to keep THEMSELVES taken care of in the manner they prefer, without regard to the effect they’re having on the rest of us.  I hate to say it, but “mom and pop” have smiled benignly and patted us on the back and pandered to our noble concern right up to the point where it’s about to wipe our asses right off the planet.

    I love my mom and pop…but I love my granddaughter too, and I’d like to think that this planet’s going to continue supporting human life long enough for her to love HER granddaughter.

    Thanks for your time, and please remember to share this as widely as possible.  There’s still time for us to “get it.”

    from archived original at https://web.archive.org/web/20100717012219/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06/21/Boycotting-Ignorance.aspx

  • Not Like The Other

    “In which JH discusses the logical fallacy of false equivalency in the context of certain arguments that favor continued offshore oil drilling.” Taking on the ridiculous and entirely nonsense idea that wind and solar power are somehow “just as bad” as petrofuels, again while the Gulf of Mexico was being drowned in oil from the Deepwater Horizon. Originally filmed somewhere around Bloomington, Indiana, on June 13, 2010 in NTSC-HD/VHS-C.

  • Willful Ignorance: The Big Lie of Omission In Iraq

    Oh, you didn’t know? Your ass better call somebody….

    “What, you mean you didn’t know WE SOLD Saddam Hussein all that stuff he used to “OMG GAS HIS OWN PEOPLE”? Surprise.”

    This is definitely one of those things I’ve hit on many times over the years and for some reason people just don’t…catch on? Grasp the implications?

    A crime of omission is one in which one’s failure to act in some way itself constitutes a criminal act. In Laird v. Texas (1983), infanticide co-defendant Deborah Michelle Becker was convicted of “murder by omission” and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison for failing to call emergency services immediately when her boyfriend assaulted and ultimately killed her four year old daughter.

    Remember all those WMD’s we were so sure Saddam had? I don’t know why nobody wanted to admit this, it’s not a secret, but the reasons we were so sure he had that stuff is that we sold it to him.

    See, we left that part out of the official narrative of the second Gulf War, after 9-11.

    The very same Donald Rumsfeld who was so aghast at the gassing of 800,000 Kurds consistently left the part out of the narrative where we sold Iraq not just the stuff to make the gas but also missile fabrication equipment and targeting intelligence. Our hands, and in particular the hands of people like Rumsfeld and others who were highly placed in Washington for decades, are no cleaner in that matter than those of Saddam himself. He simply couldn’t have done it without our help.

    None of this is a secret, or even up for debate. As Bill Hicks said, “we still have the receipts.” You can download a copy of “The Riegle Report,” aka “U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Gulf War,” at this link. Please note well: this is a PDF copy of the transcript of a series of congressional hearings held in 1993 investigating “Gulf War Syndrome.” The Bush Administration absolutely knew all of this long before 9/11 ever happened, and not one time during the prosecution of the war against Iraq did they answer the question “how do you know Iraq has WMDs” with the honest response from Don Rumsfeld: “I’m the one who authorized us to sell the stuff to him.”

    We knew it, we knew we knew it, and we ignored it because it was an unflattering truth. Imagine how differently the post-9/11 world would’ve played out, if we had just been honest.

    Originally posted June 18, 2010. Recorded in Royal Oak, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Possibly the last time my hair was so gloriously frizzy.

  • Arizona Bye

    “I’ve had about enough of these leather-skinned bigots usurping the good name of my country to foment hate. Apparently current governor Jan Brewer is in agreement with former governor Mecham’s (possibly apocryphal, I can’t find it now) take on declaring Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday a state holiday – “Shoot six more and we can take a week off.” This is the video that eventually led to working with a local group of young people and Eric Byler (co-founder of the Coffee Party) to successfully pass a local ordinance in Kalamazoo saying that if Michigan were to ever pass a “show your papers” law, it won’t be enforced by the City of Kalamazoo. Originally recorded June 2010 in Royal Oak, MI in NTSC-HD resolution in VHS-C.

  • Who Watches The Watchmen?

    JH discusses various court rulings and local ordinances which make it illegal to film police, and asks the obvious question…while filming the police. Trivia point: this is where CUSTODE got it’s name. Originally filmed June 5 2010 in NTSC-HD/VHS-C at approximately 601 West North Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

  • BP: What Is Wrong? (2010)

    BP: What Is Wrong? (2010)

    Another video from the archive, this time a five-and-a-half minute routine about the incredible experience of running in to someone who needed explained to them why dumping millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico was a pretty bad idea. In a fun bit of irony the “featured image” for this article, which you can also find below, was taken the same day this video was shot, in which I had to explain why the big oil slick in that photo was a bad thing.

    If you don’t recognize it, that thing sticking out into the water from the top of the image is southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta. The big white thing in the lower center is the oil spill, which you can see covering hundreds of square miles as it drifts off to the northeast.

  • The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game!

    The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game!

    Ain’t No Party Like A Savage Party

    (Originally published 24-April-2009. At that time, unbeknownst to me, Ms. Edwards’ career had – recently, then – been basically ended by plagiarism charges. She published two more novels after this article was written. As Stephen King said, no great loss.)

    I’m a reader. I read everything, from the Bible to the Qur’an to the Book of Mormon to Dianetics; from Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb to Shakespeare, Dickens, Lovecraft, Poe, King, Heinlein, Straub, Bradbury, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Mark Twain…if it’s written down, I’ll read it. I don’t care if it’s a multi-volume novel or the back of a cereal box.

    This rather undiscriminating approach led me to discover what may possibly be the worst published writer I have ever read: Cassie Edwards. The fact that this woman gets paid to write is a stunning and mortal indictment of everything the western world stands for. This is the kind of author who makes you think “Jesus, I could be on the USA Today Best Seller list, if this is the criterion!”

    I’ve read exactly two of her books. Part of one was called ‘Savage (Something),’ and it bears the distinction of being the first book ever in my life that I just could not finish. It was that bad. Cookie-cutter plot, stereotyped characters that are so poorly-written that you’re not just offended at the racial stereotypes (we’ll get in to those below), but simply at the fact that someone got paid to write this crap.  The other part of one was pretty much the same thing.  And the one in my hand right now.

    A collage photo of fifteen Cassie Edwards novels, every one of them featuring a heavily stereotyped, shirtless, Indigenous, American man and a somewhat less melanated woman. Hair flows, etc. Every single title features the word "Savage," e.g. "Savage Mission," "Savage Passions," and "Savage Honor."
    There’s like 85 of these, and that’s just the “Savage” ones…I donated a stack of these to the local library and the county’s average IQ dropped 38 points.

    I’m sure she’s probably a nice lady and all (this is me trying to be too nice. she’s not a nice lady, nice ladies aren’t raging bigots generating billions of dollars in revenue by perpetuating horrible and ignorant stereotypes -jh, 2019) but this woman is to literature what Pauly Shore is to brain surgery. She’s so predictable and cliche that she doesn’t just get one drinking game, she gets a whole party.

    Disclaimer: Please Drink Responsibly. I emphatically do not condone or endorse the levels of alcohol you will ingest if you take this game seriously. I mean it. Alcohol kills people. Be careful.

    That said…on with the show!

    The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game – EZ-Mode~!

    This one’s simple: Open any Cassie Edwards novel. If you see an ellipsis – you know, the three dots? Like…this? Drink. This is actually how I came up with this idea – I found one of her “books” in a box, and thought, “I bet I can open this to ANY random page and find at least one ellipsis.” I tried literally a dozen times, and succeeded every time. I’m holding one of her books in my hands right now, I’ll test the theory just for you! The title of this book is “Her Forbidden Pirate.”

    (Safety note: I was tempted as I constructed this to say ‘drink for each ellipsis.’ DON’T. Do not even think about it. You’ll die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the night. I promise. Even if you’re playing the game with water.)

    1. Page 250-251. Ellipses: 1
    2. Page 296-297. Ellipses: 4
    3. Page 72-73. Ellipses: 0~! (For your party, now pass the book to the next person)
    4. Page 346-347. Ellipses: 7
    5. Page 196-197 (weird the 6-7 keeps hitting). Ellipses: 1
    6. Page 368-269. Ellipses: 8
    7. Page 162-163. Ellpses: 15. FIFTEEN FLIPPIN ELLIPSES IN TWO PAGES! THERE ARE MORE DOTS IN HERE THAN A DAMNED SEURRAT PAINTING! I bet if you ripped all these pages out of the book and pasted them on cardboard when you back away from it it’ll look like the old grayscale newspaper photos.
    8. Page 360-361. Ellipses: 2
    9. Page 126-127. Ellipses: 4
    10. Page 270-271. Ellipses: 5

    So that’s the EZ-mode game. I promise you, if you have enough alcohol you will not be able to play this game for an hour without getting so hammered that you can’t SEE the friggin dots anymore.

    Expert Mode: General

    This is a little tougher, because it requires you to actually read this useless garbage. Fortunately you’ll be blackout drunk before you finish, so you won’t remember any of it.

    Step 1: Head to a used bookstore and find the Cassie Edwards novels. Close your eyes and select one at random. If it has the word ‘Savage’ in the title, find a designated driver.

    Step 2: Drinks are assigned for each of the following ‘plot’ points. I’ve broken these up into three categories: “Savage,” “Non-Savage,” and “General.” The “Savage” points apply only to books with “Savage” in the title, because all of Edwards’ “Savage” books apparently revolve around some bizzaro-world version of Native Americans, and there are some special things to go with that. The “Non-savage” list applies, obviously, to her filthy and witless wanderings outside of the ‘ME JOHN BIG TREE’ sub-genre. “General” applies to both.

    • If the female protagonist is under 18, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is a virgin, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is a pure, untouched virgin, unfamiliar with the ‘sight’ of a man, yet cheerfully casts off her clothes and schtupps the male protagonist out of his wits within the first five chapters, drink.
    • If the female protagonist’s mother is dead at the beginning of the novel, drink.
    • If she’s not dead at the start, but dies before chapter 8, drink. Drink twice if the female protagonist is absent for the death because she’s illicitly snuck off to be with the male protagonist.
    • If the female protagonist’s father is an outrageous bastard, drink.
    • Drink every time you see the word “throbbing” in connection with any part of the male anatomy (especially that part).
    • Drink every time a bosom heaves.
    • If the female protagonist has a friend who is described as “not beautiful in the conventional sense,” “thick,” “bawdy,” or some other variant of “unattractive but we’re trying to be performatively polite about it,” drink.
    • If the female protagonist is raped by the male protagonist and enjoys it, drink (I’m not even kidding).
    • Any time a phrase describes something that simply cannot happen while simultaneously invoking a bad romance novel cliche, drink. (Example, “‘Oh, Royce, I love you so!’ she sighed breathlessly.” You can’t sigh breathlessly. You have to breathe to sigh.)
    • If the male protagonist is cast as some sort of criminal – pirate, grifter, highwayman, etc. – drink. Drink again if it turns out he’s not really a pirate/whatever.
    • If there is a subplot suggesting that the male and female protagonists may actually be brother and sister, drink twice. If it turns out they actually are, drink twice more. If they continue having sex in spite of that, please consider donating a bottle of MD 20/20 to the “Help Cassie Edwards Move Home To MygoshijustLOVEmyfamily, Southwest Virginia” fund.
    • If the male protagonist’s muscles ‘ripple’ at any point, drink.
    • If the male protagonist is described at any point as ‘chiseled,’ drink.
    • If the word ‘loins’ appears referring to anything but a steak, drink.
    • Any time a character speaks out loud to themselves in place of a block of thought, drink. (I’m convinced that Edwards is aware of no other literary style with which to render thought.)
    • Any time a sex act is described as ‘filling her,’ drink.
    • Any time female genitalia is described as ‘her wetness,’ ‘her dampness,’ ‘her moisture,’ or ‘her heat,’ drink. Drink twice if the word “dewy” or “dew” is used to redundantly describe the aforementioned moisture.
    • Any time male genitalia is described as ‘his hardness,’ ‘his need,’ or ‘his love,’ drink.
    • If the ‘plot’ of the book involves finding lost treasure, a misplaced inheritance, or rightfully reclaiming one’s birthright, drink.
    • If the female protagonist’s father dies, drink. Drink twice if he’s dead before Chapter 7.
    • Every time you see a snippet of verse from an obscure poet that reads suspiciously like doggerel from a Hallmark card, drink. Drink twice if it’s the preface to the first chapter! (Thanks Katie!)
    • If the mother or father of the female protagonist turns out not to be her mother or father, drink. Drink again if her mother was kidnapped by her father but decided to stay with him of her own free will because she just loves the bad boys.
    • Any time you see dialogue that rolls off the tongue like a brick – thick, stilted, unnatural, heavy, and in no way related to any mode of speech ever employed by a human being, drink. (Bonus points may be involved; see the ‘Non-Savage’ section)

    Racism Bonus Mode! ‘Savage’ vs. non-‘Savage’

    ‘Savage’

    • Any time a Native American starts a sentence with “Ho,” drink.
    • Any time a Native American speaks in his ‘native’ language, which is rendered as a series of italicized syllables with dashes between them, drink. If he repeats the sentence in English, drink again. If the phrase turns out to be a secret nickname for the female protagonist that ‘translates’ to anything involving flowers, sunrises, does, or bodies of water, drink twice more.
    • Any time a Native American’s skin is described as “bronzed,” drink. Drink again if it’s “shining.”
    • If the female protagonist has a medical condition caused by an obscure combination of herbs assembled by the male protagonist, drink.
    • If the male protagonist (and the Native American is always the male protagonist) is described as a ‘chief,’ ‘brave,’ ‘shaman,’ or ‘medicine man,’ drink.
    • If the male protagonist at any time wears a loincloth, drink.
    • If the male protagonist reluctantly but necessarily kills the father of the female protagonist, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is in a near-death situation and the male protagonist revives her by singing or invoking any form of smoke, drink.
    • If at any series of concurrent events the male protagonist is described as carrying a bow and arrow, hatchet, AND machete, drink.
    • If at any time the male protagonist is depicted wearing a headband, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is assimilated into the male protagonists tribe, at first treated with loathing and suspicion by the other tribeswomen but charming them within two chapters, drink.
    • If the male protagonist already has a wife, drink. If he maintains two ‘homes’ in order to avoid any suggestion of actual kinkiness so as to avoid offending the strange people who actually enjoy reading this crap, drink again.

    Non-‘Savage’

    • If any character of African descent is featured with a name ending in ‘-i,’ ‘-ey’ or ‘-ie,’ drink
    • Drink once if any Black character says one of the following:
      • afadin’ (“fading,” especially when used as a euphemism for sleep or death)
      • any variant of “you be” or “I be” when the verb should be “am” or “are”
      • fo’ (“for”)
      • y’all. Drink twice if “y’all” is used to refer to a single person. Drink three times if it’s rendered as “y’all” and “ya’ll” on the same page. (I’m not kidding. Page 250 of Her Forbidden Pirate.)
      • Reference to either protagonist as “miss,” “missus,” “mister.”
      • Drink twice if “mistah” or “mistuh” is involved.
      • Toast Stephen Douglass if “Massa” makes an appearance.
      • ‘Fore (“before”). Bonus drink if this appears in the same book as “fo’” (I’m not kidding.)
      • “Fret” in place of “worry”
      • afta (“after”)
      • sho (“sure,” usually immediately following “fo’.” A legitimate quote: “He’ll be fit to be tied, Massa Saul will. He’ll come afta’ us fo’ sho’!”)
      • “Land sakes”
      • Yes’m
      • and of course, the ultimate in badly-written dialogue for black characters, “sho’ nuff.”
    • Drink if you can’t quite figure out whether the Black characters are slaves or servants.  Bonus drink if it’s obvious that they are slaves, but the word ‘slave’ is never used.
    • Drink if any reference is made to whipping.
    • Drink twice if it involves “whuppin’,” “whupped,” or “whup.”
    • Bonus drink if this “whipping” business is referenced, close together, by the same character in at least two different ways. (“Massa he goan whup me, I’s goan get a whippin’ fo’ sho’!”)
    • Drink if a Black character refers to themselves in the third person.
    • Bonus drink if the character adds the descriptive, “Ol’” to their names, as in “Ol’ Mazie’s goan fix you right up!”
    • Drink three times if this Steppin’ Fetchit pantomime of Blackness offends you even though you’re as Caucasian as Al Gore.
      • Add a couple of you’re politically conservative and still offended.
      • Add one more if you or any living relative under 65 regularly uses perjorative slang for Black people (e.g. the “n-word”) and yet you somehow manage to STILL be offended at how casually racist this woman is. I am. I’m almost offended at myself for even mentioning all of this, but this woman’s insane caricatures of ethnic minorities need to be drug out into the light where they can be properly examined before being beat to death.
    • This next one is a little tough. Make a two-shot cocktail for the whole party for every page (NOT every instance, see the safety warning above) where you can find linguistic anachronisms in which a black character jumps back and forth between badly-rendered and obnoxious colloquial “black” speech, and badly-rendered, unnatural, and artificial non-colloquial speech. The only way to really explain this is to quote some of it. Please note that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the quotes in the list below is spoken by the same character, the same who spoke the “fit to be tied” sentence a few bullets up:
      • “Massa Bryce will arrive soon, posing as a Doctor Jamison. There is a new doctor in town with the name Jamison, one Massa Saul hadn’t met yet. Massa Bryce will disable the true Doctor Jamison momentarily until Massa Bryce will have time to get you on his ship.”
      • “Miss Natalie, your father depends on me to keep a watch on you while he’s gone…Land sakes, if anything’d every happen to you while he was gone, he’d take a bullwhip to me fo’ sho’…probably until I’d neva’ walk again.”
      • “You’ll stay on the estate grounds, won’t you?…I don’t like the look in your eyes. They be adancin’, Miss Natalie. Since your return from your outing yesterday you’ve been a different young lady. Did you by chance make the acquaintance of a man? Is a man why you are behavin’ so strangely…so defiantly?”
      • “Old Tami ain’t gonna do nothin’ to stir up trouble for Miss Natalie…The years have made you my own.” The idea here is to celebrate the insane juxtaposition of the oh-so-richly offensive colloquial “Black folk”-speak, or proto-AVE or what the hell ever nonsense this woman is trying to stuff into these poor caricature’s faces, often in the same sentence as speech rendered, by the same character, in such precise diction that it seems unlikely even a classically-trained butler would employ it. We’re not talking about code-switching; we’re talking about glaring continuity errors in writing, aside from the outrageous stereotyping

    Conclusions & Further Analysis

    So there’s your game.

    The process of assembling the ethnic stereotypes really brought home to me how truly ignorant, obnoxious, and offensive this woman’s writing is. This isn’t Mark Twain faithfully rendering the language of the antebellum south and the Black slaves who inhabited it – it’s not even clear that this novel took place in a time of slavery, only that it was pre-industrial.

    This isn’t even Stephen King letting loose with a string of racial epithets spoken in the head of a black sub-protagonist by an evil hotel trying to keep him away.

    This is an ignorant, unskilled, suburban white hack who has likely never so much as heard a live black person speak in any context…and from the way she writes dialogue, she’s never heard anyone else speak either. Her non-white characters are a throwback of every advance past stereotype our collective consciousness has taken in the last century.

    I really didn’t start this article to write some hard-liberal politically correct diatribe, and that’s really not who I am (ed. note: in the language of 2009 “hard liberal” would have been accurate, but “politically correct” never has been and still isn’t. I don’t avoid the use of slurs to be politically correct; I do it to not be a dick. I don’t care in the least what people think is “politically correct” or not. -jh, 2021).  My own background is a mix of over a half-dozen ethnicities that I know of, including Black, at least two Native American tribes, and several flavors of European ancestry. I’m not averse to a little off-color (no pun intended) humor now and then, as long as there’s a purpose to it and it’s not just some stupid racist ‘joke.’ I certainly have no problem with honest, historically-accurate portrayals of non-white culture – the Geers, for instance, write some really excellent historical Native American fiction.

    But this woman legitimately offends me, and I just don’t even use that concept very often.

    Worst of all, this is just one facet of many that make this woman a walking offense to the concept of movable type. The dialogue of her white characters isn’t any less ridiculous, forced, unnatural, and just plain crappy – it’s just lacking the colloquial quality that marks her as not only an idiot, but a bigot too.

    But it’s not just the nearly belligerent bigotry in her portrayals of minorities or her utter inability to write dialogue that doesn’t sound like a poorly-written play for grade-schoolers. Every character is a bad cliche. Every sentence she writes looks like it came straight from the diary of a slightly insane Nazi boy of thirteen whose entire concept of female sexuality is based on Porky’s movies.

    And do I really need to point out the patently ugly, sick, and thoroughly evil nature of constantly portraying women who are first forced into sex, and then fall deeply and forever in love with their attackers?

    People play ‘cruel tricks,’ hands ‘flail,’ color ‘drains’ from faces, blue ‘swims’ in eyes, everything is ‘damnable.’ Lips are inevitably ‘forced apart’ by tongues, there is always the obligatory ‘tangle of limbs,’ and slight, spineless women are ‘swept up’ into bulging, rippling, bronzed, shining, chiseled, heroic arms. Heartbeats thunder, one always ‘rises’ from a bed, heat rises in loins, hearts skip beats, and everyone is almost afraid of the next paragraph.

    Whether you’re like me and read basically anything that crosses your path, or you’re a romance novel aficionado, I can not say it strongly enough: avoid this woman’s “writing” like the plague. She is the ultimate embodiment of every bad cliche in the genre.

    Enjoy your drinks. Responsibly.

  • My Apology To Rush Limbaugh

    My Apology To Rush Limbaugh

    Introduction & Opening Remarks

    Back in 2009, there was this weird rash of situation where noted and thankfully now deceased right-wing propagandist-agitator and all-around anthropomorphic feminine hygiene product Rush Limbaugh would say something ridiculous and obnoxious, then a right-wing politician would call him out on it, then a week or two later that same politician would reverse course and apologize to Mr. Limbaugh.

    As additional background context, back in the day on usenet’s alt.usenet.kooks group and other places, there was this fella – if I remember correctly it was the now departed Jamie Eckles – who used to write the most hilarious and deeply sarcastic “apologies” to the kooks he was trolling, like being sorry their home team big sports franchise can’t play worth a damn, that kind of thing.

    It was in this spirit the original was written, and having come across it recently (2021) while trying to curate archives and realizing that both the subject of the piece and the friend who inspired it are now gone, decided to make it part of the public archive as a tribute to Mr. Eckles…and a constant reminder that Rush Limbaugh was an ignorant pig of a man that far too many people took seriously.

    This piece has been edited from the original; a phrase used to refer to homophobes that was acceptable language when this was written no longer is, in my opinion, and a more suitable word that doesn’t itself invoke a slur has been substituted. In making this change I intend not to hide my error in judgement and my poor display of allyship, but to acknowledge and correct it. In recognition of shifting interpretations of things, I’d also like to point out that there’s a ton of sarcasm in this so when you’re seeing things that don’t sound like they’d be coming from me, like misogynist and islamophobic stuff? Yeah, that’s sarcasm. Kinda sucks I feel like I have to say that out loud now, but here we are.

    -jh
    July 6, 2021

    I’m Sorry, Rush

    In stark defiance of common sense and good taste, it seems that Rush Limbaugh, the Pundit of Palm Beach, has some how ascended from his rightful place as a fringe agitator shilling radio commercials to a legitimized conservative “leader” and, some are suggesting, potential candidate for President in 2012.

    Booking photo of notorious US right-wing hate broadcaster Rush Limbaugh after his arrest for illegal possession of prescription opiates.
    Rush Limbaugh’s booking photo from his arrest in 2006. These charges were eventually dropped by the local prosecutor. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

    Over the last few months, we’ve seen his lapdogs in the Republican party make the mistake of speaking their minds, only to recant time and time again when called out by this odious oxycontin overdoser.  Say something bad about Rush one day…and apologize the next.

    In keeping with this new tradition of reconciliation and regret, I too wish to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh.

    *ahem*

    Dear Mr. Limbaugh:

    I’m sorry.

    I’m sorry that you had such a bitter, miserable childhood, growing up in a home where your parents could afford to send you to broadcast school instead of making you actually work for a living.  In a nation where so many of our children and young adults are lucky to find work at all, indeed in a nation where so many of our children have to work to survive, I understand the incredible burden of guilt that your short-cut to a lifetime of sitting on your ass for money must put on you.  I’m sorry for not recognizing the depth of intestinal fortitude necessary to bear this onerous burden.

    They Were All Against You From The Start

    I’m sorry that you have been so viciously used and abused by not one, not two, but three different wives.  Your multiple divorces are a stark testament to your unflagging respect for the institution of marriage.  Obviously, the evil feminazis you unceremoniously dumped were merely ringers for the vast left-wing conspiracy, trying to bring you down and ruin your reputation by attempting to actually give a damn about you.  You poor thing.

    I’m sorry you spent so many years in the Boy Scouts without ever once earning a single merit badge.  Obviously, the liberal thugs who lead the BSA recognized your sheer genius at an early age, and took every possible step to stop you from succeeding in life.  But you got the last laugh, as you earned the most important merit badge of all:  the praise and adulation of bootlicking Republican sellouts and their hate-filled, bigoted sycophants all across this great nation.

    I’m sorry that the Ivy League curriculum of Southern Missouri State University was so liberal and so beyond your own intellectual scope that you were compelled to drop out after a year.  Obviously the hidden cadre of brain surgeons, rocket scientists, political leaders, and multi-billionaires who have sprung from this pinnacle of advanced learning were against you from the start; threatened by your obviously superior intellect, they simply had to sabotage you.  Kudos to you for rising above and refusing to let the MAN keep you down.

    I’m sorry that your corporate lapdogs at Clear Channel and Premiere Radio saw fit to award you a $400 million contract last year.  With your well-known back troubles, it’s unconscionable of them to expect you to carry that weight.  Fortunately for you, in Palm Beach there’s a sizable population of illegal immigrants who will happily assist you for 20% of minimum wage or less, even while you agitate your ignorant, bigoted fan base to violence against them!

    Betrayal and Impoverishment

    I’m sorry that your hero, Ronald Reagan, has been revealed over time for the homophobic elitist economic fumble-thumb that he was.  It must truly break your heart every time evil liberal reminds us that the unquestionably failed and destructive policy of “trickle-down” economics is called “Reaganomics” for a reason.

    I’m sorry that you make more in a year for sitting on your hate-filled keister for an hour a day than many families in the US will make in a lifetime.  Knowing that your personal income tax burden is going to increase – potentially causing you the loss of untold necessities like your five Palm Beach homes or your half-dozen cars that cost a cool half-million or so each – for the sake of allowing yet another drug-addicted, poverty-stricken, malingering minority welfare queen to feed her family for another month must really hurt.

    I’m sorry that your 24,000 square foot main home was too small to make the life-size portrait of you that hangs in the front hall any larger…but then for you, life-size is already pretty large. If I get busted with a joint, I’ll eat government potatoes for 90 days and sleep on a concrete mattress.  When you get busted with enough pharmaceutical opiates to put the entire Haight-Ashbury district to sleep for a month, you eat with Supreme Court justices and presidents, and sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom

    I’m sorry that activist judges trying to write laws for themselves continue to sentence young people to years in overcrowded prisons for selling a little grass, but when it came time for you to pay the piper for your illegal Oxycontin and Viagra prescriptions, you were held to a different standard. 

    This is totally not fair to you, and it is unforgivable that these judges should put you in such a position. 

    It must prey terribly on your conscience to be the victim of such judicial disparity; you too deserve to be imprisoned just like a mortal man, and I can totally understand how hurt you must be that you were robbed of this opportunity to better understand that great underclass of self-defined losers in life who so courteously provide you a target for your hate.

    Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

    And speaking of drugs, I’m sorry that the half-dozen different doctors you went to in order to feed your Oxy addiction didn’t bother ahead of time to warn you that it would cause your reproductive organs to start malfunctioning, thus making it necessary to secure more illegal drugs in the form of Viagra when you take your trips to the Dominican Republic.  Of course under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t be able to imagine what relevance Viagra would have to a single, old, man vacationing in the Dominican Republic, but after years of listening to your show I don’t think it’s any secret that you like to screw young black people as hard and as often as possible.

    I’m sorry that you had all that trouble with your ears a few years back.  I’m also sorry that you were forced to be able to have a qualified medical professional attend to correcting that trouble when so many in the Welfare World get by just fine without so much as a decent set of teeth.  Clearly this was just another liberal plot to cast you as weak and in need of the support of a doctor.  I’m glad that you can hear again – but just in case, I’m publishing this in print so you can read it.  I’m sorry to be so patronizing.

    I’m sorry that Michael J. Fox fakes his Parkinson’s disease for the sake of pushing his evil baby-killing agenda.  As you and I both know, all liberals are baby-killers who regularly conduct satanic rituals where they consume placentas and burn the corpses of dead babies to gain the favor of Evil.  Clearly Fox is either not taking his medicine or, far more likely, he’s acting in order to gain sympathy from the ignorant so they will fall in to line and promote baby-killing, thus ensuring that Evil continues to be pleased.  And you with nothing for protection but a microphone and 45% body fat.  Poor fella.

    I’m sorry that gay people think they should have the same rights to love and be loved as straight people.  Obviously, as a man who has been married three times, you know better than most what constitutes a threat to the great institution of marriage.

    I’m sorry that those evil feminazis refuse to admit that they want to be groped and manhandled by mouth-breathing, overweight old perverts.  Especially the ones who buy Viagra and fly to the Dominican Republic.  Obviously these women know in their hearts that it is their natural duty and obligation to not only tolerate but enjoy sexual harassment, and I’m sorry that we live in a world where it seems that only you and John Norman really understand the “natural order” of things.

    I’m sorry that I didn’t take the bone out of my nose before I called your show that one time in Pittsburgh.  I’m also sorry that the only reason people like Donovan McNabb is because he’s black.  I’m also sorry that all composite police sketches of criminals look like Jesse Jackson…but hey, you know, they all look alike to us anyhow, right?

    The Final Grievances Of Poor Rush

    I’m sorry that the stupid American public was so outraged over that harmless little college prank at Abu Ghraib.  Obviously since the babes were involved, this was all harmless fun.  Besides, we all know that Muslims aren’t human anyway, so what’s the problem?

    I’m sorry that the Republicans couldn’t field a black candidate, since that’s the only reason Obama won the presidency.

    And finally, Rush, I’m sorry that you had to work so hard to hone and sharpen an entertainment persona deliberately calibrated to separate the most gullible marks from the biggest percentage of their dollars. 

    I’m sure that as you cash that $38 million/year paycheck and kick around your 24,000 square foot home, your heart is just breaking to think of all the senior citizens dying in their homes because they can’t afford heat. 

    I’m sure that your unbearable burden of guilt over the way these people throw their money at you can only be relieved by the liberal (if you’ll pardon the phrase) application of synthetic opiates and erectile dysfunction remedies. 

    I’m just so glad that, because of your position and political connections, you never need worry about criminal sanctions as a result of using these drugs illegally.

    You bear your burdens with aplomb and courage, sir, and I’m sorry that more people don’t recognize your genius.