ECCENTRIC TANTRUMS
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Copyright 2012 by William A. Mays, Proprietor
The Mother of the Century award goes to Nancy Lanza of Newtown, CT—pulling away from the competition like Secretariat at the Kentucky Derby. What Nancy Lanza did was akin—except on a grand scale—to the old Saturday Night Live skits in which Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest would do things like staple their lips to a desk and then be surprised that it hurt. "Ooo, that really smarts! I hate it when that happens."
To say this end was a fait accompli is an understatement. If a team of psychologists and Hollywood script writers had tried to write the story of how to generate a mass murderer of children they could not have constructed a better narrative than that done by Nancy Lanza, with an assist from her son's father Peter Lanza.
Let's start with a son diagnosed with multiple mental disorders in which antisocial behavior is one of the symptoms. Fine. There are millions of individuals with such disorders, but there are special education and other services specifically in place to help the parents of these individuals. So what does Nancy Lanza do? She gets into an argument with her son's educators, pulls him out and home schools him herself. Events seem to have proved who was right in that argument. But the pièce de résistance is once she takes her mentally ill son away from his caregivers, she not only fills the house where he lives with assault weapons, she actually takes him out to shooting ranges and teaches him how to shoot. And all this happens with no male role model in the home, as his parents had divorced and his father moved away in the middle of his son's critical teen years.
Meanwhile, in public Nancy Lanza is in complete denial. She mentions that her son has issues, but that she's cheerfully handling it and everything's fine. She is well off financially and is very generous with money among friends and in the community. There's nothing like money, of course, to make people's morals, principles, and suspicions magically vanish. No one challenged Nancy Lanza's handling of her clearly seriously disturbed son. Negligence on her part, and to some degree her ex-husband's, doesn't have to be proven. It is negligence per se.
But in the bigger picture what the Newtown tragedy has done is exposed the complete failure of American democracy. Over and over again, our so-called government has forgotten basic common sense, gone back to square one, and reinvented the wheel like some absurd, Dadaesque Groundhog Day. During Hurricane Katrina there was no federal response for at least three days while thousands died, yet after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the federal response was immediate and massive. Today we are having a debate about whether the exploding use of solitary confinement on non-violent prisoners causes long-term psychological damage, when both psychological experts and the U.S. courts already decided that at the end of the 19th century. Now we look at the Newtown tragedy and say "Oh, gee. Maybe it's not such a hot idea to have all these military-style assault weapons out in the general public after all," when it's been obvious for at least a century. Question: Why doesn't anyone complain that nitroglycerin and dynamite are illegal for the general public to buy? Answer: Because no nitroglycerin association has been hijacked and used as a front by crypto-fascist extremists.
That the National Rifle Association has been allowed to dictate what constitutes public safety in America illustrates both a) that a requirement for serving in the U.S. government involves a complete disregard for human life and b) how easily the public can be fooled by con artists. Guns are great, and America deserves a responsible gun association. But the NRA is a sham. For decades it's been used as a facade by an extreme right-wing group that would love nothing more than to replicate Nazi Germany here—except with a few fewer dead Jews. We need Israel in the war against the Muslims. This is the group our pseudo-democratic government has been taking its marching orders from.
Are all NRA members Nazis? Not necessarily. Many are just gullible and not too bright. But in general here's how you can tell. One of the favorite arguments of "gun advocates" is that unrestricted access to guns was established in the Bill of Rights as a safeguard against oppression by our own government. This is true; armed citizens were to be the last line of defense against enemies both foreign and domestic. But ask these same "gun advocates" if they also believe in a strong U.S. military, strong national defense, maybe even increased defense spending. If they answer "yes," then you've got yourself either a Nazi or Nazi stooge on your hands. The 18th-century citizens who pushed for the 2nd Amendment also insisted on no—or an extremely small—standing national army during peacetime. The fear was that if you allowed the national government to maintain a powerful military during times when we were not under attack by foreign enemies, then the government could easily turn around and use that military to suppress its citizens. Today, the argument that armed citizens could stand up to the current U.S. military is ludicrous in the extreme. And anyone who is for both the 2nd Amendment and the large U.S. military we currently have is a hypocrite whose lie has been exposed. The 2nd Amendment is outdated, archaic, and serves no useful purpose anymore, crushed into oblivion by the very people who claim to support it. Thanks to them, not only has the usefulness of armed citizens for national defense been taken away, the government's power is now 100s of times greater than any resistance that could possibly be put up by these same armed citizens. The only thing the 2nd Amendment is being used for anymore is as a tool by shadow Nazis to dupe the public into getting their people into power. If they ever achieved a complete takeover, watch how fast all those precious "freedoms" are stripped away. These people also like to complain a lot about socialism. Well, better democratic socialism than National Socialism, in our opinion.
In the end, however, the Newtown tragedy might just have been the shock that wakes the public up. They may finally realize there's a man behind the curtain, a man with a stern countenance and Charlie Chaplin mustache who's been feeding them the big lie. The NRA's silence in the days following the massacre follows the pattern of the criminal who thinks this time he may be found out. His first instinct is to say nothing and see if this thing blows over. But it won't blow over. Like its fellow New England towns Lexington and Concord, the shots fired in Newtown are just the first in a long battle for freedom. There will be blood. But 200 years from now the sacrifices of the patriots will be remembered in the 1st grades yet unborn.
To say this end was a fait accompli is an understatement. If a team of psychologists and Hollywood script writers had tried to write the story of how to generate a mass murderer of children they could not have constructed a better narrative than that done by Nancy Lanza, with an assist from her son's father Peter Lanza.
Let's start with a son diagnosed with multiple mental disorders in which antisocial behavior is one of the symptoms. Fine. There are millions of individuals with such disorders, but there are special education and other services specifically in place to help the parents of these individuals. So what does Nancy Lanza do? She gets into an argument with her son's educators, pulls him out and home schools him herself. Events seem to have proved who was right in that argument. But the pièce de résistance is once she takes her mentally ill son away from his caregivers, she not only fills the house where he lives with assault weapons, she actually takes him out to shooting ranges and teaches him how to shoot. And all this happens with no male role model in the home, as his parents had divorced and his father moved away in the middle of his son's critical teen years.
Meanwhile, in public Nancy Lanza is in complete denial. She mentions that her son has issues, but that she's cheerfully handling it and everything's fine. She is well off financially and is very generous with money among friends and in the community. There's nothing like money, of course, to make people's morals, principles, and suspicions magically vanish. No one challenged Nancy Lanza's handling of her clearly seriously disturbed son. Negligence on her part, and to some degree her ex-husband's, doesn't have to be proven. It is negligence per se.
But in the bigger picture what the Newtown tragedy has done is exposed the complete failure of American democracy. Over and over again, our so-called government has forgotten basic common sense, gone back to square one, and reinvented the wheel like some absurd, Dadaesque Groundhog Day. During Hurricane Katrina there was no federal response for at least three days while thousands died, yet after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the federal response was immediate and massive. Today we are having a debate about whether the exploding use of solitary confinement on non-violent prisoners causes long-term psychological damage, when both psychological experts and the U.S. courts already decided that at the end of the 19th century. Now we look at the Newtown tragedy and say "Oh, gee. Maybe it's not such a hot idea to have all these military-style assault weapons out in the general public after all," when it's been obvious for at least a century. Question: Why doesn't anyone complain that nitroglycerin and dynamite are illegal for the general public to buy? Answer: Because no nitroglycerin association has been hijacked and used as a front by crypto-fascist extremists.
That the National Rifle Association has been allowed to dictate what constitutes public safety in America illustrates both a) that a requirement for serving in the U.S. government involves a complete disregard for human life and b) how easily the public can be fooled by con artists. Guns are great, and America deserves a responsible gun association. But the NRA is a sham. For decades it's been used as a facade by an extreme right-wing group that would love nothing more than to replicate Nazi Germany here—except with a few fewer dead Jews. We need Israel in the war against the Muslims. This is the group our pseudo-democratic government has been taking its marching orders from.
Are all NRA members Nazis? Not necessarily. Many are just gullible and not too bright. But in general here's how you can tell. One of the favorite arguments of "gun advocates" is that unrestricted access to guns was established in the Bill of Rights as a safeguard against oppression by our own government. This is true; armed citizens were to be the last line of defense against enemies both foreign and domestic. But ask these same "gun advocates" if they also believe in a strong U.S. military, strong national defense, maybe even increased defense spending. If they answer "yes," then you've got yourself either a Nazi or Nazi stooge on your hands. The 18th-century citizens who pushed for the 2nd Amendment also insisted on no—or an extremely small—standing national army during peacetime. The fear was that if you allowed the national government to maintain a powerful military during times when we were not under attack by foreign enemies, then the government could easily turn around and use that military to suppress its citizens. Today, the argument that armed citizens could stand up to the current U.S. military is ludicrous in the extreme. And anyone who is for both the 2nd Amendment and the large U.S. military we currently have is a hypocrite whose lie has been exposed. The 2nd Amendment is outdated, archaic, and serves no useful purpose anymore, crushed into oblivion by the very people who claim to support it. Thanks to them, not only has the usefulness of armed citizens for national defense been taken away, the government's power is now 100s of times greater than any resistance that could possibly be put up by these same armed citizens. The only thing the 2nd Amendment is being used for anymore is as a tool by shadow Nazis to dupe the public into getting their people into power. If they ever achieved a complete takeover, watch how fast all those precious "freedoms" are stripped away. These people also like to complain a lot about socialism. Well, better democratic socialism than National Socialism, in our opinion.
In the end, however, the Newtown tragedy might just have been the shock that wakes the public up. They may finally realize there's a man behind the curtain, a man with a stern countenance and Charlie Chaplin mustache who's been feeding them the big lie. The NRA's silence in the days following the massacre follows the pattern of the criminal who thinks this time he may be found out. His first instinct is to say nothing and see if this thing blows over. But it won't blow over. Like its fellow New England towns Lexington and Concord, the shots fired in Newtown are just the first in a long battle for freedom. There will be blood. But 200 years from now the sacrifices of the patriots will be remembered in the 1st grades yet unborn.
| Mother of the Century Nancy Lanza Exposes Failure of American Democracy |
| NRA's Cover Finally Blown? |