CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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A Few Things I Learned Over the Summer of 2009 Part 3

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

this entry brought to you by a perfect circle, "the outsider"

if you like politics and want to read about the gun-rights advocates at obama rallies and how i feel about that, click here.





Sometimes when famous people die, people are happy about it. You could call it schadenfreude, but sometimes a person dies and people rejoice. Ordinarily I don't find pleasure in it. When somebody dies that I didn't like I am filled with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I know that my extreme displeasure at someone isn't what killed them. I know me saying "I wish that person would die" wasn't God's sick way of getting me to never wish someone dead. And I also know that they're dead, that it doesn't really make a difference whether I enjoy it or not.

On the other hand, I don't want to be some sort of ghoul. Pleasure when someone dies just isn't a healthy emotion, and although I don't believe in an afterlife, if there is some sort of karmic retribution, I'm sure that it's not a thing the universe would look kindly on. There are just some things that you should be better than.

Let me give you an example. When Michael Jackson died, there was a certain amount of the public that said "What's all this fuss over? A child molester died. Good. Fuck him. Hope he goes to hell."

Now, here's the thing. I do believe Michael Jackson was a child molester, and I don't believe that his good music made up for it. He was a child molester, and that sickens me. But I didn't feel pleasure when Michael Jackson died. I felt a strange mixed feeling, and ultimately felt pity. What a poor, pathetic creature. Not sympathy, but pity.

Then there's Dick Cheney. It seems like a week doesn't go by where he isn't just excusing torture, he's claiming he finds it insulting when anyone criticizes torture. And with every week it feels we find more and more egregious cases of torture. First it was waterboarding, then it was waterboarding 83 times in a month, then it was sleep deprivation, now we're finding out they were threatening to rape prisoner's families in front of them, they were firing weapons near their head, simulating executions, using power drills, the list doesn't seem to stop, and with each week Dick Cheney seems to have gotten more and more smug, more and more proud of himself, and even as every single source of importance says that this didn't just not help the United States, but that it directly harms us, he claims the exact opposite with absolutely nothing to back him up other than his word. He isn't just a politician, he is a monster, a creature for the record books that history will cartoonize and no matter how horrible satires of him will be, they will never be that far off. He'll be a thing we'll have a hard time explaining to our kids. Nixon was evil and smug on tape behind closed doors; Cheney is the worst kind of evil out in the open, live on television.

Please, I am not suggesting that anybody kill Dick Cheney. I don't just mean that in the way that I wouldn't want him to be a martyr, although there's that too. I just don't want him to be killed, period, because I'm a good person, and wishing him dead is an awful thing and hopefully I'll never sink to that level. What I mean is, Dick Cheney is an old man, and he will die, as everybody does.

...And if Dick Cheney were suddenly to die, to have a heart attack, to have a stroke one day in his sleep, I would say "Good". He's going to die one day, and he will probably go before I will, and when I does, I feel like I will be relieved. I feel like part of me will be happy.

And that makes me scared. I don't like that this has happened to me, that I've become this person who could genuinely be happy when somebody dies. I can't help but think that it's not my fault, though. I can't help but think that they did this to me, and this is just a symptom of the absolute thick smoke of putridity coming from the right over the past three months. When you pour smoke into the atmosphere without any concern about reeling it in, without concern of responsibility, without any sort of regulation or criticism, you have to expect that people will get cancer.
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with love from CRS @ 11:33 AM 

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