In the twenty-first century, truth is a personalized experience.
This is how it works: The title gives a tantalizing glimpse of the theme; the subtitle teases, or elaborates, or sells the title out by explaining it for you. Simple, right? Here’s a current example.
Title: “Triggered”
Subtitle: “How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.“
A winner, isn’t it? And it’s his first book, too, the first he’s written and possibly even the first he’s read. So never think it’s too late for you, Murgatroyd McGraw.
Donald Frankenforehead Trump II, like many people, had a book inside him, but with most people that’s where it remains. Donald’s book was so deep inside him no ray of sunlight had ever penetrated its embryonic cloth covers, and now—Blessèd Judy, Mother of Liza—he’s filled his lungs to capacity, spread his knees, and, grunting and groaning with monumental effort, squatting like an Olympic weight-lifter ready for the clean-and-jerk, squeezed it out. Look, here comes the sequel—ker-PLOP!
Triggered signals that we’re a bunch of bored dads stuck watching “The Nutcracker” instead of the Game and missing target practice at the old folks’ home. And we’re about to endure the dance of the leftie snowflakes, that corps de ballet of over-sensitive types who get traumatized when we use good, old-fashioned traditional language, like nigger and faggot and kike and cripple, and deploy traditional attitudes like “I don’t care what you think you are, I’m not calling you SHE,” or “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Elton John!” or “Whites suffer racism, too.”
Them SJW’s are probably crying like lefty babies as they run off to their safe spaces, eh? Gee, are they triggered?
The subtitle with its explanation is supposed to encourage you but its very honesty poses a problem. From just the title, I might have thought Triggered was written by a super-sensitive individual who, because of his ability to feel the vibes, spent his days in a virtual torture chamber of empathy.
Except that it’s written by one of the Trump Frankenforehead children who was cooked up in a vat of virgin’s blood by a Dementor, so I was pretty sure that I had absolutely no interest in the book.
But from having seen the subtitle I know I have absolutely no interest in the book (although in fact without even reading it, even before it came ker-plopping out of Don, I had already read it a hundred times). So, thanks for the head’s up. If you are an angry white supremacist, or an assembly-line Frankenforehead son of Trump, looking to have crossover success and sell more books, take note.
That subtitle is formulaic and the formula goes: Throw out the most obnoxious, outrageously biased statement you can contrive, and present it as your premise (though it is not intended to be a verifiable statement of fact and its offensiveness is its gleeful goal); because as far as you’re concerned it’s true, and truth in the 21st century is a personalized, bespoke kind of thing.
Old-fashioned truth was dull and inefficient and did not necessarily reflect your beliefs. It was like those eastern bloc Polski Fiats everyone drove in Warsaw in 1979, or Henry Ford’s Model T, which he offered in any color you wanted as long as it was black.
Truth was one-size-fits-all. You had to cram yourself into, more often than not, an ill-fitting truth that didn’t suit you. And it was someone else’s truth, from years, maybe even centuries, ago! Crummy old hand-me-downs!
But now we have petite and plus-size, little white lies and great big whoppers. Now we have truth in all the flavors you would ever want: peppermint bullshit, cherry bullshit, tangerine bullshit and Bullshit Classic. And any color, as long as it’s beige.
Altogether, now: You’ll never go wrong with beige, my dear!
The Left, so this subtitle says, “thrives” on hate. Important point. Not just likes. Thrives on. Hate is our fuel, our multi-vitamin and our powdered whey protein drink. Hate is our Kryptonite, the fatal substance we must nonetheless ingest to power our hateful lefty energy.
Conservatives cancel your mom’s cancer medicines and fire your kids’ teachers. They fill the parks with homeless and kick the mentally ill onto the streets and legislate women’s bodies, and all of it for love—but progressives? We dare to raise the minimum wage!
Hate? Personally, you gotta know I’m counting to ten until someone, quite justifiably I might add, screams “Hitler!”
Conservatives don’t hold back. They stand up for what they value, and what they value is not caring for people but balancing budgets. Your mom will be dead, your unschooled kids fucktard stupid, but the deficit will be zero, the enterprise, free. Criminals will rot in hell. You won’t have to endure the tragic dress sense or the stench of the unhoused, and your fucktard stupid kids? Naturals as the new generation of conservatives!
Wants to Silence Us. “Us,” as in “Us and Them.” Donald Junior “knows” your country is being overwhelmed by illegal immigrants, your culture and values derided by elites and homosexuals, your wages stolen, taxed to pay for abortions and government programs for criminals and Muslims, your schools overrun by Marxists. Isn’t it awesome that the President’s son understands and is talking directly to you? Almost like he’s your buddy!
This book can be seen and purchased on Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It has its own dedicated web site. The publicist has made sure Don Junior appears on talk shows with millions of viewers. The New York Times wrote a snippy piece about it, but hey, that’s publicity. In fact, nearly every quality newspaper on the planet has given it a snippy review which is really publicity. This book is a bestseller.
So… this silencing thing? Trickier, apparently, than we thought.
Conservatives troll and shut down every progressive conversation with well-placed shouts of “PC!” “Snowflake!” “Social Justice Warrior!” “White Racist!” and mock anyone who wants to treat more people with more respect—but they’re silenced?
Only in my dreams.
In 2018 I received an invitation to write a guest article for an Evangelical Christian blog. The owner was a minister, a more than adequate writer and a progressive guy, surprisingly outspoken in his support for social justice. I knew this because he would say things in his posts like, “Jesus wouldn’t have gotten mad at all those refugees from Central America in the caravan. He would have been loving to them, because they’re poor and displaced and feeling sad right now. That’s the Christian message, yo!”
This is in contrast to his followers, who would respond, “These brown scumbags are just actors and serial killers and drug cartels funded by George Soros, and they’re gonna take away our guns and bring in their extended brown families and live offa welfare and steal our jobs! America is under attack! Resist the World Government! White people are dying out! Build The Wall Now!!”
The blog owner challenged me to provide the authentic voice and viewpoint of a gay man vis-à-vis Evangelical Christianity, which his main audience would probably not otherwise experience, seeing as they all live in white-only gated communities with matching front doors and identical window treatments, and have sharpshooters with assault rifles stationed around the perimeter of the moat who have been instructed to shoot to kill at the very moment they sense waspish humor or catch a whiff of Maria Callas singing “Vissi d’arte.”
I knew that most readers of his blog would shut down if they knew I was a Canadian gay male atheist. I decided I would ease them into my narrative using humor and various other shallow distractions to win them over. I’d mellow them into complacency, and manipulate them with my aw, shucks Canadian diffidence. Then I’d slap them hard in the face with my true identity as the Socialist Queen of Darkness and drop them down the well.
They would understand in a Damascus flash that gay guys and atheists and Canadians were actual humans with thoughts and feelings just like them, not abstractions cooked up by evil leftists for the sole purpose of vexing their limited brains with the evidence that some people, frankly, just don’t give a shit about Jesus, at least, not their version.
“How wrong I’ve been! This Canadian homosexual atheist liberal has finally convinced me that we’re all made in God’s image and deserving of respect. I’m gonna call up all the homeless shelters in Des Moines and see if my gay son is still alive, then invite him, a trannie, and maybe even a Democrat, to dinner! Y’all!”
It made sense at the time.
I wrote a great piece drawing on concepts of Zen Buddhism, poking gentle fun at my Canadian identity, and making a huge effort to come across as a bridge builder who was skeptical but non-threatening, even kind of adorable. I decided the title would be “Pivot Chords,” a metaphor from music that is about making a shift from one key—so, viewpoint—to another with finesse.
I wrote and edited and edited some more and wrote some more and submitted. Finally I got the email saying I could check the published post. My title was now the subtitle and a new title, in bold letters at the very top of the page, read:
This Gay, Liberal, Atheist, Canadian’s Sermon
on Grace and Compassion
is the Best I’ve Heard in Awhile
In nearly two years the article has collected just six likes, about thirty-five shares and two comments, from a user base of nearly four thousand readers.
We live in a time when people have to be deceived before they’ll drive down the street that houses all those liberals they hate. They have to be jumped, hooded and thrown in the van before they’ll even let you suggest that a bunch of desperate mothers, fathers and children, a bedraggled, tired, poor, huddled mass of wretched refuse from whatever teeming shore isn’t just a bunch of actors paid by the Antichrist who’ve come to overthrow the most powerful nation on earth.
Note I didn’t say “greatest.”
How are you, by the way, at this spiffing start to a new decade? I’m here, a scary clown popping out of his scary clown-box, to tell you that making Ukraine’s aid money contingent on its digging up dirt on the President’s political enemy is wrong, but not impeachable.
Grabbing her by the pussy is not impeachable, it’s—I dunno, first base? Are you getting this down? Soliciting charitable donations then using them to buy sex with hookers or self-portraits or election campaigns? Nope. Not impeachable. You wanna know what’s impeachable? Hint: Think Bill Clinton.
That’s right. Blowjobs are impeachable.
There’s more. Whatever the President of the United States does is OK, as long as he truly believes that his re-election is in the best interests of the nation. The POTUS can do anything he wants, at least, according to Vladimir Putin.
Sorry, did I say Putin? I meant Alan Dershowitz! But he didn’t get there first. Trump himself told us so. I can do anything I want. And, excuse me, bleeding hearts, he would hardly lie about something so important!
Twenty-twenty finds me in the position of a little boy wearing Buster Brown shoes and itchy wool shorts, topped with a crisp white shirt and a pre-tied bow tie, all clashing plaids and male camel toe and sausage thighs, ready to get pushed into the mud puddle by the freckle-faced bully, the rapscallion of a little boy with that everyone likes. What a little devil he is! He’ll go places!
It’s the face plant in the mud puddle, you see, the soiled perfection, that fosters one’s appreciation for all the nice new things, gifts (for you would never buy them for yourself) that may well not survive the day intact.
Not to worry. Start from the point of innocence; erase from your mind the script that has you in the final act looking like a refugee from PornHub’s “fetish” category, mud-wrestling barely-legal teens department, and put your trust in that pristine pinafore. Meanwhile, I struggle to answer my own question. I am :
Recalcitrant
recalcitrant \rih-KAL-suh-trunt\ adjective. 1 : obstinately defiant of authority or restraint. 2 a : difficult to manage or operate. b : not responsive to treatment. c : resistant.
I have been recalcitrant on Twitter towards the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), whose guiding light is one of those au courant racists, a Québecois who masks his authoritarian lust for pure laine behind the pieties of secularism and patrimonie, Maxime Bernier.
Why did Maxime Bernier cross the road?
To get to the — Oh, my God! OH MY GOD THAT EIGHTEEN WHEELER JUST RAN THE RED LIGHT!!
If populism is the soft cock of Canadian politics, Maxime has his dry, white lips clamped around it so tightly he may pass out from lack of oxygen. Allez-y! That’s the spirit, buddy! You’ll never get it up, but it’s undeniably entertaining when you try.
The PPC tweets that the housing crisis is the result of immigration (that’s non-white immigration) run riot.
(Compare the Toronto version, “the Chinese are buying all the condos,” which is approaching the status of a standard friendly greeting on the local streets:
“Hey, Fred! The Chinese are buying all the condos!”
“Fine, thanks, and how’s the wife and kids?”)
Because no rabbit hole presents itself but that I instantly picture myself burrowing down it, I tweet back that the housing crisis is caused not by immigration but by, oddly enough, a lack of housing, which could be solved by requiring developers to build affordable units in their cheap, flimsy luxury buildings, for example.
They tweet back that I lack imagination, that a trillion immigrants could appear at the borders and progressives like me would still want to throw money at the problem.
I tweet back that it’s equally [un]likely the white people could breed a trillion offspring and the housing crisis would still exist without a trillion living units, which, [sigh], could easily be built at no expense to the public and entail no tax increases except on units which owners don’t actually occupy (a tax which Vancouver has already implemented with success, and which Toronto City Council is considering).
What did Maxime Bernier say to the white immigrant?
“I’m color-blind!”
What did Maxime Bernier say to the non-white immigrant?
“Housing crisse de Tabernac!”
What is it like, I wonder, being inside Maxime Bernier’s head? It ain’t the Midway at the Canadian National Exhibition, that’s for sure. No one’s lining up for the ride, “I hope I pass the height test! The “Bernier” does a full loop the loop and my friend Sandy told me she threw up her pink popcorn twice! It’s gonna be awesome!”
Bernier burns through Canadian values like a maniac training a flame thrower at a grove of maples. A typical arrogant loser and blustering, entitled white male, he projects sour resentment and outrage at the thought of benefits or income distribution or social justice. He’s a card-carrying denizen of the joyless, shadowy, victimized world of put-upon conservatism.
What does Bernier worry about? Not the plight of refugees, our international commitments or corporate taxes. He worries about—yes!— our deficit, even though our financial health, thanks for asking, is absolutely great. (US debt to GDP ratio: 4.6%. Canadian debt to GDP ratio: 0.39%).
He is, or pretends to be, in thrall to the idea that deficits are wrong, even if roads are pock-marked and bridges are falling down, and health care and public transport are so underfunded they barely work. Pull up your socks and tighten your belt!
The idea that, just like with your personal finances, you would look at your income, calculate the costs of a big-ticket item, work out the payments and decide to run a temporary deficit to invest in something that will create value and save money, this idea is supposed to be anathema to us. Deficits bad.
And it’s not up for debate. You might as well debate whether it’s OK to put dog food mixed with arsenic in the off-leash area in Allen Gardens. Of course it’s not! What kind of sick individual would run a deficit?
Five minutes’ research would tell you that deficits have no meaning except as expressed as a percentage of your Gross Domestic Product, your “income.” You’d discover that Keynesian economics advocates government spending when the economy needs stimulus. It’s considered a very uncontroversial good thing and it’s been standard issue for decades.
Conservatives can build whole fantasy scenarios on a false premise, because people are intellectually lazy.
Well, put the Chevy up on concrete blocks and bang my missus in a trailer, is that a fact?
What does Maxime Bernier’s breakfast cereal say?
Crap, Wacko Populist!
Maxime Bernier throws nasty shade at Greta Thunberg, doomsaying sixteen-year-old climate activist. They make a synergistic pair. She’s the title, he’s the subtitle. He hates her youth, her daring, her plans to save the future and her being right. She’s grumpy, mouthy and, yes, recalcitrant. She gets under his skin.
He’s prissy, quasi-intellectual French, his affect tighter than a Parisian’s pursed lips; she’s the spooky love-child of Anne of Green Gables and Ingmar Bergman. You can tell Bernier’s just itching to send her to bed without supper, then drive across town and spank his mistress.
Maxime and Greta! They were made to be a comedy duo, the Laurel and Hardy of the apocalypse, the featured floor show on Planet Titanic.
From slapstick to sleaze: Bernier, promoted to Foreign Affairs Minister in 2007 by Conservative PM Stephen Harper, has to tender his resignation after he leaves a classified dossier lying around his girlfriend’s place. For five months.
The dossier contains top-secret information about Canada’s plans in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The petite amie, Julie Couillard, cavorts with Hell’s Angels and organized crime and people with job descriptions like drug enforcer, and was almost certainly lobbying Bernier on behalf of a realtor, Kevlar, Inc., to procure a lucrative government contract.
On a prurient note, the former model is also extremely well provided for in the boobs department and is not shy about showing us, which cannot have anything to do with her revelation that Bernier is worried people think he’s gay.
We find out all of this when she publishes her tell-all memoir, entitled, and stop me if you’ve heard this one, “My Story.” This is a new level of dedication to bringing the federal government into disrepute.
Maxime must lack any sense of irony. He runs for office in the 2019 federal election promising to close down the supply management system, so hated by Trump, that ensures Canadian dairy farmers can get a fair price for their products.
His riding of Beauce, Québec, consists mainly of—dairy farmers. And he loses his seat, the only seat the PPC held. This is a new definition of fucktard stupid.
ee
Bernier derides Greta Thunberg as “mentally unstable” and denies the overwhelming evidence about our climate emergency. He takes Greta very seriously. Everyone else understands that we support Greta Thunberg because she’s sweet and has no clout and anyway she’s just a teenaged girl.
Everyone, even corporations, even governments, supports Greta Thunberg, because she’s photogenic and does no harm, especially to the gas-guzzling agenda of big oil. You can pat Greta on the head, say “Isn’t she adorable! It’s great to see commitment from young people!” and feel fine because she’s not a threat to anything or anyone. She has no power.
It’s like giving a Girl Scout her knot-tying badge or her “most likeable gal-pal” certificate. She’s a protest march by Disney, where the cute kids pack up their signs and go home when daddy thinks that’s enough shenanigans for one day. Time for beddy-bye, Little Missy Hooligan!
Greta Thunberg is who you pay attention to so that there’s no room left for coverage of or sympathy towards First Nations people setting up roadblocks to halt the progress of a pipeline desecrating their sacred land, the land that was never conceded and still belongs to them.
Sacred land? How quaint! Riots about pipelines? Please, I’m eating dinner! Let’s see the cute little girl again! She’s the future, she’s dessert!
How many Quebecois dairy farmers does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one. He grips the light bulb with both hands while Maxime Bernier spins him around on his dick!
We want to consume Greta, because she’s a tasty, frothy cream puff of news. The First Nations people are indigestible: ornery, angry, outraged, not nice. They’re not our friends and they’ve experienced first-hand how we treat children.
We call out the Mounties for them. (The Mounties sent an internal memo: “Use as much violence as you want.” I’m not making this up.) The protestors cover their faces, they throw rocks; they don’t hold out their hands in forgiveness, and we don’t pat them on the head. Guns, tear gas. They’re dangerous because they insist on their power and their absolute right to be where they are.
Why is Maxime Bernier jealous of Greta Thunberg?
She travels the world on a yacht, but all his ships sink!
The PPC accuses me of not wanting a conversation. And they’re right. I don’t. I want them to line up and bend over so I can shove a People’s Party of Canada lawn sign up their wazoos, pointy end first—to approximately the same place where Donald Frankenforehead’s book resided— then burn the lot of them at the stake.
This seems like such a simple, intuitive demand.
And since the remaining members of the PPC would fit into an old-style Volkswagen, I could take care of it in an afternoon and still finish in time to flash some skin on Chaturbate for a couple of hours.
I call my room
This Gay, Liberal, Atheist, Canadian’s Ass
is the Best You’ve Seen
On A Senior Citizen in Awhile.
Nothing is wasted when you’re a writer. Nothing.
Now, pour the little lady a glass of Chardonnay and get yourself—impeached.
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