People have been asking about the proper means test for national gun registration. I've been thinking about panoptics a bit lately. It's part of the subject of my novel. So this is what strikes me today. First a couple headlines:
A woman’s decapitated body and two mutilated dogs were found by police Saturday morning at an apartment building in Phoenix, Arizona — along with the suspect who police say severed his own arm and took out one of his eyeballs.
Atlanta
The 30-year-old man found dead outside a Rockdale County apartment likely died playing Russian roulette, police said Friday. Robert Thomas pulled out a revolver, removed the rounds, reloaded one round, spun the chamber and told the three men he was with they were going to play the game, according to Capt. Jackie Dunn with Conyers police.
Two men in their 20s were killed in a drive-by shooting early Saturday on Interstate 5 in Mount Vernon, according to the Washington State Patrol. Troopers were called to the area near the College Way, Exit 227, where they found the driver and front-seat passenger dead inside a black Mercedes just after 3 a.m.
That took all of five minutes to discover, but I already know that there are somewhere between 15-17,000 murders every year here in the US, as well as 30,000 odd suicides. So my question is, if you could have a standard set of quizzes and evaluations put on every American, how many of them would show up to be these kinds of sociopaths? Ultimately, that's the question. What do you do with the knowledge that your society has sociopaths and psychopaths?
Now I stand against those with a zero tolerance attitude towards crime not because I have some special tolerance for crime or criminals, but because of the cost to ordinary Americans. The problem with American society, as I see it, is that we have abandoned a set of personal judgments between each other and looked away. Call it liberalization if you must. But our live and let live era has gone from the margins to the center and what was called crazy and worth of suppression 40 years ago has become manifest in the mainstream. Our natural inclination to persecute (yes), has now shifted to other weird things that don't deserve scrutiny because of our unwillingness to persecute what we instinctually and traditionally know to be hinky and wrong. The result is a mob social media following a set of narratives that don't make for common sense, but are accepted as the conventional wisdom. That and mindless aggregation as well as our democratic impulse trigger us to believe that there are new solutions to chronic problems and we need some kind of new shock to our system to right the wrongs. Does that make sense to you? Are you following me here?
Sin and crime are as old as humanity. We know them when we see them. But why should we institutionalize panoptics when everyone knows what crazy looks like? Because we are living in a society of cowardice, a nation of stooges, who prefer the institutionalization of common sense to direct action by individuals.
Oddly enough, I've been listening to and falling back in love with the music of Billy Joel. The lyrics of his song Pressure, are the poetry missing in my post:
You used to call me paranoid
Pressure
But even you cannot avoid
Pressure
You turned the tap dance into your crusade
Now here you are with your faith
And your Peter Pan advice
You have no scars on your face
And you cannot handle
Pressure
All grown up and no place to go
Psych 1, Psych 2
What do you know?
All your life is channel 13
Sesame Street
What does it mean?
Those with no scars on their faces organize frightened mobs to vote for the police state institutionalization of society from living in fear of any tool that could become a weapon. Because Confederate Battle Flags. Everyone with a scar will be searched because they disobeyed the 11th Commandment: Don't try this at home.
Keep America Safe from Stranger Danger! Register your psychological profile today! Vote for me and I'll set you free!
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