There is no question that major gun law reform is long overdue in the US.
Before I go into this, I want to say up front: there are people on this page who witnessed this. They won’t talk for various reasons including potential liability, but they were there. I found out years later there was another witness: noted dudebro Tucker Max, who broadly embellished this story in one of his books.
Back when I was in the wrestling business we did a gig at a joint in Durham NC. After the show, me and a few of the other guys were sitting at the bar having beers, just chillin, and this tiiiiiiiiny little biker dude with a mile-long mullet comes up to us and decides he’s gonna pick a fight with the biggest guy in the room. He was legit like…6’3″, maybe 270, built every inch like the jacked up barrel-chested stereotype of a pro wrestler. I’m not a small guy myself, but this cat’s biceps looked like my thighs.
The wrestler kept telling the dude, you don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this. You’re gonna get yourself hurt and in trouble, you don’t want to do this. I’m just havin a beer, minding my own biz, why don’t you go find something else to do, you don’t want to do this, this isn’t going to end well for you. Stop. Simmer down and go away.
Of course, little mullet dude didn’t simmer down and didn’t go away, and eventually he made his mistake and was promptly rearranged into a human daiquiri.
People who want to argue with me about gun control remind me of that little biker dude.
Fundamentally anyone opposing gun law reform in this country is advocating for their preference that innocent children continue dying by the truckload so they can feel safe getting their half-caf skinny mocha latte with rainbow sprinkles…but they just keep trying to make it about everything else. Even though they know their position is ethically indefensible and they don’t have a prayer of coming out of the argument with anything but embarrassment and humiliation, their need to try to camouflage their fundamental cowardice and fear of literally everything that moves in a bunch of empty NRA agitprop just will not stop.
Never in the history of anything have I run into a gun owner who argued stridently against gun law reform and WASN’T exactly the last person you’d want having any kind of weapon in their hands because they’re sniveling cowards and you know they’re gonna try to shoot the first mosquito that buzzes their ear without checking to see who’s in the line of fire.
Little dude might’ve been 5’1″, big ol’ mullet…and of course he had a little Saturday night special, which did him absolutely no good whatsoever beyond ensuring that whatever happened to him would be written off as self-defense and that he was handcuffed to the gurney that carried him to the ER. That was in like 1998. Little dude’s probably still in jail. Probably still can’t see through those swollen, blackened eyes either.
It’s long past time for major gun law reform in this country, and if you have a problem with that you are fundamentally arguing that it’s okay with you if innocent people – including little kids in their classrooms – continue dying violently so you don’t have to feel scared shopping for ramen at Walmart. I think that’s so far beneath contempt I can’t even begin describing what I think is the proper way to deal with you, without risking a thirty day ban, and I don’t care if that makes you mad every minute for the rest of your failed and useless life.
For supporting readers: The wrestler was a guy named Jason Arndt, who was part of the “OmegaPowers” clique that included me, the Hardys, Shane Helms, CW Anderson, Joey Mercury, and a bunch of other folks who all worked for the same indies and came up around the same time and place; a couple of them were around that night but I won’t put them on the spot by naming names. The nature of the business being what it is, it’s pretty unlikely anyone who was actually there will talk much about it, but there were plenty of witnesses.
If you’re a fan of the business you might remember Jason as Joey Abs, the one actual wrestler who was part of Shane McMahon’s “Mean Street Posse” stable in the late 90’s WWE. I only happened to read Tucker Max’s version of the story once, which he heavily embellished and turned into a street war with bullets flying everywhere, but it wasn’t like that. Dude got his ass beat, hard, and might have squeezed off a shot in the process – I genuinely don’t even remember anymore.
Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.
All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.
One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.
Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.
Oh stewardess, I speak jive.
If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”
If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.
Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.
The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.
This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.
I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.
When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.
Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.
Three words makes all the difference
Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”
Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)
The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?
These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.” I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.
When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.
When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.
Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!
I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!
Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.
A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.
It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!
Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)
Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.
Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.
It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.
There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.
Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.
Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”
So speaketh Mama Wendy
One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.
Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.
After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.
Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:
The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.
Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:
“We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”
With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.
I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.
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Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.
BREAKING: Nazi Texas Governor Greg Abbot Orders State Agency To Kidnap Trans Children From Parents, Force Misgendering, Corrective Medical Procedures Outlawed.
First, They’re Coming For The Trans Kids
Image of original letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, ordering state child welfare agencies to prosecute parents and physicians of any trans kids who are actively attempting transition for abuse.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott yesterday ordered the state child welfare agency to immediately begin investigating and prosecuting any parent or doctor of a trans minor who has taken any transitional steps e.g. hormone therapy.
In the letter, Abbott notes that “it is already against the law to subject Texas children to…elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”
He goes on to remind people of what “mandated reporter” means, thus making clear without stating it outright that as of now every single doctor, teacher, psychologist, or whomever else in Texas is aware of a child transitioning and does not immediately turn in the parents for abuse investigation, will themselves be sanctioned with the possibilities including loss of license and jail time.
Of course there are already plenty of state hotline numbers to call in “anonymous tips” and so forth.
This not only flies in the face of medical science and psychology and human rights and every other decent thing, it is a textbook execution of Nazi policies of identifying and scapegoating already-targeted social outgroups in order to encourage the more venal, ignorant, evil, and insane among the population to become even more aggressive and violent toward the scapegoats, and hiding behind the cover of abused authority in the form of oppressive, targeted regulation and cooperative lickspittles and lapdogs in the constabulary and judiciary.
Houston, We Have A Problem
There is simply no valid reasoning that supports the ongoing delusion we don’t have a fascism problem. A *Nazi* problem. This absolutely can not stand, not even for a day. Every activist in Texas needs to focus on ending this immediately and making damned sure nobody can try it again.
Greg Abbott is a Nazi. Not a Nazi-like thing, not an almost Nazi, not a wannabe Nazi. Everyone involved in making this possible is a Nazi.
The entire system and set of values and regulations described in his order are Nazism. It’s a whole good old boys’ system where anyone with a grudge can destroy lives under the auspices of obeying the law, and where even attempting to do the right thing is a criminal act. No different than encouraging schoolchildren to report parental disloyalty to the Nazis, or the USSR, or Big brother.
It’s meta-coercion, an entire new layer of abused power and oppression. Abbott and his fellow Nazis are sending the message loudly and clearly that not only will there be no tolerance for non-binary sexuality and identity in Texas, there will be no tolerance for any attempt to change that odious condition. If you’re a parent accused of abuse, your parental rights can be terminated and you may never get them back. Your kid will be shuttled into the foster system – or worse the shadow foster system – and subject to whatever “treatment” the state deems necessary to force them into “normality.”
In their confidence that a majority of Texans will support this behavior, the Nazis are sending the message that if you are trans, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are the parent of a trans child, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are a physician or psychologist treating a trans or intersex minor in any way the state of Texas concludes to be an attempt to help a patient physically transition, or if you even hear about it and fail to tell the authorities, you are defenseless and a criminal and legally forbidden to practice your profession.
When an abuse charge is levied, this immediately puts the option on the table of taking the kids out of their homes and putting them in foster care or some sort of state-mandated “correction” program like gay conversion therapy, as if electroshock and bullying and trauma are going to make these kids not who they are. The mere presence of this option in this instance is ludicrous, evil, and outrageous.
There is only one word for any of this.
Yes, Nazi.
You may now end your internal dialogue; this is what Nazism looks like
This is where that whole difficult discussion comes from about whether antisemitism is required for Nazism. (This discussion is largely made difficult by shallow, slow thinkers who can’t tell the difference between noting Nazism isn’t ONLY antisemitic, and claiming it’s not so at all.)
Antisemitism was waiting for a Hitler to show up and exploit it.
Racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia have been waiting for a Trump to show up and exploit it – or more to the point, waiting for a Trump to show up who’s so mendacious and narcissistic any one of several dozen fascists and Nazis and autocrats can control him easily with threat or bribery.
It’s the same Nazism, folks, it’s just different targets. The targets now are the ones you see scaring bigots in the news – trans people, especially kids; the LGBTQIA+; the educated; the compassionate; black people who insist their lives matter; people who get angry when police keep murdering the innocent and getting away with it; the increasingly desperate, hostile, and populous ranks of the poor; and as always the anti-fascists who would stand in defense of all of those targets and indeed take the offense against fascist or Nazi or other autocratic/totalitarian power grab.
This is openly flaunted fascism, totalitarian autocracy that’s not merely autocratic and totalitarian but smug, laughing in your face as if to say “look how many stupid evil people there are, that we could so easily con them into giving us power, and you think you can stand against us? Please.”
They think we’re going to sit back and let this happen. The whole point of this is to terrorize us into sitting back and letting this happen.
Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Not.
What To Do About It
Due to my public profile it would be foolish of me to make any specific recommendations for direct action. If I said “it’s time to hit the streets,” one of the Nazis would find a way to make something bad happen on the streets and then hold me responsible. So I can’t tell you that you should be marching or protesting 24/7 in front of the Governor’s mansion or what have you.
I can say that whatever you choose to do, be careful. Consider your actions to avoid setting yourselves up to get hurt or have someone else’s crimes blamed on you.
But stand. Now. Activate your networks, be smart, work together, get on the phones, get on the TV stations, get on social media and END THIS, immediately. The ACLU / ACLU of Texas should already be in court.
Aside from covering my own backside legally, as a tactical matter I don’t advise creating a situation that could be exploited by inauthentic actors, for instance a large raucous march on the Capital. We have learned time and time again that this is most often the outcome the fascists and Nazis of the world hope for because it gives them cover to be even more violent, to actually hurt and kill people and imprison them under false pretenses and seize their assets and destroy their lives.
We have learned time and again that any time the Nazis and fascists – be they calling themselves the “Patriot Front” or the “Proud Boys” or the “Oathkeepers” or “Prayer Warriors” (a common phrase in evangelical and charismatic Christian sects that has been co-opted by white supremacists other fascist types because it’s about impossible to tell at a glance whether you’re looking at “prayer warriors” or “Prayer Warriors”) or whatever – believe they have a decent shot of getting away with it during antifascist demonstrations, they will absolutely murder, and their traitorous minions and lapdogs in law enforcement and the judiciary will do everything possible to facilitate oppression. One need look no further than Kyle Rittenhouse to validate that the American legal system has fully established a pathway to the open murder of antifascists during street protests.
Fortunately for the sane and decent among us, there are other tools in the box. Not every legislator and judge supports this and those who don’t need to know we’re behind them. The ACLU and other civic groups have active chapters in Texas who should already be activated on this. If you are a Texas citizen you have local legislators you can contact. This list gives you the phone contact information for every state representative. This one has your state senators. Some of them also include e-mail contact, but this is definitely more of a phone call situation anyway.
You may consider saying something like “The oppression and targeting of trans children and their families is not just scientifically and morally wrong and a direct assault on the fundamental rights of humanity which are the basis of our democracy. This order is an unquestionable attempt to employ tactics of persecution, and terrorism intended not only to oppress trans people but to intimidate their allies into silence and criminalize those allies who are medical, psychological, or psychiatric professionals, as well as the parents and other family and friends of trans minors in transition. The people of Texas will not stand for this, nor will we support anyone who does, regardless of party.”
You may consider reaching out to companies in the state encouraging them to do business in a less fascist environment, but don’t expect a great response there; fascism and Nazism are great for business. Maybe an approach like refusing to participate in SXSW would be useful; maybe it would be more effective to triple the size; that’s not my decision to make, but certainly activists and citizens in Texas should be having these conversations right now.
We’re not in the 80’s and 90’s anymore, when we should have been taking all of this kind of behavior more seriously and putting a stop to it before it got out of hand. We can’t keep pretending that if we just ignore it, it’ll go away. We can’t keep pretending that as long as it’s not us personally being persecuted, that this hasn’t gotten out of hand. We did that for decades.
Now it’s out of hand, and the good people of Texas are going to have to figure out how to get their state back from the Nazis when it appears half the voters in the state, at least, don’t want the Nazis to go away because they are Nazis.
It’s not up to me to tell y’all what to do…but you damned sure better do something, fast.
Because even if you’re not trans yourself, nor a parent of a trans person, or even know a trans person, two things are certain: that trans people are human beings, and that if these human beings can be treated this way, so can you.
Yeah, I said it. Tiny houses suck. I don’t mean if you want a cute little cabin you have bad taste, I’m talking about as a solution to homelessness. The whole idea sucks. It’s horrible, rotten, terrible. It’s an idea that needs to die, and quickly, at least in terms of being an applied solution to American homelessness. It’s quite literally worse than useless, and by orders of magnitude.
Now that I have your attention: I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings who might be among that growing group of folks who are advocating for tiny houses and building and engineering them to be ever more tiny.
I understand that once you get below a very high ceiling within the entire housing-construction-real estate complex, most of you engaged here are earnest and well-meaning, hard-working, diligent, and really truly trying your best to do a good thing in the world, and I don’t want to discourage you from doing that.
But I’d like you to give me a few minutes to explain, from the perspective of a person who has frequently been homeless and is currently housing insecure, why you may find, after consideration, that your talents and energy to do good things might be better spent on other angles for addressing homelessness.
I’m going to break this up into a couple of sections. In the original context I’d planned to go through the whole establishing of credibility thing by pointing to all the various work I’ve done out there over the years related to the topic, but then I realized the only reason I feel the need to do that is that this started out with some schmoe responding to a social media comment, and basically telling me I have no idea what homeless people think, want, or need, and screw that guy. My work is out there and easy to find and my arguments are well-formulated and not in need of further validation by character reference anyway.
This article started as a social media comment – as they often do – on a post about a local tiny house initiative and their latest step forward and maybe there’s a shipping issue and so forth. That post was a local news report updating the current status of a tiny house project here, mentioning that 14 acres had been purchased to place these new tiny houses on. My comment was thus:
I wonder how many full-sized real-human-being apartments could be built on 14 acres for what they’re paying for glorified boxes.
And naturally, here comes the schmoe brigade to tell me what I got wrong:
[citation needed] A+ for enthusiasm. F for argument construction though. And a five-yard penalty for abuse of punctuation.
With that introductory flourish out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of the matter. In part 2 we’ll discuss why the social, political, and psychological implications and impacts of the entire “tiny house narrative” are extraordinarily problematic. Then we’ll talk about why the very suggestion of “tiny houses” as a solution to homelessness in this country is, ultimately, an arrogant insult built on an entire group of industries trapped in a loop of aspirational delusion that’s going to collapse like a house of cards, and their absolute refusal to accept that you only need so many housing units for so many people before building more is a gigantic waste of resources benefiting no one. Before we wrap it up I’ll show you the numbers I think support that prediction.
First up: the personal perspective. Then the data, numbers, analysis, and conclusions that we will hopefully all agree support my core thesis, as difficult and maybe even painful as it may be for those of us who have really gone all-in on this in the hopes that it would be an effective solution to homelessness.
Between The Cracks, Between The Lines
From a standpoint of communication, messaging, and cultural expression of how we respect the humanity of the poor (and even that phrase is problematic, like “we” are doing “them” a favor), there is critical subtext in the entire notion of applying tiny house/alternative housing solutions to housing instability problems, and that subtext is being ignored to our great detriment and expense.
As someone who has struggled with poverty and housing insecurity all my life, here’s what the “on the streets” ear in my head hears every time I hear someone going on about how wonderful it is to create “tiny house communities” where the homeless can be:
“We’d love to help you out, but we can’t find a way to do it that both treats you as an equal among dignified free people and allows the gigantic kajillionaire conglomerates and the handful of people who own them to profit from you, so we’re going to train you instead to be so incredibly desperate that you’ll take ANYTHING, even a palette in an empty warehouse, and be glad to have it.
Then we’ll come up with something that we can sell to the kind-hearted as a philanthropic initiative to ‘address homelessness,’ sequester you in boxes that none of us would want to live in outside of a few minimalists and a whole lot of people making specious hypothetical arguments they don’t actually believe in on the internet because they don’t want to ‘lose’ The Battle Of The Comment Section. You still get to be separate, less than, beneath dignity, and lacking in basic resources but we can tell ourselves we ‘did something.’ Sorry. I mean, we feel bad and all but if there’s no money to be made on putting you in a dignified living situation, you’re not going to be in one. But here’s a token attempt exploiting the good will and sincere earnest positive intent of a whole bunch of folks in between you and us, to make sure if you are paying attention enough to say any of this out loud it will hurt feelings and people won’t want to hear it.
So, sorry Poors, you can have a tiny little imitation of a home and tell yourself how brave and strong you are for making the best of it to help distract you from the fact that your country doesn’t think you deserve a real place to live, and you’d probably better appreciate it and not complain or you won’t even have that.
Suddenly when you’re hearing that message, the whole “isn’t this a good and noble thing we’re doing” narrative doesn’t play so well to your good intentions and kind heart.
I’m sorry for that – genuinely, I’m not writing this to hurt anyone or make them feel like they’ve wasted their time or even hurt people by accident – but we’re not going to get moving on real solutions until we stop allowing ourselves to be sold on the idea that “good enough for them” constitutes human decency and the fulfillment of our immutable obligation to the ultimate morality of human life, i.e. the survival and propagation of the species.
There is another reason why the whole “tiny house” thing infuriates me to a degree that, at first glance, most reasonable people would think unwarranted by the situation. We’ll have to get into some hard data and stuff to fully understand that, so let’s do that now.
The Data
Oftentimes folks who do this sort of thing get attached to this notion that if they can just provide enough numbers, charts, and graphs to make their point, then their point will be taken as well-made and that’s the end. Then you end up getting lost in the weeds looking at excruciatingly fine details of abstruse statistics, and the whole point of the discourse is lost.
Fortunately in this case we have two very basic and easy to understand data sets to review: the number of “homeless people” – i.e. residents without a dwelling – in the US, and the number of “peopleless homes” – i.e. dwellings without a residence.
There’s this great little tool called FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website, and it’s chock full of all this great information about various aspects of the economy including employment, housing, economic status of individuals, and so forth. Among this information: housing inventories, that is to day how many housing units there are in this country and their status as owned, rented, occupied, unoccupied, etc.
Here’s what FRED has to say about the number of currently vacant housing units in the US:
For clarity: this images is telling you there were roughly 15.2 million empty residences in the US in the 3rd quarter of 2021.
If you want to see the whole dataset with pretty charts over time and everything, it’s at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N, but what you need to know is in that screenshot: there were, on any given day between July 1 and September 30 2021, about 15.2 million empty residential units in the US.
Coming up with homelessness data is a little more difficult, but when taking in all of the assertions put forth by reasonably trustworthy sources and trying to assemble a big picture, on the average day in the US there are about half a million people who are homeless. This number has remained remarkably steady for decades, and basically has stayed within that 500-600K range since the late 80s. I can’t find the link now because I’m an undisciplined writer and forgot to bookmark it while I was reading it, but while researching this I found some government report from 1970 saying there were then 300,000 homeless people.
…and 600,000 empty housing units.
I want you to think about that for a minute.
In this country, right this minute, there are half a million or so people who will sleep on the streets tonight…and we have enough empty housing units for every homeless person in this country to have thirty places to live.
There is absolutely no condition by which that is not an unforgivable outrage against our people. Germany recently took over something like 30K housing units from landlords who had a surplus of empty property under their eminent domain processes, and there’s exactly zero reason why we can’t do that here.
That’s where the angry attitude comes from. It’s one thing to be like “hey sorry, we’re short on housing and doing the best we can, here’s a temporary fix.” It’s something else entirely to say “hey we could give you THIRTY places to live if we really wanted you to have one or cared in the least that you’re homeless, but we just don’t want to because our money is more important to us than you having a home.”
And that’s not just how it is. That’s how it has been for my entire life. We have had at least twice as many empty housing units as homeless people for over half a century. That’s not just a bit of bad thinking, that’s a deliberately implemented system of oppression and waste for profit.
Just this matter of the outrageous oversupply of empty houses we have on one hand and the outrageous lack of housing for the poor on the other is plenty of argument supporting our core thesis and I could leave the article here, but there are some very important secondary implications that I feel are critical to understanding the entire argument I’m making, so let’s take a look at those and then wrap it up.
Economic Insanity
We’ve discussed the sort of socio-personal implications of this approach and the difficult and (for most folks below the top who are pushing this, I believe) unintentionally damaging messages that it carries, and the stark reality that it just isn’t necessary.
Now let’s set aside the social justice concerns and outrage and just talk plain old numbers, resources, and economics.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, you have a rather startling surplus of housing units, and that’s not a good thing. Those are completely wasted resources, doing no good for anyone outside of a small group of folks we’ll talk about in a minute.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, we darned well ought to be paying folks to take those wasted units off the hands of those who are wasting them.
As it happens, I’m privileged to include some economists – and I’m not gonna namedrop about it, but if I did you’d recognize them if you follow the field, unquestionably – in my circle of acquaintance, so I asked them. Now these are busy folks so I wasn’t expecting a dissertation, but I wanted to make sure I’d given people who know what the heck they’re talking about a chance to say hey no, JH, you’ve got it wrong. None of them did.
What we have here is economic insanity. If we gave a housing unit to every single homeless person in this country, there would still be 14.5 million empty housing units. Who’s gonna buy those when we only have half a million people un-housed? What could we have been doing with fourteen and a half million homes’ worth of building materials, infrastructure, and labor? Why are we overbuilding like this?
The truth is, the entire US housing and construction industry is a shell game played on a house of cards. Naturally there’s a small percentage of folks out there who can afford multiple homes, but they don’t cover 14.5 million.
Most of those empty units are owned by big landlords who have no intention of profiting from them or renting them out to begin with. One big property management company pays a few big construction companies to spend some millions at a few big supply houses to keep their economic ecosystem churning and generating profits. The big property management company mismanages and underutilizes the new properties at a loss for a while (nice tax break here, you can get it all the way to zero if you lose enough, or even get the government to pay YOU) until it becomes implausible to keep claiming it because why would a business keep losing money on purpose. They sell it at a loss, write the loss off their income, the next company does the same thing for a few years, later rinse repeat until the property has decayed to undesirability and then eventually it’s seized for property taxes or condemned for being in irrecoverable ill repair, it’s destroyed, and the cycle starts all over.
By and large those 14.5 million empty homes are a couple of dozen super-rich bankers, property managers, construction companies, etc. shuffling money back and forth so it looks like something’s happening.
Eventually the reality that we don’t actually need much in the way of new housing construction, haven’t in a while, and won’t for a while is going to catch up to this economic sector, and when it does things are going to be very, very chaotic and confusing across the economy for a while. Hopefully the folks who get paid to manage this stuff are working on a way to deflate this horrid balloon slowly before it explodes and takes a third of the economy with it. One good way would be to sieze several hundred thousand or even a couple of million newer, decent units under eminent domain (with reasonable and fair compensation to keep the fascists from whining too much about it) and start getting homeless people into them, but that’s getting back into the social aspects of things and I wanted to stick strictly to capitalist-economic argumentation, in this section.
In the end, the “tiny house” movement helps perpetuate this broken system by continuing to prop up the systems by which landlords justify refusing to rent their empty properties to people who need them. Don’t tell us we have to rent to those filthy poors, they’ve got tiny houses right there.
With that said, I did want to give a little positive energy to tiny houses in general, so let’s talk about that and get out of here.
Tiny Houses Aren’t Evil
I really do want to put some positive framing on tiny houses in general because they are, utilized properly, a wonderful idea that can save lives.
The problem isn’t the idea of a tiny house. The idea is that a tiny house should be anything but temporary emergency shelter. I’d have loved to see a few thousand tiny houses in New Orleans after Katrina. They’d be a great solution for migrant-border crises such as the one at the southern US border, or currently blowing up at the Poland-Belorus border. Refugees, the displaced, situations when you need dignified shelter on the ground for a lot of people fast, and many of them may be transient, and many of the shelters may be used by many people, and so forth.
That is a wonderful use of the tiny house concept and I don’t wish to discourage research and development in that area in the least.
It’s just not a serious or effective solution to homelessness.
We have the homes, and the only reason we’re keeping them away from those who need them is someone wants to make a buck.
It is my carefully considered, and hopefully now well-defended, opinion that this is just not the way to run a decent society, and in spite of the earnest good will and compassionate intent of so many of those working on them, applying the technology of tiny houses to the problem of homelessness only serves in every way to perpetuate and reinforce the social structures that create it in the first place.
It may well be that this approach can be useful in parts of the world where there aren’t enough homes to go around, but that just isn’t the case here. We have 15 million real people homes where we can put people who don’t have them if we want to, we just have to want to.
We don’t want to.
Maybe we should work as hard on changing that as we are on building tiny house Hoovervilles.
Thanks for reading, please don’t forget to do all the social media stuff to help get this information and conversation out into the world!
(This post was updated on October 25, 2021 adding a link to mutation data and adjusting calculations resulting from a transcription error rendering “12,700” as “12,400.” Ultimately this results in the originally-reported 53-minute strain cycle being closer to 48-minutes. -jh)
I keep running into this dishonest, manipulative, and frankly stupid response from the murdering plague-bearers who refuse to do what’s necessary to end this pandemic. (Don’t @ me and don’t bother whining; if you don’t like the description, don’t fit it.) It goes like this:
“Well you’re vaccinated, so why do you care what anyone else does?”
This is a question that really does require quantum-singularity level stupidity to even ask, and a complete lack of self-respect to do so out loud, but it seems to be the narrative the boiler rooms are using to troll the stupid into killing as many people as possible, so since the stakes are that high let’s go ahead and answer the question definitively, then you can just link this article from now on when you run across that puerile, psychopathic, abjectly dim-witted and pathetically gross argument.
I care what anyone else does because I understand how viruses work (at least to a point sufficient to this conversation).
Makes a big difference in your attitude.
See, while a bunch of knuckle-dragging pencil-necked fit-throwing entitled twits decided this was their moment to claim the 15 minutes Andy Warhol promised them, this virus has been mutating. Last time I had solid numbers, between Feb 2020 and April 2021 it had mutated some 12,700 times (per https://srhd.org/news/2021/coronavirus-mutations-and-variants-what-does-it-mean using WHO & CDC data), which bakes down to about one new strain every forty-eight minutes or so. Given the radical increase in the number of cases since that time, I would imagine this estimate is if anything fairly optimistic, and the actual average time between new mutations is probably more like half an hour. That would mean 48 times a day, every day, all day long, we are spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger.
Someone who actually understands these things will immediately point out that probably 12,200 of those strains were self-terminating; they had a failed mutation that caused them to be non-viable, and they died out.
But someone who actually understands these things will also immediately point out that every single mutation carries the risk of hitting the big trifecta: resistant to existing antibodies, far more contagious, and far more deadly. If that combination hits, it’s the end of life as we know it, permanently. IF the species survives, the impact will be immeasurable and will absolutely and fundamentally change who we are, quite possibly thrusting us back into pre-technological and steampunk pockets of innovation at best for centuries.
Every time that virus mutates is another round of Russian Roulette we’re playing with the species because some Muffy somewhere misses her afternoon delight with the pool boy that she can’t have now that the kids are going to school in the living room.
Every hour we take the chance of wiping ourselves off this planet, and the ONLY reason it’s happening with that frequency is because people think they can argue opinion against science. I swear it’s like some of y’all WANT to meet Randall Flagg. If people get vaccinated, mask up, and stay home as much as POSSIBLE – which does not mean “as much as I want,” but “as much as is needed” – the possibility STILL remains that we can get a lid on this stupid thing, even though the chance of actually eradicating it are now very, very slim (15 months ago it would have been easy, if we’d done what we were supposed to THEN instead of cutting corners and letting the plutocrats rush us back to work).
The longer we continue this infantile, suicidal, ego-driven insanity, the greater the chances are that you and I will live to see at least the genuine beginnings of a civilizational collapse on a scale that simply can not be imagined.
And that is why your vaccination status is my business.
Hey, y’all, before you fall TOO much in love with the whole “will of the people” thing, I want you to think about something.
A few years ago majority of people in multiple states voted in favor of amending their state constitutions to make gay marriage illegal.
It took the US Supreme Court to make that un-happen, and they did so in direct opposition to the express will of the people.
Sometimes the majority is WRONG, and that is why we live in a democratic REPUBLIC. “The will of the people” is of paramount, but not ultimate, priority. This nation was not built to be ruled by “the will of the people,” but by “the will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives who also have a moral and ethical duty to oppose that will when it’s harmful or destructive.”
That’s why our system is constructed the way it is – and I’ve wracked my brain trying to imagine a more effective set of mechanics that successfully balances all the necessary priorities of a free modern nation, and I couldn’t do it. And I’m a political scientist, so I’m definitely on the shortlist of people who should be able to, if one could.
The system works: when “the people” tried to put something over that sucked, the system said “no, we’re not doing that.”
We’ve completely forgotten that the purpose of government is not to make everyone happy, if we ever really grasped it in the first place. You don’t elect people to do “what you want,” any more than you hire a doctor to perform heart surgery to your specifications.
You elect people, which makes them accountable to your will but not bound by it, to do what’s right.
This silly fantasy people have of a perfect candidate is just that – a silly fantasy. I wouldn’t even agree with 100% of my own decisions if I was in office, and if I did I’d be worried about it.
The problem is, a whole lot of folks honestly don’t give the first drizzling shit about what’s “right,” they only care about what benefits them. They aren’t interested in electing someone who’s going to do the right thing; they’re only interested in electing someone who’s going to do the thing that’s beneficial to them.
Because those among us who are sane and reasonable don’t think in those terms, we haven’t taken the threat these folks represent seriously.
But the threat is very real, and it’s in your town. It’s running for school boards and library boards and county commissions and small-town mayoralities and sheriffs and judicial seats. It’s showing up at every public meeting to loudly browbeat local leadership into accepting or conceding to things they shouldn’t, just to make the bullies and aggressors shut up and go away.
It’s not that I’m saying “democracy is bad” or anything like that. But it’s a system that requires engagement to work. If people of conscience allow themselves to neglect their duties as citizens, then people without conscience can weaponize it against the rest of us, and that’s exactly what’s been happening for decades.
I really have to add here that this isn’t a secret or conspiracy. It’s been openly discussed since I was a kid in the late 70’s or early 80’s. Here’s a link to a google search. Once you get there by all means look at the raw web results but also check the news items. If you have access to a favored news or periodical archive like JSTOR check that for obvious keywords in content produced in the 70’s and 80’s. This is an ongoing thing, and it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves that it’ll just go away if we ignore it. It won’t go away. Every time we ignore it, every time we back down because it’s too much hassle to fight, they get stronger and sanity and reason get weaker.
That’s why we’re in this mess. The covid deniers, the trumpers, the white nationalists and neo-fascists like the Proud Boys and the Prayer Warriors and the Oath Keepers, this is where they came from. We thought we could live with it; we thought we could let it go and it would just fade on its own like any other bad idea.
But we can’t, and it won’t.
If you’re going to rely on “democracy,” then you have to be prepared to deal with the reality that democracy only functions properly in an educated and informed and engaged society. The entire 20th century of social philosophy revolved around the great truths of Orwell and Bernays: if you control the information you control EVERYTHING. You can wipe out the entire concept of freedom if you just have enough power over information.
The fascists and authoritarians and nazis and white nationalists of the world are absolutely willing to literally rewrite reality if they think it will benefit them materially, and we’ve been letting them gain the tools to do it for half a century.
It’s time to stand up and say no more, now. While we still can. Go to that school board meeting, that city commission meeting. Run for that uncontested office if you’re in any way qualified for it. Run even if it is contested. Run as a third-party candidate just so you can have some power to direct the narrative even if you lose…and you might not. If you can’t stand the idea of running yourself, find someone. You know somebody you think should be in office. Ask them to run. Get a bunch of mutual friends together and stage an intervention if necessary.
But act.
Because to the precise extent you don’t, you are abdicating your democracy.
