Sooner or later, I knew others would join me in my fight to save our Spermatazoan-American brothers from the tubesock holocaust.
Update: I thought this guy might be a satirist, but after doing a little research, I learned that he is a high functioning autistic person. That bit of info changed the video from being funny to being cruel and exploitative, so I pulled it.
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I feel really, really bad for this guy, General. We should get together and rent him some professional companionship. We could take up a collection or something. Oh, dear me, saints preserve us all, and have pity on this poor young man. I have a feeling it is not all his fault. Let's not be mean to him. He has it bad enough
ReplyDeleteOMFFSM.
ReplyDeleteThe toys in the background are too much. I keep expecting him to talk about a Swingline stapler...
Wow, I didn't know that about him, that puts this in a whole different light. I'm glad you pulled it.
ReplyDeleteYes, best pulled. I thought it was satire at first, too.
ReplyDeletehe's Harvey Pekar's former sidekick
ReplyDeleteTeh Gen'l is indeed merciful. I'm just sorry I didn't get to see it.
ReplyDeleteStandard snark aside, I have often wondered whether the uber-patriotic flying monkeys of the 101st Chairborne Division might suffer from some sort of low-level mental illness or brain dysfunction. Something like autism or Asperger's Syndrome that impairs their ability to empathise with other people, to sense irony or satire, to want to share stuff. Basically, a mind development level like a 4-year-old child has.
4-year-olds are centred on themselves, which is OK because that is the level of growth their brains are at. But as we grow older, the depth of our thinking expands. We get beyond the "mine, Mine, MINE!" stage, and the fascination with poo-poo, and judging everyone based on how they look or whether we'd want to have sex with them. Most of us, that is.
But some peoples' ability to perceive irony seems to be impaired. We think "They've got to be kidding" or "They can't really believe THAT!" because that's what it would be if we did it. Not so with these others.
Your mention of an autistic person brings that to mind. I've often wondered whether a lot of folks have inabilities to think in ways that don't render them non-functional in society -- this autustic guy could still post a YouTube, which I don't have the know-how to do -- but they're still deficient in some ways.
For instance, I have a bit of what's called "prosopaginosia," the inability to distinguish people by their faces. It's not like I see blanks when I look at someone's face, and I can recognise the people I deal with a lot. But most people just look sort of generic to me -- "middle-aged brunette woman," "bullet-headed bald guy who looks like Joe the Fake Plumber" etc. Faces don't stick in my mind. I'd be absolutely worthless with shows like "America's Most Wanted" because so many of those crims seem to me like so many other people I see. I often worry I won't know which gray-haired lady my own mum is when she meets me at an airport.
It's a mild flaw in how my brain works, but I'm still highly functional in life. Could it be that people like the bloke on this video that I missed, and the screeching weasels who we encounter on teh Internets tubez, have their own sub-acute shortfalls? It's more than an idle curiousity -- there are political ramifications.
Some anti-American people could see that President Flight-Commander Bush was a lying sack o' shite, whose every word was a lie and who was an oafish, insulting frat-boy bully. But there were other patriotic sorts who lacked that insight; for whom Herr Bush was a folksy, down-home honest man. These are the people who believe what they are told (as long as they first have decided that they like the person who's telling them) and are good at following orders. "Put those Jews in that FinalShower room." "That guy with the beard might know where the ticking time bomb is. Put him in a pyramid with a bunch of other naked guys until he talks." Sounds OK, if your brain is "NQR" (my favourite Aussie medical abbreviation, meaning "not quite right.")
Anyway, thanks for reading my musings. It's a long midnight shift at the hospital, no one is actively dying, all my vital signs have been charted and I've got another 90 minutes before I have to make rounds to see who's pissed/shat the bed. So I type to stay awake...
Son of a bitch. I saved some of my "essence" in a Mason jar last night and beat myself with a pair of barbecue tongs. Now I just feel foolish.
ReplyDeleteBe careful with that ‘empathy’ stuff, Sir. It isn’t popular with the GC3R’s these days.
ReplyDeleteYou could end up with somebody like Wendy Long just itching to tear you a new one for showing deference to an autistic guy.