Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff; oleaginous profiles of this Chicago political hack, a veteran of that unlovely team that polluted the Clinton White House, appeared in otherwise respectable journals, praising the combination of his religious devotion, his family-man image, his ruthless operating technique and his command of the vocabulary of profanity. Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care.

The bolding is mine.

Question: without going to any online dictionary, did you know this word? Kudos if you did. I rarely admit such a thing, but I did not know the meaning of this word.

Question 2.0: Do you remember any media outlet, mainstream Euro or American, decrying the craven worship TDL received circa 11/08? 

Question 3.0: If a European media outlet suddenly begins criticizing the American electoral process and who wins said electoral process's jackpot, does that mean we have a problem? 

Answer to 3.0 (the other two are obvious, of course): No - in America, we sort these things out, quickly, bloodlessly and painlessly. We don't resort to ethnic cleansing, genocide, hyperinflation (yet), or any number of other European manners of dealing with mistakes. I credit the European press with many things, American reportage among them (wait, that's a term, right?). However, you don't get to worship the ground an American POTUS walk on one year and then decry the base of the ground upon which he walks the next. 

That would make you ... Eurofags. And that would be wrong. 

You worry about Greece ... we'll take care of our own, at least for now. --z'King. 

Dear Katheryn Bigelow:

You don’t know me and you won’t read this, but I’d like to give you a hearty congratulations on your Best Director/Best Picture coup at the Oscars. I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker because I rarely go to the movies anymore and I noticed the late 70s soft-core skin flick Laura was re-released the same week as The Hurt Locker on DVD, and although it’s probably a bad thing, I opted for the French nudie-flick over what is now 2009’s best pic. Regardless, you directed two of the most enjoyable in-theater popcorn movies I’ve ever seen: Point Break and Strange Days.

==

I’m not sure how a woman gets into directing action films, and it’s a shame you don’t make more of them. It’s been laughed at by some (at least some I know), but Point Break is a kind of action template; it’s not Die Hard, nor is it Dirty Harry. Perhaps it’s the notion that only a woman could apply certain sensual elements to what is clearly a man’s world, and taking the late Patrick Swayze and grouping him with, among others, Keanu Reeves (he who Dutch-Ovens blockbusters while sleeping), Gary Busey, Tom Sizemore, Lori Petty, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, well, that was genius. Maybe your casting guru deserves some credit, but still. Point Break was the little brother to The Last Boy Scout in the early 1990s, and considering that TLBS was one of the Best Dude Films ever, directed by the Best Dude Movie Director Ever (Tony Scott) is saying something.

I’ve argued with friends and foes for years about Point Break, but I think I’ve won the argument because two decades later, no one has been able to improve on it. Yes, there have been movies where surfing plays a vital role (Blue Crush being the most photogenic), and yes, there have been great bank heist movies (Heat comes to mind), and yes, there have been Keanu Reeves films that have come since that ignite the TNT (The Matrix, of course), but it was you who managed to bring all of these scattered entities, these … things … together, and perfectly.

I rarely say this about any movies, especially the action kind, but there are literally no threads left untied in Point Break.

I don’t “love” actors in the sense that many do, but I do appreciate the ones who do work that I don’t like yet am struck by how well they do it. Patrick Swayze has been in movies I liked (PB, Outsiders, Road House) and movies I either haven’t seen or would not like (Ghost, Dirty Dancing), and then, the inexplicable films I knew I would hate but loved (To Wong Fu…). You coaxed a performance out of him in Point Break that was pitch-perfect Swayze: he was the roguish fella the women wanted, but the multi-disciplined Alpha-Gamma Male men can respect, equal parts bank-robber, surfer, Buddhist (Bodhi as a name is priceless) and, to top it all off, college football fan. I don’t say this with sarcasm: in Point Break, Patrick Swayze in one regard gave the performance he was born to give, and yet, in another, it is sadly among his least-remembered. Seriously, who does ballet while sky-diving? Better yet – who does it better than Patrick Swayze?

Moving onto Keanu Reeves, where, exactly, do we start? I’ll start right here: I don’t know how much control you had over the script, but that you could take Keanu Reeves playing a character named “Johnny Utah” and keep the entire production from not only becoming a farce is impressive in and of itself; that you could take this same script – its Buddhism, Johnny Utahs, surfing bank-robbers, Gary Busey etc. – and actually make the kind of Dude Film that lives on perpetually on TNT, this takes talent most directors would kill for. And, for a change, Keanu Reeves is believable playing the character written for him. This isn’t a knock against the actor – he’s probably been in more movies I’ve watched multiple times than any working actor – yet he tends to find himself in roles that aren’t only unbelievable to his character, they’re unbelievable to the audience. And yet, Keanu Reeves was Johnny Utah. He was the guy that played at Ohio State, he was the guy that had the great day at the Rose Bowl.

Few directors give me more than one unexpected gift, yet a few years later, you gave me a second.

That film was Strange Days, and it was epic.

==

Strange Days suffered because of a high cost and low revenue, and that is pretty much a fact. However, it was still a wonderful film. It tried to kill your career, and damn-near succeeded.

I saw it in the theater with my girlfriend at the time, Amy. We were fresh off having watched the steamer that was Showgirls, and we entered the theater hoping to be cleansed of that mess. We weren’t disappointed.

The film is, what’s the smarty-pants term? Kafka-esque.

You have Ralph Fiennes, fresh off playing Amon Goethe in Schindler’s List as this kind of digital hustler in a script penned by your then-husband, James Cameron. I’ve always been wax-on, wax-off with your ex, but I enjoyed his story for Strange Days, to say nothing of what he did in T2. Strange Days was a good story, although it gets a bit too ‘we shall overcome’ at the end (heavy foreshadowing to the lazy storytelling in the last third of Avatar). Yet you have Fiennes, you have Juliette Lewis, you have Angela Bassett, you have – again – Tom Sizemore (quoting his great line: “It’s not whether you’re paranoid, it’s whether you’re paranoid enough”), you have – why not? – Vincent D’Onofrio. Lots of future-tech – Strange Days was the first film I remember featuring nothing but widescreen Hi-Def televisions, among other things – and then there were the fabulous setpieces, culminating on the wild Y2K ring-in that reflects the racial paranoia that followed the Rodney King beating.

However, at the box office, it fell flat. I, for one, loved the film. Loved it.

==

I didn’t watch the Oscars last night, but after hearing you won Best Director and your film won Best Picture, I had to IMDB it, because after Point Break and Strange Days, I became a fan, and then you disappeared.

According to IMDB, you did a few episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, the forerunner to The Wire. You did a film released in France, then you did K-19 (unseen by me) and then you did an episode of “Karen Frisco,” and then you did Mission Zero, a short film starring Uma Thurman and a yellow Lamborghini, a film I’ve not seen but plan to ASAP.

Then you did The Hurt Locker.

And this is why I love America, why I love Hollywood, and why I couldn’t be happier for you.

==

Technically, it’s been 13 years since you were at the helm of a big-budget Hollywood movie. Point Break was spectacular, so you tackled Strange Days. It was big-budget, it tanked, and for 15 years – beginning with the production of Strange Days and ending in last night’s THL triumph - you were relegated to TV episodes, straight-to-videos, and exotic shorts – good work, of course – before finally getting a big break.

What’d you do with it?

You became the first woman to win Best Director.

Your film won Best Picture.

I don’t know about how things are with you and your ex, but I heard him say recently you saw five different cuts of Avatar, so either he was lying or he was pointing out that you guys still bounce ideas off each other. With James Cameron – who knows? He’s the king of the movie world, and I may not like much of his work, but he’s earned it. He can say what he damn-well pleases creating wealth like that.

Either way, who cares? That The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and you Best Director for it is quite an accomplishment; that it beat the biggest film evah while doing so, a film directed by your ex, all the more wild.

You make movies for dudes who like movies – they’re suspenseful, action-packed, good stories, great F/X, great all around. Please don’t waste what you’ve been given. Fifteen years in the wilderness probably taught you a lot, but know this – among guys who like movies, yours is a revered name. Now that you have multiple Oscars, build on it.

Dirty Harry could sure use a remake.

Sincerely – King Kurtz

This weekend I will join a few friends to attend a “Taking Back Our Country” rally in Tulsa, Okla., what New York Times faux-Conservative columnistDavid Brooks would no doubt dub the beginning of the Wal-Mart Woodstock. That it’s being held in Tulsa should bring the pain from those on both coasts, Donkeys and moderate GOPers alike, who no doubt hate having to share a country with a place as corn-fed as my native Oklahoma. I guess everyone has someone to look down on – I live in southern Oklahoma, a place Tulsans no doubt refer to as “drive-through country.” 

The event is an egalitarian super-show that is sure to horrify whichever journalists from the Times et al who draw the short straw and are forced to cover it, assuming they cover it at all. The idea that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are being preceded by two country music stars no doubt sounds like the fifth circle of hell, the extreme epicenter of Conservative self-indulgence. I’m sure equal shock was measured when no monster truck show was announced to follow Palin’s keynote, and not one witch has been rounded up for the locals to burn once the event concludes. 

My friends and I were joking that Sarah Palin is the only spoken-word tour in the world that could get us to pony up $114 for a show. A second interest in attending this event, the one which today’s piece concerns, is the future of what Gov. Palin called “Commonsense Conservatism” in Going Rogue, and what I’ve always considered just plain Conservatism. It seems that some people don’t consider Tea Party types (or Palin or Beck or anyone else who actually exhibits the values of Conservatism) Conservative. 

Curiously, my politics probably more closely align with Beck than they do with Gov. Palin, yet I don’t care for Beck (and haven’t since I read his bargain-bin’d book The Real America way back when) while I continue to support Gov. Palin as the only popular political figure who can undo the Gordian knot of regress the current Administration is hell-bent on tying, the kind of progressive riddle that serves only to set back American progress a generation. 

The Tea Parties are populist and grass roots by nature, and have been wholly effective of scaring the daylights out of the status quo types who don’t like to answer questions from people who aren’t dressed like them. That Brooks’s latest piece compares the contemporary Tea Parties with the New Left of the 1960s is continued evidence that David Brooks, to this day, has still not attended a Tea Party protest. In his piece, The Wal-Mart Hippies, Brooks writes: 

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor.

 I wonder which “polite society” it is Brooks is referencing? Is it to the one that has taken pre-juvenile delight in calling the millions of people who attend these rallies a sexual slur? Is it the polite society that continues running with every single non-truth rumor floated about Gov. Palin by anonymous sources? I always thought of polite society as the bourgeois, i.e. the middle class. Brooks refers to the Tea Partiers as such earlier in his latest installment of better-than-thou condescension – so, which is it? Are the Tea Parties bourgeois, or are the Tea Parties offending polite society? Is it possible to offend oneself? Surely “polite society” doesn’t mean the polite society of journalists and politicos who rolled over like a stuffed puppy so Candidate Obama could scratch its belly and tell it that it’s a good boy. 

My experience with the Tea Party movement (and with fans of Beck and supporters of Palin) has been that it’s made up of a) people who work for a living, pay taxes, own businesses and hold private property who b) resent being told they’re too ignorant to know what’s in their own best interest while c) watching their representatives actively not represent them by spending us into oblivion, taking over sectors of the economy and trying to force a wildly unpopular healthcare fiasco down our throats.

 The Conservatism Palin has discussed, the Conservatism that the Tea Parties largely want (they are certainly not one in the same), is one of lower taxes, heavy spending cuts, an end – or at the very least, a push back against – the crony capitalism on display recently, and, regarding healthcare, scrapping the current monstrosity. Other facets of Conservatism include fighting the War on Terror, strong national defense, protecting our national interests and the interests of our allies. I guess Brooks will have none of that, as he goes in for the kill near the end of his piece: 

For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

Hmm. If only a famous political figure had written a book covering this ground, a book that has sold more than two million copies. I guess Brooks didn’t read Going Rogue, since Gov. Palin covers this ground pretty firmly. Beginning on page 384, she writes:

What does it mean to be a Commonsense Conservative? At its most basic level, conservatism is a respect for history and tradition, including traditional moral principles. I do not believe I am more moral, certainly no better, than anyone else, and conservatives who act “holier than thou” turn my stomach. So do some elite liberals. But I do believe in a few timeless and unchanging truths, and chief among those is that man is fallen. This world is not perfect, and politicians will never make it so. This, above all, is what informs my pragmatic approach to politics.

I don’t know any Tea Party people or Palin supporters who want to overthrow the government or tear down the establishment. I am among those, though, who see a Washington that has lost touch of what its original establishment was, and I look forward to the kind of civic action citizens can take to change this: throwing many of the bums out in 2010, and throwing a great many more of them out in ’12. That will be change I can believe in.

 ==

Cross-posted at C4P.

Working today, I followed TDL’s comments on what needs to be done for healthcare via Limbaugh, and then when I got home, I read the speech, saw the photo-op with the creepy white-coats standing behind him, and it occurred to me that, in spite of the misinterpreted bill of health TDL was given (it was recommended that “continued moderation of alcohol” be employed, not “moderation of alcohol,” implying TDL is drinking too much) he is either a drunk, or a dry drunk, or an addict of some sort.

Why do I say this? One of the first signs of addiction is the rationalization of negative events that seem to compound in the throes of said addiction. Alcoholics (or gambling addicts, or sex addicts, et cetera) will outwardly blame their problems on anything but alcohol. They’ll blame their fiscal ills on the economy, the POTUS, their boss, their screeching wife or their whiny children. They’ll blame their relationship problems on the other person not understanding them. They’ll blame anything and everything – including their mental illness, their abuse at the hands of a parent when they were a child, their barking dog – for their problems, but they damn sure won’t blame alcohol.

Reasonable drunks and any sane, sober human being, can point it out to them in a second, and they too will get blamed.

I might consider TDL a buffoon, a phony and a flim-flam man, but when the rubber meets the road, he is addicted to getting any progressive notion/concept/ideal/idea/theory of healthcare passed. He has not only staked his inevitable one-term Presidency on it, he has staked the future of Donkey party. The American people have spent the last seven months screaming at its representatives that WE DO NOT WANT THIS, and yet, we are less than a month away from getting it, and nothing me and you and everyone we know can do a damn thing about it.

Whatever monstrous bill the Donkeys, urged on by TDL (who conveniently isn’t up for re-election in ’10) passes will include federal dollars for abortion, it will include more federal dollars for coverage of illegal immigrants, it will include rationing starting in ’14, it will include the Palinian death panels, it will include everything every left-wing nut has dreamed of for the last 60 years, up to and including the rationalization for the sterilization of the opposition.

So, here’s my solution, if the endgame of passage is inevitable.

I didn’t come to this over a period of days or weeks, I came to it while talking to my parents this afternoon in their living room. At first the conversation was normal, and then I began – as I tend to do – rolling. With a mixture of pride and horror, my parents watched as I unveiled a 10-minute diatribe about TDL’s biography, Sarah Palin’s negotiations with the CEO’s of oil companies regarding increasing the tax on their activities in Alaska, and yes, what we can do to reverse the tide that is now about to drown the American public in an unwanted, unfunded mandate to cover every last Donkey constituent perpetually, because that is what this bill is.

The plan: we push for a full-scale electoral overhaul/political bloodbath (not involving actually blood, of course) of Congress. We get at least 67 Conservative Republicans into the Senate, and we get at least 300 Conservative Republicans and Independents in the House, and adopting a notorious Slim Pickens quote from Blazing Saddles, we impeach the shit out of them.

While the current Speaker of the House and the current Senate Majority Leader (arguably) cannot be impeached, The POTUS, Veep, and any POTUS nominee can be. Per Article 2.5 of z’Constitution states that the House has the power of impeachment by simple majority, and 3.6 dictates that the trial is held in the Senate, overseen by the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, and 2/3 (67 votes assuming a full house) necessary to convict.

[I’m not a lawyer, clearly, but it should be noted that in any impeachment of any officer – and there has been one Senator impeached – of the Executive Branch is overseen by the Vice President; in the event the Veep is impeached, it’s understood that the Senate President Pro Tempore would oversee the event. –CBK]

What would be the grounds? How about bribery, for starters? Aside from Pres. Obama suddenly nominating the brother of a swing vote to the Federal bench, let’s not forget the technical bribes of the so-called Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker Bailout, etc.

==

How likely is this to happen? Not very. However, listening to talk radio all day and hearing people say “whatever will we do?” I say, well, go to the *$*^#&*#%ing Constitution!” When the overwhelming bulk of the people is against what its leaders are doing, you not only throw the bums out, you do it with style.

It’s a travesty to even be writing about this. When TDL spoke today, he didn’t say the word “reconciliation” one time (yeah, I’m sure you read that on the ‘tubes too). Not once. He is standing on high in front of the white coats ordering a relatively obscure Senate maneuver intended to reconcile the budget, and yet he dare not speak its name.

He is a wicked, wicked little man. He’ll get his bill (possibly), but his party will pay for it dearly.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you think the outrageous and outraged right, the angry tea party types and other such humdrum so considered with scorn are mad now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Note to The Dear Leader: the time for blaming Bush is over – in 10 months, you’ll get to blame obstructionist GOPers. Hope you do – I look forward to see that upwardly raised chin after you become the first POTUS to lose all 50 states in ’12. GOPers – screw this up, and you’re going down with TDL. –z’King

Perfect. 

Dope show. Buy drugs, watch this vid. Good stuff. 

[My attorney informed me that I should clarify "drugs" as the kind that are legal and stuff. Obviously.

[Proclamation from the King: I thought this was lost last week, but I found it. I think most of you are sick of hearing about Tiger Woods and I’m bored with writing about it, but I cobbled together one final parting shot, equal parts misogyny and the deathly chill of reason. I urge you to not read this piece or watch this video, but if you must soldier on, I applaud you. I actually cleaned it up substantially, if that helps.]

So in the midst of all that is false and ugly about the Tiger Woods saga, you have to believe one thing about this man: His heart is not content with being Pig Woods. He really wants to be the Tiger we once thought we knew and loved. And you have to love a guy -- at least a little -- for that. –Maggie  Gallagher, TownHall, 2.24.10 

XXXX joined the group Why buy the PIG when all you get is a little sausage?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A mega-wealthy, globally-recognizable athlete screws around on his wife. Punchline? No, there’s no punchline, dumbass. Ol’boy worked his whole life, lit up his sport like the Fort Sumter, reset records  for decades to come, and then …. Dumbass got married to a cutie blonde thing. Once he got married, the story changed, and it culminated with her clubbing him with a … club. And people cheered. They said ‘you go girl…’ and suddenly, the golfer I never considered who plies a sport I don’t care for was humanized.

Everyone is tough in retrospect, tru-dat, but I’d like to think my response would’ve been: “Hit me again, I double-dog dare ya!”

Ego aside, I ask you this: If we agree that the XX is the weaker gender, and if we agree that it is wrong to hit a woman, what do we say when we’re passed out on … Ambien …. and our crazy Nordic bitch starts pounding on us with a 9-iron?

Fore!

Allow me to come out guns blazing and induce a gut-check fact: a) Elin Woods is not a victim and b) misandry is the American cultural norm that flies under the PC radar. As this will be taken the wrong way, I will re-emphasize – the only reason that she’s staying with Tiger Woods is because he can grant her lots of really pretty shiny things. There’s a word for women who spend time with men who can and will buy them shiny things, but I’ll not mention it.

However, like raccoons, Elin Woods likes pretty, shiny things.

The first quote above comes from a writer at the Conservative site TownHall, the former a writer who I tend to like on a site I tend to enjoy; the second was a group joined by a disgruntled XY friend on Facebook.

I’ll say it now, and in plain English: if you refer to men as pigs, then you’re a dirty whore.

There, I said it. Oh, and you’re sort of not really original, either.

To repeat: If you are a disgruntled woman and refer to men as pigs, you are a dirty whore. Yes, if you equate men of any kind with swine, you are a simpleton, the kind of woman who puts more thought into her nail polish than why your fella is screwing everything that moves. The best part of this? You already know it.

I don’t eat pork. I’ve lectured about this on this site repeatedly, but I don’t eat the flesh of a pig. Why not? A few reasons, none of them having to do with Judaism or Islam.

First, pigs are human-like. Not in that way that dogs and cats can be human-like, but in that really creepy way where, if you watch them long enough, pigs exhibit many of the qualities of Man. Like chimpanzees, if you give a pig enough rope, he’ll figure out how the hell to get out of his situation. Although this isn’t the end-all-be-all of the argument, it wasn’t an accident that George Orwell chose pigs to be the rulers of Animal Farm.

Second, the pig has light pink flesh – just like a human – and like humans, the pig, when bored, reverts to squalor.

Third – and I don’t like this, but it is what it is – pigs organize.

I don’t know that I buy it, but it’s said that among humans who’ve had to eat other humans in desperate survival scenarios, they tend to taste like pork.

In Pulp Fiction Jules makes the argument that pigs “eat and root in shit,” which is a valid observation, and I’ve always countered this by saying that you pack enough humans in a confined area for an extended period of time, they too will eat and root in shit, except for the rooting part, because clearly humans don’t root.

I’ll take Jules’s observation a step farther, though – give one pig one acre with 20 square-feet of shelter, and you will see a pen so organized it will defy the word creepy. Yes, pigs love to wallow because they are natural-born hedonists. Just as bears love beer and dancing, pigs love to wallow. But give them some space, and after the sty-effect, you will find a pen that is … strange.

When women refer to men as pigs, we laugh. When I say we, I mean this porcine mouth-breather.

It’s a canard from the 1970s, but the feminist reaction to masculine behavior with the epithet “pig” is – rather, has – become so ingrained in the culture it’s comical. That a friend of mine on Facebook joined a group not-so-cleverly inverting the notion of ‘why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ is beside the point. When I hear men referred to as pigs, I laugh, as I know it’s the desperate mating call of a once prim and proper sow now facing the ravages of gravity.

Why are we pigs? Is it because we root out truffles? Is it because we snort? Is it because we mate with sows?

When I think of men as pigs, I think of “Cagney and Lacey” or at least, er, “Kate and Allie,” but the larger point is I hear unfuckable women saying untenable things. It’s not that they’re bad or misguided or wrong, they’re just silly, in the same way observing a fish needing a bicycle is … odd. I hear them bleat stereotypes and I’ve no need to shake or slap them – I laugh at them.

Of course, it does not and never will work like that. Tiger “Pig” Woods is now popularly evil and an off-Broadway hack’s bread and butter because he happens to have a cock dangling between his legs. You know this, I know this, and this is how it is.

We know what the pig implication is: sloppy, dirty, sub-human, and based in filth. If that is your view of men, then I weep for your procreative, carnal future and whatever poor sap may find himself in the blinding canard of your desperation.

Yeah, I'm hooked. 

Frankly, I consider Doctor Zero to be the best Conservative writer working today. I put him above Mark Steyn, David Kahane, Jonah Goldberg, and many others. He's a blogger, he works for free and he routinely produces work that is above and beyond the notion that Conservatives have to be twice as smart most of the time.  

This piece isn't so much baffling - it's not - but it hits many nerves. He wrote a piece about suicide, and well, here we go...

Excerpt:

You may view suicide as your last chance to shake the pillars of a world that has turned its back on you. The world doesn’t need any more shaking. If you’ve been telling yourself that no one will miss you when you’re gone, you are wrong. Your suicide would tear a hole through the future, and nothing could ever fill the space where you used to be. You might think you’re alone, but you don’t have to walk more than a couple of miles from your house to see a building full of people who would be delighted to meet you. There are places like Suicide Hotlines, staffed by men and women who have spent their entire lives preparing to hear the sound of your voice, and greet every day hoping to learn your name.

I encourage you to read the entire piece.

As someone who "deals" with chronic depression, I admire the good Doctor's piece, even as I deplore it. 

Why would I deplore it? First, I tell you this: it's a beautiful piece of writing.Before launching into my critique, I will tell you that it's refreshing to read about suicide and its causes. 

After admiring its beauty, I also tell you that guilt, the kind laid out in DZ's piece, is one of the driving forces of suicide. I doubt one suicide type hasn't done the calculus, that horrible, horrible calculus: how many people will I hurt by going through with this? I get his point - taking your life will cause harm to others (as a writer, I admired the phrasing 'ripping a hole' in humanity). 

Guilt, more than any of Man's traits, drives suicide. Guilt, guilt, guilt. 

It's not pretty and we all have capacity for it. Personally, I'm wracked by it, always have been. Depressive types wander over to the work of Ayn Rand and her novel Atlas Shrugged for many reasons, but the notion that John Galt is a "guilt-free" man is appealing. 

Monotheistic religious observation is built on guilt. So long as a metaphysical authority can hold sway over a person's instinctive sense of morality, his sense of duty, then said authority can control the person. Presenting an ideal an individual cannot live up to is a perfect way to imbue guilt, and it's a perfect way to establish authority. 

Regarding depression, I admire what Doctor Zero wrote, yet I disagree with his sentimental view. I wish I knew what drives Man's sense of guilt, and I grieve for those who are so stricken with guilt that they take their own life. 

I consider depression an illness only because I live with it. It's difficult for those who don't endure it to understand, but for the truly depressed, it is not merely emotional, it is physical as well. I've been hospitalized for it, given drugs for it, and I continue to endure it. I don't tell you this to curry sympathy - that's the last goddamm thing I want - but to illustrate that even among the most rational and least sympathetic among us - me - it not only exists, it is a fact of life. When I'm going through a blue stage, a bout of meloncholy, a passage through certain circadean rhythms, I *literally* tell those who care about me that I'm off, I'm ill, that I don't care, that I don't feel good. 

The worst part about depression is the toll it takes on the people who love you. 

I respect and appreciate what DZ attempted with his latest piece, i do. It's powerful writing, and it's good enough to be higlighted across z'nets - after being promoted from HotAir's GreenRoom, the piece splashed about across z'net. 

All that said - it's, at the very least, an affliction, and a bad one. As bad as depression is, it rarely ends in suicide. An aspect of DZ's piece that I enjoyed was his idea - repeated throughout - that human life is special. Obviously, it is  - the larger point for me, without being silly, is that life is gorgeous. 

Live it. 

The laughter at the beginning was an error, but this was my first try. I am pleased. This, obviously, is my updated rant about Toyota in the previous piece.