thud. empty. hollow.

how fucking mad are you

"If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”

-Rosenham

In the early 1970s a psych professor and research scientist at Stanford named David Rosenham sent a dozen or so grad students to a dozen psychiatric hospitals with absurdly simple instructions.

Enter the facility voluntarily. Submit to psych eval and assessment. Make no sudden movements. Do nothing aggressive, bizarre, or overtly psychotic.

Say nothing but the words thud, empty, hollow.

If necessary, designate the origin of these words to be the shadow voices internal.

All of the students were admitted as involuntary patients, diagnosed as either schizophrenic or schizoaffective or elsewhere on the schizo spectrum.

One thing I know from eleven years as a milieu supervisor on a high acuity psych ward, schizoaffective is the allspice of the DSM version zero psych diagnostic kitchen or trailer park meth lab.

It means the doctor has no fucking clue.

Why am I revisiting a fifty year old psych field study. Because I cannot say for certain whether half the country is mad or just pretending to be.

I do not have a clue.

I don’t have citations but I believe it’s been historically and scientifically proven that humans on the political right often don’t grasp irony, satire or even the most tongue in cheek dry humor, even if explained to them in the most elementary fifth grade language.

Likewise the pathologically woke left.

I have for years tended to regard the willful ignorance of reality and resistance to a sense of humor plus the failure to embrace critical thinking as unmistakable evidence of hypocrisy, projection, deflection, self-hatred and blame shifting in general but now am starting to wonder if it’s a physiological defect.

Not in the racial bell curve of intelligence quotients or eugenics sense of the phrase, more the way your dog might rightly assume your ears are defective because you simply can not hear or perceive the infinite frequencies of sound a dog can hear.

Neither can you ever gain access to the wiki of knowledge a dog can extract from sniffing the neighbor’s mulberry bush, or the neighbor’s ass.

Given the endless amount of data humans are oblivious to, if the ongoing american culture war that boils down to reality, as in what the fuck is real and what is not, if this war over the truth were going down between dogs and humans triggered by a debate over whether old yeller or courage the cowardly deserves a military funeral or not, the dogs would perhaps rightly say the humans are deaf.

The humans can hear nothing of value.

They have noses useless for anything but breathing and half of them are mouth breathers and they will never begin to understand what scent x or sound zed means, therefore all hope is lost and they must be reeducated. If not they may try to kill us all in our sleep.

Meanwhile the humans are trying to cozy up to the cats, who don’t give a fuck.

None of which is hopeful or useful, I know.

I don’t know how to make people on either the near or far right or the extreme left understand dry humor or irony or even how to be self-aware enough to realize when they’re being hypocritical.

The confounding thing too, I know for a fact that we need the right wing to exist, if only to balance the left and foster moderation. I wish we had the sense to pass laws allowing for the rise of a multi party system but that is such a pipe dream it’s pointless to talk about.

All we can hope for is something massive to come along and wake them up.

But if you’ve seen the asteroid flick you already know half the country refuses to look up. They will not look up. Because they choose not to. Because their leader tells them there is nothing up there.

They are determined to not look the fuck up even if it kills them.

Empathy is a real thing. Not a made up concept. Not for the meek. Not a sign of weakness.

The good samaritan story is central to the new testament.

The lynchpin to chrstianity, some might say.

But somehow it’s a story the ambassadors of the christian right either don't believe or don't understand.

They should read it again. Read it twice.

For fuck sake. Read it for the memory of the false martyr Charlie Kirk.

If any person in power or with the influence over millions of followers truly believes empathy doesn't exist, they must be peacefully removed.

And while it’s tempting to say this is hopeless, get back in the hole and put the lotion in the basket motherfucker, the afflicted aka the empathy deniers are the dauntless prospects who buggered the ropes course at dystopian summer camp and deserve some measure of patience.

This is a civilized society last I checked and in a civil society the empathy afflicted ought to be offered therapy and meds and maybe lose their access to heavy machinery and firearms.

When you can explain the Velveteen Rabbit and how it makes you feel about your six year old Biff or Becky self and what it means to you now, then you can have your gun back.

But only enough ammo to kill yourself or stop a grizzly bear.

Because fuck off, that's why. Because you are the reason women would rather run afoul of the grizzly if lost in the woods.

Because it’s going to take more than a measured reading and good old fashioned crying jag over the velveteen bunny of light and sorrow to convince the rest of us you can play well with others.

And because the suicide option and the right to stand one’s ground against a grizzly bear were the original intent of the second amendment.

That and the hypothetical future resistance to monarchs in foreign lands, not our own carnival huckster. The rest of the constitution was meant to be water tight. To be resistant to the rise of the huckster but nothing is water tight when humans get hold of it and start fucking about, pulling wires and flipping switches without considering where that unmarked wire goes or what the ripple effect of flipping that switch, or if it might ever be flipped back.

The gerrymander and the filibuster come to mind.

And yes I realize this country was founded by cowboys, gangsters, pirates, outcasts, rebels, and dreamers. I also understand that given the wild west rape and plunder nature of the founders, the other nine amendments and the pesky software updates that came along later to do with suffrage and civil rights would likely not be possible without the second.

After you can write a coherent velveteen rabbit essay about empathy, loss, nostalgia and self-awareness, I’d prescribe thirty days working a soup kitchen for the homeless. Then you will need to go read goodnight moon to a group of crippled queer kids from the Gaza strip, properly known as Palestine.

Followed by a deconstruction of the epic if you give a mouse a cooke. Tell the children what it means about impulse control, desire and lust and selfishness but without rolling your eyes or otherwise being a dick.

If you fail the story time session, I’m sorry but it's back to shaming yourself and your family on the ropes course and a whole new velveteen thesis statement.

During the chaos of the coming weeks ICE will be rounding up the homeless for their own safety.

.

uh huh.

oh no what's this you don't have your birth certificate handy?

welcome to armadillo alcatraz.

because this America.

we go full retard.

.

The saddest dumbest thing, the most american thing about this cluster of fucks, every single one of these right wing provocateurs—Ben Shapiro, Steve Crowder, Tim Pool, Michael Knowles, Adam Walsh and Charlie Kirk—if you have the belly to watch even a handful of clips, look closely. Take in the body language, verbal tics, speaking style, shitty manners and zero social skills.

yeah I stuck the m dashes in there on purpose.

Add the above to the ever simmering indignation and clueless hypocrisy and their whole persona boils down to a massive inferiority complex.

The same applies to the vice president Vance, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, Jesse Waters, Tucker Carlson, Brian Kilmeade and the governor of Florida aka proprietor of the death camp alligator alcatraz Ron Desantis.

Likewise Musk, Zuck, Thiel.

It's lazy and too easy to dismiss the affliction as just small dick dickishness but never rule it out.

They were never the cool kids. Never even the cool nerds. Nobody liked them in high school. Nobody wanted to kiss them.

Many of them are failed screenwriters, failed actors and failed standup comics, where the bitterness runs deep and revenge is cold sour dish.

They never got laid till they started making mad money as podcasters, much of it funneled from Russia, which is surely the most deliciously ironic and dangerous thing of the whole right wing provocateur ecosystem.

I won’t bother to zero in on a particular name but statistically speaking at least one of them is most definitely closet gay or drag and churning with self hatred.

Look in the mirror America.

We are at each other’s throats because nobody wanted to sit with these sad sack dudes at lunch.

If you leave in your wake such a massive social media footprint as Charlie K, it’s not difficult to isolate any one of the hateful zero perspective white man supreme christo fascist statements he left hanging in the breeze and to then argue that while murder is not the answer, it is objectively better for society as a whole that his voice is off the board.

I should pause to remind us all that just as every american soldier ever killed on foreign soil died for our right to burn the flag, Kirk had every right to say and think the misguided hateful things that he did.

‘Hate speech is free speech.’ -Charlie Kirk

But does free speech apply to liars. This gets hazily abstract rather quickly as it delves into conditional definitions of various words but I would refer you the slander and libel statutes.

But if you zoom in on the quote about empathy being an imaginary concept, that is the one that should freak all of us out because to say that out loud and keep saying it, to not just repeat it but to double down on it, to keep insisting such an idea is true, to inflict this perverse falsehood on younger minds, a solid argument can be made that you are a sociopath and should not be talking to or debating young minds that are still soft, still forming.

My last year or two of teaching college students I moved from strictly teaching upper level contemporary lit and creative writing and took on one section per semester of freshman composition or basic writing 101.

The first thing I taught them was to forget all of the five paragraph essay crap learned in high school, where you repeat the thesis statement over and over again until both you and the reader are numbed into giving or not giving a fuck.

The second thing was details. To gather and memorize endless details, about everything.

The third and most important was prolonged abstract discourse and instruction on how to learn to write from the point of view of other humans not oneself, and what it means to pull this magic act off with grace and insight. I dumped as much weight and emphasis as possible on this one because without this element in the intellectual toolbox, college freshmen or fresh persons would have a very long and arduous academic road ahead, just as anyone lacking basic math skills is baffled by a cash register.

If any student arrived in one of my second year creative writing shops without a grasp of pov, they would learn hard and fast or they were encouraged to drop the class because trying to be any sort of professional writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or journalism without command of pov is like trying to get a gig as a tone deaf piano player. Not impossible perhaps, but not likely.

If any right wing leaning writer out there is reading this and believes they can explain to the rest of the class how empathy aka the feeling or perception of another’s pain is not only not real but a made up concept intended to make you weak, as put forth by Kirk and Musk and others, I would love to hear or read that dissertation.

Find me here in the substack abyss anytime or in the zuckverse at will7christopher.

In the meantime if you are troubled or confused by any of the above or below please read my recent essay highway 64 and how the the trail of tears is a flat circle and connect the dots.

And well now I’ve opened the OKC bombing worm can elsewhere on substack, I should clarify that my memory re OKC was meant to point out that I don't recall right and left white folks accusing each other of not feeling the right feels or whatever in the aftermath. I remember it being folded into the same what the fuck response assigned to the unabomber, who was also active in mid ‘90s aka theory of the fives.

In short, most of us assumed it was someone who was pure fucking crazy, largely because the previous lone wolf white guys who had done similar shit in recent memory were not motivated by right or left ideology but by a deeply incoherent reading of Catcher in the Rye and a pathological unrequited crush on Jodie Foster.

In retrospect one can easily argue that yeah Theo K went about it the wrong way but the dude kinda had a point.

Likewise the thing about Timothy McVeigh, if you set aside the whole openly bring on the race war vibe of his action in OKC, and if you were a young pissed off gen X writer or artist at the time, and like me had friends who came back from desert storm fucked up by the burn pits and the apathetic rage over going to needless war to protect Kuwaiti oil fields, one thing you could relate to was nonspecific anti government sentiment.

Anybody who had read Howard Zinn and Chomsky in the ‘90s was aware the whole texas hold ‘em jacks and sevens wild wild west founding fathers mythology and the christian nationalism it spawned was a smoke and mirrors shell game designed to keep the peasants in place.

The government left and right was and still is primarily in the business of protecting capitalism over all things.

That was also when they started with granting corporations personhood, the fuck seriously?

The only bigger fuckup was designating some violent crimes as hateful and others just plain old crimes because that was step one in making the eventual jump to the formal law enforcement and punishment of thought crimes.

I mean, everyone has seen Minority Report, yeah?

If anyone still reading somehow doesn’t believe the government is preparing to use or is already using the skynet chat bots to predict the future including your own future crimes not yet committed, you aren’t paying attention.

If you recognize the massive flaws in our flavor of government shadow funded capitalism and want to bring it down by any means necessary, it’s safe to assume you are not alone.

For me, Timothy McVeigh and the Utah kid and Luigi all have more in common with the Columbine shooters than with the unabomber or with the ultimate big bad wolf trained and funded by the CIA known as Osama bin Laden.

I’m not the only one who's noticed it feels safer or there’s less looking over the shoulder anyway when posting or writing or speaking the whole truth or stating your actual beliefs here on substack than elsewhere in the cloud.

This is largely to do with the fact there are still no ads here, not yet.

Because with ads come overreach.

And too because writers are by nature mavericks rule breakers assholes contrarians and freaks and I’ve been gladdened by the one for all damn the man vibe ever present within the fiction ghetto aka the orange pillow fort for the weird kids poetry dorks and the D&D outcasts in the substack corner of the cloud and I assure you it's worth sticking up for.

Then again the final shot of Detective Mills in the back seat of a black and white trying not to think of his wife’s pretty head in a box comes to mind every day.

‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for, I agree with the second part..’

-Detective Somerset

What ought to be on all our minds is that history shows no authoritarian government left or right has ever been removed by vote or tidal wave sentiment or even a general labor strike, but by revolution.

I still believe a strike ought to be the first knife thrown down.

If every american who punches a clock just rolled over tomorrow and said nah not gonna for 24 hours, just long enough to give an ominous squeeze to the balls of the supply chain, there might be at least a conversation about things like a realistic minimum wage and medicare for all, the forgiveness of predatory debt collection, and sensible gun control. That is, presuming there were a remotely normal aka not so wantonly corrupt and dysfunctional administration in place.

This one is so far gone past normal they can’t see it in the rear view and my gut says they would fast forward past negotiating with the labor strike and jump straight to the whole can’t we like shoot them in the leg or feed them to alligators or something conversation.

The reality is that if there is any sort of civil war sequel or reboot, it won't be a race war. And yes as I write this I’m aware that more than one black man in Mississippi has over the past week been found strung up gallows style on college campus, and that the national news is ignoring it. I didn’t say that racism is dead and buried or the klan is inactive. But I would point out that the cities on fire during the George Floyd protests and marches were conspicuously majority white, or roughly 90 percent non black. The cities like Memphis and Atlanta, Oakland and Baltimore that are anywhere on the spectrum of fifty fifty black and white saw no such fires. If I’ve forgotten an outlier, please drop a note in the comments.

It won't be jan sixers v antifa or maga v queer nation. It won't even be a proper holy war, though it may be clumsily framed as such.

If anything it will be the biggest wealthiest states saying fuck this and mobilizing their own national guard to protect their interests, their economies and their workers by shutting down their state lines.

And the white house responding with some version of nuh uhh my ball my yard my rules.

I’ve long held the suspicion that just as was openly acknowledged in senate hearings decades ago that every major newspaper, magazine and TV news desk was infiltrated by our own CIA agents put in place to massage, influence and bend the overall narrative and the vagaries of social angst, there were also CIA agents installed from the jump at every social media company.

When they splintered the occupy wall street movement aka the students and the working class aka the 99.9 percent into a dozen stripes on the pride flag on the left side and boogaloo proud boys oath keepers et al to the right, all of whom might have voted Bernie, they did so using the algorithm with malice and intent, never contemplating the day of the golden escalator.

Because at the time The Apprentice was just another obnoxious reality show starring a washed-up ‘80s celebrity nobody liked.

Likewise nobody was scratching their heads wondering uh hey guys, what if the Kardashian girls take over the white house ten or twenty years down the line, what then.

Nobody stopped to think boy howdy what if this grifter selling fake university diplomas and shitty rib eyes on the shopping network becomes president, we may just find out what fuck around and find out actually means.

Not until Obama rightfully but unfortunately put the grifter and shameless birther in his place on prime time television.

.

what ye say Turkish

the big rabbit gets fucked

oy proper fucked?

no Tommy ye twit, fucked like zee germans.

.

Do you know what a turtle is, Leon?

Do you make these questions up Mr Holden.

The tortoise is on its back in the sun.

Or do they write ‘em down for you.

The tortoise is dying Leon but you aren’t helping.

Why aren’t I helping.

.

We are all american psychos.

The Charlie kirk gaslighting is goddamn creepy. Like fuck off maga, don’t tell me he was a national hero. He was just a weird cringey right wing influencer with a dumb haircut but apparently beloved by the right like he was their Heath Ledger. What the fuck is this. I didn’t wish him dead. I didn’t pay any attention to him really, I just tagged him as less obnoxious than Pool or Walsh and less of an idiot than Crowder, but not the next JD Vance.

This was an error on my part, on all of our parts.

Because all indications are that he was surely a top five or top two pick to be Vance’s running mate three years from now, which ought to make everyone among us shudder.

Charlie Kirk was not a scum bag like Andrew Tate. He wasn’t running cam girls in Romania. He wasn’t acting like a total cunt 24/7. He wasn’t running a bitcoin pyramid scheme, to my knowledge. If I step back and look at his family photos, I can only assume he believed he was saying and doing the right things to make the world better, or better for people like him, and most days reckon that is about the best we can hope for.

Still it strikes me as very strange that anybody cared enough about his existence to go the whole sniper in the bell tower routine. If the alleged shooter had walked up to the debate stage and shot him point blank, somehow it would have made more sense.

I mean, if this were all reversed the right would be howling psyop yeah?

The nutshell version is that it’s exactly zero more sad than the thousands of other folks murdered in America every year. And considering the number of school shootings, from Sandy Hook to the Denver school on the day of, where the victims may legitimately be described as innocents compared to an online provocateur making stupid money by monetizing conflict and division, an argument could be made that it isn’t sad at all, that it just is.

Not that I have the oxygen or neurons really to spare much further on this shit but surely I’m not the only one whose second or third thought upon seeing the Charlie K video and the explosion of insane reactions in the fallout was a scene from The Departed.

cui bono?

cui gives a fuck it’s got a friggin bow on it.

Lost in the past week has been the whole Epstein birthday book, which.. if you haven’t seen it or considered the time and effort that went into making that book, and how grotesque all the barely veiled references to the island are, you may want to google it. Don’t ask Claude or grok or GPT about it, they are liars and tricksters, they hallucinate and make shit up and they waste our fresh drinking water. Either way anyone with a prefrontal cortex should recognize the whole of that book was about to be an atomic bomb turd in the maga punchbowl that now is not getting the sunshine the house of Trump so fucking dreads.

Likewise the fact that Charlie Kirk apparently turned down a hundred million dollars to pimp genocide for Israel may just be a coincidence.

Or maybe not.

I don’t expect we will ever know anymore decisively than we know who was on that grassy knoll.

It would be Machiavellian genius to say look y’all we need something huge, we need to sacrifice a pawn and kill multiple pesky birds with one sniper’s bullet then declare the shooter was trantifa and start rounding up the trans to take their guns and put them in camps or fuck it just decree that anybody with an X on passport is a non citizen.

If I were writing a screenplay and needed to tie a bow on a similar fictional scenario in my head, I would certainly float this possibility. But none of us have had a glimpse of the Trump admin ever being remotely so organized, competent, or disciplined to pull off such a doctor evil scheme.

Then again.

“you know the score Deck, if you’re not cop you’re not people.”

Anybody else flash to the endless idiotic zero evidence notion floated by Trump and Vance and every loyalist with a platform including Kirk about how the fearsome and diabolical radical communist but also incompetent feckless snowflaky left not only tried to silence the orange man by orchestrating the raid on his Florida fortress of solitude and so rudely poked through his sock drawers... uh yeah dude the long arm of antifa is totally a thing.

Then after all that and more scary communist hijinks they tried to kill the chosen one in Butler PA.

The loyalists said this shit over and over again like mean girls trying to make the word fetch mean something.

“They” tried to kill dear leader.

“They” being the unspecified faceless left.

The loyalists repeated this nonsense like every full of shit Karen who ever opened his or her mouth knowing he or she was full of shit.

“They” tried to kill our favorite stinky incoherent grampa.

“They” are so mean and fearsome but also useless and lame, those radical communists.

oh no.

Meanwhile anyone with eyes half a brain and a search bar realized that the generally useful pronoun the loyalists so unironically despise was carrying water in a sieve because the kid in Butler was the textbook definition of a confused untreated psych patient with a splintered grasp of reality and a smattering of mostly right some left and muddled meaningless posts online who should never have such easy breezy access to such a powerful weapon, nor the lazy ability to purchase ammo on his way to the rally with a fake or no ID.

But just as with Sandy Hook, Parkland, the Pulse, the Vegas strip, and the El Paso walmart.. now was the time for sensitive thoughts prayers and accusations against the left, while any talk of more strict or merely sensible gun laws was insensitive to the 2nd amendment’s feelings or something.

All that mattered was “they” tried to kill orange bad santa.

Uh huh.

Everywhere online and on Fox news this past week, “they” murdered Charlie Kirk for speaking his brave truth.

Again I would say fuck off maga. Nobody is buying it. Or the only ones buying it were already thirsty for the blood of the empathy unimpaired.

Take a peek at any comprehensive list of the vile unenlightened things Kirk had to say about pregnant girls carrying their rapist’s baby to term, including hypothetically his own daughter, or black airline pilots and black judges on the high court, and his greatest hit, the unfortunate but necessary sacrifice of a few public school children every year in order to again, not hurt the feelings of the 2nd stans.

“They” are at war with us, says Jesse W on Fox.

The more this shit is repeated the more the loyalists will believe it was somehow an organized plot on the left, regardless of who or what the identity of the shooter might be and who might have helped him pull off the snipe from 200 yards on an unsecured rooftop then vanish like a ninja into Utah where his primary disguise was being white.

He surely had help somewhere, or else was stupidly lucky, or the law enforcement officials in Utah are grossly incompetent. The loyalists have already tagged him as trantifa Jason Bourne summoned by the scary radical communists represented by the pronoun “they” for obvious dreadful reasons.

Because the loyalists want blood and because troops are already in the streets.

Do you remember Trump in 2024, all summer talking about enemies of the state?

Those enemies are us. The left primarily, yes. But I’d argue too he would be perfectly cool with extending that to all of the 99 percent. Anybody who has been paying attention must realize he is no more loyal to the red hat mob than to the endless list of republicans and maga sympathizers to get bounced out of his circle, from Michael Cohen to Rudy G to his best pal Jeff Epstein.

I’ve said this elsewhere, the question on the table is what kind of American are you.

Thud. Empty. Hollow.

Are you insane or are you just pretending.

And if the latter, are you pretending empathy is a thing to be written off as imaginary for obscure purposes you and I and all of us will come to regret later.

Because it fucking matters.

fade.

……….

endnote.

I am self-employed. I have a new novel nearly finished, I run writer’s workshops in the cloud, and I take on freelance editing gigs. I mention this not only because I also spend twenty hours per week if not more on this and the velvet and rule 35 substacks, publishing new and never published short stories, chapters and essays about writing and film, homelessness, psychosis, crime, and addiction, but also because the essays I consider to be if not vital at least useful to society as a whole.

These I intend to maintain on the Involuntary stack as free to all.

If you have a raw first novel or collection of stories that you don’t know how to fix and would like to submit for a rule 35 gunslinger’s autopsy, please drop me a line.

If you are one of my longtime subscribers and you have not kept up with the mad flurry of new posts and now find yourself eyeballing a paywall on one of the short stories, I’d ask you to consider becoming a founding member or perhaps purchase one of the year long packages priced at around fifty bucks, or the price of taking a date to the movies with smuggled gummy bears and no popcorn.

Because we all have too many monthly sub fees bleeding us like a thousand razor cuts.

If you’re short disposable cash or drowning in debt, or if you’re a student or an unknown artist or writer still making your bones, drop me an email telling me something about yourself, your work or at the very least the first book that ever changed your life at w7baer@gmail and I will reply with a free pass beyond the paywall.

And finally yeah I must acknowledge that were I still employed at a psych hospital or teaching at a university or even if I were still under contract with a major publisher, I might be uneasy about writing, posting or saying in public most of the above. I’m aware too that if Stephen Miller were in charge, I would surely be arrested for thought crimes.

The voices in my head tell me this is why such things must be said out loud.

peace.

….

to The Editor yes brother I’m aware the bladerunner quote is more accurately if you’re not cop you’re little people, I adjusted it for purposes.