Nazis. I hate these guys. Part 2: How Did We Get Here?

As much as I love sociology, and read the occasional book and article concerning same, I am not, and never have been, a sociologist. However, as a writer, I have made a lifetime's habit of watching people and trends and taking note of situations that interest me, particularly when it comes to people changing the way in which they behave and interact with other people. Understanding that is important if you are writing fiction or doing anything that relies on interpersonal relationships.

How great is it that the makers of the Tiki Torches have
condemned the actions of everyone at the Luau?

That means what I'm about to do is go back through my own head and try to put together for myself how we ended up in a world of people who don't vaccinate their kids and people who think the Earth is flat and people who think they are better than other people based solely on their skin color, in America, in 2017. In this meandering discussion, I'm not purporting that what I say is necessarily factually true, in that I may be mis-remembering dates and times and maybe even incidents. I'm going to do this quickly, before I lose the threads of my thesis. If there's corrections to be made, let's do it in the comments, because while I may get some particular details wrong, I feel that my larger conclusions will still have merit. We'll see.

In other words, this is me talking out of my ass, okay?

I'm not sure when my awareness of Nazis morphed from "those bad guys in the war movies" to "skinheads and clansmen." I remember Raiders of the Lost Ark and the profound influence it had on me, a few years before I discovered punk rock and started watching movies like Repo Man. There were pictures of these guys on the news, right? Shaved heads, swastikas, and so forth, power-skanking around bonfires and moshing in clubs, and this footage was trucked out on the news whenever some square in a Brooks Brothers suit needed to "tsk tsk" about these kids today with their weird haircuts and their wild ideas.

I didn't take it too seriously back then, because (a) I had a healthy distrust of anything the news said was dangerous and related to youth, because (b) they did the same thing with Dungeons and Dragons and Heavy Metal music, and later on, Warner Brothers cartoons, and video games, and anything and everything else that we were into at the time. I thought that the skinheads were using the swastika in the same way that the metalheads were using Satanic imagery--as something to frighten parents with. But they weren't really into it, right? I mean, come on, who does that?

Then Geraldo Rivera let some of those guys onto his program, and it ended in a brawl. November 11, 1988. Geraldo got his nose broken from a sucker punch, and without realizing it, ushered in the next wave of daytime live television by putting intentionally combustible elements in the same space and acting outraged and shocked when those elements blew up.

As the 80s gave way to the 90s, there would be the occasional think-piece about White Power groups, usually a "special report" where reporters would trek out into the woods to the collection of run-down mobile homes and dilapidated shacks where these people would gather to talk about White Power and genocide. It was always the same report, too: the walk to the woods, shots of the camp or compound, pictures of poor white people sitting on picnic tables, holding forth about how "we're just like everbody else, only 'cept we see this country going to hell, is all." Then the cross would get lit up and maybe the KKK hoods would come out, or maybe not.

For anyone not living in the woods, or the deep south, it must have felt like a real relief. Whew! We don't have back woods around here. We're safe from Nazis! Well, except for David Duke. He kept running for political office until he eventually got in somewhere, but the press was always dutiful to point out his ties to the KKK (the former grand dragon, don'tcha know) whenever they mentioned him. But even he was a joke, not to be taken seriously, right? I mean, come on, these are NAZIS we're talking about. when the band GWAR makes fun of you, alongside hippies and goths, it's hard for anyone to take you seriously, amiright?

Okay, so, bear with me, because we have to back up a bit.

I don't know exactly when I first became aware of the phrase "political correctness," but I'm pretty sure it was in the early 1990s. There were court cases and some legislation being thrown about, and I can't recall if Affirmative Action happened first, or the Women in the Workforce initiative. But they were real close to one another. My memory is hazy, but what I DO remember was the sudden backlash that went something like this: "What? We can't slap our own secretaries on the ass, anymore? What's the point of living? Why hire a good-looking broad in the first place?"

The Affirmative Action push back was worse: "You mean we have to hire THEM, now? What if they just aren't qualified? They could be criminals!"

"Oh," the next comment went, "and if it's a Black WOMAN..." Pause for knowing guffaws.

Classy stuff. It sounded just as bad then, in the less-sensitive 90s, as it does now, I assure you.

Political Correctness came in with those legislative changes, and the initial idea was well-intentioned, if not well-implemented. After all, we'd already been doing it to some degree for years, right? African-American was the preferred term, and it took a little futzing to get everyone on board, but as long as no slurs were being used, this was a cordial, civilized step forward. If we are going to have these conversations, let's all agree on the terms, right?

I'm surprised this book is currently
out of print. Maybe it's coming back.

Well, it only took a couple of comedians to highlight the ridiculous extremes that, to be fair, were never on the table in the first place. Who remembers "Sanitation Engineer" for "Garbage Man?" And when the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories came out, it sold like wildfire, because it was genuinely amusing, but it also shined a light on a perceived problem that people felt on an intuitive level: they weren't allowed to talk about certain things anymore. They weren't allowed to use the words they'd always used. Politically Correct speech became a band-aid to be applied to a specific situation that covered up a slur, or an unconscious bias, but it didn't teach the controversy.  It didn't explain why these old things were bad. It just said that they were bad, and didn't offer any context. People all over the country started using the phrase Asian-American, because they were told to, but no one explained to them why "Oriental" was now off-limits and horrible. This was, according to President Bush, all part of our Kinder, Gentler Nation, our Shining City on the Hill, and our first Gulf War.

In the wake of all that came Multiculturalism, an educational initiative that, alongside of everything else, was designed to expose white children in the suburbs to things that weren't white, in the hopes of making them better citizens and not White Supremacists. Its detractors were many, and of course, the first thing they seized upon was the idea that there was more than one way to celebrate the Winter Solstice. This was where the first "War on Christmas" bullshit started, in the Mid-90s, right up against the howls of outrage that Christian children were learning about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in schools! Right alongside other children, some of whom weren't even white! Horrors upon horrors!

Of course, by the time South Park got around to lampooning it, the outrage was a fixed condition, and the annual running of the angry Fox commentators was a given. That was largely unimportant, because there was a bigger take-away message from all of these efforts, even if the execution and implementation left something to be desired: Acceptance. We were being asked, sometimes forcibly, to accept people who were different from us. Skin color, culture, education, whatever the difference--the message here was acceptance.

I was slow to come around. A lot of people were. Oh, not on the big things, mind you. Women should earn the same dollar that men earn. I've always believed that. Also, women that want to serve in the military in active combat? Go with my blessing. That was never the issue. Nor was Affirmative Action or changing my language--out of respect for my friends who were people of color--and why wouldn't you? "No, listen, I know you want to be called an African-American now, but honestly, I think I prefer to call you a Negro. So, now that that's settled, you want to come over and play Dungeons and Dragons on Friday?"  You'd have to be a nickel-plated asshole to not respect other people's wishes in that way.

I had, and continue to have, no problem with that. And, once Multiculturalism was explained to me, I thought it was okay, too. It had merits. It's good for white kids in this country to understand that they aren't the center of the universe.

But that whole "you've got to accept everyone" thing...

See, there was a lot of "expose" shows in the 1990s on cable news. There were also a lot of "extreme lifestyle" shows on daytime TV. Thanks to Geraldo and the Nazis, it was suddenly all right to parade any given clutch of people that the producers dug up from under some rock and show them off on the Jerry Springer show. Or have some CNN Special Report on, for example, Vampires in New Orleans, a special investigative report. An hour-long show about twenty-somethings who were living "as vampires" in New Orleans. With interviews of Rubenesque women in Victorian dresses, saying out loud and being completely serious, "I'm more of a psychic vampire. I take energy from people, but I don't drink blood." Oh, you're a drain, all right. And then, they'd cut to the bumper for the next segment, and show a pale young man with stringy hair sitting in a wooden throne and the voice-over would say, "Up Next, meet a vampire who drinks blood."

The daytime television nascent-reality TV shows were much more sensationalistic. "Meet Adults who prefer to live as Babies!" The audience would gasp and boo, and just when it was about to turn into an angry mob, they'd put a psychologist on to explain how this was just another way to cope with stress or abuse or whatever, and it's Okay. It's Normal. It's not hurting anyone. Therefore, we need to accept it.

We need to accept it.

And that tone was carried through in every single one of these documentaries. I remember getting into a huge fight with my girlfriend over the vampire documentary. She couldn't understand why I was so hostile. "Because vampires don't exist!" I yelled.

"But they aren't hurting anyone!" she yelled back.

"Bullshit," I said. "They come into the comic shop, in broad daylight, I might add, wearing their vampire fangs that aren't their real teeth because they aren't real," I said.

"So?"

"So? So, commit to the bit, I say. If you're a real vampire, you don't get to go out in broad fucking daylight every Wednesday to pick up your comics. Your servants should do that for you. If you're really a vampire, I shouldn't have to see you. And moreover, take those damn fangs out of your mouth."

"What's wrong with them wearing fangs?" she asked. "Why are you so judgmental?"

"It's a desperate cry for attention, is all that it is," I said. "They are looking for a reaction. They want to freak people out so they can feel superior to them. Well, I don't want to give them that satisfaction, but I also don't want to ignore the fangs, because it makes it seem like I'm accepting of their stupid-ass lifestyle choice."

"They aren't hurting anyone! You're being an asshole!" she stormed out of the room.

I was an asshole a lot in the 1990s, it seemed. Because I didn't understand. I didn't know why I suddenly had to accept people who called themselves vampires, but didn't turn into mist and float under doors. It wasn't fair. But I got tired of being called an asshole, and so I learned to keep my mouth shut.

So, when the preppers and the survivalists started showing up in the documentaries and the exposes and the Special Reports, I kept my mouth shut. After all, they weren't hurting anyone, right? They were just off in the woods, doing their thing, and not bothering anyone. The reports were always quick to show how these people had families with kids...hell, I know families who like to go camping. This can't be that much different, right?

They were still occasionally featuring Neo-Nazis in their special reports, but these days, it looked more and more like preppers and survivalists and those folks with the little churches who dance with snakes. It all had the same tone. The same feel. And the same implicit message: They aren't hurting anyone. We need to accept it.

What we should have been doing instead is questioning it. Why are they doing this? To what end? How does this impact the rest of us, the vast majority of American Society and Culture? Why weren't those questions asked by the reporters? (Insert rant here about how cable news' number one goal is to make money by selling you stuff, and not by actually educating the public, and since everyone likes the Freak Show best of all at the county fair, they truck out the vampires and preppers so we'll be sure to watch.)

Before I go any further, I want to say this: if someone needs something to bring them back up to baseline functionality, and it's legitimate therapy, I have no problem at all with it. There's some really wacky therapy solutions for real trauma and damage and I get that, I really do. But...and this is a big BUT, here...even IF we were to extend that courtesy to, say, fringe behavior, such as dressing and acting like a vampire...I think my acceptance of that, and you're expecting the rest of society to accept that, stops at your front door. This is a larger version of "the right to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose," right? You can think you are whatever you are, in the privacy of your own home, but as soon as you leave your home and get on the bus and queue up in line at Chipotle and go to work everyone else, you are part of society at large, and we've got a fairly generous set of do's and don'ts to make it easier for everyone to get along, all right? If this makes me a monster, then I'll take that hit.

I think we got lulled into a false sense of security by how the media chose to cover all of these fringe groups. I think we watched the Neo-Nazi documentaries and saw how they were being treated the exact same way as the survivalists and the vampires and the Amish and the Heavy Metal fans. Sure, they are different, but they are also just like us, see? They have jobs and kids and eat dinner with forks, just like regular Americans. And so, we should accept it. "If vampires are okay, then surely my White Power group is all right, right? I mean, I just hate people who aren't the same skin color as me, never mind the decades of genetic studies and mountains of evidence that states there is not, and never was, an "Aryan Race," okay? I'm not nearly as bad as the guy who thinks the Earth is flat! That guy's nuts!"

This is my long-winded way of saying the media normalized crazy.

I may have lost some of you there. I understand. For those of you still hanging on, here's my final point about all of this:

It's hard to find pictures of Alex Jones from the 1990s on his
Austin Cable Access show. Those things are gold. And also
scrubbed from the Internet, for some strange reason. 

Alex Jones was a staple of Austin Cable Access TV in the 1990s. If you lived in Austin, Texas, at that time, and you were ever drunk or stoned on a Friday night around 11:30, then you watched him. You watched him scream into the void; a much younger, thinner, and ironically, more sincere man, yelling about the New World Order and Black Helicopters and the police state and oh, brother, it was a cornucopia of paranoid delights. We didn't think he was hurting anyone, either. Live and let live. And besides, who is going to take this guy seriously? I mean, just look at him. He looked like an angry Jehovah's Witness in his suit, yelling in front of a Chroma Key display with weird blinking messages scrawling across.  He's batshit crazy, but he's not hurting anyone.

Then 9/11 happened. And suddenly, in a world looking for answers, in a world shattered by unspeakable tragedy, and for a nation who had never been asked to look at a complex situation and think and reason and have an informed opinion about Sixty Years of American Middle East Policy, the only person who had all the answers was Alex Jones. It's what he'd been waiting for his whole life. "Nine-Eleven was an inside job." That was his message. It was easy, simple, it fed into his pre-existing narrative, and for a large number of people who didn't go running back to church as fast as they could go (a topic for a whole other blog), this answer seemed to make the most sense.

Now he's a global brand, with a media empire. Millions of people are checking out his bullshit and, in the absence of anything else that helps explain why things are the way they are, they are drinking some, if not all, of his Kool-Aid.

I've written before about Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories, and this link is a great examination of that topic. But anyone who really thinks that our government would fly planes into buildings so they can take away our guns is deranged. And we should have stamped that weird, stupid thought out a while ago.

"But Mark," you say, "That's horrible! You can't 'stamp out' an idea, no matter how repellent."

No? Look at the number of conspiracy theories out there right now. The "field" has mushroomed into an encyclopedic array of topics. Among them? Anti-vaccinators. A clear public health risk. Flat-Earthers: science-deniers who now have a growing number of converts thanks to YouTube. Hmm, let's see, I wonder what other theories and contrarian thoughts and socially-abhorrent agendas could be found online, easily searchable and accessible to everyone?

What about these hate groups and these White Supremacists and these disenfranchised loners who have been isolated in the woods and operating out of dilapidated trailers? They're online, looking for answers, because they aren't in control of their lives, and don't really know how they lost it. Desperate for answers, any answers, they will seek out and find whatever makes the most sense to them. Anything but the truth. Conspiracy Theories, floated out there by Fringe Groups, sound way better than the reality, than the truth. Surely not...but wait...it's not hurting anyone, right? We have to accept it, right?

This is how we get Golf Shirt Nazis in 2017. We never needed to accept them. We just didn't need to give them the airtime.

Desperately Seeking Someone to Punch #YesAllWomen

I held off for a week from commenting on the Santa Barbara shooting, and with good reason: I was in no place to make any grand, sweeping pronouncements about anything. I’m glad I did, and I’m also humbled and angry, as a result.  It goes without saying that the shooting was senseless and horrific, and absolutely could have been averted, if not avoided. While I applaud that the response time for the ancillary concerned parties has advanced from “We had no idea he was capable of this” to “We knew he was troubled, but we never thought he was violent,” to finally “We were on our way over to stop him when this happened,” it’s still not much comfort. I think the Onion’s recent stance on the issue, while bitingly satiric, is still very relevant. I’ll just leave that right there and move on.

Instead, I want to talk about the fallout from the tragedy. The #YesAllWomen hashtag has been a kind of wake-up call for the rest of the Internet, and while it’s good to finally have a discussion about this, it’s been like bricks on my head for five days as I read about all of my friends who had these horrible experiences, and I never knew about it.

I haven’t seen hardly any of the detractor’s responses, other than noting from other people that there seems to be a line in the sand being drawn in the big Internet Sandbox, and again, I have to ask, who would even want to be on the other side of the line? Mostly, I’ve just been reading, trying to make some sense of it all. Here’s some of what I have been looking at, and I’ll tell you what conclusions I’ve come to afterward.

Chris Roberson’s confessional polemic, while not quite as broad shouldered as John Scalzi’s, was very refreshing to read for its honesty. I don’t disagree with either of these guys; on the contrary, I admit my culpability in the entrenched hegemony, as well. This is something I’ve been looking at for the past couple of years, ever since the controversy over Cosplay participants and “fake fans” reared its head in the Geek Nation. I’ve been very mindful of it and spoken out against “nerd-misogyny” before. But this was...too much.

One of the 1980's best worst people. Look at this guy. Now
go look at the shooter, with his smirking face and his
squinty eyes and his clothes and his hair and if you can't
see the resemblance, I'll be very surprised. Of course,
the shooter would probably admire this Douche-Nozzle
for the way he handles his girlfriend, but that's not the point.

I mean, there was something about this shooter, aside from his disturbing resemblance to Nick from the 1985 cult classic movie Tuff Turf (a character who was also a mentally unstable misogynist, by the way), that felt very “been there, done that,” and by that I mean, I don’t think there’s an eleven to thirteen year old male in America who hasn’t gone through a phase that looks something like, “One day, I’ll be rich/powerful/famous/a porn star/have super powers, and then they’ll all be sorry they laughed at me!” Depending on your peer group and how quickly you discovered Dungeons and Dragons and/or masturbation, this phase can last anywhere from ten minutes to six months. 

And then we grow out of it. Most of us, anyway.

Those few guys that don’t tend to skitter backwards into the darkness wearing their Members Only jackets and then we don’t see them too much after that. I’m not saying they aren’t there (obviously), but they become sort of "out of sight, out of mind" for the rest of us. I think it’s scary, and sad, for grown-up people to have those kinds of resentments and anger and rage. That is the extent of my sympathy with any man who feels mistreated at the hands of others. We all caught a snowball in the face. All of us. Deal with it and move on.

What’s even scarier and sadder to me is this idea of “a Pick-Up Artist” Community forum, wherein all of these guys who want to learn how to “get with” women go to lick their wounds and build themselves back up again, followed immediately by another Community Forum wherein the guys who tried this approach failed, and now they hate the Pick-Up Artists, too! Talk about victim-thinking... Amanda Hess wrote a sobering article about their response to the tragedy  and then she followed it up with why it’s so hard for men to see misogyny. Again, I have no argument for this. But as we all started to try and find a reason for how this became a sub-culture in modern America, there were a couple of false steps. A film critic went so far as to suggest that the comedies of Judd Apatow were to blame for the mass murder, prompting a rebuke from both Apatow and frequent collaborator Seth Rogan.

She’s wrong, of course, but I can see that she was picking at the edge of something. Then I read Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny,Entitlement, and Nerds, by Arthur Chu and the light bulb went on. He’s dancing around the idea, as well, but he’s a lot closer to the hows and the whys.

Here’s what I think: There is a generation of people for whom it is difficult to discern reality from fantasy. I first noticed it years ago, in the mid-90s, when I was watching a show on Cartoon Network and a Barbie commercial came on that showed the doll water-skiing using the magic of Stop-motion animation (probably actually CGI, but let’s not quibble; you know what I mean). Flashed across the screen in the midst of this crass consumerism was the disclaimer, “DOLL DOES NOT ACTUALLY MOVE.” Wow. I thought we’d gone round the bend, but we were just getting started.

This? It was a Male Idyll. A fantasy.
A wishful indulgence. And it was
fake, and we all knew it. It was
never real, and it never will be.

We all grew up surrounded by stories. Myths. Legends. George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and said, “I cannot tell a lie.” Legend. Any American who works hard can pull themselves up by their boot straps and become millionaires. Myth. “They lived happily ever after.” Stories. We are inundated by fantasy at an early age, whether it’s that “all girls are princesses and deserve to marry a prince,” or “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” You get it as soon as they start reading stories to you. You get it as soon as they plop you down in front of the television. You get told things, over and over again, repeating endlessly over and over again. And it sticks, or at least, it stays until another story takes its place. And stories that get told over and over stop becoming stories and start to become beliefs. Truths. They become how you see the world, instead of a way to look at the world differently.  And that’s what I think is happening here.

Let’s take a benign example. We were all told that Santa Claus is real; we all got that story. And we believed it, earnestly, diligently, and without question, until we were, what? Six? Seven? Eight? Do you remember how you found out? For most of us, it was the other kids. There was always some kid who figured it out, or whose parents didn’t practice Christmas, and they spilled the beans about Santa. Despite your mother and father’s efforts, when you saw that enough people didn’t believe it, either, you had to come to the conclusion that yeah, Santa wasn’t real.

So, why is there a generation that seems to have trouble discerning fact from fantasy? How is it that there’s more people who believe in conspiracy theories than ever? How is it that even with hundreds of thousands of women sharing their stories, there’s people who fervently believe it’s some sort of “feminazi plot?”

I think we can lay the blame right at the Internet’s feet. See, when you were eight years old, your peers taught you that Santa wasn’t real. When you were a teenager, you learned from the people around you that life wasn’t fair, and that we all had the same kinds of problems (Okay, you might have learned that from The Breakfast Club, but still). We used to all watch the same news programs and have something to discuss around the water cooler the next day. Sixty Minutes used to be a going concern. So was 20/20.

We don’t have that, now. Now we have the Internet. And while it’s true that it brought people together and formed new friendships and relationships and has been a major impact on art, commerce, and society, it’s true that it also united every lone freakshow, socially retarded troglodyte, sociopathic misogynist, and backwards-thinking assbug in the country. See the above “Pick Up artist forums” for examples of this. Now, you’re not the only guy in high school with no sex life. You can get online and connect with every other trenchoated loaner in America, where the stories they tell themselves are very different from the stories in the real world. Or even, the real world itself.

Now, anyone with a grievance can simply unplug from society, the real world, and their personal environment and go into whatever nurturing cybercave they choose to visit, where everyone agrees with what they say, because they all think and feel the exact same way. The internet has become the mysterious cave in the story of our lives. Sometimes, there’s treasure, or magic, or knowledge in the cave. But most of the time, there’s also monsters in the cave.

I know a great many of you around my age and older had a childhood had an adolescence similar to mine. I was told that the music I listened to would turn me into a devil-worshipper. That the cartoons I watched would make me a sociopath. That the role-playing games I played would turn me into a paranoid schizophrenic. None of that actually happened. We all had parents who either grounded us in reality, or anchored us in place. We had peers with similar experiences. We were all still somewhat connected to one another, even if it was only through the umbilical cord of shared popular culture. After all, weren’t you a little leery of the kids who didn’t like Star Wars? I sure was.

All of that’s changed. I don’t want to whole-cloth write-off the Special Snowflakes of the world for their helicopter parents and their overly-developed sense of entitlement, but we’re not doing Generation Y any favors, not at all. The Santa Barbara Shooter felt he was owed beautiful women, that he was entitled to them. Says who? What on Earth gave him that idea? Well, a lot of things, apparently. Look, I think any crazy person can get a crazy idea from anyplace, and there’s no telling what they will latch onto—movies, video games, a Pick-Up Artist website’s bullshit, you name it—but I’m just wondering if that idea would have stuck in his head so firmly if there was a group of real people around this little monster who shouted him down every time he tried to bring up the “bitches be tripping” rhetoric? Or parents who took him aside and said, “Yeah, son, you’re being a douche right now.” Something, anything, other than The Internet.

Granted, it sounds like I’m picking on Generation Y, but to be sure, there are members of Generation X that have fallen into this pit trap, as well. Again, I don’t see them very often, because they aren’t engaging with regular people in the real world.  And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  I’ll wager there are very few of us who have studied the actual psychological effects of long-term online communication, and how it’s different from actual live person social interaction. I sure don’t know very much about it. I don’t know anything. But I do know this: talking to people online, even on FaceBook, is very different from talking to someone on the phone, or sitting across from me. Maybe, just maybe, when someone is a borderline narcissistic sociopath, or has tendencies along those kinds of lines where it seems easier to pick up a gun to solve your problems, maybe that person would get more positive results from talking to humans in the real world instead of “ImBobaFettBitches1974” on some message board that’s connected to the thing this person obsesses endlessly about.

I told you all of that, to tell you this: I want to start trying to do something about it. The sexism, I mean. The misogyny. I want to start making a change. I don’t want my friends to be scared anymore. I don’t want to hear about another woman’s stalking incident. Only, instead of going into my little cyber-cave, I want to stand out, in the middle of society, and say, “Okay, let’s do this! Who among you is a shithead? Come forth, and let me smack you!”

Yeah, that approach probably won’t work. I know that. Ever since the cosplay controversy, I’ve kept my eyes open at the various shows and conventions I attended. I paid more attention. I checked in with people more frequently. And you know what I discovered? Nothing. Nada. Bupkiss. Mind you, I was ready to step in, to intervene, to sweep the leg, even, if necessary. But I saw nothing, heard nothing, and experienced nothing that was actionable. I’m not saying nothing happened at all, but I am saying, I was looking for it, and personally saw nothing. Maybe if I had my telepathy helmet on, I could have scanned the whole convention and found the two or three skeeves and pointed an accusing finger at them and scared them off. But I have limits.

I’ll keep looking. And I’ll keep trying. But I want to know: how do we as men start to apply peer pressure to people who need it when they are keeping their mouth shut around us, hanging back, and in general slinking around because they know we’ll call them on it? And worse, how do you keep that lesson from transmogrifying into “the popular kids beat me up and stuffed me in a locker today because I tried to talk to one of their girlfriends” in their brain-damaged heads? Because at night, online, that’s exactly what it’ll turn into.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know where we start. I only have one idea to put forth. It’s probably not going to be well-liked, but that’s that, really. Maybe the Internet shouldn’t be wide open. Maybe anonymity online is a bad thing. Maybe if you want to comment on blogs, message boards, or send private messages, you have to provide your real information, instead of goofy screen names. Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, and if so, please tell me. I’m willing to be educated.  I’m just thinking in terms of how to curb some of the bad behavior. Anonymity tends to bring out the worst of us, instead of the best of us. Now there's studies that show trolling online is psychologically in the same head space as Narcissistic tendencies and sociopathic behavior. And also, the people who troll more often than others are (surprise surprise) sociopaths. Why give them the platform to disrupt? 

I don’t think registering your real name, I.P. address, or other measures will change the minds of ingrained misogynists, but if more women feel comfortable taking to the Internet, and there’s a mechanic in place that allows anyone who gets threatening messages to shut the other person down with extreme prejudice (and maybe even fines or penalties), then more voices can be inclusively heard (and agreed with) and that is in and of itself a kind of peer pressure.

My stance hasn’t changed. If I see something happening, I’m going to butt in. If you come up to me at a show or anywhere else for that matter and tell me someone was being a creep, I will help you. But these whiny, abusive, self-absorbed creepshow guys are scattering like cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on, and until we can all be in the same room together, it will be difficult for the rest of us to police our own. I'm open to suggestions.

Our Political Climate: Elvis Clones, Area 51 and the Necronomicon

In the days of my misspent youth, I was fascinated with conspiracy theories. My first, and favorite, was of course, Area 51 and the Roswell UFO crash. After all, I was a child of the seventies and space was on every kid’s brain. UFOs and governmental cover-ups found their way into all of the popular television shows of the day. Where do you think Mork and Mindy came from?

I was too young to hear about the faked moon landing conspiracy theory that eventually found its way into that great O.J. Simpson vehicle, Capricorn One. It’s probably just as well. Whatever marginal entertainment value the idea of a faked space program contained, there was just too much facts, evidence, and truth to give it much credence.  I think that’s part of what makes a good conspiracy theory. There has to be a lot of interesting coincidences, or incidents that can’t be explained, or questions that have no answers, in order to be really compelling.