Not Adam Lanza's Mother, But Not a Monster

I read this post by Sarah Kendzior expecting to find some really dark, depraved shit in Liza Long's blog excerpts:

Long has written a series of vindictive and cruel posts about her children in which she fantasizes about beating them, locking them up and giving them away. In most posts, her allegedly insane and violent son is portrayed as a normal boy who incites her wrath by being messy, buying too many Apple products and supporting Obama.

Except...no.

The excerpts cited are in no way abusive or violent. Please, humorless hand-wringers, read the TONE. It's clearly light-hearted venting, she clearly has affection for her family (if not for her husband, and who would blame her if half of what she said about him is true), and she is clearly trying to be funny. It's the kind of stuff I would say to a friend if I had kids who were driving me crazy, and the kind of playfully hyperbolic thing you write when you're trying to be entertaining to others about the little things that drive you nuts every day, but always with background affection for those driving you nuts. Her "my son is driving me nuts" post is actually really cute, I think--to me it reads, "This kid is brilliant, but he's a fucking teenager, and I am laughing at that fact even while banging my head against the wall." I challenge you to find me a mother who has never offhandedly said "I want to throttle my kids." Plus, when was the last time you said you wanted to throttle someone and actually intended it as a threat of violence?

The SINGLE blog excerpt I grant reads disturbingly is the one about Abraham and Isaac, but it's far less so in context. The harrowing climbing journey she recounts actually having those thoughts during is with her climbing buddy Nate, NOT her son--the hike with her son makes her recall the hike with Nate. And then the following paragraph, which the other blogger also omits, is a meditation on faith and desire that springs from the story of Abraham that makes clear she's a believing Christian. When I discussed that story in Sunday school as a believer, it was always about sacrifice, not filicide. And then this part: "To give up something that you value greatly for those you love is to know the meaning of sacrifice in the Biblical sense." "Something that you value greatly," here, is climbing the mountain (which corresponds in the Biblical story to Isaac's life, messed up as that metaphor is). Those you love, here, is her kids (God in the Biblical story).

Now, I DID find her Adam Lanza post troubling because it "outs" her son, and because of the assumptions it makes about his condition and what he might do to others in the future. Her son sounds a lot like my bipolar cousin when he was young, but he is now in college and doing really well emotionally and socially. And Lanza wasn't LIKE that as a kid, best we know. He was one of the quiet ones. They almost always are.

However, I think her post started an important conversation about the miserable paucity of mental health treatment options in America. And I believe it came from an honest place of love for her son and fear from her future.

Connect the Dots

Somebody stole my idea for a super-accessible site of basic facts busy people need to know about important issues in the political process: http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/

Looks like they stole the idea even before I had it, the crafty bastards. (Thank gawd. Making all those charts looks like a lot of work.) Here I was sitting at the Take Back the American Dream conference, obsessing over accessibility and attention and how to reach people outside the echo chamber, and then boom, I see a flyer for this.

It's a promising start, in any case.

Update

So, funny story -- I'm now actually being paid to blog. 

I am a staff writer covering politics and sundry things at Campus Progress.

Some of you might be checking this out from the link in my bio. No, it's ok, go ahead and look at when my last post was. 

I KNOW, right??

Anyway, linking to this in a public place shamed me into at least thinking about updating it more often. And in the course of blogging professionally I seem to get more ideas for things to blog about personally. There are some shiny objects on the AP-style cutting room floor.

A Google+ Ode

(by me, with apologies to W. Whitman)


Come my wan-faced children,
Follow to the Field Trial, get your profiles ready,
Have you your laptops? have you your sharp-edged wits?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must share my darlings, we must bear the brunt of beta,
We the youthful geeky races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient for an invite, full of pride in online friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you blogging with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the Facebook users halted?
Do they droop and exit Farmville, wearied by their ill-kept privacies?
We take up the task of Circles, and the Hangout and the Huddle,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer cleaner world, streamlined world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of +1 and the couch,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

How can one lead such disparate lives?

As blogged by Jonathan Blanks, an epically terrible piece of prose got published on Thought Catalog (I'd already come to the conclusion that they're generally too sophomoric to bother with, but this was in another league). It was so epic, in fact, that I decided it couldn't be bound to just a single medium:

Land of Opportunity

My dad wrote this Star Spangled Banner parody (and five others also posted to his YouTube profile), which won the Washington Post's Style Invitational contest that week:

"...and I feel fiiiine"

Why, TNR? I'm back from a fantastic buzzy day of getting my Masters degree and laughing my ass off at rapture jokes, and you gotta go put a heartbreaking human face on the evangelical crazies.  People who not only stopped saving but who spent all their savings -- and their kids' -- in anticipation of being raptured. Suckerpunch.

This sort of thing is, obviously, terrible. And maybe there is something kind of sick, or at least smug, at the root of our obsession with it. But I don't think that's ALL there is. With that, I give you five reasons why it's still OK to laugh at the rapture:

1) This is simply the stuff that memes are made of. In an Internet culture already giddy over the zombie apocalypse, we love end-times narratives that are as wacky as they are implausible. And this shit's bananas. So much that it's taken on a life of its own, in mythic rather than human proportions.

2) As people who value rational inquiry, we may look down upon those who don't -- but more importantly we find them fascinating, and terrifying. They fascinate us because we genuinely don't understand how someone can be that irrational. And they scare us because we worry about how irrationality currently rules our public discourse -- climate deniers, debt ceiling deniers, vicious homophobes. Rigid idealogues of all sorts. So when we see card-carrying members of the Cult of Irrationality throw down the gauntlet by presenting a falsifiable fact to public scrutiny -- by SETTING A DATE and putting it on BILLBOARDS fer cryin' out loud -- it's hard to resist a bit of satisfaction that THIS time -- at least -- at last -- facts might enjoy a moment of unqualified triumph.

3) And it's more than just satisfaction for skeptics. It could, dare we hope, mean real change for one or two believers. Someone who has built their life on falsehood, when confronted with undeniable evidence of its falseness, might realize that fact and do something to turn things around. Or they might not. But they might!

4) Even if believers decide not to change their ways, we might see a generation of evangelicals turning away from small-government conservatism. If they were among those who blew their life savings in anticipation of the rapture, now they get to experience firsthand what it's like to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"!

5) End of the World parties are a heap of fun, and should really become an annual tradition.