is a friend of mine

better brothers than some suited

inventors of the Lie

dressed to kill

woofs, howls and growls are music

to the soul brother

no need to nip

chew rugs

or pee inside

was that last par the payoff or what? That anxious rush of unpleasant truth telling that comes with a mix of exhilaration and fear of reproach for saying the forbidden thing that needs to be said and is way, way too impolite? Something this particular writer often excels at, particularly, one notices, in the beginning two pars and typically final par or two of each section. Not that the body of the review was something tedious to be waded through, as if with no interest at all to the reader, as if only to not miss the buildup and nuance that often support the payoffs in these pieces, just that the shows featured and reviewed, about teenagers of all things, species of organisms as separate and wild to adults as undomesticated canines, or felines, teens and their raw, unordered lives as the actual subject of shows that one will never, ever watch, although “never” and certainly “ever” are not things to toss around lightly, if one has any sense at all, but really how interesting could such shows be, so that one might miss these payoffs if one did not acutally find oneself reading these installments compulsively. Not of course compulsively compulsively, in the sense of meeting certain criteria for a type of disorder, or with clinically significant impairment in daily functioning, and certainly not with obsessive features too, certainly not in the sense of fearfulness that something bad will happen if one does not read the installments, like contamination by germs or missing out on special advice from the author on how to survive, or at least cope humorously with, something apocalyptic, and yet the themes and style of approach to social criticism might tend to enter one’s thoughts on almost a daily basis, but again not in any impairing way but instead as something pleasant to look forward to, once a week, wondering, what will get skewered this time, what will she come up with for the payoff, the thing that can transform the inanity of popular televised entertainment into some significant and valuable social truth? And if it weren’t for these “normal” compulsions, that is compulsions that never reach a clinical level of disordered behavior, but like every type of behavior that gets constructed as a “mental illness” actually has an adaptive base, an underlying healthy striving or understandable value, if it weren’t for these types of intense interests and responses, then one might have missed reading this review of TV shows about teens and being reminded by it of the really acutely and profoundly naturalistic and phenomenological representation of the chasm between “adult” interpretations of the world versus the experiences of their alienated teens in Gus Van Sant’s truly remarkable “Paranoid Park” and how important a message film and other art can provide to even “the old, the crusty, the irrelevant” of parents to listen to, atune to, and build trust with teens, so that they can help them through the messes we bring them into.

virtualize an addicted, prevaricating, morally-arrested adolescent, cliqued-up with criminals and disordered demagogues, and intellectually engaged by War-On-Drugs and War-on-Terror, boyhood fantasies :

construct, image, and download as “assured”, “intellectual” “leader”, “president” of a “country” invested in “hope” and “change”

global download in progress

systems stable

minor perturbations

virtualize an addicted, prevaricating, morally-arrested adolescent, cliqued-up with criminals and disordered demagogues, and intellectually engaged by War-On-Drugs and War-on-Terror, boyhood fantasies :

construct, image, and download as “assured”, “intellectual” “leader”, “president” of a “country” invested in “hope” and “change”

global download in progress

systems stable

minor perturbations

are, in context, useful constructions that realize some congruence and internal logic within the larger constructed system of meaning characterized by utterances like “country”, “government”, “democracy”, “political ideology” etc. - in exactly the same sense that “my TV”, “special instructions”, “from space”, “leadership of the Universe”, “only late at night”, and “because they don’t have the same processor in their brains” may be elements that have congruence and internal logic within a stable system of belief, or for that matter, “absolution’, “hell”, “original sin”, forgiveness”, and “repent” may.

Problems in living invariably arise when delusional structures are taken as adaptive representations and hence useful cognitive structures for interpreting and navigating through the world. In the case of this thread, and of course much more broadly, movement is not possible as long as these constructions provided through domestication and whose function is to maintain hierarchies of power, control and resource differentials are taken at face value – i.e. “conservatism”, “Republicanism”, “the right”, “capitalism”, “religion”, etc. are swallowed whole as actually representing systems of thought, ideas, social movements, etc. as opposed to what they actually represent – macro level expressions of psychopathology incompletely but partially described e.g. as antisocial personality traits, social dominance orientation, or more simply, arrested moral and intellectual development.

That is to say, problems will naturally arise when maladaptive behavioral and institutional expressions of psychopathology are viewed not as something to understand and treat, but as something to legitimize, enable and find middle ground with.