Fantasy Titles

 

Chatting with a dear friend this morning and was reminded of just how absolutely shit Fantasy titles are — to say nothing just here of the (ahem) books. Herewith my favorites (no, these are absolutely real.)

Volume III of The Bloodpudding Saga

Fellopia Spanakopitas

The Fallacy of Pandascape

Crabcake Bungle Knight

The Accrescence of Bathtowels

Fecundity Pin

The Folderol Flannel

Alchemical Silverware

Court of Farts and Talc

Crowns of ClownCrowd

Shadrow and Bangers Trilogy 

Nosehair Assassin 

Cheeseblade Glassbell

Gormless

The Toasted Emerald

Mum and Magoo (My Christmas Reading 2025)

 

"Until death it is all life."

When I was younger I made a practice of kissing great men. I don't mean I ever had sex with anyone famous. Never did. Might have done if it had been on offer but it never was so, alas, nothing very saucy for the memoirs. Sorry. I wouldn't call the kisses innocent either as I was young and rather brassy, but nothing really came of them in that way and my motives were, I suppose we could say, pure. (Allen Ginsberg kissed me once and that was not at all innocent or expected and he had a chest cold at the time and it was not pleasant, but that's a story for another time.)

Walking back to my friend's apartment after the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation -- that was the full title, the alphabet was less inclusive in those days -- I saw an old man on the sidewalk ahead of me. He was in a small group of friends. I was with a different group. I was pretty sure I knew who the old man was and so I ran up to him and asked if he was, in fact, Harry Hay. He was. I asked if I could kiss him. He said yes and so I did. We hugged and he smiled and waved as I returned to my somewhat aghast young friends. Now for any who don't know, Harry Hay was a great gay activist, a founder of both one of the first gay rights organization in the United States, The Mattachine Society, and The Radical Faeries. He was an actor, a communist, a labor organizer, and is widely consider the father of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I'd read his biography, studied his work, and always remembered his explanation that the secret history of gay people was "a history of kisses." I kissed Harry Hay. He had kissed this one and that one and someone who had kissed Lord Alfred Douglas and so though Harry's kiss I had a direct connection to my hero Oscar Wilde. See how it works? Further, though most of our history has been hidden and intentionally destroyed, by this same chain of kisses we are connected in a direct line of affection back and back to Socrates, to "the apostle beloved of Jesus," to Achilles, Alexander, Gilgamesh. I think it is a beautiful idea. And so I kissed Harry Hay when he was eighty-one and I was twenty-nine and  I am proud to speak my lineage of kisses.

That idea has influence my whole life, that theory of connection that links me to Edward Carpenter, connects me to E. M. Forster, to Auden, to Truman Capote and on. Humans have evolved by and for connection, it is how we survived and why we've got our lovely, big, often neglected brains. "Just connect." 

It has also shaped how I see my reading life and provided a way to understand the connection of this book to these, this author to that, to me. I can't justify calling this anything so grand as a theory, it's more an entertainment, a game, but it does offer interesting and sometimes unexpected glimpses into my past. One book led to the next, and the next and if I could remember all the connections there would be a kind of autobiography in it, not so much of kisses now but concepts, ideas, art. I have writers in my library of whom I speak as "my household Gods," some going straight back to childhood like L. Frank Baum, and Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, and some who came later and by other ways like Dr. Samuel Johnson, and dear Charles Lamb, and Edmund White who we just lost this year. I sometimes try to track back through my books to find my first meeting with Dumas or Miss Maria Edgeworth or this year's Nobel winner for Literature, Lazlo Krasznahorkai. 

There is one book I know exactly when we met. 

I recently had a boy in the bookstore, college boy with whom I had a brief conversation in which I mentioned my favorite translation of Don Quixote (it's the current Penguin edition, translated by John Rutherford because I think it the funniest.) The boy was taken back a bit by that word, "favorite" and asked how many translations I could possibly have read. Five sounds very very impressive but I was quick to amend this by saying "whole or in part" which is all too true of the way I read now anyway. No apologies. Life is short. 

Anyone remember Mr. Magoo? If you don't, Quincy Magoo was a nearsighted, elderly gentleman who bumbled through a series of short subject and feature length animation and even appeared in a whole series of literary adaptations that ran and reran as primetime television specials  in my childhood. Most famously, he starred in a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that still plays somewhere every December. I loved those shows and one adaptation in particular was, I now realize, my very first encounter with Don Quixote.

And so, age probably nine or ten, I made my way to Grove City Public Library to find and read this book where, spoiler alert, Mr. Magoo dies at the end. In order to understand this part of the story, you need to know that I did not grow up in town but four miles down the road in an unincorporated village not covered at the time by any agreement with the town library. So, in order for me to check out books, we would either have had to pay a fee or I had to pretend that my home address was actually my grandmother's house in town. That's what I did. Always felt like shaky ethical ground at the time but then I was a nervous, already quite class-conscious child, as little queer country boys must inevitably be in the surprisingly stratified society of small American towns. 

I walked to the library after school, found the book in the adult stacks and sat and looked at the Gustave Dore illustrations until it was time for my mother to come pick me up on her way home from work. At the time she was cleaning dormitories at Slippery Rock College. It was filthy work for low wages done for ungrateful, often rude kids who thought nothing of leaving chicken bones under their beds and condoms on the floor. She needed the job though because we needed the money. Both my parents worked at the time at jobs they did not love so that their children might have more comfortable lives; plenty to eat, clean clothes, a bit of pride.

When I took the big book to the counter and gave the volunteer librarian my card she seemed not best pleased. She scrutinized the book, and my card, and me and then asked where I'd found it. It was not the first book I'd taken out from the adult section, but for the first time I was told I could not have this one, that it was not "appropriate" at my age. It was made very clear that I had done something wrong, that the book was adult not only because it came from those shelves but because, I was pretty sure, the librarian thought it was dirty and that I wanted it for that reason. I blushed to the roots of my hair, retrieved my library card and fled outside to the steps here I had to stay and wait for my mother to fetch me.

Eventually she did, pulling up in yet another car inappropriate to a respectable married cleaning lady; some slightly sporty old wreck my father was probably fixing up in order to sell it in the yard. My mother drove many such cars. I can still see her bucket and brushes and gloves on the console between the bucket seats. Doubtlessly she was exhausted after a long shift and glad to be headed home. She noticed pretty quickly that I was uncharacteristically quiet. She asked what I got at the library and when I whispered, "nothing," she knew something was wrong. She asked me what and when I wouldn't say, she pulled over and parked and asked again. It was then, in tears that I explained about Mr. Magoo and Don Quixote and the Adult Section of the library. I will say bluntly that I don't know that either of my parents ever felt the need of a library. It was as I've said a small town and thus a small library and one can't spend every hour of childhood reading the same Lives of the Great Inventors or In Washington's Youth or any of the like dusty children's volumes otherwise intended for boys my age. Sooner or later, sooner in my case, one has to head out for fresh pasture.

Another thing about small towns? Everybody pretty much knows everybody.

I don't know what my mother made of my muddled telling of having been refused a book, but something in the way of it being done struck a nerve and so before I understood what was happening she had turned the car around and we were back in town and back at the library. I wanted to crawl through the floorboards and disappear. When my mother got out of the car and told me to come with her I was contemplating faking a heart attack or running away from home, anything to avoid the humiliation of going back inside and or being confronted about my status as an illegitimate user of the institution. I was sure we would be jailed for fraud at least. And yet I was a good, well brought up little puss and so in she went and after her I followed, eyes cast down to the creaking wooden floor. 

Everybody knows everybody, remember? So even though I don't know that my Mum had ever set foot in that library before, up to the counter we went and she greeted the librarian by name and the librarian returned the greeting.

And then my mother, my shy, tired, unkempt mother wearing a snap-front apron and a headscarf tied in a knot asked to see the book I was trying to check out. It was still on the desk. My mother looked at it and asked the librarian why I couldn't have it.  The librarian explained in low tones what the objection was. I couldn't quite hear over the blood roaring in my head, but I did hear the word "prostitution" at one point and the suggestion that I was too little to understand the book anyway. The librarian addressed my mother familiarly as "Stella," not "Mrs. Craft" as she might have done with a regular patron or fellow church-goer. I suspect that pissed Stella off too. Whatever was said, I remember my mother putting one chubby fist against the bone of her hip -- never a good sign -- and then, calling the librarian by her full married name, telling her roughly the following:

"You know who I am. You know where we live. You don't have to let my kid take out books at all if you don't want him to. He has for years now and he always treats the books respectfully and he's never late bringing them back, is he? No. And you know he can read already better than most and already reads beyond his grade and that, so I'm going to tell you what: like I say, you know who I am and you know he's my son and I'm telling you right now he can read any goddamned book he wants as far as I'm concerned and it is not your place to tell him he can't and if you tell me I'm wrong we will go and we'll have to just figure out how to get him what he wants somewhere else, but what he reads is not now and never will be up to you. Am I understood? Now, either give him the book or don't. I have to get home and start supper."

And I went home with my first Don Quixote.

What I was actually able to make of a thousand page novel originally published in Spanish in 1615, I couldn't tell you now. Probably not all that much. I can tell you that it was the first book I studied on my own as close as a Bible. I can tell you that I made sure that I stopped frequently to understand the English (it was probably either the Smollett or Ormsby translation.) I confess I do not think I finished it despite checking it back out twice. In fact I don't think I read it straight through until I read the Samuel Putnam translation -- still good! -- in my early thirties, or roughly the time I was still kissing great gays, just to come full circle.

And so our heroes can be, among other things, long dead, fictional, foolish, kissed, forgotten, but always and sometimes unexpectedly brave. That's the whole point of them. The great critic and essayist Simon Leys in a lovely essay title Quixotism says this lovely thing:

"When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found he had inherited his master's faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease -- through the contagion of fidelity and love.

Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die."

Isn't that lovely? 

As Ive mentioned before, my mother died earlier this year. She was ninety three years old. If I owe my survival and my sense of hard-won self-worth to Harry Hay and all the old queers who came before and fought so that I might live aloud, if I can trace my love of serious literature to that first, forbidden book and count among my first teachers Miguel Cervantes, a busted, broken old veteran and 16th Century hack who in late middle age wrote one of the humane masterpieces of fiction, then I must close with a word of thanks to Stella Cookson Craft, my shy, brave, feisty, fierce little mother. She gave me life, her unconditional love, and my best example of what it means to stand up when needs be. In closing then, I stand as she taught me to, and thank you all for coming.

Come Again

 2025? Awful. We can all agree. Just awful.

I was reminded of Mrs. Windsor, almost as was Mrs. Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg, aka Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and successively Helen Mirren, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton. So, the other night I watched the late Queen, the actual one give that speech at the Corporation of London luncheon to mark her 40th year as head of The Firm. You know the speech, it's the one about her "Annus Horribilus." Remember? Three of the old girls four children got or were getting divorced, Princess Diana smoked her soon to be ex on the television, the very institution of monarchy -- that quaint billion dollar antique -- tottered like a Chinese porcelain on a narrow plant-stand, and then poor Lizzie's favorite castle burned down, mostly. 

Now, it can be hard to feel much sympathy with anyone who gets to have a "favorite" castle, you know? I get that. I have little to no sympathy with monarchs and monarchy as an institution. "No Kings," as the best people are saying these days! Honestly, that man who wrote The Queen and then The Crown, he made it harder to only see the proud uselessness of the House of Windsor and the world's richest white woman. He made her human, damn him. Well, him and Claire Foy and the rest. So, Liz had what she thought at the time was going to be about the worst year ever, right? Took it on the chin, she did. Rather her raison d'être, that. In a quiet way however the Queen did do something pretty extraordinary in that speech, not perhaps unprecedented but certainly rare. Basically, she said, right out loud, in public, "ouch," and she also asked in so many words if everyone might, just this once, ease up a little, 'cause it had been by any measure, as she said, a horrible year. (Honestly, it's like she had feelings or something. It was eerie.)

But we've all had horrible years, right? I know I certainly have. My own "Annus Horribilis" came a quarter of a century ago. There was a disputed election, the Supreme Court basically picked a fool. It was grim. That was also the year my best friend died, I nearly died, and then I lost my job. Damn, right? My friend Peter was in San Francisco and I was living by then in Southern California and managing a famous Gay & Lesbian bookstore. When I took that job I still didn't drive or own a car because as an adult I'd always lived in civilized communities, but then I found myself not only in suburban Orange County, California, but also learning to drive on LA freeways, and then commuting forty-four miles each way every day, which I did because I loved that job and that bookstore. I had my license for about three days when Peter called and asked me be with him because he was scared. I had to drive the length of California to get there. Happened more than once. The last time his family called me. Pete was back in the hospital and he wasn't coming out. I drove north and spent a week or better staying at my dear friend Richard's apartment and then in Peter's lonely little place, getting up at weird hours to move the car. Terrible that that is one of my strongest memories of that time, setting an alarm clock to run out in the dark and move the stupid car so I didn't get a ticket for parking overnight on the street! I stayed as long as I dared and then I decided I had to get back to my job. The bookstore was already in all kinds of trouble when they hired me. It didn't get better in the years I was there. I had to get back, go home, leave Peter. That last morning I went again to sit beside him. When the nurses clearly hadn't in a while, I gave him a bath. When he woke up for awhile he made blurry eye contact with me just long enough to tell me to "stop staring, it's rude." Sorry. I kissed him and we told each other that we loved each other and then I left to drive the six hours home. He died before I got there.

After I'd given the eulogy at his funeral in Pennsylvania I came home, went back to work again, and then had a horrible pain in my side. I had a check-up scheduled for Monday. It was the weekend, so I waited. By the time I went to my appointment I could hardly walk. The doctor took one look and ordered an ambulance. It was a big practice, a huge Kaiser Clinic. They decided it wasn't safe for me to walk back out the way I came in. They put me on a gurney and passed me through a window into the ambulance, where I may or may not have died a little (and no, I didn't see God, or my grandma, or a bright, white light -- and come on, who wants direct, bright, white light when one is not looking or feeling one's best? How cruel is that?) At one point I sat up on the gurney and the EMT's voice broke like an adolescent when he said, "Please lie down, sir!" My hands were blue. It turns out that my appendix had burst a few days before my scheduled appointment and I had gangrene! Gangrene! Can you imagine?  What a truly weird, eighteenth century disease with which to be diagnosed in the first year of the twenty first century. It was like being told one was suffering from dropsy, or scurvy, or a floating uterus. I got twenty-four staples in my gut. It was a month before I could really walk with a cane. 

And then I got fired. While I was away, the owners sold the bookstore to a guy who lived right around the corner. So he really didn't think he'd need a manager, but thanks though. Done. I'd about gone into bankruptcy, managing that place, worked nights, weekends, lived in a motel, didn't get a raise, blah blah blah. So after that wonderful meeting I drove straight home. Never went back.

So 2000 was a horrible year, my "Annus Horibilis." I mean how could things get any worse, honestly? Right? 2001 just had to get better, am I right? What else could go wrong?!

Now here it is 2025 and I'll be honest, this hasn't been winner either now has it? In fact, I feel safe in saying it turns out to be ever so much worse than we ever let ourselves think even as short a time ago as that long lost paradise of 2024. I mean... phew. 

And my mother died. In February. I went to see her like I've done for years, on my vacation in the summer of 2024 and we had a lovely visit and then she got very ill one evening when everybody else: my sister and brother and sister-in-law and our friends had all gone into town to see live music and Mum and I were home by ourselves and she got sick. And then she got sicker. And I didn't have a car because everybody had driven all the vehicles in to see the show, so I had to call them at the concert and tell them to come home which they did. We took Mum to the emergency room and spent a very long time there like you do and then finally a little doctor came in and told us there was "an obstruction" and it was probably cancer. Mum was 92. She had survived two cancers already. Even the surgery to properly diagnose the cancer would probably have killed her. Then she went to another hospital, a better one in Erie, and they told us pretty much the same damned thing. She didn't want any of it. She'd survived all that, twice. Not again. "Take me home," she said, so we did.

I stayed until autumn and then I had to get back to my job -- my job that didn't end this time, but changed, a lot. Mum celebrated her ninety-third birthday in January. I wasn't there. I made it back to her house the day before she died and she got to see me and I got to see her and we got to laugh and cry and then she went to sleep and then the next morning she died. I stayed to give her eulogy, we gave away some of her chicken collection to anyone who came by, and then I had to get back Seattle, to husband, and to work. 

Everything about this year then has been hard. Nothing so bad as when she died, but nearly all of it complicated, confusing, hard.

More than once when I was alone with Mum, when she was asleep in her chair, just as I'd done when we were taking care of my Dad at the end, years before, I'd find myself standing out on the porch, to catch my breath as it were and not smile for a bit. And sometimes with not a thought to do so, I'd sing a snatch of something just to make the moment go by a bit easier. Lord knows what I was singing. It was alright. She couldn't hear me at the best of times usually, even with her "ears in" -- meaning her hearing aids.

One song I do remember. A folk song. Only knew the chorus really, but I was wrong about that. I remembered more than I'd thought, and it wasn't a folksong actually. It was a very old song, but it was by a famous songwriter, our first really: Stephen Foster. Remember him? Old Kentucky Home and Camp Town Races and "Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me, / Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee...," etc. 

Problematic we'd call ol' Stephen now. He wrote for the most popular entertainments of his day, Minstrel Shows. Songs of the South, so to say and this despite the fact that he was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania boy who mostly lived in New York and as I understand it went South exactly once and did not stay. He also wrote what they called "Parlor Songs." These were rather lachrymose ballads of "pale drooping maidens," usually pining for lost love and that sort of thing. It was one of these I remembered a little and sang alone on my mother's porch.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

there's a song that will linger forever in our ears, 

Oh! Hard Times come again no more."

Now this is interesting. Stephen Foster knew sorrow. He had what they might have called "a weak frame" and was frequently ill. At just 37 and alone in his hotel room he fell and either was injured grievously or cut his own throat. Very sad. Despite his great success and his lasting fame, a very sad end indeed. But what is more interesting is when I came to read about this particular song, the one I sang, Hard Times Come Again No More, written in 1855 at the height of his power and popularity. And what makes it interesting? I'll tell you. (I find comfort in reading and research. Something I've always done to escape.) 

Note that in this first verse and throughout he addresses not God, but his listeners, his audience, the people well enough off to presumably have a piano in the parlor and a parlor in which to gather round and sing. As I say, the song is not a prayer,  but an invitation to what we would call mindfulness. It is a plea not for divine intervention, but ours. 

"Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, 

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

The composer quotes the cry of the destitute and the sufferer, it is with their voice that he calls us to witness and intervention. And he addresses us again, those better off:

"While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,

There are frail forms fainting at the door;

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

Extraordinary. When I was repeating the chorus and snatches of that first verse, it was frankly with little more than self-pity. Poor me, worried me, busy me, me losing my mother.  Shamefully self-absorbed. No wonder I was careful that no one should hear me.

My friend Nancy recently posted a brief poem, For Instance is the title, by John Ciardi and those last lines stuck with me:

"Not everything that happens / is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is." Yeah, that. Remember that.

And yet we order even our memories to make meaning where there might not have been any, or much, at the time those memories were made, yes? It is what we as a species do: we make sense when there may not be any. But the idea that we can or should desist is, I think, if not wrong then not likely. Can't be helped. We want lessons, don't we? Coincidences and meaning and uncanny scenes that foretell and summarize and distill what otherwise is just pain. We want poems.

And that's why we need art. That's why we make it, require it, enjoy it even when it is sad. Art makes the sense we can't otherwise, even if it's little more than a feeling.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears." Yes, let's. There's something in that, isn't there? We can draw not only strength but joy from  what well-meaning people call "a sadness shared." More importantly, we can better remember even what is awful when it is made meaningful, given shape, set in story, song, art.  It is good to stop and think not just of my problems, my sadness, but of what it is to suffer and to live. It is good to be reminded even in mourning that events as they have happened around me, do not belong to me; as if other people's suffering, as if even the deaths of people I have loved do not have have meaning because I l knew and loved those people but rather because their lives were fully vested with meaning, with or without me, that their lives mattered simply for having been lived. I pause to remind myself that this horrible year, like the last and the others, is not happening to me so that I might draw a lesson from it.  (Remember when our mothers reminded us that there were starving children who would be glad of the food we wouldn't eat? They were right, our mothers. Often. Mostly.) I must try to remember that all the lives lost and all the living that was in them, all the life around me past and present, lived by those I loved and those I didn't and those unknown to me, had art in them, beauty. Better to be humbled, awed by how little any of it is to do with me. All I can do, all we can do, is try to relieve some of the burdens of others, ease their way: feed the poor, protect the innocent, fight the power of bad and stupid men, and remember what it is for those who know hard times as we, in fact, do not. And stand against forgetfulness, self-pity, vulgarity, callousness, cruelty. We must as best we can, also sing.

"'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no more

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more,

Oh, hard times come again no more."

That in mind, a moment's mirth and beauty, yes? and so ... A Christmas Memory, by Truman Capote.

A Caricature

 

A Caricature

 

Witness: The great state of Oklahoma ranks 50th in education. For children in Oklahoma public schools, let me explain that there are only fifty states so that means… ? This feller wanted not just Bibles, but Trump Bibles in every classroom — and believe it or not that was not even his worst or most dangerous “idea.” Bye, buddy.

Cots and Chairs

 Charlie Kirk was a cunt and I’m not sad that he’s dead. 

I say this, but then you probably already know. You know. Maybe not the word you’d choose, but still. You knew. Didn’t need me to tell you. Trust me though, there are plenty who don’t. I’m not talking about his friends, family, collaborators, not the men who funded him or the little incel pricks who cheered him when he brought his medicine show to campus. I don’t mean the fuckwits on Fox or the NYT opinion page who nowadays are basically the same but with their flies up and with bigger words. 

I mean just people; people you may know too, friends and relations. Woman my age from my hometown talking on social media about Charlie Kirk’s “decency,” which is like talking about a quadriplegic’s ballroom dancing. And not just her: retired nurse on my friend’s Facebook page admitting she doesn’t really follow politics (!) but she admired Charlie because he was obviously a good Christian. More than a few of those I saw. Bottle Blonds Kristin Chenoweth and Selma Blair being stupid. Various well-meaning souls reposting that picture of Charlie frolicking on a beach with his wife and children, as if that photo negates everything the man ever actually said and did to make America so much worse than he’d found it. I felt some obligation to disagree where I could. Usually I’d just scroll by, maybe mute, or “unfriend.” Not sure why I felt obliged to try. Didn’t even curse! In fact I tried very hard to be respectful of the people who expressed sympathy and regret — two qualities of which Charlie Kirk himself was devoid.

When I said he was a bad man who preached hate, I was told, “what you speak reflects your own heart,” and that I was talking about myself when I said that. I was also told that I was “on the side of the terrorist,” and that I was endorsing murder.

Right about here in any opinion piece about his assassination is where one is meant to disown political violence, guns, and murder. Shall we take that as given? After-all, and unlike Charlie Kirk, I’ve never endorsed the idea of stoning anyone to death, or described murdered school children as the price we must sadly pay to maintain the Second Amendment. Just to be thorough, I’ve also never advocated the suspension of due process, using deportation as terror, espoused the inferiority of women or races other than my own, or made blacklists of supposedly traitorous college instructors. 

Safe to say then that whatever I may be, good and bad, I’m proud to not be a reactionary opportunist like the late Charlie Kirk — which is why I can’t understand pretending to be sad about his death. He was a Christian White Nationalist, or put it another way, a cracker-fascist. I don’t mourn dead Nazis, nor worry over much about their widows and orphans. The man proclaimed empathy to be a mistake. In his case, for once he was right. Pity is wasted on the memory of the pitiless.

Now do I have either empathy or pity for the idiot who shot Charlie Kirk? Nope. Not a bit. He didn’t bump off Reinhard Heydrich. He killed a loudmouth campus bully, not a mass murderer. True, I was amused to see Kash Patel and company bumbled about for days trying to find this mastermind, only to have the dude’s dad all but walk him into the police station on the end of a rope, but that wasn’t anything to do with hoping the killer might get away. Fuck him. Let him rot in prison until he dies of old age. 

It does feel however that we absolutely must challenge the recasting of Charlie Kirk into any kind of martyr. He wasn’t “an influential media personality,” nor a “representative young conservative” nor “a rising star in Republican circles,” — all descriptions in print and broadcast media I encountered this week.  Nope. Charlie Kirk was a complete piece of shit and we cannot let them polish this turd into some kind of American hero just because some simpleton with a riffle murdered him mid hate-speech.

It feels exhausting already challenging this new false narrative even if only on the social media of vague acquaintances. Not brave, telling some elderly soul who “doesn’t really follow politics” that this was a bad man. Feels a little mean, frankly, like pointing out that this or that touching photo of celebrity A weeping by the casket of celebrity B is actually just Ai. It was a nice thought, wasn’t it? Yeah, well, but it’s also bullshit. It’s fake. Have to keep saying it because that’s the truth. Remember Truth? It’s not about having the answer or being the one telling the truth or explaining anything to anyone so much as it is just refusing the lie.

No. You don’t get to call Charlie Kirk a good Christian, or any kind of good. That’s a lie. He wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t bringing Christ back onto campus. Charlie Kirk was an ill-educated, egocentric, power-hungry bully and a garbage thinker. Charlie Kirk was a soulless goon.

No, he didn’t deserve to die for that, but he doesn’t deserve anybody’s tears either. The world isn’t going to get any better because he was shot and killed. Might get worse because of this, history shows. Definitely worse if we don’t tell the truth about what a lier he was. Have to contradict the lie that he was ever anything else. 

Meanwhile, sending cots and chairs, right? Cots and chairs.

A Caricature