“I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream”…

 

“I Have No Mouth, 

And I Must Scream”…

By Alfred Lehmberg

 

Like many, I’m abruptly removed,  excluded… banned from what passes for a spot on the world stage: Facebook. I won’t belabor any inordinate “unfairness” or senseless “arbitrariness” provoked by some algorithmic boobytrap I triggered, other than to say that when one becomes outraged by the outrageous one might be provoked to further outrage! I offer that that speaks, and abundantly, to a less than abundant fairness.

At astonishing issue and provocation WAS a malicious declaration of a mal-informed and conscienceless Religious hypocrisy by a craven enemy of the inclusive American ideal. You know, selling: Browns down, Blacks back, Queers nowhere near, and Women second tier. Those are the facts of history and conscience.

All this was revoltingly personified by a crass faux-Christian media-vangelist, one Dave Hayes, a person entirely given over to salacious rumor, wholly unsupported conspiracy theorizing, and some outdated and wholly discounted superstition! Too, here is one pronouncing authoritatively, still, by way of Facebook, his unctuous sermonizing on the callous need for the destruction of The United States (let that sink in!) as a Democratic Republic of working men and women, proud and healthy men and women attempting to enjoy productive lives aspiring to real fairness and enlightened efficacy in a sensible science-based world! This “media-person,” this QAnon conspiracy theorist Mr. Hayes (aka "Praying Medic"), was belligerently opposed to all that: 

https://www.facebook.com/rightwingwatch/posts/10158216570951748

The suggestion he declares (on Facebook) is the not-so-thinly veiled proposal that rendering our Republic over to a fascist Trumpian dictatorship of rabid wolves and evil weasels was in our nation’s best interest... best path and practice going forward! Yes, preying on one other in untenable little lives harboring no satisfaction but mean survival, in abject rightlessness, and living only to despair? That was the path forward! 

It is ever a choice… …why, the question is begged… yet, a choice, still. Hell is as close at hand as is heaven! Though, last but not least? This person criticized would DARE to foment an unrest in America’s super-power military to achieve this end! Yes! The potentiality of some "just" Mutiny in the military is proposed! Full stop by record scratch! 

I found this outrageous and was outraged. I wrote “Hey, Dave! Push a sock in that stuff or get your f'n wish, you vapid unamerican!” This was all I wrote. Bam! Three days in Facebook stir. 

Let’s review the perplexing scene. 

OK, for Dave Hayes’ glaring clarion call for foul sedition and its fulsome encouragement for our military to lurid and felonious mutiny... as God’s will... mutiny leading to the cruel soul-death and the subjugation of our Nation to traitorous criminals and psychopathic scalawags? Well, I asserted that he should muffle such talk with a sock stuffed into the provenance of that treason, the foulest treason (I remind the reader)... sputtered in such thoughtless and obscene exclamation... that it deserved, at least, a sock! At least!

Further, I offered that were he to continue his unwarranted and unconstitutional call for traitorous sedition and mutiny, he could have it his WAY and our Nation actually be rendered to the banana-republic military dictatorship he called for. Those always end so well; the reader can agree! 

I closed with a terse assessment of his patriotism as one wholly toxic, insipid, and tediously dull: “…You vapid unamerican,” I wrote, outraged and disgusted. I’m a retired officer of the military, reader; I was Regular Army still on inactive roles! This writer knew about that which he was outraged! ...And disgusted!

…So, where is my sin? Can we understand that perhaps an error or betrayal of a “law’s” spirit may have been made… right, wrong, or indifferent, here, in this instance? That some laughable irony of injustice may actually reward a clear traitor, credulous fascist, and unhinged seditionist, Dave Hayes… but punish the person (me) outraged by same and moved to express that outrage unthreateningly to said individual: a right-wing religious extremist down for Proud Boy mayhem and shouting biased lies and mawkish distortions on public airwaves… a maleficent purveyor of egregious stupefactions encouraging obvious disinformations, gonzo Q-insanities, and other faithless faux-political mendacities… mendacities so sophomorically drawn from some cooperative toxi-rumor of gladly ignored as contrary-to-agenda fact… that a sentient person’s imagination is thrown over a wing-backed chair and rogered to in-sentience! Maybe that’s the plan… 

Outrageous, like I said, but he goes on, unmolested and sans all sin, to spew his seditious sewage from a protected speech spot on Facebook’s page or radio and television, still! And then we come to it… 

There is no appeal for my dismissal! Dave has a TV and internet platform! I'm betting he's even blue-checked! 

I’m booted off the stage aforementioned, summarily, by, at best, an algorithm aping human anxiousness, a soulless and reprogrammable machine of bland indifference, an insensate tool of a sad number’s uncalculated if calculating mal-calculus, great on Newton's spin, rate and charge… right? ...But sucking at Heisenburg's nuance, subtlety, emotional response, or humanity. That was "at best," remember. At worst? 

At worst, I am expulsed by a canted human ham-hand living a life of untested and toxic hypocrisy switched out for faith, one embroiled of gravid hypocrisy in an autocracy serving him or her but having their autocratic and inexorable heel down on me and you. Yeah… it could be a lot worse, but it’s this, outlined here, that puts us on the road to exactly that... worse! That’s been this writer's experience! 

See, in the words of the late Harlan Ellison, a person who would know my outrage, understand it, be similarly outraged, but then be outraged anew at such an arbitrarily imposed inability to sensibly and even benignly express that outrage in a public venue where it might be heard… where that provoking the outrageous provokes the outrage in the first outrageous place, but then skips away untroubled? That's outrageous!

No, Facebook’s unbased, poorly foundationed, and unevenly applied "time-outs" for its supporters, meted out, domineeringly, so arbitrarily,  autocratically, and nonsensically, sans all consistency and professional responsibility... as a juvenilely intimidating punishment to "hens and roosters" more largely supporting it (chilling reasonable dissent!), while letting the psychotic wolves and ferrets run free? That seems as cross-purposed to efficacy as it is prejudiced against a "best practice." 

The subject was the touting of a seditious call for a military mutiny on public airways, the reader will recall. ...No lipstick for THAT pig.

“I have no mouth,” reader, “and I must scream.” Mr. Ellison knew what I’m talking about!  Wounded and in pain, I must scream... but I have no mouth! Not an untroubled and un-trifled one!

***

Thanks, and a hat-tip to Driftglass, suffering similar slings and arrows on Twitter, but for life... when his is the message of sanity you need to hear... not that risibly treasonous and seditious drivel of one Dave Hayes!