Now this?

That’s a fucking cover. It’s a shame that the actual story is probably crazy racist, what with this being a wartime comic featuring an insane man who changed his name to Dynamite Joe.

This is how I discovered Norris to be a fascist.

That may be a bit harsh but the list of his “campaign promises” has, alongside the expected jokes about “the real WMDs – his fists and feet,” a promise to “deport all liberals (then force them to listen to Bill O’ Reilly every day for five years, at which point they may return).” Patriotic, isn’t it? There’s nothing more American than deporting all political opponents, forcing them to listen to your own point of view exclusively for years on end before they can return home.

I’m probably overreacting but the unthinkingly loyal and blind patriotism of Norris’ writing leaves me more than a little uncomfortable, memetic darling though he may be. At least he doesn’t have any real political aspirations. The way celebrity worship is in this country, he’d get elected with terrifyingly little difficulty.

Wait.

I have no qualms about making fun of terrible people and situations both. Dark comedy and satire is a good way to deflate those who would try to assert undue privileges, but there’s a saturation point wherein it becomes counterproductive, and maybe even a little dangerous. I’m not talking about satire, which itself I believe to be necessary for a healthy society and government. Satire reflects and criticizes the world in a way which, while amusing, is also deadly serious. What I’m unnerved by is that joking about the current administration has become de rigeur, a thing done by reflex because it’s what must be done to fit in.

If the erosion of civil liberties and privacy is fit for a carelessly produced and bought greeting card, then it follows that society must be comfortable enough with the said issue to not care. Greeting cards are traditionally the blandest of the bland, reflecting the zeitgeist of a boringly bleak suburbia. Satire and comedy are still valuable tools for making sense of the world, for criticizing and understanding and changing it, all. When that comedic criticism has been boiled down to a pithy reference alongside a Garfield card and a belated birthday card with a turtle on it – that is when meaning has been lost, when the outrages legion are just accepted as part of the background cultural static and written off as just the way things are.

We’re inoculating ourselves. People are joking about the President in the same way they would about a mother-in-law, laughing about the situation and shrugging shoulders because hey, what can you do, you know?

Don’t even get me started on the Christian Science Monitor itself, though. Trust me.

Instead, I ate another. It was just as strange as the first, and made my face pucker slightly. It almost stung, or rather tingled as if there were an active ingredient other than flavor. Picture me standing there, in front of the cupboard, asking with each chip just why I was subjecting myself to this. They were horrible! And yet I ate. Abominable! I had another. Each bite was accompanied by a silent questioning of my very existence. Why was I doing this to myself? Oh god, oh god.

Ten chips in and I realized that existentialism tastes like a salt and vinegar potato chip. I’ve yet to come to terms with this.

Yesterday I visited the family for my sister’s 20th birthday. While there I found a copy of “The Secret”, the aforementioned inane self-help program. The DVD was sitting unopened in a pile of other discs, probably given to my mother by one of her clients. They tend to do that. I thought nothing of it at the time. We went to The Stinking Rosefor lunch, opened presents, &c, and I drove home. That’s when I decided to look into what the program was about and realized that the people behind “The Secret” are either evil or goddamn insane.

“The Secret” is what they call the “Law of Attraction”. The idea is that thinking about and wanting something is enough to actually get it. Don’t want to get sick? Just think healthy thoughts. Overweight? It’s not the food, it’s that you’re thinking too fat!

Think about how crazy that sounds. The claim is that “like attracts like”, that negative thoughts attract negative events. Never mind that the magnetic metaphor they use is a broken one, that negative attracts positive. Nevermind that the idea is crazy and makes absolutely no goddamn sense, being just a modern rehash of sympathetic magic.

Michael Beckwith, one of the supposed experts on the DVD, spoke with ABC News about the program. What did he say?

“I’ve seen kidneys regenerated. I’ve seen cancer dissolved,” said Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder of Agape International Spiritual Center.

Byrne told ABC that she wouldn’t even get a flu shot because “if you’re feeling good, how can you attract any illness to you?”

If you feel good and stay positive, you can’t get sick. According to Beckwith’s logic, he could go into a hospital and lick the ever-loving hell out of patients and equipment and just sort of rub himself up against everything and come out fine. He could get into a fight with an ebloa patient and not end up bleeding out of every orifice because if he feels good, how can illness be attracted to him?

That’s not all, though. This is what Rhonda Byrne, the producer, had to say when asked about the genocide and slaughter in Rwanda.

“The law of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we’re on by what we’re thinking and feeling… If we are in fear, if we’re feeling in our lives that we’re victims and feeling powerless, then we are on a frequency of attracting those things to us … totally unconsciously, totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important.”

The Producer of The Secret claims that victims of ethnic cleansing were slaughtered because they weren’t thinking positive thoughts. The implication is that it’s their own damn fault for not thinking positively enough.

I can believe that these people are either insane or exploiters of the highest order, preying on the insecurities of those who want to affect change without putting in too much effort. Were that the end of it “The Secret” would wither and die like others before it, excepting of course extraordinary circumstances.

Enter Oprah Winfrey, an extraordinary circumstance.

Oprah is, through her media empire, able to significantly influence people worldwide. To have Oprah promoting something is to lend it a credibility based on nothing more than raw fame. People listen to her, for better or for worse, and her support of “The Secret” can only lead more people into supporting and following some rather destructive ideas. There’s an article at Salon that explores Oprah’s support and what it means far better than I can do here.

I should probably call my parents about that disc when I get home.