Subject: Re: P.S.
From: Thomas Wictor <twictor@earthlink.net>
Date: 1/24/10, 04:35
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>

I also recently realized that I have no real interest in screwing with people, even jackasses.  Everywhere you go online, it's just one big, fat flamewar, and I'm really done with it.  My interest is in the First World War.  On every single discussion forum about it, there are lunatics hurling insults, taking offense, chiding, talking down to, screeching...  About a war that ended almost a century ago and that involved the taking of tens of millions of lives.  These stupid fights are larded with smarm, most of the posters equipped with gooshy anti-war quotations in their signatures, but by gum they know the rate of fire of all the machine guns, and they know who the commander of the 1st Shropshire Newspaper Lads Regiment was, and how he should sent his right flank to his left and biffed the Hun right smart.  Anti-war but pro-weaponry.  Ready to argue about anything.  Dishonoring the subject at hand.

No sobriety anymore.  Everything goes.  We're all in the neighborhood, feeling a bit wacky, and the more demented everything gets, the more exciting.  But it's all in one direction: downward.  We're poisoned by end-the world negativity and cynicism daily, from everywhere we turn.

You know what it all comes down to?  I just realized it after digesting today's exchange with you: There are so many fucking weirdos, losers, fabulists, and chip-on-the-shoulder merchants that I'm no longer interested in writing to these turds.  Everybody--not just the Freidmans or Krystols--is mediocre.  Even the rollicking cesspool comment pages at Ace of Spades have a deeply contrived, heard-it-all-before quality.  Our culture is in stasis.  Not very much excites me any more about it.  You know what I do a lot of online?  Find great music.

I was a bass guitarist and a freelance music journalist for ten years in L.A.  I heard more crap than any human should be forced to absorb in five lifetimes.  But I also found some real artists, like Moloko: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHemG2q8PeQ

Or Azis, the master of Bulgarian chalga:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBeLVoWgraQ&

And his babe Malina:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUFYNxCUKE8  

And Serbian singer Divna Ljubojevic singing an Eastern Orthodox hymn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcpUnZ_ghdA&

I'm working on a trilogy of novels about the afterlife.  In the first, the protag--a bitter, angry, desperately sad guy--dies in a car accident and goes to hell.  He's dead only a few second before he's rescued, but in that time he spends months in hell.  When he's resuscitated he isn't grateful.  He maintains his bitter, negative, inhumane lifestyle and soon begins to see the denizens of the place he spent those terrified months.  They're in his world now, or maybe he's only seeing them through the thinnest layer of gauze and he gets closer and closer to his ultimate fate.  He must save himself, but how? By jettisoning the anger, cynicism, and justified rage he's felt all his life?  The emotions that have come to make his very face?  Where will he be, then?  Who will he be?  The rage and negativity puts you down with the demons, but what if you can't change your outlook?  Can a fundamentally decent man be full of hate?  

The second book is about purgatory, and the third is about heaven. 

This is what I want to spend my life fooling with.  I went to http://trueslant.com/barrettbrown/2010/01/23/in-which-i-get-advice-from-various-conservatives/, and it's just nothing but angry dudes goading each other.  Nothing worthwhile is being said.  We've been in this pit since 9/11.  Fight-fight-fight-fight-fight. 

Nobody has a good word to say about anyone or anything, so I've dumped it all.  I vote, but I also buy paintings, write novels, give money to military charities, buy pizza for the IDF, and generally think about me and my own, my own being all those strangers in the world I donate to.

Operation Fuck Everything is going to be one big flamewar, isn't it?  With you standing back and chuckling at what you're wrought on the jackasses.  

Me, I'm going to write books about the triumph of the individual over the masses, of beauty over ugliness, and of dreams coming true.  When you wallow in the fuck-fuck-fuck for too long, it ruins you.  Ever see Shock Corridor?  The cautioniest of all cautionary tales.

Whatever happens to me, I'm not going to end up some old geezer battling his unseen mortal enemies online, giving himself a stroke over things that really don't matter.  

You like to "give people shit," because you feel that you're much smarter than everyone else.  By feeling that way, you've already shown that you're not, and you're in danger of becoming like the mental patients.  Making such a big statement as you plan on making isn't worth it to me, particularly since it's almost certainly going to lead to much more spewing and spreading of rank ugliness and amused cynical titters.  

Bah.  Not for me.  I've music to listen to and novels to write.

Cheers,
TW