A Christmas Story from Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane

In his reverie Argus had the vision recorded below. (Jenny, his girl friend, has been at large for some time in the mountains of Wyoming and is known as the “Mountain Woman.” She is wanted for certain crimes against the corporate glob of which she is innocent.) Here is Argus’ recounting what took place. I again warn you that Argus claims to be insane. I cannot attest otherwise.

Then just after the Senate broke for the Christmas holiday, Jenny came bursting through the door of silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair’s holiday office in Jackson, Wyoming. Seventy-three representatives of the coal industry were meeting with the great senator and laughing inordinately at one of his better jokes – something about why the rooster crossed the road.

Jenny stood there surveying the 72 men and one woman. She had one hand in the pocket of her coat, the other grasping a coil of nylon rope slung over her shoulder. What happened next was reported verbatim in the Washington Post because the senator happened to have his tape recorder in his bottom desk drawer going during his meeting with the coal people, “just in case he was misquoted later on.”

“This is a stick up,” Jenny announced pointing her finger at the senator through the pocket of her coat.

“Don’t shoot!” the lobbyist from Peabody Coal cried. “I can arrange a free trip for you to Hawaii on official government business. Well, then, how about an all-expense-paid trip to Tahiti?” Then he screeched, “I know who you are! You’re the Mountain Woman!”

“The Mountain Woman?” the senator cried. “Why bless your heart, my girl, you’re Jenny Baines Rogers!” The senator never forgot the name of a constituent. He rushed toward Jenny in long steps, his hand extended. “Why I knew your mama. She came to visit the great state of Wyoming back in…”

“Stand back!” Jenny warned swinging her pocketed finger toward the senator.

“No cause for alarm,” the senator said, pinning on his best big Wyoming smile. “Why, child, we were worried about you,” the senator said in his famous baritone. “I just got the Air Force to send out another two dozen ‘copters to look for you. Thank God, girl, you’ve come to me. I can intercede with the president for a pardon. I can get you an audience with Nancy Reagan. I know James Watt, personally—a sterling man with great influence in the timber industry. I can get you cheap housing in Philadelphia. I can get you and your boyfriend food stamps. I can …”

“This is a stick up,” Jenny repeated. “Hand over your Rolodex.”

“My Rolodex? Never!” the senator cried grabbing his Rolodex and clutching it to his chest. “You can have my autographed picture of Nixon, and the gold watch dear George W gave me, but I will never hand over my Rolodex!”

“Drop it!” Jenny said.

The great senator looked at Jenny – something about the glow in her eyes and the set of her mouth that, suddenly forced his compliance. With a shaking hand he handed the Rolodex to Jenny and then he asked, “What else can I do for you, little lady?” He straightened his suit and shot Jenny another of his big Wyoming smiles. “We all love Wyoming.”

“We love your state, too,” the guy from Peabody said. “We got a 127 permits to explore for minerals in the Teton National Forest alone. We’re neighbors, lady!” He extended his hand.

“We’re all for Wyoming, too,” the guy from Mountain Coal cried. “We own over a million acres of good ranch land we bought for the water rights so we can pipe out your coal in a slurry pipeline to our furnaces back east. Why, we pay more taxes in your state than any of the other big ten and…”

“Get your suck-tubes out of our state,” Jenny said.

“I can help,” silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair cried. “I can get appropriations to clean up the mess left in the desert from the uranium mines, and I can get money to fill in the pits up in the Black Hills by raising the price of federal coal leases and…”

“You can’t do that!” cried the guy from Peabody. “Remember our arrangement!”

“I made no promises,” the senator said. “I never make promises. I have never voted in parallel with the economic support I may or may not have received from your corporation or any other corporation, and you know that. Admit it!” He glanced at his desk drawer to see that it was slightly cracked open.

“Absolutely, Senator.”

“Furthermore, I report every penny of my campaign contributions and all honorariums, and I have never written a book. I comply! I comply and comply. I also go to Senate Prayer Breakfasts every week.”

Then Jenny slipped a loop of rope around the leg of the senator’s great desk, popped open the window, and descended in a single, long, beautiful rappel to the ground and disappeared into the Christmas crowd that was shopping at Ralph Lauren’s local factory outlet store.

After that the press went crazy claiming that the Mountain Woman had terrorized the senator, and the FBI was, of course, embarrassed and called every available operative into the search for Jenny.

On Christmas morning a group of 40 nondescript, oily, swirly, surly citizens gathered around silver-haired Senator Sylvester Sinclair’s home in Casper. Someone had alerted FOX television, and as soon as the cameras were set up the people began to sing “Silent Night,” and the senator came out of his house in his pajamas and slippers with his big Wyoming smile. But the second verse of Silent Night deviated somewhat from the standard lyrics.

Silent Night. Holy Night,

All is dead.

All is blight.

Round yon virgin the air is all sour Raped and pillaged for money and power,

Sleep polluted today

Sleep in eternal decay.

As they began singing other verses the senator grew increasingly irritated, and he began to scold the people saying they had no right to desecrate the holy season with such unchristian carryings-on. Further, he knew every one of them—he called all the carolers by their first names—and he said he knew their daddies, and he told them to go home and thank God they lived in America where people were free to express themselves, even if they were ill-advised, such as they were, and he wished them all a Merry Christmas. Before they could finish the last verse he slammed the door. But they had come many a mile on Christmas, and they sang the last verse anyway.

Silent Night. Holy Night,

All’s calm,

But nothing is right

‘Round yon mountain the forests are bare;

All God’s creatures lie dead everywhere,

Made into money for more millionaires, So sleep in heavenly peace,

Sleep in heavenly peace.

And from that day until the senator returned to Washington, people picketed the senator’s house with signs that read, “Take the suck-tubes out of our Mother” and “Don’t sell our Mother to the corporate dead” and “Your mother is angry.” After he returned to Washington a small group of the same rag-taggers surrounded his town house with similar placards keeping a silent round-the-clock vigil. But nothing changed, at least not that a person could see at first. Not until the silver-haired senator’s Roledex in the hands of the Mountain Woman, began to reveal certain facts and bring about certain changes that were nearly imperceptible at first.

(This is all that Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, told me at the time of this posting. Stay tuned.)

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Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane, on Moral Burnout Syndrome (MBS)

Argus Joseph Thompson, insane, presents the following on MBS. Its veracity as well as its merit are, as always, subject to question.

On the tenth of November, S. B. Hemmingsford was arrested by the FBI. A 47-count indictment handed down by a New York Federal Grand Jury charged Hemmingsford and three Wall Street brokerage house executives with insider trading in the stock of General-O Dynamics and 14 of its subsidiaries. The New York Times reported that Hemmingsford and his three co-defendants had allegedly amassed illegal profits exceeding $3.5 billion. All four defendants were immediately released on their own bonds.

Although the government claimed Hemmingsford was a criminal, the government saw him as a special kind of criminal entitled to special privileges. If you’ve illegally hoarded large sums of money before being caught illegally hoarding more, the presumption exists that you are responsible and can be turned loose on your signature to await trial…while Leroy, who is penniless and homeless and who robbed the 7-11 for $23 to get a quick fix, has his bond set at a $100,000, which he; his twelve brothers and sisters; and all of their known spouses; offspring; current and discarded soul mates and their pushers; along with their friends on Twitter and Facebook collectively could not gather.

Crime is a sport reserved for the rich.

Persons of equal loot, moolah and scratch are equal—that’s what Jefferson should have written if he was going to be truthful about it, not that worn out aphorism that he dumped in the Constitution —All (not including women) men are created equal. But why should some wino whose total assets never exceeded half a bottle of cheap Tokay and a three-month growth of whiskers have the same rights as me?

I once knew a rich man who I thought wasn’t a criminal. He bought a second-hand mattress at Orville’s Store for the Homeless, and when he was looking for bedbug larvae he found where the mattress had been sewn up. When he cut it open he found $423. Since wealth is always comparative, compared to me, he is rich. I am not mentioning names because this man did not pay taxes on his windfall. Once more that proves the age-old truth that behind every great wealth is great crime.

Anyway, a few days after Hemmingsford was released he appeared with his lawyer, Rutherford P. Benyon, before the federal magistrate where he entered pleas of “Not guilty,” and “Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

The Times filed a follow-up story, the headline of which read:

HEMMINGSFORD ACCUSES TERRORISTS

An attorney for S. B. Hemmingsford, chairman of the board of General-O Dynamics, today claimed his client was the latest victim of the newly discovered personality disorder known as Moral Burnout Syndrome (MBS), a disease said to plague high-ranking corporate and public officials operating under extreme stress and recently described by the Nobel Prize winner, Solomon P. Goldberg.

Benyon said his client was a victim of MBS and has been in the acute throes of the disease since the recent attacks on his company’s logging operations by a radical environmental organization known as The Children. Benyon said Hemmingsford took The Children’s invasion of the company’s timber sale, where thousands of trees were spiked to prevent their harvest, as an assault levied against him personally. It was the classic “final stressor-straw,” a term invented by Goldberg to denote an identifiable last emotional trauma, which, when combined with prior stresses, at last pushes the victim into the disorder.

Benyon said, “The action of these terrorists was allegedly to save trees, but their true motivation was to shove my client over the edge into the full throes of Moral Burnout Syndrome.”

The Times’ cover story recorded the history of Goldberg’s discovery of MBS, a breakthrough lauded by social scientists as the long-sought connecting link between science and morality. In part the article read:

Already some experts are proclaiming Goldberg’s identification of the disease as a contribution to modern psychology comparable only to Freud’s The Ego and the Id. Goldberg discovered that wealthy or powerful self-made men approaching the summit of their careers often suddenly plummet into the gaping hole of moral decadence. At the time of the onset of the disease most of the victims have already achieved what Goldberg called “their three primary P’s—power, prestige and position, and their secondary P’s, their plethora of playthings—their Porsches, their private psychiatrists, their personal pushers and their sultan’s assortment of blond pubescents.”

In short, the victims have it all. Yet quite without warning, many inexplicably leap over the edge into a life of crime.

The Times writers observed that the victims’ crimes were pathetically unimaginative—common thefts, ordinary bribery, artless payoffs, embezzlements, even mundane murders for hire. They embezzled when they didn’t need the money and illegally manipulated the markets when they didn’t know what to do with the cash they already had.

The Goldberg article asked by its subtitle, “Is Moral Burnout a Crime?” A picture of the distinguished professor receiving the Nobel Prize from the Royal Caroline Medico–Chirurgical Institute in Sweden accompanied the lead story in which the Times writers, in their usual imperious style, traced the psychological progression of the disorder as described by Dr. Goldberg :

The archetypical MBS victim, the high- pressure executive, having existed under fire for years, is one day heard to begin screaming, “It’s war out there, man! War! Your competitors want to kill you. Your customers want to kill you. Your board of directors wants to kill you. Your employees want to kill you. And when you get home, the old lady wants to kill you. It’s war, and it’s hell!” The victim begins to complain of autonomic anal tightening and other vague symptoms that are often precursors of the disorder.

Goldberg likens the disease to a soldier in combat who, after suffering extreme stress from fear and physical exhaustion, gets a letter from home saying John Wayne, his hero, was the secret lover of Rock Hudson. It’s the “final stressor-straw” that pushes the soldier over the edge into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

MBS is a disease in the full sense of the word, Goldberg claims. “We would never permit the criminal courts to punish our leaders for having suffered a heart attack. To the same extent we cannot allow our criminal justice system to deal with this subtle and complex syndrome.” When asked about his willingness to testify in Hemmingsford’s case, Dr. Goldberg said, “It will be my privilege to convince the jury that this man was not responsible for his crimes but was, instead, a helpless victim of the insidious side effects of MBS.”

Argus concluded his presentation on MBS by claiming that MBS was merely collateral damage in a system engaged in the eternal and holy wars of American capitalism.

I find his logic and his conclusions unsupported by fact or logic but fully in support of his claim that he is insane.

How Argus Joseph Thompson, insane, became a lawyer

As you may remember, Argus Joseph Thomson is a poor lawyer specializing in Poor Law for the poor. Here he tells us how he was driven to become a lawyer.

His childhood friend, Doc Blomister, had been working as an undertaker’s assistant and was charged with having sexually violated the corpse of a well-known movie star who was said to have died from over-exuberant frolicking with a Wyoming cowboy. They had Doc cold, pictures and all.

The charges shocked the community considering the fact that Doc enjoyed all of the apparent accouterments of normalcy and good citizenry. He attended the Baptist Church every Sunday; he was an officer in the Junior Chamber of Commerce; he served as an Assistant Scout Master, and he was an avid member of the Cowboy Joe Club, those rabid boosters of the University of Wyoming football team. But you can never tell about the secret stuff that stews away inside of people, especially immigrants from Pumpkin Buttes.

Doc’s lawyer pled Doc “not guilty by reason of insanity.” At the trial a psychiatrist, Dr. Henrietta Homony, testified that Doc’s depravity was attributable to the abuse he’d suffered as a child at the hands of Miss Bromley – the trauma of which, Dr. Homony testified, left Doc terrified of the opposite sex and powerless to relate to living women. “This is irrefutable evidence of his insanity,” the shrink testified, “because as every mentally healthy male should realize, the female of the species is essentially harmless and easily dominated by the superior, stronger male in whom God had entrusted the fate of the species.”

Doc’s lawyer hauled Miss Bromley into court to testify. She was the teacher at Pumpkin Buttes country school where both Doc and Argus attended.

“When you caught Wilbur Blomister down at the creek with Bessy Lou Hogelstein playing doctor what did you do?” the lawyer asked Miss Bromley.

“I don’t have to answer you,” Miss Bromley said lifting her chin. “That’s privileged.”

“Answer his question,” Judge Hammond interjected.

“I did what any decent woman would have done.”

“What’s that?” Doc’s lawyer asked.

“I won’t answer.”

“You’ll be in contempt of court if you don’t,” the judge snarled.

“Come over here and I’ll show you,” she said to Doc’s lawyer as she reached into her apron pocket.

“Answer the question,” the judge said.

“I’ll answer, but this is a form of rape. You are extracting from me what I do not wish to give. I swatted his little. . .what do you call it, Your Honor?”

“Call it whatever you want,” the judge said.

“If I have to say such a word I wish to use only the correct, legal terminology.”

“Call it his do-whackey,” the judge said.

“I spanked his little do-whackey with my ruler,” Miss Bromley said.

“Thank you,” the lawyer said.

“I should hope so,” Miss Bromley said. “That was the least I could do under the circumstances, and I made him promise he’d never do such a thing again as long as he lived.”

Later the lawyer called Doc to the stand in his own defense. He had grown into a nice looking young man, and his lawyer had him dressed in his three-piece black undertaker’s suit. His hair was cut short and slicked down with the latest hair grease for men so that he looked like an IBM sales rep.

“Why did you do this terrible thing, Mr. Blomister?” the lawyer asked right out. Doc didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands and began to weep.

“Tell the jury, Mr. Blomister.”

Finally Doc began to mumble something through his sobs.

“Speak up, Mr. Blomister!”

Then Doc said something about being in love and something about loneliness and that’s all his lawyer could get from him.

Doc’s lawyer took less than a minute to sum up for the jury. “What this man did was the unspeakable crime of a madman,” he whispered. “But think how lonely it is to be a corpse in a drawer in the morgue. Think of that ladies and gentlemen!” Thereupon Doc’s lawyer submitted his case, and the jury was out only long enough to elect a foreman and take a single ballot before they returned their verdict, and Judge Hammond sentenced poor Doc that same day to forty years, which is probably longer than he would have gotten had he murdered the woman in the first place.

I visited Doc in the Teton County Jail before they transferred him to the state penitentiary at Rawlins. He was wearing his blue denim jailhouse clothes and he looked pale and helpless. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Argus,” Doc finally said. “Ya shouldn’t never have nothin’ to do with the likes a me.”

“You’re my friend, Doc. Everybody makes mistakes. We all have our stuff.”

Then, like a small boy, Doc asked, “Do you have stuff, too, Argus?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is yer stuff like my stuff?” he asked hopefully.

“No, Doc,” I said. Doc looked disappointed.

“Was yer stuff as bad as mine?”

“Stuff is stuff,” I said.

“No, stuff ain’t stuff. There is stuff and there is stuff. An’ my stuff is the worst there is.”

“No, Doc,” I said, and I started to reach out and touch his arm, but I thought better of it. It seemed wrong to touch a person when he’s in jail.

“It’s awful in here,” Doc said. “I hope they kill me.” He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “All I think of is the Buttes,” and he choked up, but he held it back because real men are not supposed to cry, especially in jail.

“You’ll make friends,” I said.

“They won’t have nothin’ to do with somebody that done the stuff I done.”

“But, Doc, there are murderers in there, and rapists in there and people who beat up old ladies and there’s people in there who’ve done terrible things to little kids. You didn’t hurt anybody. Yer stuff isn’t so bad.”

Suddenly Doc asked, “What did you do, Argus?”

“Well, Doc,” I said, “a man can’t talk about his own stuff.” Then I knew I should have told Doc about Marilyn Monroe because all the hope drained from Doc’s face, and his eyes looked like they were painted on with flat brown Kem-Tone, but Doc would have never understood. Nobody understands anybody else’s stuff. “You’ll be all right, Doc,” I said. “You can learn to make license plates, and you’ll meet a lot of interesting people.” Suddenly I began to cry, and Doc, being very considerate, turned his back.

Then a guard as big as a beer-wagon horse came in and hollered at me, “Hey, you a friend of this stiff-fucker?”

“Don’t you call him that!” I said, and I took a big wild swing at the guard who slammed me up against the bars, picked me up off the floor and heaved me out of the cellblock like he was throwing slop to the chickens.

After that I retried Doc’s case over and over in my mind. I would have argued it differently. I would have riveted the jury with steady eyes and in a low, deliberate voice I’d have said:

“Ladies and gentlemen: Wilbur ‘Doc’ Blomister is a very nice person. He’d never commit rape, and he’d never commit robbery. He’d never hurt another living being; he’d never even kick a mean dog. This would be a better world if there were more people like Doc. Think of it! There’d be no little children with their heads smashed in and old folks beaten and robbed. Why, the FBI would be out of business, and the politicians wouldn’t have to compete with each other to see who could be the toughest on crime, because there wouldn’t be any crime. That’s the kind of world we’d have if everybody was like my client, Doc Blomister.”

“Now Doc testified about love. But we’ve all been in love with the dead. I, myself, have been in love with Marilyn Monroe for years, and I know plenty of people who are still in love with Elvis Presley. And so I ask that you find that Doc is only a poor lonely man who is afraid to love the living. We all need to love and to be loved, don’t we?” I looked at the jury, but they stared back at me with Kem-Tone eyes.

“It’s a frightening thing to love somebody. It can cause great injury to your heart, isn’t that true?” Doc is no criminal. Criminals injure the living. Doc is only a poor lonely man. I wish you could forgive him.” But the jury wouldn’t forgive him. I looked from juror to juror, but in my mind’s eye I saw them sitting still and stony like 12 cadavers. I thought, “Oh, Lord, the jury is dead, and they’ll find poor Doc guilty for having violated one of their own. Probably render the death penalty.”

_____________

After that Argus decided to go to law school.

Argus tell us: How the FBI solves its cases

Argus tells us:

How the FBI solves its cases

Now let’s try to be serious just once.  Here is what Argus told me about his exposure to FBI deal-making methods as taught at the U. Wyoming Law School.  Take heed!

_____________________

So the FBI wanted to make a deal with me.  Little wonder.  The FBI couldn’t make a case without a deal.   I remembered studying “Deals 301” in law school.  Professor George Washington Carver Jones, the only black professor at the University of Wyoming, taught the class.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has merely fallen in line with the preponderant persuasion in America—that deals are what it’s all about—mergers, takeovers, magical paper transactions that reap immediate wealth and make the dull and unproductive instantly rich and famous. Fuck this making stuff,” Professor Jones cried as he paced in front of the class.  That’s why Professor Jones always got the highest student evaluation in the law school.  The students loved to hear him use solid words.  “Fuck this work, for Christ sakes!  Work is for (the n-word.)”  The kids loved to hear him say the “n-word.”  He was the only one who could say it.  “The money is in deals.  Deals, man!  And that’s how the FBI sees it too.

“Today, in modern America, the FBI pretends to investigate, but its agents tap phones and plant bugs under beds so they can listen to the snoring and love-making.  They’d rather hear a couple of (n-words) fuck than make an honest case,” Professor Jones said boosting his rating ten points.  “Occasionally an agent subpoenas a document, and if things get boring a couple of honkies with the collars of their topcoats turned up and wearing snap-brimmed fedoras and imitation Porsche sunglasses corner a witness and scare the living shit out of him.  But they don’t engage in detective work.  They are merely getting things set up to make a deal.

“Now when the guy is ‘ripe,’ as the Bureau likes to phrase it, when the pressure has been on the suspect for Lord-knows-how-long, and the poor bastard has laid awake for six months staring up at the ceiling wondering how to convince his wife and his kids and the old folks at home that he is really innocent, when he gets up in the morning and the first thing that hits him is a ghastly fear that makes his heart beat out of sync, then like the Chinese water torture, the fear dripping down, the terror of the unknown having captured his mind, the pain of it, minute by minute, hour by hour, day after relentless day, wearing away at him until he has endured one drip too many, well, then he disintegrates into an inglorious pile of blubbering fucking rubble at the feet of the FBI, and he’s ready for a deal!”  At the conclusion of the longest sentence uttered by a professor in our law school career, we erupted in loud hoops and applause.

Professor Jones bowed slightly and continued.  “The FBI has several classes of deals available.  The Class I deal is made with subjects who are guilty of nothing and against whom the Bureau has no case whatsoever.   But they have been harassed so long they think they’re guilty, or still believing themselves innocent, they’re helpless to defend themselves, and stupefied by fear, they’ll testify to anything or against anybody if the Bureau will only leave them alone.

“But the FBI makes Class II deals, too.  The Class II deal is for subjects who are actually guilty, but still running at large.  Usually the more guilty you are the better deal you can make.  The Class II dealee might be more guilty than the guy they’re after, but to nail the ‘target,’ the Class II dealee can walk or take ‘short time’ in exchange for his testimony against the target who will likely get twenty years to life. The target could be innocent.  That is not the point.  The point is the deal.  The government isn’t in business to solve cases.  It isn’t in the business of bringing criminals to justice.  The government has but one function and one function only—to make good, solid, saleable deals!”

“Amen,” some smartass in the back hollered.  But Professor Jones paid him no heed.

“Then there are the Class III deals—for inmates.  Here the Bureau scrapes the bottom of the deal barrel.  Everybody wants out of prison, and if an inmate can conjure up a good enough story against the target, the Bureau will make the inmate a fucking deal.  I don’t use the word loosely but with legal precision, because…”  He paused with perfect timing, surveying the class.  We waited, our hearts pounding with excitement.  “Because the deal is to fuck your brother.  Deals!  Buying and selling!  That’s what life in America is all about today.  After the Class III prisoner testifies he’ll be placed on the Witness Protection Program.  A Class III deal is a peachy deal for convicts who have a good story and are good salesmen.  Most crooks are.  Most honest people are not.”

We tried to write down every word the professor uttered.  “The Class IV deal, the most common deal of all, is one in which the suspect is both the fuckee and the fuckor.  He may be guilty or not.  If he admits his guilt the government will be easier on him than if he makes the government prove its case by bringing in Class I, II or III deals against him.  When you’re the target it’s pretty frightening.  You’ve been rotting in jail awaiting trial for eight months without a single ray of sunshine once touching your sickly black hide, and they’ve got you charged with something that pulls ten to life, and you’ve got for a lawyer a honky public defender fresh out of law school with 150 other cases.  You’re just one more n-word.  You can get out in two if you plead guilty, and you get good time for the eight months you already spent in jail.  You make a Class IV deal.  I repeat:  It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re guilty or not.  The Bureau doesn’t care.  It’s another case closed.  What counts to the Bureau is that they made a deal! ”

I stole a glance at the woman student sitting next to me.  Her mouth was open and her lips wet like Marilyn Monroe’s.  Her eyes were filled with love or lust.  In the excitement of the moment I couldn’t tell the difference.

Professor Jones continued, “If you want to be a success, specialize in making deals with the government.  Besides, it’s risky to try a case these days, because jurors know that the last innocent person in America was John Wayne.”

The road back to sanity

Argus has had a lot of fun. He loves being insane, mostly because it brings out the insanity of others, including God. Are we to conclude that the road back to sanity is by recognizing our insanity?

Please do not get too serious in your comments. Only the insane are serious since life, itself, is the work of a jokester.

Gerry

P.S. If you can’t figure out how to respond to this in one hundred words or less, you are really mixed up and probably insane.

God is insane and androgynous for sure

Folks, Argus got such a monstrous response to his last offering here that he got quite balmy, authored the following and personally delivered it to me for posting. I disclaim responsibility for its content and do not agree or disagree with any of his conclusions.

Gerry Spence

 

By Argus Joseph Thompson

Of course, God is insane. That is, as we have seen, He or She does not know the difference between right or wrong – the legal test for insanity. For convenience, let’s call God, Henrietta, and understand that She is really a He, and that He thinks He is a She so that in the confusion Henrietta becomes an androgynous “IT.” In the end we do not know which is which and which was switched.

The foregoing is quite a wondrous and holy insight, and its truth cannot be denied since I have now confirmed the foregoing based on ultimate authority, namely the Bible. There it says, 1 Genesis 27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Now can’t we immediately see that God was a He, but he made humankind, which means he made both men and women, in his own image. And Eve came from Adam’s rib, which further proves that womankind had its origins in mankind. Think of it! God starts ITS work all mixed up (good title for a song). One must wonder if Henrietta wasn’t all strung out (another good title) when IT started fiddling around with the earth and the garden and dumped those naked folks in there with apples and snakes – with poison apples, no less, while there is no mention that the snakes were poisonous. But ever since we have been afraid of snakes, but we eat apples.

Instead, IT, namely Henrietta, could have furnished Adam and Eve with Orville Redenbacher’s Tender White Gourmet Popcorn in the microwave oven, which would have saved humankind from all that original sin. Instead IT waited until the 20th Century to invent the microwave oven, which, but for IT’s insanity, could have been dumped into the garden at the beginning along with the poison apples and the snakes. After all, which is harder to create, a microwave oven or poison apples and snakes? I rest my case.

God must have been utterly insane or IT would not have chosen to cause Eve, a perfectly innocent little lady, even without any clothes, to chomp down on that poison apple so that all of her children and her children’s children and their children’s children to the end of all children, now and forever, would be born in sin – on account of Henrietta’s aversion to popcorn and ITS insane love of poison apples and snakes instead. This proves, beyond doubt, that Henrietta was insane and that today IT does not know the difference between right and wrong. We must therefore pray not to God but for God. The prayer should go like this:

Dear Orville Redenbacher up in the sky,

Thou who hast taught your tender white gourmet popcorn to fly,

Please help Henrietta’s brain;

IT is quite insane.

And down here IT is causing us a lot of pain.

Amen.

Please pass this on to ten other insane persons immediately, (they are all around you) and together we can rid ourselves of sickness, death and AIG.

Yours truly,

Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane

Frolicking with the insane

Folks: We have been struggling about politics and euthanasia and other deadly subjects, and some you who have responded seem to be struggling with the same dilemma that Mr. Thompson has experienced – to understand our sanity. With Mr. Thompson’s permission, I thought it appropriate, to share his recent letter, which I hope you will find instructive.

Dear Mr. Spence,

As you know, I have long ago come to grips with my own insanity. I am, indeed, insane.

I recognize that some of what I have reported came to me in dreams, and some claim dreams are not real – that when you are dancing with Marilyn Monroe and feeling all heady and fuzzy in certain ways, and then you watch her walk over that grate in the street and her skirt blows up, that such sights and feelings are less real than when the President Bush comes on TV and says we should charge into Iraq to kill all those people over there who are terrorizing us by threatening that they will shut off our oil, and who thereby require our help in becoming democratic by being bombed. What I am trying to say is that it is hard sometimes to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

I know the experts claim that the definition of insanity is that state in which a person cannot tell the difference between reality and dreams, or, as the psychologists like to call such dreams, “hallucinations.” But we understand that those who feel drawn to examine into our hallucinations and who try to tell us what is real and what is not, are only reflecting upon their own perilous journey that keeps popping them in and out of reality like Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Tender White Popcorn in the microwave. So to that extent, I may be totally sane, since, although I cannot be sure about what is real and what is not, I do know that if you know that you do not know what is real and what is not, and if you know that what is not real may be real, then, reality is like beauty – it is in the eye of the beholder – which startling revelation was first provided us in 1878 by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in her book, Molly Bawn. Ms. Hungerford had just cause to believe that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” because she was, according to an overwhelming majority of those eyes beholding her, thought to be devastatingly ugly while she thought herself quite magnificently beautiful.

Mr. Spence, I want you to know that I have struggled so hard to recognize what is and what is not real that my brain has turned to tapioca pudding. I have dreamed both forward and backward, from the bottom to the top and vice versa. I have turned my dreams inside out and examined them carefully in my dream decoder, upon which I have a patent pending, and I have looked at the various critical issues in my life squarely in the eye with a massive assortment of glasses – my 250 strength reading glasses, my 3-D glasses, my rose colored glasses as well as innumerable brands of nationally advertised sunglasses, all in a good faith attempt to determine what is or is not real.

Therefore, since I am not able to determine absolutely what’s up and not up, I have, from time to time in my discussions with you just made it up. This is especially the case when I was popping in and out of reality or un-reality like Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Tender White Popcorn in the microwave oven. Some of the facts and incidents I have told you may be more or less fiction. But I am not confident which are and which are not. In the end, it makes little difference since the stranger things are the more likely they are to be true.

And remember that Freud himself must have been crazy, because how can a person, for instance, expound with authority about the taste of chocolate ice cream without having ever tasted chocolate ice cream, any more than a person can write about insanity without having experienced its hellish depths and its heavenly heights as well? Therefore, if Freud is to be taken seriously we must conclude that he was seriously insane.

And some say that Van Gogh, who chopped off an ear, was insane (which logically would render him only slightly out of balance since he chopped off only one, not two.) And Friedrich Nietzsche was clearly insane. According to his biographers, he had his greatest gestalts after the ravages of syphilis had chomped away at his frontal lobes, which is to say that we celebrate the philosophy and teaching of a man who was being strapped into bed at night in a mental hospital and who had to eat their tasteless food which, in itself, is cause for severe mental distress if not irreversible trauma, and which, therefore, renders the sanity of both Nietzsche as well as his biographers subject to serious doubt.

God, Himself or Herself, as the case may be, is not much better off because He or She has all that power and intelligence and yet does not know the difference between right and wrong — that it is wrong to let people suffer when He or She has the power to make us all deliriously happy, that He or She could, if He or She chose, let every man actually see with his own two naked eyes Marilyn Monroe, in the flesh, standing over that grate. And, as any lawyer knows, and I am a lawyer, the definition of insanity in the law is that the said subject – sometimes called the respondent – does not know the difference between right and wrong – a test best known as McNaughton’s Rule, current in most states today. Therefore, God is also insane because God obviously does not know the difference between right and wrong, which makes me feel all the more close to God.

And so, Mr. Spence, I leave it to you to determine what is real and what is not, what is right and what is not, and who, therefore is insane, and who is not. And like Orville Redenbacher always concluded his pitch, I conclude mine: “I thank you for your support.”

Signed,

Argus Joseph Thompson, Insane

Secrets of Argus Joseph Thompson: Invasion of the Mind Monitor

My friend Argus Joseph Thompson wrote about the Mind Monitor (MM). He insists it is reading his thoughts and recording and classifying the more important ones. I present his meanderings with edits. Parental guidance is recommended:

“After many weeks my initial outrage over MM’s invasion of my mind began to abate. Moreover, if I were being monitored, then ipso facto I was important enough to be monitored.

“I possessed Class A secrets, not the mundane unclassified secrets of the masses, not the secrets of farm boys who had made it with chickens—mostly laying hens, because laying hens are easy to catch while sitting on the nest; not the secrets of preachers loping the lizzard over the pages of Penthouse, not the secrets of boys fantasizing about their Sunday school teachers who gave the class beaver-shots under the table to enhance attendance. Such secrets were so common they merited no classification whatsoever although MM duly recorded the same in the event a respondent sought public office, which accounts for Jimmy Carter’s having been forced to reveal his lust for the women of Playboy. Cheating, stealing, wife beating and child abuse were also so commonplace they were merely filed away without classification.

“One got on MM’s classified record by asking certain questions, for question-askers have always been the enemies of the system. Those who wondered how the king got off taxing their tea without representation and dumped 342 chests of the same into Boston Harbor were enemies of the system. Thoreau wondering why he should have to pay a head tax to vote and went to jail instead was considered dangerous and an enemy of the system. If you secretly questioned certain truths like Jesus smiles on Texas debutantes who spend twenty thousand for their coming out dresses while thousands of children starve in the streets, or if you question certain axioms such as “The system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best damned system we know,” well you automatically got classified.

“If you questioned the efficacy of Double Dribble Economics, well, that was at least a Class C secret. But you really got MM’s attention if, in the middle of the night, you began to question the right of the non-its, the corporations, to destroy the pristine forests, the living birds and innocent beasts and generally to shit all over the face of the earth in the name of profit. If you secretly began to wonder if we had all gone mad by permitting an oligarchy of non-its to poison us in the womb of our own Mother Earth and to abort us there from in order that the non-its could dangle a favorable profit and loss statement in front of the Wall Street analysts, well, such questions were Class A secrets which ipso facto designated you as a targeted person, (TP),and I, Argus Joseph Thompson, was, indeed, a TP for which I was very grateful, for how miserable to otherwise be nothing, even to non-its.”

Letters from the insane: The domestication of man

My close friend, Argus Thompson – who is insane – wrote on the passiveness of Americans who stumble through their lives blinking and mumbling and sometimes staring at the sun while the earth is being destroyed:

“A strange stillness lies over the American masses. Something about servitude stills. Something about domestication stifles. The wolf, now the poodle, no longer howls. The wild boar lies on its side in the hog pen and grunts. The wildebeest, now the Holstein cow, stands in her stanchion placidly chewing her cud while she’s milked dry. Domestication of man and beast muffles the cry of freedom and suffocates the spirit of liberty.

“This is a war for the very survival of the earth, our Mother. Yet, as in all wars, only the radical edge, the impassioned few, rise up, the placid majority, gagged by apathy, the wicked sister of death, are heard to mumble only occasionally from under their bed cloths in the dark of night.”

More deep thoughts from the insane

Argus Thompson, who claims to be insane, writes as follows:

The forest and its inhabitants have rights. Rights are not derived from man. Man acquires his rights from that same source as does the pollywog, and man’s rights are no more sacred to Mother Earth than the rights of her other children, no more than the fiddling cricket on the edge of the pond or the small mountain frog sitting on the lilly pad like a green bud. Man is not the bestower of rights, but the bestowed. Man is not the creator, but the created. Man is no more endowed with the divine power to decree the extinction of a fellow occupant on the face of this earth than he has been granted the power to create new life, for man cannot create a single cricket or mosquito on the lily pond. He can only rip out the lillies and drain the pond and silence the singing of the forest fiddlers forever.

But man has been charged with greater responsibilities than his brothers and sisters on this earth, for his ability to do both good and evil is greater, and therefore his responsiblity is greater.