WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS BY POINTING GUNS AT THEM.

The Christian Science Monitor explores the "etiquette" of America's open-carry-mania. Some gun enthusiasts believe, or at least pretend to believe, that if they act like the loaded weapon they're twirling at Arby's is no big deal, ordinary citizens will get accustomed to living in a dystopian novel instead of modern civilization and we'll soon be one be one happy, bloody shoot-'em-up society. CSM even hears from Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, who says, "This is what lefties have done for decades, and it works" -- a cryptic statement, perhaps meaning that since liberals created feminism by letting their women go around without bras, it stands to reason that a bunch of crackers playing "Guess Whether I'm Going To Kill You And Everyone Else Here" at the Chuck E. Cheese will usher in the Groovy Second Amendment Revolution.

Some of the brethren are more hardcore:

“The idea that we must be more ‘polite,’ lest we frighten [the 46 percent of Americans who are seen as persuadable on gun rights,] ignores the nature of the right we are fighting for,” writes Kurt Hofmann on the website Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. “We must be ‘frightening,’ because the people who would trample our rights will only lose interest in doing so if they perceive a very personal risk to themselves in continuing on that course.”

He's refreshingly honest in a psychotic way. So is Michael Walsh at PJ Media, who responds to the article's concern with an armed nut who stalked an Atlanta airport thus:

Here you have the basic leftist argument: they “felt threatened” even though, in fact and in law, no one was actually threatening them. But the Left has long dwelled in a fantasy world, in which all manners of terrors — except real terrors– lurk just beyond the precinct of their psychiatrist’s office.

Liberals try to make loaded weapons look dangerous! Before they ruined everything, guns were as ubiquitous as cigarettes in America -- ordinary citizens in Anytown, U.S.A. always went around strapped, packed, and brandishing, whether at the PTA or the steel mill. Ask your grandparents -- and if they tell you different it's because LBJ brainwashed them! (If you've got some time we'll discuss how liberals censors cut the weaponry from shows like Leave It To Beaver and Ben Casey.)

Fashions in Second Amendment interpretation may come and go but, this being America, gun nuts will always be with us. The big change recently is that we're supposed to take them seriously in the sense of "accept their point of view as valid" rather than in the sense of "call the police."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Song's been going through my mind for some reason. Weep, sad freaks of a nation.

•    I guess 2012 was the last year I paid attention to "Human Achievement Hour," the annual chest-thump in which the Competitive Enterprise Institute says Fuck You to the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour by asking True Sons of Liberty to burn up as much energy as possible in celebration of the stinking shithole we've made of the earth, I mean progress. The event remains hilarious. Got some links from a CEI publicist to "Human Achievement of the Day" posts about how guitars only exist because of capitalism and so forth. My favorite is about bitcoin:

These are still very early days, and bitcoin is still thought more as a volatile store of value rather than an emergent system of property rights, but the prospects for this particular human achievement are incredibly bright, if regulators do not find a way to stifle it (by regulating people rather than the system, for example).

This puts me in mind of Hearst on the trail of The Color in Deadwood, except Hearst's psychosis was not the type that kept him in his parents' basement. Murder and dismemberment were more his thing -- the sort of activities in furtherance of capital that the CEI pencil-necks are more likely to dress up in purty language than directly perform.

•   In the high-decibel world of wingnut blowhards it's tough to rise above the din, but in a column about the Bowe Bergdahl prosecution at PJ Media Michael Walsh amps it up:  In addition to standard-issue slur-slinging -- "the Coward-in-Chief and his deliberate thumb in the eye to the honor of the American military," "pathetic little pansy Bergdahl," "painfully stupid Jen Psaki," aargh,  blaargh -- Walsh bellows:

...it’s a rare instance of the military finally asserting itself against a rogue commander who is imperiling the nation and insulting it as he goes. Unlawful orders do not have to be obeyed, even from Fearless Leader; that’s a principle the U.S. clarified at Nuremberg. 

One imagines Walsh parachuting into Fort Bragg, a cigar in one hand and a pearl-handled revolver in the other, crying PATRIOTS! NOW IS THE TIME! Or maybe not: see, everyone's a disappointment to Walsh:

John McCain and Mitt Romney should both be hanging their heads in shame. They could have defeated him, and they chose not to. But that’s America in the 21st century — it never saw a fight it wanted to finish.

Maybe Walsh can stake out a little corner of his mental ward and declare that The Real America. I'll have to read Walsh more often; I haven't seen anything like him since the heyday of Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters.

•   The composer John Adams recently remarked at Avery Fisher Hall that Rush Limbaugh exercises "casual brutality toward women" -- which, really, is about as close to an incontrovertible statement as you can get -- and to National Review's Jay Nordlinger this is Hitler plus Big Brother:

To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause. In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough... 

You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.

I suppose this makes me Genghis Stalin, but Nordlinger is a fucking idiot.