For today's long post, I am proud to announce that I was asked by Kathleen Peine to be one of the inaugural guest writers at her new writer's website, Painted Fire. In the interest of introducing Kathleen's new site to the world, I beg your forgiveness and ask you to make one more click through to read it here: Pretty Hate Machine.
I imagine that I will also be contributing to Kathleen's site in the future.
Bonus:
Head like a hole
Black as your soul
I'd rather die than give you control
Bow down before the one you serve
You're going to get what you deserve
Hi Bill-
ReplyDeleteYou might want to let people know here to click on the top site. That link to your piece goes to a freaky doppelganger site that due to my technological illiteracy got created (it was some weird technical subdomain or some shit). I'm trying to get rid of it. They should use this link:
http://paintedfire.org/prettyhate.html
And thank you! It is an awesome piece.
Hey Kathleen - it should be working fine now. And congrats again on the new site! :)
Delete“Reading through the collected list of racist tweets made my blood run cold, so virulent was the raw hatred on display.”
ReplyDeleteWhile haters keep getting their way,
Last man standing comes closer each day;
Sooner or later,
It’s likely each hater
Will also become frightened prey.
Another classic, Ben!
DeleteCongratulations Bill, both on the invitation and the actual essay, which is a cautionary both powerful and memorable, especially this creepy bit:
ReplyDelete"Make no mistake-the ugliness of the vitriol directed at Fluke also carries with it a not-so-subtle message. Namely, if you are an average citizen who is thinking of standing up in a public forum to object to one of the many great injustices currently being perpetrated in this country, you should expect to be attacked by the army of denizens who make up the Pretty Hate Machine. They will relentlessly scrutinize every detail of your life that they can dig up. Anything that can be used to embarrass you in the media or serve as a distraction to help discredit your message will be amplified and magnified repeatedly until millions of your fellow citizens begin spitting in venomous anger at the very mention of your name. Their hatred toward you will burn white hot even though they have never met you nor know anything about you other than what their preferred demagogue tells them."
Not that I'm anywhere near worthy of scrutiny or ever will be, but I did an interview for radio ecoshock this week, and I hate to think about the mountains of details in my life that I wouldn't want aired in public - yikes!
The young woman with the huge student loan debts that I wrote about last summer has now become something of a spokesperson for those in her predicament. She was recently interviewed by Russia Today and it was posted on You Tube. Some of the comments were extremely nasty. What's scary is how little it takes to get the haters to hate.
Delete