The Internet experts say you have to put it all on one page. So here goes.
R. F. Laird describes himself as America’s only Punk Writer. By this he means that his entire writing life has been about breaking the rules and getting in people’s faces. He thinks it’s as important to be funny as to be serious, and vice versa. He thinks most writers write one kind of writing and keep writing the same book over and over again. That’s why he’s done the exact opposite. His works include fiction, most outrageously a complete literary movement, and innovative forms of satire, including Bibles, a fiendishly hard video game, spoofs of famous authors, cartoon stories, and short comedic videos. He’s written half a dozen blogs covering the events of his times and both serious and comic essays about every subject under the sun, including cars, dogs, movies and TV, the sexes, religion, politics, science, sports, and multiple genres of music. He is also a graphic artist, what he calls a “punk cartoonist,” who has produced more than 10,000 computer-based drawings and photo images. He presently operates about a dozen websites featuring both his work and information about his life and creations.
There’s a price for being a Punk Writer. His first book was banned from being reviewed by The New York Times. His second book manuscript got him banned (for life?) by mainstream book publishers. He got banned for good by Internet link compiler InstaPundit (and hate-spammed by Slate On-Line) over a controversial political post. He has also been suspended three times by Facebook for violating community standards, and Facebook even temporarily banned his most recently created blog site, ban now repealed.
So if tame is your cup of tea, go away now. Otherwise here’s how you can begin exploring the very involved and unexpected world of R. F. Laird. You can click on the graphics below to be transported to a relevant url. (You can return with the back button or the open file listings on your screen.) Other links are straight from text.
Here are a lot of his books:
Amazon has them for sale. Some on-line books are free elsewhere.
Here’s his 3,000-pg video game/puzzle/labyrinth called Shuteye Town 1999:
Click the pic. Check out Side Trips. There’s even an Internet.
Here’s his massively hyperlinked fictional country, called Shuteye Nation:
Click the pic. Newspapers, Magazines, TV news,
a Who’s Who, a Glossary, and two gazetteers.
Here are links to most of his blogs:
InstaPunk Returns (2018-Present, 450+ posts) InstaPunk Rules (2014-2020, c.600 posts) RFLaird.com (a.k.a Deerhound Diary, 2013-Present, c.500 posts) InstaPunk.com (10 years of weekly archives at Wayback, 2,500-3,000 posts 90+ percent intact)(sample single posts here) Robert Laird @Facebook (2014-2023, 1,000+ posts, Scroll to read)[If you get the Newsfeed not the Main Page, click on the profile icon to the left of “What’s on your mind?”]
The video clip above is one of my favorite examples of Progressive misdirection. The first point I’ll draw from it is that none of the preceding posts is meant to suggest that Democrats are in some way copying from the Scientologists. All of the weapons and tactics employed by President Bartlet were in the Democrat playbook at a time when Scientology was still acquiring a foothold in the U.S. after its controversial offshore years. Rather, the value of looking at Scientology in some detail illustrates a simpler view of what the Progressives are working toward on an immensely grander scale. L. Ron Hubbard’s concocted mythology is very different from that of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What is virtually identical between them, however, is the strategy of using incantationally repeated falsehoods to secure and sustain absolute power over everyone they pretend to lead but intend to rule in every aspect of their personal lives.
The first and indispensable requirement is to banish the Judeo-Christian God from the scene. Why? Because he is a dangerous rival potentially fatal to the exercise of tyranny. Another way that the West Wing clip is ironically instructive. President Bartlet desires to charm the assembled press with an Obama-like spiel of liberal platitudes and cultural observations. But he cannot abide the presence of an outspokenly critical — though politely silent on this occasion — evangelical Christian advocate. He feels a compulsion to humiliate her in this White House setting, to display his superior knowledge of scripture in demeaning ways, in order to, well, destroy her utterly. Which he proceeds to do.
His dissection of the Book of Leviticus is a masterpiece of self-aggrandizing rhetoric. His is the post-modern message of those who ridicule the”flying spaghetti monster,” which is parochial, obsolete, and mostly absurd to any rational human being. His presentation is also so disingenuous as to be laughable in its own right. Yes, long lists of picayune regulations with onerous penalties for noncompliance are outrageous. Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Sinai, then all his heirs went into the commandment-making business. Folly writ large. Why the Christian reformulation of mankind’s covenant with God reduced (replaced) the original Ten Commandments with just two, liberating the human spirit to assess matters of right and wrong as individual moral beings. Thus was modern consciousness born.
How can we see the difference between Bartlet’s Leviticus version of the Judeo-Christian God and the enlightened version of the Christian Era? Easily. Draw your own side-by-side graphic comparing the Ten Commandments to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Both are chock full of “Thou shalt nots,” but the Laws of Moses are aimed at controlling individuals while the Ten Amendments are aimed at controlling government. That’s the only necessary refutation of Leviticus. But Bartlet’s more enlightened liberal vision is of creating its own post-modern version of Leviticus, building an increasingly insurmountable edifice of laws, regulations, and government mandates that reach into every part of individual American lives, always for a common good that is every bit as fictitious as Hubbard’s sci-fi fairytale. Why do you think Bartlet’s progressive heirs are so openly disdainful and hostile to the Constitution of the United States? Because of that effing Bill of Rights, which stands in the way of the smart ones who are trying to save the planet from the vile scourges of America and humankind itself.
Do all the Progressive acolytes feel this way? Probably not. Another place where the Scientology example is helpful. Hubbard’s original American recruits, back there in the sixties, were disenchanted idealists — flower children, former political and environmental activists, well meaning middle class drones — who wanted to save the whales, the rainforests, the billions of non-Americans with incomes of $20 a year, the globe itself from nuclear annihilation at the hands of evil war-mongering capitalists. As a God substitute, Hubbard persuaded them that all of recorded human history was a lie, and he alone knew the alien source of all our misconceptions. He redefined right and wrong in simple terms; what he thought was right was infallibly right. Any questions? Hubbard’s real scripture, the one that matters to his subjects, is his own long book of Leviticus, with so many regulations and prohibitions it’s impossible not to run afoul of them here and there, with the inevitable result that you will be punished, severely, in every way the human mind can conceive.
The American Progressive tradition has an analogous if bumpier history. It begins officially in 1912, but its antecedents go all the way back to Andrew Jackson, who founded the Democrat Party as an attractor for people resentful of the Virginia-New England monopoly on running the country. Jacksonian Democrats started by smashing Hamilton’s national banking system, then moved on to a concept called ‘Manifest Destiny,’ which postulated that since we were in North America and the Democrat-Republican precursor to the Democrat Party had made the Louisiana Purchase, we should, well, own all of North America. This kept them busy, in defiance of the New England model of American democracy as a calm example to the rest of the world, until the slavery problem hotted up.
See, Progress is the American Way since Jackson. No matter who you have to kill, or abandon on some trail of tears. Not all bad. The thing smuggled into all the conquered territories was the Bill of Rights. God’s own version of Manifest Destiny. A real complication for what continued to be, as it always has been and still is, the Negro Problem.
Truthfully, Progress had its ups and downs for quite awhile. The Civil War. You know. Well, Democrats know. Looting and burning and shooting and lynching and assassinating. Democrat traditions all by now. After the war, it was necessary to protect the south and the white race. Klan Time. Which actually lasted all the way through 1924, though those in the know were starting to think the Klan thing was a little over the top. New strategies were called for to keep the peons of every stripe in line.
KKK Vermont. The Dem Convention narrowly defeated a plank in 1924 denouncing the KKK. Not politic, you know.
Jim Crow laws became their own new book of Leviticus after Democrat Rutherford B. Hayes (Harvard!) stole the 1876 election from Samuel Tilden (Look it up) and repealed Reconstruction.
Which brings us, somehow, some way, to the 20th century. Klan still active, but not that popular. People want positive, not negative. Time to fix what ailed the human race. Not by killing but by sterilizing and aborting the “feeble-minded.” The best answer? Science. In the form of Eugenics!
The biggest and most influential Eugenics advocacy group was organized in 1910. Democrats thrilled. Many of them. When Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913 (year of the first ever federal income tax), he was still lagging behind somewhat. He showed the landmark film Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1914. He also re-segregated the army and made his virulent ant-semitism known. Because, you know… Democrats. For example, I was taught by my intellectually superior liberal teachers in prep school that Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest American presidents, maybe the very greatest but for FDR. Princeton certainly thought so, and named its graduate school of government after him, because the Progressives were the leading lights of the American Century, which was all about science and technology as they understood it. Meaning in their usual science-fiction terms.
Wilson thought the old ways were bad, because not science-fictional, and he was sure that smart people from Princeton and Harvard should run everything in the whole damn world. Why he jumped into the World War Europe was having at the time. He figured only Progressive Democrats knew how to end the war and end ALL wars in fact, the Princeton Way, with no Jews or coloreds and a fancy Eating Club called the League of Nations. Which didn’t work, leading to a pretty long diversion for the American Progressive Movement while Wilson went insane and died of disappointment.
In fact, as the Hitler thing got underway in the 1930s, even the Progressive name was suddenly unpopular. People, American people, got the idea that Eugenics was an embarrassment Hitler had borrowed from Americans. And he was gassing people for having bad genes. Why FDR couldn’t call himself a Progressive when he got elected to try curing the Great Depression with Progressive economic science fictions his enemies called just socialist.
FDR smoked cigarettes in a holder and replaced, in his own mind and the minds of the Democrat cult he was building, the Bill of Rights with something called the Four Freedoms. Cleverly consisting of two old freedoms and two new ones. Cool. Making government your friend against ALL the hardships of life. Screw the Constitution.
The optimal time to build a cult is when people are down in a hole.
And if you don’t have an economic answer, as Democrats never do, the best thing is to rally the people to go fight a war. Which FDR did.
It worked. FDR got credit, incomprehensibly, for taking only 12years to end the Great Depression. His constituency of all the people who had learned to become dependent on government stayed with the ‘New Deal’ Democrat cult, even the black people Democrats had always hated and used.
But there was a price. Some Republicans became president for awhile, and the cult constituency had to be appeased in new ways. Fortunately for Progressives, the cleverest FDR heir (eerily close to Republicans in his policies) was assassinated, and his replacement figured out how to reestablish the old southern plantation model in major American cities. Bulldoze their neighborhoods, break their families apart, and pay them for being promiscuous, unemployed, uneducated, and lawless.
Long lead time stuff though. Need another war. Veet Nam. Veet Nam will do. Perfect. Paves the way for the revival of the Progressives. The ones who love to pretend to hate war, love minorities of every stripe, and always show up with a government paycheck to buy your next election vote. The revival almost failed. That Nixon guy stopped the necessary war. Like Eisenhower before him stopped the Korean War. Those damn Republicans. Always stopping wars we need to keep the faithful in line.
But the new Progressives knew what to do with Nixon. Destroy him utterly. Which they did. And then it’s just all waiting, through Reagan (ugh, who refused to be destroyed utterly), and then the comparative balm of RINO Wing Republicans named Ford and Bush and McCain and Romney. While the Progressive edifice was in the process of becoming monolithic, invincible, inevitable.
Until this is accomplished, the Progressive cult cannot even dream of electing a total idiot figurehead to the highest office in the land. You can’t get a Clinton or an Obama or a sad sack dodderer like Hillary Biden unless you own the whole effing shooting match of government, the media, the universities, the unions, the public schools, the fiction writers, the European intellectuals, the scientists and doctors and technological seers (dumb as they come), and the Hollywood celebrities (dumbererer). The stoopids are our friends. They can’t be fixed and they will never see how we are using them to keep the Negroes down, the women powerless and and pantyless, and the hard working millions working hard for peanuts. You know you’re winning when even Lois Lerner comes to work Commando.
Scientology? Keep the inferiors in their place. Take what you want. Give the peons an enemy or a phony apocalypse to fear. Take their money, keep them dependent on your fake generosity. Destroy the opposition by any means necessary. Don’t EVER give in to what stupid people call conscience or scruples. Remember, there is no God but you. Never forget that Leviticus is your best friend. And sniff the hell out of that little girl hair.
[This is a post rescued from InstaPunk at the Wayback Machine. The date was September 30, 2008. It’s reporting from the time to remind you of Pelosi’s “leadership” even before she couldn’t pronounce words or remember who was President. The linked articles are mostly funnier than this one. Thought you’d like to see an honest capsule from the Pelosi Speakership.]
HOT NEW SINGLE. Presumably, all those feminists who hate Sarah Palin so much that they’d like to see her stripped and raped in public are proud of Nancy Pelosi, the worst Speaker of the House in the history of the republic. Here’s what she accomplished yesterday in her infinite stupidity.
In the speech that probably killed the agreement. Pelosi blamed the collapse on George Bush and a lack of regulation, and called Republicans hypocrites for cheering free-market principles. The news story is here:
Breaking: Bailout bill fails, Dow roller-coasters
posted at 2:00 pm on September 29, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
This has to be considered a shocker. The bailout bill failed in the House, and it wasn’t especially close. The final tally was 207-226, with Democrats supporting it 141-94, while Republicans opposed it 66-132.
How did the markets react? Initially, with panic. Dow dropped from around a -290 to more like a -660, but then recovered within minutes to a -400. Within a few minutes after that, it rose a little further to about -360, a 300-point gain, but it continued to go up and down, and probably will all day long.
What does this mean? The Senate can always initiate their own version of the plan and re-send it to the House, but that will take some doing. Can Republicans change their votes after taking this kind of stand?
If it stands, it will be a repudiation of the leadership in both House caucuses and the Bush administration. Pelosi couldn’t hold her caucus together, and Boehner, Cantor, Blunt, and Putnam will find themselves in the minority of theirs.
Update: I guess this puts lie to the notion that an agreement existed before John McCain went back to Washington. They got more Republicans today than they had last Wednesday, and it still didn’t pass.
Update II: Here’s the speech that probably killed the agreement. Pelosi blamed the collapse on George Bush and a lack of regulation, and called Republicans hypocrites for cheering free-market principles.
Yes, she’s a nice looking older woman with great big breasts, which makes her one of the hottest search topics on the Internet. But should the feminists really approve of a woman who is probably setting back their sex’s prospects in politics by a decade or more? Rest assured, there will be no female Speaker of the House for a long long time after Pelosi gets sent home to San Francisco by acclamation.
For those of you with short memories, here’s our list of Nancy Pelosi’s Greatest Hits.
[NOTE: First three links don’t work. Included for historical accuracy; they are available in the weekly links if you feel like hunting…. ALSO, many of the links inside posts also work, including links outside Instapunk if they haven’t been removed by their own sources. So give them a try.]
Someday you’ll tell people you read Deerhound Diary when R.F. Laird was still alive. You were part of the largely silent army that sustained him while he was fading away. You’ll tell everyone that you always knew there was a secret punk writing movement in Philadelphia, even when everyone else thought that was a joke. You’ll tell them you saw the photographic evidence.
Rumours of the Metalkort
Click the pic and see memories of the magic time.
Then you’ll tell them Laird invented the Internet years before Al Gore did. And you’ll be able to prove it. He had a whole huge book in his head in one moment and he connected it all.
There Isn’t Any God.
He also understood why he was connecting it all. A few outliers saw what he did but mostly no one else did. They were happy to think they were as smart as he was. They were, of course. Everybody’s always smarter than Leonardo.
Quantum Punks
Hey. People who don’t take him for granted.
To wit:
Well, you know. We always knew about quantum physics. What’s the deal with the new Spock?
Prophecy.
Except. He wasn’t just lucky. Or slightly smarter than someone else. He predicted 9/11 almost exactly 10 years before it happened. Laird conceived of Henry Elders, who somehow understood what might happen.
Predicting 9/11
Yeah. Falling towers and everything.
Because Raebert expects nothing less than the best.
Clarification of the previous post. Perhaps something of envy. I’ve dreamed of Christ many times. The image above is the closest I can get to what I experience. He’s far away, otherwise engaged, but he gives me the merest glance, as if to say, “I see you. Keep working at it.”
When I was younger, I thought he was also telling me that I had a role to play, that it was okay, and that we’d meet up later.
Now I’m not young. I struggle with everything. I’ve been given this one gift of the thing I can do, which is to see connections and to write about them with all my heart. But it costs me part of my ordinary humanity. I am always at one remove from everyone, including the people who are closest in my life.
On the one hand I have a vision of beauty, the intertwining of all life in a divine symphony of meaning and brilliant harmony. On the other hand, I am a recluse with no ability to touch and truly feel the people I love the way I think I should. I do love them. But I am always across the room watching from the corner, just as He is always across the horizon, sparing me an occasional, ambiguous nod.
I don’t know if he’s telling me that this is my place — a witness and scribe of creation’s gorgeous intricacy — or if he’s telling me to drop it all in favor of personal salvation, for my own soul’s sake. I’m not panicking, though.
How I’ve worked it out so far, which could be completely and utterly wrong. You know the old old question which is supposed to flummox Christian apologists: Why do bad things happen to good people?
Two answers come to mind, leaving aside the fact that mostly we’re none of us so good that we deserve no travail. First, it’s a phony question, invariably raised by people who do not fundamentally believe in God. They may profess faith, but they do not believe in an afterlife. If something doesn’t make sense in their own experience before death, all experience is meaningless. They’re atheists who want God to make sense of the interval between first and last breath BY THEM. Demanding children stomping their feet.
If there is meaning, it will ultimately be revealed. Just not in the nursing home or the funeral parlor. Maybe after. After death gives way to resurrected life.
Second, we all come into life burdened by the legacies of family, parents, bruising personal experience and a host of inherited sins. We’re supposed to learn. We’re supposed to take the gift of our splinter of divine consciousness and learn to be better. Loss is supposed to center us. Guilt is supposed to remake us. Love and its fading is supposed to make us appreciate love more rather than less. Time is the enemy. The stretching out of feeling, made thinner and thinner until it breaks. It’s not supposed to break.
We’re never supposed to believe that we have it figured out. We’re supposed to be thinking all the time. There’s no Home on the Parcheesi board of life. Doubt and questing are flip sides of the same phenomenon. It’s called being conscious. Which is the overwhelmingly huge gift Christianity gave Mankind. Never meant to torment us. But only to make every moment of life life, thrillingly and passionately intense. And all aimed at aiming us toward the good. Because the shutting down, the surrender to darkness and unthinking and poisonous despair, is the real definition of evil.
So I’m content to wait for the dream in which he finally says “I am here.” He knows, as I do, that it will be the moment when I’m finally ready to end this phase and go on to the next.
Far, far away on the horizon…
P.S. Bet you never thought this was a religious song.
