The Sour Milk of Human Kindness
There are some of you who believe that James Lileks, bane of Minnesota’ s least helpful Target clerks, is a gifted humorist and cultural commentator who only goes astray when he pops his head out of his ostrich hole and notices that there are people in the world who think differently than he does about the need to saturation-bomb the dark hordes of the East. This is a terribly short-sighted attitude. In fact, Lileks is capable of being wrong about all sorts of things: pop music, movies, children’s cartoons, fine dining, sports and recreation. I’m not sure if Jimbo has ever written a column about double-entry bookkeeping, but if he has, he was probably wrong about that too.
Above: “We must lock up the homeless! So says…THE LEADER!”
Today, he’s wrong about criminology. Of course, he’s so overprotective of the Gnat that he just can’t help being wrong, and it’s hard to fault a guy for being worried about his kid. Still, it’s fun to watch:
But this is nonsense, right? The fears of roaming predators are overstated. Not exactly. We’ve had two cases in towns of evil men trying to lure children into their cars, and I’m tempted to suggest that ought to draw mandatory life.
Wow! Two cases! And Jimbo’s hometown of Fuddles, MN, has a population of only three and a half million people! A 1,750,000:1 ratio of normal citizens to potential child-lurers is entirely unacceptable and certainly a good reason to propose mandatory life sentences to, uh, “evil men,” I guess. But wait, there’s more!
Because they’ll do it again. And if they don’t do that they’ll do something similar. Not because they can’t help themselves, as Peter Lorre’s character blurted pathetically in “M,” but because they want to do it and they like to do it, and that’s all that matters. They know it’s against the law, which ought to tell them they’re wrong, and consequences will follow. But they try it anyway.
It takes a special kind of intellect to make a point and then unwittingly refute it in the same paragraph, but if someone is up to the task, it’s our Jimbo. Child predators, says he, will act, and having acted, will act again — not because they can’t help it, but because they like it. And despite the consequences for performing an act, they will go ahead and do it just the same. Behavior, you might say, consistent with someone who can’t help it! That’s some top-shelf reasoning, there.
Having demonstrated his disdain for the Brawner Rule of the Model Penal Code, Lileks turns his hostility towards the homeless:
There was a creepy old man at the park the other day, my wife told me. Dressed in a ragged suit, carrying his possessions in a plastic shopping bag from a store that has no local outlets anywhere in the neighborhood.
Shopping at non-preferred retail establishments? I hate him already!
Disheveled. He wandered over to the swimming pool and watched the kids. Then he left and wandered away and came back and watched the kids some more. Then he went into the community center, where the kids play unattended sometimes; one of the neighborhood dads followed him, then followed him outside and took him aside for a chat. The fellow said he was homeless, heard about a new shelter in the area, and wanted to live in the neighborhood.
Above: Snot was running down his nose.
Disheveled? Shelter? Live? Not in my backyard, buster!
Now. You could say that there’s nothing wrong with a fifty-something guy with a grey beard and a raincoat and no fixed address wandering around a playground looking at the kids in their bathing suits, and that it’s unfair to deny a fellow the simple human pleasure of watching kids enjoy themselves just because he happens to be homeless. I don’t care.
And, fortunately for Jimbo, he lives in a society where not caring has the official sanction of government.
First of all, there aren’t any shelters in this area. Second, I don’t care. Third, it’s possible he’s homeless because he spent a lot of time in prison for kiddie-diddling.
That IS possible! It’s also possible he’s homeless because he’s on the run after a one-armed man killed his wife, or because internet terrorists stole his baseball card fortune, or because a meteor demolished his condo. The important thing is to isolate the most alarmist conclusion, assume that it’s true, and use that assumption to keep from having to help a fellow human being.
Fourth, you don’t get to look like the fellow who shows up to collect the Hellraiser cube and hang around the kiddie pool. Good bye.
Now there’s the friendly small town values that gives Lileks such a boner. Finally a working definition of compassionate conservativism: Always help someone in need unless they look funny, or you suspect that they may have once done something bad, or might do something bad in the future. Sensible policies for a safer America!
Fourth, you don’t get to look like the fellow who shows up to collect the Hellraiser cube and hang around the kiddie pool.
Wow. Homeless men in Lileks’ cul-de-sac wear ankle-length bondage gear and have Aisle 9 of the Home Depot sticking out of their faces?
That’s just weird.
I would bet there is a stronger correlation between guys who look like Lileks and child molesters than with homeless men.
Lileks lives in the world of cable news—where there is a child molester for every pretty white girl, cackling evilly in the shadows.
What you say about Lileks is so true, and yet… I can’t help but enjoy his website. I love ephemera and 50’s nostalgia and terrible 70’s decor.
I’m so conflicted…
Now. Lileks has wisely applied the Bush doctrine of preemption or Cheney’s one percent rule to the local park. It’s a good start—presuming the man is a child molester—but it’s not enough. Lilek should label him child molester, murderer, fence, chicken fighter (Thanks, Gary!), narcotraficante, and counterfeiter, just to be on the safe side.
Yes, drive out the strange-looking freaks, and surround your kids with trusted adult members of the community–like Father Filtcher, Officer Zappy McTriggerhappy (who loves to play Cavity Search For Candy), and Mayor Younglust.
Cheney’s one percent rule
Lilek’s would like to join the citizen’s block patrol, but he has other priorities.
It’s one step from Lilek’s “reasoning” to signing him up as a Pre-cog. And come on. Who *wouldn’t* want to see him floating in that pool in a nice little Speedo, bio-informatically linked to two others, enjoying their visions and thwarting crime before anyone commits, or even thinks about, it.
Oh, when Lileks last in the dooryard bloom’d…
Thank god for our Abigail Williams style of Justice in America!
I”m not saying this dude wasn’t acting crazy and should be monitored when he’s around, but assuming he’s a pedophile because he hangs around public areas?
Yes, America, some people really are just crazy, and make things up because they do. It doesn’t mean they’re up to something. My mom, being a branch manager at a few local public libraries, could talk through the night about the crazy people she deals with on a daily basis.
When Gnat and her droogs are high on vellocet and get caught rolling bums, Lileks can only have his gracious attitude towards his fellow man to thank.
Lileks love of “ole New York” creeps me the fuck out. The New York he so loves never existed, and he misplaces his nostalgia for the old urban centers with the kitschy postcards he found in Minneapolis. I really understand this urge, since I share it wholeheartedly…but then, I live in the real New York with my real children–who are incidentally not exploited in my shitty (non-existent) columns.
It’s hard for Lileks. He’s a 1930s reporter who finds himself in unappreciated senescene here in the mid-1960s, unloved by the new “hip” culture and those damned corporate folks. That said, ole James is a fine writer, with frightening hysterias: I love to read him. He must be insufferable in person.
i wish only good things for gnat. her father is an utter and contemptible piece of excrement masquerading as a human being, and she will therefore be forced to suffer, either because she is indoctrinated in and by his insanity, or because she must listen to it all summer long when back from school. it will be hard for her to overcome this and be a decent kind human being.
Happenstance said: “Yes, drive out the strange-looking freaks, and surround your kids with trusted adult members of the community–like Father Filtcher, Officer Zappy McTriggerhappy (who loves to play Cavity Search For Candy), and Mayor Younglust.”
Don’t forget Dr. Pheelumup. The community can’t work well without Dr. Pheelumup to confirm that young people are crazy for reacting badly to physical examinations. Those crazy kids!!!!!!
You know, it’s thought processes like this:
That leads to crap like this.
What’s more, Jeff, he gases on and on and on about “OLD NEW YORK,” and as far as I can tell his source materials amount to watching the DVD of “Guys & Dolls” and skimming “Up in the Old Hotel.”
This condemnation of Chester-the-not-yet-a-Molester suggests that maybe he forgot about the Bowery. Or that he just doesn’t care, when a distantly-imagined threat rears its imagined-ugly head in his child’s prospective presence.
Poor Jim-Jim. He’s beset on all sides by the tyrannies of evil men.
The whole “child predator” scare has been a gift to the Talibangelical xenophobes, hasn’t it? What’s really soiling Lileks’ shorts is the fear… really, the certainty… that someday his beloved “Gnat” is going to want to get into cars with strange men, or at least one of the boys from her study group, and that boy will be UNWORTHY, a smoker, a drinker, a predator, an atheist, even (oh Father God forbid!) a Democrat!
Of course, most parents feel at least a twinge at the idea that their kids are going to grow up and develop opinions of their own. But the Lileks and their readers seem to have decided that they can forestall heartbreak by keeping their offspring tightly caged in their gated communities, safe from exposure to strange people, unruly thoughts, and unvetted opinions. You’d think Jim would look at the current crop of second-generation Wingnut Wankers, such fine specimens as Simone Ledeen and Jonah Goldberg, and realize that trying to raise your kids inside a sealed terrarium leads to strange deformities of spirit.
Would those be the same “deformities of spirit” that gave rise to James Lileks? That sort of abuse tends to be passed down from parent to child…
And come on. Who *wouldn’t* want to see him floating in that pool in a nice little Speedo
*raises hand*
…emerging only to throw a Manhole of Promise into the mikerwave, I guess?
They know it’s against the law, which ought to tell them they’re wrong, and consequences will follow. But they try it anyway.
Like, oh, um, domestic spying, or lying to Congress, or invading countries pre-emptively, or torturing human beings you bought from shady guys on a Kabul street corner…
You know, Lileks has a really remarkable vertical crease between his eyebrows. This is a common feature, especially of males, but his is really extraordinary.
David Lynch has a deep one too, and Isabella Rosselini used to tease him that it might be “the sprouting of a third eye, or a second ass.” In Lileks’ case I think we can all agree on the likelihood of each.
Just the thought of being taunted by Isabella Rossellini makes me all squishy.
Yeah, you don’t have to dig very far with guys like Lileks to find a sadistic little brat just desperate for a list of people he can feel superior to and push around. I have a horrible suspicion that future sociologists will be coining a phrase like “suburbanity of evil” to explain Amerika in the Bush years.
“Having demonstrated his disdain for the Brawner Rule of the Model Penal Code” ….
Well played. Well played.
“Fourth, you don’t get to look like the fellow who shows up to collect the Hellraiser cube and hang around the kiddie pool. Good bye.”
What the? I wasn’t aware that Pinhead was homeless. It’s a shame he’s fallen so far.
Speaking of Lileks Neuralgia, I’m particularly fond of the Norman Rockwell tableau of the ruddy-faced cops brutally hustling the luckless bum into the paddy wagon while daddy Big-Head holds his insect daughter’s hand and watches approvingly with a big All-American grin on his face.
I don’t doubt that Target security has been notified more than once about a cleft-chinned freak bugging clerks and customers with “homey observations.”
This guy needs a metric ton of Depends. Hoo lordy.
Fifteen years from now, when Gnat is looking to get her Dad’s head to explode, she won’t even have to whip off her shirt for Girls Gone Wild–just making googly eyes at someone with darker skin should suffice.
Finally a working definition of compassionate conservativism: Always help someone in need unless they look funny, or you suspect that they may have once done something bad, or might do something bad in the future. Sensible policies for a safer America!
That’s a classic quote. If there’s any justice, it will be reposted throughout the left side of the blogosphere within a week.
Oh for fucks sake.
More kids are diddled by people they know who dress just like their dad than are diddled by scruffy homeless guys.
Wow. Homeless men in Lileks’ cul-de-sac wear ankle-length bondage gear and have Aisle 9 of the Home Depot sticking out of their faces?
That’s just weird.
Much as I hate to stick up for the Man From F.U.D.D.L.E.S., and even though it makes me a terrible human being, the Hellraiser bit did make me giggle. (At the end of the movie, the creepy grasshopper-eating hobo shows up to collect the cube. Then he, er, catches on fire and turns into a bad special effect of a skeletal dragon thing, which is kind of silly, but still.)
Now g, you know Teh Pants Pissers can’t be expected to bother their pretty little heads with statistics and facts. That’s for reality-based folk. Thinkin’ gets in the way of the hatin’.
Yes, drive out the strange-looking freaks, and surround your kids with trusted adult members of the community–like Father Filtcher, Officer Zappy McTriggerhappy (who loves to play Cavity Search For Candy), and Mayor Younglust.
Crikies, Happenstance, are you from Spokane? We’ve had all three in this decade. (I’m so stealing Officer Zappy McTriggerhappy.)
man, FUCK James Lileks.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: He is NOT a good writer. Nothing I have ever seen from him is witty, funny or interesting. Anyone that sincerely uses the word ‘bleating’ to describe their own writing should be instantly ignored.
Also, he once said that he whips out a tape he made on 9/11 of the towers coming down about once a week (warporn) to make sure his war hardon doesn’t go away. Seriously. He really does sit down and watch that shit when he feels like his vigour is flagging.
it’s the mousy, weasely little fucks like lileks that turn out to be the most fucked in the head. daffyd and lileks – besides a few hundred pounds, there’s no diff.
Well gosh, that kinda stings, as I myself look a bit like the model for the cover of Aqualung. However, before Mr. Lil-X thinks he can come up to me and say, “Move on, you don’t get to look like you do and hang around in a public place, good bye!” he should probably stop in at Target and see if they have any handy products to help a regular customer out if, in the near future, he happens to need to extract a land surveyor’s size 10 boot out from his ass. Just in case.
Jeez. Here you have an impressive case of projecting your mindless fears and deeply psychotic distrust for anyone not like you in a spinning circle of fully automatic ignorance, like Rambo with that CAR-60 in the HQ, raining willful mistrust and baseless hatred on any and all withing range, then coming up with a specious and facile justification.
Nope, therapy is not going to help this asshat out. He’s gonna need meds…
mikey
i bet he yells out, “copy!” when he finishes a column. and wears a fedora around the house with a little piece of paper that reads “press” stuck in the side.
Now that’s the kind of myopic suburbanite thinking I’ve come to expect from conservatives. You don’t get to look like a ragged, cockroach-eating homless person?
Because really, homeless people have a lot of control over their appearance; they don’t have to be dirty, disheveled folks wearing ragged clothing. They could easily purchase hygenic supplies, haircuts, and clean clothing using food stamps. The free hobo-barbershop is located right next to the fashionable transient clothing supply, across the street from the soup kitchen.
It’s a perverse sort of circular logic at work:
“Why are homeless people always so dirty looking? Can’t they just go home and get a shower? And while they’re at it, a job?”
Asshat.
I’m conflicted, as well. When I first started surfing the intertOObz, a very liberal friend of mine pointed me to his site. And by very liberal, I mean she is covered with tattoos and owns the funkiest pizza joint in Seattle. Hardly sympathetic to right wingers, she and I would laugh our asses off at his commentary relative to ephemera and vintage silliness.
I never read his blog, as I was not ‘hip’ to that ‘jive’. Since I have been visiting Sadly, No! (some say too often) I was pointed to his craven, vapid war mongering nature.
So I look back, fondly, on those halcyon days of ignorance. But now that I’ve discovered his true nature…F*ck ‘im!
“But…but…Peter Lorre in M…”
Won’t Lileks be embarrassed when he finds out that was Jesus in disguise!
We’ve had two cases in towns of evil men trying to lure children into their cars
Wow. Towns of Evil Men? I’d stay outta those neighborhoods, if I were you. Are they in Nevada?
They are almost certainly Las Cruces, NM and Bend, OR…
mikey
Homeless men in Lileks’ cul-de-sac wear ankle-length bondage gear and have Aisle 9 of the Home Depot sticking out of their faces?
That’s just weird.
Clearly, from Evil Men, Nevada….
You know, every time you guys talk about Lileks, I think it says Daleks.
Hey, Daleks and Pinhead(ish)!
They are almost certainly Las Cruces, NM and Bend, OR…
I have no reason to doubt you, mikey.
Aqualung, you’re welcome in SN-town. May I show you to the playground? Drool and expectorate all ya want. But none a that stuff with the privates. That’s for prison.
I’m suprised that no one here has pointed out that the homelessness was the direct result of policies put in place by Lileks’ “funny uncle” Ronnie. Reagan emptied the mental institutions nationwide by radically cutting funding and the homeless population rose exponentially. Most of the people “(d)ressed in a ragged suit, carrying his possessions in a plastic shopping bag from a store that has no local outlets anywhere in the neighborhood,” are victims of a system that can’t support intitutionalizing any but the criminally insane.
Lileks has no one to blame but his own half-assed politics. If he doesn’t like some creepy dude in dirty clothes hanging around his suburban park, he needs to re-examine how so-called creepy dude got there in the first place.
I’m suprised that no one here has pointed out that the homelessness was the direct result of policies put in place by Lileks’ “funny uncle” Ronnie. Reagan emptied the mental institutions nationwide by radically cutting funding – and the homeless population rose exponentially. Most of the people “(d)ressed in a ragged suit, carrying his possessions in a plastic shopping bag from a store that has no local outlets anywhere in the neighborhood,” are victims of a system that can’t support intitutionalizing any but the criminally insane.
Lileks has no one to blame but his own half-assed politics. If he doesn’t like some creepy dude in dirty clothes hanging around his suburban park, he needs to re-examine how so-called creepy dude got there in the first place.
BTW, how do we know said creepy dude wasn’t Jeff Goldstein? Have we heard from him lately? Has he gone off his meds? Has he found a pony?
Aqualung, you’re welcome in SN-town. May I show you to the playground?
Why thank you, kind person. I will not start away uneasy.
[smears shabby clothes with greasy fingers].
“homelessness was the direct result of policies put in place by Lileks’ “funny uncle” Ronnie. Reagan emptied the mental institutions nationwide by radically cutting funding”
And don’t forget that St. Ronnie Reagan presided over an era of corrupt, greedy business practices that led to the tearing down of millions of single-room housing units to make way for “redevelopment” (because we needed 10 more Gap stores and 1000 new condos downtown), also exponentially increasing the homeless population.
God forbid we should teach our kids some compassion and some social history when a homeless man shows up at the wading pool. Let’s be Christian and drive him out of our chi chi neighborhood instead.
What Mo said. Why does Lileks spit on the legacy of St. Ronnie?
I forget who pointed it out first, but there’s a sort of common thread in what Lileks does. He’s a delightfully pure conservative (pissing himself in terror at the possibility of his child being attacked by wogs and all) in that he spends all day long cracking wise against people who absolutely cannot defend themselves.
It’s a bully mentality, and there’s a reason so many visible conservative ‘wits’ are loathsome, greasy little pricks who seem overdue for a goddamned swirly. They’ve had a lot of practice picking on the smallest and weakest; my guess is that they’re so far down on the pecking order growing up they make their bones taking the piss out of that one girl in the wheelchair who smells like farts or the kid from the projects without any friends.
Of course, the kind of friends this makes them are usually other little loathsome assholes; between that and how much conservatism loves picking on victims, you’ve got a perfect ideological match for the fat little men and ugly little girls with decent middle-class educations to act sanctimonious about having.
The reason Lileks is so pure in that regard – the reason I say that he couldn’t get purer as one of those pathetic grade-school loser-wags grown up into well-paid awful reactionaries – is that literally none of his victims could ever possibly defend themselves.
He takes potshots at the aesthetics of the 70s, which has never threatened to revive itself, and the advertising and cultural ephemera of the 50s. He’s one of those little trolls whose 50s boner is based on what he grew up with, an uncomplicated world where civil rights were clearly some kind of Communist scheme to undermine the perfectly just American society and Eisenhower – 90%-marginal-tax-rate military-industrial-fearing McCarthy-burying Eisenhower – is a retroactive Reagan pioneer. He and his kind will cop in public to the racism of the 50s being bad, but get a few beers in them and I’d bet my bottom dollar they’d tell you that it was just men being men and nobody being Politically Correct(TM).
In other words, in order to fantastically reenact the days before he had to feel shame about being a virgin and the time around his early 30s when he finally took care of that, he windmills pretty much every martyr of progress in 20th-century America.
Covertly, of course. No need to mumble about why on earth anyone could name a street after a Marxist adulterer like MLK when you can pile fulsome praise on the flat-top and cowboys-and-injuns vogue aesthetic. Doing it the second way makes sure your audience won’t feel any guilt about it.
As if to underscore all that, hateful man-lump Lileks devotes this post, under the absurd pretense of ‘protecting his child’ – rather like the Klan was all about protecting Southern womanhood from carpetbagger and freedman depredation – to specifically assaulting first child molesters (with no risk of his audience thinking of pedophilia as a disease instead of a moral failing) and then, by absurd, absurd extension, a random, outwardly civil homeless man – who, by Lileksian fiat, deserves his plight for being a pederast. (OK then.)
There you have it: two groups of victims without particularly visible advocacy groups to castigate Lileks for his abusive, petty behavior get slandered to make Jimmy-boy look hip and snarky.
You’re surprised now? He does this for a living. And he makes better money than you.
Hooray for capitalism!
Rev. D. Grind – Good one.
Folks who say he’s a good writer – We’ll just have to differ on that. I can’t read his smirky crap without feeling like I should be on the side of whoever he’s pissing up at. He seems to prefer targets that can’t respond. I could see his worldview in a comic page gag panel: