We-Time

It's a day earlier than my normal schedule, but I've got some real-world kid-related BS happening tomorrow night, so here I am now. Normally I don't like to do anything that might upset my reader(s?) and their carefully regulated lives. I know the orderlies can be strict about internet time and it's hard to read when the haldol makes you all twitchy. But look, sometimes life intervenes. I can't always squeeze this through your narrowing windows of lucidity.

Look, I'm sorry. It's lazy and cheap to make fun of the fucking crazy, no matter how funny the weird bastards are. If we weren't supposed to laugh at them, honestly, they'd have come up with another name for them besides "the fucking crazy." But then without it, mental health texts would be far, far less entertaining.

The scale on which we measure mental health is in itself a bit weird, though. Times were, not so terribly long ago, that a good, solid wank was admissible evidence of sexual deviancy and actual medical categorization existed to explain the times when bitches be actin' all crazy. And then, not so long after that, the prescripted fix for "female hysteria" was masturbation. The line between deviancy and therapy can, over time, be completely rubbed out.

Where does this leave us? I mean besides with a generally socially unproductive way to fill our special alone time. You don't have to work very hard to convince me of the benefits of naughty-touching, believe me. I accept that it can have certain mood-altering qualities, but you have to admit with me that at no point in any crisis has the solution been to jerk off at it. Excepting in the case of maybe a really small and slow-moving fire.

And certainly I don't think anyone is going to argue seriously that the best way to lighten the mood in Japan would be a prefecture-wide circle jerk. Frankly, I don't know how a people rebounds from that kind of compounded trauma, earthquake, tsunami, nuclear fallout and, eventually, inevitably, giant walking lizard seamonster. One kid at an American high school drives their car into a pond (speaking of inevitability) and the school shuts down so the "grievance counselors" can put in an appearance.

What do you do for a traumatized nation? I'd like to believe in the myth of Japanese cultural stoicism, but I'm not sure I buy the media projection of the trait. Sure, there are most likely hundreds of thousands of people who, to the extent that they can, take the Sendai Disaster in their stride, urged forward by an inculcated, culture-deep impulse to preserve the common good without complaint. But these, too, are the same people who, in the face of losing a war they started, would volutarily fly airplanes into enemy ships screaming BANZAI! the whole way down. I don't have a dictionary of psychological terms here in front of me, but I feel safe enough suggesting that's not the example to lead with if stoicism is what you're trying to prove.

I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of suggestions of what it is we can do for the Japanese to help them in their time of deep grief and immediate physical and mental anguish. But if I know Western Culture like I know Western Culture (and I know Western Culture), I imagine the best we're going to get is the one-size-fits-all-tragedies self-adhesive bandage: the all-star charity fundraising novelty single.

I'm not saying don't do it. The cause is worthy. I'm just saying before you unleash Justin Bieber duetting a verse with Lady Antebellum over a clumsy rhyme for "Fukushima," remember these are the same people who perfected the art of ritual suicide.

On your heads be it.