3rd Debate: Mitt Romney Says Nothing, Repeatedly

I admit that I have a tendency to talk more about language than about substance when analyzing political speech, but then again there isn’t much substance to be had.  And besides, the little things matter.  Failing to take note of tricks of language and Orwellian efforts at branding can mean lowering your guard against political manipulation.  So I don’t feel bad about picking at nits, because I believe those nits have a tendency to grow and consume public dialogue if they aren’t gotten rid of.

There was one talking point in last night’s presidential debate that I found exceptionally aggravating.  It was the point that Mitt Romney made about the perilous situation that the United States faces in the world because Iran is now “four years closer” to having a nuclear weapon.  Considering that that was repeated four times over the course of the ninety minutes, it seemed to me that it relied upon the assumption of an audience that wasn’t really paying close attention.  It grabbed my attention as an utterly empty political slogan the first time it was uttered, and the rest of the audience had three additional opportunities to get that same impression.

There’s really no other impression to be had.  Saying that Iran is four years closer to a nuclear weapon is like saying that I’m four years closer to a Nobel Prize.  Chances are pretty good that I’m not going to get one of those.  I guess you could argue that even if I don’t, as long as I keep working towards a relevant goal – writing literature, for instance – I might be closer to having a Nobel Prize when I die than I am right now.  But speaking more colloquially, if a certain outcome is never going to happen, one doesn’t get closer to it over time.

Now, in the event that I am going to win a Nobel Prize, then the hypothetical statement is true.  I am four years close to that outcome than I was four years ago.  Similarly, if at any point in the future, under any circumstances, Iran develops and builds a nuclear weapon, then they are presently four years closer to that outcome than they were four years ago.  That’s the way time works.  Future events get closer every day.  Would a Mitt Romney presidency unlock some secret of the universe that would allow time to flow backwards within the borders of one country?  Or was this intended as a subtle metaphor for bombing nations back to the Stone Age?

At this point, I imagine a lot of people will narrow their eyes disdainfully at me and hiss, “Oh, you know what he meant.”  And in a vague sense, yes, of course I do.  Obviously he meant to suggest that President Obama’s first term allowed the Iranian regime to become materially closer to having the knowledge and resources required for building a nuclear weapon.  But I don’t know what Romney meant by “four years closer,” presumably because “four years closer” doesn’t mean anything.  It’s the vaguest and least substantive way he could have phrased what he was trying to say, and since it was repeated four times over, that must have been deliberate.

If Romney had had a substantive claim to make about a worsening Iranian threat resulting from an Obama presidency, he had ample opportunity to make it.  He didn’t.  That’s not to say that there’s no such argument to be made, but it does suggest that Romney’s claims relied on bullshit – a disregard for the truth value of what he was saying, in favor of whatever would serve his ends if it happened, incidentally, to be true.

That behavior is quite in keeping with Romney’s entire approach to his campaign.  Typically, he seems to accomplish this exploitation of politically convenient narratives by plainly reversing position, or by outright lying.  Now, with the third debate, he seems to have uncovered the perfect means of utilizing bullshit, which is by making claims that cannot be contradicted because they provide absolutely no information, even as they sound damning for the opposing party.  I suppose that in that way Romney has succeeded in emulating Reagan.

The public cannot allow such casual disregard for truth or rational argumentation to stand as a relevant political tactic.  We cannot allow politicians, corporations, or anyone else to believe that they can sway us by branding and rhetoric alone, without having to appeal to factual data or to be transparent about their own views.  Such dialogue will only improve if we hone our ability to parse it and separate it and call out the bullshit.  We’re failing in that responsibility if Mitt Romney believes he can say four times in the same debate that we’re four years closer to the future, and have that somehow count in his favor.

The Oxford Comma, Childhood Education, and Me

The coincidences that I encounter these days are not as profound as they once were.  Now it tends to be more along the lines of repeated references to a film I have yet to see, or some negative coincidence like my some last minute excuse always coming up amongst friends.  A couple of recent, coincidental encounters have compelled me to make something out of a topic of grammatical concern.

I stumbled onto an online discussion recently about the Oxford comma and whether it is or is not grammatically correct, or required.  I later found that another online writer’s personal byline declared him to be “a fan of the Oxford comma,” and having already been given cause to reflect on it, I thought to myself, “Well, hell, me too!”

For those of you who are extremely casual grammarians or who pride yourself on a 1337 ability to avoid the conventions of written English, the Oxford comma is the comma that comes between the penultimate entry in a list and the word “and.”  Nouns, punctuation, and a conjunction make up a list, and there’s an Oxford comma in this sentence.  Some writers use it, some don’t.  Some style guides require it, some reject it.  Speaking quite generally, both its use and its non-use are acceptable.  It seems to me that many people, either because they haven’t thought about it or because they’re naturally committed to one or the other, don’t realize this.

That even goes for teachers of English.  The reason why I know about the controversy over the Oxford comma is that I remember it being a legitimate point of confusion in elementary school.  I’m fairly certain that when it first came up, the teacher of what I’m guessing was my third grade class, told us quite explicitly that there was no comma between the second-to-last and last entries in a list.

I more clearly recall when it came up with a later English teacher, because she didn’t seem to know which was correct, but would not admit to that fact.  She was overseeing an assignment in which students had to add punctuation to an existing sentence, and when she gave the answer she listed the places where each of the commas belonged, paused, and added the Oxford comma to the mix.  Even among a group of nine year-olds, the class was bifurcated on that answer, so that I cheered to myself over my superior understanding, and my neighbor had to correct his paper.

At this point you may be asking what on Earth this has to do with breaking points.  Well, having thus had an opportunity to reflect on my personal relationship with the Oxford comma, I realize that the way I learned about it might represent something that’s essential to the development of an intelligent, independent child.

You see, regardless of what I’ve become, I was the picture of an upstanding, studious child who did with religious devotion what he was told to do by parents and teachers, and always followed the rules.  That contributed to a marvelously successful academic career, which paid off with a sense of pride for most of the time that I was in school but left me with nothing once I no longer had anyone to obey.

Now I seem to have such a contentious, anti-conformist mindset as to give me a rather hard edge, which acts as a social barrier.  Nevertheless, I remember well the child that always did his homework, developed an earnest rapport with authority figures, never snuck out at night or dabbled with drugs or alcohol.  In many ways, I am still the child, even though I have a well-developed and eagerly maintained sense of self.  So I know that if I were to finally be injected into a corporate setting, or otherwise put low in a hierarchy that I’m wont to accept, I will still do what I am told to do at most every turn, and do it with sincere deference.

Knowing the kind of child that I was, I sometimes wonder just how I would fare in the Milgram experiments, which, in the early 1960s, demonstrated how easy it is for ordinary people to do monstrously unethical things when directed to by an authority figure.  My life has been unfortunately short on severe challenges to my own morality.  Mostly, there have just been instances where circumstances casually flirted with a scenario in which I might be called upon to either speak up or stand by as a witness to preventable wrongs.  And I’ve always been afraid of my apparent slowness and caution in responding to such situations.

In a lot of ways, I was quite unlike what one expects in a typical intelligent youth.  My aversion to drugs and alcohol, even to sex, has been lifelong, but psychological studies indicate that a curious willingness to experiment with such things is characteristic of a changeable, and thus intelligent, mind.  The saintly boy scout type might prove to be exceptionally good at reciting the rulebook, but that doesn’t demonstrate any real intellectual curiosity.  Rebellion is supposed to be a natural part of adolescent development, but I never experienced it.  My greatest act of rebellion came at twenty-one when I refused to apply to graduate school.

These sorts of contrasts make me wonder if I really have the firm, capable mind that I was always praised for, or if, instead, I am just a terrifically smooth-running machine.  All those subject areas that I was so good at in my primary and secondary schooling – did I really understand them, or did I just repeat what I was told at the same time that I repeated “don’t talk to strangers,” “don’t smoke,” “don’t skip class,” “don’t talk back”?

My worries about the authenticity of my own intelligence are modestly alleviated, however, by the knowledge that insecurity has been a characteristic of virtually everyone for whose intelligence I have had respect in the past.  Whenever I question my skill at or grasp of something, I take a little bit of comfort in remembering the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the tendency of skilled people to think that everyone else is as good as they while deficient people think everyone else is as bad.

Still, I’m not like the other mentally-capable people I know, and it leaves me with the worry that all along I’ve just been adeptly imitating them, saying the sorts of things they say, following the rules that are supposed to lead to where they are, and generally copying instead of thinking.  After all, the best and the worst of people are the ones who question authority.  The rest are just mediocre.

Of course, what I need to keep in mind is that an essential willingness to question authority doesn’t mean that it’s necessary to do so.  And yet it is necessary to have that willingness, because a constant follower is not one to form his own ideas.  That’s a problem when the ideas that you’re asked to follow are wrong, and it’s equally a problem when you have no firm idea to parrot.  Case in point, the Oxford comma.

I was probably eight years old when I learned how to separate items in written lists.  In retrospect, I take great pride in my reception of that lesson.  More to the point, I take pride in the fact that as a child I was not receptive to that lesson.  The absence of the Oxford comma in third grade English is the first memory that I can dredge up from my spotty personal history of an instance in which I actively, albeit silently, disagreed with a teacher.

I don’t know where I learned that skill so early in life, but I believe that it contributed in magnificent ways to the development of the person writing this today.  A year or so after that first lesson, I defied the prior teacher’s instruction and inserted a comma next to the conjunction, because that’s what made sense to me.  I felt then as I do now:  There’s no sense in excluding the comma from the last item in a list, because the conjunction doesn’t fully separate one noun from another.  There are situations in which you might pair two words as a compound noun linked by a conjunction, such as “salt and pepper,” or “soup or salad.”  If such a compound comes at the end of a list and it’s accepted that the writer omits the Oxford comma, the two nouns will be inappropriately divided from each other.

In a far less analytical way, I was aware of this at eight years old, and even though I wasn’t intellectually prepared to defend my opinion to an old woman in a position of authority, I at least had the fortitude to let the instruction pass through my ears unheeded.  When my later teacher hesitated over the question, I was vindicated, because I knew then that it was a legitimate area of uncertainty, and I was confident that I had resolved it correctly.

Children need the skill to resolve linguistic and explanatory puzzles on their own, if they are to become intelligent beings.  Knowing what I do about myself, I’m almost certain that if I hadn’t displayed that skill at an early age, I would in fact be the intellectual automaton that I sometimes fear I could be.  In light of that, early childhood education cannot be simply a matter of transmitting information; it must encourage children to resolve questions that the teacher has left uncertain, and even to challenge the claims of authority.

In many circles, this is something that’s explicitly rejected.  We often tend to value pure obeisance in our children, discouraging them from questioning until they’re old enough to do so.  That, however, is not education.  The creation of loyal citizens is not the same as the development of clever, critically thinking youths.  The patterns that we establish as children can follow us throughout our lives, and a pattern of accepting things at face value then can make it difficult to pick up the skill of questioning later on.  When it is not deliberately fostered, I don’t know where the impulse to reject false information comes from, but it is enormously valuable to developing minds, and I thank god that I picked it up somewhere.

And I thank god for the Oxford comma.

"Weak Statement. Stonger Statement."

I often fear I’m destined to be a conservative. Many of the breaking points that I look forward to are reversals of modern trends. They’re usually not political, but they are conservative in more of a personal, romantic, yearning-for-an-imagined-past sort of way. In all probability, I’m just cynical. I have a habit of looking with scorn on things that are new and seeing the worst examples with particular clarity. Meanwhile, I tend to focus almost exclusively on the best elements of things once they are comfortably in the past.

I know it’s a flawed way of engaging with the world. I don’t think it’s altogether incorrect, though, only skewed. I’m just more optimistic about legacies than about trends. I like to believe that my perceptions of good and bad are still accurate, even if they aren’t counterbalanced in either case.

I can be quite unforgiving with the negative observations that I make of culture and the arts. I’m sure that history will vindicate the best that music, literature and film currently have to offer, but while I’m living amidst it I see so much more dreck. It gives me the impression that our collective standards are getting lower. The least sophisticated works of art gain the greatest popularity. Perhaps it’s always been like that, but such beautiful things have grown out of the past; how did they avoid being corrupted by pablum?

I don’t read what seems to be bad literature. There is far too much excellent literature to read for me to waste my time, and I don’t read enough anyway. So I don’t have a thorough sense of what linguistic or stylistic features are characteristic of bad artistry, beyond what is apparent on the surface. But as a result of reading modern writing more generally, I worry about the trajectory what is accepted as literary language.

I am fairly proud to admit that I’m rather snobbish about grammar. I’m probably prone to error, but I am the sort of person who will stop and correct myself in mid-conversation if I end a sentence with a preposition. (I know that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I know that my third clause in this post ended with a preposition.) So I’ve noticed some trends with which I am snobbishly uncomfortable. One of these is that sentence fragments seem to be commonly accepted, even encouraged in published literature these days.

I was reading the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction, and I found in one article several examples of short, declarative, ungrammatical phrases, which decidedly limit how seriously I can take the writing. Early in the article, the author writes:

“California is among the states that require judges to divide the community property perfectly equally between the divorcing parties. No matter what.”

Now, I recognize that the author is trying to give particular weight to that latter phrase by isolating it from the rest of the sentence, but I think that that’s a lazy way for a writer to evoke the intended response from his or her audience. But this author does it again later:

“She followed and shot him again. And again.”

(Nice phrase, let me re-use it.) And again:

“Maria got revenge. And six years in state prison.”

Thinking about it now, I’m quite sure that I’ve seen numerous other examples of this in published work elsewhere. I am uncomfortable with a literary landscape in which this sort of cutting of corners is considered effective and is widely accepted by editors.

Writers are different from spoken word artists. We should be able to convey our ideas and leave an impact upon our audience by more nuanced means than pausing for dramatic effect. If an author wishes for there to be strength in a subsequent observation, he should convey it with the strength of his language, and his words should punch his audience in the gut or grab it by the testicles, not merely slap it on the ear.

I’m sure that I have little cause to worry and that these trends will fade in the history of modern literature, but so long as I’m in the midst of it, I’ll demand better from the here-and-now. Perhaps it is the persistence of those demands that keeps the worst of our culture and art from being as visible in retrospect as it is in the moment.

Limbaugh Speaks Through Racing Fans' Jeers

I heard a recent clip from Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast, in which he commented upon Michelle Obama and Jill Biden serving as Grand Marshals at a NASCAR event over the weekend. Evidently, a portion of the crowd responded quite negatively to them. Limbaugh took it upon himself to explain that reaction from a crowd that was, in his words, insulted by the first lady’s presence there. Most any viewpoint that I hear Limbaugh express raises questions as to how, throughout decades in broadcasting, the man has managed to insulate himself so completely from anything that resembles evolution of thought or self-awareness.

A quick glance at other mentions of this incident on news sites and blogs indicates that many people are focusing on Limbaugh’s use of the word “uppity,” and the evident racial element to that kind of terminology. And while that is worth examining, I don’t like to put too much emphasis on the semantics of people’s stupid commentary. I’m willing to give Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt on things like that, and accept that he was using the word in a colloquial sense to refer to arrogance and haughtiness. Perhaps Limbaugh is simply unaware of the racial history of the term stemming from its original use by blacks in describing other blacks who seemed too invested in moving upward in a white-dominated society.

It’s a bit presumptuous to claim that Limbaugh’s use of the word denotes racism, though it very well may, but I think it’s perfectly fair to conclude from it that either Limbaugh doesn’t pay any attention to the issue of racial sensitivity or he hasn’t realized at any point in his long career in radio that words have consequences.

Still, language is kind of an esoteric way to criticize commentary that is so much more easily cut down by pointing out self-delusion and rational flaws. What Limbaugh offered, apparently as the principal reason why the crowd saw fit to give Mrs. Obama such a disrespectful reception was this:

“The first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers on four hours earlier than her husband who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that that’s a little bit of a waste.”

Now, his further comments suggest that he means “waste” in a purely fiscal, “those are my tax dollars” kind of way. I hope to God that that is indeed what he means, because if he thinks the people in attendance at an event where dozens of cars drive in a circle for five hundred miles are concerned about fuel conservation, he’s far more insane than I ever gave him credit for.

So, supposing that the source of the outcry is little more than the spending of public money, let’s look at this rationally. A jet like a Boeing 757 gets about three miles to the gallon, and the latest figures that I was able to find for the price of jet fuel place it at $3.20 per gallon. There’s about a thousand miles between Washington D.C. and Miami, so if that’s the trip we’re talking about, the first lady’s plane expended roughly 1067 dollars’ worth of fuel in getting there. If we ask for an equal share of that from just 150 million Americans – substantially less than half of the present population – then each of them is made to contribute just over two ten-thousandths of a cent to the trip. Of course, what Limbaugh seems to deem unforgivable is Michelle Obama going to the same place as her husband, except earlier. So we can double the per capita figure to about four-and-a-half ten-thousands of a cent. Is that personal loss what each of the members of the crowd was jeering at?

I recognize that the criticism of Mrs. Obama’s use of public funds extends far beyond one trip to Miami. I understand that the crowd wasn’t making so direct a connection between the first lady’s travel arrangements and their decision to give her such a cold reception. But my point here is to ask, does Rush Limbaugh understand that?

I think it was tasteless across the board for the crowd to boo Mrs. Obama, especially seeing as she was there to promote a charitable organization that serves our military veterans. But I don’t ascribe a single point of view, much less one so narrow in scope, to everyone who joined in on that chorus. I imagine that some people think she spends too lavishly given the state of the nation’s economy, but also that some were jeering at her as nothing more than a proxy for her husband’s political career. I also believe that some portion of the noise was probably coming from racists who just plain don’t like the uppity black woman taking center stage at their event.

I do not believe, however, that it’s possible to attribute Rush Limbaugh’s personal views to an entire crowd of people at a massive sporting event. Yet I think Limbaugh himself does just that in explaining just what it is that “the NASCAR people understand.” And by so doing, I think Limbaugh tends to shield his own very personal, unfair verbal assaults behind the imagined worldview of a group that probably possesses much more nuance in its collective thinking than is convenient for him.

I hope that some of the members of that crowd realize that the real insult against them is this kind of black-and-white thinking, which holds that there are only two ways of thinking about anything – the wrong way, and the Limbaugh way.

The Class Warfare Brand

One of the things that bother me most about American politics and the news media is that conservative forces always seem to be controlling the narrative. As bad as Republicans tend to be at policy, compassion, moderation, and common sense, you’ve got to admit that they’re great at branding. Terminology and concepts that should have equal weight on either side of an issue have a tendency to become tethered to purely conservative ideologies. The phrase “class warfare” is a terrific example of this, and it tends to come up every time policy debates turn toward exploration of the possibility of raising the marginal tax rate on the top one percent of income earners, or of eliminating tax breaks on things like corporate jets. Somehow, that same term doesn’t gain as much popular traction when certain politicians stonewall efforts to extend unemployment benefits, or when unions are stripped of their collective bargaining powers. “Class warfare,” we are evidently meant to conclude, can only be conducted by the poor against the rich, never the other way around.

Thus we have Rush Limbaugh responding to the president’s mention of those tax breaks on corporate jet owners by calling it “dangerous!” and “full-fledged demagoguery!” and claiming that Obama’s “aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another!”

How can the effort at narrowing the gap between rich and poor be class warfare if decades of efforts at widening that gap weren’t? What could the president possibly be doing here to make one group of Americans despise another? He’s not changing the landscape of class distinctions in America; he’s just bringing attention to some of its features. If Limbaugh’s concern is that hatred will arise from nothing other than more information, there’s probably something wrong with the reality that is being described. If anything is going to breed hatred and despisal by one group against another, it’s not going to be successful efforts to make the rich take up a fair share of the tax burden. Rather, what will breed hatred is being witness to rich people repelling those efforts and holding fast to the most inequitable elements of American society.

Warfare, you see, is something that happens between two different nations or groups of people. If anyone wants to breed hatred and promote class warfare, it’s people like Rush Limbaugh who seem hell-bent on making the differences between the two groups of people in the United States as stark as possible – one group owning everything, the other nothing. So it is outrageous that he is able to throw those pejorative terms entirely onto the other side of the issue and paint multi-millionaires as the sole victims of unprovoked class warfare.

How are Republicans able to get away with this at every mention of labor policy or class inequality when the claim is so patently absurd? Skillful branding and manipulation of language can go a long way towards making simple acts of conscience appear to be villainous and persecutory. Does the Democratic Party have no public relations people whatsoever, no one who can introduce vivid and effective language on the right side of a topic before it is co-opted by the political right? How awful they must be at PR by comparison when they can’t even use it to promote the truth or the action that better advances the public good, while their opponents can paint lead to look like gold and then sell it to a desperately impoverished metallurgist.

All right, so once again the conservative wing has established the narrative and decided the course of the conversation. This is where it’s time to become proactive and change what it is they’re saying, so they look like the manipulative misers they are, rather than noble martyrs. Glenn Beck has described the corporate jet tax conversation as “unprecedented class warfare!” I would like to see someone respond, “You’re goddamn right it is!” It’s a war we’re engaged in, and you know what? That has great potential to be a good thing in the mind of the public. My dictionary shows that “war” can be defined as “a sustained effort to deal with or end a particular unpleasant or undesirable situation or condition.” How about we put the bitter, self-serving complaints of the right in that context? That would be good branding, and then Beck and Limbaugh would be decrying an unprecedented effort to deal with the unpleasant condition of a broadening gulf between rich and poor, the undesirable situation whereby the rich are given every effort to deepen and extend their wealth, while the poor struggle fruitlessly to find work and keep in their homes.

Being more of the latter class myself, I am afraid I can’t bring myself to be so nuanced, though, in response to the rest of Glenn Beck’s comments about the president’s discussion of corporate jet tax breaks, so don’t read on if you’re offended by strong language. Beck has said that it shows Obama’s “sheer, unadulterated disgust for the wealthy, the successful and anyone who’s ever tried to do anything with their life here in America”

Fuck you, Glenn Beck! How dare you indict anyone else for not inhabiting the same deluded fantasy-land that you’ve built with your $65 million personal wealth? As someone who’s trying desperately to do something with my life here in America and finding that my constant, crushing poverty adds more than a few layers of difficulty to my struggle, I powerfully resent the implication that an effort to get the most obscenely rich members of our society to give back something substantial constitutes a punishment of the ambitious. Your greed and that of those like you is what punishes my ambition, and what’s more, it makes my own personal promotion of class warfare seem ever so justified. Fuck you, Glenn Beck, if you think your success is a testament purely to your hard work and that the poverty of 36 million Americans is underpinned by laziness, and if they all just stepped up their efforts, they could have an eventually-disgraced television show and earnings of up to $11 million a year. Fuck you and your brand of class warfare.

Recent Viral Media

Last week, there was a delightful little video making the rounds on the internet, depicting a fifteen year-old school kid being attacked by a bully and retaliating in a spectacular fashion. A few days ago, the story gained a layer of depth when the Australian teen was interviewed by that country's "A Current Affair" news program.

Watch it on YouTube.

There's a lot that I could say about this. I could use this as yet another jumping off point for criticism of the news media, as the presentation of this is sort of silly, in the typical fashion of news magazine shows. I could recall some of my earlier posts about children and teens, and praise the young man's articulateness and maturity. I could comment on the problem of bullying, and the public's responses to it, and I could certainly still criticize the tendency of this story to put the responsibility for dealing with it on the shoulders of the victim, rather than acknowledging that more should have been done before he had to fight.

But what most impresses me, and what I most want to comment on is a simple matter of language. I find it interesting, and very encouraging, that both in links to the original video of the kid, Casey Heynes, going all Zangief on his attacker, and in the subsequent interview and commentary on both, that the word "snap" is used in a glowingly positive way.

Think about it. How often do you really hear that word, in the context of someone lashing out or retaliating, used positively? The temporary loss of control or reason that that usually denotes is generally presented as a weakness of character, and as something that needs to be apologized for after the fact. But not in this case. In this case, it is the perfect embodiment of what this blog is all about. Heynes was pushed over the edge, and because he channeled all that pent-up rage and frustration into a perfectly appropriate, justified counter-attack, his life is in all likelihood taking a huge turn for the better.

Nobody who watches the original video thinks Heynes made a calculated, deliberate move against his attacker. He stood against the wall for a few moments, and then he let loose a sudden, powerful burst of narrowly channeled aggression, then walked away, leaving his bully unable to stand under his own power. In short, he snapped. That is the way it is being roundly described in media, and in discussion of the event, and everyone is praising it.

In the interview, the term is used at least three times, both by the presenter and by Heynes himself, who goes on to explain that he has no regret about what he did. Nor should he, and nor should anyone else think otherwise. Some of us probably would regret acting out as forcefully in the same situation. Many of us would probably feel conflicted about it. Even I would. Hell, when I got mugged, I pulled my punches while fighting back.

But I hope that in light of the story surrounding Casey Heynes, the positive usage of the phrase "he snapped" becomes more widely recognized and accepted. I hope this helps people to realize that when you're being pushed in the wrong direction, to snap - to reach a breaking point - and destroy something that's just no good is a beautiful thing. It may mean losing control, and it may even mean going too far, but sometimes the only way that necessary change can occur is by snapping under the pressure from that which is wrong, and fighting back against it in a way you couldn't have mustered when you were better in control.

In Casey Heynes' case, he not only destroyed the punk that would have made a victim of him, but I'll bet he destroyed the Casey Heynes that would be made a victim, that would not be given due respect among his peers, and would let himself put up with all the shit they therefore sought to dispense on him. It is in just that way that I want society itself, through all the breaking points I seek, to destroy its older self, and emerge stronger, purer, better, on the other side of that right of passage.