“Socialist Whore!”
I was mid-teens when I began to read Max Lerner. He was a columnist for the New York Post, one of the five daily papers that came into our household along with The New York Times, NY Herald-Tribune, NY World-Telegram, and PM. I read him until the day he wrote about a cat that had appeared at his window
one winter night, inspiring a demented rant about demons, and terrors of the night.
It inspired my first letter to a newspaper, explaining that a cat is just a small animal and that the one outside his window was likely cold, hungry and hoping to find a home. He actually wrote me back, a few lines saying some people liked cats, he didn’t, and I realized that the guy was scared by cats, and that his lofty columns were hysterical junk. I never read him again.
One day my kid brother, seven, showed Aunt Bea a drawing. “Oh, what a pretty kitten!” she cooed.
“It’s a mouse,” he replied, followed by Aunt Bea’s shudder of fear and breathy, “Uugghh”
It is surely fear that causes people to invest objects, animals, and other people with qualities so remote from reality. Fear changes our very perception of reality. Some might argue that it is reality. It's as common as your own phobia.
My phobia is falling. I was happy thousands of feet up when flying a bomber in WW2, but if I walk across the Manhattan Bridge and peer over the rail, or even look closely at a photo of iron workers sitting on a beam high above street level, it churns the pit of my stomach.
Stuck in a stalled elevator for 20 minutes between floors, a claustrophobic passenger turned pale and collapsed, her deep distress not relieved by solicitous reassurances.
When driving cars, otherwise reasonable people can explode with rage at other drivers, have been known to shoot them. At the wheel, we casually control hundreds of horsepower but bottle up the fear until someone cuts us off, say, when the fear bursts out and turns us into maniacs.
Today I saw a clip of Elizabeth Warren, the soul of compassion and sweet reason, spiked by a male voice shouting, “Socialist whore!” a hoarse screech of terror as a civilized veneer was ripped away by a sunami of fear. Like the disaster in Fukushima, it released a poisonous miasma, and one can only hope it has a half-life as short as twenty thousand years.
I was mid-teens when I began to read Max Lerner. He was a columnist for the New York Post, one of the five daily papers that came into our household along with The New York Times, NY Herald-Tribune, NY World-Telegram, and PM. I read him until the day he wrote about a cat that had appeared at his window
one winter night, inspiring a demented rant about demons, and terrors of the night.
It inspired my first letter to a newspaper, explaining that a cat is just a small animal and that the one outside his window was likely cold, hungry and hoping to find a home. He actually wrote me back, a few lines saying some people liked cats, he didn’t, and I realized that the guy was scared by cats, and that his lofty columns were hysterical junk. I never read him again.
One day my kid brother, seven, showed Aunt Bea a drawing. “Oh, what a pretty kitten!” she cooed.
“It’s a mouse,” he replied, followed by Aunt Bea’s shudder of fear and breathy, “Uugghh”
It is surely fear that causes people to invest objects, animals, and other people with qualities so remote from reality. Fear changes our very perception of reality. Some might argue that it is reality. It's as common as your own phobia.
My phobia is falling. I was happy thousands of feet up when flying a bomber in WW2, but if I walk across the Manhattan Bridge and peer over the rail, or even look closely at a photo of iron workers sitting on a beam high above street level, it churns the pit of my stomach.
Stuck in a stalled elevator for 20 minutes between floors, a claustrophobic passenger turned pale and collapsed, her deep distress not relieved by solicitous reassurances.
When driving cars, otherwise reasonable people can explode with rage at other drivers, have been known to shoot them. At the wheel, we casually control hundreds of horsepower but bottle up the fear until someone cuts us off, say, when the fear bursts out and turns us into maniacs.
Today I saw a clip of Elizabeth Warren, the soul of compassion and sweet reason, spiked by a male voice shouting, “Socialist whore!” a hoarse screech of terror as a civilized veneer was ripped away by a sunami of fear. Like the disaster in Fukushima, it released a poisonous miasma, and one can only hope it has a half-life as short as twenty thousand years.
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