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# Now.  The Flip-side of Pity
- URL: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/now-the-flip-side-of-pity/
- Published: 2026-09-07T04:17:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T04:30:09.000Z
- Author: Stephen Bender

'I'll pity you. I'll pity you because you're sick' was the most correct line of that bunny potboiler.

This isn't even about that, sad and irrelevant yet very true as this scene may be. This is about people being incapable of breadth. Thankfully, we on here have been kind and consciencious through this past farce, which was milked for content, to some indeterminate degree. Certainly not getting out of bed had already been tried and untrue. The craziness of human relations, which do not need to have a romantic connotation, at all, has been a long-standing frustration. A source of unfathomable revulsion. Happily, I've made the necessary adjustments, which required circumscription of trust. Circumscription of family and friends. People are supposed to grow, I was always lead to belive, over time, to become more capable. Since I resurfaced, it has largely been bitter disappointment after absurd helplessness. Alas, the weak demand forgetfulness with middle age, so it seems to me. Forgive and forget, say the Christians, these avatars of slave morality, of knuckling under and bowing and scraping for their pie in the sky. Fuck dat. It's a pitiful approach to life to take abuse and cringe in response. The Little Man. To rationalize stupidity away, he or she were just \[fucking you over\] doing the best they could with the cards they were dealt. To repeat it: no gendered reflection here, no ascription of badness to any group. Americans have learned to eat shit for a living, in their personal and professional lives and I despise this flaccidity. Nobody seems to notice and nobody seems to care, that's been quoted already. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. 'I'm just doin' my job, ya know, so say uncle and we'll take you to the mental health zoo.' Why people do not challenge family dynamics, relationship dynamics, 'buncha losers sitting at a bar sayin' I was in sales, it's a tough racket'. Sip. Dean Martin made a big hullaballo on the tee vee about being a lush. Silence isn't violence, or deadly. It's what is expected and hence boring. In DC, Hitchens said you can't eat enought to vomit enough. In Oakland, Cockburn asked the assembled Gen Xers 'is your hate pure?' Hate. That implies emotion. Towering contempt is what is called for. Rageful vigor for the looming economic and ecological impacts, whenever they may come. People retreat. They retreat into a whole host of otherwise wholesome things. Mill girls in Massachusetts 100 years ago wrote radical newspapers after 12 hour days. It's degeneration. It's acquiescence. It's Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Mencken around the same time leveled devastating critiques against the stultifying and endemic mediocrity. So, what do you do? You buy a big Betty Boop thing and copy and past a sarcastic punk rock song. Screaming into a void all your life made Jack a dull boy. So, you laugh it or drink it or smoke it away. Or, fuck the pain away, the most popular methodolgy of the masses. And then what? You make money. Money, ok, money. It's banal, this sort of accounting, but you get out, you drive around, you kid people, you buy stuff and have a belt or two, two egg breakfasts at diners, it's a pretty happy go lucky life. Snap some photos, learn about the pathos of Middle America. Well, off to Deutschland. There's no answer there either, but at least there will be questions. I'll give them that, they're inquisitive motherfuckers. And they're organized. When you ask them to do something, they still actually do it. A lost art in this shit-hole country. I could go on, but what's the point? 

The point is the rampant cruelty and subsequent blythe indifference.

To me, this is the in the pantheon of human creative endeavor, something like a Gesamtkunstwerk. Rather than choking a fucked up slut, showing compassion and marrying a pregnant young woman. And I don't even want any part of any of that. But I feel it, all the same. At least people 100 years ago had something to say. And ideals to belive in and get killed for. But that, too, was an error.