Chicken Soup with Aspen Times columnist Todd Hartley and his man sized penis...

Aspen Times columnist Todd Hartley must really enjoy reading about school massacres. As I emphasized in my post about Adam Lanza, the sort of men who spray bullets into crowded rooms have often spent their entire lives being humiliated, intimidated, and made to feel utterly alone and powerless by that darling of the American Family, the charming sociopath with the Mitt Romney smile. For many of them, and almost certainly for Adam Lanza, staging a massacre was the first time in their lives they didn't feel powerless. And what better way for a guy with a small penis to feel powerful than to deprive the public of any opportunity to take revenge after committing an act purposely designed to horrify and enrage as many people as possible? Why does Todd Hartley want to publicly humiliate such men? I don't know. You'll have to ask him.

No one can predict the exact time and place of the next massacre, but there are many more Adam Lanza's in the pipeline, just waiting for someone to provide that last little reminder that they'll spend the rest of their lives alone, celibate, and friendless. And Todd Hartley is really trying to piss them off. I wonder why. Will Todd Hartley's man sized penis become engorged at the sight of more dead children? Will he get his secret hard on?

Perhaps if all 535 throbbing members of Congress manage to perform a miracle by turning all scary looking firearms into dust, Todd "I'm With Stupid" Hartley can come up with a plan to prevent someone with a small penis from metaphorically thrusting a stolen fuel truck through the wall of a high school cafeteria. Wouldn't that be spectacular...conflagrating...media worthy? Look Ma. No assault weapon.

I'm trying to place Todd Hartley into one of the groups of bully enablers I described in this post. I'm open to suggestions. Just leave a comment. And when we've figured that out there'll only be one more question.

What will Todd Hartley say to the next group of parents who have to bury their children?

Sleep well stupid.

Chicken Soup with Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis...

Here's a recent interview with Frank DeAngelis that says a lot without saying much of anything. He expressed a desire to see money spent on programs designed to help troubled youth.

Could you have made a more meaningless statement Frank?

I'm not surprised to learn that even after 14 years and multiple mass murders, DeAngelis is still unwilling to embarrass the football program by admitting that community sanctioned bullying is a serious problem.

Perhaps after the next massacre he'll be more willing...or the next...or possibly the next?

Nahhh!

What are the lives of other people's kids compared to the unbridled ego of America's gridiron sociopaths?

Chicken Soup with the Westboro Baptist Church...

As is their custom, the most vile humans in America announced plans to picket at the funerals of the Newtown massacre victims. I haven't seen them in the news. I suppose even those idiots have a sense of self preservation.

Chicken Soup with Adam Lanza and a few hundred ghoulish American legislators...

This post is divided into four parts:

1) Adam Lanza

2) America's shamelessly ghoulish legislators

3) The customary post tragedy search for scapegoats

4) The Conclusion

Adam Lanza: Search your memory for a young man who is less masculine in appearance than Adam Lanza... Take your time... Now mentally transport yourself back to that wonderful, carefree decade between about age 12 or 13 when puberty really begins to rear its ugly head and about age 22 or 23 when most people who attend college have either graduated or dropped out. Search your memory for those least masculine males one finds in every middle school, high school, and college in America. Remember those guys? How were they treated by their peers? Living inside a physically unimpressive body, lacking social skills, and being an Asperger's sufferer is a miserable existence for any young male in America's steroid obsessed culture, but it doesn't increase the probability of becoming a mass murderer. It only makes you a more attractive target for community sanctioned abuse...and that increases the probability of becoming a mass murderer.

With that in mind, the fact that Adam Lanza was both homicidal and suicidal doesn't surprise me. He was highly intelligent and no doubt knew he would spend the rest of his lonely, disfunctional days playing video games in his mother's basement. What I have no explanation for is Adam Lanza's choice of targets. Twenty year old men who are enraged by the cruelty and ostracism they experienced usually think of the high school or college they attended, not the place where they learned to finger paint. It's possible that he was so timid, so robbed of self confidence that he just couldn't bring himself to attack anything larger. The fact that he killed six adults tends to undermine this argument, except that he killed six unarmed women. And he obviously had a low opinion of women. He shot his own mother in the head while she slept. It's also possible that he obsessed over some long forgotten incident that occured while he was an elementary school student, but that's kind of a stretch as well. Unless some as yet unrevealed fact is reported, we'll probably never know why he chose to attack 6 and 7 year olds. For anyone genuinely interested in preventing similar tragedies, it really isn't important anyway.

The Legislators: What's more important than the killer's choice of targets is the manner in which everyone is reacting. Right now even the most conservative defenders of the Second Amendment are falling all over each other in an effort to ingratiate themselves with registered voters. Over the next few weeks every elected official in America will be blathering ad nauseum about the need for "common sense" gun control. They'll be shamelessly whoring themselves for media coverage with loud, aggressive denouncements of scary, menacing looking, military style "assault weapons". I heard several of them blathering away on NPR this morning.

In truth, none of them give a rat's ass about your child's life. If they did, America would have a single payer health insurance system that covers every American citizen, or at least every American citizen under the age of 18 regardless of who their parents are or how much money they have. Instead, legislators who are now pandering to hysterical voters by ghoulishly feeding off the recently deceased chose to pander to the self interest of the health insurance industry when healthcare was the headline issue. They're so full of donkey squirts I can smell them upwind.

The Search for Scapegoats: Right now, Adam Lanza's computer is being closely examined in a feverish search for publicly acceptable scapegoats. Any website he visited; any person he conversed with in a chatroom; any motorist who drove by his home while he was surfing the web will be considered suspect. Right now the public wants to blame someone...anyone, as long as they can steer clear of The Problem.

The Conclusion" This is going to continue happening for the simplest of reasons. No one with the power to address The Problem is remotely interested in doing so. It's a national embarrassment but certainly no secret that the vast majority of these guys were victims of chronic, community sanctioned bullying. The quickest way to defuse the next one is to convince him that America is switching sides. The bullies will now be punished severely and the victims will no longer be shamelessly blamed for the criminal behavior of others. I doubt this will happen of course. America's love affair with large, violent sociopaths is a hard habit to break.

Perhaps that will change after the next massacre...or the next...or perhaps the next after that. I've been doing this so long I begin to wonder.

Chicken Soup with Jason the Columbine Jock.

I often feel like America is just an enormous version of a textbook alcoholic family where everyone is willing to make the most ludicrous claims in order to avoid admitting what everyone knows, otherwise known as The Problem:

Assholes reproduce. They want their children to be feared by other people's children. Fathers who are assholes are "devastated" when their oh so manly sons fail to make the baseball team. And an awful lot of the mothers are really just belligerent men in women's bodies. And that's where the vast majority of bullies come from. It's the parents stupid!!

In the 13 1/2 years since the Columbine massacre there's been an increasing tendency to either dismiss the incident as water under the bridge or to insist that bullying was not a significant causal factor.

Then Jason came along and reminded me why this weblog exists. Chicken Soup fans should take notice of the fact that Jason openly admits being a bully and targeting Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, yet no one asks him why he did that, why he thought it was acceptable behavior, or why none of the "innocent" people who knew he was a bully didn't ostracize him for being such an asshole. Even the Great and Powerful Oprah steered clear of The Problem. Thank you Porkah Belfrey for showing your customary concern for victims of bullying. Have a donut on me. And here's a video of Jason the ruggedly hansome Columbine sociopath explaining how much he's changed. Chicken Soup fans will take notice of the fact that mommy and daddy also have substance abuse problems. What I find most interesting in all three links is the willingness of all involved to pretend that The Problem doesn't exist. The facts loudly declare the existence of The Problem but none of the people do.

Thank you Jason for openly admitting that you proudly helped to fill Harris and Klebold with a homicidal rage. Thank you to all of the talk show hosts and producers, and all of the magazine writers and editors for successfully making Jason look like some sort of hero instead of the monster he really is. And a big thank you to all those mommies and daddies out there for producing sadistic assholes like Jason.

Are you feeling the love yet? Have some more Xanax bitch.

Chicken Soup with NFL hero Jovan Belcher...

Here's another character the world's terrorists can study in order to assuage any feelings of guilt they may have acquired about their chosen profession.

A Chicken Soup fan directed my attention to yet another great American hero of the gridiron, Kansas City Chief's linebacker Jovan Belcher. This article in Slate by Justin Peters reports that he bravely murdered his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins by shooting her. He then drove to the Chief's practice facility and after thanking two of his coaches and the team's general manager for all they'd done for him, he did the best thing possible. He shot himself in the head. Unfortunately, he didn't shoot himself in the head before murdering Kasandra Perkins.

You're wondering about the terrorists...

Americans shamelessly display a slovenly worship of large, physically powerful athletes and depraved indifference for their victims. The article doesn't specifically mention it, but Jovan Belcher has probably been a violent bully since grade school and you can bet the farm that his violence was excused for the usual reasons:

He was an athlete.

The victim asked for it.

Terrorists share a common characteristic with soldiers. Their job is much easier if they can dehumanize their targets. Soldiers usually have to be propagandized into dehumanizing the enemy. Terrorists have it a bit easier because Americans dehumanize themselves. Americans will be talking about the tragedy of Jovan Belcher's death for years. They'll forget about the victim by next week. And best of all, fans will come out of the woodwork to declare that "NFL players aren't significantly more apt to harm women than guys in general." Someone using the name "Geack" left this comment in response to this article. The rest of the comments read like a dry academic debate and most of them avoid criticizing violent behavior or expressing concern for victims...Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul.