Chuckie Watch 84: Chuckie's deep on the Dark Side lately

We haven't checked in on ole Chuckie for a couple of weeks.  Chuckie's been in a pretty bad mood lately.  In his most recent rant, Elections 01/28/05, Chuckie tells us that Congressional critics of the war, Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy in particular, are selfish, hateful and "downright evil."  Oh, and they're encouraging The Terrorists, of course.

(Chuckie's Webmaster seems to have changed something so that you can't link directly to the printable version any more.  That was better, because the graphics on the main screen are terrible.)

In An Open Letter to an Atheist 01/24/05, Chuckie explains that God's gone git them atheists.  And when he does, they shore are gone be sorry!  They're goin' to Hail, in other words.  Oh, and they're losers and fools, to boot.  And "pitiful, preposterous and pathetic."  He's actually addressing a particular atheist, but I think it's a safe assumption that he means it as applying to the rest of them, too.

In Hygiene (or lack thereof) 01/21/05, Chuckie discovers that restaurants ought to meet some minimum sanitary requirements.  I wonder if it's dawned on ole Chuckie yet that it sounds like he's supportin' some kinda gubment regulation here?  Heck far, he might even be sidin' with the trial lawyers who make all them there frivolous lawsuits!  I think Chuckie was a little confused that day.

Before that, Chuckie was a' fumin' about some of these here liberal bumperstickers he's been seein': Three Time Loser 01/17/05.

But it was in Aftermath 01/14/05 that Chuckie was really gittin' in touch with his inner white trash.  I'm a little hesitant to even link to that one, because it's unusually creepy.  It's actually an example of what I think of as a stock Klan story to justify lynch-murder.

Not surprisingly, the prototype story uses a pretty simple formula, with two parts.  In the first part, the speaker tells a story (usually sourced to a friend-of-a-friend) in which a evil black man rapes an innocent white woman or girl, maybe kills her, too.  This story normally includes some gruesome details of the deed.  Part 2 is a fantasy about the ways in which the perpetrator should be tortured and murdered, also with graphic detail.

The Enemy in the story isn't always black people.  It can be Arabs, or foreigners, or The Terrorists.  I gave an example of one of the latter in an earlier post.  The point of the story is simply to justify vigilante violence.

Chuckie picks child molesters as the Evil People in this one.  Even linking to it seems a little gross, because he uses some weirdly vivid imagery about the imagined misdeeds.  And he gives the standard version of the deserved retribution.  It probably occurred to Chuckie that a famous African-American, Michael Jackson, is coming up on trial on charges related to sexual misconduct with minors; so maybe his rant is not so far removed from the Klan version.  But since it's a set-piece story that can be applied almost verbatim to any target group, I'll insert "the Evil People" in this quote in the appropriate places:

First of all, [the Evil People] should be immediately castrated and thrown into a hole and left to rot.

That’s how I feel and I don’t want to hear from any of you bleeding hearts spewing forth your same old song about human rights. Human rights are reserved for humans, these people are not human beings. They are demonic [Evil People] who need to be taken out of society. ...

Insofar as [the Evil People] I think the government should declare open season on them and [the Evil People] should be shot on sight.

Now, if Chuckie wants to promote protection of children against abuse, I'm all for that.  It would be much more constructive than any of the Christian Right rants or self-indulgent violent fantasies that he puts in his Soapbox column on a regular basis.

But the good ole white boys telling the classic Klan story normally didn't bother to actually educate theirwives, daughters or girlfriends about practical measures to avoid rape, or encourage them to take self-defense classes that would be useful for that purpose.  And Chuckie doesn't give any practical advice for protecting children against abuse either.

The practical measures for dealing with the problem are generally well-known.  Things like educating parents, teachers, medical personnel and social workers to recognize the signs of abuse or potential abuse.  Tracking of convicted sex offenders.  Proper supervision in schools and daycare centers, and so forth.  But that stuff doesn't lend itself to lurid, violent fantasies quite so easily.

But I wonder just how much child abuse Chuckie is willing to condemn.  Because the Christian Right types with whom he identifies so strongly generally promote physical discipline of children as the only godly option.  You know, spare the rod and spoil the child, and all that.  Does Chuckie agree that its perfectly fine for Christian parents to use boards and strips of leather to beat their children?  Would Chuckie be willing to substitute for [the Evil People] in his violent formula of mutilation and death quoted avove, "Christian parents who injure their children while paddling them"?

I doubt it very seriously.  Like everybody else who tells this set-piece kind of story, Chuckie's just justifying vigilante violence, nothing else. And, as we've seen, in the first paragraph of this post and elsewhere, there are lots of people Chuckie thinks of as Evil People.