The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

It's Time for an intervention

Okay, now Professor Mike Adams, Ph.D., is unleashing his devastating wit on panhandlers. (You know, those people who ask you for spare change, and who are, by and large, untreated sufferers from mental illness and/or addicts or alcoholics — so, unfortunates who have fallen through the cracks of society).

Seriously, Dr. Mike is now engaging in battles of wit with crazy street people. See his column “How to Manhandle Those Who Panhandle” if you don’t believe me. (Sure, he claims justification in the fact that a local town leader who previously objected to the word “niggardly” wouldn’t support anti-pandhandling legislation, but it just comes across as really mean-spirited and pathetic.)

The good news is that, as usual, Dr.Mike’s conversations are all in his head. The bad news is that this column is clearly a cry for help on Dr. Mike’s part — but I can’t see his friends and family (or even his employers) rushing in to get him the treatment he needs. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the column for use at the commitment proceedings:
I’ve decided to fight back. In fact, I’ve been waging my own personal war on panhandlers for months now. Since I’ve gotten pretty good at it, I’ve decided to share a dozen or so of my best responses to panhandlers. Hopefully, they will help you to avoid unpleasant encounters. So, without any further delay, I sincerely hope you enjoy the following:
Crack Head (hereafter “CH”): “Excuse me brother, but could you spare some change?”
Major Smart Aleck (hereafter “MSA”): “No, but if you would like I’ll go straight to the projects to buy you some crack rock. I like to know for certain how people are spending my money.”
CH: “Excuse me brother but …”
MSA: “You already asked me that once. Don’t you recognize me? Oh, I get it – you think all white people look alike. You’re a (rhymes with “bucking”) racist!”
Ha, ha! Dr. Mike certainly told off the confused, hungry guy with schizophrenia, and thereby damned some local liberal who objected to the word “niggardly”!

Now, here’s another one of Dr. Mike’s snappy retorts:
CH: “Hey mister …”
MSA: (Faking conversation on cell phone). “I don’t know, Scott. I mean killing panhandlers is a little too much. I think they should just be castrated. We are talking about the first offense, right? Recidivists should definitely be hung or shot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going liberal on you.”
Sad (and scary), isn’t it, to see what goes on in Dr. Mike’s mind. We’d say “How art the mighty fallen,” except that Dr. Mike was never mighty.

Posted by s.z. on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 5:05 pm.
 
30 responses to "It's Time for an intervention"
Dr. Mikey seems to have stopped his social development right about at the point he was urinating in his pants for Mommy’s attention. “Look everybody! I’m NAUGHTY!!”
And nothing he ever said or wrote would qualify as art.
And, of course, in Dr. Mike’s world, CH would know that when MSA used the word “recidivist”, he was using it as an insult.
What exactly is he a doctor of?
How monumentally lame do you have to be to have imaginary conversations with bums?
I hate reality shows, but I would watch one about Dr. Mike. Besides the entertainment of watching Dr. Mike’s incredibly pitiful life unfold, we would be treated to interviews of Mike explaining what he would have said to so and so if he weren’t such a pussy.
Never argue with Dr. Mike. He’ll drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.
As we all know from coverage of Saddam’s execution, people are “hanged” when executed. Makes you wonder what Dr. Mike was thinking when he said that panhandlers “should be hung.”
Meanwhile, the panhandler guy is thinking, “Here comes that dickweed from the college again. Slow day. Might as well say hello, just to watch him turn all red and run away, like usual.” Excuse me, brother…
Praise be to Dr Mike, for you can never have too many excuses to quote Snakefinger lyrics…
Here come the bums
Here come the bums
They’re after me
Can’t you see me coming
They’re gonna get me
Gonna get me
“We’re taking you to the shadow land,
And only you know we’re after you!”
I don’t wanna go
Asking for dimes
Inside my mind
Every night I see them
When i’m sleepin’
When i’m sleepin’
Sometimes i think
That I’m a bum
But nobody told me
How can I tell?
How can I tell?
“We’re taking you to the shadow land,
And only you know we’re after you”
I don’t wanna go.[repeat, fade-out]
Sweet Christ, that was racist. Did he really say that? Does he know that many homeless people are white? Some of them are even blond.
I assume he is unaware that most streetpeople are *not* crackheads. That many of them have jobs, and families, and–here’s the key–crushing medical debts.
But by all means, let’s pretend they’re all perfectly healthy crackheads, if only because this is the best way for Dr Mike to rhetorically get the better of them. You just have to shake your head at a guy–who is practically begging for the celestial smackdown traditionally bestowed on those who reek of entitlement–mocking the less fortunate.
I don’t doubt that Dr Mike has worked hard to get where he is, clearly he spent a lot of effort convincing people he was a sane, reasonable human being. That’s gotta hurt, after a while. But where does he think, honestly, that he’d have ended up now if he’d been born in a shack in Appalachia, a maquiladora town, a polluted water slum in the sort of place he sees only on Save The Children commercials (before, one presumes, mocking them for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps)?
It’s a wise person who remembers that environment can play just as large a role in any life as effort, and luck can easily cancel out both.
Incidentally, jpj, I laughed so hard I could barely be outraged. But I have a lot of spare outrage on this subject. The sort that, were I Annti, would involve italics, bolding, *and* caps lock.
Makes you wonder what Dr. Mike was thinking when he said that panhandlers “should be hung.”
From Blazing Saddles:
Charlie: They said you was hung!
Bart: And they was right.
Most everyone has some really great one-liners that we think of after the situation has passed. We think, “Oh, I wish I’d said…” and then we forget about it. Dr. Mike writes about his imaginary conversations and joins Dr. Crouse in imagining the worst about the strangers whose paths they cross.
Pathetic.
I sincerely hope that all the homeless people in North Carolina are only approaching Dr. Mike in order to get close enough to tape the “Kick Me, I’m a Dickhead” signs to his back.
I wonder if anybody reads Dr. Mike other than us. I mean, who would find this stuff funny, other than the meanest bully in the third grade? He makes Ann Coulter sound like Preston Sturges.
I wonder if anybody reads Dr. Mike other than us.
I’d be inclined to agree, but this Dr. Mike piece (sorry) garnered 174 comments. And they are a hoot, especially Someone who goes by Moonbat Exterminator (ladies, he’s probably single):

Hillarious Bob& Tom routine
(No idea what he’s talking about there). Make sure popup blockers are turned off to make link work. I had a panhanler hold out a cup and say got something for me bro? I pizzed in the cup. Also if you see someone with a “will work for food” sign, offer him a job you’ll never see him again.
and
The plan is called a job. Go to work & you won’t have to beg. Unles that is you are a professional mendicant. An acquatintence (yikes! I probably would have misspelled mendicant, but I wouldn’t have fucked up acquaintance that bad) once watched a street beggar in NYC work a corner until after rush hour he was picked up by a limo.
This story is 100% true, so all beggars drive around in limos.
Dr. Mike is a self-immersed narcissist. Every article he writes is an attempt (albeit a pathetic one) at self-aggrandizement. One wonders at the damaged psyche that needs to hide behind such a bloated ego.
Gah. Pricks. Let’s pretend you’re homeless, which puts you several empathetic tiers above Dr Mike and people like “Moonbat exterminator”. You, in common with many streetpeople, had an apartment and a spouse and a kid and a dog and a car. Then your kid got cancer… Your spouse left you, taking the assets and leaving you with the credit card debt and back taxes… Upon your return from, say, an overseas war, you find yourself with PTSD and one fewer limbs than you went abroad with and you probably won’t be getting your warehouse job back… Your apartment burned down and like most apartment dwellers, you were uninsured… Your job was outsourced… Perhaps you even discovered your spouse was molesting your kid but you had no way of proving it so you gathered the kid up and simply left.
Any of these things can find you on the streets. The most common, it seems, is some sort of medical catastrophe, but I would guess that outsourcing is creeping up on it fast. Homelessness, in fact, can happen to most anyone given enough bad luck. I’m sure it’s comforting to believe that homeless people are lazy drug abusers, because it means as long as you’re not, you’ll never be homeless, and it also means you can ignore or even mock them since they are not unfortunate but undeserving.
But that’s not the reality, and anyone with even a shred of empathy knows better.
Let’s, then, think about what “Get a job, you bum” means. You’re living out of your car, with your kid. You haven’t got enough to eat, you haven’t got anything approaching work clothes, you shave and wash in a public bathroom whenever you can get in there without the cops throwing you out. While you’re working, your child is left unattended in your car. Incidentally, the injury that left you without a home and a job in the first place has only gotten worse now that you live, essentially, outdoors, and you have no medical insurance. In addition, you have a toothache that makes you miserable, and your glasses are practically useless, because, again, you have no medical insurance.
Now you walk into a fast food place and ask for a job. How willing do you suppose they’d be to hire you to stend behind the counter and take orders, or to prepare food? You suppose Dr Mike’ll give you a job? How about “Moonbat Exterminator”?
Or is it just a pointless, thoughtless, unrealistic taunt to demonstrate your superiority?
Normally I find Dr. Mike highly amusing, but most of that is because he and I are college teachers and it is a kind of weird professional voyeurism on my part. Same reason I love reading David ( College Teachers are Commie Terrorists) Horowitz or watching movies like Wonder Boys or TV shows like Numbers ( love it, but not the most realistic presentation of what we do).
Sometimes,though, it’s simply not funny on any level. It’s not twisted logic or fear of vaginas or little kid “look at me” or “watch me pull a student anecdote out of my ass.” It’s just mean spirited son of a bitch. Have a young relative or a kid’s friend whose been to your house but is now on the street whose lost on every level and you or their folks don’t know where they are, and you pass a homeless person and everytime you reach in your pocket you’re praying someone is doing the same for your loved one whether they are in San Diego or Minneapolis or Orlando. Good one Adams.
One wonders at the damaged psyche that needs to hide behind such a bloated ego.
Indeed one does!
Well said, D. Sidhe.
Thanks Anne, and tomg, exactly. Thank you. I wish there was some way to force a little empathy on people like this, a la Bender in that Futurama episode. But I suspect Bender had more in the way of inherent humanity.
“Dr.” Mike is probably one of those jerkweeds who positions his car behind me in line at various intersections–the ones in the luxury shopping neighborhoods of Chevy Chase are particularly poignant–and then honks indignantly, during the red light, when I give money and exchange a few words with one of the weatherbeaten men with the battered cardboard signs.
I guess he just has to assume that anyone who’s homeless is a sinful, lazy crumb-bum. Most of us are just a few paychecks away from the street…
I see panhandlers almost every day. All you have to do it look the guy in the eye and say “No thanks. Not today.” Nobody’s ever given me a hard time for that.
Who was it that said we’d be judged by how we treat the least of these?
Was it that Jesus fellow?
You know, my kids developed better skill at making believable lies by the time they were six or seven.
Especially the piss in the cup thing. Imagine if you will:
You are homeless and hoping to put together a buck to get some ramen soup (6/$1.00) to cook on a fire down by the river tonight. The street is crowded with pedestrians, its lunch hour. You are no idiot, you know where the people with money are and when.
Some middle aged dude comes up and stands directly in front of you and proceeds to do the following:
1. Get closer to you, pause and reach under his belly flap and tug at his pant’s zipper.
2. Reach into his Harah’s Big Men’s Department chinos and fish around with his right fist.
3. With a struggle he pulls out his flaccid two incher and thrusts his hips forward toward your hat.
4. Urine begins to spill out onto your hat.
During this entire time you haven’t moved an inch, but instead have passively waited with your hat/receptacle extended thinking he’s pulling a dime out of underwear or pushing one out of his dick.
Right?
I followed Mark’s example and read some of the Townhall comments on Dr. Mike’s column, and was happy to find that he inspired even GREATER wingnuttery in one of his followers, who was proposing slavery (the kind that’s in the Bible, not the bad kind) as a humane answer to the problem of homelessness. Seriously. I’d copy if for you, but it left me kind of queasy.
Adding to wot kate wrote…
5. Homeless person stabs fat, urinating jerk in the gut with his shiv, then takes his wallet.
followed by:
6. Homeless fellow’s case dismissed by D.C. Superior Court. “Fat, urinating jerk” has been arrested for indecent exposure.
Fellow homeless gathered on the spectator benches let out a cheer. Then they collect enough change from the herds of people in the hallways to splurge on a victory feast at the courthouse cafeteria. (Hey, that’s a nice daydream!)
Dr. Mike is now engaging in battles of wit with crazy street people
Well, I suppose it’s nice that Dr. Professor Mike is sticking with opponents in his own weight class for a change. It was really getting old watching him being smacked down over and over by anyone with a three-digit IQ.
anyone with even a shred of empathy
See, that’s the real problem. A large percentage of these wingtards are just one action away from having a Ted Bundyesque moment (which, thankfully, cowardice prevents). The internet allows them an opportunity at the next best thing…a virtual, sociopathic circle jerk. Deep down they may even know those dark corners of their minds should never be exposed, but they relish their sadistic fantasies too much.
UNCW must be ashamed.
I advise you not to read the comments, else you stumble upon something like this:
empyrius writes: Wednesday, January, 17, 2007 10:01 AM
white man’s burden
1) Never donate money to ‘religious’ charities, b/c if somebody needs a God to be human, their ’cause’ is already lost.

2) Don’t all black-haired ‘white’ people look alike (and being that they are black-haired they are not white to begin with). . .
3) Shouldn’t ‘we’ just shoot, after we ‘pistol-whip,’ anybody who makes less than 50 thousand a year, b/c you know one day soon they shall be a burden on the economy, i.e., SS, Medicare, Medicaid . . .
Everybody should become Jewish like and just take care of their own, and establish a nation based upon race alone; forget the wars’ against ‘terrorists,’ too amorphous, or between rich and poor (that comes after the world-wide race war), or the war against those bleeding-heart liberals (shoot them too after a good old pistol-whipping, those Commie-loving atheists), but let us get back to the good old race wars!
It’s nice to see that Charles Manson has Internet access in prison.
Unfortunately, Herr Adams is not the only one who thinks like this and some of them are much more likely to act out their fantasies than a loser like him…
Did you like those comments ridiculing those heartless ‘compassionate’ conservatives Mark?
2 funny eh . . .

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