Saturday, July 30, 2011

Dr. Mike Adams in: "Walking Tall 2: The Smirkening"


Hey kids, Dr. Professor Mike Adams is back!  Okay, to be honest, Dr. Mike -- like herpes -- never actually goes away, but it's only recently that the flare-ups have become noticeable, and this week he delivers a blistering eruption of logic which proves that bullying -- a misunderstood but essential form of natural selection -- should be encouraged, because it can take an effeminate, potentially homosexual second grader and turn him into prime breeding stock.  How does Dr. Mike know?  Because it worked for him!

So read on, and discover how Dr. Mike went from cringing, pants-wetting wuss to the Buford Pusser of Mrs. Humphey's Home Room.
The Bullied Gene
Yesterday, when I was arguing with a liberal...
...which is Dr. Mike's euphemism for "dry-humping the Resusci-Annie I filched from a dumpster behind the Community Health Center."
he told me I was entirely too harsh in my assessment of today’s youth.
Their refusal to go back to Dr. Mike's cabin and inspect his gun collection is actually a feature, not a bug.
He told me specifically that I needed to be aware of the fact that in 21st Century America one out of five boys gets bullied in school on a “regular basis.” I don’t know where he got that statistic but it really made me ashamed of my country. We need to do better. When I was a kid back in 20th Century America everyone got bullied in school.
Everyone got bullied?  Who bullied the bullies?  Presumably it was their fellow bullies, but did they take shifts, or was it handled through some kind of violent daisy chain?
Those really were the good old days.  
Why is it that people who don't believe in evolution are invariably the most enthusiastic social Darwinists?
My most memorable experience with bullying came during the 1972-73 school year when I was a student at Whitcomb Elementary School in Clear Lake City, Texas. The highlight of the year was Mrs. Ogden who was a total babe (sorry for the antiquated language but I’m telling a story about the 1970s). 
Speaking of the 70s, Dr. Mike, your praise of a woman's attractiveness seems every bit as genuine and unforced as the language in a Tiger Beat cover story.
The lowlight of the year was dealing with some punk named Brian...Brian was constantly bragging about how tough he was – probably because he was short and had a Napoleon complex.
In second grade?  So I guess he'd just given up on his pituitary gland and was pumping iron every day during nutrition break?
Eventually, Brian’s bragging about his fighting ability got old – even for Brian. So, one day, he challenged me to a fight on a specific day at a specific time in the schoolyard. Like a wimp, I faked being sick that day so I could stay home and avoid the confrontation. That strategy backfired. After wimping out on my scheduled confrontation with Brian he issued another challenge. And that led to another absence from school, which was excused by another fake illness. My mother was beginning to catch on.
Fortunately, this experience helped Mrs. Adams grow accustomed to disappointment early on in her career as a parent, so that by the time Dr. Mike's adulthood rolled around, she had skin like an armadillo.
I got to spend the summer at home and away from the bully in my second grade class. My parents even sent me to a baseball camp at nearby San Jacinto College where I would be instructed by real college baseball players. I wasn’t aware that Brian’s best friend Mike would be attending the same baseball camp.
Coincidentally, 1972-73 was the first season of ABC's Afterschool Special, from which I'm pretty sure Dr. Mike stole this entire story.
I wasn’t really expecting it when Mike came up behind me and shoved me in front of a bunch of the other little league players – many of whom were also my schoolmates. But the second I turned around and saw him I knew that he had shoved me for one reason and one reason only: His best friend Brian had told him I was a wimp who wouldn’t stand up to a bully. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I punched him in the mouth.
I'm sure that's how you remember it, Dr. Mike.
After Mike put his hand to his mouth and realized he was bleeding there was a real look of horror on his face. So I punched him again – this time in the nose. And after Mike sunk to his knees and started waving his hands in surrender I began to hit him with a barrage of uppercuts until he was lying on his back in the middle of the outfield crying like a little girl. 
 Oh, my mistake.  It wasn't an Afterschool Special.  Dr. Mike is just cribbing from A Christmas Story.

By the way, Dr. Mike -- and no offense to your theft of intellectual property reminiscences of childhood -- but I spent a fair number of years teaching karate to school kids, and "a barrage of uppercuts" is not in the average second grader's martial repertoire.
The next spring when I was standing in line for a snow cone after a game in Bay Area Park I saw Mike and Brian in the line ahead of me. Mike acknowledged me and asked if everything was “cool” between us. After I told him it was “cool” Mike turned to Brian and said “He really beat the crap out of me last summer.” So we all became friends and no one bullied anyone after that. 
Then they all went on a journey to find the dead body of a boy, and they almost got run over by a train, and had fights and arguments, and got sucked on by leeches, but then they confessed their insecurities and confronted their fears and learned hard lessons about life and stuff.  It was the best summer ever.
That’s how we dealt with bullying when I was a kid. Someone picked on someone until he got fed up and learned that he had to defend himself. It was all a part of learning to be a man.

Yeah.  Again, no offense...but Dr. Mike, the gun-coddling misogynist, is to manhood what the penis pump is to virility.
When the inevitable fight was over the bully and the bullied became friends. And no one really contemplated shooting up the school in retaliation.
However, if the 8-year old Dr. Mike had had as many handguns as the 48-year old Dr. Mike does, it might have been a different story.   Frankly, it still might.
But today things are different. The state is increasingly seeing itself as the agent responsible for stopping bullying.
This strikes me as more of a solution than a problem, Dr. Mike.  But then, I've experienced bullying, so I may be biased.  In fact, I suspect you'd have to survey quite a few of kids getting punched in the head before you found one who was a real stickler for federalism.
And they are increasingly interested in monitoring bullying throughout all levels of the educational process. At my university, there is actually a guide that directs students to various government resources that can help students who are experiencing bullying.
Coincidentally, the same day I read Dr. Mike's ode to intimidation, I saw this article:
When Sirdeaner Walker found out her son was being bullied and called homophobic slurs, she told his school about it.

"I thought they would handle the situation," she said. It turned out, "the school just didn't know how to or they weren't equipped to handle it. I thought it had stopped, but it continued and escalated."
Her son, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover committed suicide in 2009. He was 11 years old. As she grieved, Sirdeaner received letters and cards from parents all over America whose children were also bullied.
Not that I mean to diminish Dr. Mike's formative and character-building violence, but even though getting pushed at a baseball camp (which your parents are paying for, and whose proprietors could be counted on to break up a fight before it threatened their liability insurance) is serious business, it's maybe not quite in the same league as getting called "fag" and "queer" every day, elbowed and tripped in the halls, shoved into lockers, and punched and kicked by a gang of would-be toughs behind the backstop.

And even though I was never subjected to the degree of abuse many gay and lesbians kids endure, there were certain scary times in my school career when I would have welcomed government intervention (or just the sight of a teacher), no matter how much it might have offended the Tenth Amendment; and even if it would have robbed me of the chance to grow up to be a man like Dr. Mike Adams.
Interestingly, the guide defines bullying as “the act of intimidating a weaker person to make them [sic] do something.” Since other campus programs focus on the disproportionate bullying of homosexuals this seems to be a tacit admission that homosexuals are indeed “weaker person(s).”
Or gays and lesbians are seen as safe targets, partially because of the implicit disapproval they receive from authority figures like Dr. Adams, and are therefore disproportionately picked on.
In other words, the implications of their approach to this topic have not been well-thought-out. Few things are “thought” through in higher education today. People generally “feel” their way through problems.
At least, that's how Dr. Mike explained his pedagogic methodology to the last co-ed he tried to pick up.
Some people believe the government should stop bullying because we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system.
And so many overcompensating, infertile closet cases at the state college faculty level.
But I believe we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system because people believe the government should protect them from bullying. That’s the difference between the liberals and me. And I’m pleased to offer my advice at no expense to the taxpayer.
Proving once again that you get what you pay for.
Put simply, the question of whether one will or will not be bullied is largely a matter of choice.
The same applies to getting mugged.  Or shot.  Or cancer.  Choose wisely, Dr. Mike.
You can either remain the boy who is bullied or you can become the man who fights back. I don’t think the former are restricted by what is in their genes. More likely, it’s just what’s missing in their jeans.
When I got roughed up by some kids in elementary school, my Dad didn't shame me, but he did offer to show me how to block a punch, and how to throw one.  Confronted with the same situation, Dr. Mike would probably cut to the chase and just tell his son to "Turn your head and cough."

So remember parents:  start your kids on violence early -- it's the vaccine that inoculates boys from the virus of homosexuality.  However, even after reading through Dr. Mike's column, I still don't know what a girl who gets abused by her peers is supposed to do.  Punching her tormentor in the mouth seems unladylike, and would probably only increase the risk factors for dykehood, so maybe she should just elect not to get pushed around.  I hear that when it comes to violence in schools, bullies -- like Dr. Mike -- are very Pro-Choice.

29 comments:

Bill S said...

Mike Adams is a horrible person, and bad things should happen to him.

ckc (not kc) said...

I began to hit him with a barrage of uppercuts until he was lying on his back in the middle of the outfield crying like a little girl.

...so now we have a wuss becoming a manly man, and a bully turning into a little girl - this gender balance stuff is hard (and speaking of hard, if this is Dr. Mike learning to be a man, how come we're not hearing more details about Mrs. Ogden?)

Cole said...

What an absolute lying fuckwad.

Aside from the obvious bullshit story about his childhood, which, as Scott points out mimics every bullied child fantasy writ large in literature and for the silver screen, there is a reason bullies get away with violence in REAL LIFE--because they are usually bigger, stronger, meaner, more prone to violence and have a gang of fellow bullies to back them up "just in case." The typical outcome of bullied kids fighting back is the bullied kids getting hurt very badly.

That Mikey not only buys into that absolutely idiot notion that a timid, bullied child need only summon up his inner Bruce Lee to turn the tables on the bad guys, purely through force of will I suppose, but expects others to share his television inspired delusion, would be utterly astonishing had I not witnessed with my own eyes America's slide into a nation of frightened morons over the past decade or so.

Cole said...

Of course, the real fantasy that Mikey and his ilk dream of is a world of dog-eat-dog competition where the superior folks like Mikey reign by right of conquest.

What is depressing is that I do not believe I am exaggerating. This is no hyperbole; it really is the type of world they wish for--civilization proved too complex and exhausting for them.

heydave said...

I am unproud to admit that I would enjoy pushing around the manly Dr. Mike this very day.

Cole said...

ANOTHER THING--bullies, particularly 2nd grade bullies, are children who need attention as well. Something is clearly not right in the world of a 7 year old who feels the need to physically intimidate a classmate. So the issue isn't just about coddling weaklings, as Mikey would have it, but intervening in situations that create socially mal-adapted people at such an early age.

D. Sidhe said...

Agreed. Absolutely fucking agreed, Bill.

Also: I'm willing to bet I've been in more fights than Dr Mike, and won more, and had more people point guns at me with the actual possibility of pulling the trigger. So, I'll stack my queer and girly "manhood" against Dr Mike's any fucking day. And the thing I know about bullying is, some bullies don't fucking stop just because you punch them back. Some of them get worse. (Some of them, in fact, are bullies because they are privileged people from privileged families and punching them back means their parents bring the force of the school, the courts, or the community to bear on you because suddenly you're the one who started the fight.)

Dr Mike also doesn't seem to understand the distinction between bullying and abuse (and assault, come to that). Bullying alone is terrible. But when it goes on every fucking day, or when it gets physical, it is abuse, and rationalizing it away is sociopathic. School was probably worse for me than for Dr Mike, but nowhere near as bad as it was for a lot of kids. My interactions with adult abusers were more formative for me, but parallel. Dr Mike might be surprised to learn that actually fucking stabbing an actual fucking abuser in the shoulder doesn't mean he stops abusing you. It means he beats you unconscious, and then continues to abuse you. Maybe an extreme example, but abusers and bullies are the same damned people, and fighting back doesn't, in my experience, work very often at all.

Even if it did? Jesus Christ. What he's suggesting is if you can stop the bully from abusing you by making him go after someone else who has less muscle mass than you, that's a best case scenario. Me, I consider a best case scenario MAKING THE BULLY STOP BULLYING ANYONE. That takes authority intervention, and it takes, I would hazard, counseling if not criminal penalties. And we're better off, from the point of view of the bully *and* his victims, doing that early. The bully is not some well-adjusted future Galt, he's a damaged person who acts out in ways that hurt other people. He's a criminal who generally has low self esteem and is probably in need of some kind of psychological intervention to allow him to become a better person, to whatever extent that is possible. By the time they're adults raping kids, it's not. But when they're keying slurs on a peer's locker, it probably is. And it saves a lot of wear and tear on the people around them for the rest of their lives to do what we can to divert those bullying impulses.

D. Sidhe said...

Continued, because I am fucking longwinded.


The fact that Dr Mike seems to be the sort of person who is capable of wanting to be friends with a bully--who if not outright imaginary had undoubtedly gone on to bully other kids and that's apparently perfectly fine with Dr fucking Mike as long as they weren't him--makes me believe that he's never really been bullied, for all his whining about his victimhood at the hands of women and minorities and people who write letters. Because I can't imagine being friends with someone who bullies anyone, even if they never bullied me. I'd probably be reasonably happy to leave bullies to their miserable inner landscapes if it didn't mean they inflicted damage on the people around them, that's how little empathy I have for them. Being pals from a place of mutual respect? Not remotely possible. I doubt I'm alone in that.

He also seems to think that the bullies picking on *someone* is inevitable, and that whoever ends up being the kicked dog is someone we should be writing off anyway. It's not just social darwinism. He's pretending that his solution--do nothing but encourage fights--is in the best interests of the kids who need his actual help. (It's not different from the argument that welfare is the *real* thing hurting poor families so we should do what we are inclined to do anyway--ignore poor people--for their own good. We're not selfish, we're their real saviors!) And you know what, if you have no empathy for victims of criminals, fine. No one says you have to be the good samaritan. But don't expect us to pretend that's a VIRTUE, or that demanding credit for it makes you anything other than an asshole with no more humanity than a tape worm.

Even IF there were no kids at the bottom of the heap who lack any resources to deal with bullying and ended up killing themselves or being killed, even if you accept that bullying makes all its victims realize they must fight back, and that they all can, and that it stops the bullying, it's still a horrible way to teach kids self-esteem, and could easily be replaced--with fewer medical bills and less infrastructure damage--by karate classes or something. And if you *don't* accept all of that, and I don't because evidence pretty well proves none of those things are true, then you'd have to be an absolute monster to support it as a tactic to force kids to learn about overcoming adversity.

Today's koan: why would a man with no sense of justice teach criminal justice?

D. Sidhe said...

Said better and faster by people who know how to be concise. And yeah, I'd love to take a swing at Dr Mike right now, too. Let's see how macho he feels afterwards.

Incidentally, I'm having trouble posting in FF, so let's see if this works. (Annti, is it possible your problem was that your comments were too long? I only got actually told what the problem was when I switched to Chrome. Of course, I'm sure you already considered that.)

Spearhafoc said...

Great riffing, but, man, is anything Dr. Professor Mike Adams PHD related hard to get through.

It's like everything he writes is calculated specifically to make my skin crawl.

Cole said...

It is calculated to make your skin crawl. I have no doubt he is an absolute fuckwad, but I also have no doubt that he writes and edits with the intention of being as outlandishly creepy as he possibly can.

In keeping with his "arguments" with imaginary libruhls, the coward seems to get off on figuratively racing his car through the "bad" part of town at midnight and yelling racial slurs out the window before speeding off to laugh with his buddies about how they showed those wussies where to get off.

mew said...

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the logistics of delivering a "barrage of uppercuts" to a short kid who is kneeling on the ground. Did Dr. Mike drop to the ground, and lay on his back in order to land the devastating blows?

trashfire said...

mew, it's the same way that Jesus delivered a barrage of uppercuts to Roman soldiers when he was hoisted up in the air, his wrists nailed to a stout beam of Lebanon cedar. Then he pulled off that crown of thorns and castrated Pontius Pilate with it. The Romans all started crying like girls, and the following summer while buying ice cream at a stand on the road to Damascus, these same soldiers ran into Paul and asked if everything was "cool." (Look it up, it's in the Gnostic Gospel of Billy Jack.)

Second koan of the day: When Dr. Mike is threatened does he reach for his bible or his gun?

maryclev said...

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the logistics of delivering a "barrage of uppercuts" to a short kid who is kneeling on the ground. Did Dr. Mike drop to the ground, and lay on his back in order to land the devastating blows?

First Rule of Dr. Mike's Fight Club: Talk about fighting even though you don't have the first clue about how to actually fight.

Seriously, does the man(and I use the term very loosely)even know what an uppercut actually is?! I know what it is and that's just through one of my Tae Bo dvds!

Chris Vosburg said...

Beat that motherfucker all the way from the dugout into the outfield.

Chris Vosburg said...

So, one day, he challenged me to a fight on a specific day at a specific time in the schoolyard. Like a wimp, I faked being sick that day so I could stay home and avoid the confrontation. That strategy backfired. After wimping out on my scheduled confrontation with Brian he issued another challenge. And that led to another absence from school, which was excused by another fake illness.

Ah, we zink zis means zomezing.

[sigh] I suspect there is a question on law enforcement officer examinations: "How many times did you get stuffed into trash cans as a kid?", to which any answer over zero is considered a favorable entry.

Rejected by the local cop force (too crazy), is it any wonder he took up his current occupation?

Stacia said...

So if there was never any real confrontation with the bully because he was feigning sickness, what was the impetus for Dr. Mike to beat the shit out of a kid just for shoving him? Assuming this is true (it's not, but just pretend with me for a second) then what did the adults at camp say about Dr. Mike's beatdown? The parents? See, I think that's the biggest clue this is not reality: The story ends too soon, with him the clear winner and no repercussions for his actions.

Christopher said...

Hey, here's a tip for all Dr. Mike's colleagues:

Next time Dr. Mike is pissing you off, just sock him in the face!

He won't call the cops or rat you out to the administration, because that would be asking the nanny state to coddle him, and he knows shooting you would be a complete over-reaction.

So if you think you can take him, or even just get in a couple of good shots, have at it, he knows it's all just part of being a man.

Cole said...

Christopher said...

"Hey, here's a tip for all Dr. Mike's colleagues:

Next time Dr. Mike is pissing you off, just sock him in the face!

He won't call the cops or rat you out to the administration, because that would be asking the nanny state to coddle him, and he knows shooting you would be a complete over-reaction.

So if you think you can take him, or even just get in a couple of good shots, have at it, he knows it's all just part of being a man."

Oh, for this to be posted on a public bulletin board at whatever department Mikey gets paid to inhabit....

Woodrowfan said...

I am sure that "Dr." Mike beat up the 8 year old bully who was terrorizing the 2d grade. Of course, "Dr. Mike" was a high school senior at the time.

Scott said...

Stacia points out something that bothered me too...not even in Mike's fantasy does he teach the bully a lesson. He beats up the bully's henchman, but never actually makes it to the end Boss. Perhaps because he'd done a lousy job on most of the previous levels, and had failed to unlock any bonus attack except the fairly weak "Uppercut Barrage." Frankly, I doubt he even finished the game, let alone beat the high score.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK I HADDA GOOD POST ON HERE AND FUCKING BLOGGER FUCKING DELETED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WILL RETURN WHEN MY EARS STOP RINGING FROM THE RAISED BLOOD PRESSURE...

And D.? No, that's not why. But love ya anyway for worrying about it.

Belieeeeeve me, there's plenty more to be said about Douchebag "Doctor" Mike.

Brian Schlosser said...

trashfire: He reaches for his hollowed out Bible with the gun inside. "Salvation lies within..."

Brian Schlosser said...

So, to sum up, in Dr Mike's world, the bullies are the good guys. Also, he hates 8 year olds with small dicks.

Brian Schlosser said...

Also: "And I’m pleased to offer my advice at no expense to the taxpayer."

But he DOES expect the taxpayer funded University to give him tenure and a lifetime of paychecks on the strength of his reams of unsolicited advice...

Li'l Innocent said...

I was wondering about the uppercuts-to-recipient-on-his-knees thing too. Unless the other kid was much bigger than Young Mike, the latter would have had to kneel or squat in front of him to deliver the "barrage". I can't picture this as a kid technique somehow. In fact, I can't picture it as anybody's technique.

Then there's the "everybody was bullied" bit. Does he know what bullying is? Does he distinguish between systematic, continuous group ganging-up and assaults on a single kid with no back-up, and the antipathies that crop up between individuals and can lead to fights?

I've got 20 years on Dr. Mike. I went to elementary school mostly in northern NJ, the first part in an area that was essentially like Brooklyn or Queens, with the same kind of (then current) white ethnic mix - - Italian, Jewish, Eastern European, with a few odd Wasps like me thrown in. The Italian kids were the toughies; if you weren't in with them and walked home past their neighborhood, they might chase you and throw things at you, regardless of gender. It was a territorial thing. I recall nothing that could be called bullying or ganging up on a weak or socially marginal kid. There were a couple of fights between individual boys.

In jr. high, in a small formerly rural town that was seeing rapid suburban development and a huge influx of new residents (social stress IOW), the combo of hormones and constant social reshuffling as new kids poured into the school system led to a lot of pecking order tension amongst both boys and girls. Much more fuel for group harassment than in the supposedly tougher school nearer New York, and there was some. But teachers put a stop to it when they saw it, interfering lackeys of the state that they were.
It was a small enough school that there weren't a lot of places where bullies could get at weaker kids unobserved.

I remember describing this to a college friend who grew up in Brooklyn, who had gone thru nothing like it when she was in jr. high. She had been part of a mixed-sex cohort of friends, and nobody got picked on. So in just 2 people's experiences going to public schools in the same part of the US in the 50s, you get a varied spectrum of kid hostility and violence.

I'm willing to give Dr. Mike the benefit of acknowledgement that his school, or his second grade, or his particular class, might have been a nasty one, even though Short, Tough Brian (and his toady Mike) were willing to be "cool" with him later. I'm willing to stipulate that there's a difference between early 50s NJ and early 70s suburban Texas (his hometown is in Greater Houston, near the Space Center, and is full of technical folk, as it undoubtedly was then). But his whole Darwinian "argument" rests on that claim that "everybody gets bullied". To which I call bullshit. Bullying is NOT some sort of inherent Naked Ape-Human test of fitness to which we should all be subject to Improve the Race.

Too bad there isn't some kind of middle-grades inter-kid process to teach the young how not to grow up like Dr. Mike. But alas. The Assholes you will always have with you.

Anonymous said...

I have never been more tempted to burn someone's house down or figure out the mechanics of letter bombs than after reading Dr. Mike's bs.

Jay B. said...

Almost assuredly, he's into, and yes, I mean into, corporeal punishment for kids — so when junior comes out and beats the fuck out of dad with a bat after years of "bullying", appropriate or not?

"We cool dad? WE COOL?!"

PS: I'll pay for the bat.

D. Sidhe said...

If I may briefly blogwhore, I have a few thoughts on Cowboys & Aliens. My partner is holding out for Cops & Dragons, btw. Which I would so totally go see.

Disqus