Thought I would share this. Harlan Ellison, who is an award winning Science Fiction/fantasy writer and who came up with the plot of the Termanator, wrote an angry response recently at people who mourned the late racist Strom Thurmond. It is great stuff.

"And second, and last, is this: no amount of chortling and hoo-ee huzzahing and "dancing on the grave" of any number of wretched pismires like Thurmond, an active force for bigotry, homophobia, racism, hatred between individuals, pork-barreling in aid of the murderous tobacco cartels, separatist divisiveness, calculated ruin of the lives of his opponents or people he just happened to lay a gimlet eye on, lies that short-circuited progressive legislation, fundamentalist elitism, revenge and just plain meanspirited arrogant ignorance, by "you libs" -- if "us libs" started now and only reached the point of beginning diminution by the year 3003 -- would equal by one one-millionth the amount of public and private cackling and Uriah Heep hand-washing indulged-in by Republicans. I offer, as sole and lonely offset to my (and other's) joy at the passing of this scrod, the eight years of steady, unrelenting, meretricious shit that brought down Bill Clinton. Laded onto the scale of rational assessment, our li'l peeping happiness is, to what joy and rapture "you conservs" wallowed in for almost a decade, as a peach pit is to the Great Stone of the Kaballah.

And before you go all bugfuck that I'm defending Clinton, hear this: he broke my heart, as he did every good American who thought he'd turn this country around; and it was solely because of a frat boy character that was more akin to that of a Barbary Coast whoremonger than a leader of nations. But that said, he was capable of great things, yet "you conservs" never gave him an inch of slack. Not a chance. Like Rimbaud, he was doomed from the start. He was, after all, THE FUCKING PRESIDENT OF OUR COUNTRY, Todd! He deserved a shot. A fair shot. A decent shot. But "you conservs" were "dancing on his grave" before he ever revealed the blight of his personal moral turpitude WHICH HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PRESIDENCY! It was all "Hollywood Access" bullshit, no more relevant to the affairs of State than whether or not his stools were firm and hard or runny. Yet "you conservs" danced with glee on every inch of a gravesite exposed by yellow journalism, prying into which piece of meat was in proximity to some other piece of meat; your gloating was unrestrained; you drooled over every day's new revelation as if it was even remotely on a par with the daily perfidies revealed by the Nixon debacle; you hounded and chivvied and harassed him, turned loose that lying sack of mendacious monkeynuts, Ken Starr, on him, descended to levels of sperm-on-dresses that our long-awaited happyhappy about Strom's croaking doesn't even remotely approach. And you find our pale, pallid, joy at the long-awaited passing of Strom Thurmond improper, in bad taste, and even cruel?!!?!! Listen, Todd, sweetie, do not presume to try to teach your Granny how to suck eggs on this one. Some of us were THERE through this latter half of a century when Thurmond's relentlessly vile and destructive life was being lived at the top of his racist lungs; we saw how many lives he destroyed, how many wrong-side-of-the-arguments he won for corporations and J. Edgar Hoover and enemies of the Supreme Court and the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center and John Lennon and the National Endowment for the Arts and on and on and on. An icon of mendacity. a slug unfit for all this disingenuous, hypocritical, putrescent tearjerking ... "he was always a gentleman" is the best one Senator could muster. Yeah, great. The ones with the whips have no need to be other than gentlemanly. It's the invisible cloak pose of the beneficient tyrant, the truly awful.

Thurmond is dead. Too bad it didn't happen fifty years ago. He was so fucking senile and incapacitated these last ten years that he trained and dipped in bile till they were coated, a cadre of string-pullers and minions who carried out all his wretched programs and beliefs even after he couldn't remember how to tie his shoes.

I'm sorry that you and Roger Gjovig (for different reasons) find the recent postings about Lester Maddox (that pig muthuhfuggah) and Strom Thurmond dismaying. You, because you're playing that "oh, what politically incorrect, bad taste, rude never-speak-ill-of-the-dead" card (a Joker with two faces), and Roger because there is "negativity" on this site. Well, despite the absolute truth that I am fond of both of you in your Webderland personae, in sincerity, I'm sorry pals. But there are many other places on this website that will happily accomodate your conversational needs, but THIS li'l corner of the abbatoir is mine, and over here the ill-speakers of the dead are welcome. Chiding them for their honesty, instead of falling into line behind Todd's assertion that Thurmond was, well, not a nice man, with whom we disagreed from time to time like the loving and respectful opposition we are supposed to be, is dissembling of the most mendacious sort.

This message, written at white heat, will certainly embarrass me for its passion when I re-read it tomorrow. But its conviction and its viewpoint will not. So I'll send it now, before good sense arrives to stomp me into courteous civility."

Harlan Ellison.

right fucking on. great post

This guy is a writer?

A great writer.

That was great.

2freaky4church1 said:

IT TAKE SPECIAL WRITER WITH BIG VOCABULARY

TO DROP F BOMB TO MAKE POINT

I worship at Pooks feet.

Excellent!

Harlan is the man

He can be quite funny too.