Sorry for the confusion, seeing as how this post appears below the post containing a comment to which I am responding.
I wanted Crunchie’s December 7th post on top, because that’s what’s important today and I didn’t want to derail the comments there by going off-topic. What? Me following my own ‘rules?’ Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I tell you!
So what am I talking about? I’m going a bit meta here, but what triggered it was that LC Light29ID mentioned that Korean ‘rapper’ PSY ‘oppan gangnam style’ once, it has just been discovered, made a ‘rap’ that featured some truly vile, insulting and disgraceful lyrics directed at us ‘fucking Yankees’.
And LC Light29ID is absolutely right, those lyrics are vile beyond anything I can come up with in less than three minutes and I offer no excuses for them. They’re just plain wrong. Insulting, offensive, vile and downright full on blood red curtain of rage disgusting. I need to put that up front lest anybody thinks that I’m saying something that I’m definitely not. There are no excuses for that that will make them somehow even remotely ‘OK’ and he’ll have to own responsibility for those lyrics in full, because nobody put a gun to his head and forced him to utter them.
And then I read this article or, more accurately, the comments to the article illustrating what was going on at the time he wrote that reprehensible load of disgusting garbage, which was that a U.S. bridge laying tank crew had accidentally run over a couple of South Korean school girls. Not intentionally, obviously, and they were tried by a court martial for their alleged negligence, but you still had two Korean girls dead at the end of the day.
And so I thought to myself: OK, imagine I’d been a Korean at that time. Just how would I feel at that moment? Absent logic, because there is nothing logical about human response to tragedy when the tragedy is fresh in your mind. Would I have been pissed off, outraged, mad as hell, dying to post a three-page screed or just about doing anything to get that anger out of my system without a second’s thought to ‘just the facts, Ma’am’?
You bet I would. And you know that I would too, if you’ve been around here for more than a couple of weeks.
Anger is a powerful force, an unstoppable one and a force for good if it’s reined in appropriately and controlled, but it’s also a fearsome power that can lead you far astray if you let it master you rather than bending it to your will. I should know. I have posted things on this site that, upon reflection once I’d had a chance to think it over, most of the time thanks to you, my dear readers, pointing out to me that I was being an industrial grade asshole, I decided that I’d gotten completely and totally wrong. It’s not fun to find out that you’re a normal human being with pathetic flaws, but it does make you grow.
Many of you will remember, and that’s one of the milder examples, my full on hate boner and howling screed directed at the entire profession of auto mechanics because a shop had fucked up a repair job (which they later fixed, by the way), something that does happen in the real world. Sometimes things don’t quite pan out and then you fix them. But oh no. I was stressed out, angry, breathing fire and spitting nails, so everybody who ever lifted a Snap-On was a bitch ass whore because I’d had a bad experience with one of them.
I was wrong then, I am still wrong about it now and I will forever be wrong about that particular incident, I’m never going to pretend that I wasn’t an asshole about it, because I was. And a lot of you gearheads out there pulled no punched in telling me, and I owe you for that, because I needed to learn just how much of a fuckwad I was at that time.
And that was over a fucking invoice. Granted, an invoice that I couldn’t really afford at the time, but it was still only money. For that I was willing, in my irrational anger, to throw an entire profession to the wolves and curse them forever. I mean, nobody actually died. There weren’t two mangled bodies of school girls involved. So I’m in no position to condemn, right off the bat, somebody else for being a complete retard in his reaction to something infinitely worse than what I was going through.
I got carried away, I forgot to engage my brain before speaking, I own that. I can’t escape that, nor should I be allowed to. I was called to account for that and, thank you again for that because I really don’t need to be more of a dick than I already am, and I found myself wanting.
So I have to think, in all fairness: Was Psy’s disgusting ‘rap’ another example of the same?
I don’t know. It’s not an excuse, nothing can excuse what he said, you can’t un-ring a bell and I sure as fuck am not ever going to attempt to justify what he said back then, but I would be very, very interested to know how he feels about that pile of trash today.
And yes, he needs to be called on it. He needs to own it, just like the rest of us have to own our mistakes, if it was a mistake indeed. Then, but not until then, can we start working on forgiveness, if any is to be had.
Will the media call him on it?
Don’t hold your breath. He was demonizing the U.S. military, and that’s like catnip to the EneMedia whores, but I would, personally, really like to hear what he has to say.
Thatisall.