Just to be clear I am also not building any surface to air missiles

[substitute]

It's Kibo Week here at the substitute building. Today's guest is a social worker I mocked in May for ripping the lid off the world of abbreviations that threaten your children. No rebuttal or argument, though. Instead she chose to take my headline literally and demanded to know if this was a death threat.

I understand that not everyone understands or enjoys satirical humor or comical overstatement or sarcasm. But it's hard to see how someone could be a successful social worker with that literal a worldview.

Comments

[substitute.livejournal.com]

I'm #25 on on Google for her name as a quoted string. So, either that or someone told her.

She "specializes in the internet." She certainly does know how to push buttons but is innocent of any sophistication about people not like her, is my guess, based on that and other statements about "internet culture" she's made.

She presents herself as the familiar figure from my childhood who warned about backwards masking on vinyl records, told parents that the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" was an incitement to arson, and warned the world that playing Dungeons & Dragons caused devil worship and insanity. That attitude admits no complexity or understanding.

Sometimes these people are calculating careerists who know better. Their goal is the six o'clock news or the expert's seat on religious TV, and they sell books. You can buy a nice house with the fruits of "HOW THE INTERNET THREATENS YOUR CHILD."

Others are probably culturally autistic unfortunates who can't comprehend any activity by youth culture except as pathology. My father was quite seriously warned circa 1936 that if he kept playing jazz piano he would associate with negroes, smoke reefer, and die before he was 21.

On the plus side, if any of these people understood the real risks of being a bourgeois teenager in 2006 America, they'd probably die of stark raving panic. So they're way better off fearing abbreviations.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

You mean I wasn't supposed to burn down my parents' house?

Man, you don't want to know what I did after I heard "making flippy floppy."