The Remora of Tragedy

Remora front dorsal fins have evolved to enable them to adhere by suction to smooth surfaces, and they spend most of their lives clinging to a host animal such as a whale, turtle, shark or ray. It is probably a mutualistic arrangement as the remora can move around on the host, removing ectoparasites and loose flakes of skin, while benefiting from the protection provided by the host and the constant flow of water across its gills. Although it was initially believed that remoras fed off particulate matter from the host’s meals, this has been shown to be false; in reality, their diets are composed primarily of host feces.

Wikipedia, trustworthy only for anything apolitical

The following statement is for anyone who’s cashed a check entertaining people in the mediums of acting, stand-up comedy, films or television.

You forfeited your right to opine on the internet about any tragedy whatsoever. If you’ve already done it, you should punch yourself in the face.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of a single left-of-center comedian in 2022 who tells jokes instead of using tragedy to stealth-promote themselves on social media. HUGE HINT.

Celebrities and stand-up comedians are so robotically focused on self-promotion that it becomes infused into everything they do, whether they notice or not. They don’t understand that when they try to grow their fanbase by raving about gun control and WHY DO WE HAVE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS EVERY DAY, they’re using the dead victims of a tragedy to promote themselves.

Read that last sentence again. When you see someone like Patton Oswalt softballing a recent tragedy with his politicized “hot take” on Twitter, imagine his goblin-like frame climbing a hill of murdered children to deliver it from the top with a bullhorn. Patton has a podcast with his totally-not-a-quick-replacement wife, which he is in no way promoting by vaguely inferring whom his admirers should despise. Depending on where you look, his net worth is between $10 and $20 million. I’m no financial expert, but I’m pretty sure that means Patton Oswalt could do a hell of a lot more to help the victims’ families than tweeting about the premature death of their kids to promote himself.

Just like some of the so-called professionals in my field, who have a cartoon or illustration ready within hours of a school shooting. Because of course they do; these people are ghouls who salivate at the thought of a tragedy that would earn them that Pulitzer they so richly deserve. I don’t bother calling them out, because it only enrages them and gives ammo to their gate-keepers, who are every bit as ghoulish as the cartoonists in question; they chose to follow. They believe the cartoonist says what they can’t, because they’re afraid of the consequences.

And guess what.

Those gate-keepers are out to promote themselves, too.

Every livestream and podcast has viewers who try to stand out in the chat. To prove to all present that they’re the chosen one. A personal connection to the host isn’t just implied, it’s accepted as fact. Senpai noticed you!!!

It’s not my job or duty as a cartoonist to memorialize real tragedy in the form of a cartoon. In my opinion, it is distasteful, because the cartoonist is attaching themselves to the tragedy as though they were personally affected by it, thereby creating and validating emotional hysteria through propaganda. No cartoonist has done this with the intent of salving emotional wounds, healing pain, or any desire but the winning of a Pulitzer. There is no more virtue in basing a cartoon on a real tragedy than there is customizing a screen avatar with a flag. It reduces the tragedy in question to the level of an emoticon. A meme.

It’s about self-promotion through exploiting tragedy, nothing more, and don’t kid yourself. It’s remoras upon remoras.

If no celebrity or comedian ever commented online about any tragedy, no one would notice. Meanwhile, “Dumbest President Ever ‘Til Biden” Obama tweeted that a massacre of children in a school should remind us of an insane Fentanyl abuser who’d savagely beaten a pregnant woman not much earlier, and whose fatally botched arrest and misreported death by overdose touched off an entire summer of astroturfed riots SORRY, I meant “peaceful protests” in cities around the country. A lot of people noticed that one.

Thanks for the note, President Dumbfuck.

When a former world leader doesn’t even bother to hide how stupid he thinks you are, it’s time to admit the game is fixed. This is who you voted for twice. This is how fucking dumb he is without the entire mainstream media insisting he’s the Mulatto Messiah. Imagine what else you’ve fallen for, based on this charlatan’s tweets. Oh, but at least they’re not “mean”, right pussy?

If you claimed that Trump’s tweets were mean, while eagerly sharing a celebrity’s thoughts on a real tragedy, kindly kick yourself in the ass because you deserve it.

The internet is not real life; it’s pretend. Until you’re found out (or “doxxed”), you can be anyone you want online. There is no life or death, only the archived in-between. Murder and rape are mere simulacrum here; they can only be catalogued as occurrences, no different from waking up from a nap or feeding a pet. You can argue until you literally die of old age trying to convince people on the internet how you “feel”, without ever changing a single person’s mind. It’s not real life. There are no feelings.

Ergo, there is no reason for you memorialize how you “feel” about a tragedy, particularly one by which you are physically unconnected, on the internet. Justification is an invention of the person doing it, who will have completely forgotten about the tragedy in question in under two weeks’ time. Because it doesn’t really matter to them. Why would it? It was merely a rented billboard to display their imaginary concern.

Say you found out about a school shooting elsewhere in the country or world. First off:

How did you find out? Because unless it was word-of-mouth (I mean literally, someone told you face-to-face), then you found out from one of the many companies that supply information to you via your computer or phone. Hence the problem. Those companies are, by and large, owned and controlled by nefarious entities. They are under no obligation to tell you the truth; their goal is to control every aspect of your life, and make you pay for the privilege. They fucking tell you this, and you’re too dependent on them to care. Instant access of information is too precious to you. It’s not even that; it’s instant access to gossip. There’s no easier way to get to people who think they can’t be gotten.

So; where did you find out? Don’t answer that, I know the answer; social media. The single most falsifiable form of communication known to man. They’ll either get to you that way, or on YouTube, because everybody uses YouTube. Who’s they? The people who want to exploit your emotions to control you, or to induce aberrant behaviors in you, for their own malicious ends. People who want to make you mad enough to pick up a weapon and hurt people, so they have hard proof of your incapability and obsolescence as a human being. So they can swoop into your life, fool you into thinking they saved you, and use you as their pawn.

And make you pay for the privilege.

Your desire to stay informed has been used against you, by the monsters known as mainstream media, who have now corrupted almost every thought in your mind. There was never a point before twenty years ago where the vast majority of us were constantly consuming information from a computer. Its normalization as an indispensable part of daily life is our downfall. The ones who seek to do you harm know how to get to you. In fact, they already have.

The powers that be tricked you into believing that all your information should come from one source, something that science-fiction novels have been telling us was bad as far back as the 1940’s. Think about that. We get all our information from one place. One supplier. We don’t even do that with our food. Because if that one supplier fails, we starve.

Hey; what happens when you get information from another source, outside of the One Supplier?

The One Supplier, and its multitude of enablers, go out of their way to tell you that outside information is false. They have teams of official-looking “fact-checkers” ready to make you swallow anything. They’ll even whisper in your ear that the providers of the outside information are, in reality, perverse degenerates who engage in all manner of deviant sex acts. You’d have to be stupid to trust any source but the One Supplier. How fucking easy can we make it for you? We put the shit right on your phone. Do you really want to look like a stupid asshole in front of your peers?

Every media personality who comments about a tragedy on social media, every person unconnected to that tragedy who does the same, is doing so to promote themselves by exploiting real tragedy. Full stop. They are complicit in the trivializing of mass murder. There is simply no other way to look at it. The world will continue to spin regardless of your feelings, or mine, or anyone else’s. School shootings are “mundane” to us because social media made them that way, thanks to a never-ending supply of people willing to climb dead bodies just to remind the world that they exist and have opinions. People who invariably lead lives of luxury and privilege of which you and I can only dream. Their fame buys your attention, and here we are. All these monsters live in your head, rent-free.

I mean, let’s be realistic; there are two reasons people follow celebrities on social media. One, to pretend like they have a connection to someone they idolize, or two, to watch someone they dislike circle the drain. Celebrities are eager political puppets because they’re dumber than shit and support all sorts of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. But because they get the algorithm, and thus your attention, you get the negative influence of their emotional hysteria and political hatred. Suddenly you can’t have a decent conversation about abortion, or guns. Suddenly your real friends find you unreasonable.

And for what? To be “informed” every waking second of every day? Where’s the precedent for that kind of living? Where does it even suggest it’s a good idea? Sure, we all love books, but fifty years ago, you’d call someone who read books all day every day a huge asshole. Who wants to be around a know-it-all who constantly sits in front of a computer? Take it from one who knows- nobody does.

No tragedy has existed nor will ever exist that can be affected by anyone’s feelings or opinions. It one could, it wouldn’t be a tragedy. It would be a literal miracle. Tragedy means the death of one or many innocent lives.

If you see that kind of thing as an opportunity to advertise yourself, however you try to dress it up or legitimize it, that’s a kind of tragedy as well.

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