"Characters"

Some very dear friends of mine, over the years, have come to believe some rather crazy things. For those wondering, here is a primer of things that people believe that are not true:

• The government is not creating a weather machine;
• There is no PBS conspiracy to turn your kids gay;
• There are no secret socialist messages contained in the facades of historic buildings;
• Obama was never going to come for your guns

The list goes on, but I think my general point holds. It is interesting to note, now, that one of the foremost purveyors of what can colloquially be called "crazy shit" has now stated in open court that he does not believe anything he says.

At a recent pretrial hearing, attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”

“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”

So, what I am to understand from this is that Alex Jones is no more a crazy right-wing conspirator than Mick Jagger is a street-fighting man. He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying, regardless of all the people he influences who believe him, chapter and verse?

Irony Alert: I don't listen to Alex Jones if I can help it, but I have heard enough right-wing bloviation over the years to hear my fair share of lectures about how (insert hip hop/rock n' roll/popular culture/liberalism) is a rot on our culture and the purveyors of this rot are cynically exploiting and hurting our society to make money. Hmmmmm. Perhaps he's not the only cynical member of the right-wing infotainment complex. I'd comment on the left-wing infotainment complex, but this is IN and there is no such thing here.

Anyway, I can't help but wonder who's cynically exploiting whom? And who is being exploited?

As my first boss in litigation told me, if you look around the room and can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.

Any thoughts, dear reader, on Limbaugh, Hannity, Garrison, Glenn Beck, Pat Miller (in Ft. Wayne), Abdul Hakeem Shabaz, etc.?