Charlie Trask

Let’s Use What We’ve Got

I’ve become ever closer to instituting a news-fast. It’s just all so goddamn depressing. What may have finally put me over the edge is the whole birther movement.  I mean, I don’t particularly mind fringe-people conspiracy-theorizing, they’re always going to do that, and maybe I would too if my life was so full of misery and hopelessness that I needed to take whatever half-baked stand happened to come my way. What really bothers me about the whole thing is the term “birther.” It upsets me that this movement has become such a cultural phenomenon that a new word was created to describe people who believe in it. This bothers me because the English language already had a perfectly good word to describe them—“racist.”