From the I Just Had To Click That Link file

Disturbing thoughts. Or, according to David Schmader:

The week continues with a creepy new real-life drama starring Andy Dick, the troubled comedian who was arrested early this morning on charges of sexual abuse in West Virginia. Details come from the West Virginia Herald-Dispatch, which reports the 44-year-old Dick was taken into police custody around 4:00 a.m., after two men accused Dick of groping them at the Huntington bar Rum Runners. In a press release, the Huntington Police Department reported “two alleged incidents of a patron engaging in nonconsensual sexual contact with a bar employee and another patron. Based upon statements of two victims and independent witness accounts alleging that he had engaged in unwanted and uninvited groping of the two victims’ genital areas, [Dick] was arrested and charged with two counts of Sex Abuse in the First Degree.” As the Herald-Dispatch reminds us, this is not Dick’s first alleged sex crime: He’s currently serving three years probation following his alleged sexual battery of a 17-year-old girl, whose tank top he allegedly yanked down to reveal her breasts. If convicted of today’s alleged gropings, Dick faces one to five years in prison.

I mean, four thousand jokes come to mind, and not a damn one of them any good. But part of me actually wonders what this guy is repressing. Really, why behave this way? Sure, “He’s an asshole,” serves well enough for many, but what is the psyche of an asshole? Does the detail serve as a punch line? Or is it just freaking sad?

The Canon – Brown’s Life Against Death

Excerpt: Life Against Death, by Norman O. Brown

… it is a Freudian theorem that each individual neurosis is not static but dynamic. It is a historical process with its own internal logic. Because of the basically unsatisfactory nature of the neurotic compromise, tension between the repressed and repressing factors persists and produces a constant series of new symptom-formations. And the series of symptom-formations is not a shapeless series of mere changes; it exhibits a regressive pattern, which Freud calls the slow return of the repressed, “It is a law of neurotic diseases that these obsessive acts serve the impulse more and more and come nearer and nearer the original and forbidden act.” The doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind, if we take it seriously, therefore compels us to entertain the hypothesis that the pattern of history exhibits a dialectic not hitherto recognized by historians, the dialectic of neurosis.

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Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.