Fear, Rats, G. Gordon Liddy And A Machine Gun Bikini

“Hold them back!  Do not give in to fear!  Stand to your posts!  Fight!” – Return of the King

I can jump higher than any fence.  Fences don’t jump very well.

When The Mrs. and I were newly married, and before the stork brought The Boy, The Mrs. and I had time to just do, well, whatever.  That often involved driving, and driving in that involved radio.  We listened, mainly, to talk radio.  We had to, because we had been banned from a gas station for listening to a song by The Who too loudly.

I guess we won’t get fueled again.

One day we were listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show.  For those of you who don’t know, Liddy was sent to prison as part of the Watergate break in during the Nixon era.  If I had just one word to describe Liddy, it would be intense.  I hear that Liddy was doing five hundred sit ups a day, but had to stop – he couldn’t take the ab use.

In particular, I remember one story of Liddy’s very vividly.  The dialogue below isn’t exact (this was over 20 years ago and I slept at least once since then) but it’s pretty close:

“When I was younger, I had a particular fear of rats.  It was a very, very strong fear.  I didn’t want to be afraid of rats, but I was.  So, to get rid of the fear, I killed one, cooked it, and ate it.  I was never afraid of rats again.”

If a relative passes away, you can get a free Starbucks®.  It’s your mourning coffee.

See?  Intense.  Also the kind of thing that made me glad that Liddy wasn’t afraid of me, since I have no idea if I’m good with ketchup.

On one hand, that level of behavior is bordering on insane.  On the other, it showed an amazing amount of self-awareness.  If Liddy’s goal was to go through life without fear, facing it was certainly the way to overcome it, although I’ll say the number of times I’ve come face to face with rats is exactly zero.  If that’s your top fear, you’ve gotten rid of most common fears.

I’ve related in the past how when climbing a really tall mountain I reached a ridge and looked down over, expecting that there was no way it could be as steep as what I had just climbed.  I was wrong.  Sheer cliff.  I was looking down very far.

Several mountain climbers caught the ‘Rona but didn’t give it to anyone.  Scalers aren’t vectors. 

I never had vertigo before, in fact I never had much of a fear of height at all.  But in that moment, I developed it.  From then on, whenever I could find a tall spot to stand on and look down, I would.  And I’d stay there until the vertigo went away.

It was a lot harder than just killing and eating the cliff.  It also took a few months, but the vertigo went away.  It’s mostly vertigone now, though I will admit that sometimes I get a chill when I watch Internet videos of people doing stupid stuff on very tall buildings.  Most of the videos seem to come from Russia, for whatever reason.  I’m betting it’s vodka, but it could also be . . . no, it’s vodka.

Bad pun?  Check.  Bikini?  Check.  Machine gun?  Check.  Russian hat?  Check.

Not all fear is bad, and not all fear is debilitating.  A lot of Evil comes from fear.  I used to think that all Evil came from fear, but that’s certainly not correct (Three Kinds Of Evil).

But a lot of Evil does come from fear.  Why?  Fear is fuel for Evil:

  • Fear leads to cowardice.
  • Fear leads to deceit.
  • Fear leads to anger.
  • Fear leads to hate. (Quote about the Dark Side®, there may be here.)
  • Fear leads to regret.

Cowardice might be the worst, though.

The reason is that cowardice is, at the root, a betrayal.  First, a betrayal of internal values.  Second, a betrayal outwards.  A perfect (but small) example is someone who is afraid of the consequences of disappointing a customer.  That leads to a lie to the customer.  Which leads to another lie, which will eventually end up with a very angry customer.

The Mrs. and I started our relationship with a strict “no lies” policy.  That’s why The Mrs. never asks me, “Do these pants make my butt look big?”  She knows I’ll tell her the truth.

“The pants?  No, the pants don’t make your butt look big.”

It was half an hour outside of Bakersfield when the catnip began to take hold.

Fear is natural.  A healthy respect for fires and firearms is a good thing.  But when any single fear?  That fear has to be confronted.

It has to be killed and eaten.  It can change the world.  Say, if you were afraid of undercooked bat . . . .

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

21 thoughts on “Fear, Rats, G. Gordon Liddy And A Machine Gun Bikini”

  1. Fear and Loathing on WW&W. What a way to start a Friday.

    FDR’s famous quote about fear itself being the only thing we need concern ourselves with never made much sense to me. I suppose he was actually referring to the panicked response to fear, which might paralyze a nation. He understood that panicking the sheep could get quite woolly (take that, John Wilder).

    Whenever something in the abstract causes me irrational fear, such as, say, the threat of a global pandemic, I find it helpful to stare it down. Look it up. Research it. Beat it into submission with knowledge. Maybe not quite on the level of G. Gordon Liddy, who chewed nails for breakfast and sh@t hammers. (It’s rumored that his pushbroom ‘stache had a plow attachment for wintertime use.) But there is nothing like the familiarity that breeds contempt to bring the bogeyman to his knees.

    I won’t be chowing down on any rat-tatouille in the foreseeable future but I have to admire Liddy’s approach. We’re going to need such hard men (and a few hard ladies) in these desperate times to pull us through. I wonder what grape varietal pairs well with rat fricassee? [Insert lame pun about ‘Mousecatel’ here].

    1. I came across this video from Universe 26 a few days ago. A NYC panhandler is communicating his opinion of a bystander’s failure to spare some change at a food truck. The really scary part? The people passing by on the crosswalk acting like attempted-murder-in-progress is perfectly normal to them.

      https://twitter.com/NY_Scoop/status/1362409612318760964

      WE are the rats in a material utopia containing enough for all, and INDIFFERENCE is what to fear, not just VIOLENCE.

      PS to Aesop – I wrote a response to your excellent riposte.

    2. Is that why over the last few years I have reduced my contact with people?

    3. That’s the tough story from that – without hardship, we turn to crap. Hardship is our friend.

  3. Fear of some things is fine and healthy. I have a healthy fear of getting run over by a semi so I don’t stand in the middle of the road, nor do I drive around playing country music with the windows down in Detroit. But most fear today is artificial and driven by the perceived opposite of real danger, namely “safety”. Everyone wants to be safe. We want our kids to be completely safe, and our lives to be the same. The problem is that life is inherently unsafe, we are all closer to dying than we were yesterday and as Zero Hedge puts in, on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. If the West is lost as it appears likely, it won’t be because of a superior enemy or disease or some natural disaster. It will be because everyone is too afraid to endanger their safety.

    If there aren’t things you are willing to risk your life for, then your life isn’t worth preserving in the first place.

    1. I don’t think we’re lost. But I do think that what’s required to save it will be considered . . . extreme.

      1. When we lived in Wyoming, the local joke was that the three biggest lies told in Wyoming are: I won this belt buckle, I own this truck and I was just helping that sheep over the fence.

  6. G. Gordon is a hero! Love his stories of singing S.A. march songs in perfect German while in prison and no one bothering him. AM is a wasteland now and that show hasn’t been on since early 2000s.
    Fear is the greatest tool of the devil as it immobilizes you into an easy target.
    Our ancestors were badasses and we all have a chip off of their block.
    We are going to need it as the Satanic Globalists go for the full anti-human enchilada.
    Don’t get demoralized as more states are stating to take up open carry laws and other ways around the illegitimate regime in the armed camp of DC regarding imperial unconstitutional executive orders.
    Don’t fear government dullards who couldn’t get private sector jobs or soft weak zombies who only care about peace and safety with equality of results for all.
    They are out of touch with reality and won’t last when law of the jungle time comes, don’t be like them.

    1. Evermore we become more divided. Thankfully, Modern Mayberry is far behind enemy lines, at least in the moment.

  7. My son liked to wander around the rural neighborhood (fields, woods, steep, rocky hills and ravines) alone when he was a young teen. There were bears, coyotes, and a cougar. So I got him a machete with a sheath. And a really cheap cell phone.

    He scared the piss out of the cougar a few weeks later. He was upset he didn’t get to take a trophy.

  8. Types of Evil(TM):

    1) Psychopathy, deliberate desire to hurt. Envy is a weak form of this. Most Liberals(TM) are this.

    2) Deliberately failing to learn from experience. Most Conservatives(TM) are this.

  9. The Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas reference was great. I saved the picture for future laughs. Man you can write.

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