Dr. Faustroll Writes The Wrongs

Disorders! Disorders! I can't be blamed for all these damned disorders!

That's a paraphrase of something Ezra Pound told an interviewer shortly before he died when asked about the state of contemporary America in general and American literature in particular. That was the same year I earned my Master of Arts at the University of Arkansas, where I learned of the death of ol' Ez while shopping for Bolo at a Marvins IGA. 

Bolo was a locally-produced cat food made from poultry by-products, such as those carted off from the Ralston-Purina plant in Springdale where I hung eleven tons a night of live, kicking, shrieking toms destined for pot pies and such one summer and caught hepatitis in the process. 

It was always an adventure to open a fresh can of Bolo and see a swollen bird's eye peeking up at you, or a spur tip or beak part that Morbius just loved. Morbius was given to us by Wesley Zeigler as a coal black kitten who hid inside the sofa for the first few days we had her. We named her after a vampire from Marvel comics so we weren't surprised when she brought home body parts from her hunting expeditions. Morbius begat Wyatt Winghead, Alexander the Gimp, Mosby the Grey Ghost, and Buster Verjohn, but all that is fodder and falderal for another post.

This post is about disorders and how I was shopping for Bolo in an IGA in Fayetteville on November 1, 1972, when I heard this come over the background noise piped in to enhance the typical seventies shopping experience: "Ezra Pound," the newsman said, "noted American traitor, died today in Rapallo, Italy. He was 87." All the disorder was over for him.

Today, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced that it is updating its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for the first time since 1994 to help doctors more accurately misdiagnose their patients. The new edition hopes to redistribute patient load in the overworked and underperforming American Health Care System by reclassifying millions of emotional cripples and other miserable fucks to create new employment opportunities for the descendants of snake oil salesmen driven into bankruptcy by over-regulation during times of rule by liberals and Demoblicans.

At the same time, the APA is "responding to a growing awareness fostered by the emerging teabagger movement that the medical community needs to redress wrongs historically caused by insensitive naming conventions," according to an imaginary apologist for historical wrongs caused by sloppy language whom we were not able to contact for this story.

It turns out that Sairhead Sirhan Palin, a complete fucking retard, has convinced the APA to remove mental retardation from its vocabulary and use intellectually disabled instead. So what are we supposed to call politicians and voters without hurting their feelings? I suspect that assholes and dickheads and stupid cunts are no longer OK. Help me out here, people. I don't want to simply eschew the letter of the law. I want to devour, digest, and eliminate its insipid spirit!

Noting that more than a million American children — in the pataphysical vernacular: miserable pre-fucks — have entered the ranks of the bipolar disorder during the past decade, the APA now says that the misapplication of terminology to describe normal human behavior can result in frivolous lawsuits for malpractice that can easily be avoided by the use of Temper Dysregulation Disorder (TDD) as a reason to give bitchy little kids huge doses of pharmaceuticals to wipe those smirks off their smart-ass faces.

My question is why don't psychiatrists and psychologists have the same second amendment rights that I do? If I feel threatened in my home or place of business, I am perfectly justified to eliminate the threat without fear of criminal prosecution or civil action. Doesn't it make sense just to blow these little assholes away and be done with it? 

I don't know. I just have a problem with people mucking with the English language who are totally unqualified to do so. I'm a writer, for God's sake. I have degrees to prove it. I'm the guy who put the fun in dysfunction and coined disinformation to help poopadoodlists around the world have a new and improved way to point out a lie without being Joe Wilsony and Sam Alitoish about it.

I feel for my readers, imaginarily, with children formerly known as bipolar who now have to rethink their relationship with their demon spawn and their new induction into the temper dysregulation disorder club, not to mention the new drug commercials they can request to treat it that we will all have to sit through in the coming years. 

As I was typing this, I searched my iTunes collection for Cosmik Debris by Frank Zappa for an expression of how far beneath my contempt the DSM5 really is. Here are the lines that came to mind:

There's always an imaginary solution to any imaginary problem. Take the second amendment. Please.