Humpjones

The Digital Ghost of Everett Francis Briggs

Posted Jun 16, 2007 7 comments

The Reverend E.F. Briggs died shortly before Christmas last year.  He lived in a nursing home in West Virginia at the time.  Briggs was a Catholic priest, and in his later years he felt that Holy See was coming under attack—for Briggs, America was a Christian nation, and Athiesm was a crime.  I would also like to mention that he looks exceptionally cute and cuddly in that photo. You just want to hug the old guy, don’t you?

Yes, I Mentioned a Digital Ghost

E.F. Briggs is living a second life on the internets these days, as the ghost behind the billboard you were just reading.  He paid for a number of them and proudly displayed his address.  I have no problem with hateful old people, they’re mostly pretty funny to me.  I chose to look at them affectionately—Perry Farrell said that elderly people become like children again, and he was totally wrong about that, but it was still a great song.  If I took hateful old people seriously, they’d be very depressing.

This angle interests me a great deal—it has immense potential, and I will probably blow it completely with this article. 

But I’m still going to try, because Everett Francis Briggs is too complex for me to just make fun of.  Now that he’s dead—he’s gone, there is no more E.F. Briggs in West Virginia today—what becomes of his thoughts, his words, his hatred and fear?  I put up an unusually insane Letter to the Editor up on Brainsturbator months back—what if the lady who wrote that was dead today?  Should we not be concerned over how dangerously stupid she was?

Here’s a conversation we need to have as a culture: there’s some amazingly dumb people walking around today.  I am definitely one of them.  I shouldn’t have guns at all, seriously. I am not alone—there’s hundreds of millions of people even dumber than me.  They have jobs, they operate motor vehicles, they have graduated from major universities, many of them are in positions of power and make decisions that affect the lives of thousands, sometimes millions, of other people.  Is that dangerous?

Of course it is, but what are we going to do? I talk to so many earnest young people in bars who have great plans to Save the World, and they would all work, if everyone would just agree on a few things.  It sounds simple, rational, sane, logical, workable, normal to talk about changing other people...what people need to do....you sick, sick animals.  I don’t even know who I’m aiming that at—probably myself more than any of you.

Thanks For All The Fish

Allegedly, Dolphins are “The Only Other Species That Has Sex For Pleasure.” This is common sense, repeated so often by so many people that it must be suspect.  After all, consider what kind of position humanity is in to say something like that.  How exactly do we know this about dolphins? Did we ask them?  How would we determine if other species have sex for pleasure?  Especially other species that we haven’t kept in captivity, under scientific observation for the past century?  Can you see where I’m going with this?

Just the same, it’s a heavy concept: dolphins f*** for f**.  So do humans.  This is a major reason all systems of Morality are equally hilarious to me.  Unlike the vast majority of people who claim to be “religious,” I truly do consider the possibility of a Creator being (or beings) sculpting life on Earth. 

The Big Question is: how do you figure out what that Creator intended?  Through books written by humans who claim to speak for it?  Or through the actual design choices exhibited all throughout it’s creation? As we’ve seen, the system behind human sexual arousal is a very fine-tuned peice of work.  Although the biofeedback system can tell the difference between penetrative sex and masturbation, there is nothing anywhere in the hormonal or neurological detection chain that tells the body wether or not you’re married to the creature you’re having sex with.  Weird, huh? 

If God actually cared, you’d think that sort of thing would be built into the code—especially since taboos like incest have an actual biological mechanism at work behind them: your kids are exponentially more likely to have birth defects if you knock up a blood relative. 

The Digital Ghost of Humpasaur Jones

Think about your digital trail.  I think about mine all the time—so much, in fact, that I’ve worked out nearly a dozen different methods to make money off my Information Halo.  Sure, I’ve got more personas than Kool Keith and James Jesus Angleton combined: so what? That’s just basic business strategy—if you can’t afford to hire employees, fabricate them wholesale.  (This only gets complicated when you’re explaining “what you do” to family members just catching up to e-mail.)

Every email you’ve sent, every e-argument where you threw an emoticon tantrum, every petty social network dispute, and man...that’s not even the meaty stuff.  How about all the pornography you’ve looked at? A hyper-detailed model of your sexual desires, laid out in day-to-day, year-to-year clarity for anyone building a psychological profile of You.

Le’ts be serious, here: do any of you honestly believe you’ll have even a ghost of a chance if some intelligence agency decided to target you?  Do you have any conception of the resources that will be brought to bear upon thy forehead, should The Powers That Be deem you a serious threat?

...and me? I’m not even a joke threat.  I’m a caged animal like the rest of you, just like all the dolphins dealing with unpaid interns watching them f*** for f** in a tank somewhere.  Taking notes on a clipboard.  Writing everything down. 

It’s science, baby—welcome to the future.

Filed in: Zeitgeist

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