tick...tick...tickLadies and gentlemen, let's synchronize our watches and begin the countdown until Josh Trevino (our favorite Marble Douchebag of the Rightard Blogging Set) freaks out and deletes his archives and leaves nothing behind but a broken toy light-saber and an oily spot on the web, again.

Yes, the effete wanker with even less talent and even loftier pretensions than Dafydd ab Hugh (alas, such a thing is possible) is back and blogging and unfortunately, seems to have learned absolutely nothing from his last tantrum, freakout, and disappearing act.  So, really, I guess it's only a matter of time before he starts threatening to expose all of our private information to the world again.

You know, I don't think I'd find Trevino (or "Tacitus", his chosen nom de guerre) nearly as annoying and laughable if he could only cough up a single coherent sentence without larding it down with armloads of vague, 18th-century-ish faux intellectualisms and ultimately writing in a voice that conjures nothing so much as the lisping histrionics of Dr. Smith from the original "Lost in Space" TV series.  To wit (via TBogg):

Melancholy and meaning.

Ugh.  We're already off to a bad start, here.  That's precisely the sort of alliterative cutesy-ness that will ensure that Kathryn Jean Lopez and Ben Shapiro both die virgins.

The problem of melancholy is the problem of its appropriateness and expression. This is not the same as the problem of sadness or unhappiness within a specific context or situation: there are, after all, circumstances which universally and objectively call for the absence of happiness or satisfaction. Indeed, the absence of that absence may be regarded as evidence of insanity or moral decay, as when a loved one dies. The Homeric age knew that proper mourning was beloved of the gods — which is why there was such outrage at Achilles’ violation of Hector’s corpse before the walls of Troy — and even today, we see that the lack of proper grieving inflicts a moral wound on modern warriors. (On this subject, First Things‘ Joseph Bottum will have an extended piece on the place of death in civilization shortly.) Whether or not one subscribes to the necessity of a thing’s opposite for the existence of that thing — and I do not — it remains true that sadness and delight are both part of the human condition, and both as necessary.

Word count: 181, but it felt like so many more.

Points made: Uh, one, but somewhat squishily.

But sadness is not melancholy: it is not the state of pensive depression that descends, often enough without apparent cause, or out of proportion to its cause. Melancholy endures; melancholy tints experience; melancholy feels profound and meaningful. It feels that way, but it is not necessarily so. Winston Churchill had his “black dog” that afflicted him throughout his life, and Abraham Lincoln pronounced himself “the most miserable man alive,” and they were men of profound genius and action, whose melancholy produced sound moral judgment and proportion. Yet how many more teenagers in suburban plenty feel the same, and introduce the world to their bad poetry in consequence? Melancholy used to be a sort of gift to the Romantics, producing in its inner storms the flashes of lightning that illuminated the world. “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Would-be poets sought misery and suffering in order to be.

Oh, no, no, no, Firedogs.  I can see you guys eyeing the exits.  Sit your ass back down.  I had to read the whole thing.  I've suffered for my art tonight.

Now it's your turn.

Now, MySpace and blogging lay bare the tedious quality of most melancholy: its profundity and gift reduced to mere perception, and wrong perception at that, it now afflicts the diligent reader and correspondent more than the sufferer.

Uh, okay, yes, actually.  So, riddle me this, Jedi-boy.  How come I'm the one suffering from your melancholy right now, then?  Huh?  Lord Byron's melancholy may have inspired him to pen, uh, "flashes of lightning that illuminated the world" (oh, Jeebus, but that sentence is bad), but your melancholy just seems to mean that you meander pointlessly through another 10,000 words (where ten would have done) before you tear yourself away from your Dell desktop and lay waste to another five Jell-O pudding pops and a Jolt cola (as is your wont).

Worse than the melancholy that is trite is the melancholy that is aggrandizing.

Travestius (Can I call you Travestius?  No?  How about Tortuous?  Tetanus?), let me get this straight.  You are clearly setting yourself up here as being analogous to Churchill and Lincoln, and yet you're compaining about other people being self-aggrandizing about their misery?  Doesn't your house have mirrors?

Actually, I've seen your haircut.  You can skip that question.

Here we may judge that melancholy goes too far, or worse, elides into ego. This is melancholy’s paradox, in that it elevates as it depresses — and that both are matters of perception, and not reality.

Remember, kids.  These spindly, convoluted points are things that Tetanus felt he just had to put up on his blog and share with the world, so pay attention!

I know of a small boy who shut himself in his room and wept. “What’s wrong?” asked his parents. “I’m very sad,” he said. “Why?” asked his parents. “I don’t know,” he replied. So it goes.

That's pretty deep, Josh.  "So it goes", indeeeeeed.  How old were you when you had this seminal moment in your childhood?  23?  26? 

All things in the human sphere are caused, but the caused and the knowable are not the same. The impetus in our scientific age is to resort to medicine and pharmacology: implicit in the lack of known cause is the assumed lack of meaning. There is utility in this, but not necessarily wisdom. As we look to melancholy, we see the genius in history; but in the democratization of communication we see much more the platitudinous, the self-absorbed, and the ordinary. This suggests melancholy-as-irritant, with its sufferers to be avoided and its occurrence to be forestalled.

Phew!  Shite and onions!  Somebody open a window.

Look, Trevino.  Just because a bunch of words sound pretty together doesn't mean you're getting anywhere.  In fact, I think sometimes you let the somnolent rhythms of your chronic blogorrhea lull you into thinking that you're making some kind of point when in fact, all you're doing is spinning your wheels in the air.  It's like you write a paragraph in six or seven minutes and then spend the next ten hours digging through the thesaurus for ever more flowery, overblown words in a craven effort to cloak your solipsism and inanity in a veneer of erudition.  You can put as much carmine lip emollient on a Porcine American as you like, but a pig is still a pig, and stupid is still stupid.  Stripped of their Umberto Echoes, your musings would have a hard time holding their own in the back of a high school yearbook.

And you still have to take your meds, no matter how much you may romanticize your "melancholy".  The rest of us are safer with you Zolofted to near-insensibility.

If the problem of melancholy is the problem of its appropriateness and expression, then to solve that problem we must abandon it as a thing-in-itself, as a means to self-promotion, and especially as a discrete element in the human condition.

So, the post I've just read is now going to delete itself in a sudden fit of self-awareness?

Ha, ha!  Of course, that's a joke, since I know you and your friends in the 101st Fighting Keyboarders would all instantly vaporize at the first whiff of self-awareness.

This is the difference between its sufferers who are great — Qoholeth, Lincoln, Churchill — and those who are small: that the great ones learned little about themselves in it, and much about the world and its appointed order.

And there you have it, gang.  Josh's big coup de grace.  His melancholy ranks alongside Churchill's, whereas yours, well, keep it to yourself, you tiresome peasant!  Great depressives "learned little" from their experience, thus justifying Trevino's own intractable obtuseness, I guess.  Nice. Honestly, this guy makes me question my belief that education is universally beneficial.  In the case of the great Tacitus, education seems to have done just enough to fill his skull with scrambled eggs and then it wisely fled the scene.

Gosh, do you think we can do anything to speed up his post, whine, self-destruct, and delete (rinse, repeat) cycle this time?

At least we can rely that he'll be along shortly in the comments, just as soon as he sees this post on Technorati.  They're so predictable, those Wingnut Welfare Queens.  Lacking jobs or, you know, a reason to live, they have nothing better to do than obsessively Google their names and see what people are saying about them, and then show up to rant windily about how none of us know their pain, issue a bunch of vague threats, and insist that all of this is cruelly unfair.

Come on, Joshie!  Dance, little Wingnut, dance! 

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