The Lunatic Behind The Screen

Greetings, fellow sinners, whores and pushers of the interwebs, and welcome to The Lunatic Fringe. If this is your first time on this blog (it should be if you’re reading this) I should warn you there’s a fifty dollar cover and a three drink minimum. Don’t mind Louis, he’s just patting you down for various firearms and explosives. Bathrooms are in the back, ignore the man crying in the stall while madly drawing graffiti porn on the walls with what looks like his own dismembered finger.

In all seriousness though, The Lunatic Fringe is my brainchild, one that’s been floating around in the ectoplasmic goo that is my head for quite some time now. It’s a collection of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that in any other century would have had me babbling in the marketplace, demanding that someone listened. But hey, this is the Future, where letters take a couple seconds to go around the world and a couple seconds to come back. The internet is a bold, new environment, one where class, race, and culture don’t matter as long as you have a modem, a keyboard and an opinion. I think there’s something very empowering about that, which I hope to openly abuse (and there goes my credibility). In a hundred years, the cultural Renaissance of the 21st century won’t be marked with a plethora of literature, art or film, but the information revolution that occurred. Yet even today, demands for internet regulations and the removal of anonymity by various governments could greatly undercut this venture (“No, don’t take away my free porn and 4Chan!” I hear you cry). So I decided I might as well get in on it, while the going’s good.

Like all of us trying to be noticed in the great binary sea that is the internet, I’m going to voice my opinion loud enough to see if it rattles any cages (probably won’t, but who cares? I just like hearing myself talk). The Lunatic Fringe will primarily be about whatever is jogging around in my mind when I sit down at my laptop. How vague, you say as you hit back on your Firefox to return to your octopus amputee porn. Fair enough. Basically, as a starving university student who once had to eat both his and another gentleman’s fingernails in order to survive an incredibility long lecture, I’m not exactly leading the most glamous or interesting life.

Gah, moving a little off-topic. Focus. The Lunatic Fringe. What does it mean? What does it represent? Like I said above, whatever I want it to. Games, films, news, politics…whatever catches my interest enough. I could do reviews, or just commentary, or just link you to another one of the internet’s many prophets. Or maybe I’ll just drink myself into oblivion and record it for all you lovely people. Whatever fits the mood, you know?

Oh, I’m sorry, I may have misunderstood the question. What does “The Lunatic Fringe” literally mean? Believe it or not, it’s not just two words I put together because they sound AWESOME (cause they do). After the end of the Second World War, historians began to apply different social and economic concepts to their field. One of those was Marxism, that wonderful hey-we-don’t-have-jeans philosophy. Before, historians had looked at power elites (the bosses, politicians and leaders) to study the past. Marxist theorists, however, wanted to look from the ground up rather then from the top of the tower. One class they especially loved looking at were those judged insane, unbalanced, or unfriendly by society, known as The Lunatic Fringe (see what I did there?). As Christopher Hill put it brilliantly in his work The World Turned Upside Down:

“Historians, in fact, would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase “lunatic fringe”. Lunacy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeeth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms, and that the ‘lunatic’ may in some sense be saner than the society that rejects him.”

The Lunatic Fringe serves as a dark mirror of society, reflecting all it rejects, regardless of its merits. We experience it even today. How many news reports on school shootouts have cited video games as a factor? How many parents blame musical influences like rap for their children’s behaviour? How many people still hate and judge based on skin colour/sexuality? How many politicians are attempting to silence the unwanted opinions? That’s what The Lunatic Fringe is. It’s every foul word, angry letter, and voice that society just doesn’t want to hear. And so, as one great lunatic said, let’s buy the ticket, and take the ride.