Matthew Todd Miller – Portrait of an American Misfit.
Disclaimer: If Matthew Todd Miller is really just a spy masquerading as a freak of nature, I hereby withdraw this entire opinion piece.
“This numbskull — and I am sure there is a clinical term for what’s actually wrong with him — has returned from a psycho trip to North Korea where he should have been left to eat golden retrievers and rice, but was instead returned home like a conquering hero. Saint Gerard never got that kind of treatment — and he cured sick and dying people for chrissakes.
“Matthew Todd Miller is a guy who looks like a third-tier Gap print model or a demented Catholic saint, and he should be locked up in a nuthouse until such time that he is fit to live among normal people. The final irony is that he tried to run away and live among abnormal people — which is where he belonged — but the USA and a lot of other highly strange people with odd intentions got him sprung from the nuthouse called North Korea. Can you beat that?”
So — don’t you just hate it when mentally sick misfits and losers and weirdos become celebrated American martyrs? I do– and it happens all the time.
I mean, think about it. You work hard your entire life and for the most part, aside from friends and family and a few passing strangers, nobody notices you for 80 or so years unless you do something really right or something really really really wrong. A murder conviction doesn’t count all that much because, unless it’s an infamous case, you’ll have to settle for a small advertisement of your life on some small town police blotter.
Actually, the “doing something really really really right” part doesn’t count either, because a lot of people do really right things all the time — and nobody cares. Of course you know the the old saying: No good deed goes unpunished.
It is true, however, that a really well-placed REALLY RIGHT thing can, at the very least, make you a brief sensation on Facebook or YouTube where the simpletons of the world live only to share and comment and wallow in maudlin sentiment, but that’s the most fleeting fame of all.
You can, for example, donate a kidney to a homeless person and you’ll get half a million shares from people who will have “cried when they saw this” but soon they’ll forget all about it as that story moves down and out through their timeline. In a few weeks you’ll be left with your fame all spent and your one remaining kidney working double duty.
Then what do you do? Well, you can hire Montel Williams to go to bat for you, but that gets costly – like the PayDay Loans he shills for on TV commercials — the loans with the 409% interest. If you think I’m exaggerating, you can look that up.
Anyway, you raise a family, but your sons and daughters are more or less born into the same fate as you. To quote Quentin Crisp, “You fall from your mother’s womb and roll across the ground under enemy fire until you drop into your grave.”
Sad, but true.
In spite of your best intentions, your children and their children will live their lives virtually unnoticed whilst doing a lot of good things or a couple of really bad things.
Your son could be really great at his job, but his name will never be mentioned in the New York Times or the National Enquirer. He might get a nod in a trade magazine or something, but the USA will never send an Air Force jet to pick him up somewhere in the world should he lose his credit cards or his mind.
Of course the USA has its natural born Killer Misfits — like the Columbine freaks — and other assorted dopey teenagers with naive notions who go about destroying lives and killing people. But then, after the dust settles down at the cemetery and CNN, a lot of people forget that some people are just psycho misfits who should have never been born.
Blame for the Killer Misfit is placed on things like gun control or Prozac or computer gaming. Incredibly, the misfit who is/was really just a psychopath, rises to great fame because his madness had been attached to all the beloved accouterments that belong to stupid people who believe in stupid things. I would say that 50% of people with some kind of “cause” are at least a little nuts, or barring all nuttiness, they’re just stupid and they’ve got whatever it is their championing all backwards. It’s play acting. It’s Darla and Alfalfa putting on a show.
It’s understandable why people like the Columbine Killers and Timothy McVeigh and The Menendez Brothers and even Lee Harvey Oswald rise to great notoriety, but what about the others? What about the harmless misfits or oddballs who fly under the radar until they do something that’s just plain f***ing annoying?
Take, for example, the most recent misfit named Matthew Todd Miller — a kooky 25-year-old loon who looks amazingly like Saint Gerard Majella — the Roman Catholic Patron Saint of pregnant women.
Matthew Todd Miller is an American misift — the annoying variety. In real life he would be trying to be an actor or model or maybe he’d just work in retail as a confirmed bachelor, but instead he decided to visit North Korea and rip up his American passport with the added fun of “seeking asylum.”
Can you imagine this? This isn’t even funny — this is sick. Even the maniacs in North Korea were able to notice his “hostile acts” and charge him criminally.
It’s very appropriate for Mary Todd Lincoln…I mean Matthew Todd Miller…to look a lot like a famous Roman Catholic saint because a lot of the saints were pretty nutty too. It’s not easy to be made a saint, and a little lunacy doesn’t seem to have hurt the careers of any of those who have been chosen for sainthood. This doesn’t mean that the crazy ones were bad people. It just means that you had to be a little nuts to lay down with lepers or see visions of Jesus or Mary or whomever. But, if the end justifies the means, it’s okay.
Naturally we don’t know the whole story behind Matthew Todd Miller’s lunacy, and we’ll have to wait for his book to come out in March. In a perfect world, Matthew Todd Miller will marry Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi at the church of Saint Gerard Majella, and Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren — bless her heart — will have enough material for a month’s worth of shows.
One last thing. I am not forgetting the other guy who got sprung from North Korea — Kenneth Bae. He’s just an innocent missionary — that’s another word for “spy” — but that’s just my kooky opinion. I love spies. I think we should have them all over the place. You can never have enough spies — or saints.
Why so much hatred towards someone who did not wrong you ?
He made a straight choice to go to a place of suffering.
Whatever his strategy was it was his business not yours.
He did go to a place where many people risk their life daily.
Respect people. See what’s beautiful in people’s lives.
Yes, we need more saints …
No — he is a misfit and YOu have the audacity to think that I will change what I write to suit you? What’s BEAUTIFUL in people’s lives is the simpe fact that there are people like me who spot the misfits and label them as such. I am not going to change for you — prob’ly some simple-thinking freak.
Damien LeGallienne
Editor