Dennis Dale’s daughter purchased the right for him to post on Slog for a week through our annual holiday auction Strangercrombie, which this year benefited neglected children and the homeless. More info about our charity auction here. The views expressed in Dale’s editorials on Slog are his alone and have not been edited based on ideology.
You think a couple whacks to my guts is gonna get me down? It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than that, Counselor, to prove you’re better than me!—“Max Cady”, Cape Fear
Can it be that we’re already rounding the horn in our exploration of the ecumenical beyond? Time flies when you’re having fun—or being pelted with flung excrement, as they say.
For me the experience brings to mind the closing scene of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm:
Larry David invests in a restaurant and hires a chef with Tourette’s to run his kitchen-which is open to the dining room floor (he knows better but, seeing the lottery numbers the man’s scrawled on his arm, mistakes him for a Holocaust survivor and feels obligated). It’s opening night and the place is packed; sure enough the chef has an attack, shouting out a string of obscenities and silencing the appalled crowd. Thinking fast, Larry leaps to his feet and starts shouting obscenities himself, as if it’s all a great gag. Gradually others join in until the place is a cacophony of gleeful cursing. As the camera pulls back Larry stands amidst his chaotic handiwork, looking at us with satisfaction.
Yesterday I checked on the comments thread just long enough to read “f— you, Miss Dale.” My pretense of thick-skinned imperturbability bolted like an Afghan hash-head newly recruited into the army and catching his first sight of the Taliban. Not enough training, perhaps. Now I see the advantage of anonymity. This damn ego.
I don’t want to be melodramatic (okay, maybe I do), but I fear I may have put a loved one in a difficult spot, socially at least, with my provocations here; my imagination runs wild with images of someone identifying her as the daughter of That Awful Man. Leave her out of it please, she didn’t know what was in store—being young she has far better things to do than read my blog. She only knows that I periodically obsess over it and writing, and operates on the naïve assumption that a lifetime without evidence of anything like racial bigotry or misogyny (the desire—most pronounced in men, I believe—to live vicariously through our children, and the shrinking size of the family, has proven a sure cure for that) must mean I’m okay. When she surprised me with this gift, a part of me was terrified.
You see, in day-to-day encounters I might as well be Alan Alda; that’s the assumption people make. Just goes to show you never can tell. That person next to you? Maybe. People don’t walk about with signs around their necks cataloguing their many doubts about the various articles of our secular faith (though the idea no doubt appeals to some of our more energetic commenters here). If that was the case I imagine the experience, for those very few true true-believers, would be sheer terror—something like putting on the special glasses in John Carpenter’s They Live, only everybody is revealed as a monstrous alien.
She’s a good liberal, one of you—vegetarian (mostly), environmentalist, peace-loving, tolerant and open-minded. More importantly she is kind and decent. That’s the daughter I raised, alone and for an extended period under the duress of a long, difficult separation and divorce; if this smacks of pride so be it. If the price of my vanity-driven exhibitionism here (and it is vanity; how I enjoy the attention, any attention, after all) is to cost her so much as a troubled night’s sleep—well, you win. But I trust in your decency; the same decency that, paradoxically, leads you into misunderstanding and fury when it comes up against that which offends it. As for me, each laboriously gained certainty unleashes a demon-host of doubts. So I’ve decided to take the only advantage obscurity affords—the right to speak one’s mind. It’s liberating. I recommend it, in moderation.
So while I may know where I stand on a given question, I don’t know where that places me in relation to my fellows. I’m an atheist who prefers the company of the religious, and a conservative who gravitates toward the liberal. This crazy fucking world.
Other than that, I remain defiant. Needless to say, I won’t be looking at the comments on this one. Until tomorrow, friends. The home stretch awaits.
I think you have a future in Dan Brown-style florid novelry.
SHOT. Three more to go, maximum. Tickticktick….
Get stuffed.
Dennis, you obviously love your daughter very much, and I’m sure watching her father be torn to little pieces cannot be pleasant for her, or remotely what she had in mind when she gave you this platform. I can’t presume to apologize on behalf of other people, but I will certainly make sure that any barbs I may toss will be aimed at your views and arguments and not your family or yourself personally. In the spirit of Civil Rhetoric™!
No disrespect, but I really have no respect for you.
@4, you’re defending the KKK. How sweet of you.
wait, what is the point here? your daughter is a good person? only fnarf thought otherwise
Next year, I’m taking up a collection to give this column to that guy who hangs out outside of Pacific Place with the sign “FRYE APTS AND SEATTLE POLICE ARE COMMUNIST YOU COMMUNIST YOU DAMN LIAR I AM THE SON OF GOD”. That dude gets right to the point.
/dev/null
Am I mistaken are has the majority of this guy’s posts been about how abused he feels over his posts?
Maybe he and his daughter (really, no disrespect) didn’t grasp the obvious–to post on SLOG takes thick skin and a love for flung feces. That they didn’t get this is unfortunate for both of them and a little unfortunate for us, too, who are getting bored with the self-pity.
Look, if ranting at and abusing SLOG posters stopped them from posting, we would be free of Mudede’s self-indulgent masturbatory idiocy. But we’re not. Alas.
Well, your daughter is definitely diminished by her relation to you and your writings.
As you said yesterday, an awful truth.
When speaking about the NBA, Dennis Dale wrote:
“Not only has white America rejected sentiment in favor of the superiority of the black game, the stunning display of racial disparity on display is itself largely responsible for the success of the league—white fascination with black physical talent as a superior and therefore good thing.”
Does this prove he has an inter-racial cuckold fetish?
Hola, gus! Bottoms up, bitches!
…Alan Alda, you say? Makes you wish for Dan’s “blue aura” to better idenitify the haters…
meta posting.
dale its cool man. its like, your blog now, post your feelings, let loose. let it all out man. just go with it. surprise us all, say something youve never been able to let out. share it here with all of us.
I guessed that his daughter either
A. wanted to support Childhaven and DESC, and got a kick out of passing on the blogging priveleges to dear ol’ dad, knowing that his drivel would piss us all off, or
B. wanted to support Childhaven and DESC, and wanted to give a nice gift to dear ol’ dad, having no real concept of the drivel he’s been posting on his personal blog.
Glad to know that “B” was the right guess.
@11 Screw that. Plenty of my relatives have wrongheaded views on a great many things that I do not agree with. I am not “diminished” by my relation to them and neither is Dennis Dale’s daughter by her relation to him.
@15, white supremacy is not just a “wrongheaded view”.
Of all the quotations this guy could’ve used to proclaim that we’re not going to bring him down he chose one of a fictional child rapist. The only possible conclusion is that Max Cady is Mr. Dale’s personal hero.
6: Wait. Whut? All I’m sayin’ is I’m not going to be calling his daughter names, starting with a “K” *or* a “C”. Or a “B” for that matter. Still have no truck with Mr. Dale’s position. He’s a racist who doesn’t think he’s a racist, and dresses up his thinking with 25 cent words. Besides *you* already called dibs on the Ranty Pants, so it’s *your* job to be flinging the invectives around here.
@18, no, he’s a racist who freely admits that he’s a racist, and defends racism as a philosophy. You’re not reading him correctly.
@13: Today I will be drinking the classic, and oh so efficient, Manhattan.
@16 You don’t have to tell me, Fnarf. I’m just trying to keep calm and not lose my shit as one of my favorite blogs posts the insane rants of a man whose associations hint at a belief that my parents should never have been allowed to marry, and thus I should never have been born. Because at least he’s only here through tomorrow.
It’s funny because if the content he’s written was in the form of comments and not paid-for posts, it would probably have been deleted by now.
@19: Fair enough. But I’m still not going to use insulting his daughter as a way to repudiate his execrable and warped world view.
Keep scrolling people. Nothing to see here. Move along…
@21, I was thinking the same thing. His views may be expressed in rococo language but they’re not a whole lot different than the “black crime” unregistered troller.
Regarding your parents, I’ll bet your mom has also watched women’s Olympic events on TV, which makes her part of the conspiracy.
@ 17 unless he’s identifying with the mitchum max cady.. who just terrorizes the girl as opposed to the de niro max cady who ..well completely and thoroughly denigrates her.
Lissa, I am going against form and getting a latte, as even I know it’s bad form to grocery shop drunk. Will be joining you in the proof-bevvies later.
@25,
He *only* terrorizes the girl because he’s caught before he’s able to rape her. Either way, Cady’s still a rapist (of adults, presumably), a murderer, and an all-around sociopath.
@21 @24 after the first article, I suspected Mr Dale was really Matt Luby; after the WNBA article, I suspected Dennis Dale is actually the ‘black crime’ troll.
If you’re right, @28, that means he’s “Seattle white libtarded progressive”. Given his description of his daughter above, that would qualify him as Dad of the Year, eh?
Now I’m just waiting for Dominic to proclaim him “winner of the internet”, a la Luby.
“Even I know it’s bad form to grocery shop drunk.”
Au contraire, dear Canuck. Assuming that your grocery store is within walking distance, it can make this week’s dinner menus a lot more entertaining.
I’ll thank you to keep your filthy mouth off Alan Alda, Mr. Dale.
Just reading this at the post office, so the nearest shot is SBucks espresso.
I’m not sure how anyone could grow up with such a racist and not know. Even if he generally hides it behind a slightly-less-repugnant veneer of racialism.
Ah, you speak truth, BackyardB, but I’d probably spend more time busting a move to the Safeway musak and flirting with the cute shelf stockers than shopping for food…and then I’d get home and just want to order take-away pizza and do more shots…
You use too many semicolons.
@Fnarf: Rococo language, indeed. “Rococo” is the PERFECT word to describe this shit.
@35: As my art history teacher used to say ” Off we GO to the RO-co-CO!
I’ll spare y’all the amateur psychoanalysis today. But I still have to point out that this guy is STILL completely incapable of just saying what he means. At the same time that he obsessively tells us he is FREE to SPEAK his MIND!
@33: “then I’d get home and just want to order take-away pizza and do more shots”
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Chez BB, we call that “Thursday”.
I’m gonna tap out, crazy man. Can’t take it.
You speak-a my language, BB. Bottoms up!
I hope his daughter is reading this tripe. After all, SHE paid for it.
At the very least this Dennis Dale experiment should make clear that the U.S. Democratic experiment suffers from irreconcilable differences. there is no middle ground. Divorce is necessary.