The Jane Stillwater Show: Why haters hate

Now that I've finally discovered how easy (and fun!) it is to make YouTube videos, I've decided to start my own YouTube talk show too. Craig Ferguson and Jon Stewart, eat your hearts out. I'd mention Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck as well but they aren't really true talk-show hosts. They are just hateful people who are bringing America down.

Anyway, here's the first episode of my fabulous new talk show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSh14vAlk8U. And if you can't download it from YouTube, then here's the written account:

Why Haters Hate: "Love thy neighbor as thyself"

"I just had psychic surgery performed on my knees by one of the top psychic surgeons in the Philippines." How's that for a fabulous lead sentence?

"Did it work?" you might ask. Who knows. I'm still in post-op recovery. But it was intense, almost like having two knee replacement operations without anesthetic. Well, maybe not that bad, but still. You had to have been there. It was intense.

There is a legendary psychic surgeon now living in the Philippines, Montsignor Marcos Orbito, who is descended from generations of psychic healers and is famous all over the world. At age 84, Montsignor Orbito is still actively healing people and is planning to speak at the 2009 Parliament of World Religions in Australia in December. And the man who operated on me has been training with Montsignor Orbito for his entire life.

My knee procedure took approximately 20 minutes. There may or may not have been chicken blood involved. My knees may or may not have gotten healed. But this experience, for me, was completely life-changing -- in a way that had nothing to do with my knees.

"Before we begin," said the psychic healer, "I would like you to read a few passages from the Bible." Sure. "Read Mark 12:28-31."

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It was Jesus' second commandment -- one of a boxed set of two.

And while the healer was psychically cutting into my knees, it suddenly hit me. "That commandment is DEEP." Loving one's neighbor is hard. Then I vowed that when I got out of this surgery, I was going to bite the bullet, man up and actually start loving my neighbor -- because this Commandment is the real key to world peace, which I desire even more dearly than actually possessing workable knees.

Then I had another revelation right there on the operating table. Love thy neighbor? Like thyself? Holy crap! "Before one can love one's neighbor like oneself, one has to love oneself first!" That's TOTALLY deep! It means that all those people who keep saying hateful things about others -- like wingnut talk-radio hosts who spew hatred and fear and distrust, like racists, war mongers and even like CIA torturers, Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- really ARE loving their neighbors as much as they love their own selves. People who hate others are only broadcasting to the world just how they feel about themselves. All those people who hate others? They must truly hate themselves even worse.

They must be following Jesus' commandment to the letter. They must be loving their neighbors just as little as they love themselves.

"Sorry, Jane. There's going to be no world peace for you -- at least not until all the haters of this world can stop hating -- stop hating themselves."

PS: There is currently talk among some of my gun-toting right-wingnut friends regarding marching on Washington and staging a Revolution. However, I have two questions regarding the wisdom of such a plan. First, suppose that you guys do have a successful Revolution, all those weapons in the Pentagon aren't trained in your direction and that you actually DO manage to bring down the government. Then what?

Are any of you even half-way prepared to deal with the chaos that will surely ensue?

And my second question would be, "Where were you guys when Bush and Cheney were squelching our freedom, turning patriotism into a an excuse to 'water the tree of liberty' at American citizens' expense, murdering our children by sending them off to fight illegal wars for profit, and otherwise looting our wallets any way that they could?"

PPS: All this hatin' on Van Jones is also really starting to get me down. I've known Van since 1998, when he was friends with my boss Robert Treuhaft and his wife Jessica Mitford. Van is everything that you could ever want an American to be -- smart, honest, well-educated, compassionate, hopeful, responsible, all that stuff. He is one of our best and brightest. And he is also African-American -- which makes him fair game for a bunch of hate-filled unpatriotic losers who couldn't even make it to college let alone graduate from Yale.

Of all the people who actually did great harm to America that the GOP could have picked on (Bernanke for instance -- or Summers or, God forbid, Cheney and Bush), they picked on Van Jones instead. That so bodes ill for the future of America and for our next generations. That so sucks eggs.