🎨 Artcow Iconoclast / Jonathan Mack Sweet - The Chris-Chan of Arkansas

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I actually get the feeling that Sweet was almost successful. He was just one or two degrees too obvious with his hate. Limbaugh and other conservative personalities who were tremendously influential at the time, and who he was likely trying but failing to emulate, knew how to coat their rhetoric with enough sweetener to make the message palatable for public consumption. I think Sweet failed to grasp the nuances of just how significant those differences made things, and that a public university was the complete wrong environment to put forward such a backwards-aimed message.

In fact, he may have actually thought that his views would be received as "shaking up the establishment". It's a difficult thing to judge, especially as his story seems to morph into whatever is convenient along the way.
 
It's been a while since he posted anything substantial. I suspect he's trying to lay low and hoping we'll forget about him. He may also be feeling "betrayed" by his fellow forums members for not rallying to his defense.
 
ASU said:
In fact, he may have actually thought that his views would be received as "shaking up the establishment".
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I seem to recall Sweet saying something like that. Sweet thinks that his termination was part of a massive liberal conspiracy that outed him from the paper and runs ASU (or AS(S)U, as he sometimes calls it).

Also, Sweet said that a bicycle is an unworkable transportation solution where he lives. Do you think that's the case?
 
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DrJonesHat said:
It's been a while since he posted anything substantial. I suspect he's trying to lay low and hoping we'll forget about him. He may also be feeling "betrayed" by his fellow forums members for not rallying to his defense.
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Either that or, less likely, he's found a new corner of the internet to skulk in, possibly under and alternative name. Seeing how averse he is to change, though, I kind of doubt that.
 
His 'tism has him going to AJM Studios every day even if he's not posting (though he's recently broken radio silence). On some occasions, he's even reading the thread where the United Kiwi Front annihilated his racist ass but he won't respond. I'm guessing part of him is still hoping that someone will leap to his defense or that everyone will forget him. Neither is happening so I hope Sweets has grown to enjoy his sad, lonely existence.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Also, Sweet said that a bicycle is an unworkable transportation solution where he lives. Do you think that's the case?
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Unworkable? No. A bad idea for a long term solution? Absolutely, unless you're set up somewhere very close to wherever you need to go.

Jonesboro itself is a smallish town but it does sprawl some, in that if you live at one end of town and need to go to the other it's several miles and there generally aren't bike lanes or anything to convenience bikers (this may have changed in the 10 or so years since I've been there, but, if it did it would only be in the area on or immediately surrounding campus).

If you live outside of town in any capacity, even in many of the more suburban neighborhoods, then it would be many miles one way to go anywhere, and you'd be surrounded by nothing but fields and rural highways for a good 50 to 100 miles in most directions. There's a WalMart, a mall, a bunch of hotels, a bunch of restaurants, and that's it. The nicer downtown area with the art scene etc is about two blocks in any direction in size. All of this is within a mile of the campus. Live anywhere outside that mile diameter and you're probably going to be miserable without a car. He might could have made do with a small scooter or something, but I doubt he'd be courageous enough to dare.

For what it's worth, tho, I live on the West coast now in a very "bike-friendly" area, and no one here does the no-car thing except obviously homeless people or those with DUI's, so, pretty much anywhere in the US that I can tell, outside of major metropolitan areas, are going to be pretty much unworkable without a vehicle if you have a job.

If you're a duck hunter, a fisherman, or similar outdoorsy type, Arkansas really is kind of a paradise, albeit a swampy one.. But if your idea of fun is clubbing or even just hanging out, it can be a pretty repressive, religious place with outdated laws and an unwelcoming atmosphere for people who act strangely. Keep in mind, in the 1980s it was still so backwards there that a white woman being with a black man would be met with open hostility in public. The 90s weren't very far off, and it's very likely Sweet was raised by or at least around some very hardcore ignorance to the point that it would seem to be the norm.
 
Did Sweet ever say why he gets a tugboat? Or has the reason changed through the retellings of the story. I know he doesn't control it now. I wonder what his day consists of? He can't drive, and he lives in the middle of nowhere, so he can't walk anywhere, does he ever leave the house? It seems his day consists of posting angry screeds to the internet, and drawing his "comic". I feel more pity than amusement.
 
DrJonesHat said:
Did Sweet ever say why he gets a tugboat? Or has the reason changed through the retellings of the story. I know he doesn't control it now. I wonder what his day consists of? He can't drive, and he lives in the middle of nowhere, so he can't walk anywhere, does he ever leave the house? It seems his day consists of posting angry screeds to the internet, and drawing his "comic". I feel more pity than amusement.
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From what I remember he watches a ton of TV. I think he's posted about how he has a piss bottle so he doesn't have to stop watching.
 
Chan the Wizard said:
I thought he walked around picking up cans for recycling money. I have no idea where I read that, but some how that became my canon for Sweets when he isn't planning revenge on ASU.
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Yeah he does. He spins this as a "small business" occasionally and worries that da gobment might force him to hire blacks. I think someone posted an analysis of how this makes far less money than a normal minimum wage job.
 
DrJonesHat said:
I wonder what his day consists of? It seems his day consists of posting angry screeds to the internet, and drawing his "comic".
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Ruin said:
From what I remember he watches a ton of TV. I think he's posted about how he has a piss bottle so he doesn't have to stop watching.
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Chan the Wizard said:
I thought he walked around picking up cans for recycling money.
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You're all correct. If you have nothing to do all day, you can get a whole lot of nothing done. I wonder if he goes out can picking early in the day or in the afternoons, or if there is can picking days and non can picking days. The rest is filled with TV, comic creating and internet posting. His life is a rerun of the day that came before. I can't fault a guy for having a routine, but it strikes me as unfulfilling. A whole life of Sundays without any hope of a Friday or Saturday.
 
Getting a job would require that he learn to drive, dress like a normal person, and take instructions. Sweet's attitude seems to be he's better than the rest of us, so I don't think he'd be very good at following orders, especially if the person giving them isn't white.
 
As you can see from the map here http://www.trg.net/locations/jonesboro-ar the recycling place was about 10 blocks from campus, so it would have been possible.

There were very few work opportunities in town. I remember one of my friends considered herself lucky to get a minimum wage ($5.50/hour then iirc) job working less than 20 hours a week for the school. The only other job I remember even being commonly open was wait staff or clean up staff at the local coffee places, or cleaning up hotel rooms after guests checked out, and even those were usually only available to people who knew someone who already worked there.

A lot of students resorted to openly selling drugs. I knew kids who would go to WalMart and steal radios or Sega CD game consoles, bring them back to the dorms and trade them for $30 worth of dirt weed that was 50% seeds. Common street level drug dealers were like local celebrities because they were the only ones with disposable income. Professors were like Gods because they had both money and tenure. You'd buy weed off some random guys then see them banging later with their colors on, dancing in the streets with their car doors open, ghostriding, no police in sight.

A great deal of students I knew got into trouble, quite frankly. You had to go across town to get alcohol which led to more trips by drunk students driving for miles back and forth. Then booze was ofc banned in the dorms so you maybe got expelled just sneaking it in, or sneaking the empties out. Girls were also banned in boys dorms, with some exceptions (I think they could be signed in as visitors for certain hours in the day) so you could get expelled just for sneaking them in, also.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
I seem to recall Sweet saying something like that. Sweet thinks that his termination was part of a massive liberal conspiracy that outed him from the paper and runs ASU (or AS(S)U, as he sometimes calls it).
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As poster ASU makes clear, the idea that the university -- which was founded and endured for many decades as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Arkansas -- is involved in a massive liberal conspiracy is ludicrous on its face. The student body and the staff and most of the faculty are rock-ribbed conservatives. The political atmosphere on campus is very much what you'd find at Texas A&M or Auburn -- dominated by conservative, Christian Republicans. The odds are 50-50 that the dean of judicial affairs who sent Mr. Sweet packing is a retired military officer who serves as a GOP precinct chair and a deacon in the Baptist church. That Mr. Sweet sees him as a sinister apparatchik of the progressive movement is further evidence -- as if any were needed -- of how severely he is disconnected from reality.
 
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Actually, I couldn't tell you what the staff was politically, because no one talked about politics. Or race. Or "da homos" or any of the rest of it. Ever.

Unlike the coasts where people tend to have open discussions, sometimes loudly, about racial matters, wounds in the South are more like how Germany treats Jewish people now; with the utmost respect and if anything they avoid bringing the topic up at all. Sure in private he had no lack of company in his views, but in public...

For Sweet to show up and be all "hey, lookit the coons, aren't they funny" would have been like a cymbal crashing in a dead silent room. It's asking to get beaten, publicly, or worse, and everyone, except apparently Jon Sweet, would have and I think still does recognize that.

I never met any openly racist students or staff at ASU, because no one would have ever admitted that whether it was true or not. Surely it was true in many cases, actually, but again, those people had the tact to know not to say that shit, and damn well knew not to trumpet it over the paper.
 
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ASU said:
Unlike the coasts where people tend to have open discussions, sometimes loudly, about racial matters, wounds in the South are more like how Germany treats Jewish people now; with the utmost respect and if anything they avoid bringing the topic up at all. Sure in private he had no lack of company in his views, but in public...
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I grew up in the Deep South and know exactly what you're talking about. But I would add one caveat. The behavior you describe was precisely that of 99.99 percent of middle-class and upper-class Southern whites. But poor whites were another matter entirely. The white kids I knew who grew up destitute were very likely to use the words their grandfathers used when talking about blacks, even when speaking in public, as long as they were addressing a segregated group. By all other objective standards, the mythical superiority of their skin color was the only thing that separated them from impoverished blacks. I suspect that Mr. Sweet grew up poor and acquired his loathsome diction and his repellent racial attitudes from the same place most people pick up such nasty beliefs -- his family.
 
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DrJonesHat said:
just a handy way to get rid of him
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The way Sweet paints the picture, you'd think the Herald staff were a bunch of evil progressives that couldn't stand him, so they used the plagiarism charge to kick him out. There's a similarity there.

Also, what I still find amusing is that from Sweet's warped perspective, people who criticize or oppose him seem to be invariably progressives with "tiny, backwards brains" while he seems to see himself as a conservative hero, not unlike the self insert in Belch Dimension.
 
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DrJonesHat said:
Even through Sweet's edited recollection of events, it's pretty clear people couldn't stand him. I wonder if he'd done a lot of shit they couldn't nail him for, and the plagiarism charge was just a handy way to get rid of him.
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ToroidalBoat said:
The way Sweet paints the picture, you'd think the Herald staff were a bunch of evil progressives that couldn't stand him, so they used the plagiarism charge to kick him out. There's a similarity there.
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It's also important to recall that Mr. Sweet's termination followed closely on the heels of a one- or two-week suspension for cursing at the flashgun-armed photographer who dared to distract his Mighty Brain from its Very Important Work in the offices of The Herald.
 
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