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

[DrJonesHat]

Has ANYTHING of significance occurred in Sweet's life since being booted from ASU? I know there was the pawn shop fiasco, but aside from that, has he done anything besides post the same rant over and over?

 

[ASU]

Sweet lives in Blytheville, AR now, ASU, if that helps you answer any of the questions people have.

Thanks for your perspective!

It's a big step down. Jonesboro for all of its flaws is the closest thing to civilization until you hit Memphis.

To give you an idea of what I mean, this is the artsy section of downtown Jonesboro: http://i.imgur.com/ApLZKlQ.jpg

It doesn't look particularly run down at all, and it's not obvious from the picture that you're looking at a place that isn't particularly well off financially.

This is what downtown Blytheville, AR looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Im74j6c.jpg

Totally different story there. It's the sort of place where the only 3+ story buildings will be a hotel.

 

[John Titor]

It's a big step down. Jonesboro for all of its flaws is the closest thing to civilization until you hit Memphis.

To give you an idea of what I mean, this is the artsy section of downtown Jonesboro: http://i.imgur.com/ApLZKlQ.jpg

It doesn't look particularly run down at all, and it's not obvious from the picture that you're looking at a place that isn't particularly well off financially.

This is what downtown Blytheville, AR looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Im74j6c.jpg

Totally different story there. It's the sort of place where the only 3+ story buildings will be a hotel.

"People. Pride. Progress."

Uh-oh!

By the way, @ASU, I noticed you registered today. I was wondering how did you find us?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Has ANYTHING of significance occurred in Sweet's life since being booted from ASU?

As far as I can tell, aside from ASU and the shop fiasco, as well as some attempts at publishing the comics and stories he writes, probably not. Sweet apparently wants to be a conservative hero and celebrated comic artist and author.

Also, I wonder what Sweet wanted to be when he was younger.

 

[ASU]

I found the CWCiki in 2010 or so, following convos on the chans about Chris-Chan. I also followed Jace for a while, what a ride that was. World's more boring now that he's gone quiet. I never had anything to offer here, until I saw this thread. Been meaning to post here for a while but just kept putting off making an account.

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.

I hadn't read all of your post before I responded, but you're absolutely right that the last place anyone sane would accuse of coming up with a liberal conspiracy is a farming town in Arkansas. It's practically the definition of Good Old Boys club. Of course, Sweet wouldn't have been invited to that club, either.

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

Interesting interview, @Absinthe. You can tell straight away the interviewer is being extremely sarcastic with Sweets and it just sails right over his head . . . He admits he "cussed out" a photographer who took a picture of him with an overly-bright flash, and describes her to the interviewer as a "dippy cunt" who somehow cost him the privilege of having an editorial cartoon run in the college paper alongside a column he wrote about Ross Perot.

OK, it's time for some answers from people who were there. I have tracked down a couple who are willing to talk. I have intentionally avoided taking the easy route and contacting those who are on Mr. Sweet's many hit lists. They are probably not unbiased sources; and there is no need to further fuel his clinically insane hatred of those long-suffering individuals. Others were not difficult to find.

What happened in the notorious flash incident?

A female undergraduate photographer from the ASU yearbook showed up in the offices of The Herald one day when Mr. Sweet was present. Her assignment was to take photos of the staff at work. She was shooting inside an office, so she used a flash. The first time the flash went off, Mr. Sweet cursed at her. He was not the subject of the photo. (His description of the event notwithstanding, she did not sneak up on him and discharge a billion gigawatt flash in his face, blinding him for days and inducing the immediate onset of melanoma. No one wanted to photograph Mr. Sweet, with the possible exception of itinerant photographers from National Geographic or The Journal of Abnormal Psychology.)

Ignoring Mr. Sweet's outburst, the yearbook photographer continued to shoot. (Good on her!) Every time the flash went off, Mr. Sweet cursed at her. When this did not cause her to leave after a few shots, Mr. Sweet launched into a long, loud and offensive tirade about how sexually attractive he finds lesbians. The photographer continued to ignore him, and each time the flash was fired he paused in his rant about lesbians, cursed at her, and then resumed his lurid diatribe about the daughters of Lesbos.

Standard operating procedure for a yearbook photographer used to be to shoot at least one roll of film on a major organization like the college paper. It is probably safe to assume that this poor woman was cursed at on at least 24 separate occasions in addition to being the object of his obscene raving about lesbians.

The photographer complained about the loathsome vermin's abusive outbursts. (This probably came as a huge surprise to the the bad boy of college journalism.) Mr. Sweet -- who would have been expelled immediately at many universities -- was merely banned from the paper's office for one or two weeks. (If Mr. Sweet had behaved like this in the office of my college paper, one of the guys -- quite possibly me -- would have walked over and knocked his fat, repulsive ass out of his chair -- for starters. A man who treats a woman like this deserves a good ass-kicking. The people at ASU who endured his odious behavior for years without resorting to violence are destined for sainthood.)

There will be more.

 

[Big Nasty]

I hadn't read all of your post before I responded, but you're absolutely right that the last place anyone sane would accuse of coming up with a liberal conspiracy is a farming town in Arkansas. It's practically the definition of Good Old Boys club. Of course, Sweet wouldn't have been invited to that club, either.

Well, I suspect that Mr. Sweet hasn't got a real understanding of actual political positions and convictions, to him it's apparently all about class, race and status. He probably doesn't understand that poor rural white people like himself aren't automatically conservatives, just as people with wealth and authority aren't always liberals. I think that is a possible explanation to why his liberal strawmen sometimes resemble conservative strawmen.

 

[ASU]

I think it's probably something like this:

Sweet grew up somewhere with no liberal influence at all. None. His concepts for liberalism were all mostly shaded in racially-charged hues, because that's how local politics work on the outskirts of 62% black Memphis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Tennessee#Demographics).

He would have seen a lot of cynical shit. A lot of pandering and a lot of hypocrisy on both sides of the racial divide, and thats at the State level so you can imagine how grimy the street-level hood rats (of any race) would be. Still, this was far off stuff, not actually local, in the same way that when you live in a rural area you get the local news from the nearest big town. So he didn't actually see most of these inner-city welfare queens he was so angry about, but he'd frequently hear all kinds of sensationalized crap about them second hand.

Then, ofc, all of his news and conversations would have been conservatively biased, so he would have seen the worst in everything local democrats did. This would have culminated in Bill Clinton ascending to the Presidency from Governor of Arkansas, which probably confirmed all of his worst fears about everything. I mean, here's a guy whose only basis for reference is "white people politically appeasing the blacks". He would have felt that about Little Rock just as much as Memphis (here's Tennessee's governor at the time, I'll save you the click; it's a white guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Sundquist). It doesn't matter if it's factually true or not, this stuff was fed to Sweet through FOX News-style AM radio programs and the Limbaugh show and so on. His truths were formed for him.

So, here's a guy who knows jack shit about politics other than that, as a white guy in the modern South, he is totally a victim of racial... something or other, he's not even exactly sure he just knows that people smarter than him have told him those "lazy, good for nothing blacks" owe him something. Of course, if you asked him why he hates the blacks he'd eventually say something similar to "They think everyone owes them something", but awareness of that sort of hypocrisy obviously never enters his head or we wouldn't be discussing him here.

So this guy goes to college, and boy, are those professors stupid. They think joking about "those dirty blacks" is un-PC. The 90's were all about throwing PC out the window, so Jon Sweet decided he was going to enlighten the campus with his oh-so clever and super-subtle racism. I mean, before that all the racism he'd heard were literal "She-boon" type jokes so, just making snide comments about Moeisha was sure to slide under the radar, and if it didn't, well, it was college, he'd just impress them all by proving that he was the most open minded person there because he was the only one who was being "honest about race". I mean, it's no different to the sort of honest reality a comedian would be applauded for sharing. Everyone else was just trying to cover up the clear facts about blacks being vaguely, and obviously, inferior.

And so he goes to the only semi-liberal place in the entire fucking North-East of the state, and he posts the most stupidly inflammatory ass-showing shit he can until they shitcan him, and since this is the only place he's ever been that didn't approve of his coon humor, they're clearly these citified liberals he's been hearing so much about, these self-hating white people that need to learn the right people to hate. They hate their own whiteness so much, that they hate Jon Sweet's whiteness too. It's the only way he can explain it to himself. The concept of moderates, of people who just don't want to stir the pot, doesn't even occur to him because he's always hated blacks on some level, and that hatred was, silently or otherwise, always approved by those around him.

Until ASU. He finally reached a place that pushed back, and it pushed back hard.

Every small bureaucracy can be a nightmare if you're on the wrong side of it. You don't want to piss off the local sheriffs office or the mayor. You don't want to get on the radar as a pest to someone who has actual power and can idly make your life miserable. Once Sweet got his nuts caught in that college administrations vice-grip, he was well and truly stuck. For once he'd made an actual enemy, the sort that you can't get around without some kind of real world political pull, which he and his goofy-ass mannerisms had no concept of. He had fucked with authority and the authority had challenged not just him, but his entire worldview. Sweet learned, crushingly, that somehow, against all odds, the one glorious place he'd ever found in his entire life had rejected him wholesale. Spat him out and ordered him never to return. The kicker? Jonesboro, AR is over 70% white (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonesboro,_Arkansas). He probably thought he was at least half preaching to the choir, and instead the choir kicked him off the pulpit.

So, he goes home, and there's no computer. Who has the computer? The state. Who ran the state? Bill Clinton and friends. Bill fucking Clinton just fucking took away Sweets access to a CD-Burner. And Bill Clinton ran the country. It was all connected. Rush was right. It all made sense. He'd finally brushed up against the evil liberal media machine he'd heard so much about.

And that's when Mr. Sweet started plotting revenge and turned into the comic book drawing comic book villain we know today.

That's my theory, anyway.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

@ASU, what's the avatar of? I'm guessing some building on campus.

Anyway, if you read the thread, you'll find that since then, Sweet has said stuff like it's "high time" for the "progressives at ASU" to be swept out and Sweet let back in. Sweet has also been jealous of the perks the students get, like the dining, a computer lab with floppy drives and CD burners (he was really fixated on the whole CD burner thing for awhile), and TV lounge (Sweet really likes TV - the DTV transition and the TV ratings system are hot-button issues to him). Also, at one point, Sweet wanted to obtain these run-down buildings near the campus and turn them into a place where guys like him could have girls from the campus over for sex, in the midst of an environment recreated from the 90s, IIRC.

Sweet also thought that college dating consisted of more or less just phone sex. Apparently, that was Sweet's experience with dating, so he projected and thought all college dating was like that. I'm not too familiar with how it went down, but I believe this one girl trolled him by having a phone sex "relationship" with him, either before or after she saw him in person wearing purple pants, and of course, that cap studded with novelty pins and buttons.

Also, I find it interesting in light of all these recent revelations that Sweet still blames the TV ratings system, among other subjects that aren't himself or his own actions, for getting kicked off the Herald.

 

[ASU]

My avatar is of the library. It's the most scenic spot on campus, arguably. It's tornado country out there so there aren't a lot of tall buildings, just the library tower, the dorms, and hotels. People would pop open the lock to get on the roof of the dorms and you'd have the most amazing view, there are some hills off in the distance but other than that it's flat as far as the eyes can see. Some people took to throwing fire extinguishers off the roof and they put twice as many locks on the doors after that. People always have to ruin good things.

At night they light the library tower up and huge swarms of bugs descend into the lightbeams. These bugs are then eaten by bats. We spent many nights just getting high or drunk and sitting on the lawn watching the bats fly a few feet overhead, illuminated against the night sky.

This and chilling at the pond were, besides the arcade machine or playing console games in a dorm room, about all there was to do on campus, really. Everything there was to do, bands to see or clubs to go to, were in Memphis (which is about an hours drive away if memory serves), so it's the kind of place where most of the time you would talk about going someplace else.

A large part of my interest in Sweet probably comes back to Jonesboro being a place I couldn't wait to leave (I only spent one year there before transferring out), while for him it was apparently some kind of metropolis. Putting myself in his shoes (I'm a racist, I'm a cowardly bastard, I'm a liar, and I'm scared, etc) and trying to visualize the world is an interesting experience, because I think that's the only way you can make sense of Sweet. You have to accept that his character flaws, as we see them, aren't an act. They are his reality. I find that fascinating. The rest of his personality I don't find interesting at all, I mean, he'd be a pretty standard guy, even things like the fixation on burping and farting are the sort of things that my grandpa would have found, quite honestly, fucking hilarious. My grandpa was the sort of guy who, if you handed him a cucumber, would immediately stick it between his legs and say, "Hey! Look at my Goober!", and my grandma would swat at him with a newspaper or something. That's just old-style southern redneck humor. Sweet tried to translate that to the digital age and took it too far and it comes out looking like what it probably is; a shit fetish.

But so there's a pattern emerging there. Fart humor is quietly accepted in the South, Sweet takes it too far. Racial humor is quietly accepted in the South, Sweet takes it too far. We keep coming back to "this guy doesn't know how to tailor his material to his audience", and I think that's also a common complaint he gets over his comics.

He's a product of another time, and he can't go back to it. I feel bad for him in the sense that he didn't exactly ask for any of this. He didn't ask to grow up in a one-dimensional shithole, he didn't ask to have racist views instilled in him from a young age, etc, but at the same time, lots of people grow up in that environment and leave it behind once they realize there's more to life than "the bluebird doesn't marry the redbird and the redbird doesn't marry the bluebird" (this is an actual way that interracial marriage was described as against God to me as a young child, and even at 5 I figured it was probably bullshit because what the fuck do birds know about color).

 

[Holdek]

That weird bio at the end of "The Second Mrs. Pecker" is the only place I've seen where he actually claims to have a BS in psychology. Everywhere else he implies that he has a degree in psychology by saying things like "graduated from ASU, where he studied psychology and English." It is possible that he attended community college for a year before going to ASU; he sometimes talks about his three years at Arkansas State, and he doesn't seem the type to graduate early. But Mississippi County Community College (or at least its successor institution) offers only two freshman-level courses in psychology -- not enough for an associate's degree, much less a BS.

Keep in mind that MCCC may have offered more courses, perhaps enough for an associate's in psychology (do those even exist?), back in the mid-90s, which the online catalog wouldn't reflect as it seems to only go back to 2006.

The psych eval he was ordered to get could have uncovered his issues. He shouldn't have been charged for it at all, but he's a victim of our for-profit health care system. I find it increasingly difficult to laugh at him because the system really did fail him, though not in the way he thinks.

Realistically, though, and I kind of alluded to this before, but do you really think the dialogue could have gone like this?

Dean: You have to get a psych eval.

Sweet: I would but I can't afford it.

Dean: Well then, you're fucked. We're going to freeze your records and ban you from campus. Sucks to be you. Ha ha ha ha ha!

I think it was more like...

Dean: You have to get a psych eval.

Sweet: NO! I'm not going to pay for that unless I can question my accusers during it!

Dean: That's...not how those things work. You leave me no choice but to freeze your records and ban you from campus.

 

[DrJonesHat]

OK, it's time for some answers from people who were there. I have tracked down a couple who are willing to talk. I have intentionally avoided taking the easy route and contacting those who are on Mr. Sweet's many hit lists. They are probably not unbiased sources; and there is no need to further fuel his clinically insane hatred of those long-suffering individuals. Others were not difficult to find.

What happened in the notorious flash incident?

A female undergraduate photographer from the ASU yearbook showed up in the offices of The Herald one day when Mr. Sweet was present. Her assignment was to take photos of the staff at work. She was shooting inside an office, so she used a flash. The first time the flash went off, Mr. Sweet cursed at her. He was not the subject of the photo. (His description of the event notwithstanding, she did not sneak up on him and discharge a billion gigawatt flash in his face, blinding him for days and inducing the immediate onset of melanoma. No one wanted to photograph Mr. Sweet, with the possible exception of itinerant photographers from National Geographic or The Journal of Abnormal Psychology.)

Ignoring Mr. Sweet's outburst, the yearbook photographer continued to shoot. (Good on her!) Every time the flash went off, Mr. Sweet cursed at her. When this did not cause her to leave after a few shots, Mr. Sweet launched into a long, loud and offensive tirade about how sexually attractive he finds lesbians. The photographer continued to ignore him, and each time the flash was fired he paused in his rant about lesbians, cursed at her, and then resumed his lurid diatribe about the daughters of Lesbos.

Standard operating procedure for a yearbook photographer used to be to shoot at least one roll of film on a major organization like the college paper. It is probably safe to assume that this poor woman was cursed at on at least 24 separate occasions in addition to being the object of his obscene raving about lesbians.

The photographer complained about the loathsome vermin's abusive outbursts. (This probably came as a huge surprise to the the bad boy of college journalism.) Mr. Sweet -- who would have been expelled immediately at many universities -- was merely banned from the paper's office for one or two weeks. (If Mr. Sweet had behaved like this in the office of my college paper, one of the guys -- quite possibly me -- would have walked over and knocked his fat, repulsive ass out of his chair -- for starters. A man who treats a woman like this deserves a good ass-kicking. The people at ASU who endured his odious behavior for years without resorting to violence are destined for sainthood.)

There will be more.

Perhaps a "corrective" ass-kicking would have positively adjusted Mr. Sweet's attitude. It might have taken several. On the other hand, it might have just reinforced his delusions of persecution. How did you track down a witness to the flash incident? Also, Sweet has mentioned several times his intention to track down the woman who trolled him with phone sex and get "her side of the story". I sincercely hope his technical ineptitude will prevent him from utilizing the many resources available on the internet to track someone down. Assuming there has been no contact between her and Sweet since she met him that one time, that means 17-18 years have passed. It is doubtful she remembers an event so insignificant, and she's probably married at this point, with children and has no desire to explain her youthful antics to some creeper she met only briefly nearly 20 years ago. I really, really hope he's unable to locate her, and if by some fluke he does, I hope she is very firm and tells him to leave her alone and never contact her again.

Keep in mind that MCCC may have offered more courses, perhaps enough for an associate's in psychology (do those even exist?), back in the mid-90s, which the online catalog wouldn't reflect as it seems to only go back to 2006.


Realistically, though, and I kind of alluded to this before, but do you really think the dialogue could have gone like this?

Dean: You have to get a psych eval.

Sweet: I would but I can't afford it.

Dean: Well then, you're fucked. We're going to freeze your records and bann you from campus. Sucks to be you. Ha ha ha ha ha!

I think it was more like...

Dean: You have to get a psych eval.

Sweet: NO! I'm not going to pay for that unless I can question my accusers during it!

Dean: That's...not how those things work. You leave me no choice but to freeze your records and bann you from campus.

Of course, we only have Sweet's word that the eval would have cost $500. The $500 may have been for actual counseling, but regardless, Sweet doesn't think there's anything wrong with him, so even if everything had been free, he might have fought it on "principle".

 

[Holdek]

I can share a few things about ASU Jonesboro in the late 1990s, because I was a student there myself in 1997. I think I missed Sweet by a year or two, either way I didn't know him directly, and I think I was there before him so I wouldn't have heard anything based on his reputation.

The overall area is economically depressed to an intense degree. The areas in the East of Arkansas, especially along the flood plains of the Mississippi river, are some of the most destitute in the US as far as I'm aware. It's so bad they have to bus in medical supplies and vaccinations to kids, as in, literally, a bus shows up in and all the local parents bring their kids to the bus for their shots, because otherwise they won't get them. It's the kind of place where you can go on Google Maps Streetview and see people playing dominoes in the middle of a street, complete with large table and four chairs, because there's no traffic, or even other houses sometimes for miles. It's a hopeless place to be a kid of any race, but, you can imagine that once you add the racial component into the poverty, it's an even nastier place to get your world-view from.

Jonesboro itself, like most Arkansas towns, is a farming town primarily. There are cow fields literally bordering the campus in some places. Soybeans are a big local crop, as is rice. Methamphetamine was and still is a large problem. If you go to the "wrong" part of town the prostitutes and crack dealers would be brazen and out in the open at the local hotels. There is a nicer part, a more downtown part, with a small art and music scene and so on. Liquor sales were illegal in the county up until 10 or so years ago iirc, so, it was illegal to buy booze locally when Sweet was there. There are a lot of gangs in the area, although not so much as you would see in a place like Detroit or LA. They'd claim Crip, Gangster Disciple/Folk (Folk Nation doesn't exist anymore I don't think) or Blood and fight pretty openly but for the most part the squabbles didn't get into gunfights (although this was different in relatively nearby Little Rock, which was the murder capital of the US for a year or two I think, and the much closer Memphis).

In short, life was (and probably still is) cheap out there. You can be born, live, and die, and not travel more than 50 - 100 miles away from home, ever. When I was in high school my health teacher once asked everyone who hadn't left the county to raise their hands, and about half the class (these are 16 - 18 year old kids) raised theirs. So it's not just isolated, it's not just economically fucked up, it's not just redneck, it's like a perfect storm of depressing.

Regardless of exactly where in North-East Arkansas he lived, this is the sort of place John Sweet called home while growing up. There are nicer places out there, but, they are exclusively for the rich, suburbs with McMansions and their own school districts, that sort of thing. Based on his fear of practically everything, he probably never even saw the inside of these neighborhoods, and probably doesn't have any concept for how much better others have it than he does.

The University was a rather typical place, but, in a setting like Jonesboro what the rest of the US would call typical does look somewhat heavenly. All around are pig fields, cow fields, farm equipment, rednecks, drug addicts, and failed lives, even the local malls are boring, dreary places with little to see, and here's this reasonably attractive campus with relatively educated people and a fairly nice environment. It had both a buffet style cafeteria (with terrible food that was "free" as in included in the overall price if you paid to live in the dorms) and a second, smaller restaurant style place serving (probably Soy) burgers and fries and so on for a few bucks. There were even a few quarter-taking arcade machines (Street Fighter I or II iirc) and so on. To John Sweet, it probably was Shangri-La.

Another thing I'll confirm is that Sweet would have stuck out like a sore thumb. You notice in the yearbook pictures that all the rest of the kids look, for lack or a better word, "normal", and that's no fluke. Growing up in the south you either conform or you are in for a rough time. There would have been several dozen kids in his high school that somewhat resembled Sweet, including female versions. More or less alone, raised in some remote fuckhole, probably a face full of acne or eczema just to add insult to injury, with shit parents, shit neighbors, no future. Most of those kids didn't bother to go to college, because no one made them, or as Sweet would put it "No one told them to". They'd take a job working fast food or security out of high school to escape their shitty home life, marry some heavyset person who churned out 2 - 3 kids, and that's it. That's their life story. In that light, it's somewhat remarkable that Sweet made it to ASU at all. I might can explain that, though, because of how I got to ASU myself. At that time, you'd take an ACT and a maybe an ASVAB, a PSAT and/or SAT as routine. If you did even marginally well on the ACT, you didn't have to take the others and you'd automatically get a full paid scholarship to a public State University of your choice. All you had to do is show up and not be completely incompetent and you were good. To give some reference for how easy it was, I showed up deeply stoned and with no math ability and I still got a scholarship on the first try. Sweet is repugnant as a personality, but he's knowledgeable enough that I wouldn't be surprised to hear he got into college in a similar way.

I can't speak for how he was treated, but I can say how we treated people who acted like Sweet; we hazed the shit out of them. Flat out. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't the sort of place where you'd get bullied just for showing up and being weird, far from it. There weren't many "freaks" or people into "alternative" music or any of that so there were tight knit cliques of rejects and stoners and so on, and you had to work really hard not to be accepted because most of us came from poverty and were in no position to judge. Being an atheist was a big deal. Being gay was a big deal. I can't imagine anyone being trans out there because they would have been hazed relentlessly and from all directions, the local adults (although not so much the professors) as well as the kids.

The stuff about pennies in his dorm door ring true. If you got on anyones nerves in the dorms they'd be sure to let you know. People would do things like coat your doorknob in.. substances, whatever substances they were I don't know, so you'd get weird crap on your hand and it would slip off when you'd try to open it, or they'd slide anon messages under your door (we didn't have the internet in dorms back then, and computers were luxuries only the rich kids had) as a warning when you were asleep. Hell, one kid was known to brag about being a woman-beater, and some kids took the plastic covers off all the lights in his dorm hall and piled them up on his door at an angle so when he'd open it they'd fall on him. They'd do it repeatedly, too, and when he'd complain about it no one would help him. I want to repeat that, for emphasis; if you were so weird you got bullied, and you were a dude and especially some creepy dude, no one had any sympathy for you. Not even the Resident Assistants. It was that kind of place. Someone like Sweet would have been the equivalent to walking around with a "Kick Me" sign on his back, and found no shortage of people willing to spare a kick.

So you've got an atmosphere of somewhat dog-eat-dog kids, not in the competitive sense, but in the "if you're too weird we're going to haze you until you leave" sense. This is probably why the people at the school paper tried to be nice to him. They likely were trying to be the counter-balance to the hazing Sweet was taking, because they'd have realized instantly that the pennies weren't "to shower him with wealth", and maybe they thought he knew better too, but was trying to face the bullying without losing his dignity (ha). Things like the "bad boy of conservative college journalism" (double ha) or whatever he said they called him were probably some really nice older Christian ladies trying their best to support and help steer this obviously wayward guy back onto the path of semi-respectablity before he became so ostracized that he became pants-on-head crazy.

Being a staunch and outspoken conservative would have been enough to get Sweet bullied, not because of the views being unpopular (far from it), but because of who he was. A suave looking guy in a suit, or a lumbering jock from the football team, saying the same things Sweet said, even making the same off-color jokes, would have been fine socially. There are huge portions of Arkansas population that are quietly (or otherwise) racist. But Sweet would have gravitated to the weirdos, the loners, and apparently the journalists and writers. These were absolutely cliques there that were open to outcasts like Sweet, but he would have alienated them completely the first time he popped his mouth open and a "black people" joke came out. That shit does not fly down there unless you're with your racist buddies behind closed doors, and I'm 100% certain Sweet was an open target in his dorm (to the point of honestly flirting with violence, hell, I knew a high school kid who was shot dead for teasing a kid for being black) because everyone would have been talking shit about him. He would have been the local freak show on the floor he lived on, and fucking with him would have been a bonding experience for everyone doing it. I think I read in the AFD thread here where someone wrote something like "You made everyone hate you so much they united and bonded from their shared hatred of you". I think that is a perfect explanation for what happened to John Sweet.

To sum it up, Sweet could have cut his mop of hair, shaved, put on some decent clothes, and been sadly almost identical to a lot of the rest of ASU students. He probably wouldn't have had to change anything else, because it was a low-effort atmosphere where how you looked and carried yourself said a lot more about you than the things you did. He could have imitated the dress style of virtually any male he came into contact with (jeans, button up shirt tucked in, optional cowboy hat) and found his niche quite easily, probably even some girlfriends. Instead he decided to dress up like some kind of wayward hippie straight out of the 60s, alienating any conservatives who would otherwise have come at least somewhat to his aid, and then further alienating any liberals with his 1950s political views, sounding like someones cranky-ass grandpa.

I speculate that the plagiarism accusation is both true, and was more or less totally inconsequential, the sort of thing that would have been brushed under the rug for most other students. With Sweet, I think they saw the opportunity to be rid of someone who was using their paper to spread a hateful and completely unwelcome message, and took it.

Apologies for the long ass post, I think that's everything I had to say about it, hopefully I didn't sperg out too much about my own experiences, but, maybe this will add some color to the background haze of his past.

This would explain his complex about "Ashleigh" supposedly spurning him because she was "rich," even though by most American standards she was middle-class at most.

Is the ease of getting in the same for the UA system or just the ASU one?

Also, was Jonesboro the place where those two kids pulled the fire alarm at their middle school and then shot the exiting students, in the '90s?

 

[Adamska]

I actually feel a lot more educated about the situation Sweets was and @ASU you are dabes. This really adds to just how amazing it is he fell apart into nuclear failure, at least to me. He legitimately could've gotten the degree and everything if he just was better at controlling his impulses. Or hell, dressed a bit more normally. That just makes this even more depressing/amusing to me.

 

[Holdek]

Did Sweet ever say why he gets a tugboat? Or has the reason changed through the retellings of the story.

He first revealed, on another forum under a different name, that he gets it for his laryngitis, but now claims that he gets it because his mothers' shop went out of business (which I'm pretty sure doesn't get you although it could be a half-truth in that it was used to get the additional SSI money).

 

[drtoboggan]

He first revealed, on another forum under a different name, that he gets it for his laryngitis, but now claims that he gets it because his mothers' shop went out of business (which I'm pretty sure doesn't get you although it could be a half-truth in that it was used to get the additional SSI money).

So it's not for his obvious mental problems or is he lying about that?

 

[DrJonesHat]

This would explain his complex about "Ashleigh" supposedly spurning him because she was "rich," even though by most American standards she was middle-class at most.

Is the ease of getting in the same for the UA system or just the ASU one?

Also, was Jonesboro the place where those two kids pulled the fire alarm at their middle school and then shot the exiting students, in the '90s?

Yeah, that's the place. It was nearby in an unincorporated area. But yeah, you got it.

I do hope Sweet summons up the courage to resume his usual posting behavior.

As for his tugboat, I doubt it was for laryngitis. At one point, my bipolar disorder was kicking my ass to the point that I couldn't hold a job, and I considered applying for SSI. The lawyer I consulted informed me that despite the severity of my illness, I would most likely be denied on my first attempt, so it's unlikely he'd get it for that, even after multiple attempts. I eventually got stabilized and can work now, but for awhile, it looked like the ol' tugboat was gonna be my life. He would not have gotten it for his mom's shop going out of business. That's not what it's for. He most likely has some condition he hasn't shared with the class that qualified him. Or he got it for "respiratory issues" like severe asthma and allergies, and just said laryngitis as that may be the primary symptom. But believe me, it wouldn't have been for laryngitis alone.

 

[Holdek]

So it's not for his obvious mental problems or is he lying about that?

I don't know for sure. I don't even know if he knows for sure. But, he has complained on multiple occasions through the years that he's barely able to talk due to his laryngitis.

 

[drtoboggan]

I don't know for sure. I don't even know if he knows for sure. But, he has complained on multiple occasions through the years that he's barely able to talk due to his laryngitis.

That would be enough to preclude work, but I think laryngitis is a temporary condition.

 

[Dr. Merkwurdichliebe]

Of course, we only have Sweet's word that the eval would have cost $500. The $500 may have been for actual counseling, but regardless, Sweet doesn't think there's anything wrong with him, so even if everything had been free, he might have fought it on "principle".

Earlier in this thread there is a statement from Mr. Sweet that he -- a grown-ass, able-bodied, college-educated man -- "reluctantly" agreed to assist his impoverished mother, off of whom he had been freeloading for years, by -- in the best tradition of our pioneer forebears -- going on welfare as mentally disabled. I wonder what his family had to threaten him with in order to get him to submit the the battery of psychological evaluations that are necessary before you can qualify for federal disability payments.