“I see you!” was the chilling doom that echoed in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythic child hero, Frodo the hobbit, whenever he donned the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings movies. This may have not been lifted from Tolkien, but was congruent with his use of the fantastic race of harry-footed midgets as metaphors for the innocence of children faced with a bleakly setting adult world even as their own appreciation of wider human questions dawned.
On two occasions, this past week, as I prepared to leave Baltimore for New Jersey and points geographically north and morally south, I had two conversations with exceptionally bright minds who have found themselves peering into the pit of evil which is the post-national collective mind. Both of these men are a year two ten younger than I and both came from deeply liberal, backgrounds, raised from their earliest years to believe in doing good for others and to refrain from practicing untruth. Now they find themselves at the edge of a yawning abyss, within which team the overwhelming majority of human minds, convinced one in all that doing good and upholding untruth, caring for the collective and bowing before the weight of the deepest lies, must be conjoined in one’s words, else the thinker be named unclean and cast from the fold.
To name a woman a woman or a man a man now number among the most heinous sins.
Liverpool Joe, called me on the phone and was beside himself with guilt apologizing with his first words for throwing me under the thought bus as he explained to me that he wished to apply for a certain job, a job that might enable him to better provide for his wife and children. Unfortunately, in taking the precaution of googling himself, he discovered a single result, a book review of one of my books, which, deep in his mind, he knows, might prevent him from being hired or worse, curse him to be later fired after taking on debt for his family’s sake. I told him, “Bro, take the review down if you have a doubt. I would hate for your approval of my writing to harm you. I’ll be fine.”
It wrenched his soul, twisting on the vile lie that is the sensibility of our mega-civic hive mind upon which a breadwinner must be impaled lest the teaming insects of our kind lose faith in their improbable Untruth.
Then, two hours later, I met Joel, a documentary filmmaker, a leftist agitator who was amazed at “how aggressive Baltimore is” as he struggled to park, and not get beat up for the crime of “my complexion.” He had big plans for interviewing me based on his reading of my Harm City work, as he himself is a storied expert of the American urban condition, a man who has been beaten and tortured by police, who has felt the boot heel of the old conservative law enforcement order quite literally as his bones were broken for the crime of complaining that a fellow citizen was being beaten by police.
Joel had questions about the viability of Baltimore city gentrification, of the direction urban blight might take, of the sustainability of near-suburban sprawl, all for background information he chimed:
“You must understand, as an independent filmmaker of my complexion, if I wrote an article about your work and failed to roundly condemn you—and even though we may disagree on certain things, your work has value—than I might very well lose a chance for a film grant. You see, the independent film industry is entirely controlled according to the sensibilities of females and blacks—these people hold all of the purse strings and they are very sensitive. We have come to the point where for you to honesty report what you have witnessed is heresy and I cannot attain a position in my field from which to honestly report what I witness, if it is known that I appreciate your work. To even have our name in the same article could be crushing.”
We continued speaking of urban things and of our shared art of writing, discussing fiction and nonfiction into the night, knowing that are meeting of like minds must remain a perilously held secret.
This is America.
Rubbing Out Palefaces
Moral Minority Survival at the End of Caucasian Time Paperback
Believe it!
me.me/i/face-it-white-man-the-way-things-are-going-feminist-7813869
"“You must understand, as an independent filmmaker of my complexion, if I wrote an article about your work and failed to roundly condemn you—and even though we may disagree on certain things, your work has value—than I might very well lose a chance for a film grant. You see, the independent film industry is entirely controlled according to the sensibilities of females and blacks—these people hold all of the purse strings and they are very sensitive. We have come to the point where for you to honesty report what you have witnessed is heresy and I cannot attain a position in my field from which to honestly report what I witness, if it is known that I appreciate your work. To even have our name in the same article could be crushing.”"
In the Soviet Union, the way to unofficially endorse a dissident's work in a government newspaper was to condemn the work in the introduction then quote it at length. That way, the public could read the work without having to dig for it. It's gotten to that point here.
The more important need is to re-establish the patriarchy and dis-enfranchise women. My friend from Nigeria says men are miserable here and everything is set up to give women stuff. He mumbled something then about "Maybe civilization..." then I just repeated James' assertion that civilization is a lie. At least ours is.