What is (a) hate (crime)? I

psy•cho•sis, n
loss of contact with reality: a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or mania that is marked by delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, and distorted perceptions of reality.
Microsoft Encarta

Is it too soon, for decency, or too late, because things move fast nowadays, to speculate on the potential for an Omar Thornton fan page? Due to the solemn credulity with which the media addressed the accusations—of a killer against his still dying victims—no mass murderer has so quickly gained so high a platform for so petty a charge. When the crimination is “white racism” no decent interval is allowed. Neither, skepticism. Omar’s hearing was immediately and dutifully granted in response to his crimes, with the usual suspect “experts” weighing in—only this time on workplace discrimination, not, as we’ve come to expect, workplace violence.

This estimation of “racism”, broadly defined, as the equivalent of violence (with the noose as a talisman and the “n-word” as incantation, both imbued with supernatural powers) is how the cultural commissariat sanctions black-on-white violence as an unfortunate but understandable means of redress.

The press response occurred at the nexus of willed ignorance and forced imagination. The sort of horrors before which this cloistered class feigns to shudder on behalf of Thornton and his ilk they can only imagine. And imagine they do, with energy and diligence. I had previously reckoned a sane man’s homicidal “breaking point” was well beyond an overheard slur, an item of graffiti, and a company’s objection to being systematically robbed by its own. Merely mentioning these charges here, even if true in their slender entirety, is to give them indecent attention. Forgive me, but this is a very dirty business.

And we still don’t know the depths to which our media will go to prove its ideological gullibility—no echoes of restraint have yet answered the pings of credulity that were the first news reports. Exhaustion, rather than shame, quelled the herd’s hysteria. We can say the farcical delusion goes at least as deep as this Christian Science Monitor headline:

Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.

How quaint of you, if you thought the answer all-too-clear in the case of a shooter singling out the middle-aged white men who built and sustained the company that employed and endured him (as they tend to do wherever we find productive endeavor—an unacknowledged fact explaining most of the deliberately cultivated resentment, eagerly taken up by Omar, for this, the last remaining class against which discrimination is codified into law and derision is compelled by culture). No, this “racism” doesn’t interest the media. Even in the act of murder a black man isn’t granted the capacity for hate that a white innocent bears like a human stain, shed not even in death. America’s “original sin” is, after all, confined to white Americans in perpetuity, whoever they are and whatever they do. Sickening still, but no longer surprising.

The grotesque irony of pursuing a homicidal bigot’s complaints of racial harassment is only noticed by the irrelevant (my hand’s raised). Still, the CSM story above actually lagged the pack to the skeptical rear by featuring an authority discounting, rather than humoring or giving undue credence to, Omar’s charges. For the media the event worked like a brain-teaser, where habitual thinking leads one to miss plain meaning. You know:

one of the coins is a nickel; the doctor is the boy’s mother; the hateful murderer is the bigot.

No “but of course” moment is forthcoming. Here the press is like the ideal subject for a hypnotist’s lounge act: easily brought under, highly suggestible, shameless in its stupor, oblivious in retrospect.

This defamation of the dead isn‘t without its black comedy: the murderer was wearied, we’re told (by a callow girlfriend as oblivious to shame as the reporters encouraging her, reveling in the attention and enthusiastically adopting, as it were, the role usually reserved for a tearful mother), by the racism that just so happened to find him at every job. The chronically incompetent and stupid typically blame luck or a spiteful world for their misfortunes, and in Omar’s mind racism followed him like a personal storm cloud, manifested, I presume, in charges of tardiness, ineptitude, theft. Perhaps it is me who’s being naïve. After all, what a boundless reservoir of racism white America is!

The media’s appetite would not be sated before we were assured of the gentle nature of this man and his love for family, lovers, and handguns. One newspaper featured a photo spread of the widow (of the killer, not one of the killed), complete with an image of the tattoo consecrating her upper thigh to their love.

In this AP story some demanded (further) justice be delivered upon the dead:

Some experts said Friday that, although nothing justifies Thornton’s killing spree, the allegations of workplace racism should be investigated so they can either be dealt with or laid to rest.
“You have to investigate it,” said employment lawyer Kelly Scott, adding that racial harassment in the workplace is often a crime.

“Any chance you have to make your workplace a better place, a safer place, you have to take it,” Scott said. “If there are people who have these attitude problems or problem dealing with other races, they should lose their jobs.” [seems the company attempted just this, in firing Omar]

Sharon Toomer, founder of the website blackandbrownnews.com, called it “an accountability issue.”
“If he didn’t (report harassment), that’s great. He’s just a nut case,” [but if he did…] she said. “If he did go and nobody did anything, then the company’s hands are not clean.” [killin’ is too good for ’em]

Messages seeking comment about a potential investigation into Thornton’s racism claims were left Friday for the Hartford State’s Attorney’s Office, the FBI’s New Haven office, the chairman of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, and for the president of the Connecticut NAACP.

Once the guilt of the dead is confirmed by the standard of federal “civil rights law”—wherein the burden of proof is on the accused (here they can be said to be doubly disadvantaged, compelled by law to prove the negative in a voice rendered silent by their accuser; damn this teacher is strict!)—remedies will be considered. Perhaps a class action suit and subsequent settlement, an injunction mandating some sort of diversity program, a donation to an activist organization (and administration ally) of the Justice Department’s selection, the hiring of some member of the elect. Ms. Sherrod is available.
It has been a teachable moment.

It’s our secret! Never teach the Wu Tang!

An Untethered News Services (UNS) exclusive:

The following video was reportedly smuggled out of a meeting of the highly secretive group known as “Journolist.” According to the former member who provided it to UNS on condition of anonymity, it shows a “far too common” ritual used for purposes of initiation and punishment. Untethered cannot vouch for its authenticity, but note the individual administering punishment here does bear a striking resemblance to the group’s founder. Warning: the following contains images some will find disturbing.

Our source also provided the lyrics to the group’s secret anthem:

Who controls your Google hits?
Who air-brushes Gaga’s tits?
We do! We do!
Who knows when you get the clap?
Who thinks you’re a bunch of saps?
We do! We do!
Who’s behind all those theme bars?
Who makes Jonah Hill a star?
We do! We do!
Who made Black Eyed Peas a hit?
Who deems Olbermann a wit?
We do! We do!

Despite revealing the secretive workings of the group, the former member remains committed to the idea behind it.
“Initially it was supposed to be a safe place,” he said, clutching a balled-up tissue dampened by tears, “where we could share our fears and frustrations, in a non-judgmental, text-positive environment of acceptance and understanding. A place for a few hundred of our most vulnerable individuals whose only other options for such expression are in the widely circulated and influential publications they write for. A harrassment-free zone where they could share ideas and speak freely when referring to certain classes, sheltered from the chilling effect of public scrutiny.”

He lamented the group’s reputed demise:

“Now how will we fashion the template by which to frame the issues of the day for the average American, without being hounded into silence by populist demagogues? In a democracy such as ours, the public square is no place for forming a workable consensus. These aren’t bad people; these are the best people. These are the people who relentlessly expose the hidden racism inherent in American society. These are the people who shine a light on the coded bigotry of the Tea Party movement’s rhetoric. These are the people who hold public figures accountable for the intolerance they privately express. Who else is going to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire when they commit a gaffe? How will they perform these vital functions if they have to answer for every opinion or remark? The beneficial, free-wheeling discourse the Founders envisioned must be protected from public scrutiny, lest it spin out of control or is taken over by the irresponsible.”

He took a moment to collect himself before continuing.

“But things started to go wrong right away. Cliques formed, discussions were dominated by some, or bogged down by others who took perverse pleasure in questioning basic assumptions. I didn’t sign on for that. People were being let in who shouldn’t have been there. One of them was even mis-identified as our Chosen One, with disastrous consequences.”
But the severity of discipline in the group was what finally drove him out:
“The paddling just got out of hand. Some of those guys took entirely too much pleasure in it–giving or receiving. I just wasn’t into it, and it was getting crazy. It got so you couldn’t pick a dime off the floor in there without catching a whack.”
Read more of our exclusive interview in this Sunday’s magazine.

Your Presence is Not Required

This is going to end badly.
Here I am slouching through middle-age; sexually I am hors de combat, as if by some secret but final decree. I lament it but the sentence is just–and just as well (I wouldn’t join any club that’d have me for a member, and I wouldn’t conjoin with anyone who’d have my member); I haven’t earned any better.
It’s time for a hobby, perhaps. But what the hell is a hobby? A man does a thing, or he doesn’t. Me, I don’t do anything.

I cannot help but see the futility in all forms of action. There is nothing I feel is better done than not done; all is a wash. The moment I take up a thing is the moment I lose interest in it. I am losing my ability to distinguish worth; everything is blending together in an unindividuated mass. Society is a great burlesque; garish, farcical, and in bad taste. Beneath “reality” some equilibrium sustains itself as sure as water finding its level, and humanity is but fodder; we are the inactive ingredient. Now don’t start on me. One doesn’t choose to believe such things; such things choose him. I’m not a cheerless man, and I don’t envy your engagement with humanity.

I find organizations inherently sinister. I despise collective action. Concern sickens me. All men are foreigners to me, speaking nonsense. I am nauseated by the pace of time–I have temporal motion sickness. The less of it that remains the more mysterious it is. Its passage, the grinding, erosive consistency of it, is beyond my capabilities of understanding. Thus my default position–petrified immobility.

It’s a congenital condition; you should see the rest of the family. Our indolence is sinful. How the hell this desultory line propagated is a mystery. We are a living refutation of evolution–and God. No logic or divinity could produce this. My family’s existence is a profanation. My existence, in a world of heroism and suffering, is an obscenity. Yet we endure. Yet here I am. Still standing and pointlessly defiant. And there you are.

Nonetheless I keep an eye on the horizon for something I don’t expect and wouldn’t recognize; I am open to the prospect of meaning. Still, it cannot change a thing, because whatever comes:
This is going to end badly.

In Memoriam

Originally posted on June 25, 2009

The Multitude Killed the Video Star

But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?
–”Arthur Frayne”, Zardoz

We played the grooves off of that record. My girlfriend had Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall on vinyl. For a post-adolescent white trash burnout, steeped in rock and leavened in punk and new wave, listening to something so mainstream felt downright subversive. But it would have taken a deliberate act of cultural bigotry to dismiss that album. Not that I pretend to be free of such bias; selective cultural inhibition is always operative in each of us, not only in determining what we won’t allow, but what which we force upon, ourselves. Witness installation art, postmodern architecture, public sculpture. It is not by accident that the more public the work the more deliberately it offends reason and beauty; if you live in a major city, there’s probably more than one monument to aspirational credulity within walking distance.

Later Jackson would transcend the simple genius of his early career with the Thriller album. The unmatched commercial success of Thriller was due mostly to its associated videos. Jackson’s innovation of employing experienced filmmakers using production values previously unseen in that still raw art form would pay off in orders of magnitude. But something was lost. The Thriller video struck me, as everyone around me, with its technical wizardry. But privately I couldn’t help noticing how glittering and trite it all was. While achieving something new by aspiring to music-as-cinema, it was still overrated as music and not very good as cinema. Michael Jackson, for me, was over and done with. But I was glad, with a pretentious snobbery I’ve yet to escape, that I was maintaining a healthy critical distance from what I saw as soulless commercialism. I was still deluded in thinking that music should remain immediate and a little raw, not co-opted. I still harbor that hopeless delusion, contrary to all experience. It was always just show business, emphasis on business. The trick is to discard the pointless bias against business, as such. Easier said than done.

Michael Jackson was not the first superstar, but he may be the first to publicly renounce personhood itself in favor of renown. Michael Jackson didn’t lose his individuality, he discarded it as a hindrance to celebrity. What was always unnerving about him was the absence behind the mystique. He did not start out as a “personality”, real or fabricated; there was never anything there to begin with beyond the remarkable talent. Through the years I’ve become convinced that the absence of personality, and eventually the grotesquerie that was offered in its place, amplified that talent. We never got to know him, even as we watched him grow up. It wasn’t just that he was private–lots of celebrities are “private”–it’s that he deliberately crafted a persona without personhood. He cobbled together a few cliches he found romantic–the eternal child as a result of being robbed of childhood, the lonely genius, the besieged eccentric–all bathetic in their self-pitying grandiosity. Michael Jackson made himself into a comic caricature of egomania.

He refused even to accept the limits of nature, treating his physical body as if it were as malleable as his public persona. Had he been less delusional, and perhaps more ably befriended by those around him, he might have been made to see that neither of these things were very much within his control. Michael Jackson, in his repeated disfigurement under the knife, took on the vanity of the nation. In this, his most ridiculed aspect, that which is considered most “abnormal” about him, he is in fact most like us. He was, if anything, a pioneer in the realm of plastic surgery. When he started out on his gruesome way, the practice was far less common than it is now. Michael took on our vanity the way Christ takes on our sins.

After his ascension into the heavens of transformative celebrity his career itself became a work of art as imagined by the People and expressed through commerce–something both more and less than art, somehow. His public persona and the transcription of his private life in the press and on television, his representation across the modes of media, morphing along the way like his physical appearance, increasingly as grotesque caricature, became our ongoing work of performance art, with an individual as our canvas and clay. Even now, after his death, the performance continues. We are not done with Michael Jackson. He “lives” on, as he wished.

Michael’s desperate megalomania and personal emptiness made him the ideal instrument of the multitude. There are many more to come. This is one more consequence of our newly global village. Contrary to our intuition, despite the boasts of those who celebrate the new placeless and personless order they are so eager to acquiesce to, the individual is losing if not lost. Individuality is less possible, more illusory than ever. Those who manage to escape the ground of obscurity for the heavens of celebrity will light this new reality as they burn out–like stars. No longer does the artist conceive for the People, but he is conceived by the People. Poor Michael Jackson, both brilliant and simple, cunning but callow, never had a chance. Whoever he was.

Cadence Song

Me? I hope to go out singing, defiantly. Like DeNiro’s redneck Nemesis in Cape Fear, warbling in tongues as the rising tide consumes him. I want to play myself over this way, a segue between shows, until the dirty water fills my lungs. It’s not bravery, it’s denial; and denial gets a bad rap. Denial is essential. Here’s to denial! Without it life would not be possible.

I had a moment of clarity–terror, that is–recently, regarding the reality of death. You may know what I’m talking about. These moments when the veil lifts, for no apparent reason. You stumble into the misty vale; you are suddenly lost. The unwelcome result of too much time alone. Solitude is dangerous. Solitude is a faint whiff of death. Solitude is death’s annex. I didn’t choose solitude, it chose me.

I think about death all the time, but from a cowardly psychological remove; indeed, the thinking and talking about death are just skirting about the reality, as if to appease it, or perhaps find some soft point of entry. We turn a thing over in our mind endlessly, compulsively, as if to discover it anew; we think our gaze has transforming powers. How can a thing be seen, named, obsessed over, so familiar, so present and still taunt us with its opacity and mystery?

Death is an impermeable thing because oblivion, or non-existence, is necessarily beyond comprehension. The mind cannot step outside itself in the end. You can’t imagine, much less know, it; we make do with the possibility of a thing called oblivion; an alternative to the fire of redemption, before which we alternately cower or warm ourselves. But then, perhaps non-existence simply isn’t possible. If energy never really dissipates, but merely transfers, morphing endlessly in an ultimately meaningless burlesque, why then should we cease to exist? Vapor, too, is a state of existence. Immortality is no less plausible than mortality. But the question cannot be answered. Each will learn–or not–for himself, alone, and only upon passing. Curious? You first.

This is why religion is a necessary constant of human behavior. Death is why the organized atheists can only piss into the wind endlessly. Theirs is a sterile zeal. Death is the darkened face of nature’s mocking mystery; death will forever be the abyss, the reason why the Known will always be but a sheen over the far greater Unknown.
Buck up, friend! Come along with me! We’ll sing together the tune we know by heart. We’ll sing like the hopeless do, like the doomed and the damned will, when there’s nothing left but the breath in their lungs. We’ll shed our heartaches along the way. Think not of death but life. Death will abandon discretion to reveal himself soon enough. He’s already here with us.

Basketball is Basketball, Equality is Excellence, War is Peace

Boldly now comes the WNBA’s television campaign for its new season, to accompany the NBA playoffs. Interspersing footage from both leagues the spot creates the illusion the men and women are playing together. For example, a WNBA player makes a pass; we cut to an NBA player hauling it in on his way to the basket. Several such iterations and the tag-line:
Basketball is Basketball
It is agreed. Basketball is basketball.

As a self-contained system of rules, the game is its own standard and ideal; its quality is its only valid measure. The players’ identities are incidental–they are only represented by their competitive success. Why would you concern yourself with who plays, as long as they play well? I offer this as the best interpretation of the WNBA’s slogan.

But how is this not precisely the WNBA’s problem? It is basketball we go to see, not basketball played by X. The WNBA has the unfortunate circumstance of competing with its far superior parent league in delivering to market basketball. The women are way out of their league. Yet here they are, at once drawing our attention to and contradicting the purely sentimental nature of their appeal. Basketball is basketball, sister.

Any league not open to all is a novelty act. Akin to a six-foot-or-under league, of which we would make no pretense of parity with the NBA. Why, then, does the WNBA exist? If there is some demand for off-season professional basketball, why not another open league (which in turn might not be too competitive for the better female players)?

But “basketball is basketball” can have another meaning besides that which I’ve assumed thus far. So just to be thorough. It can also mean:
discernment in basketball is unwarranted because quality is trivial or uniform.
If you’ve seen one game you’ve seen them all. Call it the “parts is parts” fallacy. This exhausts reasonable interpretations of the slogan at two, and they are mutually exclusive.

Thus we have a phrase that is literal nonsense yet holds in potential two contradictory meanings; it is and isn’t. What a perfect foil for the encouraged chaos of cut-and-paste. Here it blends together the superior with the inferior deliberately to conflate them, to the benefit of the inferior over the superior. As the advertisement’s visual creates the illusion of one game by splicing together two, likewise the text splices together one meaning from two. The WNBA offers, as needed, two fluid options to guide us to the Nirvana of egalitarian bliss: ignore inferiority or disregard excellence.

Not that anyone is paying attention, much less defending the integrity of the language, but the slogan, mild doublespeak that it is, is the inclusion argument boiled down to its essence; all the energy they concentrate in their concise palindrome backfires and only serves to reveal that equality degrades excellence (“equality” as defaced by the modifier “social”; alternatively “inclusion,” or “anti-discrimination”). In any given instance, more of one ensures less of the other. Yet we are conditioned to believe the effect is non-existent, trivial or even opposite. Why?

Our elite is divided between those invested in and those cowed by the advance of a federally administered regime of equality. Thus too-evident instances of of equality degrading excellence and impoverishing the common good are collective embarrassments, not only as individual failures of policy, but as evidence of the constant–equality degrades excellence. The more “equality” the equalitarian gets the greater its cost, the plainer its effects, the more he must hide. He is not alone, however; the need to conceal this corrosive process has as many allies as excellence has enemies, always ready to take up pitchfork and put torch to the affronts to vanity and pride that are Truth, Beauty, God. Only here the rabble is roused on behalf of power and the status quo. We have drifted into a historical novelty: we have an elite that demands disdain for tradition, custom, history. What then do they consider their mandate? A certain definition of excellence, ironically.

Meanwhile, the NBA is a singular story of merit by excellence overcoming social and sentimental bias, justly celebrated as a civil rights accomplishment yet, less noted, demolishing the queer premise upon which civil rights law and culture is based. That premise: American culture degrades and represses minorities and all groups are equally blessed with the host of human talents.

A group representing some seven percent of the US population (before accounting for age), setting out with every social and many legal conventions against it and armed only with exceptional ability, took one generation to to dominate professional basketball–transforming the game in the process. Today black American men still represent eighty percent of the NBA, even as they’ve made it so successful it draws talent from around the world. This attests equally to the unprecedented fairness of the league and nation on one hand and the racial diversity of human talent on the other.

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. A recognizably Western impulse. Western (and if the following carried negative connotations we would be allowed “white”) creativity propels the story through various media, its ingenuity delivers it in high definition to your home, its industry daily manages the logistics of filling arenas with the reverential. African athleticism made transcendent by American imagination and industry. Is there anything comparable in history? A little respect, please.

It is not forthcoming. The celebration of this story grows progressively shriller, as if in inverse proportion to the improving material condition of its beneficiaries. The narrative focuses almost entirely on the storming of the barriers–not of their creative dismantling. Taken as part of the larger civil rights narrative it is presumed the barriers remain, their latency here contingent on our militant stance against them, active most everywhere else. But the true lesson lies in the relative ease with which longstanding social prohibition gave way permanently to excellence.

But the broader cultural emanations from this frank display of what still seems like a mystical talent to white America transcend basketball, combining with black excellence in popular music to level an entire complex of traditional barriers to blacks; once habitually taken as inferior, now considered superior in many aspects; envied, emulated, exploited into cultural preeminence.
The milieu demands however the writer frame the cracker here, yet again: the nation is uniquely neurotic regarding race, what with all this fascination with it! This sort of thing often from sportswriters, as if to absolve themselves of that they so conspicuously ridicule or abhor, shocked, shocked. But the story is not told. Racist exploitation has made Black America a cultural colossus.

Indeed, it is not an imagined human uniformity but racial diversity, and its complementary nature, that acts as a catalyst to excellence in an exploitative process that nonetheless empowers the exploited. This could only happen in an overarching culture with the energy, creativity and fairness–the excellence–of America. Ironically, when we are compelled to pledge “diversity is strength” the meaning is opposite (roughly: diversity is our strength because we’re all the same and no culture is superior–a patent absurdity!) and the intention is to scandalize this reality in the popular mind, contradicting as it does elite convention–rather, convention prescribed for us by the elite.

Equality is a conceit only societies made wealthy through discrimination can afford (or a disease only wealthy societies contract). We have so long been wealthy and thus conditioned to humor this sentiment that it has become an unexamined article of faith. That conditioning is evidenced by the oblivious confidence of the accusation (women!) implicit in the WNBA slogan: that we aren’t giving the women a fair shot! They truly know not what they say.

None of this of course means the WNBA hasn’t the right to exist, or that its athletes aren’t worthy, or that it might not carve out an economic niche and justify the NBA’s subsidy; it just means we would do well not to allow them the affront that is this slogan. If people will create and nourish the WNBA God bless them. But that does not entitle them to abuse the language or logic. You can have your ladies’ league and I wish you well; but you cannot then have your “basketball is basketball” pretense. No ma’am.

As demonstrated by the NBA’s example, excellence and equality are at odds. In the case of the NBA’s wardship of the WNBA, excellence humors equality, because it can afford to. American history in aphorism! Long may she wave!

Pessimistic as we imagine we’ve become about the nation’s economic prospects, we nonetheless dutifully assume an endless summer of rising tax revenue to fund the ever-increasing cost of our condescension. We presume the creativity and industry of the resented will outrace the demands of resentment in perpetuity. This resentment is far more nurtured than confronted by our creative class, as jealously as if it were their own. Which it is, of course; as an artistic form, the civil rights genre now is where class bigotry goes to masquerade as enlightenment.

If it seems the narrative has become indulgent, pornographic even, that’s because it has. Self-interested but still less rational than emotional. We now have an elite that not only doesn’t care what is good for the common, it doesn’t know what is good for itself. Our modern inversion: an excitable, bigoted and irrational elite in need of the calming influence of a wise and engaged population. Ah, to have one!

Where might our defensive wisdom begin? By critical examination of just such Orwellian tropes as the WNBA slogan. The fact that it is merely an advertisement, or “just basketball”, shouldn’t pardon it. This is where merit should make its stand, out here on the front line of the assault on excellence, where language and logic are the collateral damage. Exposure, examination, ridicule; these are the weapons of the insurgency.

The WNBA’s egalitarian experiment is a tap stuck into the broad trunk of the NBA–the very bounty of human inequality–diverting a trickle for the purpose of sentimental inclusion. Embarrassed by this fact, the WNBA distracts from its inferiority through artful subterfuge and chides us for our bias even as it claims privilege. Is there a better model of the Token State?

Can it suggest something of the costs of that state and its definition of equality, out here in the world where the individual’s spoils are humbler and the collective consequences graver? After all, the law is the law, engineering is engineering, firefighting is firefighting, medicine is medicine. That disparity in quality the WNBA wants you to ignore isn’t an anomaly, but a small, exposed section of something vast and deliberately misunderstood.

Of course, what the WNBA is really about is making women more like men. Which prompts a whole new why?

Alternative America Phrasebook

“Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion”
Thoughtfulness, n., blogspeak:
1. Cowardice or careerism taken or presented as reflection, meditation, or contemplation.
2. Deference to convention or power; self-censorship to avoid offense or the degradation of one’s professional prospects.
3. Intellectual conformance driven by a fear of social ostracism.

Thoughtful, a.
Milquetoast; mealy-mouthed; compliant; harmless; irrelevant; boring; lemming-like; chicken-shit; etc.

see also Seriousness/Serious

re-runs

An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This inherent conviction that things must go wrong will not be loosed by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography–maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, as if in flight from this dread; maybe this is why now we seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can’t hide.

Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull, placid farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull, placid American farmers, settling in square-head country in the perennially freezing dead-center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.