untethered

Under a gray sky the vast abandoned parking lot documented the waves of consumers that once sustained the boarded-up department store set back in it like a temple. These ruins of the suddenly but definitively ended pre-woke era made for a locale ideal metaphorically as well as geographically for the Proud Boys’ “Summer of Love” demonstration in Portland last Sunday.

Exposing the division of personality types represented by antifa and patriots (my preferred catch-all phrase for such as the Proud Boys and others who are not white nationalists), the intellectually aspirational anarchists leapt all over the supposed irony of the patriots rallying in the parking lot of a derelict K-Mart, while the patriots, I’m pretty sure, didn’t notice. Reconnoitering the grounds for defense they found no potential irony traps.

It’s too bad for them. Antifa’s standard “losers” take looks a little facile. Addressing the modest ruins about the patriots might have made for a good sobering starting point in a speech building up to an inspiring call to renewal. As it was speakers chose to stress Democrats are the Real Racists and We’re More Diverse Than Antifa and the program, naturally, featured speakers of color. No one seems to be paying attention but the patriots make their point–that they’re hardly fascists–by failing in their argument. Whatever movement they represent, it doesn’t have what used to be called a “political analysis”. What they are at this point is an apolitical resistance to the most political of movements, the radical campaign rapidly remaking America; what they don’t have are friends in any position of power or any level of political sophistication.

But they do have a cause; and somehow a sobering speech by an advocate on behalf of the January 6 political detainees came as a welcome break from the happy talk about the patriots’ diversity and wholly misguided demonization of the anti-white “Democrat Party” as the scourge of minorities.

The antifa/patriot divide often feels like a process sorting inherently political from inherently apolitical people.

Antifa had over a month to prepare for the event, provocatively scheduled for the anniversary of a patriot-black bloc brawl last August 22, and its social media was reaching a fever pitch as the date approached. After the city announced it would not send police in to intervene the anarchists protested a bit too much this refusal of the police to “defend” the city from “attack” by “fascists” (standard narrative humbug) while appearing to very much relish the coming battle.

In relocating ten miles out the patriots calculated correctly that antifa, with their reliance on public transport (while the patriots always caravan in their cars and trucks), wouldn’t be able to move enough bodies to outnumber them at the new location. Only a small intrepid group of antifa showed up late, and was chased off after a failed assault. The rogue group, which acted in defiance of antifa leadership content to stay downtown waiting for patriots to appear and engage there, giving the appearance they are “defending the city” from fascists, gives an after-action report here, arguing they went where the threat was, protecting nearby Parkrose High School, the “most diverse” in the state. From wilding fascist brownshirts. On Sunday. During summer vacation.

The meaningful level of organization for Portland anarchists seems to be the informal small crew of under ten; the above-mentioned “report back” from “several” crews making up “about two dozen people” explains their heavily criticized attack on the patriots:

We arrived at the waterfront a little before 1 PM. We had agreed to talk to other crews on the ground to reach consensus about going to meet up in Parkrose to oppose the fascist rally there.
Parkrose is a working-class neighborhood that’s home to many immigrants and people of color. The white nationalist rally was planned just blocks away from Parkrose High School, the most racially diverse high school in Oregon, and there are multiple large homeless camps in the immediate area. We stand by the old Anti-Racist Action mantra that “we go where they go”. We will never let fascists rally in our city unopposed.

Parkrose ranks seventh in violent crime among Portland’s ninety neighborhoods, and appears to be well-armed. The Proud Boys might need protection themselves, if the anarchists’ characterization of their rallies was true–the notion the patriots rally and then sate themselves attacking their hated targets around town is pure projection, and an accurate description of black bloc tactics. As for the targets the patriots have never attacked homeless or black people, yet antifa treats it as a given. Still, the patriots can be counted on to push their provocation, and I thought they might attempt a car caravan through the city but that never happened.

The notion the patriots represent a threat to anyone other than antifa is laughed off even in antifa circles now (where the frenzy of anticipation before Sunday has given way to a frenzy of recrimination this week):

This same anarchist-friendly Twitter account just said what I’ve been saying for years:

Well, yes and no. Portland doesn’t have a “far right problem”–it has a “far right” grift perpetuated by antifa. If antifa ignored the patriots so too would the city, and they would have had their meaningless flag waves and “back the blue” demonstrations and gone home. Whatever patriot intentions, they haven’t the option antifa has established, the implied sanction from the city to engage in some level of violence and encroach on the state’s monopoly. The patriots have been deliberately provoking antifa into repeatedly attacking them for years now, having begun with the ascent of Trump. When they started they could be forgiven for thinking fairness will out and their exposure of antifa would lead to its demise. Obviously the rules have changed, but the patriots should have succeeded and a sane country would have been appalled by the dynamic, played out repeatedly and reaching the intensity of last Sunday, of anarchists attacking what are in fact “peaceful demonstrations”.

The patriots are a useful compliment and foil for the anarchists; they just energized them immensely this weekend after a summer of quiet. The patriots’ scuffling with the anarchists exposes the patriots to selective prosecution as well, by a federal government faking a “right wing domestic terror threat”; that false narrative is supported in turn by its own questionable prosecutions and the domestic terror lie generally is supported by the raw image the patriots provide and a biased media molds into a useful caricature. I suspect antifa can’t help but hate the patriots, but the patriots have been very good for antifa–and for state actors pushing “domestic terrorism”. Again, antifa doth counter-protest too much.

In their encounters the two sides have the same two goals: to win the fight and to be seen as acting in defense. The latter is far more important to antifa than the former, and they’re able to maintain the fiction they’re playing defense against right wing aggression just enough with the help of a friendly media. But they’ve been pushing this evident absurdity so long even some anarchists are exhausted of carrying it.

On arrival at the patriot rally I found leader and street fighter Tiny Toese holding court from a flat bed trailer carrying a holiday-sized US flag mounted on a wood frame. Rumor was antifa had offered a bounty for the flag; fortunately for the patriots the wind didn’t pick up too much–a few gusts revealed the potential for disaster making antifa’s bounty unnecessary. A diminutive Statue of Liberty raised her lantern at one end of the stage. Tiny towered over what he at one point called “my girlfriend”. It wasn’t quite dwarves capering about a miniature Stonehenge, but that came to mind.

The ground was well chosen for defense, and about half of the crowd of little more than a hundred looked to be committed to security, with many Proud Boys in original black and yellow garb on the scene, patrolling and constantly eyeing the perimeter. Walking about unmasked in non-committal civilian clothes I drew a few stares but for the most part I felt nicely invisible.

The mood at the rally was of a tense party; beers were passed around and a keg was quickly emptied. Celebration of the sensible choice to relocate the rally competed with bravado at the prospect of an antifa assault, and less than a dozen counter-demonstrators on a sidewalk well away from the rally were harassed verbally by patriots in tense encounters that spilled into the street. Toese at one point came out and urged the growing patriot crowd there back toward the stage–the potential disaster was also drawing energy from the flagging demonstration.

A local man and political activist who identifies as clergy inserted himself and his minivan, appropriately white to convey woke purity, into the scene briefly. Reportedly later the patriots shot him with paint balls in the mayhem.

Thinking the rally would end without incident I left Parkrose for downtown around four in the afternoon, only to later learn of the ill-advised antifa assault. That bold Doolittle-esque raid failed on the two vital counts–antifa lost the fight, and in the role of aggressor. In the mayhem antifa stripped a liberal reporter (and technically a “woman of color”) of her camera, knocked her to the ground and pepper sprayed or maced her, while calling her a slut (in, I think, Hindi because of her ancestry).

Maranie Rae works for Matt Taibbi’s substack outlet and has given antifa favorable coverage, even writing an homage to the Floyd riot season celebrity Trumpet Man (who vanished from the scene at one point; I’m sure I last saw on video brandishing a knife and bouncing on his heels backward of of CHAZ, with ghetto youths in furious pursuit).  Taibbi wrote what passes for a scathing rebuke of antifa and its media enablers, which is being ignored. It’s really kind of tepid considering the outrage (which is very much of a long time practice of assaulting journalists); no vivid vampire squid metaphors to describe what’s happening, no letting go, yet, of the handrail of anti-racism.

The mass of black around Salmon Springs Fountain at the downtown waterfront was visible from a good distance; notable also was the quarter mile or so of chain-link fence running north between the riverfront lawn and Naito Parkway, where the street is being replaced whole in sections. To cross Naito to get to the riverfront you must weave your way through the poured-in-place concrete around the trenches where the road is to go; painfully sharp looking is the corner between what will be the visible gutter and the part due to be submerged beneath the street. A large brawl migrating north from the open park at the fountain would be confined to the relatively narrow grass lawn (rotten with goose droppings) between the street construction on one side and the railing over the steep drop into the river on the other.

I approached the gathering from the south along the riverfront walk. Graffiti marking antifa territory and warning away fascists seemed to cover as much available space as not. Antifa in small groups were stationed about the perimeter as per usual keeping watch. Making a pass through the gathering (I didn’t dare record) was very different from moving through the patriot rally, of course, and drawing the stares of people masked in black bloc has an added unsettling effect in that they’re indistinguishable and you can’t actually see their eyes often. Still, I was clearly an outsider and able to walk through unmolested.

A sound speaker was set up but there seemed to be no formal demonstration going on; a brother with a ghetto accent had taken the microphone–I couldn’t see him in the mass of black–to demand the return of an alleged lost item; “yo this is real shit here yo” or something he said in what sounded like a taunting tone; I’m not sure he wasn’t trolling antifa, who milled about, listless and tense. At the disabled intersection of Salmon and Naito Parkway Plexiglas shields were laid out rows forming a box; antifa was in the same tense defensive posture in which I’d left the patriots.

And for a second time Sunday I left before the action occurred; a gunfight happened downtown later in the day; it sounds like armed anarchists chased a suspected right winger they saw taking photos, who then took cover and fired a single shot. Antifa fired back. The suspected patriot was taken into custody; antifa vanished from the scene safely and have launched the rumor they’d been protecting black youths from assault by the man.

Antifa-allied media is feeding this back into the Narrate-o-Matic to come out as outrageous police inaction–no time to point out, and no point in pointing out, the absurdity of police abolitionists doing this, but the conscious overriding goal always at work now is to implicate police in the “right wing violence” of the “fascist” patriots when they protect them from antifa attack or, as now, when police stand down completely–citing, with some justice, new restrictions limiting riot control measures passed by the state legislature last year to protect BLM and antifa; these rules lay like intentionally laid traps now for the police, which is probably a fair description. The season of anarchist rioting did not materialize this summer–and we don’t know how fortunate we are, to not have been submitted to a repeat of last summer with the police’s hands tied, unable to even deploy tear gas.

The end goal of the abolitionists is to take police out of the business of street crime and into the business of political repression of patriotic resistance–not your local cops, who ideally will be disbanded and replaced by wokesters, but feds; the FBI is stepping eagerly into the role–as it must be whenever a new cause presents a government agency with a whole new area of power and funding. Maybe they even believe it, like CIA analysts imagining the creaky old Soviet Union a robust power, up to the point it fell apart as if overnight (like us now, maybe). Here’s the self-satirizing Establishment organ The Intercept twisting itself into knots to paint by the dots:

The absence of the police, in line with a policy on nonintervention announced beforehand by Portland Police Bureau Chief Chuck Lovell, reinforced a sense among anti-fascists that they were on their own. So when a right-wing gunman fired in the direction of black-clad protesters who had chased him away from their protest at gunpoint, it was shocking but perhaps not surprising that one of the anti-fascists fired back, according to witnesses.

Despite the anarchist camps’ best efforts, it seems the patriots won the day.

Is the day worth it?

As far as I can tell the road to the airport is open here in Portland, just the usual traffic, and of course the internet and broadcast media are up for the moment. Nonetheless progressive Portland breathlessly awaits an invasion tomorrow by religious fundamentalists hellbent on taking the country back to the Dark Ages. Patriot Prayer, the Vancouver Washington based “far right” group created to join the street battles that began in 2016 with Trump’s campaign, has scheduled a rally for tomorrow, August 22, anniversary of their brawl on the streets of downtown Portland last year with anarchists. Police did not intervene then and police chief Chuck Lovell has announced they won’t involve themselves this time either.

Anticipatory agitation has reached a fever pitch in the fever swamp that is anarchist social media, where competition to be the bravest and wokest whips the horses of passion onward. It’s ironic, but the behavior of the anarchist hive resembles, I think, the behavior of an isolated madman with nothing to check his self-reinforcing paranoid and grandiose delusions. No discordant or hesitant voices to serve as a conscience.

The event location has been changed and Patriot Prayer says they’ll announce the new location Sunday morning. Meanwhile the antifa counter rallies are already scheduled. No one has permits, which have become a relic of our more orderly recent past.

Mayor Ted Wheeler and some black clergy organized a “Choose Love” event live-streamed out of a local pub yesterday.  His admonition to refrain from violence against the Patriot group was muted into oblivion by the necessary self-preservative signaling about the utter moral repugnance with which he views the supposed Nazis; all with barely a glance toward the active element that is antifa violence. 

It was all steep downhill from this tepid call, with representatives of various progressive interests lining up to denounce the “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” of the worthless, no good, dangerous fascists, the profound threat they represent and the bravery of those who “protect” the city from them, with an unenthusiastic pitch for peace, maybe.  At points it felt like Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar.  The speakers did manage to advance their individual ambitions; Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, second-generation Oregon power broker and probable candidate for governor, basically made a red-meat stump speech for the woke, and specifically asserted the speech of the rightwingers is not “equivalent” to the speech of, say, police abolitionists and anarchists. Notably Multnomah County District Attorney of the Soros class, a positive ally of the anarchist movement, Mike Schmidt, gave brief and general remarks. I suspect his restraint results from anticipation he may have to file or not file charges as a result of tomorrow’s expected battle, and any assertive and definitive statements will only contribute to any controversy surrounding those actions.

The event could still be cancelled of course.  I’ll be out there to document it as best as I can.  There’s my footage from last year’s dust-up below.  The rightwingers in fact lost the optics battle then, as their exit from downtown resembled a retreat under fire.

Alas, there is no flight of refugees out of town.  Looks like I’ll be waiting a little longer for the real estate market to crater.

e co

A palpable arousal has overtaken the refugee resettlement community in Portland, as they gear up to receive an influx of Afghan refugees

For Oregon organizations that contract with the federal government to help refugees resettle in the US, the sobering headlines meant an immediate shift in workload.

“The pace of what happened—I can’t wrap my head around it,” said Matthew Westerbeck, director of refugee services for Catholic Charities. “We are all ramping up as fast as we can to prepare. We’re about to see an influx of refugee families in a way we haven’t seen in this country for years.”

Catholic Charities is one of three Oregon agencies that receives funding from the federal government to support refugees seeking to resettle in the US. That work ranges from securing affordable housing for refugee families to connecting refugees with new employers to making sure refugee children feel comfortable at school. With thousands of Afghans fleeing Afghanistan out of fear of its new extremist leadership, these agencies have been told to prepare for an avalanche of newcomers seeking a new community to call home.

Donald Trump did manage sensible immigration and refugee policies, slashing the number refugee numbers and putting a lot of the resettlement grifters out of work.  Alas, just about everything good Trump managed was through executive action, and was immediately undone with the arrival of Biden.

It doesn’t help that refugee resettlement agencies like LCSN and Catholic Charities are emerging from a period of record divestment in their work by the federal government. The Trump administration’s strict limits on the number of refugees allowed into the US left resettlement agencies with little funding and stability to support the coming surge in refugees.

Westerbeck said that in 2016, Catholic Charities helped resettle 589 refugees across Oregon. In 2020, that number had dropped to 66.

The resettlement programs have received extra support from the Oregon government over the past several years to make up for the federal gap. But it’s still left the programs largely unprepared for the expected capacity need.

To ramp back up for the expected surge in Afghan refugees, Westerbeck said his organization will be seeking donations—to cover newcomers’ rent and utility bills—and volunteers—to serve as “cultural navigators” for refugees who need guidance navigating their new environment, to help furnish new apartments, and to greet refugees at the airport. He’s also seeking landlords who are willing to offer affordable rentals to refugees or employers who may be open to hiring the newcomers.

Westerbeck, who began at Catholic Charities as a volunteer, said he has faith that the Portland community will step up to support the new refugee residents. It’s lightened the heaviness of the past week’s headlines [I’m sure it did]…

Brown responded with strong support, pledging to urge the White House to expedite refugee relocation and increase the country’s cap on the number of refugees it accepts annually. The current refugee cap was set at 62,500 per year by President Joe Biden in May. Trump had set the yearly cap at 15,000.

If the US takes in something like 30,000 Afghan refugees mostly selected from the collaborator class I don’t expect we’ll have the sort of problems Europe has had with its Afghan refugees who, like those from the Muslim world generally, come from the young, male and troublesome part of the population; but it’s worth noting again the Europe “rape gang” phenomenon (not to be confused with another Pashtun-in-the-West phenomenon, grooming gangs) is overwhelmingly an Afghan thing:

But there was one development [following Merkel’s “refugee” influx of 2012] that had not been expected, and was not tolerable: the large and growing incidence of sexual assaults committed by refugees against local women. These were not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but were vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs or packs of young men. At first, the incidents were downplayed or hushed up—no one wanted to provide the right wing with fodder for nationalist agitation, and the hope was that these were isolated instances caused by a small problem group of outliers. As the incidents increased, and because many of them took place in public or because the public became involved either in stopping the attack or in aiding the victim afterwards, and because the courts began issuing sentences as the cases came to trial, the matter could no longer be swept under the carpet of political correctness. And with the official acknowledgment and public reporting, a weird and puzzling footnote emerged. Most of the assaults were being committed by refugees of one particular nationality: by Afghans.

Our Afghans won’t be that bad because they won’t be selected from anyone who can make the walk. Likewise our Muslims, who I’ve always found amiable enough, and their womens’ modesty admirable. Of course, they’ve also produced such as Ilahn Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The demagogues are inevitable now regardless of the source population, but the well-behaved aspect of our non-African Muslims may change as Biden flings the border open further and the group is no longer selected for better traits. Europe absorbs the Muslim equivalent of our southern traffic from Latin America; God bless our relatively placid Mexicans. As somebody once quipped, we had the good sense not to locate our county north of the MIddle East. The powers-that-be are seeking to right that unfortunate oversight..

Anyway, welcome, Afghan newcomers. You may find you feel right at home here.

Wherein our hero falters and redeems himself…

Nicholas Taleb writes about risk in investing and in general, and burst onto the scene with his widely praised The Black Swan. For those of use who may have read The Black Swan and then got on with our lives, his real vocation is now Being Nicholas Taleb, contrarian tough-guy who can’t expound long without mentioning deadlifting or beating up someone from the vast, decadent class of non-deadlifting humanity.

He’s been a sensible critic of US foreign interventions but as a “Greco Levantine” Christian whose influential family was impoverished by the Lebanese civil war, he’s no fan of such as the Taliban. So when he encountered Taliban encountering, maybe for their first time, gym equipment in their new digs (courtesy of the US taxpayer, natch) he delivered what Steve Sailer called “the most on-brand response” to their triumph:

The gym of the Presidential Palace in Kabul.
Not a single Taliban tried to deadlift. One of them pressed ~50 lbs. Tells you something about the strength of the other side. https://t.co/atIZVWBlMb

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 16, 2021

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So, rousing myself this morning to post what I’d been thinking in the back of my mind about this curious spectacle (Taleb, not Taliban) since I saw it, I went to Mr Taleb’s Twitter and found this:

On the day the Taliban start training in gyms, with proper form and commercial equipment, they will start losing wars. https://t.co/atIZVWBlMb

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 17, 2021

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Which is pretty much exactly what I’d been thinking.  Taleb’s first response (if he wasn’t being facetious) represented Western delusion coming up against reality–delivered by the “Medieval” Taliban out of the “seventh” (or is it “eighth”?) century–that never went away.  America has made fetishes of muscles and military might, in film endowing special forces with mythical powers of physical capability, where they’re played by absurd comic-book caricatures like the Rock and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The pro-military genre (which is probably now a thing of the non-woke past) post-Rambo not only presents a wholly false impression, it likely has helped degrade the elite forces it’s romanticized–dropping the great magnetic lure of Hollywood before them.

Our servicemen have been holding at bay those scrawny Taliban only by virtue of technology, as one of them will no doubt tell you.  The Taliban have been doing very little but waiting for about a decade.  So it isn’t as if our defeat in Afghanistan was military–it was entirely moral.  For twenty years we provided the Western model, wealth and liberty and gym equipment and it dissolved the moment the powerful hand of technological superiority was removed.  But the curious thing is we deploy battalions of physical specimens, who shelter behind walls and call in air power whenever a fair fight presents itself–with their skinny, sandal-clad enemy.

I’m entirely serious when I say the Taliban should do to the gym equipment they find what they did to those Buddhist statues, blow it up with ceremony, for therein, like many of the temptations we’ll have left behind, lurks their doom, just waiting to be released by their vanity. You want to defeat the Taliban? Get them lifting, bro. They’ll be posting shirtless selfies and obsessing over their diet in no time.

Congratulations on your victory and may peace finally prevail in your country. I’m an unlikely ally, but trust me, you students of Islam, you don’t even want to get started with this shit. Shut it Down, as the meme goes.
Here’s a little inspiration:

Zabriske Point, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970

Repeating myself from a couple of posts ago, it’s a cliche but the decidedly anti-religious secular order of the present feels very much like religion. It has its own fantastic mythology, its own miracles, its own faith as bulwark against undermining by reason or empiricism. It works as a received religion, despite confusing its apologetics, critical race theory, with science.

Equity is the revelation, and I find it no less miraculous than the Resurrection, not that it need be. In for a penny in for a pound once you’ve crossed that empirical and logical Rubicon, and a belief in the equality of races and the mutability of sex is a far more disastrous belief than in, say, a one-off miracle about an immaculate conception, the revelation of which is God Loves You, Be Decent. No, believing in this suppressed kingdom of God called Equity requires, as you see, the very destruction of decency and the perpetual self-abasement of an un-elect, us. Original sin with no path of redemption–redemption is heresy. The cult of equity proceeds like a black mass mimicking Christianity in the negative. Western man’s boundless need to affirm his moral worth is thus weaponized against him.

Genuine religious miracles are presented as exceptions to the laws of nature–this is what makes a miracle. Equity’s miracle is not nature defied but re-conceived. The miracle the woke must believe in is present and ongoing, everywhere at once, in defiance of reality. The genuine miracle pays tribute to the laws of nature–to science; the postmodern miracle of equity robs it daily.

Wokism commands the heights of power that Christianity in the West relinquished hundreds of years ago; arguably its control is greater than the Catholic Church at its height in Europe. At the same time the new dispensation proceeds with the vigor of a young religion that no mature religion can produce. No power is greater than a credulous mass, and the woke, with comic obliviousness, credit a wholly un-scientific tradition replete with its own fantastic mythology. And while believing in the Resurrection might sound “crazier” than believing Caitlin Jenner is a woman, somehow, it’s the latter that will wreck your society. I’m a religious skeptic but I acknowledge the Resurrection could have happened. Caitlin Jenner is right before me, and I need not look under “her” skirt to say definitely no, not a woman.

The notion Caitlin Jenner is a woman is recurring fact, not an isolated event obscure in the past; you must express belief in the miracle of Caitlin every day–and are encouraged to celebrate in ritual. You must believe this along with an ever-expanding host of things, even things, not to wax hyperbolic, but it’s true, that could get you killed. You must repress, as vigorously as anyone was encouraged in sexual repression, both your disgust and rational fear.

In the new arrangement Jesus doesn’t walk on water but you’re expected to.

It’s a cliché but the West’s secular post-religious dispensation feels very religious. Its values are opposed to the religion it displaced (despite it wearing the language of routed Christian morality like a skin suit) and the successful campaign against Western decency advanced a good deal on a Jewish critique of Christian shame as unnatural, taught to oppress and indulged out of inferiority, producing both psychological dysfunction and political repression. The American boomer was subjected to a lifetime of this conditioning. Here a film pilloried the Catholic Church, there one sent up the evangelicals; in the classic Carrie sexual shame produces supernatural retribution.

My impression is a psychotherapy-inspired theme critiquing shame as such rose with sixties counterculture and waned along with the sexual shame that was its central target. Shame made you sick, shame made you a bigot, shame kills they all but said once. Needless to say we, under the new regime, are inundated with shame. I would say shame has made a comeback but it never really went away. Shame is ubiquitous; the whole of woke ideology and practice is shaming, much of it a comic mirror-image of the old realm of the shameful: being a slut, or being obese are no longer shameful, but to find them shameful most certainly is. The grandchildren of the sexual revolution are very much into shame. But not all shame is equal.

Shame is currency in the political economy, sluicing through well-worn channels and trading on its own exchange market. Shame resembles a twisted financialization scheme, a negative asset shorting white America that doesn’t earn if it’s not churned. In the scramble for position, in the flight from white identity, even in the scrum for spoils among the non-whites, at the cesspools of “intersectionality”, the mantra is shame for thee but not for me.

The discrediting of shame (call it shame-shaming) has served its purpose, but shame remains, and it remains very useful. It’s as if there’s a more or less constant amount of shame in the collective Western breast, and it’s just a question of directing it. And now it’s directed in countless directions. Infinitely more and infinitely less free we are in this new arrangement. But the sexual revolution was a gambit, taken for a bargain: for our freedom we offered up sexual shame, thinking we didn’t need it, thinking the other guy was the sucker. And we got a palmful of magic beans for our patrimony. Sexual liberation is Western man’s mess of pottage.

So while the gaslit modern takes his sexual license for granted, as the natural order of things, the way his grandparents took sexual morality for granted, he takes for granted the new and multiplying restrictions. His shame, now conditioned to fix on other things, he doesn’t really question; society’s writ is the word of God, especially in a Godless world. Respite from the shaming grows more precious. The few lights on the plain, where dissidents collect to speak the truth under their breath, go out gradually one by one. The new religion does not endure village atheists.

“Chris! Hey Chris! What are you doing?”

I was at a streetlight facing the river at the north end of downtown. Here the train tracks come together ahead of Union Station just to the north, taking over 1st Avenue where the cars are banished. The street burrows under overpasses and bridges, combining with the dilapidated stone and brick that absorbs the lessened light to give it the feel of a tunnel. As one moves north along the river here the homeless and their camps become more numerous, and their condition rougher.

Chris had just gotten off of a bus, shuffling along miserably, as he has for years, in a boot fixed to a leg ruined from the knee down, carrying a laundry bag and a box of belongings. He had been renting a room until last month, burning through a legal settlement for his leg injury, smoking marijuana constantly and, maybe, staying off of the harder stuff. He had been lately depressed, complaining there was no work for him anywhere and his money was running out. He announced his intention of moving back onto the streets. Looks like he’d done it.

Chris was a carpenter (he left his meager tools and possessions behind after he abandoned his rented room) and couldn’t work because of his injury, incurred on the job. As for doing something else he complained to me in his plaintive slur about job applications, saying he’s always worked informally. Clearly this is a dodge, but I think it wasn’t necessarily work he was afraid of, but the responsibilities that come with it. He’s unemployable in any work that requires a neat appearance, dealing with the public or speaking; he can’t even fake the merest respectable sort of speech. Adopting the professional demeanor necessary to running a cash register would be difficult. He complained to me he’d always worked informally. Forms are inherently intimidating to him. The scrutiny of others is unbearable. He’s always shrinking back, a little. I’ve seen this type, gentle and hapless, before.

That was the last time I’d spoken to him, when he still had a roof over his head. He’d already been homeless before. I asked him what it was like. Food can be had, that’s not a problem; the hassles with the other homeless however, and others, are unavoidable. Shelter in the winter, of course, is a problem. Some people just don’t want to fuck with the hassles of modern life, he said, in his way. I don’t know if he knew he was talking about himself. Chris’ own foray into paying rent was short-lived; a matter of a couple of months. Unable or unwilling to find work, his spirit was spent along with his settlement money. He grew fatalistic. He talked of suicide so much a roommate called the authorities and he spent a couple of days away in a facility. He was home just days before the suicidal talk resumed. His roommates tried to talk him out of going back on the streets, but felt some relief at his leaving. The overcrowded boarding house had already experienced one suicide, in the madness of 2020, when a man in the miserable converted garage out back took a lethal dose of pills. Chris’ behavior deteriorated as the time for his parting approached. His roommate complained of cleaning out his abandoned room, finding bottles of piss lined up behind the bed. Old habits, I guess.

Chris is probably half my age but you wouldn’t know it. There’s an open, friendly face fading behind the wear, angular still and handsome once. He looked exhausted. His left eye was reddened and receding behind its craggy folds

“Hey Dennis, what’s going on?” He smiled the same ironic, defeated smile.

“How you doin’?” I asked. What a stupid question.

“I’m alright.”

“You need a ride?” His grin tightened and he shook his head half-shrugging, as if to lament he had no where to go.

“Where you staying?” Still bearing his default grin of defeat he indicated as best as he could the immediate environment, with a sweep of his elbow.

“Out here man.”

“Fuck.” I said, stupidly shaking my head. “How is it out here?” I asked, my eye scrolling along the rough camp nearby.

“It sucks. Fuckers punched me,” he turned the painful looking eye to me, “and then fucking maced me. People out here are assholes.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I have to go.” A car had pulled up behind me as the light turned green.

“Be safe.” I said. He didn’t seem to hear. I couldn’t hear him either, but he kept talking as if oblivious to the fact I was moving away. His voice faded out. Later I guiltily realized I forgot to offer him money. I wonder if it’s the last I see of that one.