Cowboys and Insinuations

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and allies have charged General Kelly’s “empty barrel” remark is racist. Everyone laughed: there’s no traditional connotation between the two. But I like to think Kelly’s opponents get it, just like I do: an “empty barrel” making a lot of noise is a black mediocrity making of herself a spectacle. Weary whites know the type. Weary blacks know the type. You must not show you know the type. Perhaps if it was a little less common.
And that’s the problem. Nothing is so evident as that which is so strenuously ignored.

Racial slurs not directed at whites are becoming rarer. But they help maintain the sustained moral panic that is “anti-racism.” Sometimes slurs are repurposed as needed.

New slurs are being added all the time–not by racists, but by anti-racists. Honest people going about their business are often waylaid by some new, unexpected restriction. They should know better–it’s been decades since “niggardly” became unacceptable for just sounding like a word with which it had no etymological relation.

Lack of racist intent is no excuse. Ignorance of the laws of racism are no excuse. This being racism, there is no reference too obscure, no connection too tenuous. It isn’t enough to not be a racist, one is expected to fight racism, report it, to hate it with his very soul. Justice is diligence.

As a result of our hyper-sensitivity to black sensitivity, the target of any offense determines offense, not some objective social standard.

Criticizing a black person’s intelligence is almost always construed as a criticism of black intelligence generally, revealing a lack of confidence in black intelligence, mostly. This is getting embarrassing. The brilliant black thinkers of television and cinema still aren’t showing up. Hailing Ta Nehisi Coates, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Barack Obama as exemplars of the black intelligentsia is a bit of a back-handed compliment. The condescension is driving aware black intellectuals out of their minds, but the aware are increasingly rare.

But the insistence on the existence of a thriving black intellectualism is making its absence obvious.

People are still paying attention, even in their forced silence. The increasingly absurd charges and demands of anti-racism and attendant injustice erode the perceived legitimacy of the anti-racist movement. It’s a crisis that can’t be recognized because it reveals the corruption of the entire endeavor.

It’s always better if you can find the use of a racial epithet. It’s simple, it draws the flag and stops play immediately. A hush falls. There’s no explaining what so-and-so is inferring, which is a lot more work and frankly embarrassing when you’re working with such material as Congresswoman Cowboy Hat.

But the accusation that “empty barrel” is racist is not entirely baseless, just hipster-level obscure.
“There’s this racial epithet, you’ve probably never heard of it, it’s a little obscure…”
The source is out there, if one is willing to slog through the narrative/historic jungle like an explorer looking for the mouth of a river. But yes, empty barrels are empty of justice and full of hate.

Thomas Wictor is a science fiction author with expertise in warfare munitions who produces epic Twitter threads. He’s an often vociferous Trump supporter without white nationalist, anti-Semitic or racist tendencies, but he’s not humoring the congresswoman. He’s been all over the Wilson-Kelly controversy.

Vachel Lindsay was a poet of the early 20th Century who innovated what he called “singing poetry”–his poems were designed to be read at certain tempos, cadences, intonations, etc according to instructions in the margins (“a deep rolling bass”; “shrilly, with heavily accented meter”; “like the wind in a chimney”). The works were designed to be performed. Wictor calls him the first rapper. He’s also an early sort of performance artist.

His work was popular, and still familiar enough to make it into a 1964 edition of  “A Treasury of the Familiar” anthology I have at home. The poem above, The Congo, is the source of the “empty barrel” epithet says Wictor, and if this was anything but “racism” I would scoff. But I suspect he’s right.

The poem is subtitled “A Study of the Negro Race” and is in three parts: “Their Basic Savagery”, “Their Irrepressible High Spirits” and “The Hope of their Religion”. The first part portrays black Americans as boisterous primitives ill-suited to the industrial world, and is the source of the supposed empty barrel epithet:

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion,
THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

The poems were meant to be performed and in accordance with margin notes for tempo, inflection, style “like the wind in a chimney” ; “with a philosophic pause”, etc.

The first part portrays blacks in their most threatening light: bloodthirsty savages with a historic grudge:

Boom, steal the pygmies,
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s Ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell

Lindsay thought African brutish would be redeemed by Christianity.

In the third part the Apostles and “pioneer angels” cutting through the brush bring the Africans to Jesus, and the sinister “Mumbo-Jumbo” of voodoo is left in the jungle:

Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men,
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:–
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo…Jumbo…will…hoo-doo…you.”

I suspect Lindsay was too forthright and literal-minded for that last line–the vulture invoking voodoo after its defeat–to mean what I want it to mean: the vulture is foretelling the certain return of Mumbo Jumbo, in due time.

All of this is horribly racist now but Lindsay was sympathetic to the cause of black civil rights and some of his earlier work endeared him to such as W.E.B. Dubois.

The only thing I see him guilty of is naivete and condescension. In that way this bizarre character from another era is very much like your average earnest white liberal.

Mumbo Jumbo, for his part, is alive and well.

When Dindu Meets GI Joe

Those charging that General Flynn’s criticism of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson is racist aren’t entirely wrong.

I don’t take racism as it’s defined seriously, and I don’t imagine the general is personally “racist” or motivated by racial animus. But in adding to his criticism of her behavior towards Trump the charge of an earlier graceless public act, and calling her a mediocre fraud (“empty barrel”), there is, just as the opposition sees it, an implied criticism of black America from a non-apologetically white perspective.

The congresswoman is a familiar stereotype that Must Not Be Named, the Black Buffoon. Public figures have had to be careful in criticizing such people, to steer clear of implication that they are noticing the type. Naming the Fool outright is out of the question of course for the time being.

Indulging blacks in this fashion has been bad for whites and is a steady, ongoing degradation of our national character. This grows along with black cultural power. Black culture and style is inseparable from the violence and hatred of the ghetto and emanates from the same deep well of true identity. I no longer accept the argument that a “black culture of violence” harms black America.

Black America chooses its more violent culture, despite all the wailing. When attacking the presumed injustice of the legal system and incarceration rates–seeking the release of as many of their own as they can manage by whatever political means–they act as a separate nation demanding autonomy. Arguments invoking civil rights now are all attempts to rationalize black norms as dysfunction imposed from without. Black civil rights are a racial supremacy movement disguised as an appeal to our own values.

Citing the statistics for such as wealth, parental involvement, education, crime, is applying white criteria to black culture. In the absence of whites, as in the ghetto, black norms default to a harsher order. This is autonomy. Black America is asserting itself, asserting its particular culture, liberated (“free at last”) from more restrictive white norms and even displacing them in the broader shared culture, with considerable help from without, of course.

This is not to say black American culture is achieving some natural stasis in the absence of control. Black America still exists in a broader white order. Black culture can’t help being deformed by white influence and technology. Black Americans assert a black culture deformed by the vastly different and more advanced white Western culture of liberalism and rights. It’s kind of a monstrosity.

Damage isn’t limited to the degradation of black-white relations, or to standards of behavior generally (a profound effect no one beyond the hard right mentions); it’s also become a proven demagogic template for a growing list of grievance identities. The seeds of our destruction were sown in the noble ground of civil rights.

A more prosperous and well-adjusted black America would not have inspired the host of similarly modeled grievance identities (people always tryna be black!).Who knows? Diversity might have had a chance.Proponents of diversity should be the first to discourage our disastrous indulgence of black dysfunction.

All of this bears on this latest cultural skirmish.

When Trump engaged the NFL controversy he engaged the same explicitly racial movement the league has caved to, if only implicitly on the side of whites. This is just not done. Whites are getting uppity.
This asymmetrical (explicit v implicit narratives) civil war began with Trump’s candidacy (or his challenging Obama’s citizenship). He was an affront and remains intensely that to the constituent groups of the Narrative. He’s a special affront to blacks, due to his “birther” roots, but more significantly due to his threat to the present order. Being the primary beneficiary of that order and its highest moral caste tends to quicken the mind when it’s suddenly challenged. And despite all the bellyaching, rather because of it, blacks draw the most benefit for effort put in from the present social and political order.
Trump has evinced all the traits of the typically non-racist boomer over a lifetime in the public eye and he tends toward socially liberal. But he has an interlocutor problem: he doesn’t know he’s not supposed to say certain things. This is taken for obtuseness. There’s a cynical aspect obscured by all the conspicuous outrage: the dope doesn’t know to keep his mouth shut! What they’re really criticizing is a curious lack of guile that must indicate a moron. Yet they keep losing these little fights. This is driving people insane.
But what you see is usually what you’ve got. And what I see is that Trump just didn’t care if attacking Obama looked racist, he, Donald Trump in his considerable self-regard, knew it wasn’t. He knows he isn’t racist because he doesn’t feel it. He reflects his generation in that regard. Where he differs–shockingly, to his stunned peers–is that he wants his due credit. Like a naif, he wants to behave as if race is just a social construct. The fact his fellow boomers view this sensible view with horror reveals a tragedy: an entire generation going to see God clinging to a humiliating and disastrous myth.
The general is a boomer too. They trusted black America, they’ve been faithful to equality, they’ve endured bitterness and violence–they’ve been patient. Now they’re being ridiculed. They look to their children, better not to talk about the children, the children are being peeled away from them. White baby boomers were double-crossed. Do they know it? Young rightists hate the boomers for good reason. But if anyone should be mad it’s the boomers: they are the great betrayed generation.
I like to think the general has developed some awareness of this vast con. And here comes this typically buffoonish black character. Sure, she’s wielding the most powerful narrative weapon of all, the Numinous Negro, but she’s inept, she’s not even holding it right, and he’s got what is maybe the only firepower to match it, Our Troops.
Bumbling into the fight he was cut down, she never had a chance. All she could manage were some potshots fired in retreat.
What is she saying when charging the general with racism? She’s invoking the black premium which is added like affirmative action points added to minority college applications.

There’s a standard invocation, in this case Lawrence O’Donnell applied it: “General Kelly called a black woman an empty barrel!” 

He called her stupid. One might call anyone stupid, of course. But not black people. Black people are not allowed to be stupid. That’s exactly what O’Donnell is saying, it’s exactly how his ilk thinks, and they behave as if utterly unaware of its implications or contradictions.

Also black people are really not allowed to be ignoble. The congresswoman is tacky and buffoonish, in a characteristically black way.

So when Kelly thought to get in an extra dig, calling out Wilson’s showboating at a previous event that too involved the deaths of public servants, and the mortified reactions of the whites (I’m assuming) that day to it, is what struck me. The Narrative normally comes round to collect you if you dare such even oblique notice of black silliness and lack of decorum. It didn’t this time.

That is a very good thing.

Grooming is Essential

A documentary about Hollywood’s boy problem, An Open Secret, is being shared on Vimeo because it can’t get a distributor, and it’s not hard to see why. It isn’t just that powerful people in Hollywood are threatened. The Narrative itself is threatened.

At the center of the scandal is Mark Collins-Rector, who created something called the Digital Entertainment Network, producing original programming for the Internet directed at teen “subcultures” such as homosexuality. The company was probably ahead of its time (founded in 1996, before high speed internet) but drew in a lot of investors (among them high-profile gays like David Geffen and Michael Huffington) before collapsing just ahead of its IPO when Rector was accused of child molestation. He lives in Europe and is still wanted in the States.

The brief look we get at the network’s programming suggests it was some part grooming operation itself. At 35:14 (can’t embed it here) in the video we get a taste of one program, Chad’s World. Chad’s a boy who goes to live with a rich young gay couple. The house is a playground: a pool and hot tub, video games, electronics; a sort of Neverland Ranch of enticements.

I found an episode on YouTube. This one’s about a boy coming out to his conservative parents.

The show was ahead of its time culturally and politically as well in its advancement and normalization of homosexuality. Gay adoption was still controversial.

It’s difficult not to see the show and network, indeed the whole gay rights movement, as a sort of mass grooming operation.

Implicit Civil War

After General John Kelly called out Frederica Wilson by name he called her out by implication:

 I’ll end with this: In October — April, rather, of 2015, I was still on active duty, and I went to the dedication of the new FBI field office in Miami. And it was dedicated to two men who were killed in a firefight in Miami against drug traffickers in 1986 — a guy by the name of Grogan and Duke. Grogan almost retired, 53 years old; Duke, I think less than a year on the job. Anyways, they got in a gunfight and they were killed. Three other FBI agents were there, were wounded, and now retired. So we go down — Jim Comey gave an absolutely brilliant memorial speech to those fallen men and to all of the men and women of the FBI who serve our country so well, and law enforcement so well. 

There were family members there. Some of the children that were there were three or four years old when their dads were killed on that street in Miami-Dade. Three of the men that survived the fight were there, and gave a rendition of how brave those men were and how they gave their lives. 

And a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money — the $20 million — to build the building. And she sat down, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned.

There is a further implication to be drawn, and I have to wonder if it occurred to the general. There is a cruder style in black politics as in black life, a certain obliviousness. You’re not supposed to notice three commonplaces in America: black mediocrity, black malice and black buffoonery. There is also an unspoken rule that criticizing any of these in an individual black person is asserting the existence of one or more of these. The general dares to glance upon two of three–and the lady’s hat covers the buffoonish angle already. In calling out the congresswoman’s ability along with her decency the general enters a moral free-fire zone. But he’s armed with his story, and it’s powerful. Trump is fighting back in areas where it wouldn’t have even occurred to previous Republican or conservative politicians.

Of course he doesn’t necessarily see it that way. But it doesn’t matter. In framing Trump as essentially racist the left has made every engagement with him a racial controversy–especially a row with such as the congresswoman, whose street cred appears solid. When she sallies forth to engage it has to be seen as an assault by black America on white privilege. Previous Republicans thought there was no winning such engagements. Trump sees there’s no losing them.

It’s on.

Sorry, black America. It’s just not cute any more.
There has been a cost to our condescension. Humoring black America has necessitated the degradation of standards of behavior culturally and politically, and is inseparable from the other strands of the Narrative choking out the last of our common decency. I suspect the general, like a lot of us, is making these connections too:

It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life — the dignity of life — is sacred. That’s gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. 

Women and life don’t get a lot of respect in the black community. Respect, for that matter, doesn’t get a lot of respect there, where disrespect drives the daily carnage.

The Trump Administration continues to stun the left by fighting back. How fitting and proper that George W Bush would show up today of all days. His real cowardice is revealed in the fact he fought back politically everywhere but in the rigged game of racial resentment–and here he was invoking it.

Posturing as a tough guy by sending American boys to Iraq was nothing–and forgiven, as we see. Says an awful lot about the continuing power of the black privilege narrative.

A Narrative’s Progress

Feminism’s already quickening pace, the reaction to Donald Trump and now the Harvey Weinstein scandal has tipped us, as if overnight, into a new regime of expanded prohibition and harsher sanctions for politically incorrect speech.

Mainstream entertainers are wed to the Narrative. But those entertainers weren’t always mainstream and the Narrative appropriates more and more authority. So half these mainstream guys were doing material just a few years ago that wouldn’t fly today. Nobody seems to notice, until something like Jimmy Kimmel’s recent foray into the political conversation. Having drawn attention from the right over–I think–some Obamacare tweets, his tormentors then seized on his silence regarding Harvey Weinstein to invoke some particularly sexist routines from his occasionally brilliant, often obscene, The Man Show.

Note how much of that show couldn’t be done now. The show itself would be hard-pressed to find a home. This is almost entirely due to political correctness. So there’s a good question there, for the performer who’s arrived at the pinnacle by a route now closed to others–does he approve? Is this progress, and where does it lead?

Because when looking back at film, television and the like I’m struck by just how much of it wouldn’t make it past the unofficial censors of the day.

Re-run

Today’s episode of Untethered originally aired on June 7, 2008

Memento, n.; A hint, suggestion, token, or memorial, to awaken memory; that which reminds or recalls to memory; a souvenir.
[1913 Webster]

I thought to capture my history but was surprised to find it won’t stay put; I’m not sure I recognize it. Sometimes it’s a faint image, like a 3-D hologram, shimmying and wavering. I reach for it and it flickers out as my hand passes through. I don’t know if it isn’t just a composite of experience real and imagined, some mine, some stolen from others, some culled from the commons of humanity. There are those moments we all have, of sudden temporary displacement, wherein we do not recognize our surroundings, the life that sprung up around us, that is to say moments when we do not recognize ourselves. These leave behind the residue of doubt.

I’m having trouble neatly separating the experience from the flotsam trapped in the recesses and eddies of my mind, from the residue still building up about the edges of the endless stream of electronic illusion passing through even now. The sticky fragments of no particular relevance left behind in no sensible order. I can no longer clearly demarcate the boundary between the real and the representational. I see now I never really could. Did I live this life? Perhaps I saw it all on TV.

Nothing is stranger than to look in one’s past and ask: did this happen? Am I that child, connected to the present by a series of heart beats? How in the hell can this all be? How can this world be real? All this time spent no more than a blip; inconsequential, yet everything I know.
The truth is a tear of mercury that resists containment. It cannot be seen head-on or appreciated in full. It will not be drawn in from the periphery. We are all reduced to furtive voyeurs of our own lives in the end. Your history is that light smudge in the corner of your eye, that flits away when you look in its direction.
I haven’t done anything here, after all. Skirting the issue always; the story of my life, of all our lives, of humanity. All this supposed revelation just circling the periphery like a basketball “rimming out.” Nothing.

The real journey I will not make.
Or maybe not. Maybe we all make that journey within, the only real journey there is, eventually. Maybe that’s what death is. Going home. The incoherent babble of death’s delirium is the purging, surrendering energy back into the ether, in waves of language by way of dissipating will, a chemical reaction rendering our identities inert and final. Only after it can no longer be known, only after it is lost is it made whole; only then does it lose its contingent nature and become complete.
This, this is all just stalking, lurking about outside the fortress of reality in the forest of illusion.
No: illusion is the fortress, reality the forest. As it should be.

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Gender Studies Have Got to Go

Breitbart:

[Camille] Paglia argued that active programs in the [women’s studies] field were thrown together out of the urgency to highlight women’s issues in the curriculum of the American academy. “The administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide, at the time when the women’s movement had just started up. The spotlight of tension was on them. They needed women faculty fast. They needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof! ‘Let there be Women’s Studies.’” 

“Now we will just hire some women, usually from English departments, and we’ll just throw them together,” she continued. “‘You invent it, you say what it is.’ That is why women’s studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology of the early 1970s.”

Bowing to students and 1960s Current Year hysteria, American universities quickly ramped up women’s and ethnic studies departments that were sort of inorganic–there was no genuine scholarly impulse behind them.
 Perhaps some thought these programs would find their way to scientific merit. Like cargo cultists any true believers left wait still for science to arrive, surrounded by the still-proliferating mock-ups of scholarship that are the various theories of race and “gender”.

But science or study was never really the point of course. These were political creations of political necessity. The browning and feminizing of the university is a problem for scholarship and an opportunity for the Left. The tragedy is there are only so many resources. Equality is displacing scholarship.

This is just one field in the Scramble for America, the pilfering of US wealth by various factions through Social Justice, with the encouragement of our gormless elite as they burn through the vast ruin remaining in the nation.

Donald Trump should pick a fight with the academic left when he gets a moment.