untethered

The Orlando massacre aftermath was like something out of that satirical black comedy about the Left’s embrace of Islam. You know, the one that will never be made (because Hollywood may be a whore but she’s no bigot!): Isis achieves a stunning success, striking American soil in the worst attack since 9/11, and before the day is out the story is co-opted by the gay left to use against Trump and, um, the homophobia of his “Muslim ban”. Or something. Anything. Also, he scurrilously took advantage of this act of Islamic terror by warning of Islamic terror and is now increasing Islamophobia, and the further threat of Islamic terror by having warned of–not that this was an act of Islamic terror; that doesn’t really exist because No Real Muslim is a terrorist. And over here we have guns…

It all happened so fast the celebratory gunfire must have had to be interrupted, the poor devils standing there still with AKs raised skyward and stunned looks on their faces when the word came down: the mennuke cocksuckers have hijacked the narrative!

It’s hilarious. But something sinister has happened. A frustrated ISIS got the message and let us know. Hell, everyone got the message. For the media to pay attention and direct the terror–the whole point of the violence–they should pick on the straight whites. Normal Americans are fair game now, everyone else jockeys for their place in the grievance hierarchy.

The gays have deliberately pushed the majority in front of the trolley–and not necessarily to save gays from terrorists (the gays who rule the country, more or less, aren’t cramming into Latin night at a shitty disco in Miami, anyway) but to advantage themselves generally in their broader war against normality generally and Donald Trump specifically. To the extent their actions make us all less safe, they of course only serve to make gay Americans less safe. To salvage the mess of pottage that is a bad news cycle, the gay Left sold you out.

The common thread running through feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, all of it, is betrayal.

We all prefer the idea of a principle to its application.

I think that explains somewhat the actions of white (is there any other kind?) ethno-masochists and their “leapfrogging loyalties”–abjuring white identity and responsibility for their co-ethnics in favor of a romanticized Other, usually conveniently remote (less and less so as a result of the policies the pose enables). The ferocity of their attacks now, the open hatred, affected or genuine, of whites as whites by whites is a bizarre new reality that defies explanation. After Orlando went into the Narrate-o-Matic and came out a “homophobic” slaughter–to the comic dismay of ISIS, whose violence the American progressive left had co-opted–one can only conclude the American left is conditionally allied with foreign terrorists.

 “Virtue signalling” relates to this, and provides a textbook example of Saussurean theory’s “signifier/signified” distinction. Adopting a ready-made sign–which can be as little as a logo on a tee shirt or name-check in conversation–now often provided by commerce (“Whole Foods”, “Apple”, etc.) the bearer/referrer broadcasts a suite of the signified: good taste, liberal beliefs, sound health, etc. Professing the right views works the same way. Problems arise only to the extent the views have noticeable consequence.

Obviously this applies for social and political opposites: a Trump hat signifies a whole different set. But there’s a good reason “virtue signalling” became a term of derision for the familiar forms of leftist signalling. I think it’s less that they’re worse about it, and more that they are, for the moment, still holding the cultural and social whip hand. Convention, right now, is progressive; reaction is transgressive. Carrying a Whole Foods bag won’t get your ass kicked (actually it can, but by the same urban thugs who might kick your ass for wearing a Trump hat).

The reaction to Trump and Brexit unmasked the complete contempt with which the Western elite views working and middle class white Westerners. Basically, they aren’t just swearing off their poor cousins, they’ve declared an alliance with their cool new diverse friends against them. I hate to say it, but it’s all so white.

But we don’t talk about it; we are unable to tell this story because it’s a sequel to another story never told. America never debated, in all the earnestness, corruption and stupidity of our civil rights “journey”, the justice or wisdom of destroying the concept of noblesse oblige within the white American community. Indeed, civil rights necessitated–and still does, more than ever, only now it’s taken on the form of a rout–the pathologization of it, as “white privilege”. From here it appears if anything it’s worse in Europe. This venerable and humane institution was routed and destroyed globally without a shot fired in its defense. Whether by design or not, noblesse oblige was replaced by civil rights; by a liberalism so vague and corrupted it’s been driven–with all of us along for the ride–to the bizarre present, where such as the Orlando attacks now prompt half the country to blame Islam and the other half to blame the half that blames Islam.

Now we’re on to the next stage, where elites are no longer merely indifferent to us (how brief this period was), they are now hostile; working class white losers are making the good white peoples’ life difficult. They lead lives not worth noting in communities not worth saving, and their absence will be a blessing.
“Money is being lost!” elites wail like angry mafiosi, when they’ve expended every other line.

Ethnic diversity doesn’t just increase inter-ethnic conflict by its very nature, it creates and maintains intra-ethnic division for the majority population. And that division is largely caused by an imperious elite allying with ethnic foreigners against ethnic kin and fellow citizens.

Globalization is largely about shucking off noblesse oblige.

Well, how did [we] get here?
–Talking Heads

After Orlando President Obama’s position is clear and, as he and supporters (including the Republican establishment) see it, non-controversial: we’ve decided to create a larger Muslim population in America as part of a process of ethnic diversification for its own sake as well as economic growth; attacks such as Orlando will have to be endured to achieve that goal, but we’ll lessen their severity through greater surveillance, stricter gun laws and early suppression of any right wing reaction to this policy or its effects.

(There’s another version of this that holds the increasing Muslim population not a deliberate undertaking but an inevitability contingent on economic necessity or due to the impossibility of restricting migration; this you often meet with in person-to-person encounters, expressed with a shrug and shift of subject)

The president and House Speaker Paul Ryan did what politicians must do after tragic events of political consequence (if often lost in or deliberately disguised by all the conspicuous sorrow): they identified the political and social battle lines created or reinforced by the event, declared where they stand in relation and offered policy solutions.

Remarkably, the political and media elite are nearly unanimous in taking the occasion to denounce Trump and his “Muslim ban” and in dictating that our energy shall be put to addressing a proximate cause of the massacre (guns) while opposing, as bigotry, the identification of Islam as the ultimate cause. It isn’t wild-eyed to suggest they are allied against us with the Muslim world. And they do this without a hint of doubt. Is there a historical precedent for such people as these?

President Obama and Paul Ryan unite to ally with Islam against their ideological and cultural domestic enemies–basically, middle-class whites. This alliance was always there, and is revealed in tragedy when their shared core goals are threatened. When it’s time to fall back and defend the fort, the Republicans and Democrats find themselves in the same place. Donald Trump turned over the political rock and this is what he exposed.

Via Ed West on Twitter, this remarkable find by Heterodox Academy garners Judge Macklin Fleming a first-ballot entry into the I-told-you-dumb-bastards Hall of Shame:

…Heterodox Academy member Amy Wax sent us the text of an astonishing letter written in 1969, at the dawn of racial preferences, from Macklin Fleming, Justice of the California Court of Appeal. Judge Fleming had written a personal letter to Louis Pollak, the dean of Yale Law School. Fleming was concerned about the plan Dean Pollak had recently announced under which Yale would essentially implement a racial quota – 10% of each entering class would be composed of black students. To achieve this goal, Yale had just admitted 43 black students, only five of whom had qualified under their normal standards. (The exchange of letters was later made public with the consent of both parties; you can read the full text of both letters here.)

Judge Fleming explained why he believed this new policy was a dangerous experiment that was likely to cause harmful stereotypes, rather than reduce them. His argument is essentially the one that Jussim and I made 47 years later. Here is what he wrote:

The immediate damage to the standards of Yale Law School needs no elaboration. But beyond this, it seems to me the admission policy adopted by the Law School faculty will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat. If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students. Such a pairing in the same school of the brightest white students in the country with black students of mediocre academic qualifications is social experiment with loaded dice and a stacked deck. The faculty can talk around the clock about disadvantaged background, and it can excuse inferior performance because of poverty, environment, inadequate cultural tradition, lack of educational opportunity, etc. The fact remains that black and white students will be exposed to each other under circumstances in which demonstrated intellectual superiority rests with the whites.

But Judge Fleming went much further. He made specific predictions about what the new policy would do to black students over the years, and how they would react. Here is his prophecy:

No one can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression. This is likely to take two forms. First, agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards.

If you read Judge Fleming’s predictions after watching the videos of student protests, and then reading the lists of demands posted at TheDemands.org, the match is uncanny.

I’m glad the good judge isn’t here to see just how effective his predicted black political agitation has been; so successful it’s adopted by other groups such as Hispanics, similarly mismatched by affirmative action. Likewise feminism and transsexual activism provide natural outlets for students with nothing to draw from real study but frustration. One can be a mediocre student or noble victim.
 The judge’s predicted black radicalization not only came to fruition, it spread like a contagion–because it works, and it works by taking failure to the disparate impact bank and cashing it in for victim points–the same dysfunctional dynamic keeping black civil rights–and black concerns–front and center always in American politics.

Failure and alienation are the common bonds making allies of feminists and Muslims, transsexuals and Blacks, foreigners and fat fetishists; the unstable and the unable united in an axis of mediocrity waging war on excellence in academe and beyond. Failure and alienation have become the point of progressive theory, and whether that’s always been the intention is almost beside the point. It seems to be an inevitable result.

But social justice, particularly on the campus, is where blacks and other “underrepresented” groups are over-represented and hold greater influence, where the reverence and deference, particularly for blacks, with which they are treated is being elevated to ritual. For an individual so favored this must be heady stuff, and leaving this environment must come as a shock. Social justice exists in large part so people who didn’t peak in high school get a second shot in college. Of course everybody sees they’e just getting a worthless participation badge, so they must distinguish themselves, within the progressive theory framework, and the way to do that is to be angry about oppression, ideally your own. The competition to stay must be brutal, and likely explains the professorship’s increasing radicalism, as radicalism itself is the point.

My limited contact with second-tier institution student activists confirms the impression I (and I imagine a great many others) get watching them on YouTube and elsewhere: they’re not very smart. Of course they’re emotional. But’s hard to tell how much is honest and how much is affectation; it’s hard to tell how aware many of them are themselves of this distinction, as they work themselves into a frenzy because it’s what they’re expected to do. The “special snowflake” explanation only goes so far also; they may speak the language of social justice when they wring another “safe space” out of an institution, but their subsequent glorying and redoubled disdain reveal they understand what is happening, and they love it: they are wielding power. They’re more scary than scared, and they know it. They delight in it.

About ten years or more ago I read a feature in the New York Times profiling some firm or other’s attempt to cash in on Chicano gang aesthetics and culture in the same way black gang culture had been commercialized years before (most brilliantly perhaps in NWA’s groundbreaking records, which were frankly sold as marketing innovations–“fuck the crossover, let them cross over to us” they declared). What ever happened to that effort? It fizzled. Seeing as the glorification of gang violence must have a feedback effect increasing gang violence, Chicanos are fortunate, perhaps, to not be as interesting to white people–and to Chicanos–as blacks are.

On the West Coast Hispanic still means Mexicans. “Chicano” may be a politically freighted term, but I like it–it distinguishes the native-born Mestizo from Mexican nationals. And come to think of it, you don’t really hear the word that much anymore–they’re squabbling over Hispanic v Latino, or Latino/a–and I suspect you don’t hear the term as much because it distinguishes Mexican Americans from Mexican nationals and immigrants, and the narrative effort is all toward getting Hispanics to think of themselves as a homogeneous group, like blacks, united with others against American whites–whites globally, to be honest. Not to be too melodramatic about it. But then that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s getting harder to achieve melodrama.

But the follow-up profile, detailing the failure of this putsch, to that NYT story never showed up–and I do remember at the time a noticeable broader effort to–not normalize, but romanticize and cash in on Chicano culture, and implicitly, just as in the case of blacks before, cash in on the violence that is so much a part of that romance. And it all, as in that profile I can’t find, was so blithe, optimistic even. But I suspect people then still expected a resolution to the black problem; we don’t expect that anymore. And the cashing in just goes on.

Before that cynical effort, in the late eighties, there was a smaller commercial/cultural bloom for Chicanos with the film La Bamba (Which crossed the border into Mexico: I recall the title song blaring from cars in San Felipe, Baja that boozy summer.) Indeed, you can trace the Chicano cultural/commercial narrative’s failing optimism arc across the peaks that are movie releases, rising with La Bamba and Stand and Deliver (1987, 1988)–the latter a sort of companion piece to Morgan Freeman’s 1989 black uplift film Lean on Me–; optimistic, ultimately patriotic stories about Mexican Americans making the American Immigrant Journey, with Southern California standing in for New York and Ellis Island; and falling with Machete (2010) which I haven’t seen, but will safely assume is neither optimistic or implicitly patriotic. And we won’t see optimism again.

Of course in those same late eighties was born gangsta rap and the same hardening of black and brown attitudes that wasn’t going unnoticed entirely–1988’s Colors about black and Mexican gangs fighting in LA was sufficiently pessimistic, but, like those success-story films document the last, best effort to write a wholesome narrative of upward mobility for black and brown, documents the coming phase that would replace it, as one of the last films to allow a franker, non-self conscious white perspective on the problem of race.

It’s hard to imagine such as Dennis Hopper’s film, told from the point of view of two white cops, both admirable, being made now without being hobbled by critical race theory chains. My favorite moment from the film wouldn’t occur to a filmmaker today–the two white cops are sitting in the back of a black community meeting between an earnest ex-gangbanger/social worker and residents. As the meeting breaks down in the predictable cycle of threats and recriminations (much milder of course than what we would expect today, notably), the scene ends with the two white cops breaking into grins at the predictable black hijinks:

Black and brown attitudes were hardening under cultural happy talk and the oblivious machinations of American commerce as the nineties came along, shocking complacent whites when exploding into our consciousness with the Rodney King riot. People forget that after the initial explosion of the first day, the riot was dominated by Mestizo Angelenos looting the retail stock of south central LA and beyond side-by-side with blacks who had been attacking them on the streets the day before. But the shock, to whites–at least in my experience and forgotten now like our shock at the maliciousness of LA’s blacks–was at the mendacity of the Mexicans, so many of whom had to be legal and illegal immigrants. People were showing their true colors; that of blacks, terrifying, of browns, tawdry. Of course we never spoke of it because we’d already been relieved of our point of view; pre civil rights the news reports would have taken for granted their point of view was white American. There was at least some implicit recognition of a valid white American point of view left when the Rodney King riot started (and may have been killed off by it). Now that much isn’t possible of course, and is keenly watched for by the narrative police.

But there’s a lot of ruin in a degrading right to speak freely. It’s taken us a while to get from the enforced politeness of Seventies television, exemplified for me by the Norman Lear sitcom, to the grim self-abasement of the present.
 Of course it isn’t that there’s no “freedom of speech” regarding race–now non-whites are encouraged to outdo one another speaking their minds, such as they are, about race. It’s really a question of point of view–who’s allowed their own point of view, who isn’t. Another way of saying whites aren’t allowed an identity in identity politics is that whites aren’t allowed an explicit point of view.

Leftists’ struggle with “intersectionality” is largely trying to order the hierarchy of point of view in their growing production. Ideally, the order the Left would will places Whites at the center of a sort of reverse panopticon, surrounding by the interrogating, relentless gaze of immobilizing points of view. But the various mobs they employ just can’t help themselves in hating each other.

Anyway, I was surprised at the relatively late date of this video I came upon of Michael Richards apologizing for having called an obnoxious heckler the Dread Word in 2006:

It’s as if you can see here the precise moment white people were no longer permitted to laugh about race, as the audience assumes a gag is in play and Seinfeld, worried for his friend, has to chide them to stop laughing. Richards nearly panics (ironically, the comedian panics at the sound of laughter), seeing the hole he’s in about to be filled up with dirt, and compensates, perhaps, for it by prostrating himself with the sort of manic effusion so common now, where an artful enough apology draws its own reviews–Jonah Hill’s successful abjection (2014, “faggot”, paparazzi) got raves, sagging Johnny Depp’s offering out of Australia (albeit for dog-smuggling, not hate speech) this year was a mini-flop in the series of flops he’s enduring.

Richards might have been trying to lift or even reference the Lenny Bruce routine from Bob Fosse’s Lenny:

Imagine trying to pull that off today! If the blacks hadn’t torn him to shreds the internets would the next day. And the hopeful “imagine” conclusion: if we just open up (our speech!) our troubles will go away! The “hip” and “controversial” Bruce had no clue! He was trafficking in kitsch the whole time! It’s all so, what’s the word…?

Losing the right and eventually the ability to laugh is tantamount to losing the right or ability to think clearly about something. Maybe that has something to do with the way that right to speak and ability to think about race, for whites, is being reclaimed on alt right Twitter, with joy and humor.

Here one of the pro-Trump libertarians, in his infinite naivete–and there was quite a bit of that on the pro-Trump side–tries to talk a Black Lives Matter militant down from the frenzy she’s determined to work up by invoking the old “what would MLK think”.
Bad move. The young woman, who looks as likely as not to have a white mom back home in Snohomish, doesn’t miss a beat, improvising a sound-byte quality lament that could only have been better if she’d broke into tears. I don’t doubt she was trying. The reaction of those around was interesting. The whites were kind of reverentially amused, somehow, and you can see the black kids have their own typical obliviously smug reaction.
But watching the girl work herself up self-consciously (I mean whipping off the glasses is great for the broad middlebrow of your audience, but the more discerning critic finds it a bit much) and the reaction of her mates, what we see is a longtime motif of black-white relations, the tendency of blacks to perform for whites in such situations. Blacks performing for whites goes beyond the stage.

Theorists would, probably have, run this through the white privilege shredder as just more oppression but that’s a hard sell when you consider Barack Obama essentially performed his way to the presidency in this fashion. But Mr Libertarian deserved it, indulging that hoary cliche. “But I like Martin Luther King!” he protests at some point. Schmuck. The rhetorical subject of MLK is like the so-named boulevard: avoid it if you can.

This Skagg 3 guy’s hilarious analysis of the first Portland State student Trump supporters’ meeting shut down by volunteer social justice auxiliaries provides the backstory for the larger confrontation in downtown Portland the following Saturday: