There's probably five different paragraphs I wanted to quote on this one. I'll leave them for you to discover. To me, this is the essay Hunter S. Thompson would have written for Rolling Stone if he were sober and covering two campaign rallies in Iowa rather than blitzed out of his mind and covering desert racing in Las Vegas.
Ummmm, like this passage? Her compassion is admirable, glorious even, but also inaccurate. No one is more emotional than a piece-of-shit white man. They are sentimentality personified. How else can so many be moved to rage over the absence of a Christmas tree on a Starbucks cup? This article was a pleasure to read. It's also really hard to pretend you're working when you're lauging out loud at your desk.I remember reading a passage from bell hooks once, the kind that circulates on Facebook because it sounds slightly unusual in its predictable virtue. “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males,” she wrote, “is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage is psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”
This jumped out to me: This may just be my bias compelling me to defend him but Sanders probably could explain what he means and give numbers and all that, but that won't win him the election. More than any other candidate, I've heard him talk about real policy, real plans, and real action. But Americans vote with their hearts, so you have to be able to whip up enthusiasm and these sorts of empty calls to action do a much better job of that then careful deliberation on the finer points of policy. I guess that is what the author is getting at throughout the piece. I just don't like the idea of painting all of American politics in such broad strokes. Or maybe I'm just looking for an alibi for my support of Bernie as well as my whiteness. Fantastic article, regardless.Sanders’s exasperation was the principal fact to be communicated, more than any political content. Trump was about winning again. Sanders was about having lost. The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. It’s all about feelings and God and bullshit. Sanders actually uttered the following sentence out loud: “What we’re saying is when millions of people come together to restore their government we can do extraordinary things.” Nobody asked what he meant. Nobody asked for numbers. They applauded. Better to take it in the spirit in which it’s given, like a Catskills resort comedian.
I started typing, then saw two of my favorite writers already summed up my feelings on this piece: Now that we on the left have abandoned every other political project in favor of Privilege Awareness, is it rude to ask when it actually starts benefiting the unprivileged?"To my shock, publishing a giant essay in which I indict my own privilege actually resulted in me being praised! Kooky!" -Freddie DeBoer
"thank you god, for not making me as bad as all the other white men, for making me The Good White Man" -Elizabeth Bruenig
There were some elements of this I'm not 100% on board with, but the bits on the campaign rallies deserve to be read by anyone that's not illiterate. Can we have a Hubski meetup at a Trump event and wear T-shirts with some of this artist's work on them? I'll seriously consider ruffling that fucking comb-over(?) if someone offers to bail me out of prison.
Well, first of all, it's beautiful. And I should have mentioned, you can't have that particular one on your shirt, I've already called it.
this is a serious case of "i can only draw a 3/4 pose" is what this is
GODDAMNIT, I glossed over that little detail in the "about me" section! I always end up feeling like the shitty person that I am. Karmic justice. Another important takeaway is that you can find some excellenté websites by google-image searching phrases like "GOP elephant tits and ass". Not sure if that's the particular set of words that led me to VixDojo, but yeah.
Terrific writing, thank you! And Marche is spot on, there's a huge chunk of 'Murican white culture that desperately needs to always have someone they can "look down on", no matter how humble their own station in life. And this is the unofficial 'role' of black folks in the U.S., which is why they always have to 'mind their place', and why Obama's very existence as POTUS (aka, an "uppity" muslim Kenyan) is such an outrage to so many. Retired to a rural, and very white small town not long ago, and this point was brought home one day in a conversation I overheard in a restaurant between the owner and a patron, a local, and fairly prosperous white dentist. And what was intriguing was how insistent this dentist was that Obama had "help" graduating from Harvard (presumably as a minority), and that he wouldn't have made it otherwise. Though it wasn't difficult to see that even this affluent and educated dentist still "needed" to believe that the POTUS, with 3 degrees from the most prestigious college in the country… was somehow 'inferior'.
I live in a small town as well and I agree completely that the whole "needing somebody to look down on" thing is big here. I mean it's big in general but it's worse in small towns. My best guess is that while they were younger they were seen highly among the small town and didn't see much beyond said town. Once they get older and turn on the news they realize they are an insignificant nobody and they don't like it. When you grow up in a small town you just tend to remain sheltered for longer and it really screws a person up.
Yes, sorta like the Al Bundy types, whose greatest moment of their lives was when they caught the winning pass in high school, or else who always talk about their days in the service…. as though nuthin' else in life ever improved after that. And BTW, it's probably all the more reason to depend on the sorta media like cable, talk radio, and the interwebs, that not only "validates" their POV, but also keeps creating these hated "out groups" to feel 'superior' to (blacks, gays, atheists, 'illegals', edumacated elites, etc.).
HARD. BELLY. LAUGH.In between the comb-over and the ducktail, between the two follicular spaces representing the modernistic and the atavistic, the fantastical and the nostalgic, there is a third tranche. Even in person you have to look closely to catch sight of it. It bulges, slightly but only slightly. It is the real part of the hair, the human part, the actual hair. It is the hinge of Donald Trump.
I'm going to have to agree with comments written on this article. It seems like there's more and more self-guilting articles, where white people are bad. They're bad, and they all benefit from racism. But only white people are racist, so they only benefit. Being white is a sin, because you oppress people from how much you're profiting off of their work. That's basically what I got from this article. Maybe I'm not-so-left, and maybe a reactionary right. Maybe I should depart off of hubski-island too.