Sunday 12/22/19
I glanced at Twitter yesterday to see that tiny-minded people have mounted the kind of debate they love to partake in, though it's not really a debate, because the term debate--in the truest spirit of the term--means that there is actually something at stake, in that one is governed by advancing, interconnected ideas that add up to an argument. Right or wrong, conviction is required, and more thought than a knee-jerk response, take, opinion, bleating sound. The "debate" was about the race and gender problems of the new Star Wars film. Of course it was. Of course. Could the sun manage to drag its citrine hindquarters from bed, buried in some clouds, beneath some curve of the earth, if a discussion was not there to be had based upon race and gender? Or would the sun say, "No, I cannot face such a day, for race and gender is all, it is my reason for rising in the azure sky!"
Heroic sun.
The people who talk about race and gender constantly fit into two categories, and often both at the same time. But before quickly moving to that--and it is very simple--what is lost is that there are many forms of discrimination, but what is happening right now, is that those other forms of discrimination are being discriminated against, because in this age of rampant, rapid, ceaseless hypocrisy, many forms of discrimination are countenanced, are not "officially" bad. For instance: We discriminate against no one right now so much as we discriminate against someone much smarter than us. Much more articulate than us. With knowledge--in other words, actual expertise, not angry, two-bit, smug opinions--greater than ours, any we have possessed, any we reasonably hope to possess, because we are not going to put the time in, and we also fear, on some level, that we're not smart enough; to absorb, hold, understand, retain, deploy. Someone vastly more productive than us. We view them as a threat to what we want to say, how we want to go unchallenged in saying it, what we lack the ability to say; we view them as a threat to expose us, and, perhaps more than anything, we view them as a threat to our precious, cherished, illusions about ourselves we desperately hugged to our bosoms, as if they were a big old flotation device--Swimmies for the soul, for the self.
But, that's cool. We can do whatever we wish to them. Why does no one talk about that discrimination? Why is just race and gender? Talk about a power trip. Talk about a Fascist power trip. An Orwellian power trip. ONLY THESE TWO. ONLY US.
Here is who talks about race and gender incessantly:
1. People for whom the selling of race and gender is a business model. People with no talent to create, to do anything else, except work this one mine. And when the mine is revealed not to exist in the fashion they want us to believe, they try to sell the mirage of the mine. Where there is no problem, they seek to create a problem, the specter of the problem. They can do nothing else. If you take this from them, you take everything from them. They are almost always racist, sexist, or both. True racists, true sexists. True exploiters. They are not about equality, justice, right over wrong; they are about themselves, they are about exploitation, they are about making the most of this one period when someone like them could be anything in the world, with what little they have, save a hollow mind, and so much hate. A good example of this kind of person is Ta-Nehisi Coates. They are frauds, they are con men and women. They are despoilers of equality. They do not care about equality, they don't want equality. They want to exploit, they want theirs, and nothing else. And they're figuring out how to do it, have figured out how to do it, and part of that is the realization that they are cultural terrorists, that they can intimidate, and no one will push back, for fear of being on the wrong side of their fraudulent justice. And they take that fraudulent justice all the way to the bank, often enough for millions of dollars. You think they want that to come to an end? Coates? Jemele Hill? No way. Look at their entire output: They can do nothing else. Not a single other thing.
2. People who have no ethics, no sense of self, no self-awareness, no character, who cannot face reality, who run from truth, who require a stand-in self for a stand-alone self, who cannot do the real work of decency and goodness, who are not only alone, in the true sense of not knowing real connection, but, in the worse sense, are alone even when it comes to themselves. They are not even connected to themselves. Everything is a prop. And this is how they tell themselves--with their little comments, their piling on, their faux-community where nothing is truly communal--that they are good, they are just, they are decent, they are brave, they make a difference. They are often less outrightly racist and sexist themselves--they're often not at all, actually--but rather broken, scared, alone, though they, too, on account of these things, have more than their fair share of self-loathing.
