Nobody talks about the real white male privilege.

After you spend a certain number of years on the planet, you come to be aware of three things:

1. A lot of people act like they’re making sensible decisions about what’s right or wrong, who’s got punishment or reward coming to ’em, where power should be invested…thinking for themselves…they think this right down to the marrow of their bones. But they’re really just engaging in tribe-think. Ingratiating themselves with this crowd or that crowd. Playing the game of “I’m your friend because I’m the enemy of that other guy who is your enemy.” They don’t even know they’re doing it.

2. “A lot of people” means a lot. This is the default. It is not an exception to the rule, it is the rule. People dish out rewards and punishments according to tribe-think, by default. Justice, fairness, sensible thinking, these are the exceptions.

3. Life gets so much easier when you filter out these people. Whittle down that friends list. Act like a member of the armed forces keeping guard, with rifle in hand, over state secrets. Trust but verify. Yes, I’m discriminating. You have to think like a grown-up to be my friend. Disagree with me if you want, single me out for punishment, but do it for the RIGHT reasons. Or else we don’t have to have anything to do with each other.

The straight white male privilege is: If people want to play this tribe game, your tribe is the first one they’re going to excoriate. It’s pretty consistent. So it’s not at all hard to pick out these people. They hate you already.

Winnowing down this friends list is as easy as falling off a log, for us straight white males. We just say “You don’t want to have anything to do with me? Fine. Your terms are acceptable.” And that’s it. No muss no fuss.

Gays…transgenders…blacks…”native Americans” and women…who have figured out the above three truisms and are struggling to get them implemented in their own lives…I dunno. I dunno how they even get started on it. It must be awful. A bunch of damn fair-weather friends and you have to figure out which ones are lying. Who’s only pretending to be your friend, so they can be someone else’s.

It would drive me bonkers. In a heartbeat.

Glad I’m a straight white male. A loathed, native-born, third-generation, Scandihoovian, meat eating carbon spewing always-wrong SWM.

It’s the nation’s semiquincentennial. That’s a fancy way of saying the 250^th birthday. It’s twenty-one years of me hearing “How much time do you spend blogging?” — which actually means — stop blogging! It’s a funny thing. We’ve got these people running around thinking the one thing we need to make the world better is fewer opinions. But not just from anybody. They’ve got targets picked out. People like me should be quiet with our opinions. Others can blast away.

I’ve been thinking about that, and it occurs to me that people my age were around for the bicentennial. That’s half a century of change, and it’s significant change. Hairpin-turn change, occurring across a relatively short span of time. It would be a crime for me to deprive the world of (more of) my opinions.

I see that things up for debate, back then, no longer are. The Death Penalty got yanked into the realm of controversy by a Supreme Court opinion, then another opinion went the other way. Today roughly half the states allow it, and if you live in one of those and it disturbs you so much, you can move to another. That’s the way if should have worked from the very beginning.

It’s difficult for me to convey to someone younger, who wasn’t around & aware at the time, what it was like listening to & watching the grown-ups squabble about this. People on both sides of it committed the sin of aligning some sort of “moral compass” to all the preening and bluster. The people who disagreed with me, wanting to get rid of capital punishment, were likely more guilty of this. They had so much invested in it. It was their entire argument: You were a better person if you wanted this ban, and you had forgotten your bearings if you opposed it. The bottom line I took away from all of it is that this is just so much faking. People opposed capital punishment to make themselves look good. If they really thought it was a moral litmus test, they’d still be making noise about it. They’re not all dead. So this is an example of something that arouses a great deal of theatrical outrage, but only because we’re living in the moment — or were living in it. Time cures things. When so many politicians’ career prospects are no longer dependent on the issue, we stop making noise about it. One side wins the other side loses, and things are settled. That’s how it works.

There are some things that were all settled fifty years ago, and since then become controversial, then got settled again — the wrong way. Same-sex marriage is still thought by any to be some kind of a “civil rights” or “discrimination” issue. That’s because of health care and life insurance benefits. Some insist it’s got to do with establishing a household, just like a man and a woman, for the purpose of raising children. I hold out hope someday we can fix that. Children are designed to need a female mother and male father; they can make it through childhood without one or the other, that’s true. But there’s a design, a good design has intent, and that’s the intent. To arrange the childhood of a stranger ahead of time missing one of these important ingredients and then swivel the focus onto other things, confident it will all work out in the end, is monstrous. It’s pure “pull pin drop grenade walk-away.” And we’ve been paying the price for such ramshackle engineering. But the insurance issue deserves our attention. Financial security for some shouldn’t rely on turning our definitions upside-down and pretending associations are real marriages, that aren’t that and can’t ever be that. Definitions are important. And they shouldn’t be dynamic. The people like me who insist on truisms that are so simple as to be irreducible, like “Things mean things,” shouldn’t be the bad guys.

Other things that were not up for debate, back then, somehow are now and nobody can explain why. The “capitalist system,” an oxymoron if ever there was one, is criticized fairly constantly. I guess rents are high and the young kids are having a tough time of it. So keeping capitalism is more open to question, when it’s no longer easy? That would mean we’re fair-weather friends to capitalism. That’s concerning because it suggests we’re fair-weather friends to freedom. We’re not supposed to be.

We’re not supposed to demand that every thing be easy-peasy, all the time, or else it’s not worth doing. We’re still Americans, right? Aren’t we better than that? Whatever happened to “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“? Hmmmm? Did that go somewhere?

My parents taught me that any references to the term “loser” were to be bundled together with all other discouraging and/or vulgar nouns and verbs, and dumped into a hole somewhere. We were a proper Scandinavian household, observing such niceties as “no politics sports or religion at this dinner table” and “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” As I wrote recently — and this is one of the things I’ve picked up in the last fifty years — we’ve overshot that mark. People are walking around being losers, thinking like losers, talking like losers, recruiting non-losers into the loser mindset and lifestyle, and they’re more than a little bit proud of it.

And then they’re going on social media to do the bragging. Forming these crowds of loser-wannabe people who are genuflecting before them as if they won something instead of losing. Meanwhile, these same people are shaming the winners. Blaming all their problems in life on Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status, and so forth. As if he cost them something by becoming one.

That’s going too far.

This is connected to the whole “debating capitalism” thing. The argument I’m hearing against capitalism is that someone somewhere can’t ever hope to achieve something…or, I can’t, and I’m too stupid to realize it. Well, the intervening fifty years have taught me what a loser looks like, and how important it is to spot them when you’re thinking about forming new associations. They’re pretty easy to spot.

And I’ve come to realize something:

Nobody makes a statue honoring a loser. Ever.

Except for one guy. Karl Marx.

I’ve come to realize this relatively recent push for Marxism, deep-but-not-broad back in 1976, but spreading like a puddle with a speed that arouses worry today, is more about notoriety than survival. You might say the goal is “Let’s see if we can get a statue built to some other losers besides that one guy.”

The thought pattern is well defined, if not articulated outright, even though it’s risible: Capitalism needs to go the way of the Dodo Bird. The amazing creativity of this new generation, or of just a few hardy individuals within it, having been missing from the human equation up until today, were not around to thwart this millennia-long barbaric practice of agreeing on prices of things and closing transactions. All this time we just needed a bright youngster, or Bernie Sanders, to point out the obvious to us, that everybody would be able to afford anything if everybody else would simply stop charging money for things.

People thought that fifty years ago. Some people. The way some people thought they should kidnap Patty Hearst, rob banks or plant pipe bombs at the U.S. Capitol. It was fringe-kooky stuff.

Now, it’s slightly left-wing.

So when cranky old people like me start griping about how things are going and babbling about Helena Handbasket, maybe you can start to see our perspective. But I’m one of the cranky old people maintaining some faith. The pendulum swings wildly, from this weird endpoint to that one as people run around saying silly things, trying to sound smart; but it seems to more-or-less consistently return to the center. So hopefully this idea of getting rid of capitalism will resolve the same way as the idea of getting rid of the death penalty. That would be ideal. If you don’t like it, move away and don’t participate in it. The rest of us will continue to execute those who have demonstrated they’re a danger to others so long as their hearts continue to beat, and buy, sell, make profits, invest, deliver goods and provide services. All the things that keep a healthy society functioning.

It occurs to me that we have a lot of loud, brassy people walking around among us, making lots of noise, giving off the impression they speak for everybody, who are especially loud when they’re agitated and apprehensive. And they deal with these apprehensions by passing judgment on what others are doing, micro-managing, propounding narratives about who’s building good things and who’s wrecking things. Who’s showing ultra-competence in what they do, and who’s wandering around going derp derp derp knocking things over like a bull in a China shop. Which Captain of a ship is steering the ship right, which one has hit the shoals and has to go down with the ship or is just about to, which one should be relieved of command the sooner the better…

…highly inaccurately.

The Unites States’ First Holy Emperor, Barack Hussein Replacement Jesus Obama, stands as perhaps the first and best example of this. The clear and uncontested dominant prevailing narrative is that He was the leadership we had long been needing, showing us all the wisdom we needed to be shown, picking us all up and carrying us to where we needed to be taken. And yet, nine years after He left office, what’s His legacy? Where? Someone tell me. It’s amazing when you take it all in and survey the…well, no other word comes to mind. Wreckage. He made health care more expensive. You can squeeze out some metrics of good things, tortured ones, if you work at it hard enough. The most popular one is “a record-breaking 73 consecutive months of economic growth” or some such thing, which I’ve long thought to be sadly amusing. We had such a record standing? We want it broken the way it was broken between 2009 and 2017, really? That’s the way we want to see ’em go?

No. Answer to a question no one was asking. Obama didn’t build anything. In fact it’s worse than that: He represented people who don’t build things, and want to give orders to the people who do. That’s how it worked in the Obama era, all of it. People who produce things have to take their orders from people who have never produced anything and never will. Atlas Shrugged villains making all the decisions. People pretend Obama built great and grand things, because He’s half black. They want other people to see them assessing Obama positively. They want to notice Obama built something, and be seen by others noticing it, so no one will think they’re racists. The problem is Obama never built anything.

Trump has to be the polar opposite. You can bitch and cuss and moan about “millions in loans from his daddy” all you want, and you can complain about the debauchery and excess of the Trump Empire. But for you to do the complaining, someone had to build the empire. Which is worth far more, by any reckoning, than whatever Fred Trump gave or loaned to Donald.

Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire. A lot of people don’t like that. You can see those wheels turning inside their skulls, struggling to come up with a way they can say he stole it from someone. But there’s no rationale for this. He earned that money.

Loud people aren’t accurate about this. The people who make a point of being accurate about it or else not saying anything, more often than not, end up not saying anything.

I see it’s lately become very fashionable for progressives, men, women and anything in between, to pass judgment on the male sex and pronounce that we of the XY-chromosome variety are entirely unneeded, have built nothing, present nothing to the others but a lingering danger. It has become popular, at least among those who make the most noise, to say things like “In the woods I would rather run into a wild bear than run into you, and if you don’t understand why that is, you’re the reason” or something like that.

This presents two problems. The first is that, as a complaint calling out an undesirable state of things that should be fixed, it is entirely non-actionable. The question “What are we to do about this?” hovers in the air, and ultimately cannot be answered. Round up all the men and put them in a big hole somewhere? Load them into boxcars and ship them to a big prison camp? Disintegrate them?

But the second is that men have built things. Men need these things that men have built, and so do women. We’re hearing an awful lot lately about how women can do anything men can do, but the more of life we experience and the more we get to watch men and women in action, the more it’s confirmed that it’s the loud, inaccurate people saying stuff like this. I don’t pretend to know the fine details of how a woman-only society would maintain things. In all honesty, I’d find this to be educational and I half-wish the experiment could go forward somewhere to take out the guesswork. But I don’t really want that because I know it would be a disaster. Here and there, now and then, you can find a rough-and-tumble macho gal who’s ready, willing and able to climb up to a great height to rivet a girder in place, or wrestle with dangerous wildlife, or climb into a hole to do some digging, or lubricate an elevator or bridge cable. But can you find enough?

These are professions that, with things the way they are currently, are “dominated” by men to a saturation level of 90%, 95%, even higher than that. We like to use that particular verb because it makes it look like men have been crowding out those jobs, taking them away from women, abusing women this way on top of all the other ways we’ve found to do it throughout the thousands of years. But the fact is that if women wanted those jobs, they’d be doing them.

Parents see this in teenagers. I’m cool; mom and dad are square, boring, imposing on me all sorts of unwanted obligations and rules, and they also don’t know anything. But I need the shelter and food and electricity they provide to play my video games. I don’t want to think about my dependence on them and these essential utilities they provide to me, but I want to do my complaining. I’m definitely the cool one here who’s going to make the world a better place, but I don’t know what people are talking about with this “take the garbage out to the curb” stuff.

And that’s my takeaway from what I’ve been seeing:

It’s popular to pass assessments on “He’s wrecking things” or “He built this thing we use and need” or “He hasn’t done a damn thing that’s any good” — wrongfully, with an almost systematic inaccuracy, one hundred eighty degrees off course. I’m not sure why it’s so popular to do this, and I’m not sure what keeps these assessments pointing precisely the wrong way. It’s not the inaccuracy you get from a random-chance selection. Something is keeping the credit flowing to the people who don’t deserve it, with the blame for doing it wrong flowing for the people who haven’t done anything wrong, in fact have provided the goods and services consumed by the people doing the complaining.

And, it’s a way to deal with stress and agitation. People get stressed out over what’s going on in their lives, and they do more of this, their volume increasing, as they seek out the like-minded and form collectives and choruses with them, all the synchronized voices singing from a common hymnbook, about the people who built the things everyone needs to use actually not being needed, screwing things up, I’d rather run into a bear, he inherited everything from daddy, blah blah blah.

There is this inaccuracy. And there is loudness. There is anger.

There is a prevailing, uncontested narrative to go with it. And it seems to be a forever-thing.

But, I see, with distant history it doesn’t work. People revere George Washington as the Father Of His Country. Does that mean George Washington was like an Obama, just loudly scooping up the credit for building great and grand things, but unable to point to anything specific, just putting unproductive people in charge of the productive, being a noisy blowhard? No. There are facts preserved throughout history. There is hard data, about the victories he achieved, the long odds he faced — what he did, what he gave us. The same is true of all the faces on Mount Rushmore.

So we’re seeing a flaw in how we perceive things, what noises the loud people make, how we think in our collective groups, what we recognize and what we don’t. But it’s a “forest for trees” thing; we suffer the flaw when we live in the times, when we see things up close. It’s a way to deal with what bothers us. With the passage of time, it’s ultimately cured. I guess things have to settle a bit.

Not that our recording of history is perfect.

But, it’s easy to see we’re not getting a Barack Obama coin. There’s nothing to celebrate. Joe Biden’s face on a $50 bill? You can forget about that too. You’re about as likely to see Jimmy Carter or LBJ’s face on a dollar coin. Trump, on the other hand, will go down in history like Ronald Reagan: Excoriated throughout much of his time remaining on Earth, perhaps all of it, with that “strange new respect” emerging among the chattering class at his funeral or soon after it. Ultimately remembered fondly. But this is worst-case scenario. Better than even odds he’ll also get a coin, or a bill, or both. Yes, right now they’re saying he’ll be held in lasting infamy throughout the ages…just like they said that about Reagan in the 1980’s.

But that doesn’t help us in the here and now. In the current time, we have to deal with this super-loud, from-all-directions, exactly-wrong assessment of who’s building and who’s wrecking. Since it’s a way for imperfect minds to deal with accumulated stress, the more challenging everyday life is, the more of this we hear and see. What we should be worried about is: What keeps it so consistently wrong? What’s this draw upon the loud people, by the wreckers who are wrecking things and building nothing, such that the loud people see them as builders? And why are these loud people so taken with accusing and condemning the people who are really building and providing things? Why is it their way to hiss and spit, like an angry cat with its back arched in the air, at those who’ve provided needed goods and services to said loud people, in the very moment those loud people are relying on these core essentials?

Ah well. What can I say. People are flawed.

Anger has to have something to do with it. Anger, fear and guilt. The teenager knows, deep down in the recesses of his mind he doesn’t want to explore, that he should be doing a better job helping to haul the garbage to the curb. Something like that.