House of Eratosthenes

Blogsister Daphne, in an offline, sends along a link to a rant by someone leftward of mind and energetic of keyboard, but possessing a lazy non-functional sort of curiosity about the world and the things within it. It is really a sad, pitiful kind of an essay. The author even calls it an “observation” but if you read every word you’ll notice there is not a single observation within it. What is within it, is a conclusion — one based on precisely nothing. You’ve heard the drill before; they should really make one word out of it. Teepartiersizracist. Why do it? They should make one word out of this one as well: Highfivesandpatsonthebackfromhisliberalbuddies.

Does this seem like projection?

“…who are you better than?”
Quote:

“You know when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, named Monroe. He was … (subtle laugh), I guess he was just a little more luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule.

It was a big deal in round that town. Now my daddy hated that mule. Cause, his friends were always kidding him about, “They saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule and Monroe is going to rent another field now he had a mule.”

One morning that mule showed up dead. They poisoned the water. After that, there wasn’t any mention about that mule around my daddy. It just never came up. One time we were driving down that road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He just packed up and left, I guess, he must of went up north or something.

I looked over at my daddy’s face, I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, “If you ain’t better than a nigger son, who are you better than?”” – Agent Anderson, Mississippi Burning

And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge…who are you going to be better than?

And don’t think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are…but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.

It’s just that we have seen this before. Up North…in our so-called “enlightened” neck of the woods.

Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor…but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.

So we went through all this Tea Party nonsense up North, about 35-45 years ago. And the reaction was just as vehement, inarticulate, and dumb as what is being spewed now. If you want to see hate and spittle, you should have seen how South Boston reacted to school integration.

But you would not have seen it 24/7 as you do today. It happened…but not in a perpetual echo chamber. And thank Christ for that.

And if you think the enlightened liberal North embraced integrated housing with open hearts, think again, It was called “white flight” and it damn near emptied some cities. “Sure, we support integration…now excuse us while we move to the suburbs where those Zulus won’t be able to spear us with their assegais.”

But white flight was a safety valve. It kept the pressure at reasonable levels. It also prolonged it and led to new levels of stupidity, but you could, after all, vote with your feet. Many did. Many still do.

OK, the job front was a bit stickier. Northern Industry has always been (at least since the 1950’s) largely integrated. Steel Mill owners don’t give a fuck what your skin color is. Besides, you could only tell on the way into work, on the way out everybody pretty much looked the same.

But you always knew what hand you were playing, because the cards were mostly dealt face up. Your boss was still white. Your union steward was still white. Your mayor and your chief of police were still white. And, as much as it pains me to tell you this, Michael Steele did not run the GOP. And even if he did, at least up north, you went home at the end of the day to your own private Idaho in the suburbs, and played golf on the weekends at a club where Michael Steele was never going to get in. Well, not the front door

The workforce may have been integrated, but you still knew who you were better than. Nobody dared yell “You Lie!!” at a white boss.

Over time, most of that has changed (but if you take a shot every time you can name a Black mayor of a predominantly white New England city…you are going to bed sober). But it took a very conscious effort to change it. Acceptance of diversity does not come easy when the question is: “who are you better than?”

And now the way the cards were dealt 18 months ago has upset a huge segment of the population. They no longer know who they are better than. They are lashing out. And there is fuck-all for a safety valve and it does run 24/7 in a perpetual echo chamber.

They say it is about “freedoms”…but they can point to no freedoms that have been lost over the last 14 months.

They say the Constitution is being destroyed, but when you ask them what parts of The General Welfare Clause or Congresses’ power to regulate Interstate Commerce are being violated…they stand mute with rage

They say it is about taxes…but they can find no drastic tax increases in the last 14 months.

Come to think of it, I don’t really remember anyone getting speared with an assegai thirty years ago either. But that didn’t stop people screaming about the danger.

And they say they want their Country Back.

Well, Bing-fucking-O.

Now we have it. They want to return to a time and place where they at least knew who they were better than.

And the fact that most of this spittle is flying from the mouths of the poor, the semi-educated, the low information voter, and from By-God Dixie…well, that is only because it is your turn. A lot of the rest of the Country has already gone through this exercise 35-45 years ago. And the same spittle flew from the same confused lips when it was our turn.

So we don’t look on Tea-hadists with scorn because they are alien and unfathomable. We do so because we recognize these very traits as ours and those of our neighbors.“All in the Family” wasn’t the most popular show in the Northeast because Archie Bunker was despised. It was popular because he was comfortably familiar. But at least he was a character. Nobody tried to run him for President.

And it ain’t just President Obama. It is a lot else: If your job can be done on the Indian sub-continent, who are you better than? If China can launch a spaceship, who are you better than? If the world looks at the mighty Dollar as little better than an American Peso, who are you better than? If an immigrant can work your ass into the ground, and do it smiling for a lot less money, who are you better than?

A whole lot of life has been shaken and stirred the last couple of decades.

This whole Tea-Party nonsense will eventually pass. Because there is no “going back”. OK, you can move to Idaho, or Montana, and it will feel like you have found what was missing. And you might even be happy. As long as you never watch the POTUS on the national news while you are trying to answer the question: “Who am I better than?”

But Jesus wept, people are going to keep asking that damned question. Soccer may be watched for it’s beauty…American Football is about who is better. We are more of a class society than people want to admit. There is still a very strong vein of Scotch-Irish pride that runs through this Country’s character. Unfortunately that pride is seldom based, at least lately, on personal or collective achievement…just who you are better than. You can hear it every time a factory closes in this Country and people cheer. No, they really don’t believe that closing the Auto Factories will make America stronger. But it adds a whole bunch of people to the list of those they are better than.

Still…what the fuck. 600 years of violence and oppression was bound to warp the Scotch-Irish a bit. Hell, you can even consider them heroically well adjusted given their, and my, history. And history will eventually change us again once all the dogs adjust to the new Alpha Male reality and find their place again in the pack. Until then we live in the land of flying angry spittle.

PS – I never wanted to be better than anyone else. Just faster. Cheers

So the game is afoot, to mix politics with racial tension. Has been for awhile; but now that Obama is doing some real damage it’s kicking into high gear. Defensive instinct, I guess.

This seems, to me, a treacherous weapon the democrats and liberals are deploying. By which I mean: It is known damage will be done, but to what exactly, and to what extent, no one can say. It is an epoxy of unlimited doom. They are the little boy displaying all sorts of courage his parents lack…as he mixes brake fluid with bleach, flushes car parts down the toilet, uses imitation coffee creamer to fill the living room with flaming vapor…because, and only because, his parents are responsible for outcomes of things, and he is not.

Or perhaps it’s because his parents are responsible and know they’re responsible — and he simply hasn’t put that much thought into it. Whatever the case, his fearlessness is the one that only comes from the purest ignorance.

These two issues cause damage when blended together, because they are not the same. The political differences lead to rancor, to be sure; but if you think one way and I think another, at some point I’m going to write you off, catalog your opinions as a testament to your intellect and drive — a derogatory one — and you’ll damn sure do the same with me. In other words, at some point it becomes a dead issue between us. We won’t meet on a patch of ground the next morning at dawn with swords or pistols. The worst that’ll happen is I’ll go around telling people you’re a left-wing whacko and you’ll tell them all that I’m a right-wing nutjob.

But it seems nobody wants to allow anyone else to make up his own mind, about where racism exists or where it was seen. Everyone wants to tell everybody else that this thing over here is racist and that thing over there is not. It does not become a dead issue. Why is that? Because after thousands of years, we still live in a village, and every man can still be ostracized into oblivion for thinking the wrong thing…or being perceived to be thinking the wrong thing. You can be fired for being a racist; certainly, your authority over others, for obvious reasons, will be constrained no matter how precious your individual contributions to a company’s bottom line. And so the rumors hurt, personally. They contain the power to eradicate people. Think of the little boy starting fires in his parents’ living room again.

I’m speaking of the difference between insulting a man and screwing around with his livelihood. Back in the wild west days, stealing a man’s horse led to a hanging. Seems harsh now, but if you lived back then it made more sense.

Their willingness to bring such harm to strangers, doesn’t frighten me that much. What really causes me unrest is the lack of thought they put into it. People like this fellow seem to have noodled out the situation just barely up to the hash mark labeled “it just might make them all shut up and leave Barack alone” — and not so much as a fraction of an inch behond that.

But I find it educational, to say nothing of surprising, to gain so much insight about myself from reading just a few paragraphs. That everything President Obama is doing, would be a hundred percent cool with me if only He was a white guy. This, I must say, arrives as news.

I’m inclined to keep my silence on the one observation, the big one, the elephant in the room: That, if I really want to find a bunch of people obsessed with figuring out “who am I better than?,” a tea party is not where I’m going to be headed. I’m going to make a bee-line for the closest gaggle of arugula-eatin’ tree-huggin’ liberals. This is where the author’s ignorance peaks out to an impressive zenith, up where the air is thin. Anyone who’s exchanged ideas with anyone else, for any length of time, has surely noticed this: Argue with a conservative for a few minutes, and the argument goes to “if you want more of something, subsidize it and if you want less of something, tax it.” Argue with a tea party person, and the result is pretty much the same.

Argue with a liberal for an equivalent length of time, and the argument goes to “and that makes me better than (somebody).” No matter what the subject, that’s where it all goes. It is as if they have lost something, or were born without it, and are trying to get it back again.

Update: I’m told it is the height of hubris to quote oneself. It is not the first time this scribe has been guilty of such a thing, and it is almost certainly not going to be the last:

Thing I Know #330. A man who doesn’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, is not to be trusted in delivering either one of those.

Sorry, it just seems to fit Mr. Jinx to a tee.

All you folks who’ve never quoted yourselves before, now you know who you’re better-than. That’d be me.

They say it is about “freedoms”…but they can point to no freedoms that have been lost over the last 14 months.

The health care bill, stupid.

They say the Constitution is being destroyed, but when you ask them what parts of The General Welfare Clause or Congresses’ power to regulate Interstate Commerce are being violated…they stand mute with rage.

The health care bill, stupid.

They say it is about taxes…but they can find no drastic tax increases in the last 14 months.

The health care bill, stupid.

If this guy actually listened to Tea Partiers’ speeches all the way through, instead of just listening for a minute or two he’d have the answer to his inane questions.
- cylarz | 04/08/2010 @ 10:36
Besides, they are still under the mistaken impression that this is about “the past 14 months” and one Barack Obama. It’s not. Oh, he’s front and center right now for sure and pushing harder on pretty much everything we have a gripe about, but it’s nothing new, and it won’t go away when he’s gone.

They don’t want to know who the tea partiers are or what they are about. We just serve as a magic mirror for them to project who they are not over. and to admire themselves as they do moral preening against a fictional backdrop.
- philmon | 04/08/2010 @ 17:38
I knew those people in South Boston pretty well back in the day. Busing black kids to Southie was insane.
As if dooming black kids to rub shoulders and switchblades with Boston Irish was going to improve their situation. These Micks were so stupid or so drunk that they never once hesitated to re-elect the Irish family that forced it on them.
- jamzw | 04/08/2010 @ 21:47
Well hell, I thought you weren’t going to touch this one with a ten foot pole from your dismissive response. Shows that I know what you find to be irresistible red meat, sweet man.

Apologies for not making the daily rounds lately, I’ve been scraping wallpaper. A time consuming and tedious chore that costs fifteen dollars an hour to hire out, so I’ve chosen to do the sweat labor myself.

I echo James, northerners are some the most racist hypocrites I’ve ever encountered in word and practice.
- Daphne | 04/10/2010 @ 21:11
[…] Barry Has a Problem With Women Doctor Lays Off Employee Who Voted for Obama? Buy Some Extra Rounds “Who Are You Better Than?” Smith Got it Wrong Very Late Child Support “How the GOP Purged Me” How Liberals Do […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 04/11/2010 @ 12:39
[…] speaking here of the Freeberg Village Theory, discussed here and here and here and here and here and here. The process by which, in a season a famine, one or several […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/23/2010 @ 06:48

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“Who Are You Better Than?”Thursday, April 8th, 2010

“Who Are You Better Than?”
Thursday, April 8th, 2010