When a
tree dies, or when we run across decaying wood in a forest, our first reaction
is to think we should remove it. However, the ecology of the forest is such
that saproxylic organisms, including fungi and insects, depend on the dead wood
that naturally generates the dynamics of the forest. The fact is, however, that
there is a real obsession to eliminate it as soon as possible because it seems
dirty and like it will attract pests. The biggest problem associated with dead
wood is that dead wood plays a very important role in forest life. The forest
needs dead trees and decaying wood to live. The point of this ecology lesson is
that what humans think is done in good taste is not always the best way to go.
Sometimes nature has a way of taking care of things that completely eclipses
human vision or understanding. Sometimes what seems obvious and right to humans
is just dead wrong.
* *
* * *
The
transition is rough because it is still not fully understood. The Democrat
party used to be the party of the little guy and the Republican party was the
party of big business. Now, in the last 25 years it has changed. The Democrats
used to be liberal, but now they are aligned with big business and everyone who
is not a white man. Yet, not only are they still liberal, they are
ultra-liberal in the extreme. The Republicans are now not really conservatives
the way they used to be and they aligned with the working and middle class,
especially the little white guy that got left behind in the reorganization of
the old liberal and conservative factions, the old Democrat and Republican
parties.
So,
now the ultra-liberal, marginalized person is with big business? Now the little
white guy was left behind, good and stranded, until Donald Trump came along to
save him? What the hell happened?
The
thing is no one was warned exactly. It happened in little movements and stages
here and there. First, the manufacturing base began leaving the country in the
90s. Meanwhile the UN began disseminating policy laden with buzzwords like
globalization, multiculturalism, and diversity. Soon came sustainability,
global warming, climate change, and green energy. We started to hear talk about
a global world without borders in which everyone would be the same because everyone
was exactly the same. Morality was only cultural relativism. White was no
longer right – it was plain wrong because everybody is just as right as
everybody else in the new world order.
In the
80s and 90s, Affirmative Action hit, but it hit nowhere as hard as in
academics. In higher education, white men soon became an endangered species,
especially in the social sciences. By the mid-90s, jobs and positions of power were
being handed out like candy on college campuses across the nation to anyone who
was black, hispanic, female, gay or lesbian - an intersectional combination of the above was the most potent force of all - anyone but a white man. If you were a white
man, then you and everything about your world was put on notice, was suddenly
labelled as politically incorrect. It did not matter if a person had not
published or if they were not very good – if they qualified and looked the part,
they were given the position and as much power as they could assemble for
themselves merely because they were not white men. Trust me – I was there – I
know.
My dad
was Swiss and my mom was Colombian. As I entered the job market coming out of
grad school, and when I inquired as to whether I was Affirmative Action I was
told I was “not Affirmative Action enough” and I knew exactly what that meant.
Translation: I pass easily as a white man – they were looking for brown skin,
sombreros, marginalized, victimized, outsiders – it was the new identity
politics and you had to look the part. It was the most superficial kind of
racism that ever existed. If you look like a white man, you go to the back of
the line, and that is the new formula for eradicating racism in America. I had
some good reasons for leaving academics back in 1999.
Interestingly,
most people have no idea how profoundly the liberal identity politics of college
campuses in the 80s and 90s has crept into society at large. It might help if
more people were aware of some of the books and articles that had influenced
this movement. It is more than just angry women or angry black people demanding
their rights. There has evolved an entire ideology of ex post colonial
defamation in the extreme.
New
classics of leading edge Black thinkers formed a new canon of empowerment
revolving around works such as Franz Fanon
(1963), The wretched of the earth, in
which the evils of colonialism were explicated and the need for Blacks to
receive reparations from their former colonial slave masters was explicitly
pronounced. Then there was bell hooks (1992) who wrote Representing whiteness in the black
imagination, in which it was carefully explained that no white person would
ever be able to understand the trauma harbored by the Black mind to this day
from the social memories of slavery – it would never be eradicated and no white
person would ever understand it, see it, or be able to make up for it.
Then there was a piece by a white woman, Peggy McIntosh
(1988), White privilege: Unpacking the
invisible knapsack, which struck the perfect chord that ultimately served
to unite all of humanity against the white man. In this piece McIntosh
explained that white men have privilege, they have too much privilege, and the
worst part of it is that they are not even consciously aware of how much
privilege they have, and there is no way to ensure that they have superseded
their own privilege.
The stark theme of these works is that white men are not even
consciously aware of how evil they are and how evil they have been. The theme
is that if left to their own devices, evil white men will continue to run the
world at everyone else’s expense. What was required was a real movement, a real
revolution that would pull the white man out of civilization by the roots. The
white man himself could not be relied upon to participate or help because he
was, by definition, too ensconced in his own privilege to be able to
understand. He was a helpless colonial idiot savant who was afflicted with his
own evil sadistic desire to subjugate everyone else to his will.
Now, I am skimming here admittedly, but take even just the
three pieces I have cited, mash them together, and you have the beginnings of
an ideological framework for a liberal movement that wants to eradicate western
civilization as we have known it. This is, in no uncertain terms, an ideology
that would seek to remove the white man from power, tear down the world he had
built, and build it back up again the way they wanted it to be. Translation:
Screw the White Man.
It's the circle of life - take a deep breath …
~End Part 1 - Part 2 Thursday~
