More Mental Bric-a-Brac

White guilt, Auntie Barbaras, Annoying Indians, and more

Mental Bric-a-Brac is a transcription of the stuff that flies through my brain during a day. Or a week. Or a whatever.

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Hello, hello, supporting subscribers, and happy new year! Let’s get this mental dustbin shaking.

The White Guilt Hangover

Disaffected former liberals, centrists, and those new to conservatism: You can’t have what you want. I’d like to persuade you to give up hoping for these things, and especially to stop scolding for them.

You can’t have:

• Everyone being nice to each other and never saying anything that you think is “racist-coded.” You’re too goddamned keyed into this “racist” lie. You haven’t worked it out of your system. You’re still jumping in panic anytime someone insults a black person or an Indian person, or, etc.

  
  Everyone but you can see that you’ve got White Guilt in spades. You won’t even take your own side in an argument if the opponent is more “minority” than you.

• A world where there’s no backlash. You can’t have this. It’s not real. There is going to be backlash. It’s happening right now. Men are fed up with female narcissism, reasonably. Women are fed up with trans-male narcissism, reasonably. White people are fed up with racial narcissism, reasonably. They’re not evil, wrong, or “not helping.” They’re humans having human reactions that are unbelievably predictable and normal.

  
  Ask yourself why you have such a hard time empathizing with them. This is a you thing, not a them thing.

• A nice, neat resolution to all that has ailed us, but with no fighting or hurty words. That’s not real either.

• The continuation of a feminized discourse. Women and feminized men: it’s over. We’re not having it anymore. Men are going to talk like men, and you can’t stop it. You shouldn’t want to stop it. Locker room talk isn’t killing you or raping your daughters or “setting us all back.”

What you in this group are having a hard time seeing is that the leftist-femino-Marxist cultural project has abused so many for so long that there is going to be a backlash. I had a hard time seeing this for years. If this describes you, I’m not trying to insult you. I don’t hate you. I shared your views until I didn’t. I do empathize with you and your perspective. That means I understand why you’ve come to those conclusions; it does not mean I think they’re stable or accurate conclusions.

This conflict is normal, human, and overdue. It’s normal. White people, men, women in touch with reality and the sexual binary, and conservatives, are fully as human as the “minorities” some of you newly minted conservatives are still collecting and curating and cuddling as if they were Beanie Babies. You’ve had long enough now to see past this; it’s time to get to the acceptance stage.

The more you scold, wring your hands, call for “peace” (without granting the abused the right to even complain about it or point it out), the angrier people are going to get. Keep it up, scolds, and you’re going to make enemies out of people who largely share your values, and you’ll deserve it.

Shit’s gone too far. There is going to be a reckoning. It’s not going to look like a kindergarten class.

Auntie Barbara

Mary Harrington has a great article you should read:

Yes, please. Do bring back the aunties. Aunt away, matrons. Young people need it.

Aunties are what I call “Barbaras.” Barbaras are the antithesis of “Karens.” Barbaras are sensible, wise, they manage things well, they look out for the kids and also make sure the buffet table is stocked, the books are shelved correctly in the stacks, and that you have an Aunt to have coffee with when you need advice.

White Guilt Hangover II: The Hangover-ening

Here on Substack, and in some other spots, we’re onto the genre of essay “Turns out liberals were right about my MAGA friends—they’re RACISTS!” (Look for it yourselves; I’m not going to draw specific attention and deal with the fallout of daring to criticize a Beloved Publication.)

We are to believe that:

-Indians having to put up with some anger, and yeah, some racial insults, is a Holocaust Around The Corner

-White Americans saying anything negative about any browner culture is the MOST DANGEROUS SIN OF ALL SINS.

-Indians will be DYING IN THE STREETS soon if this doesn’t stop.

And, we are to believe:

-Nothing that is done to or said about any white American can ever do anything even 1/1,000th of a percent as HORRIBLE as saying not-nice-things about Indians or brown people.