homelessnyugradstudent-blog

[homelessnyugradstudent-blog]

When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong: United States of America Edition

Some words from Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most revered of our Founding Fathers:

Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.

Some more words from Thomas Jefferson:

For men probably of any color, but of [black] we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them. Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.

America is in many ways an experiment. And, like any experiment, there are results. In the arena of race and reckoning with our history of oppression, we have failed this experiment. It should not take the Grand Jury decisions concerning the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to see this. Twenty-five percent of whites do not think the justice system is biased against blacks; sixty-eight percent of blacks think it is biased. Where you come down on this likely derives from your racial identity, political views, and degree of cynicism. I’m not going to delve into the justice system tonight because I gotta be to my soul-deadening, meaningless job in six hours and would like to have enough energy to possibly sneak off and masturbate at work, but I do wanna touch on privilege.

I know some of my editors just groaned. I know some of the people reading this post rolled their eyes and are muttering things about social justice warriors and ethics in gaming journalism and whether being a white person is a “bad thing” and how Taylor Swift’s new album is actually cool and good. Anyway, the refrain goes: I worked hard and my life was hard and I didn’t get any breaks, so this whole privilege thing is overblown.

And maybe you did work hard! Maybe your life is hard! Most lives are hard. Life is a puddle of piss festering in a public restroom. Life is a kidney stone you’re trying to pass. Life is, if you’re lucky, 80 years of distracting yourself from death and trying (and failing) to accomplish most of your socially constructed and inherently meaningless goals.

But to propagate the myth that equality of opportunity, liberty, and law exists in this country is absurd. To argue that race, not the culture of certain races but race itself, contributes to this is also absurd. No, this is not playing the race card. The people who complain that people like me are “making this about race” are people who do not have to worry about how their race affects their lives. And that is a privilege. It is a privilege to have your Founding Fathers say groups other than your own are subhuman. It is a privilege to turn on the TV and see mostly people who look like you, with bosses who look like you, and writers who share American experiences with you. It is a privilege to step into your expensive office and make your six-figure salary around people who look like you and talk like you and share the same values as you because they grew up in places filled with people that look like you and talk like you and so on.

America is a nation founded not so much on liberty as on White Supremacy. Not the Ku Klux Klan kind, but the kind that leads to government-proctored housing discrimination, a legacy of separate but not-at-all equal, the century of state-sponsored white-on-black terrorism that marked the period after the civil war, and the disastrous War on Drugs.

There are two basic Americas. One is an idealized version that matches the first Thomas Jefferson quote in this post. The other is a viciously racist White Supremacist one that matches the second quote. Which America you experience is likely tied to your personal history and the history of your ancestors. If you haven’t considered the centuries-long ramifications of the second quote, you’re probably white. If you believe in Thomas Jefferson’s idealized America rather than, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fucked-up-in-the-DNA America. you’re probably sick of hearing about privilege. But understand this: getting sick of the privilege police is a privilege. Having privilege doesn’t make you a bad person; it doesn’t mean you don’t work hard, but it does mean that you have a host of institutional advantages my friend Junior, who grew up in the ghetto and got shot by the police under dubious circumstances, did not have. So please just consider this: the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Junior did not happen in a vacuum. They are stained by this country’s racist foundations, and the ramifications of this racism affects all sorts of life outcomes and actions that you, because of racial privilege, might cast aside as whiny, lazy, or worse.

Not all of Wu-Tang Financial will agree with me and that’s fine. They don’t need to. You don’t need to either. All I’m asking is to think about ways in which America’s history makes the American experience different, and not idealized, for different groups of people.

This ain’t news to me, but it is to a lotta the people I’m defriending on Facebook. America ain’t the land of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for everyone. And, from the very beginning, that was by design.

Hence, the United States of America: when keeping it real goes wrong.

[homelessnyugradstudent-blog]

Political Post Pre-Fascism

Let’s the get the conclusion and the chance to construe my words out the way first: your vote doesn’t matter and never will (but you should maybe vote anyway).

Yo. Chill. Take a deep breath. Hit that blunt and nod your head if you fuck with people like me. Start stuttering and prepare the patriotic platitudes if you don’t. Look down on my immature intellectualism if you think this is a stage I’ll outgrow as soon as I’m a few more years outta college and live in an exurb with a wife who doesn’t like me, two kids, a dog, and boring-ass life.

We cool? Alright. One more time: your vote doesn’t matter. I’ll explain why soon, but hang with me a second. When I’m not abusing Oxycontin or pounding two 40s and then abusing Oxycontin, I read a lotta damn shit. Lamestream Media. Cosmopolitan. The Economist.  Weird Twitter. Wu-Tang Financial. Text messages from women who used to like me and now hate me. I read it all, bruh. And I’m just now realizing that I simultaneously will never know enough and know way too much. And, nah, I’m not stoned right now. I’m just disillusioned. And you should be, too.

Democracy is like that group of popular kids in high school who nobody actually likes; we go along with the narrative that it’s the best we can do because we are stupid and mass appeal, common denominator stupidity begets popularity. Thus, we are stuck with the small-minded ass-hats who ran your high school and their older intellectual relatives who run this country. Political Scientists and Economists argue all the time about the rationality or irrationality of voters, and that’s a boring and pointless conversation because what matters is not if voters vote in their best interest but if they have any fucking idea what they’re talking about. Fun fact: they don’t. The average voter is often wrong about things and the politicians we elect reflect this wrongness. We ignore the experts on scientific matters and economic matters in favor of politicians who are usually neither scientists nor economists. Rather, they are experts at being popular, whether it’s through pandering to an uninformed populace or through genuinely held misinformation and cognitively biased opinions that mirror the ignorance of their would-be constituents.

On many of our most divisive issues, the experts (who are not infallible but at least think about these things more deeply than your uncle Brian who chews tobacco and works in Accounts Receivable and went to “some college” and makes his own beef jerky) often disagree with the average American and, thus, the average politician. We’re talking immigration. We’re talking carbon taxes and how people respond to economic incentives in general. We’re talking the greatest threats to our rock spinning in nothingness.

You might find this technocratic, elitist bullshit. Which it totally is. But it also isn’t. Because you can read as much as I read or you can be an expert, but you still can’t know with much certainty about many of these issues. What you can do is not get swept up in the platitude spewing politicians who claim to have all the answers but either do not or do not want to or are not constantly reflecting on what they believe and why. So, every election, you get to choose between various chewed-up options that the American public, which is stupid, finds palatable. Combine these realities with the corrupting influence of special interests, Gerrymandering and our useless and vacuous political media, and feeling any optimism toward our political situation seems pollyannish. You should enter that voting booth feeling conflicted and confused, not because you are uninformed, but because you are informed enough to know that whoever you vote for represents a whole lotta bullshit. And, yes, both major parties have different philosophies on prosperity and the role of government and whatever, but both of those platforms have major weaknesses because you and me have major intellectual weaknesses and put up with rubbish candidates and smarmy, populist policy. So, fuck it. Vote or don’t vote. It won’t matter until we get rid of the high school popularity contest and all its associated fanfare, and the candidates you vote for tomorrow are those candidates because they bought into the popularity contest and know how to game the fanfare.

But like I said: I don’t know, man. So I’ll just drink heavily and see you at the polls.

[homelessnyugradstudent-blog]

Stop Dressing Like A Moron On Halloween And Stop Supporting People Who Do

If you are not like me and actually enjoy the company of others, you might find yourself at a party this Halloween weekend. This party might feature beer or cocaine or a discussion of quantitative easing. Costumes will almost certainly play some sort of role, either as a sartorial component of the revelry or as some sort of ironic, post-Halloween posturing. Whatever role they play is fine. Maybe you remove the costume because its an orgy. Maybe you ingest DMT and stare at the wall while wearing costumes. Maybe you and your church group argue that wearing a costume invites Satanic impulses into the world. Or something. I don’t really care what you do with or without your costumes. However, there is one thing you should not do with your costume, and, if you do, I will lob hella internet criticism at you and not take you seriously:

You should not dress like a racial/ethnic/cultural minority and you should not defend anyone who does.

It’s 2014. This should be simple, but it isn’t because we live in America, a country founded on and propelled by institutionalized racism that we still try to scrub from History textbooks and patently absurd professional sports team names. Reading that sentence is gonna piss some of you off, even when it’s a demonstrable fact that racism is, and has forever been, government/mainstream cultural policy in this country. One of my colleagues here argues that this inclination to point out that white men have been fucking over non-white men for hundreds of years generates an intellectual ethos of victimhood. To which I respond: non-white men have been victims, through no fault of their own, more often than not over (at least) the last 500 or so years, so do what you can do stop that cycle. Like not labelling very real concerns about white men rigging the game and demeaning other races/ethnicities/cultures as victimhood politics.  Like not wearing blackface as a costume. Or not dressing as a Native American. Or not going as someone trying to illegally cross the American border.

A few years back, in my shitty-vodka-drinking lumpenproletariat days, I did the latter. My friends (one of whom is a Mexican-American) and I dressed up as border crossers and Border Patrol agents because we thought it would be “funny.” Fun fact about this: it isn’t funny. I don’t think any topic is off-limits when trying to be funny, but certain messages sent in the name of humor should not be sent at all. Some people lucked into the (white) privilege of laughing at the misfortune and pain of certain groups because they inhabit a world where things like cartel-affiliated border crossings or getting Stop-and-Frisked because of your skin are not legitimate concerns. So when you, for one drunken night, choose to populate the life of someone who experiences the world in a different and more targeted way than you do, you send a message that their experience (or their victimhood, depending on your perspective) is trivial. Because when you shed that blackface or remove that headdress, you return to a socially constructed caste that needn’t worry about persecution over your face or your cultural markers.

I know some of you feel that white-hot anger rising in your chest. But, you think, his Mexican-American friend was okay with the costumes. Just like some Native Americans are okay with the Washington NFL team name. Why should we change if people from the minority group are okay with it?

Why? Because subtle prejudice or hostility is still prejudice or hostility, and swallowing this minority prejudice/hostility is so ingrained in American culture that some people cannot see it. Because even when we have big problems with racism, classism, ethnocentrism, and sexism in this country, ignoring the little problems or labelling them as superficial, Politically Correct Liberal Bias does not mean they aren’t still problems; making people with a different history of representation in America feel that (subtle) aggression/dehumanization through your costume might not strike you as important as the laughable racism associated with the War on Drugs, but you and I and it and the words we choose and costumes we wear are important because it contributes to the same system. Because, to a large extent, racism is a feat of government social engineering. Because depending on your gender, sex, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, body type, and other shit, you live in a different power/influence/respect strata from other people.

Ignoring or downplaying this truth is necessary for American mythology. Since grade school, propagandists throttled us with stories of people (almost always white men) who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and made something of themselves through grit and determination alone because the playing field in America is level. To acknowledge that different groups of people experience different opportunities and struggles sounds banal, but many Americans (and essentially every Horatio Alger-style myth) deny it as anti-American or Communist or some self-serving conjured nonsense like that. To them, this essay represents another Social Justice Warrior infringing on Freedom of Expression rights. Another Libtard taking something away from them. Another Armchair Activist telling them that the way they live their life is wrong. And I hear those concerns, and I understand those concerns because I used to see it like that, too.

But then I considered that social progress is not a zero-sum game. I don’t wanna “take your rights away.” I just want people who historically have not had the opportunity or access to the same rights and Freedom of Expression that you take for granted to experience the world in a less oppressive and hostile way. Maybe that delineates victimhood and power dynamics that contradict your worldview. Maybe it makes you feel threatened. Like you can’t be yourself. Like the world wants to infringe on some central part of your identity. Then you might have a tiny taste of how minorities feel all the time. It’s not their fault the power-brokers on this planet decided some physical and cultural characteristics deserve more humanity than others. But it is your fault if you don’t see how clinging to your privilege and decrying victimhood contribute to the dehumanization of different groups over some bullshit.

So, even if it’s a small act, don’t wear that moronic-ass, dead-ass garbage costume. You might not think about it, and you might not want to think about it, but that bullshit costume says a lot about you and the world you fuck with. And I don’t fuck with anyone who, through ignorance or willful intellectual gymnastics, fucks with a world that’s fucked up and wants it to stay fucked up.

[homelessnyugradstudent-blog]

An Ebola Greatest Hit From 2.5 Years Ago. Relevant! Timely!

Bruh, I’m gonna do something that almost never happens in America and certainly never happens in an election year: I’m about to make an argument that considers multiple sides of an issue and attempts to generate a nuanced position. Y’all can call that Un-American, but that’s alright because the only American thing about our response to Ebola is that it’s been dumbed-down and politicized for an ignorant populace that obtains their infectious disease response opinions from Viagra-popping fat men named Rush or Representatives who deny the basic tenets of science.

By now, unless you believe that the Moon is made out of cheese/vaccines make the world a worse place/listening to country music is a worthy pursuit, we should all agree on the basic facts:

Due to bureaucratic dysfunction and hubris, a handful of Americans have contracted Ebola. The virus’ spread derives from a single, botched response at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas; this series of fuck-ups, which included (according to NBC News) Ebola-contaminated material stacked in hallways, medical professionals and support staff wearing basically whatever the hell they wanted, and Infectious Disease doctors just kinda hanging out while nurses dealt with the Ebola Guy (aka Thomas Eric Duncan). All this culminated in Ebola Guy dying. Pour one out for the fallen homie. And pour one out for reason and calm because major politicians and pundits have been making me nauseous from their fear-based stupidity ever since Ebola Guy passed away.

Once Ebola Guy contaminated two nurses (Ebola Nurse 1 and Ebola Nurse 2) and Ebola Nurse 2 travelled back to Dallas from Cleveland, people in Congress started freakin’ the fuck out. Which is fair. Ebola Nurse 2, before she knew she was Ebola Nurse 2, called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and still got on those planes after the CDC was like, “Yeah, whatever, it’s chill that you treated Ebola Guy and now want to board various domestic flights.” So Ebola Nurse 2 fucked up. And the CDC fucked up by allowing her to fly, and allowing Texas Presbyterian to bungle the initial response, and not taking the threat of Ebola seriously enough in THE SPRING when we knew shit was getting real in Western Africa. But this doesn’t mean Barack Hussein O’Bummer coordinated an Ebola crisis because he’s, like, an African Prince. Which is something buffoons have suggested on social media. And it doesn’t mean we should nuke Western Africa or kick Liberians out of the country or drain the Atlantic Ocean and flood affected African communities struggling to fight the outbreak. Which are all things my co-workers have suggested while spitting out chewing tobacco and/or casually using racial slurs. Bureaucratic ineffectuality does not constitute a conspiracy, and it should not engender Total War against Western Africa because some suburban white people feel threatened by some stuff they heard on the news.

So, if you live in objective, fact-based reality, you can concede that this response leaves a lotta people nonplussed. But the response to the response is what will determine whether or not we get this situation under control. Last Thursday, Congress trotted out the CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden and some other bureaucrats to fall on their swords. Mostly, it consisted of Dr. Frieden explaining why banning travel from Western Africa would not solve anything and then Republican lawmakers who are not public health experts telling him that banning travel from Western Africa would solve things because it feels like it would. Here’s a brief transcript of how the whole thing went down, via NPR:

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: ...There are no shortcuts in the control of Ebola. And it is not easy to control it. To protect the United States, we have to stop it at the source.

REPRESENTATIVE FRED UPTON: No. You're not coming here, not until this situation - you're right, it needs to be solved in Africa. But until it is, we should not be allowing these folks in, period.

Note that Upton strips Ebola Victims (read: poverty-stricken Africans) of their humanity by calling them “these folks.” Note that “No, You’re not coming here…” sets up a classic US vs. THEM dichotomy where Americans (i.e., US) cannot succumb to evil foreign events/act as though we live in a globalised century. Note that this, if anything, is a global health crisis affecting other human beings and not just some problem those savages across the pond brought upon themselves. Dr. Frieden went on to explain that encasing the United States in Jingoistic American Exceptionalism would only hinder efforts to stop Ebola at its source, but most Republicans, like most Americans, do not understand epidemiology, infectious medicine, or the externalities a travel ban induces. And, shit bruh, I’m no expert either, but I know that if Glenn Beck and other dudes who obfuscate or deny scientific consensus on things like evolution and Climate Change are calling for something that directly opposes prevailing epidemiological notions, we should probably ignore them. Even when the CDC and White House has ignored the Ebola problem or taken ineffective action for several months. Even when, like many crisis responses under O’Bungler, things look half-assed. Even when I, like you, don’t want to catch Ebola. Remember that this is political season, and that there is everything to gain from screeching counterproductive populist platitudes at the CDC Director and nothing to gain from saying we have better medical virology than Nigeria, which just quashed Ebola. People are scared, so you can win cheap political points by doing things that make them less scared instead of less likely to catch Ebola.

Since 9/11, Americans have mastered responding with fear. The news cycle and standard Beltway bullshit permeate American homes with half-truths and spread anytime you come into contact with CNN or Politico. Too often policy, whether economic, social or health-related, derives from what feels like a good response rather than a mindful, conscientious and knowledge-driven response. This is how we end up with Wars on Drugs, Wars on Terror, and a misunderstanding of monetary policy. Drugs must be bad; Terror must be easy to stop with enough bombs; any inflation must be the worst thing for the economy. I don’t know whether or not we’ll solve the Ebola crisis, but I do know that you gotta align yourself with people who have their shit together. I look at the Obama Administration’s response to Ebola and other 21st century nightmares and I’m not impressed, even with his addition of political operative Ron Klain as DA EBOLA GAWD. But the standard-bearer for reactionary, fear-based not-having-your-shit-togetherness is probably the group framing an entire swath of Africa as not part of the world (or at least not part of America’s world). So I’m rolling with the flawed side of the aisle who, despite a lotta fuck-ups, has reason on their side. And all I can do is hope a belief in travel bans and isolationism isn’t contagious.

[homelessnyugradstudent-blog]

Adrian Peterson Was Never The Victim

My mom hit me. Not a lot. Not with belts or switches. But she hit me. She hit me because a single-mother raising three boys sees no alternative. She hit me to momentarily stop the unrelenting barrage of my bullshit, even though I didn’t know better. Even though she didn’t know better. She hit me as we rode public transportation to the Food Shelf. She hit me when I bitched about my reduced-price school lunch. She hit me when I felt bad about the things I’d seen as a child and thus hit my younger brothers.

She hit me because her dad hit her.

She hit me because her ex-husband did, too.

Adrian Peterson got hit as a child, and now the NFL is hitting him with a year-long ban. The ban derives from Adrian Peterson hitting a four-year old son with a switch, stuffing leaves in his mouth, and railing away until marks littered the child’s body.

Those marks were physical. I’ve seen the pictures. They are vile. Ugly. Disheartening. But I’m not too concerned. It’s the emotional marks I worry about.

The NFL stands to gain a lot from Adrian Peterson’s year-long ban. Another notch in Commissioner Roger Goodell’s self-rewarded belt as The Great Moralizer, the toughest and strictest executive in professional sports. Another tally in the ‘W’ column for NFL owners and management; another ‘L’ for labor. The NFL Players Association looks bad defending Adrian Peterson. NFL corporate looks good, like they’ve cleaned up their act after the Ray Rice fiasco and returned to their hard-line Authoritarian instincts, where smoking weed or popping Molly deserves swift punishment but punching your fianceé is a nebulous offense. More circle-jerk fodder for the pasty old white men who run America’s most popular sports league.

What most people can’t or won’t understand is that you can loathe the NFL’s fickle moral compass AND resent corporal punishment of children

Which you should.

I understand this is largely a racial, cultural, and economic issue. That African-Americans have less of a problem with spanking a child than do whites. That Southerners are more likely to hit a kid. That soft-ass, sissified lefties who went to Liberal Arts colleges and read the New Yorker and masturbate to NPR (i.e., people like me even though I bench 275 lbs and worked construction to pay for college) condemn physically disciplining a child.

So, yes, this is a deeply ingrained behavior (and skepticism toward the behavior) with a sociocultrual/racial component that most commentators don’t consider (because racism is, like, dead or something). It is, oftentimes, literally a black and white issue.

People who hit their kids are not necessarily bad people. People who like Macklemore are bad people. People who don’t vaccinate their kids are bad people. People who write anonymously for Wu-Tang Financial are bad people. But they aren’t bad just because they hit their kids. If they thought hitting their kids was a bad thing, they (mostly) wouldn’t hit their kids.

The problem: hitting kids is a bad thing. A scientifically-researched and condemned bad thing.

Corporal punishment disfigures and injures thousands of kids a year, is linked to increased aggression, leads to disrespect for authority and unwillingness to follow rules, contributes to criminal activity in children and adults, begets an antagonistic and violent worldview, and negatively affects mental health.

So fuck that. Hitting your kids is objectively indefensible. But because this is America and we puke out knee-jerk reactions anytime our conventional wisdom is questioned or anytime someone’s (e.g., clinical psychology’s) disagreement doesn’t sit well with us, most people are cool with hitting kids anyway. Because “we have to fight the wussification of America.” Or because “how I raise my kid isn’t your business.” Or because “I got hit by my parents and turned out fine.”

Something deep within the American psyche refuses to accept when we’re wrong. We want to think we’re smart, well-meaning people, but when we are confronted with evidence suggesting we aren’t, be it Climate Change or Colonialism or state-sponsored genocides and terrorism or that legal drugs would be kinda chill, we double down and make excuses. The cognitive dissonance is too much for us. So it’s people like me who must be wrong, not the people who are True Americans fighting more liberal political correctness! Not the people who hit/spank/whip tiny, defenseless human beings!

Which brings us back to Adrian Peterson. Even if the NFL is fucking him for PR purposes, I don’t feel bad for him and don’t really care if he ever plays again. He is not a victim. His kid is the victim. Say it’s none of our business, but if his kid grows up violent or depressed or criminal, it is our problem. Even if his kid “turns out fine,” defaulting to a defense of Adrian Peterson or corporal punishment means you’d rather cling to tradition and arbitrary cultural norms and what feels right rather than what is actually right for your kid. Because it’s easier to rest on what you know than what you don’t want to know. It’s easier to hit a kid than to have a discussion.

So whatever. My mom hit me, and she was still a good parent overall. But she was at times a stupid parent. A kid shouldn’t fear his mom. Shouldn’t feel dread when dad comes home. But that was a reality for me. And I’m sure it is a reality for Adrian Peterson’s son. Fuck Adrian Peterson for instilling anxiety and a propensity for future violence in the name of discipline. Fuck stupid punishment and its stupid defenders. Fuck everyone involved in these snafus but especially fuck the aggressors.

The NFL is exploiting an uneven power dynamic because they can and because they’re frustrated and because the smaller person is helpless. Just like my mom did. Just like Adrian Peterson did.