Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (20 page)

This is poison, for it creates a new kind of peer pressure. Whereas before we were encouraged to marry and start families, now we have our most “successful” voices championing the opposite—or rather denigrating a basic, tried-and-true method of survival. Families work. Having a mom and dad is a pretty good thing, worth painting about. Thinking about starting a family of your own is not a bad idea. Sure, it’s about as cool as argyle socks, but argyle socks can be pretty cool and you want to be stylish. One thing I learned—you’re supposed to wear them on your
feet
. Who knew?

What happened to Wisconsin? Seriously,
what happened to Wisconsin
? It used to be a fun place, most notably home to the Troll Capital of the World, where I’m considered above average height.

But it’s also home to the new, Caucasian bigot. I’m not referring to the stereotypical white racist you see in your basic cable movie. Not skinheads with swastika tattoos on their testicles and etchings of Hitler hanging in their trailer. Instead the Wisconsin variety are whites who charge that all whites are racist, while claiming to defend People of Color. Their radical agenda isn’t about healing; it’s about breaking up and breaking apart. It’s about preventing a color-blind society from forming, and replacing it with warring factions divided by skin pigment.

To start with, the University of Wisconsin–Superior (superior to what? an online kindergarten?) launched the “Unfair Campaign” in 2012 to boost the “public awareness” about the widespread problem of racial privilege. Their marketing shtick: writing words like “unfair” on white students’ faces. They also Magic-Markered
on their own nonsensical noggins a plethora of grievances against white people, as experienced by People of Color. As you can imagine, their faces look like a road map of victimization, a paean to pain. According to the website Mediaite, the university released a statement defending this exercise, claiming it was “designed to be very provocative.”

Ah yes … “provocative”! Whenever something really stupid is performed in an effort to score cool points, it’s described as “provocative.” In commonsense language, it translates into “annoying.” And “pointless.” And “academic.” And usually “harmful.” It’s important to note that this campaign wasn’t the university’s idea alone. It was launched as a group effort by a collection of community sponsors. Meaning, people who think community organizing is a real vocation.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (or WDPI for you initialism fans) conducted their own separate effort to expose white privilege, suggesting that some of their white workers “wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege.” And by privilege, they mean the many advantages white people have over all People of Color. We are now at a time when being born white is a fundamentally racist act. If you are white, just by procreating, your parents committed, or rather produced, a hate crime. You are a hate baby (a “hateby,” for short). You should be ashamed of yourself. I bet even the diapers you wore were white. From now on, all of my Depends will be black. They already are (I sat in something).

The WDPI has a Web page explaining their thoughts on white privilege. This is where members of VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, or HEAY
^*
) can take tests and read other
stuff for the purposes of further guilt-building. The sad part: These VISTA workers are supposed to help the poor. Instead they’re annoying them. Because it’s way cooler to expound on your own white privilege than look up ways to apply for building permits if some poor guy wants to open a laundromat (which is racist, if your intent is to make your whites “whiter”). Seriously, can you imagine if you actually needed real employment information from these banal bureaucrats? You’d be better off waiting for Obama’s next “pivot to jobs.” (We’re on #7. He pivots enough to join the Bolshoi.)

This stuff would be laughable if it weren’t being lauded in academic circles (otherwise known as circle jerks) and harming poor people in Wisconsin.

Check out the department’s website, which offered suggestions for the privileged to help facilitate their desire for white penance. For example:

(All of which could be shorthanded as “Vote Obama.”)

I love that last part. Your mission: Find someone to condemn you. Why not save time—get married.

This, my friends, is what passes for organized religion today—at least for people who find paganism too much of a commitment.
Instead of confession, you kneel before the Perceived Aggrieved—and take your punishment, willingly, all the while writhing in the pleasures of patronization. American universities have finally become caricatures of themselves.

Does this help the true victims of racism? Of course it doesn’t, but you knew the answer to that question before I asked because you’re not a moron (by definition, since you’re reading my book—or having someone read it to you). All this putrid exercise in white superiority does is foster a victim’s mentality and a teeming class resentment that’s only meant to end up in one place: societal upheaval, full of rage and ruin, and voting “progressive.” All of that stuff, for a cool racist, is pretty cool. The cool racist loves riots, after all. To them, it’s not looting—it’s redistribution. A race riot is actually something like a constitutional convention. Tea Party rally? Evil. Smashing the windows of local businesses in your own neighborhood? Justice! It’s actually cathartic. To these tools, a race riot is just a messy yoga class.

Fact is, the cool racist really doesn’t care about POC. (Now they’ve got me using acronyms.) The moment People of Color stop thinking about color, the cool racist loses clout. And their radical agenda is dead—which is why they must perpetuate the hate. (By the way, can we retire the word “radical” once and for all when referring to crap left-wingers come up with? Radical implies revolutionary thinking that’s genuinely new. However, none of this is new; it’s just applied differently by different dimwits.)

And I should remind you that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is a state agency, so essentially it’s the citizen who’s paying for this bigotry. This new program seems to be performed under the guise of providing education for poor families, which could explain why these families are doing so poorly. If anything, having these weirdos spread these pernicious ideas
to these struggling families should be labeled a hate crime, and these new racists should be hung in the town squares (by their toes, of course—I’m a tickler, not a killer).

Perhaps a better message to send People of Color is to simply point to the White House. Instead of saying “Sorry we’re white,” say, “A black man lives there. Well, half-black—but you get the idea.” The point is, the United States is run by a black guy, and that’s cool, right? For blacks, it’s kinda inspirational, no? It’s far more inspirational than repeatedly pointing out that we are all really sorry your ancestors were slaves fifteen decades ago. I’d love a black leader to emerge from somewhere, with a new campaign, called, “Get Over It.” And that “it” could mean annoying white and black activists who rely on past oppression to guarantee their future income. Sure, slavery was an abomination. An abomination only compounded by whites who continue to live off it. They’re ghouls, misery junkies. I’d boycott Wisconsin, but I rarely make it there anyway. (Something always seems to get in the way. My fear of cheese, mainly.)

Who are the closest entities we have to actual superheroes in America? Aside from 3:00 a.m. talk show hosts, it’s our military. They are as cool as cool can get. But ever since the 1960s the military has been regularly portrayed in the media, on campuses, and elsewhere as ultimately uncool. Before the sixties, joining the military was about sacrifice (which was sincerely cool). Now, the cool sees recruits as blind, ignorant to the realization that they’re just a sap out of options.

Even a veteran like John Kerry echoes this crud. Remember what he said back in 2006?

Or in Congress, apparently.

To Kerry, a new recruit is sure to become just another idiot
stuck in some weird-ass country, doing pointless crap for no good reason. It would be so much better if you joined another part of the government, where you could get paid to do nothing, get a sweet pension, and be a slave to comfort. (Or you could just marry the heir to a condiment fortune! He should rename his yacht
Thank You, Ketchup
.) I don’t know if Kerry, an experienced warrior himself, meant to denigrate the military, but he denigrated the mind-set that would drive you to join the military. He could not believe that someone would make that choice because they saw it as an amazing opportunity. He thinks they must have thought it was the only option they had once they realized they had nothing left. What a condescending way to look at millions of really brave people. And what a simplistic mind-set from one of our leaders. Who, as I write this sentence, is pleading for an attack on Syria.

Kerry places education as a polar opposite to the military. Our current secretary of state has embraced the falsehood that education in a classroom is somehow superior to the education you gain in the military or on the battlefield. I can tell you this: I learned almost
nothing
at college that didn’t involve alcohol poisoning. But I wonder, after working with veterans in various capacities over the last twenty-five years, if I would have been better off enlisting and actually learning something real about the world (and more important, myself). There’s the possibility I would have been rejected (I have flat feet and a vestigial tail), and I’ll never know what I’d be like in war. (I could have been a hero, or deserter, in a burka.) That’s something I regret. (And it’s easy to regret, now, safely, at forty-eight.) As for education, I can’t possibly think of a single thing from my college years that helped me get to where I am today. I was a drunken, stupid embarrassment and, in fact, that was my major
and
minor. (Not much has changed.) I should have majored in being a major.