Punk rock is a great way to spend your adolescence, but is has some drawbacks when you”re an adult. For example, having a full back tattoo of a skull-head jellyfish eating Chiang Kai-shek and Fidel Castro enhances your stage presence when you’re screaming into a microphone about anarchy, but the same tattoo makes you feel like a Coney Island freak when you’re at the water park with the kids twenty years later. Punk was about fighting, looking stupid, listening to noise, and being gross. That’s what childhood is all about. Outside of permanent mistakes such as tattoos and ODing on heroin, punk rock is a great way to prepare for fatherhood.
1. YOURE FINE WITH ROOMMATES WHO PUKE ON YOU
While all teenagers get wasted, punks had this thing where you had to be as disgusting as possible while you got wasted. Puking was considered hilarious, and puking on someone was enough to win you the Mark Twain Award for wit. Young kids barf on your shoulder almost as often as they drool, and the only thing that concerns an old punk dad is when his kid didn’t get a good enough arc on it.
2. SNOT DOESN’T GROSS YOU OUT
Babies don’t know how to blow their nose so they’ll just sit there bubbling green slime out of their nostrils until the cold goes away. One night when my infant daughter was congested, I put my lips up to her nose and sucked out about a pound of snot before spitting it into the sink. My wife was mortified but my daughter could breathe, and I felt like a great dad. (I didn’t know the Swiss had invented a handy rubber tube that can get it out of there.)
3. YOU DON’T MIND LOOKING LIKE SHIT
Speaking of gross, we spent almost a decade wearing black shirts covered in barf, dandruff, and snot. As a new dad it’s almost impossible to make it to the office without looking like you slept on the floor of a porn theater. This is embarrassing to many fathers. We don’t care.
4. YOU ARE NEVER EMBARRASSED
Little girls love doing this thing where they divide your hair into a million tiny ponytails with multicolored rubber bands. It’s so hard to get these out that you often have to leave the house looking like Tommy Lee at his most annoying, and that means people on the train laugh. We used to spend hours on our hair trying to look as retarded as possible, so being laughed at is considered an accomplishment.
5. YOU UNDERSTAND BEING OBSESSED WITH PANTS
Ordering tartan bondage pants from London took months of saving and waiting, so when they finally arrived, you never took them off. Skinheads would attack anyone wearing Doc Marten boots, so owning a pair meant you were willing to die for them. So when your daughter is so attached to her red cords that you can only wash them when she’s asleep, you think, “That’s perfectly reasonable.”
GSTAAD—If a catastrophic avalanche were to crush the Davos convention hall where the fat cats of this world were meeting recently, I’m afraid there would be a lot of discreet raising of glasses by many so-called populists, who are basically envious “haves” that have plenty but don’t particularly like people who have more than they do.
This Ed Miliband chappie is a populist, as are Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to mention a lot of white, brown, and black trash one sees in glitzy nightclubs nowadays. I’m no fan of the types that frequent Davos—people such as Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster and a partner of the ghastly Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook—but I don’t wish them to perish in an avalanche while they’re busy telling us how to improve the state of the world; far from it, in fact. Apart from being one of the seven deadly sins, envy is what splits nations, races, and people apart, and envy being an ancient Greek trait, believe me, I know all about it. Newspapers, especially lefty rags and tabloids, thrive on envy, making the reader feel like a “have not” and then some.
Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum’s founder, is a serious man who means well and tries to keep the bling and glitz out of his forum, but with people such as Sean Parker throwing nonstop parties in order to self-promote, his is a Sisyphean task. It now costs 70,000 greenbacks just to be invited to attend meetings in Davos, and you’d be surprised how many people are willing to pay this amount just to be able to say they were there. Basically the people who do this try to network with bigger fish, and there are even some who go there just to attend gatherings not under the auspices of WEF. I remember the American tycoon Barry Diller stopping over in Gstaad on his way there some years ago and sort of boasting what his next destination was. When I asked him how much he had paid for the invite, he didn’t look best pleased; neither did his yes men.
Still, the WEF is a good thing and many good people attend it and the world’s economy is better off for it. No matter how the envious types wish for the avalanche to hit, there will always be those richer and more fortunate, either through their intellectual capabilities, their hard work, their luck, or—dare I say—their background. There is nothing wrong with inherited wealth unless one uses it to make other people unhappy, like driving a Ferrari at top speed while under the influence, for example, or having an entourage that pushes people around in public places, as the sons and heirs of the camel drivers from the Gulf tend to do. One of the things that bothers me about many modern tycoons is their lack of manners. Inequality will always be with us, but once upon a time inequality also meant extreme courtesy toward those less equal. Liberated from the constraints of class and race, you’d think a modern tycoon would act like those better than him in the past. To the contrary. Have any of you ever been in the company of a multi-millionaire rap star? No Gary Cooper he, no Roger Moore, certainly no Fred Astaire. Henry Ford II, whose grandfather started the Ford Motor Company, was a bit of a slob—I knew him quite well—but he tried to play Jock Whitney, however much he failed. But at least he tried. These Silicon Valley multi-billionaires make the old type gangsters such as Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel look almost posh.
Oh lord. Oh lord. Can the government do anything right? There is no evidence for it. None. Everything it touches turns to grotesque failure. It hurts me to contemplate the federal reigning monstrosity in the Yankee Capital. I may have to send out for a bottle of Padre Kino red to get me through it. The Great Purple Father is the worst wine known to man, thirty-nine cents a trainload. Never mind. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Nothing works, government-wise. Ponder healthcare, if you can stand it. One approach to keeping people alive and healthy is national healthcare, which many countries, such as France, have and it works. It’s because grown-ups run it. Or you can have private healthcare, which the US had and, though it was way overpriced and unwieldy, strangled by paperwork and corruption, more or less worked, sort of.
So the gummint comes up with Obamacare, that doesn”t work at all. The feds can”t even write the freaking computer program. Yes, here in the world’s greatest technological power. We ought to contract the software to Guatemala, which couldn”t do it either but would cost less.
The War on Drugs”another disaster. A half century, billions of dollars, countless stupid laws, Mexico a war zone. Result? Every drug known to man, woman, or hermaphrodite is for sale at great prices in every high school in America. Another triumph of private enterprise over governmental regulation. If Washington tried to provide free drugs, it couldn”t come close. No one would be able to get so much as an aspirin.
Race relations. Another charred ruin. Better than a half century into the Great Society, huge numbers of blacks live trapped in urban Bantustans, Newark, Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, barely literate if at all, unemployed and unemployable, bastardy almost universal, utterly dependent on federal charity, without the slightest hope that any of this will change. If Washington had deliberately tried to make a greater mess, it couldn”t have.
Open borders. Another train wreck started, stage-managed, and supported by Washington. The merest glance at the outside world would show that mixing immiscible peoples regularly results in strife, division, decline, and, often, civil war. Coming to a theater near you. Merry Christmas.
The military. A trillion withering green ones a year and we get forces that can”t beat a few pissed-off goatherds with AKs. Which actually is a good thing since they shouldn”t be trying. A chronicle of unmitigated failure, and always for the same reason: trying to use shiny toys to whip whole countries that don”t want us there. Hey, if it doesn”t work, let’s do it again.
And now Washington wants wars with Iran and China when it can”t beat Yemen. You have to concede a certain logic here: If you can”t defeat Afghanistan, a billion Han Chinese will be a cakewalk.
Economic policy. If any. Washington drives the country bankrupt, colludes with Wall Street, to the extent that there is a distinction between Washington and Wall Street, and brings on the subprime crash. The swine tell us that we are the greatest economic powerhouse known to creation, while unemployment is ghastly, college grads have to live with their parents, food stamps spread, and the middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. Oh thank you, thank you.
“Never darken my door again” was the standard Victorian parting shot to a person you wanted to be rid of. (It was adjusted in one of Bridget Jones’s diaries to: “Never darken my towels again.”)
In case it slipped your attention”perhaps because you haven’t been reading my output assiduously enough“there has for six or seven years been a movement afoot to darken the door of the liberal commercial-democratic order ushered in by the Enlightenment.
It calls itself the Dark Enlightenment. “Endarkenment” would have been crisper, but Roger Scruton has already adopted that term for a somewhat different purpose. The Dark Enlightenment is, so far, a critical movement, with no particular intent to endarken individuals. They just want us to be aware that the Enlightenment had a dark side and that the modes of thought and society that it steered us toward might lead ultimately to a dark place, an antithesis.
At least I think that’s what they want. The most-spoken-of among the Dark Enlightenmenteers”Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug“are prone to earnest philosophizing: the kind of stuff of which, for me, a little goes a long way.
And I guess I should drop the third-person pronoun in talking about the movement. A few months ago the blogger Scharlach (German for “scarlet”) drew up a very handy diagram of the movement, with participants grouped according to their major themes. At 11 o’clock on the diagram, grouped with Secular Traditionalists, is me. (Or possibly “…am I.” Please don’t email in to tell me.)
So Derb-wise, the Dark Enlightenment is not a “they,” it’s a “we,” although as a chronic non-joiner, I’m probably going to have trouble being consistent about that.
Well, mainstream British journalists have noticed the Dark Enlightenment. On January 20th a chap named Jamie Bartlett (Jamie? Isn’t that a girl’s name?) blogged a flesh-creeper piece titled “Meet The Dark Enlightenment: sophisticated neo-fascism that’s spreading fast on the net.” Good grief! I can hear the distant stomp of jackboots already!
What’s it all about, Jamie, this Dark Enlightenment?
Well, they”sorry, we“are fed up with democracy. And:
The neo-fascist bit lies in the view that races aren’t equal (they obsess over IQ testing and pseudoscience that they claim proves racial differences, like the Ku Klux Klan) and that women are primarily suited for domestic servitude.
I didn’t know that races obsess over IQ testing, etc., but let that pass.
Having got your flesh creeping, Jamie (really? Jamie?) closes with soothing reassurance: “I’ll be keeping an eye on them, and report back here with any interesting developments as they happen.” Thank you, Jamie! Who knows what pit of horror our society might fall into without brave souls like you, ever vigilant!
Who is this Jamie person? The indispensable hbd* chick tells us. Jamie…
…is at the UK think-tank Demos. (Demos was founded by a guy who had been editor of Marxism Today, the “theoretical magazine of the Communist Part [sic] of Great Britain.)”
Ah.
Two days later, while your flesh was still creeping, a different bloke, name of Tim Stanley, followed up with more reassurance. Nothing to be too frightened of, he murmured emolliently: “The ‘neo-fascist’ Dark Enlightenment is more sad than scary.”
Phew! So those weren’t jackboots I was hearing, only the compulsive thumping of neurotic fingers on worn keyboards in some loser’s dad’s garage. We won’t be needing those Moroccan visas after all, Honey.
Not that Tim thinks Jamie is altogether mistaken.
Amy Chua, the Chinese Mom America Loves to Hate, follows up her 2011 bestseller The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother with a new book coauthored with her more laid-back husband and fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld: The Triple Package: Why Groups Rise and Fall in America. Their essential point is that being a minority in 21st-century America can be a pretty sweet deal.
A few years ago, I came up with the idea for a sitcom called Korean Mother-in-Law, about a nice Stuff White People Like white guy (picture Joaquin Phoenix in Her) who has to live with his (wait for it) Korean mother-in-law, who regularly punctures his liberal American delusions with her bleak, Malthusian cackling.
Chua, however, more or less beat me to this shtick with Tiger Mother.
But it’s probably just as well, since Korean Mother-in-Law would have been the lowest rated show ever, judging by how only Charles Murray and I noticed that Tiger Mother was awfully funny. Most of the press, which is heavily driven by the primal resentments of Jewish women writers and editors, was outraged by Chua’s act. First, she steals our husbands, and then she steals our children’s spots at Harvard!
Now Chua has gone back to the theme of her first book, World on Fire: market-dominant minorities.
Here in America, we assume that discussions of minorities, ethnic and/or sexual, controlling certain industries is just conspiracy theory crazy talk. But in many countries that don’t have long histories of intelligent nationalism, a majority of business assets actually are owned by enterprising but insular outsiders, such as the Lebanese in some West African countries or the Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Chua herself comes from a family of Overseas Chinese who got rich in the Philippines. This hasn’t made them popular with the locals. When her aunt was murdered in Manila by a native servant, the Filipino police made only nugatory efforts to track down their compadre.
Market-dominant minorities understand that it’s crucial to stay close to the centers of power to protect them from the masses.
For example, one of my readers married into an Overseas Chinese extended family in Indonesia that was tight with the Suharto regime. When the Indonesian economy collapsed and the dictator resigned in 1998, a native mob began looting and raping in the upscale Chinese quarter. As the furious locals approached ever closer to the family compound, my reader, being a white American guy raised on action movies, tried to organize his in-laws to defend themselves from the pogrom.
But they looked at him as if he were crazy. They weren’t fighters; they were dealmakers. They’d live or die based on the connections with the authorities they had bribed their way into during the decades of mutual exploitation. Finally, my reader’s father-in-law succeeded in paying off an Indonesian army officer to deploy a platoon with an armored half-track in front of their estate. So the mob instead looted somebody a little less connected.
Similarly, the Lebanese Carlos Slim launched himself on his improbable ascent to challenging Bill Gates for the title of World’s Richest Man by being a close personal friend of Mexican president Carlos Salinas when privatization was the fad in the early 1990s.
It’s extraordinary that Slim has been able to squeeze so much out of the supposedly poor country of Mexico, but he understands that Mexico, lucrative as it is, is still the minor leagues compared to having influence in America. Over the last half-decade, Slim has moved closer to the center of global power by bailing out the agenda-setting New York Times. He now may own as much as a fifth of the stock. His investment in the Grey Lady has been lavishly paid back, both in financial instruments and in Narrative. The telecom monopolist profits exorbitantly from phone calls between illegal immigrants and their friends and family in Mexico, and the Times has dutifully demonized all immigration restrictionists as despicable racists.
Now, Chua has turned her attention to prosperous minorities within the US, focusing upon eight groups presumably chosen for their diversity: Chinese, Lebanese, Jews, Asian Indians, Iranians, Nigerians, Cubans, and Mormons.
Granted, Chua’s eight minorities constitute a somewhat silly list. Many of these groups’ success in America is less the product of culture than of simply skimming the intellectual and financial top off of foreign societies. Many Indians (total population back home: 1.237 billion) and Nigerians (169 million) in the US are here because they are related to somebody rich enough and smart enough to pursue graduate study in the US.
Cubans and Iranians (like the Vietnamese whom Chua leaves out) are refugees from the rich ruling class of extinct pro-American regimes. Cubans have recently been reinvigorated politically by the increasing ethnicization of politics. With all the emphasis on amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants, blow-dried Cuban politicians have elbowed their way to the front as the Hispanic Talented Tenth, a mediagenic elite more TV-savvy than actual illegal aliens, who tend to be short, round, and inarticulate in any language.
In fact, many Iranians didn’t even have to start over. They’re not just benefiting from their superior human capital; they’re living off their financial capital they looted from their native land during the oil boom of the 1970s. Years before the Shah fell, numerous rich Iranians relocated much of their fortunes to Beverly Hills.
Moreover, the current Iranian government isn’t ideologically anti-capitalist like Cuba, so many Iranians in the US (including, perhaps surprisingly, many Jewish Persians), continue to profit from enterprises back home while enjoying the good life in the Hollywood Hills. I’m sure you would similarly find that, say, Russians in Cyprus and Monaco are doing pretty well for themselves, too, without looking too hard for their cultural secrets.
Mainstream liberal blogs have recently discovered the neoreactionary movement, also known as the Dark Enlightenment, which is a plucky collection of backward-looking upstarts that started to gel sometime in late 2012. The only unifying themes in coverage are an unfounded sense of hysteria and a complete inability to get the point.
To start with, neoreaction isn’t a political movement per se”at least not yet and not for lack of trying. It’s more an intellectual trend that scrutinizes hatefacts away from “The Cathedral,” the neoreactionary neologism for the semi-official universalist secular religion of equality that ironically emanates from Harvard’s elites.
Neoreactionaries trade ideas on WordPress blogs and Twitter. Their disparate voices include British expat continental philosopher Nick Land, monarchist transhumanist Michael Anissimov, Catholic anarchist Bryce Laliberte, post-libertarian escape artist Jim, and the snarky satirists of Radish. On discussion boards, scattered Old Right fanboys and a gaggle of fresh-faced, clean-cut Southern men working on oil rigs, ranches, and forex markets discuss the relative merits of Frederick the Great, Lee Kuan Yew, and Thomas Carlyle. Theden is the popular daily record, a sort of neoreactionary Huffington Post”except way, way smarter, natch.
The Dark Enlightenment is a big tent, but there are some common points of agreement. Democracy is seen as a dangerous scam, inevitably tending toward Morlock mob rule. Order is more precious than “justice,” which is really just a code word leftists use to bully everyone else. The world’s social order has been out of whack since approximately 1789, with cultural decline masked only by technological advance. Elitism”nay, aristocracy“is to be cultivated as the only antidote for the egalitarian dysgenic trend toward idiocracy.
Like any fringe movement, the DE has its own lexicon. The Cathedral is the seat of secularist, universalist, progressive power. One often hears the refrain “America is a Communist Country,” which is both a washing of the hands and a warning to cover your ass. Demotism means something between “democracy” and “populism”; it seamlessly encompasses fascism, Bolshevism, and Anglo-American liberal democracy.
It’s easy to see how TechCrunch, The American Spectator, and The Telegraph were so confused. There’s a lot to take in here, making it much easier to declare the movement an idiosyncratic form of monarchism or even (clutch the pearls) neofascism and move on without engaging it seriously. It’s even starting to scare some bloggers on the right who show a painfully shallow understanding.
To be fair, there’s nothing else out there quite like neoreaction. Archaeofuturism is close, but it’s a distinctly European phenomenon. The European New Right is too populist. The Alternative Right is too closely tied to paleoconservatism and right libertarian conventions, though it’s perhaps neoreaction’s closest ideological ally.
What’s more, neoreaction is hardly a monolith: Even the most visible faction, the monarchists (largely winning the PR war because it’s the sexiest angle for lefty clickbait articles) are divided on feudalism versus absolute monarchy. Still, this is a pleasant disagreement among friends.
All neoreactionary roads lead to pseudonymous blogger Mencius Moldbug, who alternately self-identified as a “neocameralist” and a “formalist.” His 100,000-plus-word “An open letter to open-minded progressives” is ground zero for the Dark Enlightenment. Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Yarvin, asks pointed questions about democracy without easy answers: What does “freedom” even mean and what makes it a goal worth pursuing? If equality is the cure for what ails us, why then does the world get worse off the more of it that we get? Why do modern Westerners take for granted that there are massive sections of cities that they’re just not allowed to venture into?
You know, the type of questions that get you called names like “racist.”
As Marx famously noted, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
But before said “history” gets to repeat itself, it has to be born. And when “tragedy” and “farce” mate for that purpose, they often switch positions.
Have you noticed that modern life imitates not “art” or even “Kafka” so much as “Monty Python”? How often yesterday’s absurd throwaway comedy sketch becomes today’s “enlightened” social policy, typically a fatal collision of good intentions and unexpected consequences?
In a scene from the troupe’s 1983 movie The Meaning of Life, two briskly efficient louts in white coats confront a vaguely Rastafarian-looking fellow at his home and demand his liver. After all, he’d signed an organ donor card, had he not?
“It says, ‘In the event of death!’” the dreadlocked gentleman objects.
“No one who’s ever had their liver taken out by us has survived,” the lead lout assures him.
Mrs. Rasta wanders into the sitting room while the “operation” is in progress. Her soon-to-be-late husband, she complains with much eye-rolling, was always doing silly things such as signing organ donor cards and giving blood.
“‘It’s all for the good of the country,’ he used to say.”
“They all go to saving lives, madam,” the lesser lout assures her in a tone that indicates he’s uttered the same phrase thousands of times.
In real life, we’re similarly informed that this or that suddenly urgent and slightly ridiculous overturning of ancient common law conventions is necessary “for the good of the country” or “saving lives.”
Enter Harold Winter. A professor at Ohio University’s Department of Economics, he’s hit upon a solution to the US kidney shortage. Almost 5,000 people died waiting for kidney transplants last year, he claims, and 3,000 new patients are added to the long list of hopeful transplant recipients each month.
“To make up for the excess demand,” Winter writes, “what if kidneys were made part of eminent domain? What if, when we died, our bodies became property of the state, allowing the government to take ownership of our organs for public use?”
Winter tosses around phrases such as “market solutions” and “supply and demand” in a transparently cynical attempt to head fusty (and presumably uncaring) conservative critics off at the ideological pass. The professor himself, of course, wears his conspicuous “compassion” like a colored ribbon. He notes with concern troll resignation that markets “don’t always work well,” so obviously the government should barge in to “fix” yet another alleged national tragedy”one that, as usual, actually affects only a microscopic percentage of the country’s 300-million-plus citizens.
“Because people have two kidneys but need only one to live, we all have a spare,” Winter fairly chirps before reassuring us that “kidneys would not be taken simply at the whim of the medical profession but for the sole purpose of saving lives.”
As the civil-rights movement settles into stagnation and one nostrum after the next fails to move the needle, public rituals celebrating the faith have become de rigueur. Nowhere is this religion-like activity more visible than when people beseech prestige universities to open their doors for more blacks and graduate them by hook or by crook. The college diploma has taken on a magical quality, the ticket to the middle class as if “the middle class” were an exclusive club requiring a BA to get by the doorman. That this give-us-a-diploma mania has been going on for decades with little to show for it makes scant difference”gotta keep the faith.
The latest public ceremony occurred on January 16, 2014. Here President Obama, egged on by First Lady Michelle, held a daylong White House “summit” attended by scores of college presidents, corporate heads, and nonprofit leaders. As the price of admission, all participants were obligated to bring a plan to increase minority college enrollments.
It was axiomatically assumed that intellectually talented black high-school students abound but that top colleges ignore them. Furthermore, these potential college graduates were allegedly often clueless regarding the admission process. Particularly odious according to the president were standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT that impede access to top schools. (In the civil-rights lingo, when blacks cannot pass a test, it is “a barrier.”) The president called for doubling of the National College Advising Corps where recent college graduates help students in “underserved” high schools complete the college admission process. He also advocated hiring new advisers and subsidizing college prep classes routinely available to rich white and Asian students.
Meanwhile, the University of Michigan also witnessed another ritualistic we-need-more-diplomas event. Here agitated black students were outraged that blacks comprised 14% of the state’s population but only 5% of the student body. So on the High Holy Day of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the activists granted the university seven days to respond to seven demands or face “physical actions” by Monday, January 27, 2014. Demands included emergency scholarships for black students unable to concentrate as a result of the school’s hostile racial climate, inexpensive on-campus housing for blacks, and doubling black enrollment to 10%. No mention was made of the state law that bars the university from using race in college admissions.
To a clear-eyed Martian, such rituals are truly bizarre given the plain-to-see reality. SAT scores do predict college success, and blacks and whites on average differ by 100 points on the reading, math, and writing tests. These gaps have remained unchanged for 25 years. Yes, intensive tutoring and memorizing math formulae might add a few points here and there, but Obama’s call for free tutoring to boost scores just echoes charlatans peddling alleged miracles.
Even more damning (and unspeakable) is the average 15-point white/black difference in IQ. The evidence that IQ cannot be boosted by enrichment programs is, as they say, settled science. This gap is particularly discouraging at the bell curve’s right side where the pool of young blacks with an IQ appropriate to an elite school”130 or higher”is tiny. Billions have been spent trying to narrow this largely genetic gap, and, despite some occasional misleading media hype, nothing works.
Moreover, even if we politely ignore SAT and IQ tests, most colleges already have elaborate outreach programs targeting talented minority students. It is inconceivable that an impoverished ghetto dweller with 650 on his SAT scores will slip through the cracks and instead head to the car wash. If anything, today’s colleges are overdoing it”admitting marginal black students, polishing them up with summer “bridge programs,” and supplying ample remedial academic help”even creating whole iffy academic programs such as Black Studies to manufacture diplomas.
So why the charade?
What do you call it when thousands of dark-skinned, slum-dwelling youths conspire on Facebook to suddenly show up at a swank, tony, mostly white shopping mall?
Some might call it a party. Others would call it a nightmare. In Brazil, they call it a rolezinho, AKA a “little stroll.”
Such little strolls have been an escalating cause of alarm in the past couple months as loud, giddy throngs of teens from Brazil’s notoriously wretched favelas pour out en masse from the dilapidated roach motels they call home and into the gleaming, glittering palaces of consumption typically patronized by the nation’s upper crust.
Although in its infancy, the rolezinho phenomenon recalls prior instances of deliberate mass intrusion into public spaces and private establishments such as the lunch-counter sit-ins of the American South in the 1960s, the Occupy Wall Street debacle of a couple years ago, and the randomly violent black flash mobs that have been one of the Obama Administration’s signature achievements.
Last summer in Brazil saw widespread street disturbances among the emerging South American superpower’s lumpenproles. Such shenanigans picked up again during the Christmas season, when shopping malls became targets for mass displays of poor people’s public petulance.
A rolezinho in early December at São Paulo’s Itaquera shopping center attracted an estimated six thousand gleefully disruptive teens that culminated in a police crackdown. Although apologists meekly claim that these teens only seek acceptance and a place to sing, dance, flirt, and share communal joy without being hassled or oppressed or made to feel inferior due to their skin color, video footage from the December event reveals throngs of loud shirtless assholes loping around scratching their nuts and creating near-riot conditions that likely drove away anyone who’d innocently arrived at the mall seeking to buy things. Then again, maybe one man’s rudeness is another man’s revolution.
There have been an estimated dozen or so rolezinhos in Brazil since December. On January 4, a rowdy little stroll at Shopping Tucuruvi led to a mall shutdown. A week later, another rolezinho at Shopping Metrô Itaquera resulted in a crackdown involving rubber bullets, tear gas, and Brazil’s famously overeager police whomping partygoers with nightsticks.
This led to at least a half-dozen malls in São Paulo obtaining court orders to block such future events, allowing them to station police and security guards outside who could bar entry to unaccompanied minors. This naturally led to cries of racism, discrimination, and accusations that Brazil was an “apartheid” state. Just as America’s civil-rights movement shat upon the idea that business owners should have the freedom to refuse service to whomever they choose, it was deemed a crime against humanity that wealthy mall owners should refuse to open their glass doors to hordes of ghetto rats who may not possibly have the best of intentions.
A planned January 17 rolezinho at São Paulo’s super-chic Leblon shopping mall was expected to draw nearly 10,000 party-crashers, but mall owners nipped it in the bud by shutting the place down for the day. Similar preemptive shutdowns have occurred elsewhere. The nation has thus arrived at a temporary and unsustainable standoff”rather than call in the Shock Battalion to beat teenage intruders senseless and possibly set off large-scale social unrest, they will merely retreat and lock their gates…for now. But this can’t last. Sooner or later, something will have to give. Such is always the case when hordes of angry peasants seek acceptance on demand.
The Week’s Most Semitic, Parasitic, and Sodomitic Headlines
RICHARD SHERMAN’s “I HAVE A SCREAM” SPEECH
Martin Luther King Day came and went last Monday. Some missed the civil-rights icon, while others only missed their mail.
The 900+ streets named in MLK’s honor nationwide are “black America’s Main Street,” says writer Jonathan Tilove, adding that the nation’s blighted constellation of MLK Boulevards comprise “a place where white America seldom goes and black America can be itself.” Researcher Derek Alderman claims that Americans “racially profile these streets.”
Grenade-tossing, animal-slaying, tree-swinging rocker Ted Nugent commemorated the holiday by bemoaning the state of black America:
Say what you will, but the destruction of black America is the result of Fedzilla’s $16 trillion and 50-year-old so-called war on poverty, which created a cycle of dependency, destruction and culture rot for black America….To honestly celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, black America would have to admit to the self-inflicted destructo-derby they are waging and begin to tell their liberal Democratic slave drivers to take a hike.
In Nugent’s state of birth, a group that calls itself Being Black at University of Michigan“where, presumably, a bunch of black students at the University of Michigan walk around being black, acting black, reminding everyone that they’re black, and possibly even focusing on their blackness to the detriment of their calculus grades”has threatened “physical actions” by today if its list of seven demands are not met. The demands, made on the holiday honoring the presumably nonviolent MLK, are somewhat vague and seem to revolve around being further compensated, rewarded, and stroked gently on the head for being black.
While one “Native American” rights group has taken their campaign to ban the Washington Redskins’ name all the way to the United Nations, last Sunday night’s televised postgame apopleptic chimpout by Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman has led to the predictably pious and tut-tutting national lectures about race and America’s fear of assertive black men and how the word “thug” is racist (except, apparently, when black men embrace it). Despite his uncultured outburst, Sherman graduated from Stanford with a 3.9 GPA and is expected to make millions in new endorsement deals based on his now-famous fifteen seconds of televised barking. Next Sunday’s Super Bowl is largely being framed as a matchup between Denver’s cerebral and fair-haired quarterback Peyton Manning versus Seattle’s all-black starting defense.
THIS GAY WORLD: BEGONE, YE FELINE FAIRY!
An unidentified middle-aged Nigerian woman has disowned her male cat due to his “unnatural sexual behavior” that she deemed to be “a contradiction of the laws of nature.”
The roughest-looking lesbian in memory has pled guilty in a Scottish court to “charges of behaving in a threatening and abusive manner and dangerous driving” after an incident where she used her car to block a bus that her ex-lover was driving.
A gay New Zealand house sitter has been rewarded $13,000 after his female employer mocked his speaking manner, gave a limp-wrist gesture, and called him a “fucking faggot.” Not bad for a day’s work.
A Kansas judge has ruled that a man who donated his sperm so that a lesbian couple could have a child is now liable for child-support payments.
Chinese property magnate Cecil Chao Sze-tsung has upped the dowry to HK$1 billion for any man willing to marry his lesbian daughter, despite the fact that his lesbian daughter says she does not want to marry any man.
A Florida mom whose 18-year-old son acted in gay porn films to help the family meet its bills calls her son “the most awesome person in the world” and claims he “stood up and he was the man of the house when I couldn’t be.”
