I told you Donald Trump was a fascist!

December 9, 2015December 11, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 36 Comments

December 9, 2015

Well, I hate to be the one who said I told you so, but even mainstream Republicans are using the “F word” to describe Donald Trump. After his ridiculous fantasy about banning Muslims from America, I felt I should chime in, even though I’d rather write about Cozy’s first poop in her IKEA baby toilet. His use of the these emotional hot-button issues certainly is good at keeping this billionaire “man of the people” candidate in the headlines, but there is a frighteningly ugly side to his appeal.

It’s clear that a lot of people don’t understand the basic political spectrum with fascism on the right side of the continuum and communism on the left. (Hint: We’re pretty much in the middle.) I’ve given up on explaining to people that Hitler’s “National socialism” is not actually socialism but a violently anti-socialist form of fascism. The right is characterized by the rule of the one and the left is characterized by the rule of the many, with lots of gradations between the extremes. (Bernie Sanders is to the left of Hillary Clinton and to the right of Fidel Castro. Similarly, Donald Trump is to the right of Marco Rubio and to the left of Benito Mussolini.)

So the memes comparing Trump to Hitler have been coming fast and furious. Godwin’s Law aside, I’m sure Trump is flattered by the comparison with a former Time Magazine Person of the Year. They do have much in common. But let’s stick to four hallmarks of fascism.

Conspiracy Theories: Trump is the king of the “Birther” movement. The theory is that Obama was born in Kenya instead of America and his college transcripts were forged. It’s all part of an elaborate conspiracy by foreign Muslims to instal a jihadist in the White House and institute Sharia Law in the United States. Since Obama will be leaving the office in January 2017, he better get his Jihadi ass in gear.

Then there is the fun one about the Mexican government is “sending its worst” to the U.S. (Remember, all those rapists and murderers?). They’re destroying us, he will tell you. “Believe me!”

Obviously, all these guys harp on the “liberal media” conspiracy that is out to get them. (Hint: The media is only as liberal as the corporations that own it.)

The fact that these juvenile theories are disproven on a daily basis doesn’t really matter. Facts don’t matter to Trump and his minions. Conspiracy theories offer simplistic world views and explanations. Everything is very black and white. And the left has a few conspiracy theories of their own (9/11 was an inside job, Monsanto runs the world, etc.). But Trump’s are rooted in xenophobia and blaming “outsiders” for our problems and that puts him firmly on Adolf’s team.

Racism: I think Trumpies believe that you have to parade around in a Klan robe to be a racist. Trump does have a few black supporters and Hitler had a few Jewish supporters (before he gassed them). But let’s be clear, Trump is either a seething racist or he is an opportunist who uses racism to rally his sub-moronic drones.

A) He’s anti-black. Whether encouraging the man-handling of “disgusting” Black Lives Matters protesters or crowing that “All lives matter,” it’s clear that he has no interest in addressing the institutional racism that plagues the lives of millions of Americans. He’s tweeted “facts” from a white supremacist websites to reinforce his position that black people are a violent threat to his white followers.

B) He’s anti-Latino. His asinine comments about immigrants (he never mentions white immigrants) is based on the most extremist narrative and denies the reality of actual Latino immigrants, including members of my family.

C) He’s anti-Muslim. I know Islam is a religion and not a race, but it comes from the same dark place. He’s denied the role of Muslim Americans in the war on terrorism, in the armed forces, in government, in eduction, in science and even in sports (while bragging about his “good friend” Muhammad Ali).

Trump is not the traditional racist but brown is the new black so he can hope for a handful of black supporters by going after Latinos (“Mexicans”) and Arabs (“Muslims”) and his loyal flock is A-Okay with it. The assumption is that all non-whites are voting Democratic anyway so why not just recruit the highly motivated whites and make America great again, “again,” meaning back to early 1954 before America went all to shit.

Of course Trump’s plan to ban all Muslims from America is idiotic. According to what he told ABC’s George Stephanapoulos , customs agents would just ask people if they were Muslim and if they said “yes,” they wouldn’t be allowed into the country. You know, because actual terrorists are so honest. And would they be allowed into the country if they converted to Christianity? It seemed to work for the Spanish Inquisition.

In that interview he likened his plan to FDR’s WWII internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, one of the great American human rights abuses of the twentieth century and a massive violation of the due process constitutional rights of 110,000 Americans and thousands of Japanese immigrants whose only crime was being Japanese. In 1988, President Reagan apologized for the atrocity but here is Trump using it as his model. Even Jeb Bush described Trump as “unhinged.” He may be nuts or he may be secretly trying to help ISIS make the case that Americans hate all Muslims, but most likely he is just be rallying his rabid jingoist base.

Aggressive Nationalism: All this is wrapped up in a flag and rhetoric about “making America great again,” taking us back to a time when straight white Christian males didn’t have to be bothered with the “politically correct” language that addressed all the others who thought they deserved a bit of equality at the American table. Trump hates political correctness. He doesn’t want to have to be sensitive to the issues of the needs of Americans other than his brat pack. “Believe me, they are doing horrible things.” He wants to kill the families of ISIS members, including their children. (“Pro-life!”) He wants to be a bigger terrorist than the terrorists. He wants to save America. He says, “We’re at war. We don’t have a choice.”

Donny, you always have a choice.

Fearmongering: This is what Trump does best. The Mexicans are going to rape you, the Muslims hate you and are going to kill you, and anyone who disagrees is second rate and is a less valid human because they don’t get the ratings he does. He demagogues until his voice goes out. “Believe me, I saw thousands and thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11.” No you didn’t. Maybe you saw Muslims helping people and got confused.

“Believe me, there will be lots more 9/11’s if we don’t do something.” Remember when Rudy Giuliani tried this scare tactic in his 2008 presidential campaign? It’s only slightly historically removed from Father Coughlin who, in the 1930s, told his radio listeners that Jews were coming to kill Americans.

Trump is using the fear of terrorism and the general ignorance about Islam to whip his followers into a nationalist lynch mob. Listen to them carefully and then listen to people at a Klan rally and tell me how they differ. Scapegoating is an old tool but it is very effective.

I’ve gotten some flack for referring to Trump’s followers as “sub-moronic” and it’s a fair criticism. It is not my intent to dehumanize them. I’ve been studying right-wing extremists and white supremacists for thirty years now. I know what connects them and the Trumpies is a desire for simplified world view provided by a charismatic leader who can explain how to solve their problems, whether they be real or imagined. It’s how cults work and it’s how fascism works. But I also know many intelligent, compassionate, and progressive people who once subscribed to those ideologies and then walked away from them toward the light. There are plenty of former neo-Nazis and former jihadists who can testify that it’s entirely possible. And soon we will have some former Trumpies to add to the list.

This piece could be about the list of hate groups that have endorsed Trump or hate crimes that have been committed by his “very passionate” followers. It could be about how the Tea Party has dragged to the GOP into the ditch and how we should celebrate the death throws of an increasingly irrelevant political party that now only appeals to rednecks and fascists. But I just want to remind people, that America has been here before, in the 1930s. The specter of fascism was growing in America and the exact same bogus claims that Trump is now making were made by little Hitlers here. But America was better than them and America is better than Trump. We reminded ourselves of our core values and turned away from the fascist tide. It’s refreshing to hear this message from traditional Republicans, like Paul Ryan. We are so much better than Trump.

But for those who continue to follow this megalomaniac, here is a picture of my daughter’s first toilet turd. I’ll look forward to your brilliant comments.

Why Paris is different. Why everything is different now.

November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

November 16, 2015

Do you get the feeling that things are about to get really ugly?

Sometimes the world shows up to pull the rug out from under your little plans. There was a Friday in 1994 when it was announced that Kurt Cobain had died. Over 150,000 people on Earth die every day but this was personal. I felt like we were friends, fellow travelers. I was incapacitated. How was I expected to I go on without him?

Last Friday was a another day like that but on such a grander scale. The attacks in Paris came when people who had no vested interest in the global jihadi conflict were just out to enjoy a Friday night in the City of Lights, including doing something I would normally be doing B.C. (Before Cozy), going out to see a band. And it was a band I had been out to see before, maybe on a Friday night, The Eagles of Death Metal. Suddenly coordinated attacks by men, heavily armed suicide bombers, executing Parisians, Americans, and others, flooded our news feed with horrific images.

I was a student in London on July 20, 1982 when men from the IRA set off two bombs in the city, killing 11 people. One of the bombs blew up a bandstand in Regents Park. Seven musicians were killed, with dozens of civilians injured. I had been sitting on the grass next to the bandstand a few hours earlier. It was my introduction to the randomness of terrorism.

Friday night I thought about my many trips to Paris, often hanging out in Les Halles where some the attacks took place. I thought about some of my friends in town for the weekend’s big U2 show. Mostly I thought about what kind of world my french-named daughter, Cozette, would inherit. It was too much to process. And then came time to talk the media but I could only speak as a father who was crushed with sadness.

My obsession with Paris started in 1978 when I was 14, reading the liner notes from Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia album. Patti lead me to poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Rimbaud led me to the bohemian world of Paris. I finally got to Paris when I was 20, and ended up watching the 1984 LA Olympics with a bunch of hash-smoking American girls I met on the Champs-Élysées. It was the first of many trips and wild adventures in Paris that included being chased down Boulevard Saint-Michel by French police for spray-painting my girlfriend’s name all over the Latin Quarter.

But this isn’t about my crazy youth in gay Paris. This is about why this attack is of profound significance. About how on 13 Novembre 2015 the world changed.

My good friends on the left will point out that terror like this happens in the brown and black world all the time and the media never bothers to go into hyperdrive. People don’t change their Facebook profile picture when there is a bombing in Maiduguri, Nigeria. All lives matter, not just white lives in Paris. Brown and black lives matter, too. My good friends on the right will comment that that attitude, while it may be true, cheapens the importance of mourning the innocent people killed in one well-orchestrated heinous attack by Muslim jihadists hellbent on destroying modernity.

I can see the merit of both sides. I’ve written about how we need more empathy in the world, including for parents escaping Syria with their children, fleeing the hell created by ISIS and Assad, as well as bombs, drones and missiles from Russia, America and France. (Who was it that said war is just terrorism with a bigger budget?) I’m also aware that we could now think of ourselves as living in World War IV. World War III was the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, fought on proxy battlefields, like Vietnam and Nicaragua (with very real casualties). World War IV, according to some neoconservatives, is the war between the Western world and Islamic fascism. I have to say referring to the attackers in Paris as “warriors” insults all men and women in the armed forces who fight based on some (occasionally ignored) rules of engagement. These men were criminals not warriors. Mass murderers not soldiers.

Someday I’ll go to Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower

I want to make two points about why the November 13 attacks are different and require our global attention. First, I’ve been lucky enough to go to Paris many times. I have a favorite bookstore and a favorite café to sip cappuccinos and people watch. But even if you haven’t been there, you’ve surely imagined traveling to Paris at some point in your life. We all have an idea about ourselves in Paris, whether it’s hanging out with artists in Montmartre, or studying the gothic majesty of Notre Dame, or walking with a lover along the Seine, or visiting all your favorite spots in The Da Vinci Code. I’ve never been to Maiduguri or Damascus. I’ve never even imagined myself there. Those people matter as much as folks in Paris, but, in my head, I am in Paris quite often and, like Kurt Cobain, they are people I know.

Why do we go to Paris, in our heads, in our hearts, and on our credit cards? Because Paris represents all that we aspire to be. It’s more than the values of liberty, fraternity and equality. It’s the bohemian ethic of art for art’s sake and the right to express yourself in the purest of forms. Since the 1840s American expatriates have moved to Paris to live a genuinely expressive (“authentic” is so overused) existence. It’s in Renoir’s paintings of café-goers that must have looked much like the cafés where people were slaughtered on Friday night. Obviously, the real Paris has lots of real world problems. (Try getting good cellphone service in the 27th arrondissement.) But the mythology of the artist capital is strong. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) is such a great representation of this. Paris is what we all want our cities to be. I love it when Portland is referred to as the “Paris of the Pacific Northwest.” Sounds so much better than the Mogadishu of the Pacific Northwest.

The triumph of reason over religion

The second reason is Reason. Paris is the birthplace of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. This is a topic all my students know well. When French philosophers like Rosseau, Condorcet, and Montesquieu took Immanuel Kant’s ideas of rationality and empiricism as a mandate, the days of theocracy and monarchy were numbered. There was a reason Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin went to Paris, and it wasn’t the hookers. Casting off the yoke of Churches and Kings for the rational system of democracy inspired the American Revolution and then, on July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille in Paris and the start of the French Revolution.

Paris stands as a monument to the triumph of reason over the irrational rule of religion. The Enlightenment gave us modern science, the concept of the balance of power, a belief in individual freedoms and the radical idea that people have the right to pursue their own talents. All these values are in direct contrast to the beliefs of the radical jihadists who defame the name of the 1.6 billion Muslims on earth. They don’t represent modern Muslims any more the Ku Klux Klan represents modern Christians. These men with guns and bombs hate women, music, and art. They executed people at a rock show, for Pete’s sake. They hate Paris and everything beautiful that Paris represents.

These extremists are so much like the people I have studied for 30 years. They are anti-feminists of the highest order. They reject the feminine in favor of the worship of violence and worldview that has no shades of grey. Their women are slaves and their only joy is in the sociopathy of destruction. And yet, they are human beings like me and the people they seek to oppress and murder. The good news here is that there are plenty of former jihadists, like former racists, who have seen there is a better way to live on this planet. In those men their is great hope of a way out of this mess.

But I fear it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The difference between September 11 and 13 Novembre is the sinking realization that we are not going to exit this nightmare anytime soon. In 2001, there was hope that, once we eradicated the Taliban it would be all over. That delusion is long gone after Friday for all of us. I’m headed to Washington DC this week and I can’t not think I could end up in another pile of bodies on the evening news as this conflict widens. (A new ISIS video makes it clear that DC is the next target.) If that happens, I hope people won’t say, “Well, even more people died in Syria that day.”

My wife and I still plan to take Cozette to Paris when she’s old enough. I want her to see the fountains in the Jardin du Luxumborg and the brilliant statues at the Centre du Pompidou. When she’s older we can smoke a joint at Jim Morrison’s grave and I can show her Pont Neuf, the bridge I was going to jump off of when was a heartbroken 23-year-old, thinking I was the subject of a silly sad French song. I want her to live in a world where art and freedom are lived with each breath and not sacrificed to fear and religious fanaticism. We are not trapped in medieval times.

The world is at a turning point and it’s time to realize there is no “us vs. them,” only us vs. us. The religious people on both sides who want to bomb and shoot and destroy will only drag us into a war of all against all. That is not rational. That is not a world that has room for love. When I put my daughter to bed on Friday night, with tears in my eyes and her arms around my neck, I sang “Frère Jacques” to her and hoped the world would choose peace over violence when the morning bells were ringing. Recherchez la paix et poursuis-la. (Psalm 34:14)

Maybe you should sit down to pee.

October 6, 2015October 18, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

October 6, 2015

I’m learning that internet trolls hate all things feminine or gay (shocker, I know). In the wake of recent blog posts on Donald Trump, fraternities, and last week’s Roseburg shooting, commenters have called me a “pussy” and a “fag” and have accused me of wearing panties and (my favorite new putdown) sitting down to pee.

This is nothing new. If you think about how boys bully other boys, it’s typically some attempt to feminize them. They’ll accuse them of being gay or, worse, being a female, or even worse, being a vagina! I know this first hand because when I was a teenager my name was transformed from “Blazak” to “Gayzak.” I remember one bully named Ted who stopped me on my way home and announced, “Gayzak, you’re a pussy.” Being a little too quick, I responded, “Well, I guess you are what you eat, dick.” Ted then punched me in the face, not for being homophobic but for meeting his feminization with a better one. (I’ve mentioned this story before in a blogpost about vaginas but I should point out that at our 20 year high school reunion, a few days after 9/11, a very emotional Ted apologized. It meant more than he knew.)

Now I regularly get called “Ballsack” by “clever” trolls who are stuck in the fourth grade and can’t mount an actual critique of my positions. But it all fits into the larger paradigm that’s behind the toxic masculinity that drives schoolyard bullies and school shooters and I would guess explains a lot of what drives America’s favorite bully, Donald Trump. It was clearly a factor in Roseburg. The shooter was mad at the world because he was a still a virgin. If you are a 26-year-old virgin, you probably shouldn’t be angry at anybody but yourself. This theme parallels last year’s mass shooting in Isla Vista, California (six killed, fourteen injured). Don’t die like a boy, go out “like a man.”

The root behind all of this is the devaluation of the feminine, the hallmark of all patriarchal societies. Females are less than fully human. While this predates the demotion of Eve from the Mother of Humanity to the Original Sinner (that BITCH!) by ancient Hebrew priests, it is not universal. Despite the mythology of the essential nature of male dominance, not all cultures are patriarchal and cultures get less patriarchal the farther you go back in time. Cavemen did not rule cavewomen. Hunting and gathering societies were mostly gathering and evidence relays that men and women shared in both tasks.

There is a lot to be said about patriarchy but here are two quick ways that men can keep power over the women who gave them life.

1. Create a god in your image. For most of our human history, men and women have bowed down to goddesses, the source of life. But early nomadic tribes and their warrior gods invaded goddess cultures, like Crete and Anatolia. Over thousands of years, goddesses were replaced with gods and then just one male God. And as Mary Daly said in 1973’s Beyond God the Father, “If God is man, then man is God.”

I’m going to write more about this important point later, just know if you worship a god who has a penis instead of a vagina, you are part of patriarchy. Also, is your god circumcised and if so, who did it and where is God’s foreskin now? (Sorry, I wonder about these things.)

2. Devalue all things associated with females, whether it’s ovaries or reproductive rights. Women are “girls” and men who you want to rank over are “ladies.” If a guy is being a pain, call him a little bitch (or the weirdly homoerotic “my bitch”) and accuse him of being on the rag. Call him anything to do with feminine anatomy; fallopian face, labial loser and the ever useful “pussy.” (The hatred of vaginas by these guys really makes you wonder.)

There is a right-winger who posts a lot of crap on my Facebook page. This is a guy who thinks Russian dictator Vladmir Putin is a bad ass and Syrian mass murderer Bashar Al-Assad is a hero. When I called him out on his sexist language he posted an image of a woman in t-shirt that said, “Obama is a pussy.” My response was, “You must really hate pussy.” He seemed confused.

This is the weird conflicted psyche of the misogynist. In devaluing the feminine you end up looking kinda, well, gay. You think women and “pussies” suck. So what DO you like? Men and cocks? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Holla!) I’m quite fond of the vagina and find it infinitely fascinating, so if you call me a pussy, I will take it as a great compliment. And when I think of the awesome gay people I know and what they have to go through because of asshole bigots, well, I couldn’t think of a better thing to be called. When I hear, “That’s so gay,” I translate into “Fabulous!!”

But of course, that’s not what the He-Man Woman Haters mean. If you Google “Obama is a pussy,” you also find plenty of images of Obama as a female. That’s the put-down. Female, like your mother/wife/daughter, is the worst thing you can be. Patriarchy makes these boys and men so sexually confused, no wonder so many of them are deathly afraid of cunnilingus. According to the male God bibles, that’s nothing but a dirty devil hole. “She was bleeding from her whatever!”

One more story. Before my neighborhood got the shit gentrified out of it, there was a brothel on my block. A pimp named Freddie hung out there and the license plate on his Caddy just read “TNB.” One day I asked, “Hey Freddie, what does TNB stand for.” He answered, “That’s my street name, Trust No Bitch.” Without thinking of the time Ted punched me in the face, I replied, “Oh, does that include your mother?” That was the day I learned you don’t talk feminism with a pimp.

How anyone with a daughter can hate the feminine so much is beyond me. You have to feel sorry for any woman who is married to a guy who hates pussy and tells other men they are going to be his bitch. Don’t these men know they came into the world through a vagina? (Shout out to my C-Section peeps!) What happened to them that they loathe females so much? Oh, that’s right, they grew up in a patriarchal culture. Eve, that nasty-ass skank biotch.

I have a baby daughter. Besides the fact that keeping her vagina healthy is an important agenda item, I’ve also learned to not wake her when she is blissfully sleeping. Since the bathroom is next to the nursery, one way to achieve this is to pee sitting down. (Trust me on this one.) When you pee sitting down, you can check your email or read a few paragraphs in the latest issue of Men’s Health. It’s kind of a cool thing. (Sitting down is also handy if you are drunk, hungover, really tired, or drunk.) But I also eat quiche, watch Ellen Degeneres, sometimes I wear pink and always call myself a feminist. When I was a boy, I might have been afraid of some of that. (I think a lot of “disco sucks” crap I was into as a teenager was driven by fear of the feminine.) Fortunately, I grew up.

The point of all this is that if boys and men started listening to women instead of hating them or only viewing them as sexual objects to be cum upon, they might learn some important lessons about how to live. All week I’ve been asking people to ask why boys and men go on these shooting sprees. Perhaps the better question would be to ask why girls and women don’t go on shooting sprees. Stop calling people pussies and start really hearing what people with pussies have to offer.

I don’t have all the answers, just this thought. Maybe men should just sit down and shut up and have a nice pee.

Note: Plenty of liberal guys engage in “bro talk.” You don’t have to be a right-winger to fear the power of pussy.

The following book was mentioned in this post and is available at Powell’s Books by clicking on the cover below.

White Boys to Terrorist Men: Pointless Male Violence and Charleston

June 19, 2015June 20, 2015 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 11 Comments

June 19, 2015

Seems like I’m having a hard time just writing a blogpost about the baby and/or gender. The news keeps punching me in the gut. My mom and nephew are visiting from Georgia and we were planning a day trip to the Oregon coast when the news broke about the mass shooting in Charleston. My heart sank for so many reasons. Since Trayvon Martin it seems like an almost weekly assault on black America in this supposed “post-racial” America. What must it be like to be African-American in 2015?

Charleston shooting terrifies black America

But I also knew it was most likely one of “my guys,” the racist boys and men I’ve been studying for 30 years. When I posted my theory on Facebook, one of my old (white) friends from Stone Mountain, said it was probably just a personal matter. “I am so tired of everyone taking every opportunity to make it a race thing,” she said.

Usually I go into full media mode when mayhem breaks loose. I knew there would be requests for perspective and I might be able to add something of value to the chatter. But I made a promise to the family and I was really looking forward to a little getaway. I got calls from the local stations and Al Jazeera, but I wanted to stay focused on the beautiful sunshine in Cannon Beach and Cape Kiwanda. I checked the updates while I held Cozy and tasted Andrea’s clam chowder. The news just got worse and worse.

Probably the most well-read piece of scholarship I’ve published is a 2001 article in American Behavioral Scientist entitled, “White Boys to Terrorist Men: Target Recruitment of Nazi Skinheads.” It was based on my research on how boys get involved with the racist skinhead subculture. It is the research that brought me to feminist theory and it’s why I can say something about Dylann Roof. He’s the 21-year-old white male who shot nine African-Americans, old and young, male and female, in the sanctuary of their Charleston church.

Roof was a petty criminal from a low-income background who was a fan of the Confederacy and South African apartheid. His friends say he supported segregation and joked about killing black people and starting a civil war. “He had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” one said.

This where I come from. The land where the Confederate battle flag is ubiquitous and you can hear Charlie Daniels sing, “Be proud you’re a rebel because the South’s gonna do it again.” In the late 1980s, I was on tour with Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ and we were in a truck stop in Arkansas or Alabama or Appalachia. There was a big bearded bubba with red t-shirt. On it was a Confederate Flag with “The South will rise again” under it. I used it as an opportunity to play my favorite parlor game, Asshole With A Cause. So I asked him,

“Excuse me sir. Can I ask you about your shirt? I’m from Stone Mountain….”

“Grunt.” Approval, I assume, from being from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Um, yeah, and I’ve heard that saying a million times. The South will rise again.”

“Grunt” A bit of chaw falls out his mouth.

“I just wonder what that means. Because the South has risen economically. All the good jobs are in the Sun Belt now. It’s risen politically. You don’t get into the White House without the Southern vote. And it’s risen culturally. Everybody is listening to Country music or hip hop from the South.”

“Grunt.” He was clearly agitated. “Well, it just means the old ways.”

“So a purely agrarian society.”

“Yeah, like it was.”

“With slavery.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

What an idiot. I kinda wish they’d tell white people like this that slavery was suddenly legal so black people could just shoot these crackers. “Woo hoo! I’m gonna go into this house and get me a negro!” Bam! It’s not 1815. But that would be wrong. Peace and love, right?

My point of telling this story is that there is a white MALE mentality that is popular in the South but is common everywhere that says, things were better back in the good old days, when minorities knew their place, women stayed in the kitchen and “them queers” stayed in the closet. Even mainstream Conservatives blather about “restoring America.” We can only presume that means to 1954, about five minutes before the passage of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka. Roof himself reflected this when he told one of his victims that he “had to” shoot them. “You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

Of course, white women are overwhelmingly raped by white men and the black population as a percentage of the whole has shrunk according to the 2010 census. But you can’t talk reality to a white male who feels he is entitled to always be the unchallenged king of the hill. How dare these people exist and think they deserve the same rights as me??? The New York Times reported a quote from a black Charleston resident who summed it up perfectly. “We’re not worth the air they don’t want us to breathe,” he said, feeling the shooting was just an extension of what black people face at hands of local whites every day.

I saw this over and over again in the hatred of the racist skinheads I studied in the 1980s and 1990s. THEIR jobs were being taken away by immigrants, minorities and Jewish conspirators. THEIR women were being taken away by feminists and lesbians (and sexy black men). THEIR generation was being polluted by hip hop, homosexuals and really delicious Mexican food. How do you get it back? How do you “restore” America? With the tool men have always used when their backs are against the wall – unholy violence.

I think it’s clear that Dylann Roof intended to die on Wednesday. He was going to go out “like a man,” guns blazing in “valiant” attempt to jumpstart a “civil war” and go down a hero for the “Southern cause.” I’ve seen variations of the theme a hundred times among racists. The most bloody was Wade Page, who killed six people in a Wisconsin Sikh temple in 2012 before turning the gun on himself. Sorry, Wade. Dylann just knocked you off the throne.

When will this end? There’s a larger conversation about how white people need to FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGE THAT RACISM IS STILL A SERIOUS PROBLEM IN AMERICA, and stop whining about Al Sharpton being on TV. Nothing changes until you own this truth!

But my part here is the issue of straight white males believing they are entitled to anything. We live in a democracy. We’re all working hard to make it work. If you can’t handle the fact we’re trying to make if fair for people who are not straight white males, move to Russia, I hear being an entitled straight white asshole is very popular there right now.

I have no doubt that Roof pieced his moronic worldview together from peers and the plethora of racist websites that will tell you that America is being destroyed because Whoopi Goldberg is still on The View and gay marriage is coming to a bakery near you. These people are intensely unhappy. They see a culture that is leaving them at the train station and instead of racing to catch up, they are getting out their rocket launcher to try to blow the damn train up. How dare that train not wait for me? Everybody on it must die.

But these boys and men always fail. Timothy McVeigh hoped his 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people (including 19 children) would spark a race war. It didn’t. It did rally Americans to squelch patriot militia groups that wanted to lead a “second American revolution” against the government. Dylann Roof hoped his slaughter would start a new civil war in America. It won’t. Right now black and white folks in Charleston are holding hands and singing. There is a renewed push to get the stupid Confederate battle flag off the lawn of the South Carolina state capital. Dylann and boys and men like him die for a lost cause that should be renamed the pathetic cause.

The message to all those straight white boys and men is this: Catch up. This is an awesome train to be on. It’s mighty and soulful and delicious and you can dance with your hands in the air and love like you just don’t care. We’ll leave the caboose door open for you. Just leave your gun back at the junction. And then come join my multi-racial family at the Oregon coast. I’ll buy you some chowder and a taco.

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Watching the Wheels

Feminist Fatherhood

Violence