Turn Out the Lights and Lock the Door

Guest Post by Fred Reed

I Hear the Fat Lady Singing

Breitbart: A white man in Baltimore was sitting in his car when two female er, teens got into a fight. To continue this enterprise they climbed atop his car, perhaps mistaking it for a tree. He got out and asked them to take their dispute somewhere else, whereupon fifty er, teens beat him nearly to death, leaving him with $200,000-$400,000 in medical bills. The daily grind. Life as usual. If fifty whites similarly beat an er, teen, cities would burn and the media would go crazy. In this case, silence will prevail. American-Africans can do no wrong. But something is wrong in America..

We read over and over of the Culture Wars, and the War between the Sexes, of Red States and Blue States, as if these were amusing disputes between parents and adolescents in a sitcom. Methinks something far uglier and more dangerous brews.

Almost daily, friends send me links to accounts of what seem to them, and to me, lunacy, usually accompanied by notes expressing incredulity and—this will matter one day–anger. The stories deal with things utterly repugnant to much of the country, especially the South and West, the blue collar, the military, and much of the Mid-West:: racial lawlessness, glorification of every sexual weirdity anyone can imagine, hostility to Christianity (but not to Judaism or Islam), phony charges of rape, compulsory Ritalin-ingestion, grotesque affirmative action in the hiring of cops and firemen, attacks on academic standards, little boys dragged from school in handcuffs for drawing a soldier, the anti-gun crusade, the truffle-hound search for “stereotypes” and discrimination, and the denigration of masculinity and every aspect of white European culture.

And, always, always, the suppression of news of the unending vicious attacks by er, teens, on whites. This latter goes beyond bias into undeclared censorship. Er, teens can loot, burn, and rape, and not much happens to them, but if you are white and say “nigger” in an email, you lose your job.

We have two countries that do not like each other at all.

This can’t last. A large part of America loathes these things and wants no part of them or of the country that enforces them. We see two utterly incompatible views of the world, one found chiefly among the Northeastern “elite,” academia, the upper middle class, the media, the Left Coast, and the other found in the rest of the country. With breathtaking imprecision, I call them the Center and the Seaboard.

“In April 2013, then-eighth-grader Jared Marcum was suspended from Logan Middle School in West Virginia after refusing to take off an NRA t-shirt he wore that day. His mother is now suing the Logan County Board of Education.” To much of the country, assuredly including me, the National Rifle Association is a perfectly legitimate group, shooting an enjoyable sport, and Jared’s t-shirt none of anyone’s damned business.

I grew up in an America where kids had guns, hunted deer, slaughtered beer cans, and a first rifle was, like a girl’s first bra, a step into adulthood. Nobody shot anybody. Had home-invaders entered our houses at night, we would have made an exception, and potential home-invaders knew it. Guns didn’t kill, we knew from observation; people did. We had never known a gun to jump up and kill someone without human intervention.

By contrast, the Seaboard believes that people don’t kill; guns do. (Actually they know better but they also know who usually does the killing, and they aren’t going to go there.) People who own guns, they believe, are crazed killers, gun nuts, and if we just outlaw guns, killing will stop. Two countries.

But below the furor over guns, or any of the specific furors, lies a profounder difference. The Seaboard has the collective mentality of a hive. It believes in central planning and the imposition of values. Everything–morals, attitudes, curricula, security, everything–should be decided by a government embodying the Seaboard’s values. By contrast, the Center believes that things should be decided as locally as possible. This translates to “Leave me the hell alone.”

In particular, the Seaboard recoils at the idea of self-defense which it finds frightening, macho, and mentally unbalanced. If attacked by fifty er, teens—well, that doesn’t really happen, the New York Times says so, and anyway it only happens to other people, and if someone crawls in your window at three a.m., well, it only happens to other people. The New York Times says so.

The Center has, not always consciously, a pool-hall understanding of life, a recognition that bad things can happen, a depression and horrific “civil unrest,” cancer, losing a job with no other in sight, plague, getting the hell beaten out of you for no reason, riots, or civil war. “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”

To the Eloi of the faculty lounges, this is loony-bin fantasy, but they have never been in a schoolyard fight–not yet. It is a blue-collar conception. Truck drivers and carpenters live closer to the bone, closer to the edge. They know that men exist who will crush your face with a pool cue just to watch you bleed (see leading photo above), or torch your city and loot the stores. And they know they can’t depend on a hostile government to protect them.

To people not raised in Ivy hothouses, the Seaboard seems an inexplicable pack of milquetoasts. The men, if such they be, fear the women, and the women fear everything, are offended by everything else, and expect the world to be concerned about their petty disturbances. You know, micro-aggressions, hurtful words, hate speech, dirty jokes, men who look at their tits, rape–which excites them so much that they they invent it. This is especially true of the female young.

They rule the United States.

College girls displaying hairy armpits, a form of resistance to oppression. Note that they are ugly as mud walls. Attractive girls may have other things to do. College kids used to be occasionally silly because they were practicing to be adults and didn’t have the hang of it. Now they prepare for a lifetime in the tenth grade.

Consider a couple of examples of Seaboard girlisms pandered to by the nominal adults of the universities. First, we have “triggering.” This means that when, as happened at Columbia, a female (always a female) reads in Ovid of the rape of Leda by the swan, it is a “triggering event,” bringing back traumatic memories of sexual assaults, mostly imagined, and making the girls feel “unsafe.” Got it. Unsafe in an Ivy classroom. Bring back the swooning couch. What quivering little darlings.

From Inside Higher Ed: “Trigger warnings, which are common in blogs but also have begun to appear on college and university syllabuses, are supposed to signal to readers that forthcoming material may be uncomfortable or upsetting. Trigger warned-subject matter – in literature, films or other texts – usually relates to sexual assault and other kinds of violence, racism, and the like, and advocates say students have a right to know of sensitive material in advance.”

Case Two: Again at Columbia, we have one Sara Grace Powell, who was distressed because the Butler Library is named for an (Ugh!) man, presumably one Mr. Butler. Quoth Sara,“Butler is an extremely charged space — the names emblazoned on the stone facade are, for me, a stimulant for resistance.” Oh. Why not inductance or capacitance? Daddy of course pays her tuition.

What will these creatures do it if ever rains hard?

Milquetoasts and Fauntleroys seldom admit that they are milquetoasts and Fauntleroys, but it is evident in their behavior, and this is a salient strain in Seaboard life. They are afraid of Moslems and er, teens, but the Moslems and er, teens are not afraid of them. They don’t give a damn. Gordon Liddy, in his highly readable book Will, made the point that if your response to provocation is wildly disproportionate and unpredictable, no one will fuck with you. Yep. This is why reporters are afraid of Moslems, and governments are afraid of blacks. Journalists know that Moslems will not hesitate to kill them and their families if they criticize what’s-his-name, and governments know that blacks will burn whole cities if provoked. Both groups get their way.

Any girl who feels “unsafe” on reading classical poetry belongs in an asylum (some would argue that at Columbia she already is) or else she is engaging in forever-thirteen passive-aggressive rebellion against professors confused with her father. She obviously has no interest in Ovid.

The conversion of young women into pathetic whining goo-goos is entirely the work of the Seaboard. The women of the Center, who I grew up with, and married, and fathered, are as as tough as boot soles when the need arises. The idea of a woman saying, “Oh…oh …Ovid said rape two thousand years ago and I feel so…so unsafe!” Poor widdle fings. I assume that real women laugh.

Sara, the face of the declining birth rate, chilly, prissy, sexless, prudish, censorious, and adolescent. A likely spinster librarian. Would you date her on a dare?

It is easy to parody these twits–I choose my vowel carefully–but they represent a class whose rule does not bode well for the country–helpless, self-absorbed, sheltered–aye, there’s the worst of it–and desirous of forcing their values on everyone else. Arrayed against them is the Center, increasingly very angry but not organized and not sure what to do. The only solution I can imagine is for the Center to call the Seaboard’s bluff and set their own standards locally, the Seaboard be damned. We could call it “freedom.” Will this happen? I hope.