Edge of the Financial Cliff
One is immutable, the other is changeable, or is the other immutable and the one changeable? I can’t keep track any more, but at least I am not alone…
If you’re generally a busy bumblebee like I am, you don’t have time to sit around all day socially constructing things. Thus, I am so glad that there are volunteers who do this work for me—and at no charge to boot! Merely keeping up with the latest culturally acceptable semantic terms is a full-time job in itself, and I am truly grateful there are people out there who tell me what to say and how to think. I am also in awe of their ability to make shit up while believing it’s true. Hats off to them—and I say that as a man who owns about twenty hats.
So for those of you who are far more socially conscious than I am, please be patient with me, because I’m just trying to keep up here—at least as I’ve been led to understand it, according to the latest science from The Global Science Foundation or whatever it’s called—homosexuality is genetically hardwired, but race and gender are only ideas, right? Is that the latest science? Got it. Bookmarked and filed. I will pick that, lick that, stick that, and flick that.
In other words, gay people can’t help it. That explains a lot.
But I’m so glad that science has proved that gender and race are simply dumb myths concocted by capitalist robber barons to keep us all angry at one another rather than working together to raise the minimum wage at Burger King.
These last few years have been a glitter-spackled, fuchsia-tinted explosion of progress as the mighty transgendered have finally received respect and official protection in society now that we all realize that they are actually—scientifically and medically and socially and everything—women living in men’s bodies rather than sad and maladjusted delusional crazy people who are hacking themselves to pieces while chasing a dream. I am SO glad that’s out of the way.
But as always, my allies and comrades and fellow travelers, there is more work for us to do. I know that it seems like there’s always more work for us to do, but if we didn’t have that work, then we wouldn’t be “us,” now, would we? And it’s not as if any of us are working, anyway.
We’ve made tremendous progress with destroying, defaming, and defiling the very notion of gender. For that, I give you two thumbs up. But we have a long, long, LONG way to go when it comes to race. Since we’ve successfully swung our unforgiving ball-peen hammers at the false idea that gender is real, let’s swing ’em around at the eternal fiction that is “race.” As everyone who has, like, read a book knows, “race” is a really bad and harmful idea that you should mentally electroshock out of your head the moment it dares to creep inside your skull.
Race is only an idea. It doesn’t exist in the real world. So if you get the idea that you belong to another race, you should run with that idea. Even if you’re obviously more ginger than a frosty bottle of ginger ale, you can be as black or brown or red or yellow as you want. It’s objectively no more true or false than the idea that you’re “white,” even though that’s what black people at the subway station are always calling you late at night when they’re surrounding you and asking for money. They may seem a little gruff to you, but you don’t realize that they are only showing you the hate that hate created, so it’s not really hate at all—it’s more like revolutionary love.
Identity is incredibly confusing to many people – but why normalize the confusion and stereotype by pushing goofy anti-norm norms?
Head over to Taki’s Magazine on the regular for some great head-clearing common sensibility. Column above can be found here.
