My wife and I took a vacation a few weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings back in 2013. On the flight home to Tennessee, I sat across the aisle from a younger fellow wearing a Boston Strong t-shirt. He was mostly unremarkable—skinny, mop of hair, maybe twenty five and travelling with a artfully distressed leather messenger bag—but I had occasion during the flight to contemplate that shirt at length whenever I wasn’t trying to figure out how a guy my height is supposed to fit into an airplane seat. The lack of leg room might have been coloring my perceptions […]

President Obama (and his administration) is facing establishment backlash for not attending Paris’s solidarity rally. As leader of the free world (whatever the hell that means today), I suppose he should have attended the march of hugs and kisses, or at the least sent Secretary of State John Kerry or Vice President Joe Biden. When one Western democracy marches, the rest often have to follow suit. But for reasons unknown, President Obama decided not to attend, nor did he send anyone in his stead. Nevertheless, the world took notice. I have to agree with President Obama for not attending, though […]

You’re supposed to feel warm inside when you see a big crowd of people demonstrating for ‘unity’ and ‘tolerance’ carrying candles and signs, speaking soothing words of peace. The images are intended to reassure you, just as the mass of the herd reassures animals like deer, gazelle, kangaroos, sheep, and cows that they are safe from predators. But the herd is as much of a target of predators as it is a form of protection. And humans are not, ultimately, herd animals — we are pack hunters with a sophisticated social structure. The herd is not a form of social […]

Contemporary political discourse is shrill. Hell, that might be it’s most characteristic feature. Shrill and nigh omnipresent. My wife complains fairly regularly that her facebook wall has devolved into links to snarky “thinkpieces” and running comment wars about them. Frequently between people who have known each other for years to boot. Fathers divided against sons and daughters against mothers, that sort of thing. Twitter’s much the same, far as I can tell. Superheated rhetoric, mutual incomprehension, acrimony. These two platforms are social media, of course, which tends to exaggerate all those phenomena. But I think it’s fair to say that even […]

Feminists and people of color believe white men are gods. Divine is what divine does. Divinity is the omnipresence of racism. White men have such a difficult time containing their power-levels that they exude evil unintentionally, like a superhero unable to pull off Clark Kent for but a minute before busting out in uniform. What’s a god? Gods are portrayed in myths as heroes which define societal standards of power, prestige, status, fulfillment, rightness, right action, right being. Society thinks white males are Nietzschean übermenschen. Put down Anton LaVey, White Man. You’ve already made it. What’s good, what’s decent, what […]

The phenomenon of #BlackBrunch, in which black activists pile into fashionable restaurants to ruin the dining experience for the people who live there, is wonderful for a whole number of reasons. At least, if you don’t live in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Oakland. It’s an in-your-face, modern version of blockbusting, a technique used by real estate developers during the early days of Civil Rights to ethnically cleanse white people from American cities while earning big commissions for doing it. Whereas in the 1960s, real estate agents had to hire black people at day rates to wander around neighborhoods […]