Scattershots in August

My cousin the nun put up a share on FB showing an Indian chief in Brazil breaking down in tears because the Brazilian President --a female who is apparently not a worshipper of Gaia-- just approved a huge hydroelectric dam which will flood a million acres and displace 40k Indians.

What the post is pulling for is guilt and outrage, etc. The culprit of the piece is "globalism" which does not honor "diversity". I am unmoved. Why? Because the displacement of the Western Hemipshere's aboriginals was fated when Europeans first set foot in their "New World." Only an unavailable and mass preternatural awareness of the future could have moved them to take unprecedented steps to drive us out while we were still few in numbers.

The message I take away is not what I am supposed to take away. This incident tells me a) to resist with all your might becoming a minority in your own land and b) do not become so attached to your habitual traditional way of doing things that you cannot adapt to change. The flora and fauna that go extinct are the ones who are far too well adapted to their local environment and cannot handle change.

To me, the fate of the Indians is not a source of guilt, but a warning sign of what will happen to my tribe if we don't wake up.

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Comedian Tim Allen recently took his life in his hands and gave an interview in which he defended Eeevil White Racist Chef Paula Deen and decried the prohibition on saying The N Word, along with a whole host of other words that the ideological descendants of the Free Speech Movement now forbid us to utter. Well, forbid Whites to utter. Allen remarked that in his movies with Martin Lawrence, Lawrence used "niggah" constantly, while Allen was forbidden to say it. As ExC notes, this is an exercise in dominance, no different from the old South custom of calling a Black man boy and him having to call a White man sir. 

I suddenly thought of Harry Potter and He Who Must Not Be Named. As Hermione smartly pointed out, defending Harry when he refused to abide by the ban, fear of the word increases fear of the thing. So the Good Guys eventually all start saying Lord Voldemort. Is the prohibition on saying Nigger really any different?

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My reading of JK Rowling's great work of imagination is in the ballpark of what Harold Bloom calls misprision, a creative mis-reading. As I've noted, while the central war of the books and its central moral issue, the Pure Bloods vs the Mixed Bloods, can be lazily read as a promotion of a multiracial and egalitarian Britain, the Rowling's Wizarding World itself accepts and relies on the very differences, animosities, dominances, exclusions and inequalities such a Liberal reading would shriekingly condemn.

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I notice the same thing in Star Trek, whose underlying liberalism I have come to see clearly and roll my eyes over. But even there, the "evils" prohibited on the utopian Earth are projected out into the cosmos as the condition for having any story to tell at all!

While the Earthlings have achieved blissful sex and race and class parity, --thanks mostly to Vulcan technology--what goes unnoticed is the inter-species racism of Spock, a halfbreed like Voldemort, who holds the human race --with the exception of his friend Jim-- in contempt. If you made Spock a White-identified White-Black halfbreed and transferred his attitude toward Homo Sapiens to "African-Americans", you'd have a liberal's nightmare of unabashed racism. But Spock is the noblest character in the series, completely Tefloned against such low suspicions.

Sometimes even when you lie, you have to tell the truth.