Monday, September 10, 2018

A Politically Incorrect Guide To Not Being a Dick

Political correctness is a fucking bust. It may have started with the best of intentions but so was the Russian Revolution and both ended in bourgeois tyranny. Political correctness has been more or less the law of the zeitgeist since the early Eighties when the radical feminists teamed up with the puritanical Reaganites to poop the raucous party of the Seventies, after the CIA unleashed AIDS to kill all the fun faggots (I'm only half-kidding). And in the proceeding decades the PC revolution has achieved absolutely nothing. Black and brown people are still poor as dirt. Women and femmes are still roundly violated on a daily basis. And the prison state has never been stronger.

The only thing political correctness really achieved was making it easier for bigots to hide behind the facade of good manners. Based on policy alone, the Clintonian Democrats clearly despise brown and queer people as much as those knuckle-draggers in the alt-right, they just know how to cover their ass with careful newspeak like "super-predators" and empty gestures to people who disgusted them three weeks ago when they weren't politically viable. Personally, I'll take an open bigot like David Duke over some squishy closet-basher like Alec Baldwin any day of the week. At least that silicone supremacist will call me faggot to my face.

So the current backlash against the malign influence of political correctness is not only totally natural, it's also totally necessary. But that doesn't mean you have to be a fucking dick. The reality is that marginalized individuals such as myself do have plenty of reasons to be pissed off and straight white cis-folk could strongly benefit from learning why and realizing that their mainstream cache does afford them some privileges that the rest of us don't have. I'm willing to bet that most of you can enter a public restroom without having to seriously consider the possibility that somebody might set you on fire for having the wrong genitalia. But nothing gets solved without conversation, so I've decided to put together a few suggestions on how to be politically incorrect without being a total dick.


#1.  Assume Nothing-  I've got a bumper sticker that reads that and it's good advice for everyone to follow. The biggest problem with race and gender relations today is that everybody already has everybody else figured out and they're all usually wrong. This can be easily ameliorated by quite simply assuming nothing about anybody until they tell you otherwise. Not every woman has a cunt. Not every inner-city black man is a gang banger. And not every redneck is a cousin-fucking racist. I'm a genderqueer dyke but I'm also a foul-mouthed, pro-life, anti-imperialist who cares much more about Yemeni genocide than bathroom rights, though I would appreciate not being lit on fire. People are more complex than black, white, gay, straight, cis, trans. Just stay open to infinite possibilities and get ready to be surprised.

#2.  Ask Questions-  If you don't know something, just fucking ask. Some people will get offended but most people will appreciate the effort. Ask a black person why they smoke menthols. Ask a gay person how they decide who rides on top. Ask a trans person why they pee sitting down (I don't, those seats are fucking heinous). Don't expect everyone to be comfortable with giving you an answer. Don't expect one person to speak for an entire population. But by all means, don't be afraid to fucking ask. Bigotry loves ignorance and the silence political correctness spreads ignorance.

#3.  Words Matter Less Than Context-  Patti Smith once sang, "Jesus Christ was a n*gger, Mahatma Gandhi and my mother too. We're ALL fucking n*ggers!" For those of you who don't know (and shame on you), Patti's a white bitch and she's far from a bigot. Her statement was one of solidarity from one oppressed person to another. It's the same reason I make regular use of words like faggot, tranny, dyke, and queer, just to name a few. To me these are terms of endearment, of love for my people. And if some hetero-cis-boy tells me, "You know, for a tranny, you're alright", I'm gonna respond, "Well thank you. For a breeder, you aren't half bad either". That doesn't mean your lilly-white ass should waltz into the nearest bodega and shout, "What up, my niggas!", there is nothing genuine about that kind of imitation which is why you'd probably get your ass kicked in. There are no bad words, just bad (or dumb) intentions. The most hurtful thing anyone ever told me was to "just be normal". The Catholic Church did a knock-out job of teaching me how to hate myself and they didn't have to call me faggot to do it.

#4.  Empathy Is Everything-  The biggest problem with the world today is that so many people seem almost medically incapable of putting themselves in other people's shoes and this cuts both ways. Suburban liberals don't ask themselves why someone would vote for Trump in a post-apocalyptic Rust-Belt town. Traditional conservatives don't ask themselves what it must be like to be a stranger in your own body. And Americans don't ask themselves what they would do if they came home to find their family on the business end of a Tomahawk missile. We need to remember that we're all just people, regardless of our tribe. You don't have to agree with someone or even like them to respect their right to live their life however they damn well choose.


Political correctness may be a bust, dearest motherfuckers, but human kindness is always a boon. Take it from a white-trash-tranny-n*gger like me, you don't have to be politically correct to not be a dick. You just have to give a fuck. Give it a shot, dearest motherfuckers, your honky-breeder ass might just like it.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post

* Voices Carry by Sky Ferreira
* Rock & Roll N*gger by Patty Smith
* Express Yourself by N.W.A.
* Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard
* White Minority by Black Flag
* The Day the Niggaz Took Over by Dr. Dre
* You're No Rock & Roll Fun by Sleater-Kinney
* A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash

9 comments:

  1. These two articles paired together and what they represent freak me out though.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/02/climate-change-will-create-worlds-biggest-refugee-crisis

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/10/immigration-europe-sweden-elections-brexit

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  2. Empathy is everything, but at the same time humans are shit and humans will freak out at any change if they feel it is out of their control. While I like the ideal of an open free world I have to reconcile with the idea that humans can be xenophobic and territorial and that any change at least in the short-term makes people go apeshit. Most humans won't think bigger picture, if people are lurching rightward at the current amount of refugees and migrants what will they do as climate change picks up?

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  3. Humans have created a conundrum for ourselves and there really isn't a solution that doesn't involve some kind of mass death in the next few lifetimes. We could buy some time by all living like the Amish (since rich countries and people disproportionately cause climate change and it's the industrial lifestyle that the world wants to follow in suit that causes it) and yet we can't sustain our current population with pre-industrial Amish technology because the only reason we humans mushroomed in population is due to industry, the thing that is long-term threatening us existentially :/ There seem to be no current solutions that don't involve going against liberal democracy in some way. And most answers involve mass death somewhere in the world.

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    1. There really aren't a lot of good options when it comes to climate change which is why I don't write to much about it. We really are going to have to completely rearrange the way we even look at society. The way we organize communities is a huge part of this. A lot of the causes of climate change can be traced back to the concept of suburbia. We need a localist revival on a massive scale that radically reduces the use of carbon vehicles and increases the proliferation of rooftop solar. Otherwise the earth will correct itself by reducing the viability of human existence. In other words, we need to shape the fuck up or we're boned.

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    2. I'm sympathetic to that idea myself, but I just don't know how viable it is with the amount of people we have.

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    3. Exactly, so... we might be boned. In which case, we need to go into survival mode, continue to advocate for the best but prepare for the worst. A lot of people will be tempted to resort to authoritarian methods but if we put this in the hands of the state they'll do what they do best and use our resources to save themselves. Organize locally to prepare for a doomsday scenario so that at least some of the people who make it might be egalitarian minded.

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  4. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23278682/typhoon-mangkhut-videos-hong-kong/

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

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  5. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/94wji8/migrants_storm_spanish_beach_in_boat/e3oy44r/

    http://www.bldgblog.com/2018/07/oven/

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  6. https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/568324/

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