I may be the queerest anarchist between Fire Island and the Salton Sea, but I've never had a great deal of patience for the current fad of political correctness that seems to be all the rage with the other Queers of my generation and younger. At times this makes me feel like a 34-year-old grandmama lecturing young sprites about the glory days when drag shows weren't G-rated and poppers only cost a nickel. At other times it makes me feel like a seasick sailor on a ship of fools, trying to convince my people to care more about canceling FOSTA-SESTA than Dave Chappelle. I love my people. I would be dead without them, but identity politics in this country have been commodified by that gruesome little conglomeration of breeders known as big government/big business and rendered into a toxic distraction from truly revolutionary politics.
This all began after a glorious cabal of wild faggots and pissed-off brown people turned straight kids on to the magic of revolution in the sixties and pulled the plug on the holocaust in Vietnam. Back then, identity politics were lethal. Every minority had been radicalized by the example of Black Power into a feral pack of heavily armed anti-colonialists hellbent on replacing the United States with a Rainbow Coalition of stateless nations. But then the feds killed Fred Hampton, Jesse Jackson assimilated his outlaw confederation into the Democratic Party and the next thing you know, they're flying rainbow flags at Langley and using the vocabulary of radical feminism to justify exterminating half the Muslim world with drone strikes and sanctions. Identity politics have been affectively colonized by an obnoxious yuppie cult that prioritizes good table manners over anything remotely revolutionary.
The only thing more reactionary than political correctness however is the melodramatic hissy fit against it coming from supposedly rational adults on both the left and the right who have become convinced that teeny bopper wokeism is the new white supremacy. I shouldn't have to say this out loud, but nobody has ever been lynched for using the wrong pronouns. The kneejerk tendency of straight white cis men to play the victim card every time they're even minorly inconvenienced by liberal overreach makes it at least as hard to have a rational conversation with them as it does with well-intentioned hipsters who hyperventilate every time I call Joe Biden a fucking cunt.
The reality is that the woke kids get it right about most of the big picture shit. The American school of perpetual imperialism is defined by a form of pervasive and systematic white supremacy that either assimilates or annihilates everything and everyone that exists contrary to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values of collective subjugation and absolute conformity. Notions like gender and race aren't static facts but social constructs invented to control the various tribes who resist this conspiracy and more often than not to turn us against each other. Conservatives don't seem to get that just because the master class has adopted a few of us minorities as pets doesn't mean that the rest of us aren't the first people to taste their wrath and most liberals seem to fail to realize that these constructed identities are worthless shackles unless we take them back and define them based on the radical individual liberty for which they once stood after we reclaimed them in the awesome name of freak power.
I say most liberals because this is the one place where the youngest generation of woke Queer kids really hits it out of the fucking park and puts grouchy politically incorrect grandmamas like me in our place. The anti-PC alarmists are constantly going off about the radical proliferation of new gender identities but I for the life of me can't think of a better example of using identity politics as a lethal weapon for radical individualism. Queer kids create ten new gender identities a day, pick three and then reject them all and start over tomorrow. It's absolute fucking chaos and it totally turns me on, though it's not as new as the youngins or their cranky parents may think.
Genderfluid, genderflux, bigender, agender, polygender, neutrois, pangender, androflux, antigender. This dizzying Kaleidescope of crowdsourced IDs may be relatively new but before a nasty clique of Romans hijacked Christianity and turned it into an excuse to turn gender into a binary tiered chauvinistic class system, we had identities like nadicchi, chukchi, wakawahine, bangala, hijra, mahu, muxe, bakia, fa'afafine and khanith. Every tribe had their own diverse school of Queerness with its own regional variants. More than 150 Native American tribes alone had third genders, and many had as many as five. But this wasn't just an Indian thing. Ancient Jewish rabbinical legal writings designate the existence of six genders and the existence of transgender priestesses has been recorded in ancient Mesopotamia, Symaria, Assyria and Babylonia going back to the Paleolithic Era.
All of this jibes perfectly with what we know about the animal kingdom which contains thousands of species of snakes, lizards, fish and birds who routinely and often quite fluidly portray behavior inconsistent with their reproductive ascribed sex as a means of survival. Back in pagan times, survival was defined by diverse tight-nit communities. Today, the very survival of humanity itself is being threatened by a corrosive globalist society that is attempting to use the drag of identity politics to dress up conformity into its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant order in the clothing of inclusion. They achieve this evil trick by turning individuality itself into just another collection of capitalist lifestyle choices.
I honestly believe that the recent rise in gender chaos amongst young Queers is an instinctive and evolutionary attempt to defend individuality against this toxic trap of homogeny by demanding that all identities, even those that are literally fifteen minutes old, are considered as valid as any other. By doing so, these kids have once again found a way to make identity politics ungovernable. They have affectively turned these new genders into what that old German anarchist wizard Max Stirner would refer to as Unions of Egoists or totally voluntary and spontaneous associations of individuals drawn together by nothing but mutual interests for only as long as those interests remain mutual.
It's a common misconception, even among many anarchists, that Mr. Stirner and his Egoists were all just a bunch of anti-humanist nihilists, but this is only true if you consider the society they were committed to burning down to be in the service of humanity. Stirner, much like other controversial secular shaman like Ted Kaczynski and John Zerzan, saw the sickness before the storm and called on individuals to reject all systems contrary to their nature and only accept unions based on the interests of their survival as free radicals instead. What Max Stirner was essentially advocating for was a totally voluntary school of socialism based on mutual aid and I believe that the current trend of gender chaos invoked by these wee woke youngsters not only follows in this proud and deeply misunderstood tradition of radically individualist egalitarianism, but it also offers us all a wild new alternative to shallow liberal identity politics.
What if every identity followed this fantastically erratic pattern? What if other modern social constructs like race, age or even sanity became fluid too? How would Fox News demonize the great brown menace if Latinos suddenly exploded into Mayans, Aztecs, Chicanos, Tejanos, Chicanoflux and Nicaraguan-Neutrois? Even better, what would become of white supremacy if European Americans began to voluntarily reject the poison privilege of identifying with the master class in favor of identities based on something other than conquest? What if honkies suddenly became Rednecks, Irish Catholics, Celtic Revivalists, Cajun Americans, Hillbillies, Anglo-Fluid, Greco-Slavic Orthodox or just old school Italians, Poles or Jews? All committed to fighting the same WASP conspiracy that assimilated them into becoming agents of a global capitalist rape culture. The same culture that continues to crush Queers and people of color everyday while carefully minding its manners for the cameras.
This has long been my Queerest psychosexual fantasy. A hopped up panarchist fever dream about a nation of minorities too Balkanized to assimilate into any politically correct hivemind. A thousand voluntary tribes engaged in a thousand voluntary revolutions against one enemy before multiplying into a million. It would be pure fucking chaos and it could be beautiful. Imagine it, dearest motherfuckers, Max Stirner as a girl!
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: songs that influence this post
* Venus as a Boy by Bjork
* Imagine by John Lennon
* Danny Nedelko by IDLES
* Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie
* Townie by Mitski
* Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
* Country House by Blur
* Shitty Ballet by Bleached
* Been a Son by Nirvana
* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls
“The only thing more reactionary than political correctness however is the [...] while carefully minding its manners for the cameras.”
ReplyDelete— Nicky/CH
“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules.”
— George Carlin